Medieval Torture

The following episode of the Supernatural Hour that you're about to listen to contains graphic content. Listen in a description is advised. The dead of night, as people sleep, that's when the spirits creep. As the belt holes three, dark things take power.

We like to call it the Supernatural Hour. Alrighty, I'm welcoming you all to another episode of the Supernatural Hour. I'm Tim. I'm Raiden.

Jeff. And Chad. And... Do I need to go by lurch?

You can call yourself like... Because you know whatever you want to call yourself. I feel weird calling myself, you know, third person. Nickname.

I don't mind that you guys call me. I don't know why I'm talking about this anyways. Go ahead. Introductions.

Awesome. Because it was like me way back in the day when everybody had a nickname but me and you wanted to call me Randy Cinnamon. Now that we're dropping our nickname, you're like, I want to be Raven. And we're like, oh, cool.

You do what you got to do. You can call me whatever you want. Just don't call me late for dinner. You took the wait.

I wasn't going to say it, but you did. I will finish your dead joke. Um, I think that was a joke before it was a dead joke for a thing. I think that was a thing.

Yeah, I think so. Call me whatever you want. Just don't call me late for dinner. Hi, oh, where is half a with the William shot?

But a bunch. We finish each other's sandwiches. Thank you. Don't remember that.

That's from, but I remember that. From frozen. Yeah. Take me a minute.

You have to have little kids to get the reference. Oh, should I admit that I've watched. No, no, it's tangled. It's tangled.

Not frozen. It's tangled. I haven't seen tangled, but I know the line. There you go.

We even finished the other sandwiches. So that's our Disney start for the. No, maybe this frozen. I think it's frozen.

I've seen frozen. So it's probably frozen. Okay, enough about this. Moving on.

You can buy a new line for $30 on Disney Plus. Yay. I think there's ghost in that show. I have no idea.

Really? You know, it's not Disney. This is totally like it's sort of paranoid. There was a movie that came out in like the 80s.

And I just loved as a kid. And I watched as an adult. And the funny thing is, it's like, when you see some of the names of the people in this movie, you're like, holy crap, I didn't know that they were in this. Because they have like Chrissy Swanson.

Is that a name that Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I think so maybe. The movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not Sirmish.

Yeah, no, not the TV show. The movie. And then also David Faustino in it. They played the kids on the movie.

And I'm like, holy cow. Little tea. I had no idea. But the show is called, I'm saying this because Halley's coming up.

And if you're looking for like Halley Titan movies to watch it or family friendly, I would recommend Mr. Boogie. And I believe it's still on Disney Plus. It's a great little show about a family that moves into a house that used to be had some guy.

I can't remember that it was like William Hanover, I think it was his name. But everyone called Mr. Boogie because like when he scared kids off his property, he'd be like, Boogie, Boogie. That sounds familiar though.

It was such a great like awesome, terrible movie from the 80s. David Faustino though. You know that he put out a rap album. I have a copy of Little D is how he, the nom that he gave himself, for the rap album.

And it is so bad, it's good. I've put it on my record player a couple times. And it is like so terribly bad. That's how I feel about this movie.

It's one of those so bad, it's good. But if you're looking for a family friendly, Halloween type movie to watch beside Tocos Pocus, check out Mr. Boogie on Disney Plus. I'm still there.

It's ghost related. So yeah, we have everyone here this week. Last week was a fun episode. We're gonna talk about the Stanley Hotel.

This week we're gonna actually talk about torture devices that were actually used by some creative and sick people in the head. But before we do that, do we have any business or investigations we need to go over? Oh yes we get. So I'll do the residential.

I'll let Chad do the business. So we had a residential, and it was interesting. It's almost like the spirits that were there did not want us to go there because everything that could have gone wrong good. You know, I was pretty sure I knew where what city was taking place in.

And I just sent a text and we're heading the direction that I think it's in. And I'm looking for the address so I can put it in the GPS. I couldn't find it so I texted her. I said, hey just shoot me around us again.

I said we're on our way. Anyway, it was like completely the opposite direction we were going. So I said, oh we're on our way but we will be a little bit late. And they were a really cool family.

So we finally get there. All of my batteries were dead and I swear I put new batteries in after the last investigation because they were dying but they were all dead. The batteries. Batteries.

I'm not people. So I think the spirits were dead. Shut up and everyone was dead at home. It's like oh sorry.

We can't talk to any investigation. Anything. Anyways. I was like, oh, I look more scared to know.

So the activity that they were speaking with her, you know, I believe that she is very sensitive. But she said that she would see a spirit. So apparently the previous owner of her or occupant of that was a duplex had killed himself in the other side. But she was seeing a spirit in her bathroom and the way that she described it and kind of the picture and the feels because I could feel him, the emotions that I was feeling.

Do you remember Donnie Wahlberg's character in the Sixth Sense? And he's just emancipated and he's just hunched over and and... Emaciated. Emaciated.

What did I say? Emancipated. Well, you know. Well, he did shoot himself in the head.

So he freed later. Emaciated. You know, and just shaking and scared. And that's kind of the same feeling that you got from the spirit.

But she could see him. She has two children. They were afraid to sleep in the rooms. She said she had doors opening.

She could see shadows. She could see a shadow. She'd wake up in the middle of the night and she would see... The way she described it was claws on the door.

And then someone looking around. Like people around the inside of the door. And so there was a lot of activity. So her husband and little boy actually stayed downstairs and talked with Chad about some stuff while the other investigator and I were upstairs in her room and we were talking to a spirit.

And the spirit was a relative of the woman. And was actually sent there to kind of protect them. And so we were just some yes, no questions getting some activities through her. And we were asking more questions.

And suddenly you could tell if you've never asked yes, no questions through a K2 meter or the Ghost Meter Pro, you can kind of tell when it changes spirits. Just you know, you get used to the activity and then it starts acting different. You're like, I know this is someone else. And we could kind of tell that it was a type three.

Just the way it was acting in the field in the room. I mean, the field in the room just instantly got heavy and dark. And all the hair on my arm stood up straight. We were asking questions and it was giving us conflicting answers.

And we said, you know what, let's go to a different room for a little bit. So we went downstairs and we were downstairs. We just kind of chatting a little bit. And the husband went upstairs.

I can't remember if he was going to use the restroom or get a diaper for the baby. But he went upstairs and the wife was telling us that the chandelier in her kitchen would swing. And I mean, she told us two other things, but she looked over and she goes, oh my gosh, there it is swinging. And so I hurried and got a video of it.

By the time I got my video camera out and pushed start, it's still swinging, but not as hard as it was now. It was swinging a lot. And nobody had been in the kitchen. I mean, I'd been sitting in the room and could see the chandelier from where I was.

And I didn't notice when it started, but nobody had gone in that room. Right now, it was the night when it was, we had a hurricane, force winds come through your tongue and not down a lot of trees. And now it was that night that being said, the room that it was in, it was in their dining room and there was a sliding glass door to outside and the sliding glass door was open, but there was no wind coming through. They've said that they'd seen the chandelier moving before though.

Yes. Okay, so yeah. And then they had those blinds that were like the long strips and the video, those aren't moving at all. So you know that there's no wind coming through.

And I used to live in an apartment that had those and you open up the sliding door and the slightest breeze will shake the whole, you know. Right. So we're, you know, the whole strip. And then, so the way their apartment was, it was very open concept.

And if you stepped back, you could see every room. You know, there were stairs, but it was open and you could see upstairs. And so I thought, well, the husband was just walking around up there. And he'd come down and I said, hey, would you go back up?

I said, just do exactly what you did. Just, you know, do it again. And so he did. And then we kind of had him stop and like, hey, you know, stomp really hard, jump up and down, you know, come look forward, go back.

And we could not recreate that swinging. So that was kind of cool. And I do have some video of it. And then, you know, we decided that in the home, there was the spirit of the man that had killed himself.

There was a type three and there were a couple type two. So we decided just to stage them out. And so we did. And we were staging, you know, and it was really hard.

When you have an open concept room, it's really hard to, it took us a long time because we had to stage little areas because, you know, open concept, it can be rough. But we'd, and then the stairs were like the stairs that were open all the way through the back. So we had to like salt every step. Because we're trying to bottleneck everything and force it from the back to the door and then seal that off once.

Right. And so I was like, oh my gosh, this is, you know, this is hard. This is, it was probably the hardest. It wasn't a, I mean, I've done huge houses before that didn't take nearly this long because we didn't have to salt every single individual step.

Anyway, and so we got everything, you know, pushed out and we decided to push it out that same sliding glass door that, you know, the chandelier was in. And the interesting thing, so, you know, the power with this, with these winds, a lot of the power up in that part of the state went out. But as we got to the kitchen, we actually kind of parceled off the kitchen in different areas just the way it was. And as soon as we got to where that chandelier was, it f it flickered.

And you know, people could argue and debunk and say, oh, it was the storm could be a surge. Right. But no other lights in the house. Flicker.

Yeah. That one. Yeah. That's unusual.

Yeah. You know, it wasn't the whole house. It was just that light and it flicker just as we were doing that final push to get it out. Yeah.

So to me, it's like, no, that's that's the thing. So it wasn't flickering the entire time you were there or just kind of as you were doing the cleansing. It's just that last grass trying to hold on to staying in the house. Yeah.

Well, that's interesting. I dig it. Yep. Let's see if it was flickering the entire time, I'd say that's probably an electrical thing.

But yeah, if it's just at the end, yeah, I didn't notice any lights flickery in the whole time we were there. And it was even with the windstorm going and everything. It was just very, you know, so the family, they were so cool. They were really cool.

And it's for me, that's probably some most investigation that's had some of the most activity on it that I've been on in one time. So it was pretty cool. So if you hear heavy breathing while you're listening to this episode, that's not paranormal. I'm fat and I like to eat my microphone.

Because I think I've noticed it twice now that I've done it. So just so you know, there's no UVB. It's probably just me like breathing heavy because I'm fat. Yeah.

You're thick, Tim. You're thick. I'm fluffy. Thick.

Fucking. Anyway, sorry. That was cool. Business.

Couple of things got, we've got going on. We have an investigation on Saturday, September 19th at the Merkner Cemetery, so near Twillah, kind of between Twillah and Eagle Mountain. And up there, we've done a lot of research on it. It's going to be really interesting.

If you ever want to know what the boonies are, this is it. Yeah. So tickets are available at eventsparanormal.com and through Eventbrite. You check the Facebook page.

We've got to post it in a number of different places. So do there. The tickets are like $15 and then with the Eventbrite taxes and things like that. They're about 18, 75, something like that.

No, I've never been to Merkner Cemetery. I've driven by it a few times and it's one of those places I think I've always wanted to go to. So I'm looking forward to this. I've heard some other paranormal investigation groups have been there and it is told the outdoors.

I mean, it's a cemetery. It's a pioneer cemetery. But from what I've heard, there's quite a bit of activity. And we've been twice just on our own, not on any official investigation.

Just took my son and a couple friends out once. And then I think we've been under twice. I haven't been there twice. I don't remember who we went with.

But we've had really good activity both times. What kind of things have happened out there? So it was early on in our investigation. We just did a lot of yes, no through the K-2s.

So I mean, the last time I went with about five years ago. So that's all I got was a lot of K-2 play. In fact, the couple that we were just talking about in the previous investigation and they brought it up. They said, have you ever been out to Merkner Cemetery?

They said, that's really creepy. And I said, yeah, we have an investigation scheduled out there. Absolutely. Yeah.

So no, but they said when they were out there, they had heard Chopping and they'd heard a little girl's voice. Wow. And they're, you know, it's desolate out there. It is.

I mean, you're literally on a mountain top or a hilltop, aren't you? It's not that high up. It's not that high up. Oh, that high up.

Oh, cemetery is down quite a bit lower. Okay. I've only driven by it, but I know that you have to kind of go around the mountains to get from the Utah Valley over to like Tawilla. And you pass around the south side of the cemetery where the city used to be.

But I've, I mean, it is, it's out in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. If you can, make sure you go to the bathroom before you come. Or just find a bush.

Or just find a long water. Or just find a third tree on your right. Pretty much. You have to go trotting off the way.

There's some junipers out there that I guess you could facilitate. Yeah, we're recommending you bring a chair and a flashlight because there's no place to sit. Now, I've been out there twice and never run into a rattlesnake, but a gal on our team went out just a few weeks ago and did have a rattlesnake about tap dance overhead. So it is Utah.

It's, it's out in the stick. So, you know, we're, if you come, wear some, you know, good shoes and be aware of your surroundings. But we're going to keep it fairly small. So we're only looking at about 20 guests.

So we want to keep it so that, you know, we're not contaminating each other's evidence and things. It's going to be a fun time. We're looking forward to that. Another event, this is a free event.

There is a backyard haunt that will be going on October 23, 24th, 30th and 31st. I'm October. Yeah, I said October. Yeah.

I don't know. Okay. October. Yeah.

I mean, Halloween-ish. It's a free backyard haunt. It's in Provo 28, 17 West, 950 North in Provo. And we will have it up on our events, paranormal.com site so you can look it up.

It's, it's a really, really good free haunt. Yes. We've been to it for, I have seen it for like the last seven years. Chad's been to it since its conception.

Yeah. And we will have a booth there. We'll have a booth. We'll have information and pictures and tomatoes and come see what we're all about.

But at school, I'm going to put a link up to the YouTube on it. It's a backyard haunt. It's phenomenal. So, and it's free.

Yeah. Last year, I think they said they had about 2000 people go through it. Wow. Yeah.

I've been in it for a second. Check it out. I've heard it's pretty good and he keeps adding to it. He cheared, doesn't he?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's different every year.

I mean, there'll be some similar aspects, but it's not the same haunt every year. That's awesome. So let's go on. We're going to have a couple of other things to talk about the next time on a few things that may be going again in October.

But we've got one more. We want to do an October, but we kind of had to solidify the dates for this haunted house before we could set up the other ones. So next week, when you hear the new other podcast, we should have that. Okay.

I think that's it on our business. All right. Let's talk about how we can kill people. This guy's a limit.

Okay. I have to tell you, we have done in the several years that we have done this podcast, we have done all sorts of stuff. We've talked about serial killers. We've talked about, you know, ghosts and voodoo and you name it.

We've talked about it. But researching this was the creepiest, yucky, stealing. This was a tough subject to research because you look at all these different ways of torturing people and you think, Oh my gosh, I would hate to be that victim. And yeah, it's definitely good to watch.

And our system now of the criminal justice system, I mean, it's like, I'm I would rather go to jail for the rest of my life than have to deal with someone to stuff that they did for justice. Well, they're doing this for the rest of their lives. It just wasn't that long. Sometimes it was.

Yeah, well, they weren't getting a lot of degrees while they sat in their 5-5 cell. And you got to think too, a lot of these devices were used back in medieval times, 14th, 15th century. And you know, they don't have the same resources and technology we have. But I mean, that was that was a form of entertainment for them.

You know, you'd have someone being executed on the town square and that was like, you know, it's like they spoke of. Yeah, bring a picnic. Bring a picnic. Yeah, have a barbecue, you know, watch a couple people get publicly killed and then you go home and you know, that's been so much that I was your family.

I mean, you had public executions all the time. We're not going to go too much into the guillotine because I mean, that's pretty much self-explanatory. Yeah, that's not really torture. That's just not really torture.

Well, the stocks and the pillars though, stocks and things. That was something that they did as well. And they would even hand out like fruit for you to throw it in the person while they got their head and feet stuck to these things. And a lot of times with being in the stocks like that, it depended on the feel of the crowd, the mood of the crowd.

Like, you know, it wasn't necessarily a crime that or it wasn't necessarily a torture that would result in death because a lot of times people would throw, you know, fruit and dead animals and feces and sometimes even stones. But usually it was just a way to deter people from whatever bad activity they had done for. It's like, if we do this bad activity, we're going to be in there. Yeah, that's probably one of the more mild forms of torture that we're going to talk about.

Yeah, you throw them in the stocks for two hours in the middle of the day when you have the most activity from the crowd. They see that something's happening. They interact with it. And then, yeah, they're shamed.

They're publicly shamed and then you release them and things are better. But occasionally people would die if the crime was, you know, demanding of it. If the mood of the crowd was worked up enough, there was something I read about how someone had been put in the stocks or occasionally people would be putting the stocks and depending on the mood of the crowd, if it was something like them standing up against government, then the crowd would even react to like throwing flowers at them, you know, like regarding them as being a hero almost. But 99% of the times it was usually let's throw poop and running for it.

Yeah, I would rather would have been a Roman gladiator at that point or fighting one and dying in the Colosseum as opposed to some of the stuff that they've done on this list. That's what we're going to go through. So we've got the kind of long list. We've got the list and this is in no particular random order.

We just kind of pick ones. It's not like we're doing a top 10. We're just going to kind of go through and tell you what we came up with. So you want to start with the first one on the list?

Yes. The first one on the list is called the Judas Cradle. And in my opinion, this is is probably one of the worst ones. So what the Judas Cradle is, is like a little pyramid and...

It's not little. It's probably like, I don't know, six inches square on each side. Yeah. And then it was probably like seven or eight inches tall, you know, equal lateral...

And then they would put the point of this pyramid near your private parts. You'd sit on it. Yep. Yeah.

