For today’s Curse-O-Meter testing, we have the Magical Battle of Britain, the disappearance of a man looking for Alaska’s secret black pyramid, the sickening and rude effects of a haunted nunnery, and how not to perform an exorcism on your mother-in-law. Also, during our shopping break, we’ll reveal artifact number three, which will be up for sale on the Probably Cursed Museum.

TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to episode three of the Probably Cursed podcast. For today’s cursometer testing, we have the magical battle of Britain, the disappearance of a man looking for Alaska’s secret black pyramid, the sickening and rude effects of a haunted nunnery, and how not to perform an exorcism on your mother-in-law. Also, during our shopping break, we’ll reveal artifact number three, which will be up for sale on the Probably Cursed Museum. I’m your Probably Cursed host, Chris.

And I’m Sheryl, also Probably Cursed.

To be determined. One day we’ll put ourselves through the cursometer.

To be fair, I am going to say right now that you could try an exorcism on your mother-in-law. I have no qualms about that. Just don’t follow the steps of the guy in the article.

That’s fair. I think for as religious as your mom is, she may take great offense to being exercised. That’s fair. Well, as we do at the start of every episode, we will feed our Lord Canarvon Cursometer some recent news in order to calibrate it for our main topic. We’ll activate the Lord Cursometer now.

As we’re alluding to our first story, man jailed after setting fire to mother-in-law in an exorcism ritual. This is written by Yoon Min-sik from the Korea Herald on December 13th of 2023. So, my aunt’s birthday.

Hooray! A sole court on Wednesday sentenced a 44-year-old man to two years and six months in prison for setting his mother-in-law on fire while performing what he claimed to be an exorcism.

Wait, that’s it for setting your mother-in-law on fire?

Yeah, I guess so. Alright, I’m just checking. Two years, six months. Yeah, it doesn’t seem very long. I guess maybe he would have gotten more, because I think she survives. Oh, okay. The defendant, surnamed Kim, was taking care of the 68-year-old victim at a hospital in Nuangu, Northeastern Seoul on May 29th when he lit pieces of tissue paper on fire and threw them at her. The victim sustained second-degree burns on various parts of her body, including her scalp, left hand, face, and neck. Kim’s lawyer claimed that throwing the tissue was part of an exorcism ritual and that he did not mean to injure the victim, saying that the tissue set fire to her hair only because she moved.

Well, what was she supposed to do? Just sit there and let him… where was he aiming, first of all?

You know, I guess it must have been around her face. A bit of advice for you out there, if you’re getting exorcised, remain completely still, especially if your son-in-law is throwing flaming bits of paper at you.

Yes, that’s probably a good call. Kim also claimed to have been suffering from mental illness at the time of the crime and was reportedly taking medication for his depression, which had a possible side effect of hallucination. The court, however, dismissed his claims that Kim was not of sound mind, saying that he was fully aware of the potential for damage to the victim, the bed, and the hospital.

The court dismissed the attempted murder charges, saying that the evidence presented by the prosecution is not sufficient to prove his intent to kill the victim. So I guess they decided he did mean to exorcise her and not kill her, and it just meant accidental fire in her hospital room.

I feel like this is a potential future episode of trying to look up exorcism rituals in other countries because that feels very random, throwing bits of fire at someone who needs demons removed.

Yeah, I feel like that would work just as well on a person as it does a demon. Yeah. Like, many things are vulnerable to fire.

I don’t know, that’s a weird one. Because I don’t know enough about Korea, I have no way of knowing if that’s actually part of their exorcism ritual, but that feels very witchcraft-child type stuff. Yeah.

Right? Like, is something supposed to happen? They say it’s because she moved, but if she didn’t move, does that mean the demon would have left her body? I’m confused. I guess so.

If she didn’t flinch the demon would, and then he could grab it by the shoulders and shove it out into the hospital hall and give it a kick in the butt.

Yeah, that makes sense. I got you. I got it now.

Don’t let your son-in-law do an exorcism on you. MOTHER-IN-LAW is out there.

Our next story is a man who went to Alaska to look for the Black Pyramid and went missing. This article is by Zo Mitchell, and it was on December 11th, 2023, from the Anomalalian. Anomalian? Anomalian? Anomalian.com?

It reads better than it said out loud. Yes.

