Kids would like squeeze as part of your neck and then you would pluck out and then they would let it go, and then you would kind of like kind of lose it, and then you would come back and they would let go because your blood was start flowing again. Wow, I bet that turned into a big kink. Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the Internet. I'm Edwin and I'm Michelle. Michelle. Yes, you are on the ship of one of the most important voyages in a not so distant history, the Titanic. What kind of history do you call five hundred years ago? I wouldn't call that recent history. Okay, would that be like just in history? Yeah? Are we in the seventeen hundreds. We're in the fourteen hundreds. Oh, we're like in Columbus time. So we're way back. This is before the Titanic. So you're a part of this voyage. You're in there. You're one of those helpers. You know your way around a rope a sailor. Ye, you climb up that tube thing all the way up and look at the star at the crow's nest the mask. Are you talking about the sure the ropes and the wood and the paddle sounds like a boat to me. All right. So you're at a boat and you're over the Caribbean Sea, and as you're going one night, you step out of your cabin and you're out in the deck wondering when you'll feel the touch of a woman again. I yearn for that always. And then out of the corner of your eye on into the sea, you see this thing kind of peek out of the sea. It just kind of rises, it comes back down. You kind of confuse it with like a little wave, like a little fishes kind of whoop, kind of swimming around or something. And then you see it again, and this time it kind of leaps out a little bit higher, but it's not leaping. It's kind of like rising out, turning its head. And then you see long hair and the exposed body out in the open sea. You rub your eyes and as they adjust it changes. Like what you're seeing out on the sea, it's not what you thought it was. The thing that was hair was not hair, is probably like seaweed or something, and it isn't a woman. It's a man. Oh hm hm. You think even better. But then herman. But then it starts to look like a monster. You freak out, You run back in, and you report this to your boss or to the assistant of the boss, because I guess the boss is kind of sleepy. Way, the first mate I call this ship ski because I have no idea of it. Instead of the boss, it's the captain. And then the second boss is the first mate. But okay, yeah, okay. The day before, when the Admiral was going to the Rio del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water, but were not as pretty as they are depicted. For somehow, in the face they look like men. Christopher Columbus wrote that journal entry on January ninth, and this is real in fourteen ninety three. Honestly, that's amazing. He wrote that in an actual journal entry as he sailed out past the Dominican Republic, and sailors often spoke of mermaids sightings. But were they really saying mermaids? Good question. Yeah, there's a few theories out there and about what Christopher Columbus wrote, and they're saying that maybe they were not men, they were manatees. And during this time they say that Christopher Columbus's vision was failing him. What I got out of it, it's more like, so they're not as pretty because they look like men. Men can be pretty. I've seen some pretty men out there. There's been some pretty men. So we're talking about some fugly things. Yeah, in general, Like when you think of stuff out at sea, like you're kind of bored. That's how I imagine it, Like you're kind of when you're not working and doing stuff like this might be nothing to do out there, so you're just like looking out there's nothing, the same sound, same everything. You might start seeing things, right, So that might be a thing that happened. I think that's a common thing out there. You can hallucinate land if you've been at sea for a while too. Uh huh. Yeah, even though you know the idea that maybe his vision was failing him, that maybe it was manatees and all this stuff in those waters. Hundreds of years later, sightings continue to take place. What In a post from twenty twenty on x formerly known as Twitter user Hazy twenty one point fifty quoted this one post. If you see this at the beach in Haiti, don't go. It's a mermaid, and the thing went viral. It had thousands of comments that were replying with all these other experiences with a mermaid. One of them a mermaid took my grandma and wait, I need more context on that took her where? I don't know. But there was another one that said I was almost taken by a mermaid. And among all those comments, there was one by this user keeps swimming. My grandma is eighty four years old and she's from Jackmail, Haiti. This happened back in the day when she was in her teen years. There was this waterfall in jack Mel that a lot of people like to go to. Women especially like to go there to wash clothes or to shower and bathe. One day, this man went and he hid somewhere watching the women