Podcasts
Pop a Squat in the Devil’s Chair for More from Wikipedia’s Urban Legends List [Guide to the Unknown]
Urban legends are just cozy. They used to be shared person to person, often in some sort of idyllic, spooky setting, like the ring around a campfire or at a sleepover. More recently, we’ve traded the light and shadow of campfire flames for the glow of a computer monitor, which is less romanticized but has its comforts and charms, lying low in the blankets, scrolling Reddit or Tumblr (RIP).
So it’s only appropriate that we’ve hit a cozy sitting place on this week’s show in our continued journey through Wikipedia’s page of alphabetically listed urban legends. We were midway through the D section in the last urban legends episode of our Bloody FM podcast Guide to the Unknown. This time, we finally hit the end, taking a moment to rest with a little legend known as The Devil’s Chair.
They’re listed as singular, but Devil’s Chairs are a category of gravesite chair sculptures. Sometimes, they serve as the headstones themselves (giving a kind of dedicated bench in the park vibe, but made of stone); sometimes, they’re off to the side as a secondary monument.
Initially made in the 1800s, they were called “mourning chairs.” Some were made for people to sit and visit with their dead loved ones, while others were just chair-shaped monuments. However, as time passed, cemeteries started providing benches for people to sit on, and they went out of fashion.
But of course, they’re a curiosity, so stories started to be told about them, and that’s where the urban legend of it all comes in. Stories vary by location, but people began to say that if you sat in the Devil’s Chair at midnight, you would hear Satan’s voice in your head. An especially unique version from Florida says that if you leave a full beer can on the Devil’s Chair in the Cassadega cemetery, you’ll find it empty by morning – and yet unopened. The devil does have his tricks!
Another Devil’s Chair from Missouri, known as the Baird’s Chair, is said to offer a few different options should you dare to sit on it at the stroke of midnight. You could a. be dragged to hell by a hand that rises from the ground or b. be rewarded for your bravery. It’s a real roll of the dice.
To split hairs, these are really more fun, creepy games/superstitions than urban legends. True urban legends are stories with a kernel of truth that usually have a moral agenda. But both are that perfect brand of creepy, scary-but-not-really that just hits the spot, whether heard at a slumber party or, say, from a podcast while you’re doing the dishes.
For more urban legends, including two ghost towns, join us, Kristen and Will, for this week’s episode of Guide to the Unknown. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get a new episode every Friday.
It’s been a busy month on Murder Made Fiction podcast. In addition to introducing a new co-host (Perfectly Good Moment‘s Amanda Jane Stern), we spent Pride Month tackling a wide variety of Leopold and Loeb fictional adaptations.
In 1924 Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb plotted to commit the perfect murder when they abducted and killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks. As Amanda outlines in her primer on the case, the men were caught almost immediately and the media circus that followed was billed “the trial of the century”.
Listen to Leopold and Loeb mini primer.
The fallout has reverberated throughout the last century as countless books, plays, musicals, and films have drawn on the case for inspiration. Some are more faithful than others, such as Richard Fleischer‘s 1959 drama Compulsion, which stars a young Dean Stockwell as Leopold and Orson Welles as the boys’ lawyer, John Darrow (named Jonathan Wilk in the film).
Listen to Leopold and Loeb: Compulsion (1959).
Then there are the texts that use the idea of queer-coded killers as a jumping off point, but confuse (or flat-out disregard) the details of the real life case in favour of jumbled fiction. That’s what happens in Barbet Schroeder‘s Murder by Numbers, which awkwardly introduces a tortured backstory for lead actress (and executive producer) Sandra Bullock. The result is an uneven film that misunderstands which of its two competing storylines are actually interesting (hint: it’s the Leopold and Loeb stuff with Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt).
Listen to Leopold and Loeb: Murder by Numbers (2002).
We ended up discussing other (often more successful) titles on Patreon, including 1992’s Swoon (a New Queer Cinema art-house take on the crime), Michael Haneke‘s 2007 Funny Games remake, and gay screenwriter Kevin Williamson‘s Scream, which proved to be a much more reverent and sly interpretation of L&L than we anticipated.
We wrapped up the month with a final summary episode about our favorite adaptations before chatting with author and archivist Erik Rebain, who literally wrote the book on Leopold (Arrested Adolescence) and maintains one of the foremost websites on the crime.
Watch our discussion on YouTube below (or listen here):
Next month: For July, we’re turning our attention to the Boston Strangler, with a look at films from 1964 and 1968, as well as the most contemporary version from 2023, starring Kiera Knightley and Carrie Coon.
Want even more true crime adaptations and Murder Made Fiction? Support the show on Patreon to listen to the aforementioned episodes, as well as a full-length primer on the case and 160+ hours of bonus content.
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