Advisory. This episode contains one story that engages with morphine addiction and thoughts of suicide.

Listener discretion is advised.

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It's a late, dark night, likely in the early 20th century. A wide window of time,

true, but the man now transfixed by paralyzing terror will never bother to record the exact date

of this horde nocturnal fright. Yet still, we can speculate on its approximate date intelligently.

It might be 1904. 14 years old at the time, this is a year when the sufferer, whose tail we are on

the cusp of broaching, is filled with loneliness, sorrow, and pain. He grieves the loss of a father.

Not his biological father, so long ago committed to a Providence Rhode Island mental asylum,

and long since dead. But it's true, father figure and hero, his maternal grandfather,

Wippel van Vieren Phillips. He too is now cold and in the ground. The boys are wreck,

and his and his mother's descent into a life of poverty is beginning as they're forced to abandon

the family estate for far humbler dwelling down the street. It's altogether fitting then if this

is indeed the year of the particular horrid manifestation that will so deeply and cruelly take

hold of his mind. But perhaps it's 1908. This is the year the still teenage wretch

endured such mental anguish, such episodes of panic, dread, and fright, a nervous breakdown

will forever destroy his aspirations to attend Brown University as he fails to complete his fourth

and final year of high school. Yes, this year so full of cerebral pains and untold fears,

a veritable anus horribilis. It has all the ghastly markings of mental anguish that our tragic

...