41-year-old Nathan Campbell hired a charter plane out of Tel-Kitna to fly him to a small lake in northwest corner of Denali National Park. Along with some basic camping gear, Campbell brought a hefty cache of food, stored in plastic tubs, and two-weight satellite communicator to check in with his wife and his kids. He planned to spend the next four months alone smack dab in the middle of interior Alaska. But Campbell wasn’t there for fun.

He was on a mission. Campbell had come to Cary Lake to search for something that until now only existed in the darkest, least updated corners of the internet, the Black Pyramid. A massive underground structure rumored to be four times the size of the famous Cheops in Egypt, and thousands, if not millions, of years old.

So older than people. I think people are about one million years old.

Well, the other thing is that people wouldn’t have, even if that was the case, people didn’t arrive in North America until quite a bit later. So who would have built it?

I’m going to go by the fact that it’s four times the size of pyramids that we know people built. Who is bigger than people? This is a big foot pyramid.

Ah, good call.

And maybe black, so it absorbs the heat in the Arctic because it’s cold up there all the time.

I’m going to go with dinosaurs. Oh yeah. Dinosaurs built the pyramids. Conspiracy theorists claim that the structure is so powerful, it’s important to national security, so tantamount that all traces of the pyramid and the military base believed to protect it have been wiped from satellite imagery.

Although Bush pilots, trappers, and indigenous people have traveled the area around Kerry Lake for generations, a quick search through the Fairbanks Daily News Minor archives shows few references to a giant alien pyramid or to top secret military base in Central Alaska. In the early 90s came the real evidence of the black pyramid. Scientists studying shocked waves of Chinese underground nuclear testing recorded a grainy pyramid shaped spot of interference about 700 feet below the surface of interior Alaska. The black pyramid got more traction after a hot tip from an anonymous naval captain on the legendary radio program, coast to coast. The captain worked on a top secret radar installations in Alaska. For years he noticed that a mysterious, massively powerful source of electromagnetism near Lake Minchumina was disrupting his base’s aircraft and communications. And now after seeing the results of the Chinese test, the captain realized the source of the disturbance was a massive underground pyramid shaped structure in the heart of Alaska that has not shown on any map or satellite imagery. Not surprisingly, when the captain brought these facts to his superior, he threatened him with a quartet marshal, probably because of mental health concerns.

Don’t tell anyone your theories please.

Especially when you’re in the military, that sounds like a dangerous prospect. With the captain’s report, everything came together. Secret bases, government cover-ups, global warfare, ancient aliens, pyramid power, to create the story of the black pyramid. The story that Campbell, if he followed any of the internet lore, surely planned his summer vacation around. No one knows for certain if Campbell believed any of this. He may have spent a month poking around every clump of dwarf birch looking for secret door to the command center, or Campbell’s quest could have been an excuse for someone to get some alone time in the wilderness to tramp around in the woods on a mission they didn’t need a resolution to.

I can understand that. I’m going to the woods to hunt for a big foot and then just sort of camp for like eight days and go for long hikes. And you go, nope, didn’t find him. I’ll try again next year.

Why would you tell people you were going to look for a black pyramid? Like that sounds worse. Like if you just wanted some alone time in the wilderness, why don’t you say you’re looking for treasure or growing gold panning or hunting or…

I’m guessing it was a made up excuse. It was something he thought that no one would want to invite themselves along to. They’ll be like, have fun. Like maybe he is just an internet conspiracy nut and they’re just like, you go ahead and do that.

I don’t know if I was a kid and my dad was like, I’m going to go look for a giant black pyramid in Alaska. I would have been like, sign me up.

Me too. But there are those people out there that don’t have much curiosity in their life.

I suppose. Regardless, somewhere out there he got himself into trouble. Travel in any direction from Cary Lake would have been slow, difficult and dangerous. Did Campbell surprise a bear? Fall into a beaver pond? Did he get caught in a freak snowstorm?

No one knows. All the National Park Service has to go on are scattered testimonies and fragments of evidence. Before the plane left, Campbell gave his charter pilot instructions to pick him up at Cary Lake in mid-September right before the onset of the Alaskan winter. That was the last time anyone saw Campbell alive.

Sometime in mid-June, Campbell’s satellite texts stopped. His wife contacted the pilot, who told her to call a company flying helicopters to check the site of Campbell’s last flight. The results of her call, or if she tried to actually instigate a search, are unknown. It wasn’t until Campbell’s missed September 15th pick-up date that the National Park Service had sent a search team to Cary Lake. After a few days of beating through the bush, Rangers found Campbell’s gear, cracked food bins, moldy clothes, a battered tent, but no signs of Nathan. The only clues were rodent chewed remnants of his diary buried in the tent. The last entry dated sometime in late June simply dated went to get water, and then he simply disappeared.

