This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover [email protected] Is it possible that believing in ghosts can actually make it harder for you to see one?
And then we take a look at bizarre conspiracy theory I came up with sitting on a bench one day. We do know that there are organisms that can cause animals to kill themselves. But is it possible there's an organism that can do the same thing to a human? With a million suicides globally a year, is it possible that even the smallest amount of them could be out of our control?
Is it possible that some humans are forced to kill themselves simply to be part of an organism's lifestyle? Today on Dead Rad Radio, I'm having a great day. Hope you guys have a great day doing whatever you're doing. We got tons of stuff to cover today, so let's go ahead and get started.
First off, running into the red and give it up for Penny Royale. Woohoo. Yeah. Wee.
Ah. Yeah. Running on in. Woo.
Shiny like a brand new penny, blinding us with its glass. Earlier, Penny Royale, I believe. I don't know for sure. His name was on a list that I found on the floor of my studio.
And I believe Penny Royale made a donation during our sixth anniversary live stream. But you know what? Whether or not doesn't matter. Because if you can't support the show financially just by being part of the Fluffle, just by sending your energy not just to me, but everyone else in the Fluffle, you're doing your part to really help the show grow.
You can support the show financially. We have Merch Store, we have Patreon. You can get the word out about the show and that helps the show grow. But you're just being part of the group, just being part of the flow, it just helps so much.
So, so glad we're able to give you a shout out. Returning from yesterday's episode. Like I said, we got a ton of stuff to cover. Not a lot of time sit around and dance.
Anyway, I'm attaching the keys to the Jason's lobby. Everyone climb on board this rickety old car. Penny Royale fires it up. We're leaving behind the Rad Radio command.
The Penny Royale drives us all the way out to an old hotel. We're headed all the way out to this hotel. We don't have an exact name or location. For it.
But while we're there, we're going to meet two brothers. One of them is the narrator of the story. We will call him Max. Then his other brother, Chuck, works there as well.
The year is 2012, and in the year 2012, this hotel is already about 100 years old. It's one of those historic hotels. And they're not really too working there. They're just working at this hotel together.
Max has had some bizarre experiences at this hotel. Bizarre. But are they really is kind of where Max is at with this? Max says that, you know, he has to go down to the basement from time to time to get supplies.
And every so often he would go to the basement, and before he would go down basement, the door would be shut, the lights were shut off. He'd open the door to the basement, turn the lights on, go in the basement, get the stuff and leave. When he leaves, he shuts the light off, closes the door. Sometimes, though, he'd come back to the basement in that same shift maybe an hour or so later, and the basement door would be open and the lights were on.
Now, Max said I was the only person during that shift, especially, you know, the owner. Someone else may have the keys at other times. And he goes, when I'm working, I'm the only person who has the keys. So I'm the only person who could open the basement door.
I'm the only person who needs to go down into the basement. That's why I'm the only person with keys. How is the door open? How are the lights on?
And this is one of those stories that you go, yeah, that could be paranormal, but there's so many other rational explanations for it. If you were sitting around a campfire and people were telling scary stories, and this is what you had ready to go out of your backpack, you'd just be like, probably skip. You skip me. Because listen, I mean, the obvious ones are you're at work, you're kind of discombobulated, you're doing a bunch of stuff, you're stressed out.
How many of us have in our life swear up and down that we did something that it turned out we didn't do? As in, I could have sworn I shut off my bathroom light when I left to go to work. You come home, your bathroom lights on, and it is weird, right? You're like, I swear that I shut that off.
And you may feel a little trepidation as you're walking into your house. You grab your baseball bag, you're walking around, just wait, where are you come out, come out bathroom, like burglar. And then once you realize that there's no one in your house and no one's been in your house, you do eventually have to say, oh, I thought I shut off the bathroom light. I guess I didn't.
Now while that could have been a paranormal event, it's so mundane. Even if it was. Even if you like, the only thing you really have is like a ring doorbell security camera in your bathroom, which I don't recommend doing at all. You have a security camera streaming live to the Internet and they show you flick the light off and then two hours after you go to work, the lights flips back on.
Outside of that, it's not paranormal. And I think most people would go, well, no, if you tried saying I think my house is haunted. Well, why? Well, because I left and I know I shut my bathroom light off.
