This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau Podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? I've just been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio. And welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Norrie with you. Les Klinger is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, H.P. Lovecraft, Frankenstein, and the history of mystery and horror fiction. He's the editor and author of many books. He's a two-time Edgar Award winner and has edited two anthologies of classic 19th century mysteries, along with co-editing five anthologies of Sherlock Holmes stories. He is the New York Times best-selling editor of New Unadicated Dracula. Les, welcome back. How have you been? I've been good, George. How are you? Great. And I'm glad you're not with the Washington Post right now. Well, me too. It's a bad time to be a journalist. Do you have any friends out that way? I do. One, my old friend Michael Durda, who is still on the staff, I'm going to still be doing books. Thank goodness. Good for him. Now, how did you get interested in Bram Stoker? Well, when I was finished with my Sherlock Holmes books, that was a passion that I discovered in law school and was fascinated by Holmes for years and years. But when I finished the Sherlock Holmes books, I had enjoyed the process of writing an annotated book so much that I wanted to do another one. And I thought about it. My wife said, why don't you do Dracula? You love that book. And I thought about it, and it was perfect, because Dracula and Sherlock Holmes were exactly contemporary. I like to think they walked the streets of London together. How do you think Bram Stoker got the concept of Dracula? Well, there were a lot of vampire legends around already. His mother had told him tales when he was a wee lad in Dublin. of vampires, and he was fascinated by the subject. Some say he had a role model in his mentor, Sir Henry Irving, but I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. But he wanted to be a writer. He had written a number of sensational books that, frankly, weren't very good, but he cast around for an idea, came up with the idea of the vampire. The vampire had been in English literature already, There are two great works before him. There was John Polidori's The Vampire way back in the time of Mary Shelley and the sensational Varney the Vampire that had been a multi-part dime novel series in the newspapers and elsewhere. And he decided to write a book about vampires. And so, to our great fortune, he sat down and wrote Dracula. How would you grade that book? Well, first of all, it's certainly the scariest book I've ever read. It's hard to put yourself back into a place of being scared, but I read it in college. And I read it at a time when I thought I ought to read it. I was an English major. It seemed like something I ought to be familiar with. And then I discovered how scary it was. But you have to put yourself back into this mood of forgetting the movies, forgetting everything, because you find yourself yelling at these people halfway through the book. It's a vampire, you dummies. You know, why don't they get it? How did Hollywood transform these books? Oh, my. Well, the love affair between film and vampires began very early in the 1920s, almost with the beginnings of films. There were many versions of Dracula. The first great one was the wonderful film that you can still find on YouTube and all over the Internet, Nosferatu. Now, Nosferatu was essentially a ripoff of Dracula. With that ugly little vampire, right? That's right. That's right. Max Schreck was the actor who played the vampire. And this was a far cry from our modern image of the vampire. This was long before Bela Lugosi took the stage as Dracula. And so the vampire is a rat-like looking creature, really horrifying, scary, scary creature. How scary was he, Les? Well, I mean, he's pretty terrifying. There's been modern versions. The film was remade later by, I think, Vim Vendors. And in a sort of under-seen film that came out a couple of years ago called Voyage of the Demeter, there a wonderful scene in it that lifted right out of Nosferatu of the vampire on the prow of the ship it a scary character scary character this is not um you the sort of what i call the lounge lizard dracula with the version that we have with lugosi of the slick back hair dark good looks seductive of women this is a this is as i said rat-like looking creature with long teeth and nothing romantic or attractive about it whatsoever. You've written a series and edited a series of annotated books. Annotated means, of course, there are comments and notes left behind. Tell me about that. Well, this bad habit started, according to my wife, when we went to the movies and I found myself talking to the screen. You know, I don't know if you're one of those, but I'm one of those people who sits there in the audience and says, watch this. This is really good. This reminds me of that. That the person, the director must have meant this and so on. And that habit translates into dropping footnotes all over texts. Once you get started, it's hard to stop. It's kind of a disease, George, I admit. And I know you're going to want some after hearing this. This is an amazing story. We've got Stephen and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand. I understand that Malachi, who's eight, almost nine years old now, was suffering with not just one or two warts, but, I mean, a significant outbreak of warts all over his body. So significant, it impacted his ability to really function. Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil to write. It was Ty's book, actually, that got me thinking about it. I'm not surprised. It is an amazing immunomodulator. And so I can see that it would work. And so at what point did you see that there was actually improvement? It was really going to work. Well, look, we really started to notice it around 12 weeks. You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller. And then going down to where they're just little red marks, the whole things are gone. And we're talking about one the size of a walnut. I thought, no way that's going to. Wow. It's just been miraculous. To see him get into a pair of shoes. Yes. How wonderful. It's great to see him so happy and confident. Absolutely wonderful. Our friends that have seen it, they're just blown away. Ty, this is awesome. Yeah, this is awesome. Another amazing story. Why? We're talking about Carnivora. Call them to awaken your immune system and protect yourself now. Call 1-866-836-8735. That's 1-866-836-8735. Or visit Carnivora.com. C-A-R-N-I-V-O-R-A. Carnivora.com. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpwright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real I thought it was a mistaken identity The best lie is partial truth For 22 years, only two people knew the truth Until a confession changed everything I was a monster Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, a.k.a. Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level if the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're going to get back to Vampires and Dracula in a moment, but you've got a great annotated book on Sherlock Holmes. How did that happen? When I was in law school, I got a magnificent gift, a gift of a book called The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Bering Gould, and I was hooked. I was hooked by the footnotes. I was hooked by the idea of footnotes, and I discovered the cult of Sherlock Holmes. That became a fascination for me for many, many years, and then sometime in my more mature years, when my career was sort of well in hand, my kids were older, my wife said to me you have all those books on Sherlock Holmes Why don you write something And I thought about it and there had been a long tradition of amateur scholarship about Holmes So I did. I started doing it. It met with some success. And then to my great joy, I was approached by Bob Wild, the senior editor at W.W. Norton, and asked to edit a new edition of the Bering Goul work that I had so admired back in the late 60s. Now, Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character, though. He was not real, was he? Well, I lecture about Holmes all the time, and after I discuss his life and the life of Dr. Watson, I'm usually asked that question, was Sherlock Holmes real or fictional? And I always say the same thing, yes. Yes what? He was real or fictional, yes. There's the Sherlockians of the world And there are thousands Play what we call the game The game is that Holmes and Watson really lived The stories are true Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a brilliant writer Is known as the literary agent He helped Dr. Watson get these stories published And in the words of Dorothy Sayers We put our tongues firmly in our cheeks and pursue this sort of slightly mad study of the stories. What did you like about Sherlock Holmes, Les? Well, many things, but I like that Holmes is a superhero that somehow if we just work hard enough, we could be like that. We don't have to be bitten by a spider. We don't have to be born on another planet. If we just really study hard and learn everything, we could be like him. And that seemed to be – that's appealing. But he's just such a fascinating figure, always on the side of right and justice. And he's got this wonderful, warm friendship with Dr. Watson. You know, I think if you ask Sherlockians, would we like to be Sherlock Holmes? I think the truth is he's kind of an uncomfortable figure sometimes. Would we like to be Dr. Watson? Absolutely. To hang around with this genius and sort of bask in his light and bask in his friendship. What a great. Holmes was the brilliant one, wasn't he? Yes. Yes. And, you know, too many of the movies depicted Watson as this fool. but he wasn't a fool. He was a stout fellow. He was a smart guy. He was a doctor. He had obtained his medical degree and he kind of allowed himself to play the fool a bit to make Holmes look better. And he did. He did. He did make Holmes look good. He stayed out of the spotlight himself. Dr. Watson did and always shown it on his friend, his brilliant friend. And so we have these wonderful adventures, and we can travel along with them and take ourselves back to what seems to be maybe a simpler time, a time when things are a little more black and white. We know who the good people are and who the bad people are, and we can stand up for right and justice. Les, what did Holmes' line elementary, my dear Watson, come from? Well, it came from the movies. That doesn't appear in any of the stories. He says elementary. He talks about my dear Watson. He never says that exact phrase anywhere in the stories, but he comes close. Now, when you flipped over to Dracula, anything unusual there? Well, yeah, lots of unusual. First of all, as I said, as I studied the book, it's the date of the events. Not very many people want to treat it like Sherlock Holmes, but I played the game a bit with the Dracula novel and treated it seriously as if what if those events had really occurred. And when we date the events, they take place in the late 1880s, possibly 1893, but certainly at a time when Sherlock Holmes was very active in London. And we can imagine this shrouded figure walking the streets of London, maybe with Holmes actually on the case, trying to track him down. But people ask me, what was the scariest thing that I found about Dracula? The scariest thing I found was a British magazine called Bite Me. I'm not sure if it's still in print. It was in print at the time that I was doing this book back