The National Park Service flew over the area for several days, but eventually had to abandon the search. Campbell, if he was still alive, was hopefully prepared. The icy winds and subzero temperatures of the winter could come at any moment.

Soon snow would cover the landscape and make foot travel virtually impossible to survive. Campbell was as good as dead. On October 1st, 2020, Campbell was declared missing wherever he is. Hopefully he found what he was looking for, somewhere in the deep Alaskan wilderness the search for the Black Pyramid continues on.

When I found this news story, I immediately thought, I want to do an episode on the Black Pyramid. Doesn’t sound like there’s a whole lot to it. I’ll have to trek down that episode of Coast to Coast AMC to see if I can listen to the broadcast. So I bet other people are looking for it, not just this one guy.

Yeah, it’s the one thing that’s weird to me, which almost makes me wonder whether this is a real story or not. Yeah, is that it was wrote, it was written in 2023, but he’s been missing since 2020. I would think that all the missing person shows that I watch or something like that. I would have heard something about this guy.

I did look for, because like the Anomalian, it’s a paranormal news site, and I don’t know if they do a whole lot of fact checking. So I did try to look for like a real news report, quote unquote real news. Yes.

All I could really find is there is a missing persons poster on the Alaska State website for a person with that name, but it doesn’t include any of the details that he was looking for a Black Pyramid. Fair.

It’s not really the sort of thing you want to post on there anyway.

That’s true. That might change people’s minds on whether they go find some weirdo in the forest. Correct. Yeah, mysterious Black Pyramid in Alaska. That’s kind of cool, if it’s real. Well, we will feed in one more story into the cursometry here to complete our calibration testing. Ghost Hunters left sick after encounter at one of UK’s most haunted buildings. This is by Allison Brinkworth, who wrote for the Mirror.

The date is December 14th, 2023. A group of paranormal hunters were left feeling sick after they reportedly confronted by a bad mouthed ghost after they stepped inside a haunted nunnery. Tiktok hunter Tony Ferguson said he was left stunned by the spooky encounter which allegedly took place in the nunnery on Ranallah Road, Malvern in the Midlands. We’re not going to pronounce any place names, correct?

Nope, not today. Especially if it’s a vaguely Welsh. He claimed a ghost swore at his team and said they heard a bizarre dragging noise inside the Victorian building when they visited on December 9th. Tony and his fellow paranormal investigators visited the landmark to find out if long standing claims of the nunnery and its substantial grounds being haunted were true. He said, while we were all together in the basement area, we all heard a dragging noise above us.

Natalie said she had never heard anything like it before. We then began our investigation and were shocked to hear tapping noises, banging doors, and disembodied voices telling us to, for our edit version of the podcast, f off and get out. We even had responses to some of our questions. The group’s devices reportedly responded to paranormal activity with bleeps during their exploration of the nunnery. Tony described it as a phenomenal sight, reports of Birmingham Live.

We had responses from several devices that we had around the rooms when asking questions at Tony. We heard footsteps coming up the stairs whilst we were in the upper floors investigating. We had investigators starting to feel sick and uncomfortable and wanting to leave the room. The nunnery left us with many things that we could not explain. Even Natalie was shocked when she heard the dragging noise across the floor as we were all together.

She could not offer an explanation for this. He added, we were all shocked by the paranormal activity, admitted Tony, but we hope to return in the future to see if we can capture more evidence or try to debunk what we encountered. Full video and Tony’s other paranormal experiences can be found at his TikTok channel TonyFergusonGhostHunter1. Tony was already taken.

Why does he want to go back? Also, I guess it didn’t say, like, sick in what way.

I couldn’t find much information on what they meant by sick.

Maybe the pressure chain messed with their ears. Maybe the nunnery was wired with EMF pumps.

And if it was a nunnery ghost, do nuns curse? Is a nunnery a place of worship? Do you think? Because you’re not allowed to curse in a place of worship, I don’t believe it.

No, you wouldn’t be cursing. My suspicion is that somebody’s going to claim there’s a demon there. Okay. Yeah. I’d have to look it up. It’s funny because they’re like, it’s one of the most haunted places and I’ve never heard of it. Yeah, me neither. No. But yeah, I would say somebody’s going to claim it was a demon or something else because nuns don’t typically curse.