When I came back, my bathroom light was on. Most people, like I didn't argue, most paranormal investigators would go, and no, Evan Slimer showed up that all your hot dogs go missing. I don't know, everything else was fine. Just there's not enough to it.
It could be paranormal, but knowing how forgetful we all are, I mean, it's possible that he finally shut the door, but it didn't click completely and just slowly opened up. But remember, his brother Chuck works here as well. His brother Chuck doesn't believe in ghosts. He's not a paranormal guy.
That's not his thing. Max though does. Max would love to have a ghostly encounter. So is it possible that he's taking this minor thing and being like, you know, because here's something also this hotel not only is 100 years old, other people who work there have experienced things there.
Max hasn't. This is really what he has is this door opening, closing. Chuck doesn't leave in ghosts. One day he's working there and he's working in the walk in freezer area.
I'm assuming this is like hotel that kind of has a restaurant attached to it or you know, like room service or whatever. Chuck is working in the walk in freezer area. He's literally in the walking freezer and he does what he needs to do and he walks out and he turns to close and lock the walk in. And usually these.
I've worked at a lot of places with walk ins. They have to lock. It's a giant refrigerator and leave the door open, you spoil thousands of dollars worth of food. They usually have these locks at you have to press in that they make a distinct noise.
This door apparently has what this is described as a, quote, an old style exterior deadbolt, unquote type of lock. And so you open it up, you do what you need to do. You come out, you make sure that it's closed. Chuck is coming out of the walk in, and he goes to close it.
And as he's pushing the door closed, the walking door closed, as he's getting ready to lock it, he hears from inside the walk in, the walk in freezer. He hears, no, don't. And it terrifies Chuck. He knows for 100, there's no one else in there.
He closes the walk in freezer door, locks it, and then he begins to hear someone inside the walking freezer begin pounding on the door, pounding on the walking freezer door to be let out. He was just in there. There was nobody in there. But he clearly heard, no, don't.
And then once he shut the door and locked it, someone began pounding on it from the inside. He knows this for a fact. And Max said this event completely traumatized Chuck. He said it totally upended Chuck's entire belief system.
He did not know how to process it. If you don't believe in ghosts and you experience something that vivid, it's not a shadow at the foot of your bed. It's not the feeling of someone touching your hand as it lays over the side of your bed. And it's like, you know, dangling down.
It's not catching something out of your corner of your eye while you're brushing your teeth. None of that stuff. It is very, very clearly hearing the voice. And that again, you could probably go, maybe I just heard something.
But once you hear someone pounding from inside the door, you really have to reevaluate it. And he goes, it shook up Chuck so much. First off, he quit. Within a week, he was done.
And now, 10 years later, Max, who posted this online, Max posted this and said he still will not talk about it. He refuses to talk about what happened, which to me also means that there could be more details that he is leaving out or that he can't remember, that he can't literally, his brain won't let him process it. So that's a terrifying story, and that's one of those ones that you think you know. The hotel is as old as it is.
The walk in freezer had an old lock on it. So I'm assuming the walk in freezer is not like a state of the art Cisco brand that came right off the factory floor. It's also probably pretty old at some point. Was someone Locked in there.
Now you could go. Some could have got locked in there and died. You know, freeze to death in there. Take a while.
You're not gonna start to death. You're all yummy. All this frozen food. It's also possible that it's not necessarily a ghost.
This would be the perfect setup for what we call, like a. An impression haunting where you could have locked someone in the walk in as a joke 50 years ago, right? You did as a joke. The person, super claustrophobic, they didn't bring their jacket that day to work.
And you lock them in there, and they're freaking out, they're trying to get out, and the employees are kind of laughing about it. And the person inside is so worked up and so terrified, they're actually leaving behind a psychic impression of that trauma. And eventually they're let out and they're like, wasn't that funny joke, Jake? No, no, no, it wasn't.
And they have to go warm him up. Crawl into this oven, Jake. We won't turn it on. We promise.
It's possible that someone didn't die in that walk in. And it's just that psychic impression. And every so often it would play out. It didn't happen all the time, right?
And then you have to put it in the new boy. And by the way, our walk in taunted. But it did happen this time. So it's possible it was a psychic impression, not a real trapped human soul on earth.
It's also possible that that is the case, that somebody died in that walk in at some point. And every so often it will reappear. One ghost you can interact with if it's a trapped human soul. The other one, if it's just like a recording of a trapped event, it'll just play out every so often.
