Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: All right. Welcome to another episode of Secrets and Lies, a Storyteller's podcast. Hi, Vicki. How are you?
[00:00:10] Speaker B: I'm doing great.
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm doing pretty well too. Carved the pumpkins last night. This is our Halloween episode. We're calling it writers beware. Yeah. So Halloween, it is peak peak fall season out there.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: It's beautiful.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: It is beautiful. But we are getting buried in leaves at my house. Like, buried.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: We have in fact, David went out with a blower, and he blew off the driveway and came in. And then we went somewhere like an hour later, and I said, didn't you blow off the driveway? What happened? And all the leaves were it's like rain.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: It falls down. Like I mean, it's beautiful. But yeah, he swears he did a.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Lot, but I kidding that he didn't.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Because it is the spooky Halloween season. Coming up, I have been finding interesting stories about the local area. Yes, you have some good ones too. But I had come across a note. Somebody had posted it in the local Hendersonville Facebook group or something about an episode of Snapped that was about a crime that took place here years ago, certainly long before either of us moved here off of Rugby Road. But Rugby Road is near you, isn't it? Yeah, it's past my house a little bit. Yeah. And I have driven past where this took place. I don't know exactly where the house is, but it was apparently a woman who went a little cray cray and clubbed her husband to death with firewood and then tried to dismember him and scatter his remains.
Yeah, it was like full on dateline worthy. But anyway, it's an episode of Snapped. We'll put the link, if you're interested, and you want to check it out on our Facebook page so you can.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Well, you know what? My daughter sent me a my favorite Murder episode related to Hendersonville.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: We love that podcast.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: She loves it so much.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Tell me about it.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: She sent me some, but she was listening to this one, and in the little different sections that they have in there, hendersonville came up, and she's like, I got to send this to mom. So it's about bodies, and evidently not far from Hendersonville, they found some bodies back in the 1960s, again, way before we ever lived here.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Or lived.
[00:02:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
And they were found in this crude semicircle in a forest somewhere south of Hendersonville with objects laid on.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: And there's an episode of my favorite murder about this.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yes, there is. I'm just going to leave you with that. It's very creepy.
I believe that the people that they found were from Hendersonville.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: I can't wait to listen to it.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: It is my favorite murder podcast. Number three eight two, and it's called Underpants. And this particular story, I know this.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Sounds like a children's story, but not.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: There'S a series of children's books. Captain Underpants.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: That's it. My kids loved that episode. That series.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Anyway, if you want to underpants, I'm definitely going to check that out. That's really cool.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: It's at 22 minutes if you want to just skip right to the Hendersonville.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Story and then weirdly. I mean, I love Hendersonville. I love this town. I love this area.
I feel very safe here for the most part. As safe as anybody who's watches as much dateline as I do can feel in any place. But we had a murder. We had an actual murder in town a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah, it was so weird. And we'll put a link in if you want to hear more about it. But apparently I guess two ladies were fighting on a bus or at a bus stop or something and one of them just wanted to get away from the other one and went into a McDonald's. Right. And then the other lady came in and you'd think that the crime would be between these two ladies, but no, I guess the McDonald's manager was trying to intervene and then some other random person who works there pulled out a gun and shot one of the two ladies and she died and then he ran away. But they caught him. He got hauled off to jail because he is like an ex felon or he's not supposed to have a gun.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: But he was people with a gun.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: Not only had a gun, but had a gun while he was on the job at McDonald's, which is kind of freaky. I'm not going to complain about my French fries or anything.
Everyone is armed.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: It's North Carolina. It's North Carolina. Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I saw that on the news.
And the guy on the news, he's from our news station. Our television station is from South Carolina. So they were reporting it and the reporter was like, oh yeah, it's like the first murder they've had in Hendersonville for so many years. And he repeated mean that's part of the news.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: The news stories know, I came down from Baltimore, which is we can have three murders before lunch. But the news stories here, it's a completely different experience. It's about the traffic, occasionally traffic accidents or something.
