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Ricco Sweets “From The Mean Streets”
Ricco Sweets was born and raised on Mean St of Parts Unknown in the 1970s.
He was a curious child who had a happy-go-lucky attitude about him and wanted nothing more than to investigate the mysteries of everyday life around him.
One day in the mid 1990s when the internet was becoming widely available to the average household Ricco found old computer sitting just inside someone’s open window. He decided to give it a good home and as he sprinted down the street with it, he suspected that this abandoned computer would open a whole new world to him.
One day as he was logging on to the internet with his dial-up modem, listening to the melodious hiss, whine and squeals that would connect him to the world wide web, Ricco launched his web browser of choice, Ask Jeeves, and began to explore.
After misspelling what he was searching for; he was shown something that would change his life for ever and open all new mysteries to him, it was a result for Sexy Bigfoot. The accompanying picture, which took several minutes to load all of its full colour glory, introduced Ricco to a mysterious website that told him there were hot, sexy cryptids in his area just waiting to meet him.
This idea of cryptids, ghosts and the supernatural rocked his mind and Ricco decided to make it his mission to seek out, find, study and date these cryptids.
Armed with new knowledge of this mysterious world of the supernatural, Ricco set out to begin his life as an investigator of the paranormal and he’s never looked back … unless it was to see if a date gone wrong was still on his tail.
Along the way he’s met friends as curious as he is about the world of the paranormal and eventually, with his good buddy Ben Macdui decided to chronicle their shared adventures in a podcast called I Fought the Lore, where they bring you their take on a certain paranormal topic and tales. They don’t concern themselves with whether the stories are true or not, but whether the tales hold up after years of being told and decide whether the lore wins or loses.
Ben McDouhui
Ben McDouhui grew up in the 80s with an imagination that left him scared of pretty much everything. The movie “E.T.” gave him nightmares. His brother had a ViewMaster that played a Michael Jackson Thriller video and since anyone else in the room could only hear what was happening, Ben’s interpreting the sounds of screaming and splintering wood as screaming and flesh and bone left him scarred about zombies. “The Hitcher” where a woman is pulled apart off screen didn’t help his overactive imagination in the slightest either. Dennis Quaid’s “Dreamscape” was a stark introduction to the cold war’s looming threat of nuclear annihilation and eventually just the horror movie section of the video store in general with its rows and rows of gruesome imagery.
Ben’s eventual saviour came in the form of books and reading but at a price...when Ben began to read the backs of the rental cassettes, he realized the plots of the movies rarely had anything at all to do with what was on the cover and his nightmares about being lost in endless rows of VHS box art ceased. His trips to the school library most often ended up in armfuls of books about “the future” easing his fears about an atomic holocaust and giving him optimistic things to look forward to which brought the theme of nuclear bombs in his 4th grade writing assignments to a halt. It was that same library though that led him to books about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs and ghosts. Unsolved Mysteries and Robert Stack continued to feed his curiosity for the paranormal, Ben’s pretty sure he interacted with something unexplainable as a Cub Scout aboard the USS Sullivan in Buffalo NY. He even gradually developed a love hate relationship with zombies (though they still give him nightmares to this day).
When Ben first ran into Ricco in the mid 90s a common interest in the paranormal saw them crisscrossing the historically significant region that they were both living in; comparing notes and seeking out every haunted cemetery, pub and landmark they’d heard of to find out for themselves if there was any truth to the stories. It’s been almost 30 years since then of books, television, movies, discussion, alcohol, hype, disappointment, more discussion and then the internet. In the I Fought the Lore podcast, Ben and Ricco take new and classic stories of the unexplained and ignoring whether they are true or false, try to filter them through those 3 decades of experience and references to bring you the story behind the story and decide if it is even still worth our time and attention.