Some of these, a lot of these you've got to be, we've got to use like nice words. You'd direct them. Yeah. You'd dang, you're killed them.

In this case, that's actually true. Yeah. Sometimes it would kill them, but sometimes it came to a question. But they would tie you up in such a way that if you moved an arm or a leg, it actually would move everything else and it would push you further down on this.

Yeah. It would rip. Yeah. It's just...

Yeah. Terio, new one. Literally. Or Terio, your one bigger.

Yeah. Size nine poops shoot. Yeah. So you couldn't move.

And if you did move, you caused yourself excruciating pain. So there you go. Yeah. You just cradle.

It would tear scrotums, tear rectums, female genitalia too. Yeah. And sometimes they would just set you on it. I mean, there's a couple different ways they could use this.

One was just sitting on it, one was, you know, tying your arms and legs and... Yeah. That's what I read is that they would tie you up and then slowly lower you so that your body weight would eventually take the pyramid. That sounds nice.

Oh. Take it. Anything else you want to talk about that one? I think we've covered that one.

Plenty. So the next one is saw torture. Saw. Nice.

Not the movie. No. No. So, so you take this one.

This was really upsetting. And there were some... There were some like wood cuttings, you know, wood carvings that they showed, you know, lithographs of like actual, you know, this, this torture being acted out. And it's like the...

What they would do is they would take the victim, they would hang them by the legs, spread the legs into a V shape, and then take a long saw. And you're upside down. And you're upside down. So all of the blood would go to your head, which would keep you from passing out.

It would keep you conscious as long as possible. And then they'd have this long saw, like a 10 foot saw, and it would be manned by two people, one on each side, and they would just start sawing you down the middle, starting in your crotch. And because all the blood would be in your head, you usually wouldn't pass out or die until the saw got to about your midsection, your mid torso. And you know, these, these wood cuttings, these wood carving lithographs that I saw, it's like there's almost like a pleasant expression on the faces of the people that are doing this.

They're just like, they're having a fun time. They're like, they're having an Arby's when we're done. Just another day at work, you know, let's saw another victim in half. But yeah, I mean, I can only imagine, not even just like the first few, you know, saw as back and forth, you know, cutting into the skin, but how that would feel ripping through your bones, through your pelvis and into your intestines and like you're cutting vegetables for dinner, and you accidentally, you know, that serrated knife goes through once and then you come back and you're like, Oh, I can't even imagine.

I've cut my finger once with a serrated knife. And yeah, like you said, I can't even imagine like that happening on a larger scale with like a lumberjack saw in your primates. Next manise week. Not in a good way.

No. Okay, so the next one on our list is the pair of English, the pair of English and that's pair spelled P-E-R, right? Yes, like a parachute parachute. So I haven't heard of this one.

So this one, um, definitely not one that I would want to have done. Sometimes it didn't actually, it wasn't meant to kill the person. Although it did occasionally. They would use this for a number of different reasons.

One is if you were like lying or stealing, they used it for if you were convicted of being homosexual, or even if you miscade, apparently that was a crime back then. So what they would do is it's pear shaped. They would also, they said if it was a, how did they word it? They worded it really weird because I thought the same thing.

I'm like, how can they torture someone if you have a miscarriage? You have nothing. But the way they word it was like a self-inflicted miscarriage. And I think it meant an abortion.

I think they thought that you aborted your child. So this is a pear shaped device. It's kind of a metal thing that looks kind of like a ship. Looks like a pear.

But it's got like, or do you go ahead? Because you know, they still butt plugs out of that big. I'm just saying. So this actually has, it's got four metal leaves to it.

So it actually opened up. Oh, yeah. It's true. And it opens inside of you.

So they, so like if you were convicted of like lying or whatever, they would put it in your mouth. Wow. And then they would slowly turn it and it would expand and it would like start tearing the ligaments in your jaw and it would like crack your jaw. Or if you were accused of being homosexual, it went up your anus.

Yes. And then they would turn it and it would tear apart your insides. And then on the other one, if you were convicted of the self-miscarge or the abortion. Or, and I think they also did it for adultery.

They would put it in the ladies' privates. Into the ginia. Yes, sir. And they would twist this and it would just open up and basically tear apart your insides.

And as it opens, not to tear the voids between things, as the skin goes in and rips, as the thing, you know, opens up. And then you can't help but wonder, I doubt very highly that they sanitized it between people. Exactly. Well, that was one of the things that they mentioned.

They didn't know what like bacteria and germs were back then. It was the same thing with the Judas cradle. They didn't sanitize it between you. So if like the cradle didn't kill you, the bacteria and stuff could.

The infection will. Yeah. And it was all seen as like an act of God, you know, if you if you lived or died afterwards. A lot of these these methods of torture that we're going to be talking about, like you said, people spectated, they watched.

And sometimes the people that were watching were people that were like convicted of other crimes and seeing that English that other people are going through would be enough for them to to confess to what they did. So they didn't have to do as well. So that's the pair of English. That's a lot of the list that I came across that was like number one.

I didn't even come across it at all. That's crazy. The thing that you know, blows my mind too, is that you know, these public executions, they would be family gatherings. I mean, they would literally bring packet picnic and bring your kids and you would be part of a lesson, you know, you don't you don't whip your kids.

Let's take them down to the execution. This is what's going to happen little Johnny. If you don't get your shit together, if you don't get your act together, you're gonna wind up like, you know, this dude. I was trying to say something witty, but it didn't come to be fast enough.

Yeah, it's something to think nowadays, you know, we would never do that. But you know, things like that was a family fair clear up to even the Civil War. You hear about the, you know, families would go pack lunch and go watch the battles. So I'm making it a family deal that's quite the thing.

But the pair of English. Yeah. The next summer. I don't want one.

Who signed me up. So the breaking wheel is the next one. To me, I don't know. None of these.

What's also known as the Catherine's Will. Yeah, none of these are like amazing and I'd want to have happened to me. But the breaking wheel is another one to me that if I made a top 10 list, it would be on the top 10 list. It's disturbing.

Yeah, this one really disturbed me too. This was almost as bad as the saw when I was reading about it. Well, originally or not originally, but some of the times they would just strap you to a large will and roll you down the hill. But that was, that's I think that wasn't nearly enough.

You got easy. You got off easy if that's all that happened to you. The other stuff that they did was a lot worse. So what they would do is they would break all your bones.

They would keep you alive. They would just break all your bones, mostly the joints, so that you could easily be threaded between the spokes of these wits. Yeah, braided was the term that they use. You would be braided in between the spokes.

And then I think they said sometimes they would roll you down the hill. Sometimes they just leave you there. But the and I say this in just, you know, the funny thing, not that it's not funny. The unusual part is I like you usually die.

I'm like, really? You think? But I just I can't imagine how much that had to hurt. Let's just prank every joint on your body and you know, braid you in this wheel and then leave you out to roast to death in the that was the worst.

But sometimes they just like can't get over pit of a fire or like drag you across metal spikes as well. But yeah, that's the one I would want to be put out in the sun to die. You'd be there for days. People are just cruel.

So the next one on our list is the iron chair. Okay, so the iron chair is very similar to the iron made and we'll just kind of talk about both of these in this one. The iron chair is literally just a chair that's got thousands of metal spikes coming out of it. I don't know if you've seen the movie Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp when he's having the flashbacks of when he was a kid.

I mean, you see through the movie has got all the the spike like holes on his hands. It shows him in the flashback like his mom, I believe, actually put an iron made in the movie. And when he saw that he fell back into the iron chair and I mean, it's got spikes on the armrest, the hand rest, the whole chair is just spikes and they would just have you sit on this. And I don't know what else I did other than how you sit on it.

I can't find it. I almost wonder if they had to make as if he sat generally carefully. Maybe you'd be okay. I wonder if someone else sat on top of you or play additional weight.

It made you hold a big rock or something. But either way, I still don't know that I would want to sit on a chair of of spikes that wouldn't be fun. They would progressively tighten iron strings around you. And so it just keep forcing the spikes into your body.

So they keep pulling it out. They keep tightening it and tightening it until it just kind of it says it would go on for hours and sometimes days. The spikes, they never penetrated any vital organs and the blood loss was minimalized at least until the person was released from the chair. Death often followed.

It was often used as a psychological instrument of torture and victims would also often confess after being forced to watch other prisoners being tortured by the device. So while you were in the chair, you didn't die. But I think when you came out, you just have so many holes and stuff in you from being in there. Because the spikes I think would be in your body while you're being tightened to it.

And then it was when they pulled you off as when you'd probably lose a lot of blood and I. Well, and then again, infection, because I don't think they're pulling out the sanitizer between. We can pause the picture of some of these on Facebook. We probably won't.

