Nightmare Now
Erik Byrne
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Midwest Monster Mash: The Enfield Horror
Nightmare Now
11/18/22 • 63 min
The enfield horror
- I've got a real treat for you this week one of my favorite cryptids.
- This was 1973 which as we get deeper in our episodes over time you might notice that number a lot because in my anecdotal research over the last few years that seems to be the one where a good chunk of the weirdness in the united states happens.
- I’m talking bigfoots,
- So many Fucking UFOS
- Aliens
- Other random one off cryptids
- Different high strangeness,
- MIBS
- Timeslips
- Other crazy stuff
- The early 1970s midwest is gonna be in the paranormal history books down the line and I don’t think a lot of people are necessarily connecting all those dots.
- This was 1973 which as we get deeper in our episodes over time you might notice that number a lot because in my anecdotal research over the last few years that seems to be the one where a good chunk of the weirdness in the united states happens.
- Lastly I wanna give a quick plug to curious cryptids
- It’s from curious cryptids that I actually drew inspiration for today’s show, and in particular today’s nightmare. The ENFIELD HORROR
- I always thought this was a cool creature when I read about it as a kid in ripleys believe it or not or some other adjacent publication but this book reminded me of the weird creature that terrorized enfield illinois in the spring of ‘73 so without further ado lets leap right into it.
- First sighting (Chronologically)
- Greg Garret a young lad of 10 years was happily catching fireflies in his backyard when it began that fateful night, april 25th 1973
- Greg was attacked by the creature as it leapt out of the woods, and tore his tennis shoes to shreds
- It ripped his shoes apart, I couldn’t find anything about whether Greg's feet were okay but since there’s no mention of it I assume the horror literally just tore up the shoes. And left his dogs intact.
- He described the creature with gray slimy skin, short claws on two small arms and here’s the real kicker. 3 clawed legs. I want to know how he was tearing up shoes on three legs, did he plan one leg and go to town ith the other two or pull like reinforced excavator move with two legs in the dirt and tear it up with the other one. How many animals do you know with three legs, naturally that is, I’m not talking about lucky the jack russel terrier
- He ran back into his house where his parents though nothing of the incident, they probably smacked him around for destroying his shoes though, I have no evidence to support that other than baseless assumptions about early seventies illinois.
- This sighting wasn’t actually the first one reported though. That honor belonged to the mcdaniel family about an hour later.
- Jil 12 and her older brother henry junior mcdaniel 15 were home alone while their father henry mcdaniel was working late. This was right up the road from the garret's place so that’s a little bit of corroboration.
- 10 pm
- He gets inside finds his kids going nuts telling him there’s a monster trying to get in. first it scraped the door then tried to rip their AC out of the wall.
- He’s pissed because his kids are still up and then goes and checks and the AC is actually awry
- The kids are going ape saying that it’s been trying to get in for a half hour up to and including the last five minutes when he pulled up and came inside.
- He opens up the door and standing in the porchlight is the enfield horror.
- 3 legs
- Short body
- Two little arms coming from the breast area
- 4 1⁄2 feet tall
- Grey in color
- Big pink eyes the size of flashlights
- He’s like fuck what the heck is that, slams the door shut as it’s coming towards the house and grabs his 22 pistol that’s just chilling next to the door. I love this country.
- Mcdaniel opens the door again to find the creature perched just beyond his porch stoop
- He shoots 5 times. The first time connecting because the creature let out a hiss like a wildcat and recoiled back
- The next 4 shots all seemed to miss because after the first the creature took off, covering the 50 feet to the treeline in just 3 leaps. That’s like 17 feet each jump.
- He didn’t see it again, and called the police, who showed up around midnight, this is another important detail. That gives it credence. If he’s just making shit up and haphazardly blasting bullets into the neighborhood it’s probably best to not call the police.
- Together they find strange tracks, like a dogs with 6 pads instead of five and with an abnormal pattern, could be related to the thing having 3 legs.
- There were also scratches on the siding of the house.
- Greg Garret a young lad of 10 years was happily catching fireflies in his backyard when it began that fateful night, april 25th 1973
- The Next day the police asked around the neighborhood and found greg garret, which is where we get his report from earlier.
- This is where we get the first newspaper article in the mt vernon register describing mcdaniels sighting and report from the night before.
- Things are exciting in town, as you would expect from a mon...
Tilikum, and Other 'Serial' Killer Whales
Nightmare Now
05/01/23 • 45 min
Nightmare Now Trailer
Nightmare Now
03/01/22 • 1 min
Robert Liston and the 300% mortality surgery
Nightmare Now
03/29/22 • 25 min
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare_murders
Loose Transcript:
Hi everyone and welcome or welcome back to another episode of nightmare now. I’m the host, Erik Byrne. Today’s episode is gonna be another short one, lets say truncated or even amputated. It opens up a whole topic of medical horror like a bonesaw to an artery. I’d love to do more episodes on the wider subject of the insane stuff humanity used to call medicine, but I’ll split that up and sprinkle it into the feed at large over time. I don’t want to spend too many episodes in a row on one particular topic. Maybe if I was doing this in seasons or something, but for right now I’m gonna jump all over time and space like I’ve got cosmic ADD. Maybe down the line I’ll curate collections of episodes on broader topics like medicine, history or animals, but for that to happen I need to pump out more of that thick squidgy content. So without further ado I would like to jump right into the blood and guts of today’s episode. I give you the fastest knife in the west end, the slickest slicer south of the north sea, Robert liston!
Robert liston was a prolific surgeon in britain from around 1818 to his death in 1847. He was born in late october of 1794 to a minister and inventor in Scotland. He grew up fascinated with medicine and anatomy and after a rudimentary schooling as a boy went on to attend medical school in edinburgh (edin-bruh). He left for a while to study under this guy william blizard in London and eventually returned to edinburgh to teach anatomy there before becoming a surgeon and then kind of bounced between london and edinburgh throughout his life. He got canned in edinburgh and moved to london, came back then went back to london where he lived out the remainder of his days. He married a wine merchant’s daughter along the way who isn’t mentioned in most of the articles and the one’s she’s in don’t even really give her name. Give the ladies some coverage too c’mon! Given her absence in most of the literature here I, I don’t think there’s much relevance to me covering her either. Sorry mrs Liston, I’m sure he couldn’t have done it all without you. We’ll take a brief second to pour out a whiskey for the happy couple and make a note to find some strong women leads for future horror stories on the show.
Back to old robert, that covers most of the biographical information of any relevance to the medical insanity we’re going to be jumping into today. I think he’d appreciate the brevity and cutting to the chase as you’ll soon find out. So during this time period of history, people had a Fairly good idea of how most of the human body worked and how to fix a lot of the medical issues people had. But it certainly was far from perfect. I mean even today we’re far from perfect. Reminds me of a time I tried to give blood like two years ago and they had to take the needle in and out 3 or four times because they weren’t getting any flow. After squeezing the stupid rod for ten minutes and not filling a drop of the blood bag, 2 nurses and a doctor later some tech figured out that they had crimped the wrong tube. They just gave me the coupon for the free whopper or whatever and told me to get out of there, so there’s kind of individual incompetence like that and societal incompetence like the fact that back then other surgeons thought you were a pussy if you washed your hands before or after a surgery.
Most notably and most relevant at the time though was that speed of the operation was of the essence. The longer you went with an open body cavity or bleeding stump from an amputation, your chances of dying skyrocketed up. You lost more blood, you became more susceptible to infection, (although that wasn’t really well understood at the time), and you just have an overall lower chance of survival. Enter Robert Liston. He really, really leaned into the faster surgery good, slow methodical surgery bad. And now we’re getting into the reason this dude gets his own episode on my prestigious show.
