An Old Mystery Solved

I have a memory from many years ago. I was watching a TV program some time between 1959 and 1966 when I saw a short sequence of two scenes. That memory has haunted me since then, but I have no idea what it was about. Now I think I know.

The sequence I remember starts when someone opens a doorway and a very bright light shines through the opening. Three women walk into the light and then they close the door. It was followed by a scene where they open the door and the bright light is gone. Some men go through the doorway and bring out the dead bodies of the women.

I’ve often wondered what it was I saw. I don’t remember anything before or after. It didn’t make any sense to me. I used to wonder what it was all about. I assumed that it was some low budget TV program and it was unlikely that I would ever find out where it came from. There were times where I wondered if it was a real memory or maybe something I dreamt.

Recently, because of social distancing I’ve spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos at home. I started to watch an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on YouTube. They were doing “The Mole People”, the 1956 horror film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq6AlUUCgi4  I’d heard of the movie and remember seeing pictures of the mole people. I never had any inclination to watch it, but I wanted something on the TV while I did my exercises for the day.

I only watched about half of the movie at the time. A couple days later I decided to watch the rest of the movie. In the movie there is a slave revolt that threatens to cut off the bad guy’s food supply. The king of the bad guys decides that the only way to save their country is to do a human sacrifice to their goddess Ishtar. https://youtu.be/hq6AlUUCgi4?t=4460 It was a bit weird because the way he expressed it was similar to a report I saw on TV about some politicians down in the US who said they are willing to let other people die of COVID-19 to get the economy restarted. In the movie they used it to portray the bad guys as uncaring and inhumane.

Anyway, they came to the scene where they were going to do the sacrifice. As soon as it started, I noticed they were going to sacrifice three women, which got me thinking about the scene I saw all those years ago. https://youtu.be/hq6AlUUCgi4?t=4613

When it came to the actual sacrifice, it was so close to what I remember that it had to be what I saw. It wasn’t exactly as I remembered, but it was close enough that I’m sure the differences are due to over 50 years of a slowly fading memory. I didn’t recognize anything else from the movie, so I must have just seen that one scene.

At least I don’t need to wonder what I saw anymore. I can rest easy now, except for nightmares about human sacrifices.

When I made the image for this post, I added some details to the TV. When I resized the image before uploading it, most of the detail was lost. At least I had some fun doing the image.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog