Sea Demon

You're at the beach, standing at the water's edge, shielding your eyes from the sun glaring off the water, you gaze out at the far horizon. There's a tanker ship out there, barely visible, little more than a gray smudge against the azure sky. Overhead, a twin-engine plane rides the currents, trailing a banner advertising a seafood buffet and margaritas by the bucket.

Wait, what was that? Did you see that? Was that a trick of the light? Or was it? No, no, no, there it is again. Look, is that a is that a fin? Oh, you know, you're seeing a shark's fin. And now you're about to hear a shark tale unlike any other. A shark tale that makes jaws look like Finding Nemo. This is the terrifying true story of the Sea Demon.

And they got a small beam of light. The very first human being to encounter a shark and come out on the losing end? No one knows. But the very first attack to make the news? Got it. It happened in the Havana harbor in Cuba in 1749. The 14 year old boy involved had already been plenty unlucky before he ever decided to go for that fateful swim. His name was Brooke Watson. He was born in England in 1735, an orphaned at the age of seven. With no relatives handy to take over the boys raising, he was shipped off to an aunt and uncle in the colonies. Like a character straight out of a Dickens novel, seven year old Brooke Watson found himself journeying across the Atlantic to a new life in the new world, expected to buck up and face his fate with a minimum of fuss and drama. And before you think suck it up, kid, there's a pizza buffet on the Lido deck, five swimming pools and a roller coaster aboard.

Remember when and where Brooke Watson is. Travel by sea in the 18th century was mostly awful. The journey from his home in England to Boston would have taken at least a month and that's under ideal circumstances. Wind, weather, the risks of shipwreck and piracy, crowded conditions, sickness and uncertainty. This was no celebrity cruise for Brooke Watson and his fellow passengers. And don't for a minute think that anyone so much as glanced at the little orphan and thought, oh, poor child, because childhood in the 18th century bears little resemblance to childhood today.

For starters, children of poor families were expected to get out and work for wages just as soon as they were able to take instruction and perform a task. An orphan child who didn't have prosperous kinfolk in the new world could find themselves easy prey for every flavor of nasty and unscrupulous adult. At least Brooke Watson had another home waiting to shelter him. However distant and impossibly primitive the colonies may have seemed to the boy. Watson grew up in a world where children were expected to enter adulthood very early, as in, you know, the age when many of us were anxious about starting ninth grade and worried about being able to remember our locker combinations. Pressed to find a suitable occupation, Watson had shown a keen enthusiasm for the sea.

Maybe it was the result of having been forced to make that lonely transatlantic voyage at age seven. But as luck would have it, his uncle was in the shipping business. At age 14, Brooke Watson signed up for a tour of duty aboard one of his uncle's merchant ships and set sail for the Caribbean. When Brooke Watson became a merchant seaman, he was no longer a child in the eyes of the world.

He was a man and a sailor, but he was a young man filled with a young man's fearless bravado, intoxicated by the freedom of being away at sea, no longer a schoolboy in his uncle's house. The Caribbean heat was brutal, the sun relentless, the harbor calm and clear and inviting, and with his duties completed, Watson decided to go for a swim. Accounts of the day tell us that the shark surprised Watson, slamming into him and tearing the flesh below the calf of his right leg.

He must have shouted the commotion, bringing his shipmates running. They tried to pull him from the water, but before they could succeed, the shark made a second pass, this time locking its powerful jaws on Watson's right ankle, snapping off his little foot as easily as you or I might chomp the end off a carrot. Brook Watson's shipmates wrestled him onto the deck, snatching him away just as the beast circled back in the now blood churned water. There was nothing to be done about his leg.