Batheugh, yeah, typical. Well he was watching them. A lady came out of the water near him, and she asked him why he was watching the women. Yeah, I mean, it's not rocket science. And then he couldn't speak because he was so stunned at her beauty. This guy sounds oh. That's when she took him down into the waterfall and he disappeared for years without a trace, and when he returned, he told people that he married a mermaid and that he couldn't live on land anymore. They transformed him and he had to go back, but he came to tell everybody he couldn't be there. I can't be on land and he's on land. So that wasn't the only the only story though, with a disappearance, and this is actually a common thing with mermaid stories, that they take people and they disappear. Another user on that same thread wrote, a lady in my neighborhood always told us the same story that she was taken by a mermaid in the ocean, that she doesn't remember much After that, everyone thought she was dead. A year later, she appeared on the same beach, but she lost most of her memory and one of her fingers was missing. Something bad happened to her. I don't know what. It's something weird happened. Yeah, I mean, for one of her fingers to be missing kind of random, but I don't know. Mermaids. That's it. Mermaids, that's what happened. And people just believed her and the police was like, oh okay, sorry about that. Under that same post, someone commented, look up Stephen Kubaki, so obviously we looked it up and you never heard of. Gives me chills. Stephen Kubbaki went missing in February of nineteen seventy eight, very close to Lake Michigan. His ski poles and skis were found near the lake. After that, as footsteps went on for a bit and then completely vanished, there was not a single trace. Who was believed that he had drowned in the lake until suddenly he just reappeared. Detectives never actually bought the story that he had drowned because they looked up Steven's dental record. So they also use the records to make sure that he was not one of the victims from John Wayne Gacy's you know, people that they couldn't identify, but he wasn't. Detectives, friends, families, everybody was where is he because obviously, I mean, I can imagine that being just one of those You're desperate for answers, so any answer really is like, okay, if this may have happened to him, okay, okay, Like they kind of take that as an answer, but everybody was just puzzled. Fifteen months later, though, he reappeared and he showed up just randomly at his stepfather's home. Reporters, friends, and all these people asked him what happened, and he couldn't remember. Decades later, he still does not remember a single thing from those fifteen months. Okay, many speculate that he's making it all up, but or it's just it was so traumatic. For whatever reason, he's blocked in. Yeah, and some people say that it's a mermaid that took him. Maybe, I'll mean, why not is he saying it's a mermaid er? He doesn't remember anything. He's just like, well, I don't know what happened. He married a mermaid and had a whole life and then came to a family of fishies and needs to get back to a school of fish. Oh, oh that was good. The mermaid idea. Isn't that crazy because it wouldn't be the first sighting in Michigan. Oh. May thirteenth, seventeen eighty two. A Canadian fur trader Venant Saint Germaine, Venant Vaunont. You know how to do it in French. I don't know if it's French though, but anyway, a fur trapper in Canada. Yeah, that's French. He was in Lake Superior. He was making a stop at Pie Island in the northern part of the lake when he saw something in the deep cold waters of Lake Spear. It was a Merman with brownish skin, long hair, and quote extremely brilliant eyes. He fell in love. Oh no, that's not it. When he set his eyes upon this creature. I mean he could have fallen in love. It's just a different story for the seventeen hundreds. Lots of murm men, you know, way more murman than worm women, right, So I don't know what's going on here. A part of it, like why I wrote the thing was, like he says, when he set eyes upon the creature, he drew his gun and tried to shoot it. Of course, you always kill what you love. He was in love. He's like, if you're not mine, you're nobody. No one can have you. But he tried to shoot it, but he was stopped. There was somebody in this party that said, no, don't shoot him. The guy that tried to shoot him. He actually signed an affid David in an attempt to prove that he was telling the truth. And he also wasn't the first one to speak of creatures that lived in the lake. The indigenous Ojibwe tell tales of a merman called the may May Gwashi. It had actually been an Ajiboy woman that stopped the guy from shooting the murman because of her belief. She already knew who or what this thing was, and she told him it was bad luck to threaten water creatures, and almost as if she had prophesied it, they actually encountered bad luck. Right after that, a storm rolled through and it lasted three days, which