You can't interact with it any more than you can be listening to a cassette of Mariah Carey and you go, mariah Carey sing Someday. And then she changes the song. So interesting. I was like, looking at just like the different types of ghost stories, but we're not even done here because there's a bigger question.
And I see this pop up a lot of time. I've seen this pop up for years and years and years. When Max posted this online, they posted it underneath the name Carbon D. Murda.
He writes, this is how he ends his post. He goes, quote, there was a lot of stories from that place corroborated by lots of people. Like I said, I never saw anything that crazy myself. But I also suspect that it's Because I wanted it to happen, unquote.
This is a really interesting part of paranormal research and we don't know why this is, but you can have a lifelong love of the paranormal. You can just love hearing ghost stories and, and reading about ghost stories and all this stuff and never have seen a ghost yet people around you have. You may go on these haunted tours. You may go.
And they're fantastic. If you guys ever get the chance to go on a ghost tour, do it. If you guys ever get a chance to involve yourself in any social aspect of the world of paranormal outside joining the cult. Obviously I shouldn't say anytime you're like, oh, there was that group of guys who was asking me if I wanted to expose my butthole to the sun every morning.
They have some sort of sun gazing cult. We do see this happen. It's very interesting. If you go and you read a lot of stuff online or you talk to a lot of people who are in the paranormal, you will very often find people who want to have a ghostly experience but never have.
And they won't even go out of their ways. And they will even go out of their way. They'll go on these haunted group tours. They'll go to places where they think ghosts might be and yet they still don't experience the phenomenon.
And it's a very interesting question as to why that happens. We don't know. I've talked about this numerous times on the show. Not going to go into too much detail, but I episode in the show notes, if I remember what episode it is, I was a lover of the paranormal since I was a child.
I was always into ghosts and aliens and Bermud triangle across circles. I was reading all those books when I was a kid. I read books about cults when I was in middle school. Conspiracy theory stuff.
Like I was buying these, those Illuminati game cards when they were out, when they were like selling them next to baseball cards and Marvel superhero collecting cards and stuff. I've always been into this cult conspiracy stuff. But I did not see a ghost until I was 17, 18. I didn't even see it.
I heard it. But my parents had interactions with ghosts. My mom and my dad, at separate times and sometimes together. Like at one point my dad had to sit us down.
So, you know, like, just ignore it. He's floating, flames are shooting out his ears. He's like, ignore the evil gateway that opens up to consume us all. Pretend it does not exist.
No, because it got so bad, daunting, got so bad, so creepy. My dad was like, oh, great, babies. They're gonna be complaining. Oh, the souls of the Damn.
They get me out. That's why I failed that math test, dad. And, you know, I didn't. It was interesting because as much as I read about all that stuff, I didn't experience it until I was, like, 17, 18 years old.
Like, nothing. Nothing. I hear people tell ghost stories. People near me would tell ghost stories.
Like in the house I was in, nothing. And that's. Some people never have the ghost story. Now, some people never experience the ghostly phenomenon.
They just really, really love the subject matter. And some people desperately want to experience the phenomenon, and they love the subject matter, and it doesn't happen. Many have people who don't believe in ghosts at all have an experience that's so terrifying, they quit their job and don't want to talk about it 10 years later. And we don't know why.
We don't know why. If you're a botanist, if you're like, man, I really love flowers, dude. They're, like, totally great. Like a rose by any other name.
Still the same. Awesome. And you go to school and you become a botanist. And they're like, today we're going to learn about a leaf.
You're, like, writing down master's course leaf. You draw a little picture of it, and they're telling you about leaves and stuff like that. And they're like, on day two, we're going to talk about branches. You're like, slow down, Professor.
I don't know. We'll be able to do this. And eventually you learn about, like, photosynthesis and moss. That was.
That was extra credit. You learn all the stuff about plants. You learn all the stuff about flowers. And then at the end of the semester, you raise your hand and you're like, professor, professor, this is all really cool, but when do we get to see a rose, like a real rose growing out of the ground?
Professor's like, what do you mean? And you're like, well, I mean, I've seen these pictures and we've watched these videos, but when do we actually get to see a rose? What is it? Rose bush?
Never in my class is looking at you. And they go, you've never seen a rose bush before? And you're like, no, I really, really want to. I've just never seen one.