The damage was so great and medical options so few, they had no choice but to amputate the leg at the knee. Fourteen-year-old Brooke Watson spent the next three months recuperating in a Cuban garrison. Adolescent boys, the word teenager hadn't been invented yet, are pretty remarkable machines when it comes to healing though, and Watson was no different. He was soon bound home for Boston, not knowing that in his absence, his uncle had gone bankrupt. Like I said, this poor kid was a real-life Dickens character. Not to worry though, as we're about to leave history's first attack victim to get on with his life, trust me, Brooke Watson was a survivor. He's going to be fine. He's going to be better than fine. He's going to join the British military. He's going to work his way up to a leadership position. He's going to earn the nickname the Wooden-Legged Commissary, and eventually he'll return home to England where he'll become a successful businessman and one day, Brooke Watson will be named Lord Mayor of London. Not too shabby for a young orphan who nearly became shark food in Cuba. You see, long before Peter Benchley was even a twinkle in his great-great-granddaddy's eye, long before the book Jaws or the movie, sharks were already living rent-free in people's heads. Human beings have been using the sea for trading and commerce and fishing and warfare for over 5,000 years, and it was brutally hard work and dangerous.

Sharks are not. Sailors losing their lives and their limbs was just an accepted part of doing business on the open water. Think about our caricature of the pirate, the wooden leg, the hook for a hand, the missing eye covered by a patch. I mean, good grief. Customer service is the literal worst, but you seldom lose an eye or a hand in that gig. Just your sanity and also any warm feeling you might have had ever for your fellow humans, but that's another conversation.

So where were we? Sharks. Yeah, sharks. Thanks to the fossil record, we know that sharks have been on Earth for 450 million years. These animals are so profoundly badass that they've managed to survive every single mass extinction event that has occurred on this planet in the last 439 million years. They are naturally engineered survival machines.

They've evolved and adapted over time, but the basic design was just so efficient that if we went back in time to the Jurassic period, we'd immediately recognize those dorsal fins in the water. That's how little the shark has changed in thousands and thousands of years. The first evidence we have linking people with sharks goes back to ancient Greece. They found a vase. They a fierce shark. Now, opinions regarding the creature vary wildly in the ancient world.

For some cultures, the shark was a god. For some, it was the spirit of an ancestor. And for many, the shark was a demon. Legends of sea monsters and sea dragons were passed down for centuries by word of mouth and were even noted in ship's logs. Today, the average eight-year-old who watches the Discovery Channel Shark Week knows more about the creature than anyone living on planet Earth back in 1794, the year that Brooke Watson was attacked. That's because the shark wasn't even properly studied by science until the early 1900s when a biologist named Eugene Goodger tackled the subject. And this is kind of gruesome, but listen. The U.S. Navy only started paying real attention to the whole shark situation in the mid-1900s. Wartime losses of ships at sea meant bodies in the water, lots of bodies.

And what a feast for sharks that was. And you know that the U.S. Navy was like, this is not going to help with recruitment. We cannot let word get back to land that you get eaten by a freaking monster out here. Somebody needs to call the old spice people stat and tell them to start romanticizing the hell out of this whole going to sea business.

But after Brooke Watson broke the seal on shark attacks, more and more truly dreadful stories began appearing in papers all around the world. In 1753, the Maryland Gazette published the very tale of a sailor in Barbados whose body was severed in half in one bite. The shark swallowing whole the man's entire lower half. His shipmates seized the remaining upper half of their fellow sailors bloody torso and dragged it back on board. And one of the men howled in fury, vowing that he would avenge his friend's death. That man grabbed a harpoon, leapt back into the water and commenced wrestling to be stabbing at it repeatedly.

Man and shark rolling in the bloody waters, submerging and surfacing, then submerging again to seem all chaos and confusion. The injured shark was now like, what is up with this? And made a beeline for the shore. His tormentor riding his wake, clinging to the harpoon that was impaled in the great animal's side. And then the sailor dragged himself and the shark to land, hacking and hacking at it till it was dead. Then wipe the blood off his face and called for a coffin for what was left of his deceased shipmate and set about to ensure a proper Christian burial.

Oh my God, what a hero, what a friend. And such was the power of this dramatic tale that it circulated around the world for years afterward, appearing in dozens and dozens of broadsheets and tabloids. And no matter how many times it was retold, the horror never lessened. Then in April 1833, the Pittsburgh Gazette reviewed a brand new published book called The Life of a Sailor.

It was written by a naval captain. It was a three volume opus that included the tale of the wreck of a small ship called Magpie off the coast of Cuba. As the crew began to desperately bail water from the sinking vessel, one man suddenly cried out, shark. Here's what the author recounted. No language can convey the panic which sees the struggling seaman.

A shark is at all times an object of horror to a sailor and those who have seen the destructive jaws of these voracious fish and their immense and almost incredible power, their love of blood and their bold daring to obtain it can alone form an idea of the sensations produced in a swimmer by the cry of shark, shark. All order was now completely unraveling. Commanding Officer One Lieutenant Smith exhorted his men to keep calm and to once again try to right their ship. It was their only means of salvation and these remote and shark infested tropical waters. The men worked feverishly and as the boat was slowly cleared, they dared to hope that they might somehow survive this calamity. And then it happened. Fifteen sharks moved in among the men. In their panic, the 22 sailors tried to clamber back into the boat, but they only managed to again overturn it.

The sharks weaved in and out of the clump of frightened men, bumping them and rubbing against them. And then there was a scream. A shark had taken the leg of one of the sailors. As his blood drained into the sea, it triggered a feeding frenzy. Sharks tore sailors from the boat as they clung to it. Limbs were ripped from bodies. Men disappeared beneath the water and through it all, Lieutenant Smith stayed cool, barking orders to his doomed crew. It is a real tribute to naval discipline that the poor men tried so hard to obey their superior. Somehow the boat was righted again and two of the men managed to haul themselves aboard. But listen, you haven't heard anything yet. Lieutenant Smith, still in the water, clung to the stern of the boat and cheered his men for successfully regained the ship. And just then a shark arrowed up from the depths and in one monstrous bite, severed both of Smith's legs just above the knee. Survivors of this nightmare reported that Smith tried to conceal from his men what had befallen him. But a deep, wretched groan escaped his lips. His hands loosened their grip on the stern. But before Smith could sink, his sailors heaved his broken body aboard. They said that even in death, Smith's thoughts were only for his men. His last words. If any of you survived this fatal night and returned to Jamaica, tell the admiral I was in search of the pirate when this lamentable occurrence took place.

Tell him I have always done my duty and that I. We will never know what the rest of that final sentence was, because at that very moment, other sailors attempting to pull themselves from the bloodied waters and get back aboard the magpie caused the small vessel to heel violently to one side, tipping poor Lieutenant Smith back into the sea. His last words vanishing with him into the depths. And Max, I think you and I can both agree that right now, if a shark took off both of our at the knee, we would not have the presence of mind to use the phrase lamentable occurrence.

Not I think some other choice words we'd be using that don't rhyme with lamentable or occurrence. In all, nine sailors died that day. The book noting that this buffet seemed to only temporarily satisfy the sharks. The two men who'd managed to remain alive were saved, though their ship had no mast and no sail. They had no oars, no food, no water. They were becalmed. The sun, a relentless furnace. The book tells of how these survivors, no strangers to the perils of the sea, feared cannibalism awaited the next. Should they now ever present circling sharks, not take them first. And then after some time, spotting a sail on the distant horizon, the dehydrated and sun blistered pair dared to hope that rescue could be imminent. They stripped off their jackets and waved them in the air, shouting, inhaling the slowly moving brig.

And then as they watched with sinking hearts, the vessel turned and began moving away under sail. The magpie had not been seen after all. Let me tell you what. People of the olden days were made of 100% pure high octane hero stuff. One of the surviving sailors, his name was Tom, announced, by heaven, I'll do it or we are lost. And at that he jumped into the water.

His lone companion, Jack, watched in terror as the sharks who'd been stalking their boat abandoned the magpie to now pursue the frantically swimming Tom flailing his arms and hollering as loudly as he could. Tom realized then that there was not one soul to be seen on the deck of the brig. No one heard his cries. No one saw him in the water. All around him circled the sharks, still well satisfied from having dined on his shipmates and patiently waiting for their moment to snatch this last tasty bite of prey. That's when the miracle happened. A man suddenly appeared on the deck of the brig and using the last of his strength, Tom threw up his arms and lifted himself from the water and the brig was suddenly alive with action. A small boat was swiftly lowered into the sea and Tom was pulled to safety. A human victory snatched from the literal jaws of the defeated sharks. Jack was rescued from the magpie soon after and it's only thanks to Lieutenant Smith's leadership and Tom's balls-to-the-wall courage that the fate of the magpie in her crew is even known. And then there's this wild fish tale. It was recorded in 1863 by the crew of the English vessel, the Fairhope. The brig was east of Sri Lanka, which was then called Ceylon, heading for the Strait of Malacca, which was and still is one of the world's most important shipping lanes, well known to sailors of the time. Pirates patrolled its surface and sharks prowled its depths and seamen were forever on alert for signs of either. The threat of shark attack was very much a part of a sailor's daily existence. Here's just one proof of that. On merchant ships, if a shark was sighted, it became customary to allow the men to pause in their labors so that they might attempt to kill their enemy. And this is the exact scenario that set the crew of the Fairhope on the path to tragedy. That morning, one man had gone aloft into the riggings to, you know, I don't know, scan the horizon, yell out, Land Ho! and serve as a lookout for pirates. Important boat and sailor stuff.