Well, I believe that is enough data for the cursometer to calibrate itself for a main topic. I will activate the cursometer now and have it tabulated its results. Please stand by. So for the first story of the soul man exercising his mother-in-law, it is determined the real curse is people.

Definitely.

If you were feeling like your depression medication was putting you in the wrong state of mind, don’t start exercising people.

I just, I don’t know if antidepressants actually cause hallucinations.

No, I think that was just his lame-ass excuse for flubbing the exorcism. And now his mother-in-law has both demons and second-degree burns. The second story for the missing man’s trip to the black pyramid, the cursometers determined that the man is definitely cursed. Cause he’s not returned and all of his food containers are cracked and his clothes got moldy. So he ain’t coming back. I blame bears.

Probably most likely bears. Or he fell into the black pyramid and could not get out. Maybe it’s like that season of Channel Zero where they went into the one house and they came out and it was an alternate reality.

Maybe he fell into a different universe on the other side of the pyramid. I hope so. And for the last story, for the haunted nunnery, probably cursed.

It’s making people sick and it’s also cursing them, literally with curse words. And before we get on to our final and main topic for the episode, we’ll just go over to the probably cursed museum and gift shop. So Sheryl and I have traveled far and wide to antique stores, estate sales, thrift shops to find the eeriest and most probably cursed items to put them up for sale to raise funds for our future probably cursed museum.

For today we release artifact number three available for sale now at probablycursed.etsi .com. It is an antique razor kit. It’s a compact portable shaving kit in a black metal case labeled on the case or the words the searchlight culbertson Montana looked it up and the searchlight is the name of a newspaper in culbertson started in 1902. So my guess is that the origin of the kit is that it’s a corporate gift, probably to a reporter, newspaper employee.

Nice. Like you know, like some companies like, oh, you’ve been with us for 20 years, you get a watch. Maybe they gave out shaving kits.

That’s possible. It also includes a safety razor inside that comes in two easy to assemble pieces. So it’s made for traveling and packing away in small compartments. Probably your old timing newsman suitcase back in the day. It somehow made it from culbertson Montana to north of the border to our local antique mall where we had found it on one visit.

What drew us to the kit one, it’s such a personal item. It might have been carried around by some journalists to prepare for his interviews. Do we know if it’s been passed down as a family heirloom many, many times before it made to the antique mall? We’re not quite sure. Comes with no story and we couldn’t really find much about it, but it drew us to it and it’s probably cursed nature. And you can see photos of it on our Instagram and our TikTok as well.

Facebook page as well should also have photos. The history of razors both in fiction and real life stories have had some oddities. In terms of fiction, Sweeney Todd comes to mind.

There’s been a few real life cursed shaving incidents and these stories are courtesy of mental floss. The first one, John Thoreau was the brother of the famous American writer and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. In the winter of 1841 while taking part in his daily shave, John Thoreau cut himself with his razor. A few days later he came down with lock jaw and died in Henry David’s arms. Just imagine shaving and then a couple days later you’re dead. Might be why a lot of dudes are sporting big bristly beards these days.

Out of curiosity, does it mention Lord Cronarvon in here? No. Well then I’ll add that one at the end.

Sounds good. I’ll continue on with these two more stories here and you can tack your zone. Michael F. Farley was the next one. He immigrated to the US from Ireland when he was 18 years old, way, way back in 1881.

He ran a successful liquor business in New York and was elected to Congress in 1915. The story was cut short after a visit to the barber shop and little did he know that the barber, that the brush the barber was using to create the lather was contaminated with anthrax. What? Farley was infected with the virus and died a few days later. And the last one here is John Henry Taylor who is a horticulturist and he took a trip on Red Line cruise ship back in 1911. In between matches of shuffleboard, Mr. Taylor felt his beard was getting a little rough and decided to visit the onboard barber. The waves must have been pretty rough that day because the barber gave old John Henry a little nick on his neck.

Because small cuts are par for the course when getting a shave, John Henry didn’t think much of it and returned to his cabin. But later that night, his throat began to swell up and filled with fluid. The ship doctor said it was just a case of blood poisoning and told Taylor that it would soon heal itself.

Yeah, that’s how blood poisoning works. That’s a good ship doctor.

Two days later, the swelling increased and Taylor could no longer speak. A week after the initial cut, he suffocated and died from severe edema. Wow.