They just walk outside. They're like, oh, my son take you out. You're like, oh, a rose bush are all bloody. Like, I was wondering what that was.
I kept yanking on every single day, every other field of science outside of like. Like people don't really see black holes. Okay, so maybe the comparison, that's mad. People who believe in like negative numbers.
People are all like, numbers go backwards, man. And they see that. But you can't see in the real world. Like, if I give you 10 apples and I remove 12, something's like, dude, negative two apples.
Got it, professor. And take a note. Like, no, no, there's not. You can't see negative two apples.
And they're like, yeah, I can. I have special eyeballs. Special math eyeballs. There are some sciences where you never see what you're talking about.
Think about, there's a bunch of them, like anthropology, like ancient civilization. Like, oh, these people used to live by the river. And like, how do you know that? He's like, I don't know.
Just like doing my professor work by the river. He has like a lawn chair and a little like hammock. He's like, I don't know. I'm sure, I'm sure some civilization lived here at some time.
I don't know. Dig up some pots. Dig up some pots. Watch out for those rose bushes though.
I guess there are a lot of sciences, sciences where you don't see exactly what you're talking about, but it is interesting. Paranormal, you know, you get it more honestly than with UFOs. There are way more people who believe in UFOs, want to see UFO that never will. UFO sightings by and large are statistically far, far more rare than a ghost sighting.
But it is interesting because people love the paranormal. They love ghosts and they really want to see something. And why are they not? You think it would be the opposite.
You think a ghost would be more willing to show up to someone who would believe that they existed because then you might be able to help them with what they need or help them find their way shy or whatever instead of making someone go running. But then also we did that episode that sometimes ghosts. We think ghosts may want to scare people on purpose because being dead is so terrifying. Being a ghost is so scary that they want to scare other people.
They want to scare the living to make them feel like the ghost is currently feeling. Interesting question, though. I don't think we'll ever have a concrete answer. Penny Royale.
Let's go ahead and touch the keys to the world famous partner copter. We are leaving behind this hotel. Why don't you fly us all the way out to an old house at the end of the street? This is a crazy one.
This is a crazy story. Strap in. This was quite a journey that I went on myself. And just when you think you know all the answers, just when you go, oh, I know what he's talking about, stick around because this one has a twist ending to end all twist endings.
Just on the way that my brain works. I'm sure your brain works the same way. I was hanging out at a park bench a couple weeks ago before I went on vacation and I thought, we know for a fact that there are organisms that cause animals to kill themselves. And the reason why not, because it's mean, not the organism's not like, oh, you've had too many birthdays.
No, it's part of the organism's life cycle. And there are examples of animals that are infected with a parasite or an organism and it causes this infection or this disease that makes them kill themselves, commit suicide. I thought, if it's possible in the animal kingdom, then surely there must be something out there that can have a similar effect on a human. Is there a disease, is there a parasite, is there an organism that may account for some humans committing suicide.
And I had a hint of what could be the truth on that. Like I thought just popped in my head and I kind of was sitting on the parking chest kind of thinking about the kids are playing, the people are eating ice cream, the sun's beaming the sky. I'm like, suicide, eh? Suicide.
Oh, think about this. I had an idea, but I had no clue, I had no clue of where this journey would take me. This is absolutely terrifying. So let's get started.
When I was thinking that initial thought, what I was thinking about is there are the, very famously the zombie ants, which combines my two favorite things. I love ants. I won't say I love zombies. Like I realize zombie books.
I just before recording this, I watched a two and a half hour long project Zomboid Hunger Games on YouTube. They're just watching these guys, these are guys running around by zombies. And she showed them the brain. What it is, is there are.
There's a particular type of fungus that when it is able to infect an ant, it's not 100, you know, just like anything. But when a, when a spore, when a spore is able to infect an ant, it will begin to grow inside of the ant and eventually it'll take control of the ant's brain. The ant is still alive. It'll take control of the ant's nervous system and make the ants climb up a nearby tree.
Like at this point it stopped working for the hive. It's completely Just off its rocker. The other ants are like broken back. Can you smell the road?
And he's like, huh? What? And he walks up a tree and at that point the ant will climb up to a little teeny tiny branch and bite onto it with his jaw lock on and just hang there by his mouth. He then slowly dies, either through starvation or because this fungus is growing in his brain.