Picture this, your leg is green and sickly from some horrible 1800s infection probably just from stepping on a tomato that somebody stored their sewing needles in or something. Before antibiotics and other more modern inventions or discoveries it was just kinda like, that’s gotta go. And then it’s we let you keep your shrek leg and you’re guaranteed to die, or we chop that s**t off and you’ve got like a one in four chance of dying. Han solo was right when he said never tell me the odds I guess.
Dr Liston’s whole schtick was that given a faster surgery you had a more likely chance to survive, why not take that to its logical conclusion and go for the speedrun records? Liston wasn’t called ...
10/17/23 • 46 min
George Washington's Ghost's Lightsaber
Nightmare Now
06/03/22 • 17 min
I'm not a school child, MLA format can suck a fat one
google the gettysburg address
Hey everybody, welcome back to another Thursday episode of nightmare now! Where we laugh about lurid lore and learn about lost languishing laments in layman’s terms and lay on the levity talking about loss, life, love and in today’s show, liberty. I thought it might be fitting to do our first foray into ghost and war stories on the week of memorial day. And what better american veteran to cover than the man, the myth, the legend, MC dolla bill ya boi george washington himself. Memorial day was first celebrated as a holiday in 1868, known then as decoration day to honor union soldiers in the civil war. Now as far as George Washington and the civil war goes you’ve got a couple of takes on it. The joke take is that sure, Washington was there in the flesh. The broke take is that Washington wasn’t there at all, after all my man died in december of 1799 and the civil war wasn’t for another sixty years or so. From April of 1861 to May of 65. The Woke take is that Washington’s ideals and legacy inspired people on both sides to fight for the America that they believed he founded. But then we get up to the straight bespoke take that George Washington’s ghost literally showed up at gettysburg in july of 1863 with a f**king lightsaber to turn the tide of battle like he’s obi wan kenobi. This episode of Nightmare Now brought to you by disney plus.
Glad to have you all here and I’m very excited and pleased to announce, thanks to you yes you with the headphones, that we hit 500 overall downloads, that’s a fun milestone and I’m super pumped about it and the future, watching that number grow, but more importantly what that number represents, and that’s you the listener deciding to listen to this greasy little show when there’s millions of others out there competing for your time. It truly means a lot to me so thank you all so much!
Now back to our regular scheduled programming about jedi george washington. Some of you history nerds may have heard this story before, I know I have, but I never actually looked too far into it until this week. And especially all the non americans listening might not have heard this either but lets just jump right into it.
As far as the civil war goes we’re zooming in on major part of it, the battle of gettysburg, but we’re gonna keep zooming in further to one of the more famous parts of that most famous battle. Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th maine infantry holding the strategic little round top. Gettysburg and even this particular skirmish within the three or four day battle of gettysburg are kind of outside the scope of this episode. I defineitely want to do a deep dive on the civil war, and probably gettysburg specifically, but the short version is like 6000 people died and like thirty thousand f**king people were injured, and most of them probably died later because medicine in the civil war was bascially just amputation and hoping for the best. Lotta blood lotta screaming, bullets blew apart in you and you died of infection most of the time. Not really a good time for anyone I reckon. Gettysburg ended up being one of the turning points, if not THE turning point of the American Civil war. The defense of the little round top, was part of the reason that the union won gettysburg because like the obi wan kenobi analogy from before, it was the high ground.
Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine fought off two waves of a larger force of confederate troops to defend the hill but eventually ran very low on ammo. With another wave incoming chamberlain and his famously quivering mustache yelled to fix bayooonnnneeettteeesss! And led his boys to charge down the hill in a last ditch defensive offensive bluff. Nobody is gonna fault the confederates for scattering after this lunatic gambit, because seeing your buddies shot is one thing, but seeing them skewered on a bayonet by a whole company of charging berserk sold...
The Demon Core
Nightmare Now
06/30/22 • 28 min
The links are on my other laptop they're coming soon I love you!
The Number 13 and Triskaidekaphobia
Nightmare Now
07/08/22 • 26 min
Linkies:
Friday the 13th rooted in the bible
Why is friday the 13th unlucky
Loose transcript
With all that out of the way, why are we here today? That’s a little unintentionally existential. I just mean what are we talking about today. I’ll get existential on the hologram earth episode but that’ll be at another time. If any of this is real at all. Today however we’re talking a fun little word: Triskaidekaphobia! The fear and aversion of the number 13. It’s bad luck we’ve all heard that right? I know I have but I never really gave it more thought than that, it’s a weird superstition and nothing more. But most superstitions have at least a little bit of folklore, historical precedent or other ghoulish tale surrounding them. So what better day to take a look at this ubiquitous superstition surrounding the number 13 than the thirteenth episode? Maybe a Friday the thirteenth, but that doesn’t really work for releasing on thursdays. But we’ll see if we can get one out on time won’t we.
Why thirteen though? Nobody really knows for sure, although we do know it’s mostly a western tradition. Middle easterners don’t trust the number 39, which happens to be thirteen thrice. And many easern countries and cultures do what they can to avoid the number 4 apparently because the word for number four in chinese, vietnamese, japanese and korean is close to their word for death.
So mostly the thirteen thing is a western thing. And there’s really no consensus on why that is so I’ll throw a couple of theories at ya and you can decide for yourself which explanation is most likely to impress the emo chick you’re trying to take home at the party. Don’t act like you don’t subtly think you’re intellectually superior because you listen to obscure occult history podcasts, you can’t bulls**t me I know why you’re really here. And I’m happy about it. I’m thrilled to be your wingman when you bring up this stupid stuff later.
Anyway here’s a few theories as to why the number 13 is considered unlucky in the west, the first and most likely historically seems to come from norse mythology. And I’m proud to announce this show is brought to you by thor love and thunder, in theaters this saturday, nah I’m just f**king with you, one day we might have a sponsor though, won’t that be nice?
So thirteen, Norse mythology, where are we? We have a lovely supper with a bunch of the gods hanging out having a grand old time especially my man baldur. The god of jo and gladness, he was just having himself uite a rumpus getting wasted with 11 other gods.
Flashback to when baldur was having prophetic dreams of his death, his mother frigga, wife of odin, yeah he was thor’s brother. His mother went to every entity in the universe collecting an oath from every single one of them that they would not hurt her son. Loki shows up, that f**king rapscallion and asks casually, hey is there anything that didn’t agree not to hurt baldur? She’s like no, but come to think of it I never asked mistletoe. It’s probably fine right? And boom loki poofs away.
*Back to the dinner, everyone goes back to one of their favorite hobbies, trying to kill baldur. Loki is the 13th guest and is not invited but shows up anyway. Might have something to do with him having sex with horses, I don’t know.
*Loki gets hodr, baldur and thor’s brother, even more wasted, who is blind to boot and he’s like throw this at him here I’ll help you throw it. He gives hodr a mistletoe spear and helps him aim and wouldn’t you know it, it kills baldur instantly.
*In short it births the tradition that if thirteen people are at a dinner table one of them will be dead by the end of the year. In baldurs case it was the end of the night. We’ll revisit that theme in just a minute. Can you think of anyone else that had an ill fated supper with 12 others? HMMMMM
*Baldur didn’t go unavenged though, wait you think someone blamed and killed loki? Nope, they made sure there was justice so odin f**ked a giant named rindr to give birth to a son Vali, who reaches maturity the day he’s born. And I thought a year of puberty or whatever was bad, jesus, hey there’s a spoiler. So Vali rockets from inf...
The Night Marchers and Haunted Hawaii
Nightmare Now
07/15/22 • 24 min
In this episode we look at Hawaii's night marchers, spirits that shepherd souls along the island at night, and we chat about unified paranormal theory. What a fun topic to look at, we're definitely gonna cover more on future shows!