I’m surprised it didn’t bring up Lord Cnerven because that’s one of the things from my childhood that I remember was his death, the curse of Tootin Common. So he went to Tootin Common’s tombs shortly after Howard Carter discovered it and two months later he died. They believed that he got blood poisoning after cutting a mosquito bite accidentally while he was shaving. So the bite became infected with, I’m not going to pronounce the Latin name, but with blood poisoning.

Which should go away on its own after two days. The doctor I heard once.

Rumors spread at the time that he died that the lights in Cairo, which is where the hospital was where he passed away, went out and plunged the entire city into darkness. Yes. Reportedly, at the same time back at his home in the UK, his pet dog gave a great howl and died. Wow. Yeah, so.

Lord Canarvon died hard.

He died hard, which is why I think it’s so funny they didn’t even bring him up. He is like the most famous shaving curse accident to me.

Yeah, and he’s the namesake of our cursometer. Yeah. The Lord Canarvon Cursometer. Oh, that’s crazy. Well. And with all of these stories about people dying horribly from one little nick on the razor, if you do decide to purchase this razor for yourself and decide to shave yourself, it is old and a tiny bit rusty. So you too could die in a few days from a razor cut. And I’m going to say right now, if you’re buying it, you are absolving us of all responsibility.

Get your tetanus shots, boys and girls.

Get your tetanus shots. It’s not so bad. I got one last year. And that concludes our museum gift shop segment here. Now we’ll get into our main topic.

All right. I am doing the story of the magical Battle of Britain and Dion Fortun. The year was 1939 and it was only one month since the start of World War II. Dion Fortun began writing letters to the members of the fraternity of the inner light, telling them that they must all meditate every Sunday morning from 12.15 to 12.30 in order to participate in a united meditation.

So this would have been in the middle of the night? So this would have been 12.15 to 12.30 in the morning.

It says every Sunday morning. So I guess so. Instructions would be sent out on Wednesdays so they could prepare for the Sunday and achieve a single pointed concentration in order to find success in their meditation goals. Dion Fortun’s plan is to help fight World War II through magical means and with the help of magical practitioners throughout Britain. Dion Fortun was born on the 6th of December 1890 in Wales to an upper middle class family. Her real name was actually Violet Mary Firth. She was a poet and a writer who studied psychology and psychoanalysis at the London University. During World War I, Dion joined the Women’s Land Army and started a company where she sold soy products.

The Women’s Land Army. Yeah, so I did a little bit of digging into it. This is just my Coles Notes version of what it is. During World War I, when all the men were sent off to fight in the war, they had a group of women that they called the Women’s Land Army that they basically took over running the farms and the agriculture in the area so that they could still have food. So that’s what they titled as the Women’s Land Army. Yeah, so she was a ceremonial magician who specialized in intentions and evocations. I won’t go into too much about her life because this episode is more about our magical battle of Britain, but you can always Google her. She led a really interesting life. Had a bunch of books.

Yeah. Dion’s first letter was dated October 8th, 1939. In the first letter, she notes the rules to the members of the Fraternity of Interlite. So the rules were no participation in politics.

Which is a good rule in general. Yeah, no kidding. To be fair, who wants to be a part of politics during a war? I feel like that’s a bad plan. That’s politics on hard mode.

Uh-huh. Rule two was to remain bipartisan, so showing no favor to one party or nation. So in keeping with this theme of remaining bipartisan, a French correspondent had sent a letter to Dion asking her why the group didn’t use their powers to confuse the German leaders or destroy the lives of the officials who were in charge of the German army.

A fair question. Mm-hmm. That’d be something they would do if they had magic powers.

100%. Though at this time, I don’t think people quite understood how far the war was gonna go. Oh, this was still early on. This is within a month of the war starting.

So yeah, we’ve just barely begun to scratch the surface of what is about to occur. Dion, however, explained in her letters that it would not be a correct method for success. She did not think that anyone could be pure evil, and trying to harm them or confuse them was just not justifiable. The only goal that they should have would be to channel the spiritual forces so that they fix the problems of the war to find peace.

Get to the root of the problem.

Mm-hmm. The group mind was to only work for healing and to not focus on hate.

You know, with the whole position that no one is truly completely evil, the Germans were about to give them a run for their… A terrible word. Really encouraging them to approve that statement.

Oh, don’t worry. We address when she eventually decided to give up on the whole bipartisan thing. By letter three, so three weeks in, the group mind of the fraternity of inner light was beginning to see some success from their meditation. Dion noted in this letter that they no longer had to imagine the symbols of the rose upon the cross, but that their visualizations were taking on an astral form. One member during their meditation was able to astral project themselves into the sanctuary at Glastonbury. So, the sanctuary at Glastonbury was their new astral meeting place, and this would be where they would astral project themselves for the group mind meditation.

Okay, so they would leave their bodies from their homes, and then they would all meet at this one location in astral form. Correct.

So she did have a meeting place set up for people who could meet that were living in London, but for those that couldn’t, they would astral project from their homes, and they would all meet in this one location.

Okay. Yeah. Astral zoom meeting.

So they would now visualize the rose cross in a cave under the hill of vision. Again, these are things that probably mean something to them. Oh, that hill. That’s right, but there is no description for those of us who have no clue where the hill of vision is.

It’s next to the hill of smelling and the hill of touching.

And there’s a cave under it. It’s just an FYI.

Vision cave. Vision cave. Dion noted in her letter on the fourth week that the ideals and ideas that the group mind were focusing on were beginning to be voiced by the media and politicians, pointing out that it happened way too often for it to just be a coincidence, and starting to take some sort of responsibility for implanting these ideas or influencing these ideas. So this is kind of their first note that they feel like they’re starting to show spiritual abilities. Now, again, I’m not going to break down each letter because there are a lot of letters and a lot of them do not contain information that would be interesting enough for this podcast. Yeah, because there was one letter a week and the war went for how many weeks? Six years of weeks.

Yeah, six years of weeks. She does eventually give up. 300-ish letters. Uh-huh. She does eventually give up with the once a week letters and goes to once a month. So Spart move on her part because I’m sure she was getting very tired of writing letters. So as I mentioned before, you can find this book. It’s, it is called The Magical Battle of Britain and it’s available everywhere. Chapters had it, Indigo has it, Amazon has it.

Yeah, we saw this book when we were in a New Age gift shop in London.

We did. In the actual letters, it brings up the name of the location of like where the secret meeting was occurring. And I was like, oh, I wonder if it’s like the bookshop we went to. Like wouldn’t that be cool if like they were meeting in the basement of the bookshop? Yeah. They weren’t.

Wow. It’s a real address, but it looks like really fancy, smancy houses. So I’m guessing at some point after World War II, they just cut all demolished and rebuilt.

Got gentrified. Yeah. So to continue, in one of the letters, Deon points out that the group is not foolish enough to believe that their meditation is controlling the fate of the nations involved in World War II. But they do note that there is proof that they were beginning to have influence on world affairs. No addressing as to what those are.

It sounds like they wanted to take the credit, but none of the responsibility.

Yes. By the 19th letter, which was on February 25th, 1940, Deon is finally convinced that there is something wrong with Hitler. She is convinced that Hitler is attempting to use occult forces against the group mind of their meditation.

There’s something not right about this Hitler chap.

Which they have been observing signs of occult involvement within their meditation for weeks. So they had been noticing what they thought was sabotaging of their psychic meetings. And they assumed that Hitler must be trying to…

They found out. Yeah. Someone also astral projected into that church at Glastonbury.

That’s right. It’s not actually too strange to believe that there is some connection between the Nazis and the occult. Again, this is one of those topics. It’s a little hard to find legit information because there’s so many conspiracy theories out there. But from the few searches that I did, this is the little bit of information that I got. So there are some online sources stating that the party was actually originally started as an occult organization. So there was a society called the Thule Society, which was the original people who believed in the Aryan race. The Aryan race was supposed to be people who were descendants of the Atlanteans from Atlantis.

Yeah. Some of the more recognizable members of the Thule Society were Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Dietrich Eckhart. The Thule Society, like many other occult organizations in Germany, were quashed under Nazi control because of Heinrich Himmler’s Rasputin-like personal occultist Carl Maria Willignet.

Carl’s not putting up with any competition.

You know, yeah, it was… it makes me wonder because like when I went to look up Carl, it’s actually a woman. Oh. I don’t know if you caught that, but her her middle name is Maria.

Maria. Carl Maria. We shall name our beautiful baby girl Carl.

I was kind of hoping she would look more Rasputin-like, but she looks pretty normal, I gotta say. She didn’t have crazy eyes. Nope, she had curly hair. I guess some people could say that’s crazy. As we mentioned, there are a lot of crazy theories out there about the involvement of the occult on the Nazi side during World War II, but I couldn’t find anything directly mentioning occultist attacks on Allied forces. So if something existed, I can’t find it.

He didn’t have an 18 of psychics and had it widely published.

