The one about Scooby Doo style crimes. People the world over use scare tactics for their own nefarious ends, here's a couple of fun ones!
Sorry this one's out a bit late everyone, hope you enjoy some lighter fare this week!
Links:
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/12/117_78466.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/reallife-scoobydoo-villain-gets-four-months-for-haunting-a-castle-5344742.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooby-Doo
Loose Transcript:
Hey Gang and welcome back to another Repisode Rof RightRare Row. This week and probably next week we’re doing night bite episodes while I plow through the next book I’m reading for one of the full length episodes but that doesn’t mean I won’t give you guys scooby snacks of fun spooky stories that you crave in the meantime. If you guys haven’t figured it out by now by the obnoxious voices, overt name drops or literally just reading the title of the show. Well split up gang cause the mystery machine has broken down in the podcasting swamps and there’s a creepy castle up on the hill, THat’s right TODAY we’re talking real life scooby doo villains. I’ve got a few tales of people that thought they would have got away with their hoaxes and crimes if it wasn’t for us meddling kids, our dog and newfangled internet radio. Like Zoinks audience, let's jump right into it. Grab a sccoby snack, hopefully it’s an edible and get ready!
For those of you that aren’t familiar with scooby doo or any of its spinoffs, it was a fun, if formulaic saturday morning cartoon that first aired in 1969 and still continues in some form or another to this day where four teens and a talking great dane solve mysteries, usually of people in monster costumes attacking people, covering up robberies, scaring people to plummet property values in out and out fraud, and various other variations on that theme. There have been live action films and quite frankly a staggering amount of crossovers with other celebrities both real and fictional. Seriously, find a list somewhere of all the scooby doo crossovers and tell me avengers was the biggest crossover. They met the three stooges, batman and robin, Urkel, checks notes, halsey? Sherlock holmes, speed racer and the f**king harlem globetrotters on top of a bunch of others. It’s interesting but this isn’t a scooby doo lore podcast, and I’m fairly certain the show and spinoffs have had enough of a cultural impact over the last 50 plus years that people have some idea what the hell I’m talking about.
I always loved the show when I was a kid and I came across a few of these stories that really aren’t enough for their own episode but all share that same “would have gotten away with it too” DNA of posing as monsters for their own nefarious ends. Without further ado let’s try to crack the first case open here, The year is 2005, if you’re as numb to the inexorable march of time through the two thousands that was like 4 years ago. If you’re not, that was 17 years ago. We find ourselves in northern italy in the thundering rain, our groovy van has a flat tire at the foot of a hill and briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning we see a castle surrounded by mountains. With the first flash we see an eerie figure silhouetted in a window in a tower, with the next flash it’s gone. Between the thunderclaps you swear you hear an ethereal moaning and clanging over the sound of the rain splashing against the windshield.
A man approaches through the fog and downpour, please, you gotta help a me! There’s a phantasm in de castle! Over the last few weeks, the castle, now an inn hotel thing has had guests complaining and the owner, his name isn’t given so we’re just gonna go with luigi has been fraught with fright. At the stroke of midnight in castle coldrano moans and shrieks can be heard throughout the halls. Pots and pans clang together but when the noises are investigated, there is no trace of anything being amiss. Doors would slam shut, paintings eye’s seemed to follow people that walked the halls and quote “minor vandalisms occurred” I really tried to find a police report or something more concrete than a news article for this one but the castle is right on the border of austria and italy, and I don’t speak italian or kangaroo. I know austria and australia are different I’m just kidding. It seems like a lot of the court documents and stuff like that are pretty well sealed up so I couldn’t get any names or more specific details on what sort of minor vandalisms were occuring. It could be anything from drawing dicks on the paintings to knocking over suits of armor to just hammering holes in the wall so I really have no idea. What I do know is that mario was terrorized by unexplained poltergeist activity for months before exhausting other options like gangs of teenagers and dogs before finally giving in and calling the cops.
