Published Sunday, November 08, 2026 at 03:14 PM PT
Burbank · Sunday, November 8, 2026 · 3:14 PM · 66°F, 47% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 2), 29.54 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6
Six Mystery pieces went up this week, one every morning at about 7:49 Pacific, with Thursday, November 5, skipped entirely. I’m told that was a scheduling thing and not a mutiny, and I’m choosing to believe the people who told me, which is the first act of faith this section will ask of you. Honest is a generous word for a sarcastic woman reading her own homework.
Monday opened with “Mystery and Friends: Your Soul Has a Terms-of-Service Agreement and Nobody Read It,” and the rabbit hole was Johann Georg Hohman, a German immigrant who landed in Philadelphia in 1802, published a pile of material, and then dropped out of the record after 1846. His book, The Long Hidden Friend, was a folk-remedy and charm collection that Pennsylvania Dutch powwowers leaned on hard. I like this one because the mystery is the man, not a monster. Hohman left a book and no body, which is more than most of the vendors in my life manage. The “bad Wi-Fi signal” line is the best image in the whole set, and I stand by it, even though it means I’m now ranking my own jokes.
Tuesday’s “Mystery and Friends: Loops, Lost Oil Towns, and Immortal Sith: The Tuesday Weird-Fest” was the Dark Seas story of an American destroyer commander named Talbot, running through Japanese shipping off Balikpapan and dumping burning ammunition over the side while fretting that the glowing shells would paint a bullseye on his hull. Nobody issues that manual. The detail I keep coming back to is the flag that read “well done” by seven in the morning. That’s the entire victory speech. It’s more restraint than most people manage after a bad Tuesday, and I’m the one who has to live with the ticket queue afterward.
Wednesday brought “Mystery and Friends: Cow Autopsies, a Cranky Marine, and a Soul Exit That Was Behind You the Whole Time,” which walked through the cattle mutilation panic and the far less exciting answer that the animals were being eaten. Anthropologist Nancy Owen’s team ran the experiment that should have ended the argument. They gave a dying heifer a lethal dose of tranquilizers, left it in a ravine, and had a sheriff’s office watch for 30 hours to make sure no aliens or Satanists tampered with it. The only visitors were flies and scavengers. Memento mori is Latin for “remember you will die,” and that heifer would like you to remember the scavengers got there first.
Six mysteries solved, one Thursday vanished, zero mutinies. I’m choosing to believe the calendar.
Friday was “Mystery and Friends: Hustler Fire, Soul Firewall, and a Sith Who Forgot to Finish the Job.” The B-58 was built to win a nuclear war, and in 1964 it nearly made a nuclear mess on American soil all by itself at Bunker Hill, Indiana. The piece’s best habit is that it tells you when it’s guessing. The claim that roughly one-fifth of all B-58s were lost in accidents gets labeled as the narrator’s estimate, and the piece sends you to the Air Force accident records instead of asking you to trust a video. The 1936 fake Necronomicon review, planted by fan Donald A. Wollheim, makes a good palate cleanser, because it’s the right kind of fake: you know who made it and why.
Saturday’s “Mystery and Friends: Arsenic Dreams, Dead Alchemists, and a Fictional Assassin Who Got a Better Ending Than You Will” covered the Modena family of Italian alchemists and one Mordecai, who reportedly died trying to transmute arsenic into silver. Little Mister, I said it in the piece and I’ll say it again: this is why you don’t bring a hobby to a toxin fight. The testimony chain runs from Modena to a student of Isaac Luria to the Baal Shem of London to Ezra Stiles, later president of Yale, and at every link the claim gets more impressive and no more verified. The Ferengi, the greedy aliens from Star Trek, have a rule, Rule of Acquisition #219: “A friend is not a friend if he asks for a discount.” Every link in that chain asked the evidence for a discount, and the evidence paid it.
Sunday closed the week with “Mystery and Friends: Sayatik, Sealed Exits, and a Sith Lullaby: The Sunday Weird Shelf.” In 1924 a writer identified as George Totski told readers of The Oregonian that the attackers at Ape Canyon weren’t a new monster. He said they were the Sayatik, a people from older Pacific Northwest legend. Ecclesiastes 1:9 in the King James Version says “there is no new thing under the sun,” and the Bigfoot panic of 1924 proves the point, since it had an older name before the tabloids got to it. I’d make a Sasquatch joke, but the thing has been around so long it has squatter’s rights. The piece also declined to overread the spelling variants, Seatik, Sitako, and Taiau, which is more discipline than most of the internet has ever shown about anything.
So what’s the throughline? The B-58 piece does it, the cow piece does it with a sheriff, and the Sayatik piece does it by refusing to connect names that don’t connect. My advice for next week’s pieces is to lead with the “what’s known” section and put the confidence level right next to it, the way the B-58 piece already does without thinking about it.
If you only read two, read the Friday B-58 piece for its method and the Wednesday cow piece for the 30-hour stakeout, which is the best image this section has produced. The Sayatik piece is worth your Sunday for the Ecclesiastes gag alone. Skip the chain of testimony in the Saturday piece unless you enjoy watching a claim get more expensive at every step.
Next week I’m going to find out which of these legends has a county file, a dead-letter box, or a sheriff who will answer the phone. Until then, End of Line.