Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: Buried alive, in total darkness,

with no way to escape.

Invisible forces with demonic intent

that control your mind and body.

And ordinary objects with supernatural powers

that leave a trail of death and destruction.

Fear. It's a universal emotion,

human emotion, that is often essential to our very survival.

Our biological drive to stay safe is designed

to help protect us from danger,

both real and imagined.

We might be startled or even amused at times

by loud noises, dark places, or confined spaces,

but what happens

when the stuff of nightmares is not a dream,

but instead, a terrifying reality?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

SHATNER: All over the world, various cultures

practice a period of mourning

between the time of a person's death

and when they're finally laid to rest.

This is a time to pay respects,

to process one's loss,

and in some cases, to quell the fear

that the dearly departed might still be alive,

and prematurely placed six feet under.

MARK P. DONNELLY: The fear of being buried alive was a fairly common fear

up until 20th century medical practices

meant fewer people were, in fact, buried alive.

It was most common in 18th and 19th century

Europe and America,

mostly due to the medical practices

and the burial practices at the time.

This was when medical diagnoses could get things wrong,

and people were, in fact, buried alive,

and stories of that became sensationalized,

and therefore, the panic would spread.

JOSEPH LAYCOCK: In the 19th century, the great fear

of being buried alive

was partly because this was the age of cholera.

Cholera causes severe diarrhea,

which can deplete all the electrolytes in your body

and, in extreme cases, can induce a coma.

So, sometimes, people appear dead,

and they're actually in this sort of vegetative state,

and they can come out of it.

But if you bury them,

then you've buried them alive, and that is a terrible death.

SHATNER: Historically, the thought of being trapped

in a wooden box, beneath thousands of pounds

of dirt, with no possibility of escape,

was so widespread, that this fear was actually given a name.

It's called taphephobia.

Taphephobia is the idea of simply just

the fear of being buried alive.

Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote about premature burial

was terrified of being buried alive.

Frédéric Chopin, the composer, wanted to be

stabbed in the heart and bled out to make sure

that he was dead when doctors believed that he was.

And even George Washington was so afraid of being buried alive

that he had written in his will that his body had to remain

in bed for three days after they thought he was dead

to make sure that he didn't come back.

KEITH EGGENER: It was estimated by the 1890s

that some two percent of people being buried were buried alive.

Now, this is a gross exaggeration, no doubt,

but it was believed at the time.

Enough so, that organizations

like the London Association

for the Prevention of Premature Burial

was founded in 1896.

And they lobbied parliament for greater diligence

on the part of doctors to make sure that doctors

were verifying death.

SHATNER: Despite doctors' best efforts, it was simply difficult

at the time to determine whether a person was alive or dead.

And so, in order to ease people's minds,

authorities in Europe were forced to take drastic measures.

Within this storied city, lies the Vienna Central Cemetery,

the second largest cemetery in the entire world.

In the heart of the cemetery stands a small building

that today houses a museum.

But in the 19th century, it was referred to as a Leichenhaus.

The Leichenhaus was a kind of mortuary where

corpses were kept for a period, typically about three days,

and watched over by attendants

to make sure that a person was truly dead

and wouldn't be buried alive in a state of coma or catalepsy.

SHATNER: In modern times, it may sound a little disturbing

to hear that doctors once stabbed their patients

in order to determine whether they were alive or dead.

But the truth is that the hysteria

about being buried alive was so prevalent

that an entire industry sprang up to help calm

such fears by producing bizarre contraptions

that were known as safety coffins.

LAYCOCK: If you were afraid of being buried alive,

the solution was the safety coffin.

And this began very simply with a bell

tied to a string that went down under the earth into the coffin.

And if you were buried alive, and you woke up in a coffin,

you could pull that string, the bell would ring,

and hopefully, somebody would hear it and come dig you out.

And this tradition is where we get the expression

"saved by the bell."

And if you had more money,

safety coffins could get more elaborate.

They could add air tubes, they could add windows,

so you would have some lights inside the-the coffin.