just completely stopped their travels. Jermaine actually went on to die in a very unlucky manner. A friend of his pulled out a shotgun and fired, believing it to be a prop gun, but it was real, which is weird because like, why would there be prop guns in the seventeen hundreds, right, He must have just thought it was unloaded. Everyone had a gun, but like he just played around with guns like that and aim and I don't know, maybe people are just drunk or something. I don't know. Anyway, there's a lot of similarities between the mermaid stories, Stephen Kabaki stories, Sea creatures, and all these that go on in Lake Michigan. The Missing People thing and the Mermaids is a recurring tale. If you look up stories of like disappearances due to mermaids, it's like missing people disappearances mermaids. I'm like, I thought mermaids were just like, oh, that's creepy, but no, like it's tied up to this stuff. Yeah. I always think of Ariel Or. I think of Hans Christian Anderson and the fact that aerial story is more depressing than you take. Oh yeah, and then I think of manates, which are also kind of depressing too. They just look depressed, you know. They just look kind of like gentle sea cows that have trouble surviving in our modern world. In twenty twenty one, TikTok user Sauce ninety went viral. He was a fisherman and when he recorded the video, he was working and he was on a commercial fishing boat. He uploaded a one minute and a half video which he claims to have heard mermaids and fared like these like screams, and that thing went viral, but he claimed to have been raided by the government while he was in the fishing boat. Comments say that he's being silenced, that they got him, that they don't want us to know. Rumors that he had been killed, started spreading like the whole I just imagine just making up a mermaid guy. Yeah, I mean all I could think of is like, oh, her beautiful sirens song. You just don't you just want to run towards that screaming in the middle of the ocean. Yes, the dream, that's it. So since this guy went missing, people were like the story all over again, right, mermaids this guy disappearing. Turns out though he had been in a near fatal car accident and it took him many months to heal. So, yeah, he was not online, but he's back on social media now. He still says that what he heard on twenty twenty one a couple of years ago was definitely a mermaid and if it is real, it's the very first ever recording of real mermaids. But wow, you see there's like beautiful mermaid and then just screaming. Well, I guess that's a siren. I don't know if mermaids and sirens are categorically different, but it's a siren call of a mermaid. Is that you're supposed to, you know, immediately go to them. Yeah. One of the strangest mermaid tales happened in Zimbabwe. Now mermaid folklore is serious there. They are set to have sharp teeth. They pull people to their deaths. It's a bad thing. Now go back to the year two thousand, such a long time ago, twenty four years ago. Oh my god, what was that? Oh? What? Oh god? What? I just felt something push me? No you didn't. Oh and the switch is off? Well okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, hold on, okay, Michelle. There's a thing that's been happening here. There's a just getting chill. I'm getting chilled. Let me turn this light. Oh god, okay, there's a thing that's been happening here. At desk in the middle of the room. In front of me, there's a couch to the TV. In front of me. Behind me is the dining room area and the kitchen right. For a couple of weeks now, I've noticed that my computer hasn't been charging right. And I would always turn on the switch and it would just start charging all over again. The cable that charges my MacBook would be unplugged and right off to the side by the lamp. Things that I have in my drawer are like not in the drawer. This has been going like I'm like, okay, I'm gonna keep taking note of this. I'm gonna turn this on. I'm gonna leave this plugged in. I'm gonna leave right the next morning it's unplugged. When I was writing a little bit earlier today, I turned it on and I'm like, if this turns off, something weird going on. Now. Just now I picked down and it's off, right, I need to turn it back on. Computers charging again, and just now. No, it's just it's just a regular standard that thing that splits it into you know, like six little things. Yeah, and just now, I swear when I was I don't even know what I was saying in the recordings that, but I clearly felt somebody push on this like just like that. I got chills. I looked down. It's just like, look, yeah, that's what I felt like. Somebody just went right past me and it has like this net like it's not like a solid plastic chair, and it freaked me out. I got chills a little bit before. I started getting like weird chills in my arm. And then I feel that and it's creepy. It's just it's creepy. It sounds like you have something in your apartment. I don't know how much more proof you need because you