That’s correct. The 19th letter is also where it appears that Dion Fortune is no longer on the fence. So as I noted, she talked about concerned about Hitler trying to psychically become psychically involved. Well, at some point, she also read Mein Kampf.

And after reading it, she decides that the Nazis must be stopped. This ain’t good. No. So in one of the letters, she mentions that she had a premonition in which a man is standing on a cliff and can see ships approaching the shore, but kind of feels like a weak premonition. Like there’s nothing more than that. She just mentions there’s a guy standing on a cliff looking at the water and he can see ships approaching the shore.

I feel like that happens everywhere.

Well, and especially because we know World War II was fought in land, sea, and air. Like anyone could have seen ships, warships approaching from anywhere. It’s no description of the man. Like it doesn’t say whether it’s a German man or a British man. Like it’s just a man.

So yeah, when we were in Whippy, I was a man on a cliff looking out at ships.

That’s true. She prophesied that. In another premonition that the groups saw, she recounted the idea of a beam of power going from England across France and then stopping to rest on North Africa. Beam of power.

A beam of power. After seeing the vision, France was actually taken over by German forces and the French colonies in Africa announced they would not yield to enemy forces, but would continue to fight the war. They stated that at the time when they received the premonition, they didn’t know what it meant, but in light of the details about the French colonies in Africa, it finally made sense to them.

Okay. Which kind of makes your premonitions not terribly useful.

No, no, especially if you have to like bizarrely interpret them. Like what kind of premonition is that?

I see a beam of power. And everyone’s like, oh yes. Hopefully not a death ray.

So on October 27th, 1940, the location where the fraternity of inner light had been meeting was destroyed in a bombing raid. The week prior to the destruction, the fraternity of inner light had been asked to meditate on protective images. Take that for what you will. They were asking to get protective images and then their place got blown up.

Obviously there was a German psychic team. Here’s what they thought about their namby pamby protective images.

That’s right. The group set about trying to rebuild their sanctuary, which slowed down their meditations for a bit. The letters after for a little while there is just basically talking about like the progress of trying to rebuild. So here’s another funny anecdote. Again, history hindsight is 2020. We can see how premature this is, but on September 21st, 1941, Deon announces to her group that the war has already been won on the inner planes. So on the psychic level.

Inner planes. Sorry, what was the date?

September 21st, 1941.

A little premature.

She’s just got a few years to go.

I mean, maybe the psychic planes were won.

We have no way of knowing. However, in her next letter on October 5th, 1941, she warns her group that Hitler is a natural occultist and a highly developed medium, and that he can use his powers to help him with military matters.

Oh, a dark lord.

Yep. This is Sith Lord. In addition, she believes he’s using astrologers to figure out timing for attacks.

But would Karl have accepted that? Because she made them get rid of all of the cool society groups.

That’s right. So her hopes that the World War had been won already were further dashed a few months later when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. World War II was finally announced as a global war.

Well, in her defense, she was only looking at like Germany and Europe. Japan’s very far from where they were.

That’s correct. She would have seen what China was up to before she saw Japan was up to. I mean, Pearl Harbor’s a little bit closer, but not by much. I think that’s even farther away. Is it? Oh, I guess.

Yeah, Hawaii. The last weekly letter was dated on September 27th, 1942. This was letter 136.

Crampt hand by now. In October of 1942, she switched to monthly letters instead. So most of the letters for the rest of the war discussed her views on the war and then had discussions about psychic teachings. There wasn’t really much about premonitions or what they thought they’d influenced on all that sort of stuff. So it kind of ends the anecdotes for our podcast because there isn’t really anything to…

Yeah, by the time like if you’ve already declared the war has been won and you’re not even a third into the war, I mean, do you just keep going? Like, sure there’s like cult leaders out there that claim, oh, the world is going to end on this date and then the day passes and they’re robust minded. They’re like, oh, I interpreted the imagery wrong. It’s going to be next Wednesday.

Well, also by this point, she’d written a bunch of books. And so on top of writing all these letters, she’s also writing books. And her books that she’s writing are on how to teach people who are magical to use their powers or to heal themselves or to etc.

etc. And so she basically starts getting into that idea of teaching people instead of trying to fight the war anymore. There’s also because with the addition of America to World War II, we start seeing a lot of pushback from the Allies, right? Like suddenly there’s this major force to be reckoned with and that was kind of the turning point for World War II was once the states kind of joined in on it. And so because of that, we see her focusing less on it because they can see the success of the actual war itself starting to like the tides are starting to turn.