Bear sightings. We get a lot of those.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: We do.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: So, for those of you who, in our other episode heard about the goats that I had, that herd of goats that had worked on my yard was doing some weed removal in downtown Asheville. And one of the goats that had been at my house had gotten attacked by a bear. But is going to make a full recovery. So I don't want you to worry about him. He'll be back to snacking on Fig Newtons and people's poison ivy in no time.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Poor guy.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: So the other thing I was thinking about when we were thinking about Nefarious things that may or may not happen in this area is the whole process that both of us went through when we were house hunting. When we were trying to pick neighborhoods and look at different houses and figure out what we liked and didn't like and giving side eye to the neighbors and all. And you're trying to choose where you want to live. And you were so cool to let me crash here and then ride around with me when I was looking at houses with my real estate agent.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Except that the first house you found.
Well, you fell in love with the first house you found because it was calling you, basically.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: It was a little bit of a Charlie Brown house in that it needed a lot of work. Yeah.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Which you're not afraid of because I've seen you redo your house in Baltimore. You kind of like Facebooked the whole thing. And it was awesome. I love the work that you did to that. But this one had some characteristics to it.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: We looked at a lot of houses and all air quotes, characteristics with character. But, yeah, we did call this first house. It was way too big for us, but it was so cool. It had a wraparound, like semicircular wraparound balcony on the deck out yeah. On the second floor that went around huge rooms. But it did look like somebody had been murdered in the dining room.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Yes, you said that. And I was wondering, when I looked just at the pictures on the Realtor website, you could see, like, this big stain on the floor.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Hardwood floor.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: It definitely something went down. I don't know what happened there, but I remember asking my agent, did a crime happen here? And then I had to follow that up with it's. Not a deal breaker. I'm just curious what's going on. I did love that house. It had a great yard. It was in a great neighborhood.
But it was probably a little bit more work than I know Dave wanted to take, so we passed.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Carolyn is fun to go house hunting with because, you know, if you've ever bought a house in a new town or whatever, that you look at several houses around the same time or in the same day. But she spent a few months doing this. So the houses tend to get nicknames so that you can talk about them quick enough and remember which one was which. Yes, exactly. So you know which one, because even if you just say, oh, the house on Indian Hill Boulevard or whatever, you're not going to remember what that is necessarily if you don't live in the town already.
So she came up with some very interesting like the one with the stain in the dining room was the murder house.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: That was the murder house.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Then you had the serial killer basement.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Yeah, the house was a serial killer basement.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: That was a creepy basement.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
And then the farmhouse that oh, you didn't actually get to see the farmhouse with the barn? No, the barn that was full on crack house. The house part was a mess. The barn was gorgeous, but the house was completely out of a movie. Crack house, kind of.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: You had a cancer house?
[00:10:36] Speaker A: We had a cancer house.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: You had one that you didn't even go look at. She just got to the point where she's sending me links of creepy ass places to see this. Let's go check it.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And then when Dave came down and we were looking at places together, he had unkind names for some of these places, too. That was the house on the top of Meth Mountain. And he was yelling at me.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Okay, so Hendersonville is a beautiful place. Don't go away thinking that everything is like a dangerous, murderous cancerous.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: No, this was entirely us and our imagination trying to figure out ways to differentiate houses at the end of the day so we could do her.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: Yeah, because if I saw I saw the murder house picture of the stain on the floor, and I write nonfiction mostly, so I would see that and say, oh, I could pull up that floor and replace that floor, no problem. But Carolyn, who writes murder stories yes, she sees other right. Okay.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: I would still have pulled up the floor and replaced the floor, but yeah. Yikes.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: All right, well, so writers beware being our theme for the day of this episode as we record on a full moon day. This is Hunter's Moon. Hunter's Moon. Yes, it is full on, 100% full. My app told me that.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Well, it must be true.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: So we're going to talk about something scary that writers have to put up with, which are scams. One of them, I think this is fairly new, is these people are posing as major imprints. They will contact a new author and say, we want to buy your book from you and publish it for you. And they're pretending to be like Hatchet.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Which is yeah, they publish some big people.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: They publish big people. They're also a sub or an imprint of a bigger publishing house. So these people approach this one author.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Well, I know new writers, and I've been there.
You crank out something, and you work on it and work on it and work on it, and you want to get it out in the world, and you're so both terrified to share it and eager to share it, and you're putting queries out and talking to people online, and in they come.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Yes. So there's an article in Poets and Writers magazine, and I'm just going to read the first section of it for you to give you an idea what happened. The senior vice president and publisher of Little Brown received a disturbing call from a self published children's book author. The writer said she'd been contacted by someone named William choBy, who claimed to be an editor at Hatchet, which is Little Brown's parent company. That's the one. I couldn't remember a minute ago, choBy said her agent had given him a digital copy of her book and that he wanted to publish it with little brown for young readers. But to do so, choBy told that the author she would need to pay steep fees for removing the book from the self publishing platform and licensing it.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: So, I mean, that's a flag anytime anybody is asking.
I remember in the early searches for agents and so on, if they're asking you for fees in order to read an excerpt or to read your manuscript, watch out.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: So another flag is that she didn't have an agent.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: So he's saying, oh, your agent contacted me, but she didn't have one.
She may have been a little bit desperate to publish because she paid him nearly $15,000.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: Oh my gosh.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: And then he stopped returning her calls. Big surprise there.
But she was desperate. She was so desperate she flew from her home in California to New York City and appeared in the lobby of Hatchett's office Building and asking for him.
And no one worked there by that.
This is this is a bad thing. And this is the kind of scam that Victoria Strauss wants you to know about. She's the creator of Writerbewear Blog and she's been doing this for years, and she tracks literary fraud for if you're if you follow her blog, you will be up to date. And I believe she even has lists on there of smaller publishers because another one this has been out for a long time is that there's vanity presses that will offer to publish your book for you and do the editing for you or whatever. But those vanity presses charge a lot of money to publish your book. You don't always get all the services you think you're going to get or you might think you're getting stuff that the big publishers provide, and they don't.
And those are tricky because you got to know the difference between the one that just wants you to pay for everything and the one that just is offering a decent service.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: I mean, I remember going to conventions and conferences and so on, and there would be tables there from different self publishing presses that were looking for content, essentially.
But I haven't been out and about that much lately. I don't know how much of a bite out of that apple Amazon has had because Amazon makes it so easy to self publish your work that's true. And post it up and then it's know, unlike the old days of the vanity press where you did it and then you had to pay for like a minimum of, I don't know, however many copies. And then it was up to you to market and sell them wherever Amazon prints on know, they're so big that they don't have to hold inventory of your book. So it's not that big a deal. Plus, they just take a cut of whatever your sales are.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: Yes. And there are pros and cons to doing that. I mean, it can be a good service depending on what your book is, what you need from your book being published.
And then there's bad sides to doing that too, which is a whole nother episode, honestly. So Amazon, they are so big that they may not even catch some of.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: The issues out there.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Right now, another scam is using AI and we're all scared of AI right now because we don't know where the hell that's going.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: And we've seen Terminator exactly skynet.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: So anyway, AI right now is using books for learning and they're doing it without the author's permission.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I've seen a lot of buz in the press about authors putting I don't know if it's a class action suit or what it is that they're doing because nobody asked them if it was okay.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Exactly. The Atlantic has been following this very closely. They have some articles out there which are really good and they even have a database they put together where you can go in and search your name and see if they found that your book has been used. And I found a whole bunch of people and posted them, tagged them and post them on Facebook because is it.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: A little bit wrong if I'm like a tiny bit excited? There's a possibility even a machine is reading my stories that are out there. No, just checking.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Anyway, this has become such a thing that it's even been brought before a Senate subcommittee. And an open letter was signed by more than 10,000 authors, including Roxanne Gay and Margaret Atwood to get AI to make AI obtain consent before they use their book for learning and pay them.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: Generally speaking, consent is a good idea.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Yeah, to get their consent. But you know what, authors may say no, or authors may say, sure, use my book to teach AI, but pay me for it, right?
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: So that's what they're trying to get, the AI. Here's another horror story.
AI is being used to make fake books. So imagine a reader of yours comes to you and says, hey, I love your latest book, but you don't have a latest book.
So you look on Amazon and you find fake books terribly written by AI with your name on it as the author.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Oh yeah, that's not cool.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: That's another nightmare. And it happened to Jane Friedman. So she went on there and found several, actually. And she had to go to Amazon because Amazon makes it so easy for this to happen.
