Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. It's 1981 and in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, a phenomenon has begun. Dozens of gamers are in line waiting to play the newest arcade sensation, Polybius, a game so exciting that people have come to physical blows just to be next in line to play. Perhaps addictive is a better word, as some players begin to suffer from a series of strange side effects such as seizures, amnesia, insomnia, night terrors, and hallucinations. The machines are rumored to be a government experiment to test the game's psychoactive properties and official-looking men in black have even been seen tending to the machines, extracting data from the consoles. Then, suddenly, after only a month, Polybius disappears without a trace, with no explanation as to why. The story is so strange that it has been deemed an urban legend, but could there be some truth behind the Polybius happening? I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here, you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved, and unexplained. Coming up in this episode, it's rumored that an arcade game from 1980 might lead to the real death of its players. We'll look at the death curse of Berserk. But first, another arcade game in the early 80s was surrounded by controversy because the game never existed, despite so many saying that it did. Or did it exist? We'll look at the urban legend of Polybius. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, to connect with me on social media, and more.  In 1981, an arcade in the Portland, Oregon area was the scene of countless gamers coming down with migraines, heart attacks, addiction, seizures, strokes, and even amnesia, all due to one game cabinet, Polybius. The game itself was said to have been created by an unknown government agency to test mind-control technology on unsuspecting civilians. And it worked, almost too well. Or so the legend goes. It's almost quaint to discuss Polybius now. In the age of hyper-targeted Facebook propaganda, military recruiting via Twitch, and the looming specter of deep fakes, the idea that the public would be so terrified of an arcade game is kind of adorable. It goes without saying that urban legends like this were the product of a more naive time. A time before such tales would become weaponized and mutate into the far more dangerous genre of conspiracy theories. The name Polybius itself was likely selected specifically as bait for the inquisitive and easily spooked. The original Polybius was an ancient Greek philosopher born around 208 BC in Megalopolis, Arcadia. He is known for his affinity for cryptography and puzzles. He created the Polybius Square naturally, as well as his belief that historians should strictly report what they can verify through hard evidence and by interviewing witnesses. His name itself means many lives in Greek. Get it? Many lives? Arcadia? Cryptic puzzles? His famous skepticism? It's almost too good a name for a spooky video game. The urban legend of Polybius gained popularity on February 6, 2000 when a listing for the game popped up on coinop.org, a digital museum and database for arcade gaming. The page for Polybius listed the game as having been copyrighted in 1981, though no such copyright exists and only briefly mentions bizarre rumors about the title before classifying its history as unknown. Though impossible to confirm without a confession from the man himself, the person believed to have created the post is Kurt Kohler, the owner of the site. Kohler would also tip off writer Dan Electro of GamePro, which at the time claimed to be the world's largest independent multi-platform gaming magazine to the existence of the story. Eventually, in a 2003 listicle called Secrets and Lies, GamePro came to an inconclusive verdict regarding the veracity of the tip. The story went on to hit slash dot, the closest thing to going viral in the early 2000s, on August 21, 2003. But as we in the age of fake news know, the point of getting the story out there was not to have it debunked, it was to lodge it in the popular imagination of American gamers. At this, Kohler was wildly successful. Polybius has gone on to be the subject of television shows, music videos, documentaries, extensive investigations, even an episode of The Simpsons, and has even become a real purchasable game more than once. Coinop.org has had a similarly long life, it still exists on the internet today, with Polybius remaining its most popular entry. On the page for Polybius are infamous comments left by a user claiming to be a man named Stephen Roach. Roach details his involvement in the game's supposed development. Merrick Vouchasek was the programmer who came up with the name Polybius. He had studied Greek mythology at Masarek University and came up with the name because it sounded quite bold and mysterious, which is what we wanted quite simply. The inspired graphics combined with the puzzle elements and scintillating gameplay was something to behold. We play-tested it for hours and hours and it certainly was an addictive game that was well loved professionally and recreationally by all that played it. We then received a phone call stating that there were concerns within the company that the basic graphics which featured prominently in so many other games at the time were fine for the average gamer to spend hours at a time without any noticeable physical or mental detriments, but the intense and engrossing gameplay of this new step was very much an unknown quantity, so the game was put back several months due to divided opinion within their board of directors, much to our consternation for breaking our backs to finish it on time. We disbanded shortly afterwards because we didn't want to restrict ourselves to the stringent deadlines of other companies and favored distancing ourselves from the game in case of any lingering recriminations which could have done a great deal of damage to our personal and professional reputations which was our livelihood and with some of us having very young families, this was extremely important to us. As far as I'm aware, no ROMs or otherwise exist unless they remain in the bowels of the company that distributed it. We only received a basic payment in view of the fact that the game was withdrawn without nationwide or international distribution, so we grew to loathe it and was often a cursed word whenever we used to meet up and still is today, which is a shame. In his documentary investigating the game called Polybius, the video game that doesn't exist, Stuart Brown of Ahoy claims to have actually tracked down the user who claimed to be Stephen Roche and states unequivocally that his addition to the story is entirely fabricated. In addition to the would-be hoaxers, there are feature films about arcade machines with supernatural powers which would popularize the concept. 1984's The Last Starfighter is about a boy so good at video games that aliens recruit him to wage an actual intergalactic war.  The popularity of Polybius' story is such that it transcends other video game tall tales. It's easily more popular than Minecraft's Herobrine, GTA, San Andreas Sasquatch or that time that people thought Saddam Hussein was trying to conquer the world with a PS2. As mainstream urban legends go, Polybius is probably only slightly less successful than Slenderman or The Hook. But is any of it true? Actually, yes. 