Okay, they’re ready to let everyone else handle the rest.

Kind of. It kind of the letters read like that.

It’s a good move for teaching like other people to use their magical powers. Because like if you’re going to defeat a natural black magician, I forget the phraseology she used for her.

Okay, a natural occultist.

Natural occultist. You just combat him with hundreds and hundreds of like little occultists. That’s right. It’s like that who would want to fight a thousand chickens or tyrannosaurus?

Yes, 100%. That is exactly what’s going on. It’s a thousand of tiny occultists versus Hitler. So her very last letter was written on the 25th of March 1944. And it ends with the paragraph, each man lives his own life in his own age and in his own place. None may live for another and none should judge for another. Be loyal to your own truth at all costs. It is your only sound foundation.

The blessing of the master is on all who serve. So unfortunately in late 1945, so shortly after the war ended, Dionne became ill and she died of leukemia in January of 1946. So she only got to see the end of the war and then…

I mean, it’s good that she got to see the end.

You wouldn’t want to die before. No, no. You know, and I was kind of expecting there to be people that are like, oh, she used up all her energy to… And maybe there were people that believed that. She used up all her energy to fight the psychic forces of the Nazis and ended up dying because of it. It’s a good story.

It’s a good story. She was buried in a church yard at the St. John’s Church in Glastonbury. And you can still visit her grave. It’s covered in flowers. It’s hard to miss. I do think that there’s a lot of people that go out there to kind of thank her for what she did, even though I don’t know if I’m a believer, but…

Hey, the psychic planes were won.

That’s right. I mean, she sounds like a nice person. She was doing what she could. So that’s the story of Dion Fortun and the magical battle of Britain.

That’s really cool. I remember we saw that book in the occult bookstore and I was like, what is… What could this possibly be about? How have I not heard of the magical battle of Britain? It’s such a grandiose name. You think that it would be more widely heard of. It would be interesting to know how many different magical groups were attempting to take down the natural occult master in Germany.

If you do decide to read the book, the one thing that’s kind of neat that they do is she wrote the letters, but the person who took over writing the book has little anecdotes about… Because he knew her in real life, so he has little anecdotes about what she thought here or whatever else. And then they also list points in history. So they’ll have like, this is the day Germany declared war on Britain.

This is the day that Churchill’s We Will Storm Them On The Beaches speech was played. Like all that sort of stuff. So you can see some of those important parts in World War II.

Saves you some googling while you’re reading to see what happened on these days.

So it was kind of neat to read through it and see some of that stuff, but it is very wordy. And as I said before, there’s a lot of stuff where it seems like they expect us to know what is happening, but because we are not part of the fraternity of inner light, I have no clue.

Well, we’ll book a trip to Vision Hill in the cave underneath.

Yep, and meditate. Hmm.

We will feed in the magical battle of Britain into the cursometer and get what it says about the events. All right, into the cursometer it goes.

And the results are…

The results are probably benign.

I agree. Like nobody got her, or at least she admitted to in her diary.

Yeah, and she was a really nice person. Like at the beginning, she really just was trying to get peace. She wasn’t trying to like hurt anyone. She just wanted the war to end.

Not understanding, not as simple as just hoping for peace. And again, she seemed like a really nice lady. She helped with World War I. She wanted to do her part for World War II, and this seemed to be like a good way for her to do her part.

And I bet through like those group meditations and the letters and everything else, for some people it probably helped them get through the war. Just having that idea that like all these people are gathered in one idea to try. You know.

It’s almost like a superhero tale. Yeah. A collection of Doctor Stranges. Thanks for doing all that research. You’re welcome. And reading old-timey writings. Well, that wraps up today’s episode of the Probably Cursed podcast. Tune in to us next month for our new topic. We have new episodes on the last day of every month. And as I’ve said before, also check out our Probably Cursed Museum and Gift Shop on Etsy, probablycursed.etsy .com to view the artifacts that we release with every episode.

If you have any episode suggestions, or maybe you’ve got something at your own house that you think is probably cursed and you want it gone, you can send us an email at probablycursedpodcast.com.

And if you and your magical cabal are working together to stop any wars right now, we’re wishing you a whole lot of luck in your endeavor. Stop the war. In Ukraine. In Ukraine. In Israel. In… Oh gosh, everywhere these days. Fox News says there’s a war on Christmas. Yeah.

I don’t think we need to stop that war though.

It’s true. If you’re bringing peace into the world, we wish you great success.