MrBallen: “They thought it was their dead mother… but it was worse”

YERRR the GOAT storyteller is with us on the couch today and he's got some crazy stories: - A terrifying TRUE story of a haunted hosue - The strange death of David Lewis - The Dyatlov Pass Incident - The Screeching Lady - 9/11 and it's impact - Diving in the Sterkfontain Caves Gone Wrong - Chris Lemons cheating death and much, much more - ENJOY! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 0:40 Insane True Story of a Haunted House & Ouija board 27:48 Sociopath v Psychopath + Danny LaPlante 30:11 Dyatlov Pass Incident + Russian alien jealousy 45:28 Strange Death of David Lewis 53:49 Fugue State + Dumped there? 59:00 Football is BACK 1:02:31 Case of Missing Skier + Hitting the fugue 1:11:14 Mark believes in demons + The Screeching Lady 1:20:35 Superstition + Indiana “showtime” 1:28:09 9/11 impact,People jumping + Freedom Eating 1:35:28 Ellie Lobel Stumbling on Surprising Cure + Lab leak 1:45:26 Sterkfontain Caves Diving 1:53:56 Surviving 60 hours underwater 1:56:35 Catacombs of Paris 1:57:32 Chris Lemons Cheating Death 2:01:04 John’s Supernatural experience 2:14:52 Extreme sleepwalking 2:22:51 Releasing graphic novel “Terror Within” 2:24:10 Where “MrBallen” came from? #mrballen #dyatlovpass #demons This episode is sponsored by Kalshi. This episode is sponsored by Sesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up everybody? Today, we are joined by maybe the best storyteller on the internet. And he's come with some of the most insane, dark, strange, twisted stories that I've ever heard, some of which he's never told before. And trust me, these absolutely blew my mind. He even tells us about his firsthand experience with the supernatural. But first, a family starts noticing strange tapping happening inside their home. At first, they think that the house might be haunted. Then they discover what's actually happening. And somehow, the truth is even more terrifying. The story is 100% real, and you're not going to believe how it ends.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Everybody enjoy, and welcome to the couch, Mr. Baldwin.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  I got a demon-esque story. You may have heard this one. This is a classic one. So in the 1984, there was this family, Frank, Karen, and Tina, who lived in some part of Massachusetts. Forget the name, but it's like western Massachusetts. And in 1984, or whatever it was, 86, the mom died sort of abruptly. And it was not only this like huge tragedy for the family, but from sort of an economic perspective, it immediately put the family in duress because they needed her money. She was making money, and with her deceased, suddenly the dad, Frank, who was a blue collar guy, you know, he wanted to be home with his 14-year-old and nine-year-old Tina and Karen, respectively, to help them grieve.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  But it was like, I also now need to work more, just to pay the bills. Pepperell, Pepperell mess. And so, you know, this is like in the, in the, in December of 1984, probably getting the year wrong. But on one of the first nights that he had his, his late night shift, his first late night shift, the girls were left alone. You know, they really haven't been able to process the grief yet. This is a very new wound. And the girls had been really, really close with their mom, like more so than the average girls to their mom. This was like a devastating, devastating blow. And the girls, they, they're not even really at the stage where they're ready to accept that their mom's dead. They still think like she's going to come back. And so their dad's out for the night. They know he's not coming home till like midnight or something.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And they're like, hey, like, why don't we get out the Ouija board and try to contact mom? You know, if she's still here. And so they get out the Ouija board, the girls go down into the basement, and they like set up the séance. You know, they put candles out. It's like cliche, you know, their Ouija board in the middle of the room. And the basement is like nondescript. It's a classic New England basement where there's like nothing down there but like a washer dryer. But they start the séance, and they have their Ouija board out. They'd never used it before. And the girls, they're asking these questions, you know, "Mom, if you're here, like, give us a sign." And they got their hands on the planchette, and they're like waiting for it to move, but nothing happens. And like, over the course of an hour, it's like they, they just keep asking more and more questions, and they're trying so hard to like will their mom to, to come into existence. But she doesn't.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  It's a failed séance, you know. Eventually, the girls sort of pack it in, and they're like, you know, "I bet she's still here, but you know, it is what it is. She didn't come through the Ouija board." So they pack out the Ouija board, they go back upstairs, they go to the second floor where their bedrooms are, their dad's still out at work, and the girls go into their respective bedrooms, sort of a disappointing end to the night. And they're like, "All right, you know, go to bed." And they're laying in bed, and the two girls independently start hearing tapping noises coming from somewhere in the house. And at first, neither of the girls, you know, thought to contact the other girl. It sounded like the noise was maybe coming from downstairs. They didn't think it was the other. But they were sporadic noises. It was not like a, something consistent, like a fan or something that could be written off.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  It was something random happening downstairs. And the girls, at first, just laid there and listened, and you know, kept them awake because it was loud enough. But then at some point, the little girl, the nine-year-old, she got scared of this tapping noise. And so she left her room, walked down the hallway, came into Tina's room, and climbed in bed with Tina. And she's like, "What's that noise? Like, it's scaring me. Like, what is that?" And Karen and Tina, they lay in bed, and Karen's like, "I don't know." Or Tina, the oldest, is like, "I don't know." And then at some point, one of them says, "Well, wait a minute. What if it's mom? What if our séance worked? What if, what if we've contacted mom, and she's trying to contact us? What if, that's what it is." And they like desperately want this to be true. So they get out of bed, and they walk to the doorway leading into the hallway, and

• 4:27Speaker 01

  there's some steps going down, and the steps kind of turn and go down another flight to the first floor. So they can't see the first floor. They can only see the first floor landing. And they kind of like look down the stairs, and they, they call out like, "Hey, mom, is that you?" And there's like silence in the house. And then they hear tap, tap, tap, coming from somewhere downstairs, like a distinctive reaction, or it sounded to them like there's a reaction to what we've just asked. And the girls, they're like freaked out by it.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Just got goosebumps.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  And they walk out of their door, they go to the top of the stairs. Now they're like, looking down, they say it again, like, "Mom, if that's really you, like, give us a sign. Like, please, like, we want, we want to talk to you again." Tap, tap, tap. And they're like, "Oh, there's something down there." And they're like, "It's mom." And they're pumped. They're like, "This is the best. This is like the greatest thing that's ever happened. Mom is here." And so, not scared, they start going down the stairs, and they start firing off questions, like to mom, thinking that she's down here tapping somewhere. This is definitely her. And they're asking questions. Some of the questions aren't even really like a yes/no answer. They're much longer, but even still, it's like every question just about, they would hear like a rapid tap, like a three, three taps was often what they would hear. And the house is dark, Frank's not back yet.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  They follow the tapping noise to the first floor, over to the door that leads down to the basement. And they realize that the tapping is coming from the basement, which in their mind, only further establishes this has to be from the séance that we did down in the basement. It's gotta be mom. She's answering our questions. And so they open the door, and they're looking down this, this dark stairwell into this dingy basement. And even though they know it's mom, they're a little bit too scared to like fully commit and go down in the basement right now. But they stood there at the top of the stairs for several more minutes, asking more questions of their mom, and getting their taps, you know. It felt very much like we're, we're talking to mom. Eventually, it stopped, and the girls are so jazzed up from this interaction that they, they can't sleep. So they're like, "Let's just wait up and like tell dad the great news that, you know,

• 6:23Speaker 01

  mom's still in the house." And so, a little bit later, Frank comes home, and he's very surprised to see that the girls are still awake. He comes in, and he's like, "What's going on?" And they're like, "Oh, my gosh, you wouldn't believe it. Like, we did the séance, and mom was here. She was talking to us. Like, oh, my God, it's so unbelievable." And Frank, you know, he knows they've just lost their mom. Like, we're talking probably, probably within the last couple of weeks. And he knows he's not here for them. He's out doing what, what he's got to do. But he, he knows these kids are, are left alone, and they're in this terrible position. And so he instinctively is like, "I'm not about to sit here and try to dispel the idea that their mom is talking to them, even though this feels borderline unhealthy, what they're doing here." Because he doesn't believe this is real at all. He's like, "That's great.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Of course your mom is here. Of course your mom is, is, is going to be with you forever. And yeah, I'm sure she's looking out for you right now." And the girls, they're like giddy, they're so happy, like, "Dad's just said it's true too. Like, this is great." And so the girls, they go to sleep. And Frank, you know, he sort of didn't really think that much of it. Ultimately, he's like, "If, if this is their coping mechanism, that's okay with me." Over the next couple of days, the girls, despite not doing any more séances, continued to hear tapping noises in the house, not just at night, but sort of throughout the day. And for the most part, they were coming from down in the basement. But they would only be heard when Frank wasn't around, where he wasn't near enough that he could hear it. Like, they would hear it, they'd run to get their dad, he was like out cutting the grass or something, and he'd be like, "Oh, okay." And you wouldn't hear it.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  He doesn't think it's real, so he's not expecting to hear anything. But this was, this was a very prevalent thing. Like, throughout the course of the next few days, there were taps almost practically all day. Frank never heard them. And Frank, again, he's just rolling with it. It is what it is. The girls are, they're grieving. But at some point, you know, maybe after about three days of this, the girls, they started to have a different opinion about the tapping sounds. They, when the tapping was pretty much only coming from the basement, it felt like mom. But they noticed about the, the day three, four mark, the tapping began to migrate through the house, and it began originating from places that were a little bit frightening. Like, they'd be laying in bed, and they'd hear tapping under their bed, or they'd hear

• 8:36Speaker 01

  tapping coming from their closet, or they, it was just, it was in other parts of the house that felt a little bit ominous, and it scared them. And they started to worry that maybe our séance worked, but it didn't bring mom out. Maybe it brought a demon out. Maybe it's like, we invited something we don't want into our house. And so the girls went from, "Dad, check it out, mom's here, the taps are her," to, "Dad, I'm scared. I keep hearing the tapping noises. I think it's a demon. I think, I think there's a ghost or something in the house." And at that point, Frank, he sort of went from allowing this to happen, to being a little bit more authoritative and saying to the girls, "Look, like, I know you lost your mom. This is, I know you're dealing with it. You gotta let this stuff go. Like, there's, there's no tapping in the house. There's no ghost, there's no nothing. You guys are fine."

• 9:20Speaker 01

  You know, sort of doing the sort of, it's, you gotta get with reality here. But the girls are like, "No, dad, you don't understand it. Like, we're not lying to you. We don't believe this is mom anymore. We're, we're telling you, there's something in our house, and we don't know what it is. And, and for some reason, you can't hear it, but it's very real." And Frank's like, "Just let it go. Like, there's nothing here." Over the next few days, this is the, the first week of the séance, post-séance. Now we're at like day four post-séance. The girls now are constantly trying to get Frank to hear these taps, because they are still happening all over the place. And Frank's still not hearing them. He's getting progressively more upset with them, no longer being soft, more like, "You gotta cut it out. This has got to stop. I think you guys might need to go into counseling or something. This is getting out of control." Girls are adamant, they're not lying.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Fast forward to, it was almost exactly a week from the séance. The girls, this is the first time they're going to be home since they started getting scared. Before, when they, when they noticed they were getting scared all the time, Frank said that they could stay at friends' houses when he was staying out late, or he would stay home. This is, this represents the first time they're going to be home alone at night while he does a late shift, now that they're scared of their house.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  And so they're already on edge. And in the beginning of the night, there's no taps. The house is quiet. And the girls, they know they're not gonna sleep. They're too scared. They're just waiting in the kitchen for their dad to come home. But at some point, they start hearing tapping noises, the sort of sporadic, random tapping sounds. And they can tell it's coming from the basement. And the basement door is shut. And the two girls, they look at each other. I mean, this has been going on practically every day. It's sort of expected. And Tina, the older one, looks at Karen and is like, "We have to go down. Like, we have to go down and see what this is." To this point, they had never really actually investigated it. Every time they heard tapping, even under their beds, they'd be so scared, they wouldn't look. They would just accept that, like, that was mom, or it wasn't mom, and they just, they never looked for it.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  They never went all the way. And so Tina, she grabs a knife from the kitchen block, and little Karen gets behind her, and they open up the basement door, and they can literally hear tapping coming from somewhere in the dark basement. And they flip on the lights, and they go down the stairs, and they get to the basement, and there's nothing down there. It's like utterly devoid of anything down there. And in some ways, it was almost worse than had they discovered, like, a fucking dude down there or something. Because now, maybe some part of them had thought, "We are making this up." But now, they're hearing tapping. There is no point. There's nowhere it could be coming from. They're freaked out. They turn, and they start running back up the stairs. And as they do, they notice on the wall, in the stairwell, in red, is written,

• 11:57Speaker 01

  "I'm in your closet, come find me."

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Oh, shit.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And so the girls, they see that. They sprint out of the basement. They don't go to check their closet. They run out of the house. They run next door to their neighbor's house. They're banging on the door. "Oh, my God." The neighbor comes to the door. He's aware they've lost their mom. He knows that they're, like, you know, dealing with some really serious issues. He just lets them inside, and they're hysterical. They're trying to explain that, like, "Oh, there's writing on the wall, there's ghosts, oh, my God." And the neighbor's like, "You're fine. You're staying here, you're safe. Like, just stay here. We'll wait for your dad to get home. He'll know what to do. Like, just, it's okay." So the girls are hysterical. They're in the neighbor's house. Frank comes home a little bit later. He pulls in the driveway. And the neighbor promptly goes out and says, "Hey, here's what happened. I don't know, they said something about writing in your basement. I don't understand it, but I just want you to know,

• 12:46Speaker 01

  they're safe in the house. So just want you to, whatever you wanna do." And Frank's like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, okay, I get it. This has been going on the whole week. It's okay. Here, just tell them, I'll go look in the house, and I'll make sure it's safe, and then we'll get him back home." And so Frank goes in the house, and there's nothing amiss. You know, the house is normal. You know, they'd left the door open. But, you know, he goes inside, and, you know, there's nothing that seems out of the ordinary. He eventually finds his way into the basement, and he sees for himself the writing on the wall that says, "I'm in your closet, come find me." But he sees it's written in ketchup. And he immediately thinks, "My daughters must have done this." They've now taken this delusion to the next level. They're now, they're actually adding props to it. They're making it, maybe they want me to believe this is real, so they've done this.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  So he's not scared at all. He's just like, "What the fuck is this?" And so he checks the whole house. There's nobody there. He sees the writing. It's ketchup. So he leaves, he goes to his girls, and he just says to them, "Look, you're starting therapy. There's no two ways about it. This has gotten completely out of control, and you're starting like tomorrow. You're going to therapy."

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And the girls are so scared and resigned, frankly, that, like, they don't even know what to do, that they didn't even fight with their dad. They just are like, "Fine." And so, literally, I think it was actually the next day or very shortly thereafter, the girls start therapy. And around the same time, they start grief counseling, all the tapping in the house stops. Just completely stops. It's like everything goes back to normal. No weirdness. The girls even said, like, "It just felt better in the house." And they began to attribute it to, must be the therapy. And the dad's like, "Yeah, obviously." They didn't say it to them, but that's his thinking. He's like, "Of course. This is just grief manifesting." A couple of weeks later, this is, things are great in the house. Tapping's done, everything's good.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Frank took Tina, Karen, and I think their friend, whose name was Maureen, out for ice cream. So they go out for ice cream. It's the evening, and they come back to Frank's house. And when they get there, Frank actually notices that something's off about the house. It's late at night, and he sees that there are lights on in the house that he didn't remember leaving on. He couldn't be 100% sure, but it immediately made him think, "That's weird. Like, I definitely didn't leave that light on." And so, he gets in front of the girls. He doesn't tell them this. He just sort of puts himself in front of them. He walks up onto the porch. And as he's about to open the door to, like, examine what's going on here, he wanted to be the first one in the house, he hears the TV is on, inside the house. And he stops, and he looks at the girls. And the girls, at this point, pick up

• 15:18Speaker 01

  that something odd is going on, that Frank has noticed something. And even though things have been good, Tina and Karen know how quickly this got really bad in this house. So they're like back into that mode of, "Oh, no, what do you see? What's going on here?" And Frank, he looks at his daughters, and he's like, "Did you guys leave the TV on? Was that you?" And they're like, "No." And so Frank's like, "What in the world is going on here? Like, I definitely didn't do that." And so Frank, he's sort of looking at his daughters, trying to size up, like, "Are you doing this stuff again?" He didn't say it to them, but he's thinking it. But then he's also like, "I was just out with them the whole time. I was with them the whole time. Like, I was the last one to leave the house, and I didn't leave the TV on." So he has these competing realities that don't mesh. "I know my daughters were the ghost, so to speak,

• 16:03Speaker 01

  but I can't explain what's going on right now." So he enters the house, and the girls are terrified. And they've sort of tucked themselves up behind Frank. And he's like, almost half-invested, sort of walking through the house, like, "What in the world is going on here?" Girls are so scared, right behind him. And he goes room to room, just looking around. And there's weirdness, like, the TV's on, the radio's on. Again, there were some lights on, but that was basically it. He searched the whole house. And, you know, he doesn't find anything beyond those oddities. And then the last room that he hadn't checked was the front room of the first floor that overlooked the road. It was basically right off the main door. He just hadn't gone to it yet. And so Frank, again, he's just like in disbelief that this is going on. He walks straight in to this room.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  So he's basically facing the window that leads out to the road out front where they arrived. And as he walks in, he looks up, and he sees on the drapes above the window is someone had written in shaving cream, the words "Marry me" on the shaving cream. And he's staring at it. And he looks back at his girls, and again, he's like, "Did you guys do this?" And he's looking at the words, and he's just staring at them. And the girls are staring at them, and they're all scared. And then they hear movement inside of this room. And there's this little closet in the back corner of this small front room. And Frank looks over, and it opens up. And this person walks out of the closet wearing his wife's wedding dress, clown makeup on their face with a hatchet over their shoulder. And they walk out into the middle of the room,

• 17:33Speaker 01

  and they look over at Frank and the girls, and they just point to the stairs, and they just go upstairs. And so Frank is immediately in like, "What the fuck is going on?" And he grabs the girls, and he starts ushering them behind him, out the door, back into the house. And this dude with the clown makeup and the dress and the hatchet is just slowly pacing towards them. And Frank sort of brings the girls upstairs. He's just positioning himself between the hatchet person and his kids. And they go in the first bedroom, and the girls all go in. And then when Frank goes in the room, again, this person's just slowly walking up. He slams the door, and he holds it tight. And suddenly, there's a struggle at the door between the hatchet person and Frank. They're fighting at the door. And Tina, the 15-year-old, just turns and runs and jumps out the second-floor window.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Just jumps clean out the window, smashes to the ground. She runs to that same neighbor. And she tells them, "Oh, my God, there's somebody in the house. You gotta call 911." So the same neighbor who had the whole ketchup thing happen, he's like, "Oh, my God, like, what's going on?" Calls 911. The police show up minutes later. And when they get there, they look up, and they see Frank and Karen and the friend Maureen. They're all leaning out the window of that same room, screaming like, "Get us down from here! There's somebody in the house. He's gone, I don't know where he is, but there's somebody here." And so the police, they put the ladder up to the window. They go up. They get all the kids out. They get Frank out. Everybody's safe. And then they bring all the kids and Frank over to the neighbor's house. And they're like, "You stay in there. We're gonna clear the house. We're gonna make sure no one's in there. We're gonna find whoever you're talking about."

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And so, guns drawn, the police go into the house, and they search the house, and they can't find anybody. But they do find a hatchet leaning up against the back sliding glass door that was opened partially, suggesting somebody was here that matched the description you gave that has now fled the scene. And so afterwards, the police are like, "Okay, Frank, you know, we're gonna look for this person, you know, the dress-wearing, clown-makeup-wearing, hatchet-wielding maniac. But admittedly, we don't even really know what to look for. You've described them as a man, but frankly, just based on the description, they could be either. Don't really know how old they are. Like, it's gonna be really hard to narrow this down, even though they're really distinct, what you've described. But here's what we're gonna do.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Stay with family, stay away from here, and we'll keep an eye on your house for the next couple of days. We'll search the town, we'll look for this person. And then, you know, when the coast is clear, you can come back, and hopefully, we find this person." So Frank and his kids, and then the friend, they all leave. And Frank and his girls, they go stay with a friend. And over the next couple of days, the police are in contact with Frank, and they're staking out his house, you know, basically just watching it. And they're looking around town. They can't find anybody, you know, that matches the description. But, you know, no one's coming in or out of the house. And there's no sign of anybody in town or anything that gives away, you know, who this guy is or whatever. So it's sort of a dead end. It's like terrifying dead end.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  So after three days of this, Frank is, you know, sort of restless from not living in his house, you know, he's left all his shit at the house, all his toiletries and stuff like that, it's all at the house. And so in the middle of the day, three days into this, he decides, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back to my, my house real quick and just like going real quick, get my toothbrush, whatever, and I'll be out of there. And so he drives over to his house, but before he goes, he's like, actually, you know what, I should probably tell the police, who's there monitoring the house. I don't want them to accidentally think I'm like breaking into my own house. And so he goes to like his neighbor's house and he calls the police and he's looking at his property and he didn't see any police cars marked or otherwise near his property. And he thinks that's weird, you know, maybe they're on the other side or something. But he calls the police and

• 21:09Speaker 01

  he's like, hey, it's me, I'm going in, I'm doing this thing. And they're like, okay. And, uh, and as Frank is like having this discussion, he's looking out the window at his property and he notices that there's somebody, or he thinks for a second, he sees someone moving around in the second floor of his house. And like, he couldn't be sure, but he immediately tells the officer, he's like, hey, I, I, I think, I think one of your guys is in my house. Are you like, are you monitoring my house from the inside? Just like let them know, I'm gonna be going in there and I, I don't wanna scare anyone. And the officer's like, no one's gone inside your house. No one's come in or out of your house. No police officer's gone inside of your house. You must be seeing things. There's no one in your house. And so Frank's like, I know, I just saw someone, like I'm nearly

• 21:52Speaker 01

  positive, I saw someone in my bedroom. And the police officer's like, do not go in your house. Uh, we are gonna go in and search your house, make sure it's okay. So remember, over these three days, they, there has been a couple of times where the police had left and there was a gap in security on the outside, monitoring the property. But damn near 24 hours a day, there's someone physically watching this house and they had not seen anybody interact with the house at any point. And so this is the first time anyone's going inside the house. And so the officers, they're, they go up to the front door and they unlock the door, they go inside and it's just fucking madness inside of this house. There are pennies that are glued to the ceiling all across the first floor. There are knives driven into

• 22:34Speaker 01

  the pictures in the wall of the girls, Tina and Karen with the words like, I'm gonna kill you, you're dead, all over the, all over the house. And there are like half-filled champagne glasses, like champagne flutes around the house. And furniture is not broken, but it's like toppled over and like organized in weird ways around the house. And you're thinking like, you would have seen this shit happen inside the house, right? So now the police are like, huge gap in security, clearly someone's coming in and out of this house. They're probably here now, Frank just claimed to have seen someone. And so they full bore like guns out, they tear this house apart, looking for whoever is in this house. It's like a full effort, loads of people there, top to bottom. And for hours, they're searching the stupid house and they can't find anyone. There's weird shit here, no doubt, but there

• 23:19Speaker 01

  is no one in this house. And like, there's not even any footprints outside of the house suggesting, cause there was snow on the ground, that would have shown them coming in or out of the house. And so finally, a couple of the officers are down in the basement of this house and they're like frustrated, they've been just looking endlessly and they can't find it. And they're like, man, like we must have missed something. Like, I don't know what we missed, but we missed something. And one of them is leaning up against the washer, the washer dryer that's down in the basement, like the only things down in the basement. And at some point, it like moves, like his weight caused the washer to literally just move. And it revealed a hole in the wall of the basement that had been overlooked by the entire group of police that had searched this house over and over again. No one thought

• 24:01Speaker 01

  to look behind the washer dryer. And they get their flashlight out and they look into this hole in the wall and they see there's a tunnel, it's burrowed into the wall and they shine down into the back corner and there's this person crouched in the corner in the wall, wearing a dress with clown makeup on, looking back at the police. They pull, they pull this person out of the wall.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Look at Mark.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  You just fucked Mark up, bro.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  I feel like I'm getting kind of proven right here a little bit.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Okay, go on. So they, they pull this person out of the wall and they get arrested and this person would like say who they are and why they were there. So their name was Danny, Danny LaPlante. He was 16 years old. And Danny, a year earlier, like six months earlier, had gone on a date with Tina, or he believed that they were on a date, or maybe they were out together, but he saw it as like a romantic connection. And he felt like she had spurned his, his advances and he felt really put off by it. And so naturally, he broke into their house as retaliation and built this tunnel in the basement of the house. And over the course of six months, he was living in their walls, not full time, he would leave,

• 25:24Speaker 01

  get this, during the day, while they're out and about in their house, just like living their lives, he also would just leave the wall, he'd walk around their house, he'd just like come up, like, he should have been caught dozens of times and he wasn't. He was just living, he, he began burrowing into other parts of the wall, there were, there were holes, or there was a way to get up to one of the other walls up in the, the second floor, I believe. But he was in the basement at, when they were doing the séance for their mom.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And he knew they were trying to contact their mother. And he admitted that he pretended to be their mother by doing those rapid taps. And so he pretended to be their mother and he continued to make those tapping sounds. He would walk into their bedrooms and he would flick the springs under their bed. He's not even hiding, he's just under their bed in the middle of the night and no one ever caught him, but it gets worse. So he has this just horrifying thing that for basically six months to a year, he's living in their walls, just like spying on them, eating their food, like flicking the walls, torturing them, right? So he gets arrested and he, he is let out on bail or whatever it is for minors, he's basically allowed to roam the streets until his trial. 10 months after he was pulled

• 26:33Speaker 01

  from the wall, he broke into another family's house, except he murdered the entire family.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Oh shit.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  And he had, he had no connection to them whatsoever. He was, he's alive. Danny LaPlante is alive right now. He's in max security prison and he has zero remorse. And he was recently, he's not, he was not released, he's not gonna be released. He was put up for parole. And during the parole hearing, there's like an element of trying to discuss whether or not this person is capable of rehabilitation. And they determined the parole board that arguably Danny LaPlante is the single most psychotic person in the entire prison system. And he was denied parole.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  What the fuck?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  So that's a real life demon right there, dude.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  That's a story, dude. Holy.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Holy shit. Hold on, let me get this guy.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Have you, have you told this one before? Yeah, I've told it live quite a bit.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Oh my God, that's an insane one, dude.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  That's a good one.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  The term is frogging.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  And how do you not believe in demons, bro?

• 27:34Speaker 01

  So that dude.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  How do you not believe in demons?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Just a full-blown sociopath.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Socio or psycho?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  I think, well, I think, I think, I don't know. I think psychotic was the word that they used to describe him, which is sort of like the understatement of the year here.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  What is the difference between socio and psychopath?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Isn't socio like not feeling anything? Psychotic would be like not of sound mind. So you can be, I'm probably so wrong, but I believe sociopathic is you lack empathy, you lack the feelings, but you might be a good person, but you don't have the ability to like understand that my actions could hurt you and that type of thing. I think psychotic probably lends itself to people who are also sociopathic, but I think that's more like you do things that are like mentally unwell.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Like a break from reality.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you're acting on things.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  That's, that's also being psychotic, but then there's also psychopath.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  But that's someone who is psychotic. Psychopathic and psychopath, yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Where were his parents?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Well, he, by the way, he would leave the house. But I think he had a very dysfunctional home life and so he was able to be in and out of the house, I believe.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  But you go.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Is that him as an adult right now?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  No, I don't, uh, no. No, I think that him in real life now looks like a guy that should be in prison. Like, he, he looks like, he don't give a fuck.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  And you know what's weird is like, he looks relatively young still, you know, he's just like this nondescript, sort of like weird looking guy. Yeah, there he is.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Oh my God.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Danny LaPlante.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Looks like a judge. His cardigan, is that a prison issued? Look at that.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Whoa. Yeah, he was born in Townsend, Massachusetts, parents divorced. He claimed to have been psychologically and sexually abused by adults in his life. And then, uh, his classmates described him as creepy and weird and was considered a loner. Residents in the neighborhood described him as disturbed or strange. Whoa.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Fuck me, dude. All right, guys, this fall, I'm back in the lab getting the new hour ready. And I just want to say thank you so much for New Brunswick, New Jersey, Houston, and Wes Knight for selling out all the shows. Uh, also coming to Indianapolis, Indiana, October 23rd and 24th. Uh, Birmingham, Alabama, November 6th and 7th. Cleveland, Ohio, November 13th, 14th. Raleigh, North Carolina, December 4th and 5th. Columbus, Ohio, December 11th and 12th. Those are the remaining shows for this fall. Theandrewshultz.com for tickets. I will see you there.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  The D I L A pass is fascinating. And 1959, there are these nine hikers who are really like mountaineers, uh, in Russia. And they were going up for what's called their level three hiking exam, which sounds sort of lame, but it effectively amounts to like the highest degree of mountaineering in Russia at the time. So if you pass this test, you're sort of like, uh, the top mountaineer, if you will. Not, not, not many people had this credential.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  So the Navy SEALs of hikers.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Sort of, sort of, kind of. These guys are very serious mountaineers. So the way it works is you need to plan a route, you, the test taker. You got to plan a route that sort of is technically challenging enough on a piece of paper that someone can look at it, I think it's like a university, and they approve that yes, this, this is most, this is difficult enough that if you successfully navigate this path and there's checkpoints along the way.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  You know, you, uh, you pass your test, right? So they set it up, they talked to this university that's going to effectively be their graders. And they were given, or they gave, like, here's how long it's going to take us. We're going to start here, we're going to enter the Ural Mountains, these like snow swept, like huge icy mountains. And we're going to nav, it's a multi-week long course. It's a pretty long course.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And they're going to get to X number of checkpoints and we'll be out in February of 1959 or whatever it is. So, uh, there was a protocol in place for if they didn't get to a checkpoint. Um, I believe there's a little bit of grace period if they didn't hit a checkpoint. They had to, I forget how they were even in contact, but either way, there was a little bit of grace. Uh, and then at, at the end, when they finished, there was a little bit of grace if they were late. But for the most part, if you were late, it, you sort of failed the test right away. You had, I think, 24 hours or something. And so they pretty much enacted a rescue policy if you were late. Cause it's like, you already failed, we might as well get you out of there safe and sound. So I don't know exactly if they actually made their checkpoints, but I do know, because really the story picks up

• 32:08Speaker 01

  when it's clear they have not returned from the journey. They've entered the wilderness and they have not come out again. And this is not a place where there are other tourists. This might as well be Antarctica. This is like the middle of, of nowhere. And the university, they send out a cursory search sometime in February to go look for these hikers and they have the route that they were supposed to be on. And they're going in reverse, they're sort of backtracking. And they get to this point where they look out and they see this huge mountain. And on the side of the mountain is this one canvas tent that's sort of, you know, conspicuously sitting on the side of the, the windswept side of the mountain, which is tactically like the worst place to put a tent. These are skilled mountaineers. They put it in, there's a crops of trees down here would have saved you from the wind, like,

• 32:53Speaker 01

  it's just an odd place. It's like an amateur would put a tent there. So already it's like red flag, but there's no hikers anywhere. They walk up to the tent and that's actually the tent right there on the left. Uh, and it's collapsed, they see that. And even though I don't think you can tell from this picture, but they pulled the snow off of it and they looked at this tent and there was a cut made in the tent that looked like someone had cut it with a knife. But it apparently, based on the way the threads looked, it had been cut from the inside out. So somebody in this tent, and it was the hiker's tent, one, because there's nobody else out here, but two, there are, some of their equipment was still inside the tent that identified it as theirs.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Hikers are not there, it's been cut open from the inside out. A lot of their clothing that would have been required to survive in the cold, it was negative 40 degrees, was still in the tent, like lots of cold weather gear was still sitting in the tent. So it's like, okay, this is really bad. Where are they? Uh, also fun fact, I learned minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit is the same as minus 40 degrees Celsius.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Fun fact.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Oh shit, I didn't know that.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  So they, they, the university, they realized that we now have a, a pretty serious problem here. Cause this is obviously quite bad. So they round up, I believe the police, or not the police, the, I think the army was rounded up for a much more robust search. And they ended up finding a set of, uh, prints in the snow not far from the tent that initially, I guess they discounted, but it was prints left by the hikers. And they were traveling in a group and the footprints were, there were at least eight sets of prints. There were nine total hikers, they could see eight for sure. Many of them only had one shoe on, so it's like barefoot boot or barefoot sock or just two bare feet or two boots. But again, you're, you're entering the, you know, negative 40 degrees, you know,

• 34:35Speaker 01

  the, the cold had made no sense and they'd cut their tent open. And they, they saw that the cadence of the footsteps were, they were not running. Like, these are not people running down the mountain, they're walking. The space between all the steps was a very casual pace. And so they follow these footsteps down the hill and it brings them to this, this forest. There weren't, there, not a forest, it was a crops of trees, it was pretty small. And the footsteps sort of stop at the edge. And they're looking into this, this dark, foreboding forest. And they can't see anybody in there. And they start weaving their way into the trees, they pick up a few, a few prints here and there. And it brings them to this, this clearing where there's this huge cedar tree that's right in the middle of the, uh, the clearing. And at the base of the tree is one of the hikers.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Uh, and there's a, a burned out fire, a little puny little fire that couldn't have provided much warmth that's burned out. And one of the hikers is, is sort of curled around it like they were trying to get warm. And they're deceased, they're, they're, they're not really wearing enough clothes. They're, they're clearly died from some sort of exposure, hypothermia, whatever. Uh, and then they see the tree has various scratch marks in it, not, not super aggressive, but there's some scratch marks in it. And they also found higher up the tree, there were, uh, broken branches and some human, it sounds aggressive, but there's human flesh. But it suggests someone had climbed pretty high up the tree at one point and left behind their skin.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And then, uh, one report said there was one of the hikers draped in a tree. Uh, I actually recently have seen, I don't think that was true, but there were two other hikers that were on the ground near the guy near the fire. So there's like three hikers that are all dead, all in various stages of sort of bedraggledness, their clothes were all fucked up. And they're all dead. And one of them, later they would find he had some of his own skin, I think from his hand and his mouth, like he had swallowed it. So he was eating his, himself, presumably. Or, you know, theoretically, someone could have put it into his mouth, but it looked like he was eating himself.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  But they're missing the other hikers. And so they look within the forest and they find another two hikers, uh, that were a little bit further away from the cedar tree. They're also all dead. So they're all dead. It looks like, okay, something caused them to flee their tent. They, they weren't prepared, their clothes are not right. Hypothermia, you know, mass hysteria. I mean, it looks like this is just a horrible tragedy.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  They also haven't found the other four hikers yet, but already the picture they're painting is this is, this is like a mass hysteria event or something. But these are also very experienced mountaineers who, who go into this type of environment a lot. You know, it'd be like if you went on your podcast and then suddenly forgot how to do your podcast. It'd be like, I guess that's possible, but realistically, it's just not going to happen. And so it was like, okay, maybe that's what it is. But they couldn't find the other hikers. And it was, the, the weather was quite bad. And so they decide at this point, it's, it's not going to be a, we're not going to find them. Or I should say, it's a body recovery at this point. Like they're, they're very likely dead if these five have been found dead already. So they wait until the, the snow thaws and they come back in the spring and like May.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And they, there's still quite a bit of snow out there, but there's the remains of this old snow cave, this big snowdrift. And they find the other four hikers inside. They've clearly taken shelter inside of this, this cave. And, um, they have just catastrophic injuries. They're all dead. Uh, one of them has this chest injury that was consistent with being struck by a speeding train, I think they said. However, Lexo's chest is, is caved in, like utterly caved in, but he has no or very limited lacerations or bruising on his skin. It's almost like his chest caved in without any external force being applied. Um, one, the woman, she had her lips, her eyelids, and I think a piece of her nose, or maybe her ears, I forget which.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  They were gone. Animal predation is a thing. After you die, animals might pick at your body, but usually there's a tearing to it, like it doesn't look neat. And these were neat, like almost like cuts were made in her face to, to pull the skin off of her face. Um, one guy was missing his eyeballs, but again, animal predation, that could have explained that one as well. They were wearing the others' clothing, at least some, some variation of the others' clothing. So they weren't wearing enough, but like the woman was wearing men's clothing and the men were wearing women's clothing. Uh, and there were trace levels of radiation on several, several of their clothing, clothings. Uh, and so they're all dead.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Radiation, yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  And so this is, this, this discovery is made. And in some ways, this, this story was already pretty big in Russia at the time, because the hikers' families were really up in arms about how little information had been discovered. It just sort of felt like, how in the world can this have happened? And there isn't some huge investigation. Why aren't we doing more? We can't just say, oh yeah, they went crazy and just died out there. We'll find the others in the spring. They were already pretty mad. And so when this happened, Russia in turn, they did launch a fairly public investigation into what happened and really just to, to respond to the outcry.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  But they very quickly shut the investigation down and classified it all. And the families were not given much in the way of information. They were just sort of told, oh, yeah, like, we're just gonna shut it down. But some information got out. One, and more today, because they unredacted, or, yeah, they unredacted most of it. One is the conclusion that Russia came to is that the nine hikers who died, they didn't die from exposure. They died from a compelling force, was what they described it as. A compelling force, that was it.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  And then, in addition, there were all these people in Russia in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, on the outskirts, including a fairly senior military official, who was running a military operation or a training exercise in the Urals, but not close, just but somewhere in the Urals, that reported these orbs of fire. Independent people who did not talk to each other, described orbs of fire shooting up and down in the Ural Mountains around the same time that these hikers all died. And the military guy, he even went so far as to say that he thought they were being invaded. And he stopped the exercise, this huge military exercise, because he was fearful that we might actually need to go literally defend our country right now.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  No one ever explained what the orbs of fire were. Compelling force was all that was given for what happened.

• 41:04Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, what does that mean?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  So they went classified. And so this mystery remained a mystery for decades. And everyone's like, holy shit. And also, there's pictures, like, there's more pictures from this. There's pictures of the hikers when they step out. They're all in good spirits, everyone's so happy. They're like doing selfies in like 1959. It's like, wow, like, it's the sort of a movie, it's so nice. And then it's just like, just death and destruction.

• 41:28Mark Gagnon?

  See, I was thinking like a bear attacked them in the tent and they had to leave in a hurry. That's why they didn't have all the shoes.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  There's like no animals out there.

• 41:34Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  So, finally, in 2020, and this is probably part of the reason why the story really went as big as it did for me on my TikTok page, is I told it by saying, at the end of this story, you're gonna Google two words. And then I tell this little bit about what happened. And then at the end, I say, this is known as the Dyatlov Pass. If you Google Dyatlov Pass, it's this fucking mystery. And right around that time, Russia unredacted what happened and they gave more information. It was definitely not, nothing to do with me, it was just timing. And they did their own new investigation into the Dyatlov Pass and what happened. And they concluded that it was an avalanche. There you go.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  But the thing is, is like, I'm saying it sort of like facetiously. No one really buys that.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  Oh, no one buys the avalanche thing?

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Well, because there's so many discrepancies. They were like, oh, an ice slab broke off and it caused them to run out of their tent. And, you know, that's why. And then they sort of like got scattered and they died. And like, okay, fine, totally buy that like there could be a sudden, oh, my God, ice is crashing down, we gotta go.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  You hear the ice, you cut out of the tent, I think, Mark, you were explaining this to us. I don't know if it was another pod, but was it, did we record a pod? So you hear the avalanche, you cut out a tent because the tent is organized in a way where unhooking all the things is more time consuming than just cutting out. You don't have all your stuff because you gotta go right now, you die. So like, that part makes sense.

• 43:05Mark Gagnon?

  Totally, trying to climb up the tree to, you know.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Oh, climb up the tree, some of your skin is on the tree because you're climbing a fucking tree.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Start eating your hand because you're scared, you know?

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Now, we're getting a little weird.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Lose our eyeballs because there's, you know, animals, birds and stuff.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  You start eating your eyes, you take your knife out, you cut your lips off.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  What about lips for, what about lips is you get, what is that called?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Chap lips.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Chap lips.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Chap lips is a nightmare.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  It's a frostbite and then when it thaws, it just decomposes.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Oh, and it's just frostbite and it turns black?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  They were getting ahead of it.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  So just cut it off so it's frostbite.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Okay, so you don't buy it, you think something fish is going on.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Well, the radiation thing is weird.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  The what?

• 43:47Speaker 02

  The radiation.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they're Russian, like, I don't know, I feel like. It was very low levels. And so people have said that it's possible that their clothes could have been contaminated going in. But like, I think that the thing that stands out is that the reports of the multiple fireballs, those reports hadn't been made before. And so many people did it and they're like, oh, that's weird. It's in the same spot where all those hikers just died really mysteriously. Gotta be an avalanche.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  But couldn't that be like Russia's just trying to sweat us? Like, we get all the aliens, they get none. They're trying to use a tragedy to like make us think, oh, the aliens like us too.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that could be it.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Because aliens don't go anywhere but America.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  That's right, that is how aliens work.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  I've never heard of anybody say there's aliens, and Brazil, but that's part of the Americas and they've probably seen a porn that came out.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  That's how it is, that's how it is.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Also, if you're an alien, where are you gonna go?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  I mean, America.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, go to Russia.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Shit seems whack.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. If you're Ukrainian, where do you want to go? You want to go to America, everyone wants to go to America.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Ukraine is kind of lit, I'm not gonna lie. All right, all right, all right, so that's the Dyatlov Pass. But that, we can find like certain, there's certain.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  What about military testing that then caused the avalanche?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Ooh. Well, that's another theory, is that perhaps Russia was testing military equipment. And they're like, oh, boy, that went wrong.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Oopsie daisy.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Better cover that up.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  I feel like that's the most plausible one.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that would explain the fireballs.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're doing some military testing, it caused an avalanche, they have to cover it up because they're like, you know, we accidentally killed nine people. And so then they're like, oh, it's just a regular old avalanche. And then the families are like, well, they wouldn't have gone in an avalanche area. And they're like, eh, don't look into it.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Dude, I have a great story that's in the same vein as this one, but very different genre, you know what I mean?