Well, and then so one night we were just kind of tired. And so we were just watching some YouTube videos. And there's actually a torture device museum in where was that Indiana or go to YouTube and type in torture device museum. It's somewhere and they went around and showed you all of them.

The guy that did the video, it started out really good and he did a good job. But towards the middle of the video, there's some noise that I think it's maybe his background music got a little louder than than his voice. So you can understand some of it. But he went around and showed you a lot of these torture devices in this museum.

That was pretty similar to the Iron Chair. You'd have the Iron Maiden Iron Maiden and the great, great band from the 80s. They're still around. I saw them last year in concert, believe it or not, I put on a great show.

That's cool. I didn't know they're still around. But what's not still around is the torture device the Iron Maiden. Now the research is a little conflicted because everything I saw said that it was, it was a thing.

It was a real thing, but it was never used to actually torture anybody. Blurch, I believe you found evidence that it actually was used as a torture device when you talk about that a little bit. Yeah, see, I'd heard as well that there were speculations that it wasn't actually a real torture device that was just fictional. But during my research, I did find contrary evidence.

It said that any 1800s researchers found one in Castle of Nuremberg, Germany, and documented proof of its use later surfaced. So sometimes it's known as the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, or it was also referred to as the Virgin or Yoonfrau in German. There's a variation found in Spain that was made to look like the Virgin Mary. And it had machinery that when you manipulate the machinery, it caused the virgin to hug the victim and close the spikes on them.

But I mean, it was basically a sarcophagus. I mean, if you know what an Iron Maiden is, you know, what it looks like, it's sarcophagus, you step into it, there's spikes on the inside of the lid. And there's even, what was it, there's spikes from, oh crap, I just lost my train of thought. They were relatively short spikes.

So the wounds wouldn't be instantly fatal. But the victim would linger in bleed to death over several hours. Two spikes were also positioned specifically to penetrate the eyes. So I mean, it was meant to be just a very slow, painful way to deny.

The device itself wasn't meant to kill, it was meant to just kind of puncture so that you would slowly bleed out and succumb to death that way. Blood loss, internal bleeding, stuff like that. Groovy. Yeah, I'm just, I'm still kind of stuck on just the infection from just all the, you know, even if it's just meant to torture, you're going to die from whatever.

No, I'm pretty sure they all got out there, Lysol wipes and Clorox wipes, if they were done and wiped everything down. Yeah, I'll probably talk about that a hundred more times. So, all right, so the next on our list is pretty self-explanatory. It's a head crusher.

And what does a head crusher do? Crushing it a head. Crushing it a head. Kids in the whole reference, anyone?

No? No? Sorry. Yeah, it was just basically, if I remember right, kind of a dome shaped thing or flat, I'm sure they looked a little different, but it was basically just a, there's a screw you put your head in it, they tighten up the screw and your head would switch.

It looked like a medieval orange squeezer, orange juicer. You would rest your chin on a bottom bar and then there would be like this device and sometimes it would be just like a bludgeoning piece of wood or metal or sometimes it would be like almost a cradle cap with spikes on it that as they twisted would also kind of like twist into your bone and twist your head. But yeah, you just kind of screwed it down and as you twisted the thing would lower more and more onto your head, but it was very graphic. What I read saying that, you know, it would, you know, brains eyeballs popping out and brains oozing from the eye sockets and watching, you know, faces explode and blood running from ears and eyes and noses.

Yeah, I think sometimes they put a little tray there underneath it in case your eyes did pop out and so you would catch your eyes. Oh, that's great. I wonder if you could still see. For about three seconds.

I think something's done. The picture that I saw, it was almost like, you know, like you said lurch kind of a cap that they would put on, but meeker here has got one that just, it's just flat. You just put your head in and it's, there's a flat part probably laid on and then the flat part. I mean, I guess if you squish your head, you squish your head.

Yeah, I saw both. I saw one that was just like a piece of wood, like a big block of wood that they would lower onto your head and, you know, with the screwing, it would slowly, you know, impact and I saw another one that was more like a school, a school cap, you know, metal. I saw that one too. Yeah.

There's several different ways to do. I mean, essentially you don't need a whole big elaborate thing that Preston said. No, and I mean, this isn't on our list, but this just reminds me of when we went back to Salem and one of the, I think it was one of the men that was accused of being a witch. I mean, he just got pressed to death.

He just kept putting rocks on him. I think so. Yeah. Jelk or something like that.

We could say in more weight. More weight. Yeah, it was, it was a form of being stoned. I think they called it being pressed and they just piled, they'd get large flat rocks and they would just pile on top of your chest.

You kept putting them on your tail and you got squished. And then here's the thing too. You know, the people that did this, and I'm sure a lot of them were, you know, hired to do this, but just how desensitized would you be to just be sure that the look is eyeballs just popped up. Look, keep going, keep turning it.

And that's just, so they're talking about sailing witch trials. Let's jump a little farther ahead on the list and let's talk about something else they did during that time. It wasn't just during the sailing witch trials. It's actually happened in Europe for like hundreds of years.

And that was being burned at the stake. No, I found this one kind of interesting because you know, you hear steak burning and you think, oh, you know, witches and you think, you know, the sailing witch trials and you know, the witch frenzy that even went on in Scotland and England. But when I was researching this, I said not only did they do it for, you know, for witches, but they did it for adultery and for. I can think of one case of treason, I think.

Right. It was for General Arc. Yeah. It was burned at the stake.

And so another thing that I read too is that, you know, oftentimes when you see like Hollywood's interpretation of being burned at the stake, you know, the flames to come the victim and they die within a relatively short time. One of the things I remember reading is that oftentimes the death would take an hour and a half, two hours for the victim. And they would literally be standing in flames. You know, they're their their skin being seared and falling and melting off.

And they're still screaming. Sometimes I even heard a read about how they would take to like a crop. What's the, what am I trying to say? They would, they would heat up a device that would clamp their tongue.

And so it would swell their tongue to a normal size. And then they would have like this weird muffled kind of screaming and shouting as they died. And it gave it a nice twist. Let me see if I can find that reference here just one second.

So yeah, now interesting and Salem, they did not burn witches at the stake. They hung the witches in Salem. So there was nobody burned up. Yeah, but it wasn't common in Europe.

Yeah, there was a lot of stake burning. Yeah. And like you said, it wasn't just for for witches and whatnot. And this is usually after when they when they got to the stake, this is usually after they'd been through other types of torture first.

It wasn't the first up. It was, it wasn't just going straight to burning. You'd gone through the rack, which we'll talk about here in a little bit, or you've gone through some other type of torture before they finally put on the stakes. Yeah, that was kind of like the last thing that they're going to do the last straw that they pulled.

But yeah, the thing that I read here was that the tortures of the Inquisition in the Netherlands developed a particularly cruel twist that prior to being tied to the stake, the victims tongue would be sandwiched between two hot iron plates. The scorch and swollen tongue would only allow strange muffled screams of pain once the burning began, which supposedly added a great deal to the audience's entertainment. The cruel irony of the inquisition's practice of burning people's stakes was that it happened whether you confessed or not. So once you were accused of heresy, you would almost certainly be accused, could be consumed by the fire.

However, if you confessed it would be strength, you would be strangled to death before the fire was lit. So that would supposedly spray the agony. But yeah, you would die the stake whether you confessed or not. And that was just kind of like the final, the final fall of the axe, so to speak.

All right, so next on our list is a rat torture. And this was popularized in the great Game of Thrones TV series. We'll be familiar with it. Fascinating theories too.

They did this. Oh yeah. That's right for Sog. Well, good torture.

I mean, come on. Well, it was it was easy to do because in England, you had rats everywhere. They were the tower of London. They were everywhere.

So it wasn't hard to get a rat. There are several different ways of doing the rat torture as well. Do you want to talk about that? Well, one of them was just basically put a basket on your stomach, tie you down on a table and put a basket on your stomach with some rats in it.

Hungry rats. Make sure the rats had eaten in a long time. And they kind of go to school and you kind of kind of have a lunch. So you get to get to, it doesn't kill you instantly.

So you get to watch yourself. Leaving burrow down into your intestines in your body and because they like to go, you know, into dark laces. The other way that I'd heard was that they would put them into a metal pot, which would be attached to your stomach and then they would slowly heat the pot and then the rats wanting to escape. From the heat would burrow.

Well, that's how they did in the Fast and Furious. They started heating up the pot with a blood torch and the other rats. They're trying to get away. They dig through you.

Awesome. There's a cat in the wall. Cool. Okay, cool.

Some other stuff that they would do is sometimes they would actually cut you open beforehand, stick the rat in your stomach and let the rat just go to town on your insides. And another way they would do it is not your stomach, but they would go up the back end and then shove a rat in there and just let it go to town. Isn't Richard Geer and stuff like that? No, I have no idea.