And there's a CNN article about it. Know, she was approached on this situation and we'll put that link out there for you so you can read that article. But yeah, she had to talk to Amazon. They took her books down finally. But it's mean she's a very good writer and she has had a blog out for years. So there's a lot of content out there that they can use to do this with. But this particular situation, the writing was terrible. It was awful writing. It was not her voice. It was not anything, which is a good thing, honestly, because that's how it got caught. But it's just a nightmare to me that that would happen.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: I have a scary story, okay?
I have a scary story that it actually turned into a story that I wrote. And you mentioned before that I had done renovations on my house in Maryland, which I had, and I kept, like, a running Facebook album about it and posted pictures along the way because I did a lot of the work myself.
If it didn't have to do with plumbing or electricity.
Mostly demo.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: If I remember correctly. You enjoyed the demo.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: You have to I mean, it's messy and it's dirty and it takes a while, but it can also relieve some stress because you get to wax stuff with a sledgehammer and those pry bars, prying things apart. Very satisfying. Anyway, for all of the things, though, that I'm not qualified to do, I had a series of contractors and handymen and plumbers and electricians and even a carpet guy come to my house and put together estimates for me. Or take a look at what it was I wanted to have done and then talk to me about the best way to approach that.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: That's your new house.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: This was not my new house. This was my house. Actually, I've had some of that in my new house here in North Carolina, too. But this is primarily in Maryland, and that house was built in 1927, so there were some surprises along the way. Anyway, some of these people were sketchy. Sketchy? I mean, they do the things where they accidentally leave stuff, and then they call you, and then they want to come back and get it, like, after hours.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: Are you in the shower right now? Because I need to come to your house and get something.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: No, I think I left my tape measure.
Come on, I'll put it on the porch.
Yeah, that kind of stuff. And then you'll find them. Sometimes they'll swing by. And this one guy who had talked to me about some plumbing work would be like sitting in his van down the street. Why?
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: Creepy. No?
And then working with them, anybody who's ever had renovation done, it's a terrible experience. Generally, if you're living in the house and it's noisy and messy and sometimes they don't show up and there's a lot of things. It's very expensive.
Yeah. You're at the mercy of these other folks. And that actually led to the very first short story I ever had published, was called Handyman as a sort of double entendre.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Handyman about these guys who are in your house doing you don't think anything about it. You give them keys, you give them the security code. Your alarm system. They're in there doing whatever it is that they're doing.
Anyway, so in that story, it all goes terribly wrong, and then writers beware about that. That was my first story. It was included in an anthology of psychological horror stories published in Australia.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: They accidentally misspelled my.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: To.
I'll put a link if anybody wants to find it, on Amazon or whatever.
Yeah.
Again, therapy. So anyway, so that was like real life, scary things that led towards infusing that feeling into a piece of fiction.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: Well, I have kind of a creepy story of my own. When I was researching, my grandmother and my mother and I found their house that they lived in back in the 40s in Galveston.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: When you want to do a research.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: Trip, you need to go there. You need to go walk in their shoes and see what they saw and where they lived and stuff. So the house actually became an airbnb. That's where I found it. Yeah.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: Well, that makes it easier.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: It was on the market at one point, and I saw the pictures online, and they were terrible, awful, gross pictures. And, I mean, the house was in really bad shape. It was a little cottage about a block from the Gulf, from the beach. And luckily, I took screenshots of them because I like to write about how bad it was, how bad a condition. I mean, there's, like, trash laying around in the yard. And they're posting this to sell.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: Zillow is good for that because it'll show you the new pictures. But if you continue to scroll down, you'll see the pictures from the previous owners. Oh, I didn't know it did that. Like, keep going.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, I'll have to see if those are still out there. But yeah, you look at the picture of the bathroom, and it's got this old mirror hanging off the wall with wires and one of those old sinks that just has the little metal stands, and it's attached to the wall, two little metal holes holding it up. And I'm like, that could be the same exact sink that my grandmother stood at in the mirror that she looked into. And I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. So anyway, it was all remodeled and fixed up and was an airbnb when we went back. And I think it was my first night that I stayed in that house.
And maybe I made the mistake of bringing a photograph that actually belonged and was taken in that house or near that house. It was taken in 1940, brought it into the house. And I heard that I've heard that items, especially photographs, can bring, like, spirits or something with them. I don't know. But that night, I was falling asleep, and isn't that always the story? When you're falling asleep, something happens?
I felt something, like, at the foot of the bed, push down the bed, and then it happened again, like a little closer to me and then again, and it felt like someone was on the bed crawling towards me, and I freaked out. I freaked out.
Yeah. I don't know what that was.
I don't know what that was. It's just creep. It really did feel like something was crawling towards me.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: That is a creepy, creepy story. Yeah.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: I woke up and I walked around. I thought, why did I bring this picture in here?
But anyway, why it happened in my mom's childhood home, I have no idea.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: Except that you don't think this was a whole, like, I'm partly asleep and partly awake and my imagination oh, it.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: Definitely could be something like that, because that's when all those things happen anyway, when you're waking up or falling asleep. So sure, it could be something like that, but who knows?
That's a good creepy story for how I was. And I stayed there for ten days. So every night when I was falling asleep, I was thinking about that and.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Hoping it wasn't going to that doesn't sound restful.
Two stars, haunted. I don't know.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Maybe that's why my grandmother ran away from could be.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: I would be looking into what was going on in that place before.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: Okay, free pay.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: Speaking of stuff you have been working on and research, tell everybody your good news.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Oh, I finished the orphan heirloom project.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: You found the family?
[00:29:05] Speaker B: So the Bible. Have I talked about the Bible on the you have. Okay, so the super old family Bible that I found in Waynesville, I finally called one of the numbers that I didn't know if it worked or not. Again, the info you find doesn't always work. So I called the number, left a message, and found it. They called me back. This is the daughter of the woman I thought the phone number belonged to. She called me back, and she was generally excited about this idea. And I remember her saying on the phone, she's like, she had her sister nearby, and she's like, I don't know if this is what did she call it? Credible, or she used another word.
And her sister's like, yeah, it's real, it's real. Go ahead and talk to her. Call her or whatever. And I was like, Yay. So we were both excited on the phone, and we set up a meeting the next day to meet for lunch. We went up towards Asheville and had lunch at Stone Ridge Tavern, which is very good. You and I had lunch there once looking for houses.
Very good. And they got to see the Bible, and we talked about family and stuff like that.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Did they have any idea about how the Bible ended up in this antique store?
[00:30:36] Speaker B: No, they couldn't really figure out who had it or how? No, not really.
I looked at the history, and I think it was the 1940s census had Sandy's mother and grandmother in the same house and grandfather in the same house. So trying to track who would have probably had it, I'm guessing, but these.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: Ladies that you were talking to were related to the string of people listed in the Bible. Did you give it to them?
[00:31:15] Speaker B: I did. I did a couple days later.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: That's really cool. I guess they were really happy.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: I took it on a trip back up to Waynesville, and I was hoping to take some pictures with the guy who sold it to me. Oh, yeah? But he wasn't there, so that was a waste of a day.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: Except that you probably took the Blue Ridge Parkway. Did.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: Yeah, we did.
[00:31:35] Speaker A: Fall Peak.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: Fall it is. It's so beautiful up there. It was a gorgeous day. And the Apple Festival was on that day, too, so it was not a wasted trip there at all.
[00:31:45] Speaker A: Any day that involves apple cider, donuts.
[00:31:50] Speaker B: Or whatever down for that Sunday, I called Sandy and know we can meet up. I'm going to be at Appalachian Mountain Brewery.
You want to come and get it? And she came and got it, and she hugged me in the parking lot.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: It was.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: Cool. It is really neat.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: This kind of makes me want to go find cool things and then try and hunt down where they I don't have time for that. But, I mean, if my life were a Hallmark movie, that would be the coolest thing ever. I would be like that person. I mean, I know they have a whole mystery series of the antiques person who solved crimes.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: But yeah, I don't want to be an antiques person. I don't really know anything about antiques, but finding interesting things and running that.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Down, that sucker called me. I did take pictures of the I put the Bible back on the original shelf where I found it and took pictures of that. So it's going to be in my blog post when I get it out there. But it was like, I don't know how anybody could pass up an old super old book with duct tape holding it together.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: Yeah. It's amazing the stuff that you find.
[00:33:06] Speaker B: Still there and out there.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Well, I finished the story that I'd been working on many sleepless nights until that got done and sent out. So send me the good vibes that that gets picked up.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: Yay. Good vibes. Woo. Pick it up. Everybody wants to read it, so they should publish it.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Let's play truth or fiction.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Okay, I got one.
All right. You ready?
[00:33:33] Speaker A: I'm ready.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: Okay. A woman owns a hotel. She's having an affair with a pharmacist.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: I'm noticing a trend for these scenarios that you are. You didn't use the word hussey this time?
[00:33:49] Speaker B: No.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: Okay. All right. So a woman, she's having an affair with a pharmacist.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: Go ahead. Okay. He has an office nearby, and he's a very handsome and charming pharmacist, by the way. And she gets knocked up. Okay. Now that's different than the other. Ones.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Okay, so she gets knocked up, but when she goes to tell him, thinking he'll marry me now because I'm knocked up, he rejects her.
So she kills him in the basement.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: Holy cow. That wasn't the way I expected it to go.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: And then she sells his body to the local university.
[00:34:27] Speaker A: Oh, for like for medical school?
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: I'm going with True.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: No, I think I got you this time.
It is fiction.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: What book is this?
[00:34:42] Speaker B: It's not. I switched it up. It is a nonfiction book that I messed up for you.
So the real story. You want the real story?
[00:34:53] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Okay. So there's this guy that has a hotel. He owns the hotel. The woman comes to him, says, I'm pregnant. He's the pharmacist. And she wants him to marry him. Marry her. Sorry.
But he rejects her. So he kills her in his basement.
[00:35:16] Speaker A: I was going to say that's way more common. Like, the dude kills the pregnant. I mean, that's, like, common.
Yeah, it is more believable. It happens a lot, I'm sorry to say, even now.
[00:35:29] Speaker B: Well, this happened in 1892 or somewhere around there, and it was in Chicago, and this guy created this hotel with.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Builders just during the World's Fair.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Yes, it was.
[00:35:46] Speaker A: Yes. I have read this book. I read a book about this guy. H h holmes.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Yes.
Or Herman Mudgett was his real name. The devil in the White City.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: Devil in the White city.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: Eric Larson.
[00:36:01] Speaker A: One of the first nonfiction crime books I ever really? Yeah, yeah.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: He is so good.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: It is an excellent book. If you haven't read it, this little nugget should not be spoiler for you, because there is so much more you want to talk about. The tip of the iceberg. This is the tip of the iceberg. Well, that was a good one. Thank you.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: Yeah. That chapter is called Remains of the Day.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Get it?
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Remains of yeah, like Soup of the Day, and then also Remains of the Day.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: All right.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: Let'S wrap it up today with a good Tip of the Week.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: Okay, so my tip of the week is to check out the links on our Facebook page so that you can see these stories, these scams that I told you about, and go check them out for yourself.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: And if you haven't found that, that's Secrets and Lies a Storyteller's podcast, there is a Facebook page for that. You can leave us questions or suggestions or you can contribute. We've got some good threads going on about some of the things that we've been talking about here in the podcast.
[00:37:19] Speaker B: And just basically stay updated on the scams. Just don't fall for anything. Stay updated. Maybe subscribe to writers beware.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good resource for you, too. Plus, if you come across anything that we didn't talk about, that is something else that others should be on the lookout for. Share it.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: We'll get it out there yeah.
[00:37:49] Speaker A: Well, thank you.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: I hope you writers are thoroughly freaked out and scared and that you channel.
[00:37:58] Speaker A: That onto the page yes, in some way. Or that maybe you have some good spooky story recommendations. We love good reading recommendations, whether they be nonfiction or fiction. Throw them in the chat or on our Facebook page. Send us a message and we will check it out. All right? Until next time, good stories, good writing.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
And we'll talk to you next time. Talk to you soon.