He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep and he could never catch the haunting in the act, just the noise and carnage left in its wake. After all the complaints the police set up hidden cameras in the locations most prone to the paranormal activity and captured the ghoul in the act. Was it the ghost of a long dead lord of the keep, perhaps a butler, cursed to roam the halls in perpetuity? Nope, far scarier. It was a very much alive, 42 year old polish woman. She had been dressing in white and sneaking around in dumbwaiters and stuff to get around the castle. She would come through some unlocked staff door or something every night and howl and moan in polish yelling s**t like zahbka, keilbasa, ushkush manoush, mrouvka, preeba manouk zahbakano, clanging pots against the wall breaking s**t and generally being an unbelievable nuisance.
Why was she doing this? An undisclosed work dispute with her husband and the owner. Tis is so god damn funny. Her husband, also annoyingly, unnamed in ANY article I could find on this worked for luigi at the castle. It really makes you think what the hell was it that wasn’t worth quitting but was worth having your wife haunt the place every night for weeks! She was trying to scare away guests and future business from the place that as far as I can tell, her husband still worked! Was he passed over for a raise or what happened?
If anyone has more details on this story, please please get in touch with me, I’ve got all the links to contact me through email or social media at nightmarenow.com.
If it was such a minor dispute that they didn’t put it in any of the reporting on the case, I’m just picturing luigi upping the prices of a f**king fire flower in the company vending machine by a red coin and that was just a bridge too far for polish boo. That’s the last mario bit I have I promise. I love italy and can’t wait to visit someday. So the scoob and the gang yoink her powdered white hair off and reveal who it is to the police after she’s caught on video disturbing the peace. And again I need to reiterate this isn’t a scooby doo lore podcast, this is a real case from 2005. The unnamed woman mutters something to the effect of “Ooswaby me tuna sue-ho, goodibi ni vif-triance she jitze”. Or I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids in polish. I told you we’re a global show! Who needs duolingo when you have practical polish lessons right here on the pod!
Anyway polish lady, let’s call her izabella, gets caught in the act and through what I imagine was a freakin hilarious court case, gets sentenced to 4 months in prison for her tresspassing, vandalism and I guess hooliganism charges. There’s no word on what the couple is up to these days, but the castle coldrano has pretty favorable reviews on italian yelp and as far as I can tell there’s no mention of poltergeist activity in any of the reviews.
In this economy though, I sincerely doubt this was a one off case. If you’re the proprietor of a quote unquote haunted establishment, double check that your employees are doing alright! In fact if you’re a proprietor of a non haunted establishment, check on em too, a little bit of preventative ghost busting goes a long way!
It’s classic scooby doo though, haunt a place, wreck the business, drive down the property value, and commit some sort of fraud. Let’s move on from italy and her haunted castles though and go further east to korea, now it’s unclear where in korea because this story takes place in nineteen oh one, forty four years before korea split into north and south korea in 1945.
So we find our mystery machine with an overheated radiator at the entrance to a goldmine. In front of the yawning mouth of the mine lies an altar, ceremoniously decorated. Atop the altar, staring directly towards you is a perfectly spherical eyeball, glowering, watching. You look to your teenage compatriots as a Korean man runs out of the mine, drops a pickaxe and some sifting tools in front of the altar and takes off like a bat outta hell screaming that he’s sorry to the spirits. You hear a chuckling and a dude walks out from behind a big tree. This is patch eye pete. I don’t know if it’s just because his name is pete, or my imagination is just not working at one AM but the only thing I can picture for his description is f**king stinky pete the prospector from toy story two.
If you’re wondering about a reason the episode was late it’s definitely the 38 hours in paint pasting brendan fraiser’s just f**k my s**t up eyes onto stinky pete that’s in the episode art today.
ANYWAY, stinky pete comes out with a gaping hole where one of his eyes should be and scoops the eye up off the altar. He introduces himself as patch eye pete. Maybe he doesn’t have a gaping hole, given his name he must be wearing an eyepatch. Oh well, Cest la vie. I’’m not redoing the stinky pete image, You’ll just have to imagine the eyepatch.