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That's WeirdDarkness.com slash CBD. To understand the truth behind the legend of the Polybius arcade game, one must fall down an internet rabbit hole that spans both time and cyberspace. Online listings for Polybius all contain the same blurry photo of the game's cabinet and marquee. There's no way to tell if this physical cabinet ever existed or if it's an early Photoshop job thanks to its dubious quality. Listings also host the only known screenshot of the game, and the screenshot displays the game's title screen, the aforementioned copyright date, and credits its development to a company called Cineslotion, a word which roughly translates to something along the lines of sense-deleting or sensory deprivation in broken German. There is no evidence of any such company having ever existed in Germany, the United States, or arcade gaming's capital, Japan. So that's a dead end. The font used for the name Polybius itself is actually quite notable for being so large and colorful during an era when the memory required to produce such an effect was a serious premium. Only games from powerhouses like Nintendo or Williams were known to spend such high-priced resources on something as fleeting as a title screen. In fact, the lettering is reminiscent of the one used for Nintendo's versus Pinball, and one used for Williams' bubbles, though not an exact match for either. It even resembles an East German cabinet called Poly Play from the era, though it's unlikely anything this obscure inspired the American legend. Again, there's not much to go on here. Some sources have claimed that the story of Polybius was making the rounds on Usenet as early as 1994, though there is yet again no record of this in any existing Usenet archives. This may be a case of the Mandela effect, where groups of people misremember the same events, as there was indeed a Pink Floyd-themed puzzle, or a hoax of a puzzle, going around Usenet in the early 90s called Humblius enigma, which became so popular that its name was inexplicably displayed during one of the band's concerts. The puzzle itself is near incomprehensible and has never been solved. Still, other dubious sources have claimed that the gameplay of Polybius was similar to the vector stylings of Rez, Tempest, or Kix. Tempest was extremely popular at the time and known for its mesmerizing graphics, so it's not a stretch to think that it may have stuck in the memories of gamers from that era. Cube Quest, similarly, was a visually stunning title that was only in active use for a very short period of time, owing to its reliance on sensitive, laser-disk technology. A local arcade can only afford so many high-priced repairs. There's also all the people that got sick while playing games like Tempest at the time, just like Polybius. As was the case with Michael Lopez of Beaverton, Oregon, who suffered a sudden migraine while playing Tempest with some friends at the Malibu Grand Pre-Arcade, I began to feel a weird sensation in the back of my head. Then my vision started going out, little flashing lights, recalls Lopez.  One of my friends walked with me back home, but we didn't make it all the way there. My head hurt so bad, it got to where I couldn't speak. I couldn't walk anymore. I collapsed on someone's lawn, four blocks from my house, rolling and screaming in pain. It felt like my head was cracking open. Someone called the cops. That was the first migraine headache I ever had. I've had them off and on my whole life since, but it was freaky because I didn't know what was happening at the time. Blame was put on the game's flashing lights and intense visual effects, and the incident was documented by local paper. As was the case of Jeff Daly, a gamer who suffered a heart attack and died after getting his name on the high score list of the game Berserk, which we will talk about later. In that case, Blame was also put on the stress inducing arcade cabinet. Similarly, Peter Bukowski also died of heart failure, possibly due to a myocardial inflammation while playing Berserk.  Morrow survived, but it's easy to see how the reporting of such events in the Northwestern United States could lead to paranoia about the long-term effects of this new entertainment medium. It's hard to imagine now, but at the time, gaming was such a new phenomenon that it was labeled a fad and classified as part of the toy industry. Parents were suspicious of the machines that were seemingly out of nowhere mesmerizing a generation of American children. Who could blame them? Game developers have spent decades trying to ring the money out of their audience by making their games attention-grabbing, sensorily immersive and increasingly addictive. If anything, parents today should be more skeptical about the immersive, addictive, gambling-adjacent games that are freely available on every conceivable screen in our homes. But today, as was the case in the 80s, people tend to be more suspicious of their own shadowy government than they are of corporations whose motives are transparent. They want to take your money. It doesn't help matters that the FBI indeed was conducting top-secret operations out of America's arcades. The Bureau's records indicate that the agency actually was monitoring and subsequently raiding arcades in the Portland area right around the time that stories of players collapsing in arcades had hit the mainstream media. In those days, arcades which are naturally dark and maze-like had seedy reputations as hot beds of gambling, drug activity and pickpockets looking to prey on teenagers. Though the extent to which these arcades captured the public imagination was out of proportion with the actual issues and the establishments, some of that reputation was earned. Cabinets were being repurposed for gambling. People were selling weed in between rounds of Pac-Man. There are pickpockets wherever teenagers tend to gather, especially in the days before cell phones. One more fanciful operation conducted by the FBI included agents rigging classic cabinets like Tempest, Scramble and Galaxian with cameras and microphones in the hopes of catching criminals in the act. Games like Tempest were selected less for their mind control abilities and more because their cabinets featured glass bezels, ideal for sticking cameras behind. The program was so extensive it briefly caused a shortage of Tempest machines in the Seattle area during the early 80s. Just imagine, teenagers watching men in black wheeling Tempest machines in and out of arcades every few days. It only makes sense that they would start ascribing outlandish motives to the agents. These stories of mind control and government experiments are also, unfortunately, completely based in reality. Many people have heard of it by now but at the time there were only whispers about a CIA program known as MKUltra which was pursuing mind control techniques using technology, multimedia and a whole lot of drugs. The experiments were conducted without the permission of their subjects who have described the experience as extreme psychological torture. With that in mind, a mesmerizing video game doesn't seem so fantastical. These disturbing stories are all verified, but none of them contain the actual game, Polybius. To actually play Polybius, you'll have to settle for one of the many fan games developed in Tribute to the Legend. There is the supposed copy distributed by GoodDealGames.com around April 2004 called Polybius.exe. The game claims to contain its own emulation software and warns players the Polybius video game has been linked to impaired memory and psychological changes. Gameplay may cause epileptic seizures and susceptible individuals. Do you still want to continue? It says that before booting into the familiar title screen. Once one presses any key, the game crashes and another pop-up message explains that it was simply an April Fool's Day joke. Freeware developers Rogue Synapse, known for creating fan-made cabinets of arcade games which never existed like the one from The Last Starfighter, developed and distributed a game named Polybius in 2007. This version attempts to faithfully recreate the gameplay as described in the Urban Legend, including trippy visuals and subliminal messages. In an effort to further the immersive prank, the company's owner, Dr. Estel Vance, registered the URL Synaslotion.com and trademarked the usage of the name Polybius, though noted that it was not an authentic original and was simply an attempt to recreate the Polybius game as it might have existed in 1981. The most famous and easily obtained version of Polybius is from developer Llamasoft, who released its game for the PlayStation 4 and PSVR in 2016. Though the game contains vector-like graphics, it's very obviously a modern creation intended to actually be played as a standalone title. It was in fact so popular that it was used for the music video less than by 9-inch nails in 2017. None of those games are the true Polybius, which, if it ever existed at all, only survives via word-of-mouth and online articles. Polybius was almost certainly invented by Kurt Kohler to promote his website, which obviously succeeded beyond any reasonable explanation. But in the light of free-to-play mobile games with addicting visuals and mechanics, corporations