see someone on the stairs, don't you Last time, remember I told you that. Yeah, it happened while we were on call. That was weird, but anyway, in June of two thousand, two men drowned in a dam in Mowing. Now that was not unusual. It was sad, but not unusual. Villagers, you know, knew of other cases of people had drowned, but they were afraid the two men had drowned trying to chase a mermaid. Locals still avoid the dam after the sunsets, and they believe that a mermaid traveled to the dam after causing problems. And other parts of Zimbabwe, south of Mohendoro, in the Moonezi district, a girl went missing. The townspeople began to believe that she had been taken by a mermaid. She went missing in twenty ten and in twenty twenty one, villagers gathered where the girl had been seen last. She had been bathing in the river at the time. Now they gathered saying played instruments, called to her, hoping that she would return, and she still hasn't because they believed that they still gathered to try to call her back. There had been cases also of people returning forty years after being taken by mermaids in that same village, and every year they gather just calling you know this girl's name, just in case forty years later she comes back. Just a year after the little girl had gone missing, in the Midlean's region of Zimbabwe, mermaids were scaring locals again. You see, the President of Zimbabwe had ordered a dam to be constructed between the towns of Goke and Mutare, and the local workers were installing the water pumps until they suddenly refused to keep working. Workers were going missing and many claimed to have been chased off by mermaids. Question, how do you get chased by a mermaid? Don't you just get out of the water. I don't know, I guess because I mean, technically, if they're the kind that we're operating with, they don't have legs, you know, like we're operating from our standard image of a mermaid. Unless it's back to my theory where the fish was on the top and the legs front the bomb. It's just like, well, they thought the workers were just being lazy. They're like they don't want to work. So they brought in workers from other countries, people who didn't believe in mermaids, and they were like, all right, now people are going to finish this. And it was it was okay for a few days, but then the newly hired workers all left while installed in water pumps. They never said what they saw down there, but they also refused to work. So the government had no choice but to lean into the mermaid folklore, so they brought in traditional leaders. The performer ritual were cows or slaughtered. Beer was brewed and they used them as offerings to make the mermaids happy, and the local workers returned after that, and the dam was eventually completed. Now, after all this, you're probably wondering, I know, this is the question, how do you become a mermaid? Yeah, that is my question. Actually, it turns out you can become a mermaid from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, because they offer certifications for you to become a mermaid and actually perform and get into those big old fish tanks. And now the course, a basic course costs two hundred and fifty dollars, a standard one costs four one hundred and fifty dollars. And there's an advanced one that costs fifteen hundred dollars. And you can actually teach this stuff by getting instructor certification, so we can make a whole business out of it. And according to this article I found on collider dot com, you can actually make potentially one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year if you work forty hours away being a mermaid. Wow. The average pay is sixty seven dollars and thirty nine cents. So well, this is good to know. This podcasting thing doesn't work out, I can go you a mermaid. Yeah, take another stable career that my parents will fully support. Mermaids creepier not I think they're creepy now. I used to think mermaids were just legends of oh, sightings of the Mermaids out at sea, kind of like the Lockdown. Yeah, but no, like it turns out these are actual creepy, freaking things that make you disappear. I'm curious about which half you think is a fish? That's all. Let us know in the comments, either on Spotify or on our Instagram, because yeah, I mean, which which one for all these things that people claim to have seen? And if there's a record of it. Could it be real or could we all just be imagining? The more you talk about it, the more it becomes real, you know what I mean? Like it's it's the belief that makes it real. Like the flat Earth. The Earth is flat, guys, remember that. Just kidding. I'm not a flat earth there. Please don't cancel me, thank you, because then we'll never know what we're going to talk about next week, Edwin, I don't know. It'll be a surprise, Okay, it'll be a surprise. Scary Mystery Surprise is hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Komarubes. This podcast was edited and sound designed by Sarah Orhe's Wendel, a VW sound