It's probably a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But he has in effect killed himself. He has willingly, quote, unquote willingly. The other ant must be like, what the guy doing?
He climbs up the branch and he locks on. It's really the fungus controlling him. And at that point, the fungus starts to grow out of the ant's head. Like breaks through the exoskeleton or the carpus or whatever you call it.
It sticks out of his head and he had this little green fungus stalk. Once it's ripe, once this fungus is ripe and ready, this ant's dead body is still locked onto this branch by its teeth suspended above the forest floor. The fungus explodes, raining down thousands of fresh spores on any ant that happens to be walking by. Out of all of these spores, all that has to happen is one of them has to land on an ant and get in it.
And then it will use that ant as part of its reproductive cycle. It forces the ant to kill itself so it can reproduce. I mean, I remember hearing that. That's so diabolical.
That's so diabolical that you force it to basically not only are you consumed by it, you're going to be the host for something that will consume your brother as well. And I was like, that's nuts. I remember hearing about a long time ago, I kind of think that's where the fungus for the Last of Us, that video game now it's a television show is based on. And I'm pretty sure it's also the fungus for a much better zombie story called the Girl with All the Gifts.
The Last of Us. I've never really been into, but the Girl with All the Gifts. I should do a full Dead Radio recommends on that. But until I do, that is an amazing bleak zombie movie.
If you are looking for a depressing afternoon, check out the girls Dead Radio. I'll give that a full Dead Red Radio recommends the Girl with All the Gifts. Fantastic zombie movie. But it has to do with fungus taking over the human processing center.
So you go, okay, so we know that exists in ants. It's been scientifically proven. There's video footage of It. It's terrifying.
The video game movies based on it. That's what I was thinking of. And I go, I wonder if there's something like that that could cause a human. Something that's fairly like, obviously people aren't having mold shit out of their brain, but could be something like that.
And as I was thinking about that, you know, I had other stuff to do. I couldn't research it at the time, but in the back of my head I was thinking, well, I do know that there is a particular organism that does cause similar things. There is something called Toxmoplasmosis gondi, I believe is how it's pronounced. This is something I heard about a long time ago as well.
It is an organism that can only replicate in a cat's intestines. That's the only place where it can reproduce. And what this Toxoplasmosis gondi does is it leaves the cat's intestine. At certain point, the cat goes poop.
And if a rat is exposed to this organism in the cat poop, strap 100 cats, you're all, you're eating six year olds right now. You're like, yummy, delicious treat. For my favorite podcast, we talk a lot about cat poop. When the cat poops the stuff out, it ejects these things called osis, or basically eggs, right?
They're laying these eggs little. This, this organism that's laying eggs in cat poop. And if rats are exposed to the cat poop, and it's really hard not to be exposed to this because if they poop in a garden, they poop outside, and it's infected by this thing, they poop inside. And a rat is exposed to this if it eats food that's contaminated with it, if it walks on it and doesn't wash its hands, which rats are famously unclean, if the Toxoplasmus Gondi gets inside the rats.
This is so fascinating. Remember, this organism can only replicate inside the intestines of a cat. They've studied this thing for years, if not decades. They know for a fact this is the only way to replicate itself.
But now it's in a rat. Now the eggs have hatched in a rat, so what is it going to do? It has to get back into the cat. So it makes the rat lose its fear of cats.
Telltale signs of cat activity, like cat urine, will not dissuade a rat or mouse from being in that area. Normally, rodents will be like, I'm out here because those are like giant monsters to me. I'm smelling pee and that's not for me. And they'll run the opposite direction.
But when they're infected with this organism and they smell cat pee, they don't care. In fact, it's kind of the opposite. They will develop such risk taking behaviors that they will congregate in areas where there are cats. They'll hang out where they shouldn't be.
They'll hang out where their main predator is because the organism in them is overriding their survival instinct. Because that organism inside the rat needs to get back in the cats to lay its eggs. So it shuts down any rational thought of the rat. The cat eats the rat.
The meat is infected. This infected rat, which is easy prey, right? This cat doesn't have to run around the barn looking for rats. Templeton is literally like sitting on the kitty litter box being like, gum to daddy, come to daddy.
The cat eats the infected rat. The cat gets this toxoplasmus on the back in its system and it's like home at last. And then it goes into the cat's intestines to lay more eggs. That is insane.
