Dead Air | Ep. 12 | The Mole People Are Back and a Man Flew 200 Lizards in His Socks

At 4:19 in the morning on August 18th, three people in headlamps and overalls pulled themselves out of a sanitation manhole about 150 feet from the main entrance to Penn Station and walked away fast. There is video. An Arizona tourist watched it and said, out loud, "reconnaissance, 9/11." The NYPD is running facial recognition and has arrested nobody. Mike has been following the mole people since the very first episode of this show, back when they were surfacing in Williamsburg and Gravesend, and he would like everyone to understand that Penn Station is an escalation. Dead Air is what happens between Fear Archive episodes — no research, no structure, no plan. Just Amanda and Mike talking until something disturbing comes up. It always does. Then Amanda opens the World's Fair. Between 1850 and the early 1900s, dozens of them went up around the world. Grand palaces, domed halls, ornate facades, built in almost no time and then torn down within a year or two. Roughly 1,500 buildings, gone. She has questions about the attendance numbers, and she turns out to be right about them: the famous 27 million figure for Chicago in 1893 counts the same people over and over again. From there it is a short walk to the Tartarian Empire, to the Great Chicago Fire taking out nearly everything the fair had built, and to H. H. Holmes running a murder castle in the shadow of the White City while millions of strangers moved through a city that had no way of noticing anyone was gone. Mike counters with a woman in a grave. In 2022, archaeologists in northern Poland opened a 400-year-old burial and found a young woman with a rusted sickle laid across her throat and a padlock fastened to her foot. DNA work published this month found something the first reports missed: they had also forced a copper object into her mouth. It is the first burial ever documented with all three. She is one of several dozen strange graves in the same field, which includes a child buried face down and a body arranged as if crucified, and the documentary about the site is called Field of Vampires. Amanda's position is that you do not open it. Amanda also dug a rusted sickle out of her own flower bed this spring and hung it on the wall. Also: fifty driverless Jaguars parked across Nashville with twenty-nine cameras apiece and the microphones running; a new horror movie hiding an analogue horror ARG somewhere on YouTube; a shout-out to Cloud Nothings at Tubbies in Kingston; and the man who boarded a flight to Tokyo with two hundred live lizards zipped into twenty-two pairs of socks. Everything we make is on Patreon for $5 a month. Every episode ad-free with no mid-rolls, a bonus Dead Air every month, The Watchlist breakdowns, the mailbag, case files, and you vote on what we cover next. The summer movie list drops there soon. https://www.patreon.com/c/FearArchivePod A new season of The Fear Archive is in production. Hosted by Amanda Kagiwada and Michael Ryan Assip. Executive produced by Cassie Jozefov. A Violet Hour Media production. LISTENER WARNING: unsolved disappearances, serial murder, a 17th-century burial, mass shootings, surveillance, animal smuggling, strong language, and one dad joke Amanda knew was bad while she was still saying it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices