When only the goblins are out

In a comment on "Drill, baby, drill!" Bill writes, referring to my posts about the poem by Christina Rossetti:

The last, and it looks like only, time you've mentioned goblins on your blog was in connection with the Goblin Market.

When I read that, I knew that wasn't true. (Bill, it turns out, had searched for the singular goblin and thus missed posts that used only the plural.) I knew that I had once used the phrase "when only the goblins are out" in a post here to describe my habit of prowling about in the wee hours. That turn of phrase was borrowed, or so I thought, from Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi's 1974 book about Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders, where he (the prosecutor in the case) used it to question why certain of Manson's associates were abroad at an hour when all decent folk are asleep.

I would swear on a stack of White Albums that that's where I got that expression, but apparently I would be wrong. I have scoured the Internet, and a pirated ebook of Helter Skelter, in vain for any such wording. (Crazily, the very first thing I tried -- searching Google for goblins "helter skelter" -- returned the very poem Bill had mentioned: "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti, which happens to include the phrase "helter skelter.") I really don't know what to make of that. I have never read any other books about the Manson affair, and scarcely any other "true crime" books, so I can't imagine how I can have misremembered.

Casting a wider net, and trying various paraphrases, I ended up finding a reference to St. Mark, in Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

Anyway, wherever the phrase may have come from (and I still feel 100% sure it was from Helter Skelter!) the post that used it was 2020's "Not just fear; dogs can smell leonine thoughts." This post recounts an incident in which

As I was walking along, I suddenly visualized myself as a lion -- specifically, as the bipedal lion depicted on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Bridges to Babylon

The synchronistic significance is that Bill's comment, the same one that led me back to that old post, connects the Great Tower (vulgarly yclept "of Babel") with a Stone Bridge and also mentions a Stone Lion -- a lion, stones, a bridge, and Babylon. A pretty tight set of links, and definitely coincidental, since we know Bill was unaware of that post's existence.

Another Helter Skelter link is found in the "Drill, baby, drill!" post Bill was commenting on. That post quotes a Conrad Aiken poem that begins:

One two three four

five six seven

all good goats

will go to heaven

Just a few days ago (March 9), someone posted this on /x/:

That's a door on Spahn Movie Ranch with some graffiti put there by someone in the Charles Manson group (my guess would be Sandra Good, but who knows):

1234

567

ALL

GOOD

CHILD-

REN

(Go to Heaven?)

As I said, I'm not really a "true crime" guy. My familiarity with the Manson saga is almost entirely due to the influence of my uncle Bill, who has been staunchly speaking up for Manson and arguing for his innocence for longer than I've been alive. This same uncle also wrote a narrative poem about Robin Goodfellow (Shakespeare's Hobgoblin) being transformed by Merlin into a mortal child who grows up to become Robin Hood.

In my Drill post, which connected the red-nosed Mandrill with the Hobgoblin, I referred to this conflated character as Robin Rednose. Bill made the obvious link from this to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I have connected the Drill with the Dolphin, and my 2021 post called simply "Dolphin" connects this animal with Rudolph.

In another comment, Bill brings up Shrek (which I've never watched) and connects this ogre with the Hobgoblin:

Shrek is an ogre, a word that can mean something like "demon, monster", which is not unlike the meaning of goblin, which can mean "devil, demon" as well. Further, Shrek is a Yiddish/ Jewish name that means "Fear or Fright". This seemed like a direct hit for our Hobgoblin, a word that Etymonline specifically says "Something that causes fear and disquiet".

The D&D hobgoblin "deep dive" I linked in that post also makes such a connection:

A Hobgoblin King can be found in its lair and may have up to 200 Hobgoblins with him. Both the king and his bodyguards, numbering 2-4, fight as if they were an Ogre. This just means that they deal extra damage when they hit you with their attacks, and it, unfortunately, means that they aren’t carrying around 100 to 600 gold pieces… which is strangely what Ogres do when they are walking around away from home. We guess you need a little walking around money, but that seems like a lot to just be walking around with.

Given the recent mandrill syncs, I decided to search /x/ for that word on 4plebs. The first few results were super-synchy:

The first (i.e. most recent) result pairs dolphin with mandrill. The fourth says:

>mandrill

you must be a D&D player

This was because a thread about animals that seem demonic had a mandrill as the main image. In my Drill post, I explained that a D&D manual illustration is the reason I associate the mandrill with the Hobgoblin. The image accompanying the /x/ post is not a hobgoblin, though, but a D&D baddie called Demogorgon, shown with two mandrill-like heads. In other words, the hobgoblin connection is a complete coincidence.

Most of the other results were references to the Mandela Effect as the "Mandrill Effect" -- a running joke about how "in my timeline" it's always been called that. One of the top results focuses on Fiona Broome, the person who coined Mandela Effect:

This is a sync because apparently one of the characters in Shrek is called Fiona, and Bill's comment discussed the name and its etymology.