It shuts off the rat's ability to survive. It makes the rat be want to be in cat areas where cats are and allows the cat to eat it. I mean, I'm sure last moment, it's a little bit of a fight. It's like, oh, I don't know, man, I don't know.
I'm having a buyer's regret on this one. But you think about that. You're like, wow, that is insane. This organism wants to be inside the cat so badly that it can actually hijack in other species thought process to get back in the cat.
That's insane. Humans and cats are living such close company and have for so long that humanity is infested with this organism as well. Toxiclasmas gondi. Most people get it and pass it just like any infection.
Just like any organism. Just like anything. A thousand people could eat lettuce with some sort of like E. Coli or whatever on it.
But it turns out that 50 people actually go to the hospital and 10 die. There's a variety of symptoms, right? You can eat something like, oh, I didn't sit well with me. The person sitting next to you goes, I'm totally fine.
And then the same person who ate at that restaurant, but you didn't know, went home and puked in the toilet all night long. We have different symptoms for stuff. Humans can be infested with this and just have no symptoms. But you can get exposed to it multiple times through your life.
Some people do show physical symptoms of it. Some people. And this is where, you know, again, we've been studying this for decades and people keep looking into this. The question is, does this organism, because it does affect humans pretty badly if it gets rude, right?
Not every rat that steps on dried cat poop or walks in soil or a cat, these eggs, these Gondi eggs can lay dormant for years. So it's not like the cat pooped and then the rat walked by as the cat was pooping, like the cat pooped in the garden three weeks ago. And then, you know, 10 rats could have walked in that area. You might want to clean your backyard.
But 10 rats could walk through that area. But only one gets infected. Like one it actually takes a hold of. Scientists see a link between this organism, Toxoplasmosis gondi.
There's a link between that and schizophrenia. There's an identifiable link between the two. The question is what science can't figure out, is it that this organism causes schizophrenia in some people or schizophrenics are more likely to get this organism in them and have it fester. They don't know.
But there is a link. And I'll put all this stuff in the show notes. This is link. We haven't really gotten into the.
There's a lot of this stuff is pretty common knowledge. Honestly, we haven't gotten the crazy stuff. This is why people think these stories of the crazy cat lady come from. Because if you have five cats in your house, you're constantly being infected with this organism.
It's like a tapeworm. You can get a tapeworm and you never know it, right? You poop the eggs out 30 seconds later because you're eating tapeworm infected food. Or you get a tapeworm and it grows and grows and grows, and eventually you're able to remove it from your body.
But if you then a couple months later eat more tainted meat, you're gonna get the tapeworm again. It's not like you can develop a immunity to it. So if you're constantly having this toxic plasmosis gong the infection in your body, and by the time you expel it, by the time it dies off in you three, that's it, three more times that week. How does it affect the brain?
They think this might be where the idea of the crazy catalytic comes from. They actually are suffering mental illness because they have this cat parasite in them. Even if you don't have cats and stuff, like I said, it can lay dorm them for years. You can get it by gardening in an area where a cat has expelled this stuff.
Apparently, if you have a cat, you're supposed to change the catty litter box every day. And I can tell you, as a previous cat owner, I never did that. I didn't let him wait. There's like, oh, it's like your monthly cleaning, but every single day.
And imagine if you have multiple cats. I mean, you can have your day clean up after these things. People love cats, though. I'm a cat person.
I do love cats. But is it possible? Well, you know, it's funny, I go, is it possible? No.
We know there's a link between mental health and this cat organism. The question is, is it just people who have mental illness are more susceptible to it, or is this organism causing a mental illness? We don't know, but there is a link. So when I came back, I was sitting on the bench and I started thinking, well, there's that other thing that can kind of infect the rats that can cause them to, quote, unquote, kill themselves, put themselves in situations where they will die.
And I know there's a link between our organism, that parasite, and humans having mental illness. I go, maybe I'll look a little bit into that. Maybe. Maybe this is just something that's popping my head like some of the other crazy thoughts.
Maybe there's something to it. Very, very little bit of research I did, and a ton of stuff was popping up. A lot of people are looking at this connection between T. Gandhi, which would be the short term saying T.
Gandhi, and suicide. I'm not the first person to think this. People have really been wondering, is there a link? And that kind of blew me away because I thought I was just kind of having a shower, thought, but on a bench.