and the government's hyper-targeting ads on Facebook, effectively mind control, and the alphabet soup of federal agencies torturing children, the themes of the legend are more relevant than ever before. In a way, the story of Polybius is entirely true. People were dying while playing addictive video games. Men in black were using arcade machines in secret operations. The government was and probably still is pursuing mind control. The Portland area witnessed all of these things. It just wasn't called Polybius. Up next on Weird Darkness, Polybius wasn't the only arcade game in the early 1980s rumored to cause the death of its players. Another is called Berserk, and it might be even more sinister than Polybius, because this game really did exist. I'd like you to meet the newest member of our Weirdo family. Meet Psyjac, a female arctic wolf. While visiting the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Kingsburg, Colorado, Robin and I fell in love with the place and their mission to save the lives of animals from abuse and neglect. I immediately felt drawn to Psyjac upon seeing her and decided to adopt her in the name of Weird Darkness. Psyjac was born in a safari park that couldn't care for her, but the Wild Animal Sanctuary steps in to save Psyjac and other wild animals from private owners and less than ideal living conditions. Psyjac now has a lifelong home in a large acreage, natural habitat near other wolves. Wild Animal Sanctuary has saved numerous other wild animals from abuse and neglect, lions, grizzlies, tigers, panthers and more. Visit WildAnimalSanctuary.org to learn more, donate to the sanctuary, and maybe adopt an animal of your own, like we have with Psyjac. When it comes to urban legends, foreshadowing is everything. To those who know the background of the berserk death urban legend, it is deeply curious that a certain coincidence happened to be overlooked by the majority of journalists writing on the subject over the decades. One wonders how something so eerily profound could have ever been missed. In Kalamut City, Illinois, if you drive north from I-94 near Highway 83 and Pulaski Road, you'll see two Smiley Face water towers rise in the distance. Dubbed Mr. and Mrs. Smiley Face in 1973, the two well-known landmarks bear striking resemblance to the arch nemesis Evil Otto from the Stern Electronics arcade game Berserk from 1980, the arcade game whose gameplay has long been rumored to yield deadly consequences. From any direction, the smiling happy face towers can be seen rising against the sky. To some, a cheerful welcome, yet to others, mostly arcade historians, they are an intimidating, if not ominously creepy sight. How did no one ever catch that before? The game berserk as the urban legend attests can kill you, just like its partner in crime who was born in the same year, Polybius. For his legend has it, in 1982, a young man walked into Fryer Tuck's game room in Kalamut City, Illinois, put a quarter in a berserk machine, had the game of his life, and then dropped dead. Evil Otto, as the legend goes, possessed the supernatural ability to influence life, threatening physiological conditions, and cause instant death to any player, intruder who failed to heed its alert. Okay, I'll buy it for a moment, but the legend is far from complete and even farther from being accurate. There's more, so much more. On Saturday, April 3rd, 1982, 18-year-old Peter Bukowski, often reported incorrectly as Burkowski of South Holland, Illinois, walked to a severely cold morning blanketed in a thick layer of snow. The iron-gray sky churned with a weather system that prompted forecasters to issue a public announcement warning of an imminent blizzard. The winner of 1981 had been a hard year for Illinois residents who had battled 11 Lake Effect blizzards since January. Peter Bukowski, a seemingly healthy young man and no doubt one who had interests in common with others his age, must have felt a bit bored by the seemingly endless sieges of winter. Like all teens at the height of the video craze, video games were definitely something that was on his mind continuously, just as much as girls.  I wonder if he had any idea in his mind that something was a miss inside him. I wonder if he sensed today could be different than any other day he'd lived on earth. Did he feel tired upon waking, sick, or have chest pain? Apparently not, for he hung around his room playing video games that morning, entertained a girl at her home later on in the day, then went to the arcade with a friend after first going home for a warmer jacket. According to census records, the Bukowski home was located on Price Avenue, in a tree-lined, respectable neighborhood of single-level homes, a mere two miles from Friar Tuck's game room once located at 674 River Oaks Drive, Calamity City, Illinois. Judging by events recorded by witnesses, this places him arriving at the arcade roughly around 8pm. From what reports remain, it appears he walked first to his girlfriend's house, then back home, then to another friend's house, then to the arcade, an estimated total distance of 4 miles. Trudging through snow often makes the journey far more strenuous, with many heart attacks reported annually from the act of merely shoveling snow. But Bukowski was young, strong, and not a middle-aged man with a history of angina. Legend has long supported the belief that Bukowski was obese when in fact, he was actually 5'10", and as the coroner observed, weighed 172 pounds, with no prior medical conditions. Bukowski at the age of 18 looked physically sound. Berserk had been on his mind from the moment he first saw the arcade game. As Tom Blankley, community leader and former owner of Friar Tuck's game room remembers, Bukowski was on that game every chance he could get, sometimes with a friend, but a lot of time alone. He loved it. He was a real nice kid, quiet and kind of shy, no problems. For anyone who remembers the old Friar Tuck game room, it was a place of memorable good times. Feamed like a medieval inn, with wrought iron lamps hanging from the ceiling, and candlelight bulbs, stained glass windows and huge wooden doors as an entrance, it appeared as if Robin Hood and his merry men might be found enjoying a game of joust inside. It was not, as some have reported over the years, one of those arcades, where bad kids assembled, smoking dope and causing trouble. It operated as a family-style gaming parlor, offering complimentary coffee and donuts to parents accompanying children, as well as fundraised many great community causes. It was not the kind of place one would expect a teenage boy to die. It was too clean, too innocent, too family-oriented. What happened on that snowy Saturday night in 1982 is sketchy at best. Contaminated by decades of added hearsay, newspaper reporting errors and convenient rewriting of facts that gave rise to an urban legend that persists to this day. But some clear facts do remain. Prior to Pekowski arriving at Friar Tuck's game room, he had complained to his friend, Burton Ben Everett, that he was feeling short of breath and thirsty. Stopping at a convenience store, Pekowski purchased a soda, drank it down quickly, and the two continued on to the arcade. Upon arriving at the arcade, it became obvious to others in attendance that Pekowski was not well. Everett alleges Pekowski was laboring for breath, but he wanted to stay and play Berserk anyway. Thinking he was just too hot from their long walk in the cold and the snow, Pekowski removed his coat and began to play Berserk. In less than 15-20 minutes, he had played two games, both high scores, and put his initials in twice. On the last game though, after putting in his initials, he stepped away from the game, took a few steps, and collapsed. An arcade attendant rushed to his side, and, noticing Pekowski was unresponsive, began CPR while an ambulance was called. Pekowski was rushed to an Indiana hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. It was so awful. Just such a tragedy, Blankley remembers. My staff did what they could until the ambulance arrived. The attendant never left him and never stopped trying to revive him, but for some reason he couldn't be brought back. That's something I have never forgotten. Rumors spread immediately of Pekowski's sudden death by Berserk, making its way to schools and various arcades, prompting