Linkies:
Loose Transcript:
Hi Everybody thanks for tuning in an welcome or welcome back to another episode of nightmare now the show where we hunt down horrors and harrowing historical happenings, hailing from the Himalayas, the Holocene and in this here helping, haunted hawaii!
My name is erik byrne and I’m the horrible host, here to bring you a heaping hoard of awesome stories from the fiftieth state in the union all alone in the pacific!
I hope everyone is doing well today when you listen to this and when you’re not listening to this, I’m having a pretty busy week but what else is new there you don’t want to hear that. Big congratulations to my good friends Dan and Asia on their wedding that was a blast, I don’t know if I brought that up last episode, and looking forward, a huge early congratulations to Maddie and Caleb on theirs this coming weekend, I’m so excited!
Kitty cat is good, needs his nails clipped but we’re hanging in there and we’re glad to have you here with us today. The idea for this episode comes from one of my friends on twitter going by Koa ah nooeh nooeh, I’m probably butchering that pronunciation, and I will continue to do so throughout the show, just by virtue of being a white guy trying to figure out how to say stuff in hawaiian. I better learn quick though because we’re booking a trip out there after the wedding, and I’m trying to be at least the second most ignorant person there, as long as I’m not the biggest a**hole I’m happy with that. So they reached out and I asked if they had anything cool they wanted me to cover, and they provided me with a couple of links on a phenomena that is both uniquely hawaiian but also has ties to high strangeness the world over. That is of course the night marchers, or as they are known in hawaiian as hoowa kai e po.
Again if I mess up all these words, at least I tried, which is more than can be said for a lot of the haunted hawaii clickbait articles I came across this week so cut me some slack. What do the night marchers do? What makes them interesting? you may be asking. Well they certainly don’t run in daylight.
The night marchers as the name suggests are spirits that march, at night. Not a very imaginative title but hey it’s a translation. Folks are always saying, look at them marching at night, nobody asking why. Or how?
More interesting by far are those latter two descriptors. Let start with what and then move on to why and how.
So you’ve just got done with a long day of surfing, ok maybe that’s a stereotype but whatever, most of my cultural knowledge of hawaii comes from Surfs up, Moana, and blue hawaii plus a bunch of pearl harbor trivia. 1959 50th state, almost 20 years after the japanese attack on pearl harbor. Oh man do we have some great WWII content coming down the pipe for you guys, I feel like when you hit thirty lawrence fishburne shows up with sunglasses two pills
Red is WWII history and Blue is just like model trains, and before you ask taking both pills and building WWII model train stations is generally not an option in polite society. Pretty sure that’s some kind of watchlist.
I don’t know what pill leads to a podcast but here we are.
Anyway, model trains aside, you’re done surfing and you hit your tent for the night to get some shuteye and off in the distance in the jungle you hear some chanting and the faint sound of drums growing ever closer. You look up to see a brilliantly illuminated full moon and turn your gaze back to the island paradise you’ve set up camp on. A dense fog has rolled in and obscured much of the far off road. In the distance you see a faint bobbing light, getting close...
09/04/23 • 37 min
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FAQ
How many episodes does Nightmare Now have?
Nightmare Now currently has 46 episodes available.
What topics does Nightmare Now cover?
The podcast is about Weird, Aliens, History, Occult, Survival, Comedy, Nature, Podcasts, Ufo and Horror.
What is the most popular episode on Nightmare Now?
The episode title 'Eye of the (Champawat) Tiger' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Nightmare Now?
The average episode length on Nightmare Now is 38 minutes.
How often are episodes of Nightmare Now released?
Episodes of Nightmare Now are typically released every 13 days, 3 hours.
When was the first episode of Nightmare Now?
The first episode of Nightmare Now was released on Mar 1, 2022.
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