No. Scientists have been like, there might actually be something behind this. July 2012, the Archives of General Psychiatry Journal. They had a study in that, where they looked at.
They had a study in that. And the result was women infected with the T. Gondi organism had a 1.5 times more likely chance to attempt suicide. They looked at 46, 000 Danish women who were pregnant and gave birth between the years 1992 and 1995.
And the reason why they had to do that is because this organism is so pervasive. I. Most of you listening to this probably have it in you, right? Like, you're like, oh, man, you have 100 cats.
You're like, come here, cats. It's like our favorite podcast. I probably have it. I'm around cats enough where I'm definitely walking around.
Well, maybe not that much, but it's possible. So many people have it. They said, we have to look at women who gave birth, because what we could do is look at the babies. And if the babies had this parasite in them, it most likely meant that the woman had it around the time she gave birth.
Like, they had to have this marker there. They had to pick women who gave birth in this time period to try to figure it out, because otherwise you. You could grab a hundred thousand people and all of them have it, or 50 of them have it. They had to really kind of figure, try to figure out a way to mark a moment in time out of that.
46, 000 women between the years 1992 and 1995, 500 of them attempted suicide. Which doesn't sound huge, doesn't sound like a massive amount. But the reason why this study prompted researchers and scientists and psychiatrists and everyone to kind of go, there might be something behind this is because out of those 500 women who attempted suicide, 78 of them attempted violent suicide. That would include things like shooting, you know, shooting yourself, jumping off buildings, or slashing your own wrists.
The reason why that was kind of alarming was that, yeah, slashing your wrists is a. One of the ways a lot of women kill themselves. But it's not the top. They mostly use pharmaceuticals.
Men tend to kill themselves violently through jumping or shooting themselves. Men are three times more likely to kill themselves. Women are three more times likely to attempt suicide because they tend to choose suicide attempts that aren't so final or can be. You can come back from the brink, from maybe someone can save them in time.
But here we had nearly one fifth of the women who attempted suicide in the study choose violent ways to go about, which was alarming to the researchers. They go, that's not normal. It should have been much lower than that. The researchers who looked at all this information said, we gotta be honest, this is such an incomplete data set.
They go, one, it doesn't include men. They said, two, it doesn't include women who don't have kids. And they said, three, we're going off the information of attempted suicide reports. So the mother who attempted to kill herself by overdosing on pills and drinking a couple glasses of wine, and wakes up the next morning, puddle of puke next to her bed, and never tells anybody.
It's not part of that 500. They said, It's a completely inaccurate data set. And even then, even with thinking there could be way more suicide attempts out there. They know there's not less.
They know that this is the lowest amount that they have. They said, even then, we're looking at 1.5 times higher chance of a woman killing herself than if she did not have this parasite in her. Okay, so let's put a little pin in that for a second. And also another part of the study, they go.
They go, here's the thing, and this is something else they noted. They go, we do not know if the parasite causes mental health issues or if people who already have underlying mental health issues like suicidal ideation, if they're more prone to get it. They don't know. But there is a link.
The question is which way goes which way? So the question isn't, if you just look at that number, it does cause an increase in suicides. You may go, well, it's a small increase. It's 1.5 times.
It's not like 20 times. It's not 50 times greater, but it is an increase. With a limited amount of data, we know it's. No, it's not less than that.
Right? We know that it's not less than that. So I go, man, you know that that's nuts. I kind of.
What my initial thought was was that there's some suicides, not all, but some suicides could be attributed to a alien organ. It's not alien as far as coming from another planet, but it's not supposed to be in our body, and we're getting it from our furry feline friend. We're getting this infestation that in some people may make them kill themselves, which is horrifying and tragic. Someone who otherwise may have never taken their own life because they became infected with this and it latched onto them just right.
Again, you could have this organism in you right now, and you're listening to this podcast while you're taking a dump and it's leaving your body. You could have had this organism in you 100 times by now, and it never really took root. But in some people, it does. In some people, there's physical.
If it really gets in, you'll start to have physical ailments. You actually start to feel sick. But if it does get to the point where it's affecting your thought process, maybe you are just become the crazy cat person living at the end of the street. But maybe.
Maybe it causes you to do something that you otherwise never would have done. We don't know if it causes schizophrenia. We don't know if people with schizophrenia are more likely to get it. But if you think about how awful that would be, that you never ever would have thought about killing yourself and you got a really bad case that this organism is really taking control and it.
And it makes you take your own life. So there I was and I had all that research and I go, wow. I didn't even think. I thought this was just something hypothesis that I come up with that it might be based in fact or I may do research.
But it turns out that scientists, psychiatrists, a lot of people have actually studied this. They do think there's a link. There's a link. Like the one study that we have does show a link.
We just don't know what's the cause and what's the effect. Right. That was more than I had thought I was going to find. And I thought, oh, that's really cool.
It's really cool to kind of come up with a thought like that and find out that other people have done the legwork and the heavy lifting. As in, I should say, I'll give a shout out to the author of the Archives of General Psychiatry Journal back then. But that was put together by Dr. Theodore T.
Postalation. He's associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Mood and Anxiety Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He's the one with that Danish study together. So there you go, right?
We do actually have a link. There's a link. There's a study showing that the two things are connected in one way. But we have that question, does Tandi cause mental illness or do people with mental illness, are they more likely to be affected by it?
Cause and effect. We don't know which one's which. But then I thought of a just the most depressing, creepiest, darkest way to end this episode. I started thinking, this thought popped in my head when I thought I was done with all my research.
As far as I know, no one else has really put this part together. Follow my logic here. We're at this old house at the end of the street. That's where we started the segment.
That's where we're ended. This is the home of Molly. Molly has two cats. Molly is a loving cat owner.
She's well liked in the community. People enjoy her presence at work. Molly lives alone with her two cats and she becomes infected. Probably not for the first time, but this is finally going to be the end of poor Molly.
Molly becomes infected with T. Gondi from her two lovable furry roommates, these adorable cats. It infects her. These eggs are hatching inside of her.
They're spreading throughout her body. They're getting into her muscle. They're getting into her brain. She's been infected with T.
Gondi. This organism now lives in her, and it has a firm grasp on her reasoning and whether or not there are other factors before this. This time, this infection is the leading reason why Molly decides to kill herself. She does end up sitting in her favorite chair, listens to her favorite album, and then swallows a lethal dose of medication while following it up with a few glasses of wine.
And shortly thereafter, her breathing slows and then stops. She's dead. The T. Gondi overrode all of the survival instincts in her brain.
She took her own life. Now, I have a question for you. This really freaked me out when I thought about this. What famously, do we know about pets, what they do after their owners die?
There's never been any big studies on this because you can't really replicate it in a laboratory setting. So the accounts we have are from first responders. You have ambulance come out to a house for a welfare check, or police officers come out to a location because someone hasn't been to work in a couple days. And there are stories of the first responders go into the home, and there is a deceased man there, lived alone with his trusty dog.
The man died five days ago, and the dog is sitting at his feet dead as well. The man died a while ago. His body is just sitting there in that chair. But laying at the owner's feet is his loyal dog, who starved to death rather than to eat his former owner.
You can find accounts like that all over the Internet, the inverse. This is something else that they cannot study in the laboratory. But you hear this from first responders all the time. If you have cats and you die in your home and your body is not discovered, within hours, those cats will begin to eat its previous owner, their previous owner.
They will begin to devour you with no sense of who you once were. You're just meat. You're just food. But it could be even more chilling than that, because I thought, what if this organism is so.
Meaning we use the word diabolical, but it's the only thing this organism knows. But it's so diabolical that it can take a human who has cats. And this human would have never killed himself in any other situation. But they have become completely infected by T.
Gondi. Just like the ant climbing up the branch. Just like the rat walking into the cat's home, the organism needs to reproduce. It's infected a human brain.
It's infected human meat, human flesh. But its life cycle will end here unless it gets back inside the intestines of a cat. That's the only way it can reproduce. So like the ant climbing the tree or the rat nonchalantly walking towards the sleeping cat, Molly sits in her favorite chair, listens to her favorite album, and begins to swallow the pills that will very shortly take her life.
All because the organism that now controls her brain needs to get inside of the two cats who are watching their owner kill herself. And a few hours after Molly stops breathing, after her favorite album has stopped playing, after this old house on the end of the street has fallen silent, these cats will begin to devour her, taking little bites, eating her flesh, licking her blood, tasting her infected muscle tissue. And the organism known as Toxoplasmosis gondii has found its way home. Therapradio gmail.com is one of your email address.
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