We’re trying something new with our very first video episode! For our Trick or Treat Special, we both bring you two stories; with Sheryl bringing the Trick, and Chris the Treat.

Transcript:

Chris: Welcome everybody to our Trick or Treat special. If you haven’t listened to our podcast before, here we discussed the bizarre, the supernatural, the paranormal, dark, spooky, creepy things, and determine the cursedness of those topics with the help of our Lord Canarvon Curse-O-Meter. I’m your probably cursed host, Chris.

And I’m Sheryl. If you listened to our podcast before, we’re trying a couple new things today. We’ve never done video before, but our audio podcast has gotten really popular on YouTube. So, Sheryl thought we should try our hand at making a video episode.

Sheryl: It’s also a good way of making sure that we stay humble, because it’s harder to edit out our mistakes.

Chris: It’s true. You’ll see the jump cuts. Or it’s like… But faster. Yep. Like I said, we’ve never done video before, so this is technically our first day. So, if there’s anything that you think looks really janky or bad, it’s our first day.

Sheryl: We’re trying. Let us entertain you.

Chris: The other new thing is that this being a Halloween special, we are doing a Trick or Treat episode with a story from both Sheryl and I. Usually we switch off every episode for our main topic, but this one, we will have two stories. One about a trick, one about a treat, and Sheryl will start us off with a trick story.

Sheryl: So, this is the story of the Pacific Tree Octopus. Or Octopus Paxar Borbolus. You’ll have to forgive me for my Latin. I have not had to do Latin in a long time for school.

Me neither. So, the Pacific Tree Octopus can be found in the temperate rainforest of Washington and British Columbia. But most commonly, they’re found on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, adjacent to the Hood Canal.

Chris: And this is like an eight-legged octopus with suckers and tentacles and everything?

Sheryl: Yep. So, the tree octopus is amphibious, which is not like the other octopi. They only spend the first couple of months living in the water.

Chris: So, amphibious meaning they spend both time and water in inland? Yep. Okay.

Sheryl: The only time they return to the water is actually once a year during the breeding season. They have evolved specialized skin which can absorb moisture from the wet rainforest air, allowing them to maintain their amphibious lifestyle.

Seems legit. You can find photos of you Google it. They measure around 30 to 33 centimeters from the tip of the arm to the tip of the mantle. So, from like one squidy appendage octopus appendage, I guess, to the top of the head. Okay.

Chris: Yeah. Head to the toe. Yeah. They have comparable eyesight to humans, which is important for the Pacific Tree Octopus, because it uses its colour-changing ability to communicate its emotions to other octopi. I wonder what the colour emotions are. Are they same as what people would pick? Yeah.

Sheryl: So, I will actually be getting into that right away. Excellent.

Chris: Yeah. I’m imagining all the different colours from inside out.

Sheryl: So, although the colouration is typically a mottled brown to help them camouflage in with the bark of trees, if angered, they turn red, and when scared, they turn white. They turn white as a sheet.

Perfect for a Halloween episode. The reproductive cycle of the Pacific Tree Octopus starts with the trees whose roots grow into the water. So, they leave their inland homes and migrate to the water to congregate and pair up for breeding season.

Once they have mated, the male returns to the trees, and the female goes to look for a safe space to deposit the eggs, often using the roots of trees for shelter and protection from predators.

Chris: I wonder what’s eating the octopus’ eggs? I mean anything fish. Oh yeah, squirrels.

Sheryl: Squirrels, yeah. I mean, it’s underwater, so keep that in mind. The eggs are deposited underwater in the roots of the trees. A female tree octopus will guard her eggs to the point that she will likely starve to death to defend them. That’s a good mom. The baby octopi will float aimlessly in the Pacific Ocean for about a month or two, allowing them to grow in size before finding their way to shore and making their way into the forest.

Ah. Because of their life cycle, the Pacific tree octopus eat a varied diet. As babies, they eat small crustaceans, mollusks, small fish, and other small organisms. And on land, the diet of the Pacific tree octopus changes as they start eating bird eggs, small rodents, frogs, and various insects.

Chris: Little kids, tiny yappy dogs.

Sheryl: Unfortunately though, the tree octopus is at risk. Not only under the pressure of natural predators, so says Eagles and Sasquatch, but also due to threat from human activity. The introduction of house cats into North America has contributed to increased pressure on the tree octopus. Once abundant through the Pacific Northwest, the hat trade also nearly drove the species to extinction. The hat trade? Yes.

Chris: People wearing an octopus on their head?

Sheryl: That is correct. People who once decorated their heads with plumes from fancy exotic birds decided that wearing an octopi was much more fashionable, causing a dramatic decline in the Pacific tree octopus’s population.