And there were even cases of people buried

with a key in their pocket, so they could unlock the casket

from the inside, if this happens.

EGGENER: There were loads of patents

taken up for these safety coffins.

And they would include devices like

little flags that could be raised.

Sometimes safety coffins included

food or water, they would have breathing tubes,

they might even include periscopes.

One of the best-known ones, really, belonged to

a doctor named Timothy Clark from Vermont.

He came up with his own safety coffin device.

He had a set of stone stairs installed next to his grave

that could be opened up by a concrete block

that was sitting beside it.

That way, anyone could get down to rescue him

if he needed to be rescued.

But the real kicker to the whole thing

was that he had a glass window installed

directly over his face, set into the stone.

However, he died in 1893,

and the doctors did not make a mistake.

He really was dead.

SHATNER: Safety coffins may seem like a quaint fad from a bygone era

that has no relevance in our world today.

But believe it or not, there have been some recent cases

in which people appear to have been mistakenly buried alive.

Being buried alive is very, very rare, uh,

at least in our own time,

but it does still occasionally happen.

As recently as 2018, there was a case in Brazil

where a woman woke up in her grave,

and is thought to have survived for 11 days there.

TAYLOR: Being buried alive doesn't happen nearly as often

as it used to, but if you think about it,

waking up in a coffin would be probably one of

the most terrifying things that could ever happen to you.

SHATNER: The very idea that a small mistake due to negligence

or misdiagnosis

could cause one to be buried alive

is a terrifying thought.

But it's often what we can't see that instills fear the most.

Like in the case of an ancient predator

who still lurks beneath the ocean's surface

with a frightening history of hunting for human flesh.

SHATNER: 25-year-old Charles Vansant

is swimming in the brisk Atlantic waters

off the coast of this resort community...

...when he's suddenly attacked by a massive shark.

Lifeguards pull Vansant from the water

and see that his left thigh

has been stripped of its flesh

by a massive set of razor-sharp jaws.

CAPUZZO: The story is that they had to almost

wrestle him away from the shark.

As they pulled him ashore with the shark following him still,

his father, who was a doctor, operated on him

or tried to save his life, but he died of a flesh wound

to a bite on his thigh, actually,

and, uh, loss of blood.

SHATNER: The gory death of Charles Vansant

was the first recorded fatal shark attack in U.S. history.

And then, on July 6th,

a mere five days after Vansant was killed,

there was another attack along the Jersey Shore.

Charles Bruder, who's a 27-year-old

Swiss native who was in the Army,

went for a swim, and 1,200 feet out,

in the middle of the day, was attacked

and bitten by what appeared to be about

an eight or nine foot great white shark.

Severed his legs and a part of his torso.

By the time the lifeguards got out there,

there was hardly anything to lift into the boat.

SHATNER: This second deadly attack was widely reported

in newspapers across the country

and set off a nationwide panic.

Many people believed it was no longer safe

to swim in the ocean off the coast of New Jersey,

and several beaches were closed by the authorities.

The public reaction was hysterical.

There were calls all the way up to President Wilson.

Woodrow Wilson had a cabinet meeting

and talked to the early men who founded the Coast Guard

about eradicating all the sharks on the east coast.

Bounties were given by towns and cities

and anybody that could kill any shark could get $100.

You had fisherman going out, catching and killing sharks.

And it wasn't just in New Jersey.

It was all up and down the Eastern Seaboard

and even infiltrated into the coastal states;

Texas, Louisiana,

and as far as the Pacific coast of North America.

SHATNER: Less than one week after Charles Bruder was killed,

on July 12th, three more people were attacked

by what many witnesses claimed was an eight or nine-foot shark.

Curiously, all five of these incidents took place

along a 50-mile stretch off the coast of New Jersey.

Because of their proximity,

and the similarities between eyewitness accounts,

many began to wonder whether the horrific attacks

could have been the work of a single killer shark.

The New Jersey attacks are so strange

'cause sharks don't kill people with any kind of regularity,

and nobody witnesses it

with any kind of regularity when it happens.

But the concept of a rogue shark

that kills or injures one person

and that gets a taste for human flesh

and goes after another like a serial killer,

the Jersey Shore may be the best evidence

we have that that's ever happened.

SHATNER: On July 14th, 1916,

two weeks after the first fatal attack,

a taxidermist named Michael Schleisser

caught a seven and a half-foot, 325 pound great white shark

off the northern end of the Jersey Shore.

After cutting open its stomach, authorities found what appeared

to be partially digested human remains.

There are many who believe that this

great white shark was responsible for all five attacks

that took place, four of which were fatal.

Fatal shark attacks on humans

are seldom predatory for feeding.

So what was going on that would cause a series of five attacks

over a 11-day period?

What was behind all of this?

People panicked.

No one wanted to go in the ocean.

So, its effect on individuals, citizens, was enormous.

And it was something that, to this day,

still has an effect on us.

SHATNER: The 1916 Jersey Shore attacks helped to popularize

the notion of sharks as deadly man-eaters.

More than 50 years later, the killings inspired

the 1974 novel Jaws by Peter Benchley,

which became the basis of the blockbuster film

made by Steven Spielberg

that terrorized generations of beachgoers.

But despite their bad reputation,

the truth is that sharks rarely kill humans.

According to statistics gathered

by the International Shark Attack File, on average,

there are only five fatal shark attacks worldwide per year.

So why does the belief persist that some sharks

are a serious threat to humans?

NIALL McCANN: Sharks, unsurprisingly, have terrified people

forever because

sharks live an enormous amount of their life out of sight.

Unlike terrestrial species that we can see,

sharks live underwater, and the only time

that we really interact with sharks

is when they come to the surface, and that tends to be

in antagonistic circumstances with people.

Traditional island cultures

have had multiple deities that have shark appearance,

and that comes from an inherent fear

that we are at risk of sharks.

They have this power of life or death over us.

TOK THOMPSON: Sharks are apex predators.

The idea that sharks can be celebrated in a culture

might seem a bit odd. After all, they do kill people.

But there's a couple of things to consider.

One is that they are recognized as apex predators,

and this is something that people often aspire to.

Also, the idea that these are apex predators

and you'd better understand them.

COLLIER: Over the years, sharks, especially white sharks,

have been portrayed as killers.

Unfortunately, people are killed from time to time.

It has been postulated that white shark's hunting

have similarities into the tactics

utilized by serial killers.

Serial killers use what is referred to as an anchor point,

which is where they will sit and watch

and pick their victim.

White sharks do the same thing.

White sharks like to hunt stealth,

where the intended victim can't see them.

CORBIN MAXEY: A lot of people often look at sharks and think

that there's nothing going on,

but great whites are intelligent animals.

We've watched great whites attack seals.

And you'll find the older great whites

will pick out specific individuals, usually young ones.

It's very methodical.

So, it is 100% possible

that some sharks like the taste of people.

SHATNER: Are there certain sharks that specifically

and methodically hunt people?

Some marine biologists have suggested it's possible.

But if this theory is true, then what's even more disturbing

is that a killer shark

may keep stalking people for a very long, long time.

Great whites can live to be 80-plus years old.

There's some accounts of specimens being over 100.

They study their subjects just like a serial killer.

They learn from their mistakes just like a serial killer.

That's terrifying.

SHATNER: Coming face to face with a predator

like a great white shark would be terrifying, to say the least.

Just imagining an encounter

with a dangerous creature can trigger our primal fear

of being overtaken by something much stronger than us.

Like in the case of a powerful presence

that can possess the human soul.

SHATNER: Anneliese Michel, a 20-year-old student

at the University of Würzburg,

claims that she's hearing disembodied voices...

...and seeing visions of the Devil.

Before long, her family comes to believe

that Anneliese suffers from

a condition that defies understanding.

Demonic possession.