some operators, according to Blankley, to pull the game from the floor. Meanwhile, Pekowski's family ordered an autopsy, and what the coroner found was more surprising than what anyone could have ever expected. Unbeknownst to Pekowski's parents, their son's heart was riddled with scar tissue from an undiagnosed congenital condition. Pediatric cardiomyopathy, PC, has long been attributed to sudden heart failure in children and teens if left undiagnosed. Often having no symptoms, the child will often enter their teen years until a physically demanding exercise like football or basketball triggers a cardiac incident, often resulting in sudden death. Historically, thousands of children have dropped on basketball courts and football fields across the world, momentarily baffling those around them as to what happened. There are several types of PC, and each form affects the heart muscle in a different way, but the rarest form is arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, ARVC. As misfortune would have it, this is what Peter Bekowski had. ARVC is caused by the death of healthy heart muscle and its replacement with scar tissue and fat. This results in a disorganized structure of heart muscle tissues, causing abnormal electrical activities, arrhythmia, and problems with the heart's contraction. Basically, Peter Bekowski's heart was a ticking time bomb and his physical exertion from walking miles in the snow coupled with the caffeine in the soda that he drank and his excitement at playing berserk had been too much for his already damaged heart. In fact, the autopsy indicated that he had had a mild heart attack three weeks before he died. It's a good guess to surmise that today's reports in the Urban Legend, claiming Bekowski was obese, came from the fact that it was reported in autopsy reports that his heart was encased in a layer of fat, which it was, but this was not from being overweight. It was a result of ARVC. Bekowski did not die from berserk. The game did not kill him. Evil Otto has no malevolent powers outside of his 8-bit badness. Bekowski had just the misfortune of having a bad heart. But legends ache to be born, writhe beneath the surface of wonder and bloom in the minds of creative storytellers like little rogue children clamoring for the freedom of the streets.  Jeff Daley and the rumor of his 6-6-6-6 death after playing berserk rose six months later, gotta love it, as a copycat story of the Bekowski incident after video game magazine made mention of the death of Bekowski after playing berserk. Post publication, the new legend was repeated in a small independent gaming magazine called Video Ace, which released two issues in 1981 before going defunct. According to this publication, 19-year-old Jeffrey Daley of Virginia, prior to Bekowski's death, had suffered a massive heart attack on January 12, 1981 after playing berserk for hours and died at the scene. His ending score was allegedly 16,660, mysteriously containing the number of the beast 6-6-6, the biblical sign of the devil. But what is problematic, if not thoroughly cancels out any previous reports as evidence, is Jeffrey Daley, aged 18, interned at Holly Lawn Cemetery in Suffolk City, Virginia and he didn't die playing berserk in January of 1981. He died in a car crash on May 29, 1981 and had been nowhere near an arcade or a berserk machine. Also, his score of 16,660 is not considered even by 80s standards to be that impressive of a score, let alone one that would take hours to accumulate. A good player can rack 16,000 up in under 20 minutes, 25 at the longest. Whoever wrote the initial story on Jeff Daley was clearly not familiar with the game berserk. There's no way possible to play hours on a game of berserk on one quarter and only get 16,000, observers berserk champion Grant Thyneman. If Evil Auto wasn't a part of the game, I would then agree. In the 80s video craze era, people, and especially Hollywood, were eager to entertain the idea that video games had ethereal supernatural powers, or were at least compelled to perpetuate those fallacies for profit. Technology was evolving at such an accelerated rate that with its propulsion came a certain level of public paranoia concerning if whether the future might see an Orwellian rise of machines take over mankind. You see this paranoid mindset over and over again in creative themes from the 80s, in movies and stories, like the short from Nightmares in 1983, The Bishop of Battle, or the movie The Last Starfighter, where the protagonist finds himself chosen as a savior by an alien race from another world because he can beat a certain video game. In Bishop of Battle, the protagonist finds himself being controlled by the game that he seeks to beat. Tron exemplifies this paranoid concept completely as well, where the player becomes part of a game in a world where a program rules them all. The urban legend of Polybius grew from such paranoid if creative ideologies as well. Video game technologies, and just plain video games in the 80s, were something most members of the average public did not understand, with even more confusion surrounding how they affected people long-term, especially children.  Even now, decades later, we're still trying to figure that one out. However, there is something to the Berserk legends, something I found completely by accident. Perhaps not a supernatural manifestation, like a skull-faced ghost demon in the night, but there is some curious fog on the road of its history. For no other game in the history of the arcade catalog has as many myths surrounding it with actual facts as Berserk does, including Polybius. And even more curious is that one of the most unknown events never written about is actually true. I'll give you the details of this true little-known story of Berserk when Weird Darkness returns. If you or someone you know struggles with depression, or dark thoughts, I'd like to recommend the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. There, I've gathered resources to help fight depression with the Seven Cups app, connecting you with people who have also struggled with depression and are there to lift you up, even professional listeners there to listen at all hours of the day. If you're having dark thoughts of harming yourself or worse, there's the suicide prevention lifeline that you can either call or chat online with anytime 24-7. The folks at ifred.org are doing what they can with research and education on depression to give us the tools we need to fight against it in the days ahead. These resources are absolutely free and there when you need them on the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. Out of all of the Berserk legends, there is one in which few know anything about. Until now, it has never been written about and only discussed in private conversations. The reason being is the memory of it is too painful for those who are there. Another reason is the witnesses save too have been lost for over 30 years after the crash turned arcades into veritable ghost towns and people went their separate ways. The other reason is true tragic tales are often fogged in by an intentional act of mercy. On an unusually warm Monday night, on March 20, 1988, Edward Clark Jr., 17, of Lansing, Illinois, found himself at Friar Tuck's game room in Calamity City, the very same arcade that Bakowski had died at in 1982. Prior to arriving, he had been hanging out for a while at the River Oaks Mall across from Friar Tuck's game room. The young man was no stranger to mischief, having been already in trouble half a dozen times by the time he was 15. Nothing serious, other than he had a problem with authority and an attitude to match. Having been selected to enlist in the Army Reserve's Green Beret just days prior, his mother was confident her son was moving in the right direction with his life. Upon entering the arcade with his friends, Clark headed first for the battle zone, had a few games, and then stepped to the berserk machine, the same one Bakowski had played. Seeing the game had a couple of quarters up on the glass, but no one was around, Clark took a quarter, put it in the game, and began to play. Someone immediately stepped from around a row of games claiming ownership of the quarter, which was a lie, and wanting his money back. His name was Pedro Roberts, and he was not someone you wanted to mess with for any reason at any time. At the age of 16, Pedro Roberts was already showing distressing signs of a young man heading for early incarceration. He was street smart, tough, and emotionally void of empathy when angered or engaged in conflict. Clark refused to give him his quarterback or get off the game. Some threats were thrown around, with Roberts demanding that Clark get off or else. Clark ignored him and kept playing the game. Roberts then began a fight with one of Clark's friends, pushing him in the chest. Some witnesses reported that he pulled a knife and threatened Clark and his friends with it. However, court records claim the report of a knife inside the arcade was ruled out due to inconclusive evidence on grounds of hearsay. I'm not sure what happened between them prior, if there had been some bad blood for a while or what? Tom Blankley, former owner of Friar Tux Recalls. I remember someone saying Clark had stolen Robert's girlfriend or something. I don't know if that's true, but whatever it was, it got out of hand pretty quickly and they beat each other up pretty good before we, the arcade security, kicked them all out. According to fragmented and conflicting incident reports, including testimony both from Blankley and a reported eyewitness, the two young men got into an argument, that a fistfight over who had the right to play the game berserk or maybe just a swearing match. No one knows for sure. Court records report that Clark stepped in to defend his friend being beat by Roberts. An arcade attendant on hand separated the two and, fearing it would escalate further if he kicked them both out at the same time, kept Clark inside as he sent Roberts off into the night. The attendant waited 10 minutes before he allowed Clark to leave, telling him to walk the opposite way. Edward Clark foolishly did not heed the attendant's advice. According to Blankley, Clark walked with his friends in the same direction where Roberts and his friends had gone and hiding in an alleyway, Roberts jumped out, ran across a small parking lot and attacked Clark, stabbing him with a knife in the chest. Not thinking he was seriously injured, Clark refused to allow his friends to drive him to a hospital. Until moments later and near collapse, he was bundled into the back of a friend's car and driven at high speed to an area hospital where he was pronounced dead shortly after from a stab wound in the heart. One witness claims he died in the back seat of the car. Pedro Roberts was tried and convicted in May of 1990 after spending two years in jail pending trial. He was sentenced to prison for 11 years for the murder of Edward Clark Jr. Yet since his stabbing of Clark was ruled self-defense by the court, after Roberts made a plea deal, he was eligible for parole after serving only three years in prison. Curiously enough and more akin to the Polybius urban legend, Pedro Roberts served his sentence at Marion Prison in Southern Illinois, the prison that implemented a behavioral modification program entitled Control and Rehabilitation Effort, or CARE, beginning in 1968. Marion Prison pioneered lockdown techniques and sensory deprivation for the proliferation of mind control experiments using young prisoners as guinea pigs. Whether Roberts was subjected to these experiments is unknown. Given his young age upon incarceration, it is surely probable. When Alan McNeill designed the game Berserk in 1980, he claims he got the idea after having a dream in which he fought robots against a stark and colorless landscape. Reminiscent of the Robot Doomsday Weapons in Fred Saberhaken's 1967 science fiction series Berserkers, the game mimics the robot's attempts to annihilate all living beings after taking control of its programmers. So it's rather interesting to discover that without players having the knowledge found in a series of books, the game still managed to convey the very same thematic imagery to the public and turn it into a legend that the machine, or game, had the power to manipulate events outside its circuitry. Even today, with the barrage of school and public shootings, video games have been blamed for their supposed manipulative effects, suspected of inciting violence, sexual debauchery and anti-social behaviors of every sort, just like Nickelodeon's swing music, television and rock and roll allegedly did before them. The paranoia of the video age of the 80s is alive and well even now in the 21st century, as humans are still scrambling to make sense of what all this technology means to us, and more importantly, how it might affect us. Honestly, we may never know. As human beings, we search for the magical, the flamboyantly mythological, and the seemingly malevolent as a way of coping with natural occurrences, negative and positive that happen in our lives. It's in our nature to seek blame for the dark and often cold, shadowy sides of our humanity, and pass it on so we don't have to take the blame. We are flawed, amazingly flawed, and so much so that we often can't see our own flaws, or the flaws in others. However, the reality of it is this. Video games are just video games. They can't make us do anything we aren't already predisposed to do. We possess the controls that inhibit or exhibit our own actions. We are the berserkers. We are the machines. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. And please leave a rating and review of the show in the podcast app you listen from. Doing so helps the show to get noticed. You can also email me anytime with your questions or comments through the website at WeirdDarkness.com. That's also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks, shop the Weird Darkness store, sign up for the newsletter to win monthly prizes, find my other podcast, Church of the Undead, and more. Plus, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story or call the dark line toll free at 1-877-277-5944. That's 1-877-277-5944. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The Polybius Conspiracy was written by Ryan Hulahan for inputmag.com. The Berserk Death Curse was written by Kat Despira. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Jeremiah 29 verse 11. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future. In a final thought, some people pay more attention to how much God doesn't do for them than what He does do for them. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Want to receive the commercial-free version of Weird Darkness every day? For just $5 per month, you can become a patron at WeirdDarkness.com. As a patron, you get commercial-free episodes of Weird Darkness every day. Bonus audio. And you also receive chapters of audiobooks as I narrate them, even before the authors and publishers hear them. But more than that, as a patron, you're also helping to reach people who are desperately hurting with depression and anxiety. You get the benefits of being a patron, and you also benefit others who are hurting at the same time. Become a patron at WeirdDarkness.com.


Welcome to Sheboygan County government, working for you. Can you believe this is our 200th program today? 200th program, prepare yourself for the balloon drop. 200th program, we've been doing this since the year 2000. County Board Chairman Dan Lemme, you and yours truly started the program back then. And since then, every consecutive chairperson has decided to continue the program as Chairman Wagner does now. And every month we strive to bring a different guest, generally a different department head here to talk about roles and responsibilities and good things happening in county government. And there are many good things happening at our transportation department. Greg Schnell is here. He's been our transportation director since 2006. Welcome, Greg. Thank you, thanks for having me. This man is busy. His entire department is busy. And one of the reasons is we're putting up a new transportation complex. Exciting times for county government and your department in particular. Let's roll it back just a little bit. Please set the stage. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Greg, and a little bit about your department and what your department's responsible for. A little bit about me. I came from Anatoa County. I think Anatoa says it's 2006, so it's been awhile. But we got a lot of stuff accomplished in the seven years that I've been here. We are presently, we have 90 employees. We're responsible for 450 miles of road, 158 bridges. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff happening. The complex has taken a considerable toll on all those guys right now, but we're getting ahead of the curve. And this complex is the meat of what we want to start talking about here. I'm a lot of people in the community asking me about it. A lot of interest in it. A lot of impressed people, I think, by how this site has developed. So please share with our viewers what's happening if they're not aware that the county is building a new transportation complex consolidating three facilities into one. Sure. I kind of started back in 2008. We had an operational review done on our department. Back then, we had seven outlying sheds along with our facility on 23rd Street in Sheboygan. Shortly after that study, we closed the ADEL facility in 2011. Gain some efficiencies and that was a small shed. It was built many years ago. Didn't even fit the trucks that we had on the road to date. So we sold that one off and we split and diversified the people that were there and split them up between our cascade and our south side shed. From that point on, the county had always talked about locating to the center part of the county with a bigger facility to do some more consolidating. When we started to talk about cost at that point, it was a little more expensive than what the county board was comfortable at that point. It was a down turn in the economy spending on the facility. So we kind of left it go. During our budget process in 2013, 14, we were looking at our facilities and what the needs are for those facilities and we started to come up with a rather lengthy list of cost that we're gonna be faced with in the future and that's what kind of started our conversation of consolidating. And at the first onset, we weren't really looking to bring out the administration in a shop part and that just kind of developed into this to bring it all into one complex and move the shop and administration, Elkhart Lake and Plymouth altogether. So main headquarters in Sheboygan, the Plymouth Shed, the Elkhart Lake Shed, three facilities into one. I set the stage for us. How big is this complex? How much is it gonna cost? And how is it being financed? Okay, the main building itself at the new complex is about 123,000 square feet. And if you look at what the sheds and the unheated facility is gonna be, it's about 163,000 square feet. So approximately a little bit better in two football fields is what we're gonna consume for space. Where we're at today are with the bonding and such is about $17 million that's gonna be bonded for. $2 million in potential sales from the facilities we're going to sell and the remainder is gonna come from fund balance which is about five and a half million dollars. So about a $25 million facility, $17 million bonded, use of some fund balance, use of some sale proceeds from the three facilities that'll be consolidated. And then of course you have equipment from time to time that you have to purchase whether it's a new snow plow, what have you. How is that purchased and funded? It's gonna be funded through the sales tax. Years ago we were lumped in with the rest of the departments and we competed for those dollars that were available. It was typically about a million dollars spread throughout the county. Now the sales tax proceeds are available for us to use for our highway operations or our overlays, construction and equipment. We will be funding that equipment through those proceeds. And that was just a quick point of clarification that I wanted to make sure that our viewers are aware of that no sales tax revenue is being used to build this new facility. That's correct. It's being bonded or borrowed for as well as positive fund balance as well as sale proceeds. All of the new sales tax revenue is being used for transportation related work, overlay, purchasing equipment, making sure the work gets done. So I just wanna make sure every now and then Tom and I get that question. So back to the site itself, why was this particular site so attractive? Well, to back up a little bit, we looked at back in 2008, when we were looking at this, we looked at a facility or a piece of land on at the intersection of 27 and, or 28 and 57 south of Plymouth. Plymouth is kind of the center part of our county. So we'd have been a few miles off of the center part by looking at that location. And again, you know, the conversations about building a new facility kind of went south a little bit and we stopped looking at that. But as this came forward, we had looked at buying the additional property next to our Plymouth facility the way it is today. It was a little bit more expensive and it didn't provide us the space that we were looking for. Plus we'll be losing our access to 23 at some time in the future. So we felt it would be better off or a better opportunity either to move north or south. I looked at a couple of different pieces of property in the same area of where we're building at the intersection of J and 67. This is the individual that we came to terms with. And what it does, it moves us three miles south of El Carleic where we have a facility now and it moves us three miles north of Plymouth. So it'd be brought those two together. We can still provide the services to the area that we have, which we have contracts with 11 out of the 15 townships throughout the county. So we're servicing a lot of different people from that facility. It was a site that didn't, I guess, wasn't classified as prime egg land. So at least we weren't taking out the best of the best land. We did have to do a lot of filling in order to raise the site to get it the way it is today. And we're looking at building this for the future. This is an 80 plus year building. So we wanted to raise it up. We didn't want to be blamed for something and building in a hole and that type of thing. And we want to make it aesthetic and pleasing to the area that's there. And when you talk about a facility of this size, as you said, about the size of two football fields which is tough to wrap your head around. That's gonna be a big complex, the cost associated with it. I know that the three of us, and I think the County Board as a whole is real pleased that we've been successful in doing some things ourselves to keep the costs down. What is it that we're doing? As I mentioned, we were in charge of leveling the site, if you will. We were fortunate that the County Board had the foresight to purchase some gravel pits many years ago. We're using those resources to raise the site. So my staff went in with the equipment that we have afforded to us by the County Board and the taxpayers to strip the site and raise it and build it into the condition it is today to have a buildable facility on top of it. So we are extremely fortunate that we have the property, the people, and the equipment in order to take care of this stuff in-house with my staff. And in addition to using our own gravel and workforce to prepare the site, you also were able to gain some efficiencies working with the Rocky Knoll Healthcare Center. What are we doing there? That's correct. It was a great win for us. We're gonna be utilizing the Rocky Knoll Water Tower, which is about 200,000 gallons of capacity, which is bigger than the Village of Wallows, which I might add. Our take a day for gallons of water depending upon the seasons, about 750 gallons. So we're not a big user. Well, we need all the water for us, fire suppression and event. We have an emergency like that. But with us using the Water Tower versus putting in high capacity wells, there was a fair amount of savings. And when I say a fair amount, between three to $500,000 that we saved by going this route and running our own piping in and utilizing the water that's already available. Plus this will also help with the quality of water at Rocky Knoll. It increases the usage a little bit and sometimes it's better to utilize that water at a higher rate so that you have the best quality of water always being brought in. Along with that, we're also tying into the sanitary sewer that feeds little old Cart Lake sewage district as well as Rocky Knoll. And then it is forced down to the city of Plymouth treatment plant. So we will be entering at the intersection of Jay with the sewage and that'll be forced down to Plymouth. So we won't be having to have either pumping or a seepage bed for that type of sewage. So when you combine the three different areas there, you're looking at well over a million dollars in savings. And perhaps twice that when you look into the workforce, the hours that went into this. Absolutely. Nice work, nice work. Last question before I turn it over to Tom. Key milestones, what are some of the key milestones of progress that people can expect to see as they drive by this site and see it developed? As we are about 95, 98% complete from my staff's point. We are putting in our secondary driveway. We're having a driveway out to State Highway 67. We're working on it as we speak today. But again, that's only secondary. Our main entrance will be off of Conny Trong Jay. 95% complete with the site design work. With the earthwork, yes. And once we give up or leave the site, there's gonna be a tremendous amount of utility work that's gonna be happening as well as the building. The next milestone for us is, as of today, as we speak today, the crane's being dropped off to set the panel. They are gonna start Tuesday after Memorial Day and the panels are start going up. They haven't bought a month and the building will be erected.  As I mentioned, we're using precast panels so that it's eight to 10 feet at a time and that panel is 35 feet tall. So it's gonna be a big structure coming up in a short amount of time. Very good. Thank you, Greg. Tom. Thank you, Adam. Obviously, this will leave the, as we talked about the county with three vacant buildings, one in Elkhart Lake, one in Plymouth, which you've talked about a little bit, and the one in the city of Sheboygan. What are the plans for those three facilities? Two out of the three are for sale yet. We do have a suspected offer on the Elkhart Lake facility. So as it stands today, that one is no longer on the drawing board. We'll be moving out of that and vacating that at the end of probably December, or hopefully earlier, if we can get out earlier. We're working with an individual that is offered to buy Plymouth as well as the Sheboygan facility. So there's a lot of activity centered around having buyers for those parcels. So it'll be nice to get those back on the tax roll. Absolutely. From a tax basis, what would that mean to the county and you think getting all three of those back on it? Depending upon the amount of investment that the buyer makes in them, if there's some improvements that are gonna go along, and one of the individuals that we are working with in Plymouth is gonna make some improvements. So that will obviously raise the value of that. It could be anywhere between three to $500,000 back onto the tax roll. And I know, when do you anticipate your staff and equipment moving out to the new facility? The Elkhart Lake and Plymouth guys that respond to those facilities for the winter months or even during our summer construction, they will be moving out there sometime in November-ish, depending upon progress of the building. I would say sometime in July of 2018 or mid-summer of 2018, the shop where I am in our administration building in Sheboygan, we will be moving out at that point. So a little over a year from now you're planning on the whole thing being completed. That's correct. Okay. Snow and roof equipment has certainly changed over the years both in cost and size. You wanna talk about that a little bit? Sure, years ago we had little one-axle, single-axle trucks with just a plow in the front. No wing, no nothing. We've expanded from that 20-foot truck to almost 50 feet now. All of our trucks are equipped with wings. Some of them have double wings, depending upon the highway that they're maintaining. So when you go from 20 feet to 50 feet and your facilities are structured around that 20-foot truck, we were running out of space and that has a lot to do with what we're doing today and expanding our space. And you talked a little bit about how long you think this facility would last, but obviously we're looking at a long-term facility here, the estimate of the lifespan of this new facility. What I've been told is 75 to 100 years. So I don't think I'll see the end result of what that is, but my guess is that we're gonna put up a nice facility that our next generations and generations beyond will be able to enjoy. One other thing I just wanted to touch on a bit because I know you're building two areas for salt to be, and one is for the county and one is for the state. That's correct. I think there's a lot of people out there who don't always realize how much work you do for the state of Wisconsin. You mind talking about that later? Sure, not at all. We are the maintaining authority for 170 miles of state highway. That's interstates and anything else. So anything that's numbered is a state highway. We have the story-mover responsibility to grass cutting, litter pickup. You name it, we take care of it other than the bigger improvement projects, but we also do some paving for them and pipe replacement, that type of stuff. So as you mentioned, the salt sheds, we did make a little bit of a change there. We combined the two salt sheds, but there's gonna be one wall down the middle and one will be owned by the state, which they pay for, and then one will be owned by the county as well. Thanks, Greg. And on that line, Tom, thank you. When we talk about the work for the state, unless you've got your head in the sand, I think people are well aware that the state has issues with our transportation system and how we're gonna pay for maintaining it. And Highway 23 is getting a lot of attention. And of course, again, as I think our viewers are well aware, that work should have been done years ago. It still hasn't been done. It's a dangerous road. And what it boils down to is we continue to have problems at the state level with funding these transportation projects. Set the stage for our viewers a little bit. The state, obviously, is very, very important, the state's transportation system, but we also have a county transportation system. And then our local municipalities have town roads, village roads. How many county roads and bridges are Sheboygan County responsible for? We have 450 miles of our own county road system. And then we also maintain, like I mentioned, the state highways at 170 and then we have 465 miles of town road that we're responsible for. The bridges, there's 153. 79 of them are owned by the municipalities, but we are the maintenance authority for those as well. So we help those townships with funding, that type of stuff as far as guiding the applications and then also doing the maintenance work. The state bridges, that's all left up to the state as far as we do the maintenance on them, but they will tell us what that maintenance is all going to exist of. This year, we're looking at paving 30 miles of County Truck Highway. It's all overlays, pretty much overlays. There's a little bit of milling and pulverizing in there, but it's just over 30 miles. And that was our promise with the half-send sales tax proceeds. It's gonna be a tremendous benefit. Maybe we won't see that the first year, but as time progresses, it's really gonna improve the quality and how we get around and infrastructure for businesses, you name it. There's a lot of positives to that. And down the road, we'll be having to bond for less and spend less. I think the state now, if I have the numbers right, is around about 22, 23% of their bonding. And as soon as that means 77 cents on the dollars actually going to construction and 22, 23 cents is going to pay off the interest. And if that continues to grow, that gets you behind the eight ball and that's something we believe we will not be in the situation to do that. That's right. Yeah, I'm glad you set the stage with the number of roads and bridges. I mean, some of these bridges are upwards of 100 years old. And of course, they have to be maintained. Our transportation system is vital for economic development. And I wanna take a moment just to thank Chairman Tom Wagner and the County Board. The leadership that the Board showed in implementing the half-person sales tax. I mean, we certainly weren't the first to do it being the 63rd County of 72 to implement it. But it took some strong leadership to step up and problem solve and implement the sales tax. And that half-person sales tax now we anticipate is gonna generate around nine to 10 million a year. All of it under the direction of Chairman Tom Wagner and the County Board, all of it is going for transportation. And that's now allowing us to do 30 miles of overlay a year. Whereas previously we were doing maybe 12 or 15 miles, depending on the year and the dollars available. So we now can be fiscally responsible and maintain our system and do it appropriately rather than kick the can and those costs down the road. And we've shared this in the past, but I'm gonna share it again. One mile of overlay is what, about 150,000. 120, 150. If you have to pave and pulverize that same one mile because you've let it go, you haven't kept up with it, it's 250,000. And if you have to completely reconstruct that same one mile, you're talking 1.2 million. So 120,000 versus 250,000 versus 1.2 million. We all know what the answer is from a standpoint of being fiscally responsible. If we maintain our roads, it's the right thing to do. And unfortunately, we're struggling with this at the state level. And in my opinion, and I know in Chairman Wagner's opinion, it shouldn't be that difficult to fix this problem because if we aren't taking care of our roads and infrastructure, we are simply passing more dangerous roads to the future and more cost to the future. And that's just not the right thing to do. So I compliment Chairman Wagner and the County Board and our prior County Board Chairman, Roger Distruity. It was really the two chairs that helped lead the charge to get this done. And Greg, you mentioned you started in 2006 and we've had some challenges with the economy, what have you. And now in 2017, we have the resources we need to maintain our local roads and we have a new transportation complex being built that's gonna help with our transportation system for the next 100 years. And then the final thing that the County Board did, which is the first county in the state to do it is they're sharing some of the 1.5% sales tax with our local municipalities. And how does that help them, Greg? They have to make that investment into a road improvement. They can't just roll it into what they have or cut back on their levees. So the County Board has put some, I guess some, what I'll call minor strings attached to the money that they make that investment back in their road, which is a great thing. The feedback that I've been getting from those townships is phenomenal. If they get 20,000 or 6,000, that's money they didn't have before. And some of them are getting upwards of 100,000 plus. So will that money be shared and go a long ways in the future? Absolutely. And as the nine or $10 million grows in the future, so will those funds as well. And I believe that it's just gonna make us a better, well-rounded county from a standpoint of our transportation and being more inviting, either whether it's to residential areas or commercial areas, I think it'll be a great success for all of us. And Greg, as you know, Tom chairs the Heads of Local Government Group and probably the number one thing we heard consistently from all of our chief elected officials in this community is that roads and the lack of revenue and maintaining their roads was the number one problem. And again, this is a step in the right direction. Greg, you and I also attended a meeting last week about safety enhancements and back to 23 for a moment. Not only is there a great deal of concern about the lack of progress on 23 going from a two-lane to a four-lane and the cost associated with these delays that have now gone into the decades, but we were meeting with a couple of very affluent businesses, very successful companies that were concerned about the intersection of TT in 23 and semis coming into play. How does one get engaged, you know, share with our local legislators or how do we make safety improvements when clearly improvements need to be made? The difficult part to making safety improvements and it happens in every level when in order to get any type of feet or legs underneath those types of improvements, unfortunately it comes with history and that would be the history of accidents and fatalities. And it's not like nobody wants to generate that type of activity, but that's what we'll push to make those safety improvements. So from a standpoint of a taxpayer, calling your local legislators and calling Madison and getting in their ear and saying, we have a real issue here or calling the region office in Green Bay or calling my office and I can share those concerns. We can share those with the DOT and that will start to generate some of that activity. The DOT has an opportunity for safety improvement funds through the federal government and a lot of times those funds aren't actively pursued. So sometimes there's a pretty good chance of getting those funds. A lot of times they're gauged on the amount of accidents that have happened, the severity of those accidents, whether their lives were lost or if it's disability accidents or disabling accidents. So there's a formula, if you will, put on that to see how much of the dollars and funding they can get back. We've utilized those to build some of their own devotions in Sheboygan County to make the intersections much more safer. So the ability is there, but in order to get the legs, as you mentioned, underneath these projects, you need to talk to your local officials and put some pressure on it. Particularly on the state highways, the federal highways, because of course at the county level, you can come to the county transportation director, the transportation committee, and speed limits can be reduced, stop signs can be put up, rumble strips can be put in play, and I've seen that over the years, but if it's making a substantial change to an interstate, it can be frustrating for people because clearly they see the safety issue, yet you have to gather all that data and have that track record before the time and money is put into making that improvement. Correct, it's a difficult answer to provide people because we aren't here to create history, we're here to prevent it. Well, I'm gonna close on 23 because I know this is an issue that is near and dear to Tom Wagner's heart and our board and our entire community. We've been in discussions with Sargento and Master Gallery and Beamus and Rockline and Kohler, and the list goes on and on of these very successful companies in our community that have a lot going on with their manufacturing process, trucks coming and going, and everyone is saying the same thing. And we're hearing wrapped up frustration, frankly, that what's taken so long to get 23 improved? Most people are well aware that there's a lawsuit in play that has held things up, but regardless of what comes out of that lawsuit, the money needs to be there to make the improvements and right now it's not. So if you care about the safety of Highway 23, don't hesitate as Greg said, put in a call to one of our area legislators and I know they care about it. I know they support the enhancements, but they'd certainly appreciate your support as well. Anytime you have to go to the Assembly or Senate and ask for resources or engage the governor to support resources, it's nice to know you have your community behind you. So don't hesitate to weigh in. Greg, I wanna thank you and your team for the great leadership that you're providing and all the good things that you're helping make happen in Sheboygan County. My compliments to you. Well, thank you for giving us that, the resources in order to do it. We got a good team here. You do. Thanks for joining us today and thank you for joining us today. If you have any more questions about our transportation system, questions about something that Greg touched on, don't hesitate to reach out to him. A lot going on, but always open to input and suggestions for improvement. So we appreciate you joining us. Next month, we're gonna have a new face across from Tom and I. It's going to be our new district attorney. He was just elected and took office what January 1st, right? Joel Armanski. I wanted to make sure I got that right. Joel Armanski, our new district attorney is gonna be here next month to talk about the roles and responsibilities of the DA's office. We look forward to him being here and again, we thank you for joining us.