Chris: I wonder if that’s more of a summer hat? I don’t think a octopus is very warm enough for winter.

Sheryl: I wouldn’t also recommend it in the summer because it’s going to start to smell.

Chris: Oh yeah. Not on a hot day. This is fall, early spring. Get your fashion tips here.

Sheryl: Now the population is slowly recovering, but the threats still exist including climate change and habitat loss due to logging. That’s poor octopi. Now originally I was going to play into the joke a little bit more and tell everyone to contact Congress or their local politician, but actually the Library of Congress has a website specifically to address the fact that the Pacific tree octopus is not real. It was created as an internet hoax in 1998 by Lyle Zepato and is often cited in university classes with discussing critical thinking on and how misinformation spreads to the internet.

Chris: I’ve critically thought about it and nobody makes things up on the internet. Yeah, that’s right. Why would they lie?

Sheryl: I did add some of my own details and changed some things to cater to my own whims a little bit, but 90% of the information was actually obtained from Lyle Zepato’s original website. You can go look it up if you want to see. He’s got some pretty fun stuff on there. Good job Lyle. Thanks for our fantastic trick.

Chris: Alright, so as we do with all of our topics, we have the Lord Canarvon Curse-O-Meter determine how cursed these stories are. So I will activate the Curse-O-Meter here and get it to spit out the results. Please stand by.

Sheryl: And the Curse-O-Meter says the real curses people.

Sheryl: Yeah, I mean, granted Lyle was having some harmless fun, so it does seem like, you know, that’s not the right thing, but I do think it’s weird that people just believed it so wholeheartedly that they started hassling Congress and emailing their politicians.

Chris: Well, if you also remember ancient early internet, there’s the Banzai kitties in the glass tubes. They’re almost like wiener cats if you’ve never seen it. Yeah. Google Banzai kitties, it’s this whole thing.

Sheryl: It’s not real people, by the way. If you see the pictures, don’t worry, it’s not real.

Chris: People believed it was real. It was like people got impassioned.

Sheryl: Yeah, yeah, there was a big hate on for Japan for a short space of time because people thought that the Japanese were producing these.

Chris: Yeah, and they’re like, we don’t even know what you’re talking about. Nope. We got the same email and they said it was you guys.

Sheryl: So yeah, that was my story.

Chris: I like that. I’ll keep my eyes out just in case that they’re real and someone said they’re fake so no one goes looking for them. Good call. Alright, before we get to the treat episode, we’re going to take a trip over to the Probably Cursed Museum and gift shop. For our Halloween special, I am releasing a very sinister looking artifact I call a murderer’s sickle.

Sheryl will display it here for everybody. Now no murders have been committed with it since it came to be in our possession, but who knows prior to that. We found this item in a local gift shop. The blade is serrated on the inner curve and all along the metal it has this beautiful and creepy patina of rust and tarnish. This would look right at home mounted in someone’s shadow box in a horror fan’s home. To get a closer look at this artifact or any of our others, visit our shop at probablycursed.etsy.com. The sale of every item helps funder podcasts and get us closer to our dream of opening a real world probably cursed museum.

Sheryl: It does have some weird sticky stuff on it, just an FYI we didn’t put that there. Might be ectoplasm. Yeah, we’re not sure. It’s definitely ectoplasm.

Chris: Alright, that concludes our probably cursed museum segment. We’ll get over to the main topic. For my treat portion of the episode, I want to talk about a man named Terrare. Now treats are things that people crave for, be it a delicacy or reward or something you just love. But what if a person craves anything and everything, and to such an excess it defines you as a person. Terrare was well known for having an enormous appetite. Born in the 1700s in Lyon, France, by the time he reached his teens, he was said to be able to eat a quarter of a butchered cow in a day. His parents, unable to provide for their son’s enormous appetite, eventually made him leave home.

Sheryl: Sounds like every mother talking about their teen and how much they can eat.

Chris: It’s true. This is not abnormal. Fortunately, Terrare was able to capitalize on his prodigious hunger. He joined a traveling sideshow where he would open as an eating act. He would consume corks, stones, live animals, he particularly liked snakes, and would finish off the act by eating an entire basket of apples. And the basket? It didn’t say what happened to the basket.

That’s fair. His appearance was also strange. His body was always hot to the touch. He had a high temperature going on. His face and eyes were bloodshot. He was a slim guy, but his stomach skin hung loosely. His cheeks were saggy. Like that. Except when he would stretch them out by holding up to a dozen eggs or apples in them. Like that.

Sheryl: How did he stay skinny eating that much though? You know, I don’t know.

Chris: I wonder if he ate so much it just pushed the food out the other end before he could digest any of it. It’s possible. And he also had a constant B.O. that only got worse right after eating. The meat sweats. That probably was the meat sweats. And the apple sweats. And the snake meat sweats.

That’s right. In his 20s, Terrare quit show business and joined the army, but quickly found it hard to live on military rations. Despite him trading tasks with the other soldiers in exchange for their rations, he eventually found himself hospitalized for extreme exhaustion. Doctors could droop his rations, but found Terrare still scavenged for food out of the trash and ate the other patient’s leftovers. And then hospital staff started conducting experiments on Terrare. They wanted to see just how much he could eat and presented him with enough food for 15 people which he ate. They observed afterwards his belly appeared inflated like a balloon.

Sheryl: That’s fair. Yeah. If I ate that much food, I would also have a big belly. That’s true.

Chris: We all would. Unless like we were 20 feet tall. Then it might just poke out a little bit. And because this was the 1700s and this is how science worked back then, they experimented on feeding him live animals. Cats, snakes, puppies, lizards, eels, all of which he would eat. Those poor puppies. Yeah. I don’t know why they had to be live. Freddie, cover your ears. Freddie, our dog is sleeping on the ground next to us. They also experimented with non-food items and this earned Terrare a promotion.

Sheryl: For eating non-food items? Yep. Huh.

Chris: They found when they fed him a wooden box with a note inside, the note was still legible after he pooped it out. Wow. Terrare was now a spy, currying military documents inside his belly. Good for him. He was a successful spy for a while until he was captured, imprisoned and ultimately a document was recovered from him. After he was almost put to death and instead released, Terrare wanted out of the army and begged his doctors to cure him.

Sheryl: I don’t know if I would trust them to cure anything back in that time, but alright.

Chris: Yeah, after you feed a man a live puppy. I mean, do you really have morals? Yeah. Did he have a good doctor? But his doctors attempted to cure him, attempting different treatments like loudenum, wine vinegar, tobacco pills, large quantities of soft boiled eggs and nothing worked.

Controlled dieting had no effect. Terrare would still scavenge for things to eat, waste from butcher shops, garbage, the blood from blood lighting patients, bodies in the morgue and quite possibly he also ate a toddler.

Sheryl: I wonder who’s toddler that was?

Chris: You know, it doesn’t say on any of the records I heard and it’s not been proven, but everyone suspected the kid just didn’t go missing and then they kicked Terrare out of the hospital.

Alright, good to know. A few years later, Terrare died from, ironically of all things, consumption. Before dying, he called his previous doctor stating he believed he was sick due to swallowing a golden fork two years earlier, but the doctor could clearly see it was tuberculosis.

Sheryl: Yeah, coughing up blood is associated because you swallowed a fork.

Chris: I mean, maybe he did some crunches afterwards and he was like, oh, I think I stabbed myself with a fork. Inside. Afterwards, in examination of Terrare’s body, found that he had an abnormally wide gullet and his stomach was enormous and covered in ulcers. The fork was never found.

Sheryl: He could have made money from that golden fork. That’s true.

Chris: He was already making money just from eating a basket of apples. That’s fair. He should have stayed in the show business. And that is my treat for you, the story of Terrare. I like that story. Yeah, I liked it too. I remember hearing about it like years ago. It made it to like the front page of Reddit. I shared it with our friend Ivan who used to run our D &D campaigns and he was like, I got to include this guy as a character. That’s cool. But yeah, and when I was trying to think of a treat, I’m like, this is the perfect opportunity to tell this bizarre story of this equally bizarre man.

Sheryl: Now to figure out the results on the Curse-O-Meter. Please stand by. The Curse-O-Meter says?

Chris: Definitely cursed. A man ate a live puppy.

Sheryl: Yeah, and it sounded like the military was experimenting on him. That’s not usually good either. That’s true.

Chris: I mean, feeding a person wooden boxes just to see if they come out on the other end. What if it went wrong the first time? They could have killed a man. And there you have it. Thanks for checking out our Halloween special.

If you’d like seeing our beautiful faces, tell us how much in the comments and maybe we’ll try this again. If this is your first time finding out about us, you can listen to probably cursed wherever you get your podcasts and make sure you check out our socials on Blue Sky, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and even TikTok.

Sheryl: If you decide that the items from the probably cursed gift shop and museum look fascinating and you have one you would like to contribute to our museum, you can send us an email at probablycursedpodcastatgmail.com And as always, stay spooky.

Chris: Happy Halloween everyone.