And what he saw made him tremble. He described it as a monster shark, a monster lying alongside the ship. The Fairhope had extraordinarily high sides, they're called bulwarks, and the creature was only visible from the rigging. And it was enormous and distinctive. It had an odd milky white swelling roughly eight feet behind its head. So they speculated that this strange marking was the result of some prior injury. The Fairhope's captain, once he was informed that a gigantic shark was riding shotgun, informed his crew that instead of killing the beast, they were going to capture it alive and haul it to their next port of call in Singapore. Now, as someone who has spent many years in corporate radio, I'm not the least bit surprised to see upper management come up with an idea this riotously stupid and doomed to failure. But hey, you got to fill the workday somehow, right? Seriously, they're gonna capture the shark alive. And they tried. Hours were spent lowering baited hooks into the water. And the shark was like, What? No, I'm not biting on that.

What is wrong with you people? Who the hell ever heard of catching a great white shark with a bent hook and a piece of salt beef? I don't know, man, you guys might be too stupid to even be worth eating. Geez. And they kept trying. And the men conferred. And they seemed to agree. Geez, you know, just can't. I don't think we can take this shark alive. So the ship's carpenter found an old harpoon on board, and they decided to give that a go. To the utter horror of his shipmates as the man tried to spear the shark with the harpoon, he fell overboard and was immediately seized by the great fish and disappeared beneath the surface before the dozen witnesses could even cry out his name. Now you'd think that the gory death of a coworker would put an end to this nautical version of capture the flag. And you're right, it did for the crew of the fair hope. But not for the shark. Just three days later, the crew of an American ship called the James F. Bradwell found themselves loaded with a cargo of tea and becalmed for more than six hours.

That's when a sailor aloft in the Bradwell's rigging spotted it, a shark of monstrous proportions lying quietly alongside the vessel. The animal was so large that at first the sailor mistook it for a whale and then observed the dorsal fin of the man eater along with this peculiar pale swelling behind its head. Believe it or not, the crew of the James F. Bradwell decided that they'd like to capture the shark alive.

Out came the hooks and lines, this time baited with both beef and pork. The shark ignored the bait drifting motionless alongside the ship. Observing the stillness of the great beast, the crew came to that the animal must be, for whatever reason, near death. So they came up with plan B. We'll attach a noose to the shark's tail, hoisted aboard and sail into port with their terrifying prize swinging in the breeze from the ship's yard arm. And so a small boat was lowered over the Bradwell side. The sailor aboard that little dinghy was in the process of trying to lasso the monster's tail when he lost his balance. In the blink of an eye, the shark turned all sudden and swift silvery movement and took the man diving under the keel of the Bradwell and vanishing. The captain's log noted that all five eyewitnesses declared that the shark had swallowed their shipmate with no more difficulty than if he'd been a piece of the pork they'd tried using as bait.

Two weeks passed with no sign or word of the fearsome shark with the strange white swelling on its back. And then, hundreds of miles away in the Bay of Bengal, an English whaling ship called the Two Sisters was anchored off the Andaman Islands while the crew made needed repairs. It was 10 o'clock in the morning, cloudless day. There had been no sign of any activity in the Then, to the shock of the crew, a massive shark suddenly rose from the depths and nestled alongside the ship. To their great disappointment, the captain made the decision that the needed repair work was way too extensive and time too short to allow the men to knock off for a bit of shark hunting. This time though, they weren't the only humans in the vicinity. A small fishing boat carrying three men was nearby. Hailing the small vessel, sailors on the Two Sisters gestured and pointed out the beast. The fishermen in the small boat acknowledged the report and the crew returned to their labors. And the shark, it continued to drift motionless alongside the Two Sisters.

The temptation though proved too much for the fishermen in the small vessel. It was decided, wait for it, that the three men would try to capture the shark alive. Now, I know you're not supposed to anthropomorphize animals. I know you're not supposed to endow them with human motives. I know a shark's got to do what a shark's got to do, but come on, it's clearly a trap. This is a top-line predator, ancient and cunning. The survivor of every mass extinction on planet Earth, a relentless eating machine that, fight me on this, was obviously capable of learning and applying those lessons. And it decidedly had a taste for sailors, filthy and salt and crusted as they no doubt were. And I'm not judging because one look at my family tree tells you that the lynch women also had a taste for sailors. It's a thing, okay? Anyway, the fishermen landed on what they believed was a solid strategy, throw a noose around the shark and tow him ashore.

So they made their way to the whaler and accepted the offer of a length of heavy rope. It was at that very moment that the shark abruptly roused from its seemingly lifeless torpor and made for the tiny boat. And this craft, which was made only for reef fishing, it might as well been a bundle of twigs. That's how swiftly it came apart after just one strike from the colossal bulk of the shark. All three of the fishermen were now in the water, panicked and floundering.

The crew of the two sisters threw lines into the water and succeeded in pulling one man aboard. Another man clung to the ship's rudder. The third was gone, devoured in one single powerful motion of jaws and teeth and throat. Sailors on the deck of the two sisters bellowed at the shark, throwing whatever objects they could lay hands on, throwing stuff at it. But the leviathan was as indifferent to the hail of buckets and hammers as you might be to a storm of paper clips and pushpins. Within seconds, the man cling to the rudder was plucked off and he too disappeared into the maw of the shark. By now, stories of this terrible predator have begun circulating, not just in the newspapers of the time, but in the taverns and warehouses, shipyards and docks, places where sailors congregated. They gave this fearsome shark the name that would strike terror in every seaman's heart. They called it the Sea Demon. Several months went by with no new sighting of the monster until early 1864 when a ship called the Speedwell suffered a calamity.

On the way to her home port in Philadelphia, the Speedwell was caught in a sudden squall in the Strait of Malacca. The storm tore away her main and four top masts and several of her sails. There was nothing to be done but drop anchor and make repairs. And guess who showed up? Tucking himself right along the port side of the Speedwell, remaining as still and as lifeless as a giant inflatable water toy. This time though, he wasn't a surprise. The crew of the Speedwell had heard the stories. They'd been warned. The ship's officers came up with a new plan.

How's about we take some accurate measurements of this thing? The shark was 38 feet and three inches long. That's about the size of a standard bus if you're like me and have kind of a hard time with dimensions. It's also more than twice the length of your average great white shark, which leaves us with a bit of a mystery since the only sharks that we know that can reach anywhere near that size are the basking shark, the whale shark, and the tiger shark.

The first two are plankton eaters. The tiger shark has been known to attack humans, but its distinctive markings are absent from every eyewitness account of the sea demon. So could the sea demon have been a megalodon? A giant species of shark that went extinct three and a half million years ago? There's a whole community of megalodon fanboys and girls who argue that there are remnants of the species still alive in the oceans today. I don't know about that, but I do trust that a group of maritime officers accustomed to navigating by the freaking stars could probably manage a tape measure. This shark was 38 feet, three inches long, period.

The sailors on the speedwell went back to repairing the masts, and the sea demon stayed put, barely moving. Captain Taylor loaded a heavy shotgun with buckshot and took aim at the beast, hoping to scare it off. The first three times looked like a success. The shark would dart under, disappearing for five or so minutes at a time. Then he'd reappear, and he'd take up his usual position. By the time Captain Taylor aimed the shotgun at him for the fourth time, the mighty shark seemed to know what was coming, moving to the ship's stern and staying so low in the water that the buckshot had no chance of reaching him. From 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., the shark hugged the side of the ship. By now, the sailors were joking about having a new crew member, their high spirits fueled by the completion of repairs and the promise of continuing their voyage. And then it happened.

A sailor tumbled accidentally from the yardarm, plunging toward the sea below, and the ever-present waiting shark. He hit the water feet first and was lost to sight. Then, as swiftly as he had fallen, his body shot straight upward to the cheers and shouts of encouragement from the men on deck. Wouldn't it be just amazing, like something out of a movie, if this one sailor somehow managed to outwit the sea demon? Yeah, it would be great. But that is not how real life goes. In real life, the shark reared, clamped down on the man's legs, and swallowed him up, life preserver ring and all.

Later, bits of that life ring were seen floating on the surface. But the shark and his luckless victim, gone. In April of that same year, the shark appeared once more, this time alongside a brig called the Charleston, about 50 miles off the island of Mauritius. The sea demon had never been spotted this far south. This was at least 3,000 miles away from his last known attack. And the crew of the Charleston, they were well aware of the dangers of tangling with this particular shark, and the men were frightened. The only weapons aboard the Charleston were a pair of Navy revolvers. And though they emptied 12 rounds into the beast, they saw immediately that it was futile. The thing was just too enormous. And as the ship gained speed, so did the sea demon moving right alongside the Charleston. And that's important, because up to this moment, sailors believed that no shark would even approach a moving ship, much less remain with one. But the sea demon was no ordinary shark. His stalking of the Charleston began on a Tuesday and continued without pause until Friday. Sailors are known to be superstitious anyway. But this relentless haunting had men frantic. The captain had ordered the men to stay out of the rigging and to take every precaution.

But, of course, accidents happen. And on that Friday evening, the ship's cook carefully approached the deck opposite the shark and lowered a pail into the water. Why did the ship lurch at that very moment and send the cook overboard? And how did the shark move so swiftly to take him that there wasn't even time for the man to scream?

Over the next two years, there were more sightings of the sea demon and many more deaths. One sailor was consumed whole when he fell from the bowsprit of a Scottish whaler called the Albatross. A Boston-based ship called the White Wave also lost a man to the sea demon's voracious hunger. After an English ship called the Cape Horn wrecked off the coast of South Africa, the survivors took to a raft only to find themselves pursued for seven days and seven nights by a colossal shark with an odd milky white protuberance on its back.

And that shark devoured nine of those shipwrecked survivors. And then, in 1866, the sea demon finally picked the wrong ship and the wrong fight. He was back in his old hunting grounds in the Bay of Bengal. This time, he appeared alongside an English gunboat. The crew had heard the stories. They knew what they were up against. There was no talk of capturing the creature alive or lassoing it by the tail or ignoring it and hoping it might go away.

Instead, these sailors studied the shark with great analytical care, and then they loaded the ship's guns and trained them on the monster. When the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the mammoth shark. Though, to be fair, there was also no evidence that the ship's guns had found their target either. But after that day, the sea demon was never spotted again. Never again did a sailor tell the story of how a great silent leviathan emerged from the depths to stalk their ship to hunt and kill their crewmates.

I would not blame you if you doubted the truth of these tales, because no one is better at spinning an epic fish story than a sailor. The legend of the sea demon, though, it's a real story, not a make-believe fable meant to frighten children away from the water. And speaking of water, marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols is the author of a beautiful book called Blue Mind. He says that humans are born with a connection to the water. He says that we are hardwired to react positively to water, that just being near water is healing, that it calms us and connects us, that it's perfectly designed to bring us pleasure and happiness, that the reward center in our brains is awakened by the movement of the waves, that time slows for us on the water, that the experience is one of euphoria.

Our brains, he says, like the water, are blue. The sea calls to us at the deepest and most primal level. So, enjoy the beach, have you a little dip in the ocean, and as you scan the waves in search of the dreaded telltale dorsal fin, try not to think about how, once upon a time, a fearsome, cunning goliath cruised the deep, a creature so unthinkably enormous and clever that it feared no man, no ship, no harpoon, no bullet, a creature they called the sea demon.

Next time on True Weird Stuff, imagine this, someone's built a time machine and you get to go for a ride. Are you headed to the past? Are you headed to the future? Do you believe that there are time travelers walking amongst us right now? We've got stories on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com, for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

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