What the heck is going on here? Let me explain he says, and he continues to explain in the third person so the host doesn’t need to do a ridiculous prospector accent for the whole story. He explains that he works for the oriental consolidated mining company. It’s a night bite and it’s my birthday so I’m not gonna do an exhaustive coverage of western interests exploiting eastern countries for mining, try dan carlin or something. The short version is the company employed native koreans in their gold mine and boy were they a pain in the a**. Equipment would go missing all the time because selling the picks, dynamite, rope and other mining equipment was a lot more lucrative, and a hell of a lot easier than busting your a** to get the gold out of the earth for someone else. They would literally put the stuff in their quote “voluminous hair.” and walk out.
Obviously this is a problem for the westerners that own the mine, that patch eye pete represents. Yes, that is his only name across three or four different articles I could find on the guy. Some of those that aren’t redundant will be in the show notes. First name patch eye last name pete. Anyway he decides the only way he’s gonna stop the theft of his mining equipment is taking advantage of the korean’s propensity for superstition and traditions. So patch eye pete calls a meeting of his work force, says a few gibberish words not unlike me trying to speak polish a minute ago. Then he puts his hand over his false eye and jams his fingers into his eyes like he’s at a slipknot concert, screaming all the while, and yanks out his fake glass eye. Makes a big to-do about it right? Then he places the eye onto the altar in front of the mine and explains to all the local workers he can see through the eye and he’ll know if anyone steals anything out of the mine and a great curse would befall them.
I bet he had an accomplice stand in front of the eye while he looked away and correctly identified how many fingers the partner was holding up, for dramatic effect. They believed him completely that he could see out of the eye and just like that the thefts from the mine stopped overnight. That’s technically a reverse scooby doo villain at that point isn’t it? Using fake paranormal phenomena to stop crime? Whatever, close enough.
Either way this respite only lasted a few days to a week, because when patch eye pete came back to check on his equipment he found a bunch of it missing again. He’s like COME ON! Then he goes over to check on his eye and I would love to see the facepalm that happened next. His eyeball had a coffee cup over it. I mean… sound logic I guess. Cover the eye and the foreman can’t spy on you. Imagine how smart that dude with the coffee mug must have felt?
So patch eye pete grabbed his eye and went back to the old drawing board for more meddling koreans antics. If I cup over the eye was gonna block his hitherto, completely nonexistent, scrying abilities, he was gonna need to really come up with something good. Luckily for him and his mining equipment he did just that.
Patch eye pete’s next scheme is almost literally the plot of 1969’s scooby doo episode, mine your own business, just 68 years before it originally aired. Gramophone technology was fairly new at the time, and especially so in korea. Over there, the technology hadn’t really found purchase in the societal consciousness yet. Doubly so for the blue collar koreans dependent on stealing dynamite and pickaxes from their own job sites.
Pete set up a gramophone with a message of howling and moaning in korean saying something to the effect of this: “WE THE SPIRITS OF THIS MINE, will haunt the souls and souls of ancestors of all who steal or have stolen from this mine for eternity.” Over and over again. THe gramophone was set deep in the mine so with all the echoes it truly sounded like ethereal voices deep within the mountains were well and truly pissed about the missing supplies.Within 24 hours pretty much all of the missing equipment had been returned to the front entrance of the mine. That’s so funny to me.
Unfortunately we don’t have a whole lot of other information on what happened after this, presumably the thievery stopped from then on out. Good job patchy!
I’ve actually got a couple more but I’m kinda running close to the shorter night bite time at this point and the episode is already a day late, so maybe we’ll do a part two down the line for a couple more crazy cases like these. If you know of others get in touch with me at nightmarenow.com!
Thanks everyone for understanding this is coming out a bit late, with Easter and my birthday happening at the same time, on top of my computer being annoying. It's been a bit of a hellacious week to just put out a short one. I’ll be back next week hopefully at our regular time to cover an amazing Men in Black encounter right here in New Hampshire!
I’ve got some late night editing to do so I’d say sweet dreams but you all know it’s only gonna be nightmares now! Catch ya next week!