in the 2000s. This is the Journal of Consensual Vampirism. These are people who enjoy sharing blood and dressing like a vampire. They get their teeth capped to look pointy and long. They wear red contact lenses, and they share blood. Big time, too. Yeah, that scared me more than anything. When you edited these books They were written by the original authors You just added to it, right? Right, right I always say that these books didn't need Les Klinger to be great books They are wonderful books And if you've never read the book Please don't read my footnotes first Because inevitably I had to spoil things Because I want to talk about the endings earlier in the stories so that you can sort of see how it builds up to those endings. But I think of my footnotes as kind of like the director's track. It's a way to enhance your enjoyment of the stories, maybe find things in them that you didn't know were there, and look at things in a fresh way. Les, I was always told that Dracula was written after Vlad the Impaler, a real person. Is that true? Well, no, it's probably not. What we do know is this. Stoker did some research into his work, into the work and putting together the work. And in the course of his preparation, he came across some accounts of Transylvania. Now, Transylvania was a kingdom or principality of a faraway place, not yet the nation of Romania, but a faraway place, and beyond the Carpathian Mountains, little visited by English-speaking travelers, very little written about it. So it was an ideal location to place his tail because it was like the dark side of the moon. Nobody knew much about it. You could say all kinds of strange things happened there. Now interestingly Transylvania doesn have much in the way of a tradition of vampires or vampire literature There a lot of Eastern European vampires but not so much there But along the way Stoker discovered a prince Vlad the Impaler who was a prince who fought against the Turks and was a great hero to his people. There was never a suggestion that he was a vampire. He was a bloody warrior, But it was never suggested that he had any sort of supernatural, because it was like the dark side of the moon. Nobody knew much about it. You could say all kinds of strange things happened there. Now, interestingly, Transylvania doesn't have much in the way of a tradition of vampires or vampire literature. There's a lot of Eastern European vampires, but not so much there. but along the way Stoker discovered a prince, Vlad the Impaler, who was a prince who fought against the Turks and was a great hero to his people there was never a suggestion that he was a vampire, he was a bloody warrior, but he was never suggested that he had any sort of supernatural abilities he did impale on a stake his victims from time to time, and he had a nasty reputation as an enemy because of that. But there was never a hint of him being a vampire. But what Stoker discovered, he had already written the book, by the way. He had written the book, and he was calling the lead character Count Wampir. Not a very fetching name, but that was kind of the placeholder that he had. And he came across the name Dracula Solicitor in London, and he gets hired. His boss is hired by Dracula to help him buy some real estate in London. And Harker, who is newly engaged to a woman named Mina, is shipped off to Transylvania with the closing documents, as we would say. to get them all signed and sealed and complete the real estate purchase. So he's sent to Transylvania on this journey that, you know, it's like, as I said, a journey to the dark side of the moon. He travels across Europe and passes through Vienna and gets to the streets and finally goes to Dracula's castle where he meets Count Dracula, where he is promptly imprisoned. And Dracula takes all the papers, locks Harker in his castle, and takes off for England. Was Jonathan Harker perhaps based on a real person? Well, as I say, I think he's loosely based on Stoker himself. Stoker himself was a solicitor. I like to pretend that the two of them met while they were studying to pass the bar examinations there. but there's no basis for that evidence other than my wild fever dreams. Les, do you think the vampires of that day scared people? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The vampires were not seen as seductors. Is that the word? Seducers. They were seen as revenants. The dead returned. and they were feared. In some cases, the vampire might be a relative. It might be Uncle George, who had changed into a vampire because of bad things he had done during his lifetime and came back from the fact you had just buried him and sure enough, he's back in the village. And in the early days of vampire recordings, which is to go back to the 15th century in England, 16th century, It was often a village that was suffering predation by a local vampire. The villagers would go down to the graveyard and they'd dig up Uncle George and they'd see evidence that Uncle George was a vampire. The evidence was typically things like, well, there might be foam on his lips or blood on his lips in the coffin. The body had moved in the coffin. The fingernails had continued to grow. The hair had continued to grow. So this being positive proof that Uncle George was the vampire and had gotten up out of the grave and walked around, they would then sort of staple him into the grave with an iron stake to make sure he didn't bother the village anymore. And when things went back to normal, the horses stopped dying, the crops got better. that was clear proof that they had done the right thing. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at 1 a.m. Eastern and go to coasttocoastam.com for more. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? I've just been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