Anneliese Michel was indeed tormented

by a possessing something.

She spoke in a horrendously growly voice.

(indistinct, growly gibberish)

PICKNETT: Her eyes seemed to go black,

and she had a great aversion

to holy statues,

which there were a great many in the house

because they were very pious Catholics.

And she was taken to a doctor,

who said she might be epileptic,

um, and she was taken to a psychiatrist,

and nothing changed in her life.

In fact, she was getting worse and worse.

BADER: Her family believed from the beginning she was possessed.

The Catholic Church accepted that framework

and engaged in the exorcism.

Ultimately, Anneliese Michel died of starvation

and dehydration over the course of numerous exorcisms.

This was a case where that belief

directly led to her death.

What we cannot say for certain is what was really going on.

I can't say that she for sure

was not possessed or for sure was.

SHATNER: The story of Anneliese Michel

is perhaps the best-known case

of an alleged demonic possession.

But what happened to her?

Was she actually possessed by demons?

And if so, how does one identify

when a person's mind and body have been taken over by Satan?

RICHARD GALLAGHER: During the course of my career,

I've witnessed a number of cases of possession in my life, but

I definitely started as a skeptic.

I certainly never thought I would see anything

sort of paranormal or diabolic.

A priest who, I guess, knew I was Catholic--

I don't exactly know how he got my name--

but he came to my office when I was at Cornell medical college.

And he said, "Dr. Gallagher, I'd like you to, uh,

"evaluate someone for me

who I think has a demonic attack."

And I said "Well, with all due respect, Father,

"you know, I'm an academic psychiatrist,

and I'm pretty skeptical of those sort of things."

And I remember what he said to me, he said,

"You're the perfect man for the job

because we want somebody who's skeptical."

Of course, in the years since, you know, 25-plus years,

I've seen so much that I'm not a skeptic anymore.

There are very strict criteria

which clearly have to be present

to distinguish the case

from a psychiatric or a medical disorder.

You have to see something that is inexplicable

in terms of purely materialist science.

Things that could not possibly

manifest in somebody who doesn't have a diabolic attack.

The first case sent to me was a woman who claimed

that she would be lying in bed,

and she would be pummeled by invisible forces.

She and her husband were convinced that

she was attacked by demons.

So, we did a number of medical tests on her

because she had bruises all over her body.

And at the end of my evaluations--

and she was a very sane, lovely woman--

I said to the priest, "Look, this doesn't seem like

a medical or psychiatric case, it doesn't seem possible."

SHATNER: Mysterious bruises

inflicted by invisible forces?

While that may sound like something

out of a Hollywood horror movie,

the truth is that accounts of possession

have been recorded for thousands of years.

Any scholar can tell you cases of demonic possession

go all the way back to the Bible.

When Jesus had to cast the demon out of a man

into a herd of swine,

who then ran off of a cliff and into the water.

Very famous story in the Bible.

And stories of demonic possession,

they are not confined to Christianity.

The idea of possession is inherently tied to the idea

of Satan and demons,

and is an attempt by Satan to take over your personality

to ultimately control you.

Satan's end game, according to the Bible,

is to draw as many people away from Christ as possible.

So, his endgame is to get as many people

to move from God to him.

So, his ultimate role is as a tempter.

The film The Exorcist is believed to have really

brought attention to the idea of possession,

but it's not that those ideas started with The Exorcist.

Those ideas spread with The Exorcist.

MONSIGNOR STEPHEN ROSSETTI: The Exorcist was actually based on a real case.

It was a 12-year-old boy who was possessed, not a girl.

How did he get possessed? Using a Ouija board for months.

Start doing something occult,

that creates an inner vulnerability to evil.

You're using magic that does not come from the Lord.

You might not know this, but you're actually invoking

the powers of Satan, whether you believe it or not.

GALLAGHER: Most people who are possessed,

in a sense, they've invited it in,

wittingly or unwittingly.

Possession is the most dramatic attack

of a demon upon a human being.

And in a way...

...spiritual warfare should be a concern of everybody.

That we're all sort of in a battle

in our own souls between goodness and evil.

It's frightening

to think that a person can be controlled by an evil entity.

And while it's difficult to determine

if possession is a spiritual or a psychological phenomenon,

perhaps even more terrifying is the biological aberration

that can turn the deceased into the walking dead.

SHATNER: In this small village,

Angelina Narcisse was going about her day

when she was approached by a man

claiming to be her brother, Clairvius.

It may sound like a heartwarming tale of reunion,

but there was just one problem.

Clairvius Narcisse had been dead and buried

for nearly 20 years.

DONNELLY: Clairvius was a Haitian man born in 1922.

In the year 1962,

he went to, uh, a hospital.

His symptoms had been a severe fever,

fatigue, and he'd been coughing up blood.

His heart stopped, and he stopped breathing,

and was declared dead and buried.

20 years later, a man claiming to be Clairvius

showed up at his village and approached his family.

In many respects, his story did check out.

He beared a physical resemblance to the deceased.

He went by a nickname that was only known to him

and his sister when they were very little kids.

And so, he was able to relate certain details

of his former life that seemed to add up.

SHATNER: But if Clairvius Narcisse died and was buried,

then how on Earth was he alive and able to track down

his sister almost 20 years later?

Well, according to Clairvius,

the reason he was not lying dead in his grave

was that a voodoo priest had transformed him

into a zombie.

In Haiti, a zombie is an individual

who's had their soul stolen by sorcery,

causing them to be sort of flung into a perpetual, uh,

place of purgatory through this incredible transition

of death, rebirth, and return to the living,

induced by the folk poison known as a pudzombie.

It was a plethora of ingredients,

including various plants

and the toxin from a fish.

It selectively blocks sodium channels and nerves,

bringing on paralysis until the moment of death.

And yet, critically, if you get through that,

you have nothing to worry about.

This fascinating poison

had made people appear to be dead.

In Haitian folklore specifically,

the zombie is-is not a villain, but a victim.

In these cases, people are turned into zombies

and forced to work on sugarcane plantations in Haiti

and elsewhere in the Caribbean, but primarily Haiti.

And this has been a legend going back

many, many, many years, centuries, in some cases.

Certainly since the slave trade.

And it was all considered to be just sort of a legend

until 1980, when Clairvius Narcisse emerged.

He told the story, it made huge news, as you can imagine,

because this is a first-person account

of somebody who's a former zombie, right?

So, this is wild. This is crazy.

According to Clairvius, um,

he had been paralyzed by a voodoo priest.

This was a result of being drugged, um,

and this paste mixture that he was forced to consume

kept him in this deathlike toper.

Narcisse was buried,

and the priest then dug him up from his grave

and enslaved him on a sugarcane plantation for 20 years.

DAVIS: From the Haitian point of view, the fate of a zombie

is said to be to become an indentured servant.

And losing your soul, losing your identity,

your personal autonomy,

combined to make this a fate worse than death.

SHATNER: The story of Clairvius Narcisse being buried and then revived

as an undead zombie made headlines around the world.

Numerous experts investigated the case in hopes

of shedding light on what exactly took place.

The first question on everyone's mind was whether

Clairvius had only appeared to be dead because he was drugged

or if there was some truth to the idea

that he actually died

and was then revived by the power of voodoo.

What made the case of Narcisse unique was one single thing.

He had been pronounced dead

in an American-directed philanthropic institution,

the Schweitzer Hospital.

And his family members had witnessed the death

and authenticated it at the time.

So, all these lines of evidence

led scientists to go public in the 1980s

saying they felt they had found the first

medically verifiable instance of zombification.

DONNELLY: The doctors who had initially declared Narcisse dead

were no longer at the hospital 20 years later when he returned.

However, many doctors looked into, um, his case,

and did tests and proved that it was, in fact, him.

Why the premature diagnosis

and why he was buried prematurely is unknown,

and where he was for 20 years is unknown,

but there are photos of him sitting on his own gravestone.

SHATNER: There are many theories as to what caused Clairvius Narcisse

to be declared dead and then seemingly brought back to life.

Ultimately, what happened to him remains a mystery,

but many Haitians are convinced

that Clairvius did, in fact,

rise from the grave.

And for some, his story is a reminder

that the distinction between the living and the dead

may not be as clear-cut as we commonly think.

DONNELLY: When we imagine zombies in the 21st century,

we tend to imagine the dead rising

from the grave to prey upon the living.

That is not the case in Haitian voodoo practices.

Zombification in voodoo

was not something that was done to the dead.

It was something that was done to the living.

It was turning the living into

a fugue-like state, a deathlike state,

um, but they were not reanimated corpses.

DAVIS: Narcisse never doubted that he'd become a zombie.

In Haiti, a zombie is a complete pariah,

who walks the edge between life and death and will do so

for the rest of their existence.

And so, this idea that a person could be

brought back to life fills all of us with mystery

and trepidation and dread.

SHATNER: The prospect that any of us could become a reanimated

husk of our former selves is a haunting image.

But just how one joins the ranks

of the walking dead is debatable.

Is it a biological response?

A psychological phenomenon?

Or could there really be something to the power

of a deadly curse?

SHATNER: Just outside the city, on a normal suburban street

in an ordinary neighborhood

is the home of Greg and Dana Newkirk.

From the outside, their home is not much different

from any other house on the block.

-Get some fork action going on. -Yeah.

SHATNER: But inside, it contains something quite extraordinary.

Because there is a room in the basement that is filled

with a collection of strange objects,

sent by people from all over the world,

that are believed to be cursed.

Greg and I lead normal lives, and we go about our life

the same way that everyone else does.

We just happen to be caretakers for very strange objects.

The way that we got started collecting cursed objects

was complete accident.

It wasn't something that we had set out to do.

Never would have imagined myself doing this.

We were just interested in-in general weirdness.

My wife and I investigate all manner of high strangeness,

and we were both very interested in the idea of cursed objects.

We slowly gained a reputation as being

particularly good people for this.

And so, anytime anyone had a problem with an artifact,

they would come to us and say,

"I don't know what to do with this.

"This thing is affecting my life.

"Will you just take it off my hands?

"It'd be easier to just give it to you

and let you deal with it."

So, we built up this collection

of very bizarre things.

SHATNER: Visitors to the Newkirk's home are given ample warning

that the basement is filled with objects that are cursed.

We have a lot of haunted robes.

SHATNER: But curiously, every day, the Newkirks receive requests

from people who are eager to view their cursed collection.

JASON W. OCKER: You'd think with cursed objects,

you want to avoid them, but there is a draw to them.

When an object is said to be cursed,

another word you could use is "special." It's special.

If this chair is cursed,

it's different from every other chair in the world.

And that makes it unique. That makes it interesting.

And that draws our attention every single time.

And the fact that that specialness

is that it hurts people--

that appeals to a certain macabre streak

that we all have as human beings.

DANA: People think of cursed objects as being kind of fun and spooky.

But working with them, it feels a lot less

about that and a lot more about that kind of heavy

responsibility to keep some of these objects with us

under lock and key and maybe out of the wrong hands.

And maybe in a place that's safer, not only

for everyone else, but for them.

SHATNER: The Newkirk's collection includes several objects

that are considered to have the power to inflict harm

on anyone who comes near them.

This is the cursed deer skull.

We drove down to Nashville to pick up

from a woman who saw this in an antique store and

took it back to her office and almost immediately,

her employees started getting sick.

One of her employees was hit by a car.

And then the wall that this was hanging on

actually fell down and took half of the building with it.

DANA: There are certain objects specifically in our museum that,

without people knowing why they feel

the way that they feel,

they will definitely have heart palpitations, anxiety.

We've had people almost faint. We've had people throw up.

We've had people dry heave.

People have very visceral, physical reactions

to being around some of the objects.

SHATNER: Among the cursed objects in the Newkirks' collection

is a deadly ring that is claimed to kill anyone who wears it,

a Bible used during a failed exorcism,

and a doll that is believed to spread illness wherever it goes.

But of all the cursed objects the Newkirks have come across,

there is one that is so harrowing

they refused to keep it in their collection.

It is an unsettling wooden effigy known as the Crone.

DANA: The Crone really is the definition of

kind of a cursed object.

It is a carved statue of a woman.

Someone at some point in time

took this object and attached the noose and the nails.

It was given to us by some hikers who found it

in the Catskills off the beaten path in a cave.

They took it home and initially started

to experience really frightening things.

Their animals were behaving strangely,

they were finding wet footprints on the ground,

and they didn't know what to do.

Someone who we had worked with previously

put them in contact with us,

and after, you know, having some communication

with them, they-they sent the Crone to us.

GREG: People who would get near the Crone,

they would be just overwhelmed with anxiety.

This guy came all the way from Canada

to come and see the Crone.

He begged us to take it out of the box.

Almost immediately,

his eyes roll up in the back of his head,

and he starts to bleed from his mouth,

and he has a violent seizure

and he has to be taken out by the paramedics.

And that's when Dana and I looked at each other,

and we said, "We have to do something about this."

SHATNER: The Catskill Mountains.

October 2018.

After a string of frightening incidents,

Greg and Dana Newkirk are convinced

that a strange object in their possession,

known as the Crone, is cursed.

So they've traveled to this remote region

of Upstate New York to free themselves of the evil object.

The Crone is one of the objects that

does fall into that very small category of objects

that we didn't feel like we could handle.

It got to a point where the Crone was just

too dangerous for even us to take care of.

And what we wanted to do was

bring her back to the Catskills, which is where she's from.

SHATNER: To remove the Crone's curse, the Newkirks' plan

was to return to the area where it was originally found

by two hikers many years before.

At which point, they would remove the nails

embedded in the Crone in a cleansing ritual.

DANA: We wanted to bring her back,

and every time a nail was pulled out,

the intention was that we were pulling

that curse out of the object.

We hiked into the woods for miles,

and I set up a circle.

The idea of setting up a circle was basically just to create

an energetic space for containing this ritual.

And the whole time we were doing this,

we were hearing footsteps...

...and strange sounds that weren't animals

around our circle,

but we couldn't see anything.

GREG: We were absolutely terrified,

but we start performing the ritual.

I pull the nails out.

As soon as that happens,

we feel this almost electric pop in the air.

When we were done, every coyote

on the mountain just started howling.

And the ritual was finished,

and what we were looking at was just a block of wood.

And we just kind of knew that we had done

what we went there to do.

Scholars of religion have long known the power of ritual,

that when a group of people get together

and engage in the same set of actions,

believing that there's a supernatural origin behind them,

that brings people together.

And so, special movements that you need to go through,

special sayings or songs that you need to do,

it's incredibly powerful phenomena

that can help rid us of the devil

or whatever other force has cursed us.

SHATNER: Is it possible that ritually cleansing

the Crone removed its curse?

Perhaps.

But of course, it all depends on whether

you believe curses are real in the first place.

Whether you believe in cursed objects

or don't believe in cursed objects,

they can still have a power over you.

What that power is,

to what extent that is, how it's kind of comes out,

who knows.

But they're still powerful objects,

no matter how you look at it.

GREG: For people who don't believe in curses,

what I would say is keep believing they're not real.

That's the best defense you have against a curse,

is to not feed it.

So, what do you think?

Is there good reason we should take heed of our primal fears

and follow intuition when our heart starts to race

and we tremble and thoughts turn to dread

and impending danger?

There are good reasons for our body and mind

to protect us from obvious risks,

but exactly why we've become frightened of dark entities,

unseen evil, and unholy objects

may be better left unexplained.

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