• 45:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  So there's this dude, David Lewis, this is in 1989. Successful lawyer, he lives in Amarillo, Texas with his wife and his young daughter. And in many ways, his life is sort of unremarkable. He's sort of, he's living the American dream, if you will. But, you know, he's sort of living a basic life, he likes to watch sports, he's got a couple of friends, he goes to work nine to five. And in January of that year, this is again 1989, his wife and his daughter, they decide they're gonna go on this weekend trip to Dallas. I think it was to see family, but it was a trip that normally David would have gone with them to just go be a part of the trip. But it was the Super Bowl weekend. And he's like, actually, you know, I'm gonna stay here, I'm gonna just watch the Super Bowl, you guys go, you know, see when you get back. And they're like, okay.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  And there's nothing going on in his life or their life, everything's fine. And he's like a total nerd, like a dude with glasses, like just, David Lewis, you're probably gonna give it away if you Google it, so you might want to hold on.

• 46:25Mark Gagnon?

  I won't give it away.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Anyhow, so the mom and the daughter, they leave. And they come back a couple of days later, on the day of the Super Bowl. They actually returned to their house in Amarillo, like literally within 30 minutes of the actual game coming to an end. And when they get to the house, they expected to see her husband, her father, either, you know, cleaning up after having watched the game or, you know, still watching the post-game or something. But they go in the house and there's nothing odd about the inside of the house, but they see the TV's on and it's on the channel for the Super Bowl and the game's over, it's post-game. And David had a habit of recording major sports games, like the Super Bowl, World Series.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  And so the VHS was still recording, like he had clearly hit record at the start of the game. But David's not in the room with the TV. And so the wife is walking around the first floor, she's calling out for David and he's not, it doesn't appear to be here. She gets to the kitchen and she sees that his wedding ring and his watch are sitting on the counter, which is a little bit weird, she can't, she couldn't recall the time that he did that, but it was like odd. So she's in the kitchen, like, what in the world, like, he's not here? She ends up opening the fridge and she sees there are two freshly made turkey sandwiches, which was sort of his go-to sandwich, just sitting in the fridge. And so she's like, that's so weird, like, all signs point to David should still be here. And then she went outside and she realized she hadn't noticed, but his car was actually not in the driveway. She just hadn't seen it when she showed up.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  And so she's like, okay, he probably went to go catch the end of the game with a friend or something. And apparently, their return trip that night was a little bit early. So she's thinking, he didn't know we'd even be here right now. So it's totally normal, he's probably out at a buddy's house, he'll be home soon. And it's 1989, she can't really call him. So she's like, okay, whatever. So she stays up, her daughter goes to bed and she's just waiting for David to come back. But David doesn't come back. And so she ultimately, the wife, just goes to bed thinking, okay, he's a responsible guy, there's, you know, no sign of anything wrong here, it's a little weird, but everything's fine. So she goes to bed and then she gets up in the morning, David's still not home. So at this point, she's concerned, she goes to the police. The police, that day, they start searching Amarillo for David

• 48:33Speaker 01

  and they quickly find his car and it's been abandoned near the courthouse. Remember, he's a lawyer, just for reference, so it's near the courthouse. And no damage to his car, but it's parked in the lot, he's not there, there's no sign of him, he's not in the courthouse. And they look in the car and they find his checkbook, his license, his wallet, are in sort of the cup holders where he would normally keep them. And then under the mat on the driver's side were the keys to the car and the keys to his house. And so David's not there, his stuff's all been left here. They look all over that area, they can't find him, no one's seen David. He did not go to a friend's house, at least not anyone they know. And so no one has any idea what happens to David, what's happened to David.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  So the wife is immediately brought in, like, you gotta tell us, like, is there, was there any sign of something going on with David at all, like, that you can think of? Because this seems like foul play could be involved. And she's like, no, the only thing I can think of is that he was supposed to give a deposition in the next couple of weeks for the old law firm that he worked for. They were wrapped up in a really vicious lawsuit with a high-profile client. And the law firm was being accused of something like medical, like malpractice. And the firm was trying to get David to lie in this deposition to protect the firm. They didn't know this, but he was not prepared to lie under oath. He had told his wife, I'm going to tell the truth, even if it hurts somebody.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  And so she had said, David had said to me, I feel like I'm in danger. But she had always interpreted that as, I think that in the future, if I do this, something could happen. Like, if I destroy somebody's image, I could be in danger. And so she thought that it was like, you're doing the right thing, it is what it is. But she's like, beyond that, there's nothing else in his life. So the police don't have much to go on, they expand their search, but there's no sign of David. And 11 months later, David still hasn't shown up and they officially say, this is no longer being viewed as a crime. We're gonna view this as David chose to disappear. We believe he's elected to basically abandon his life, people do do that, he's an adult, there's no sign of a crime.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  They interviewed the law firm and the client, like, they're like, oh, my God, I have no idea. So it's just, it's just decided that, well, I guess David just went his own way, it is what it is. And so the family's left with nothing. I believe it was 11 years later, so 2004, that was 1993. This is actually, yeah, 1993, for sure, that was the start. So now it's 2004. And out in Washington State, there's this cop who is a big true crime enthusiast. He loves, just personally, he loves true crime, and he's a cop, part of the reason he was a cop. And he was always digging into like rabbit holes of unsolved mysteries. He thought they're really interesting. And he had just learned about this

• 51:24Speaker 01

  one particular mystery of this, this hit and run. It was a John Doe that had happened in Washington State. He'd actually, it was one of the first cases that he had worked on when he became a cop 11 years earlier. He began investigating it, investigating it because people were like talking about it online. Basically, this guy had been struck on the side of the road in Washington, and he had no ID. He was wearing military fatigues, and he was just walking along this highway, and, and this cop had been the first on the scene, and he had seen him. And like, it just stuck with him. It was this weird thing where nobody ever identified him. Simultaneously, he saw this like news report, this cop did, about how David Lewis was still missing after 11 years, and the family was giving an interview about David Lewis, and he

• 52:06Speaker 01

  saw a picture of David Lewis. And he was like, oh my God, I think that's the same guy from the John Doe case. I think he's the guy who got hit 11 years ago. And so he pulled out the evidence, I suppose, that included the glasses of the guy who was hit and killed. It was the same prescription, same type of glasses. They ultimately did DNA. It took a minute, but they discovered that sure enough, the John Doe, who had been a totally unidentified body on the side of the road, was David Lewis, which means, also, when he was hit and killed was 24 hours after the, the wife and daughter came home from the trip. So if we follow the, what's happened here, David Lewis starts watching the game, the Super Bowl game, assuming that he's the guy

• 52:48Speaker 01

  who turned the TV on and hit record on the VHS. Within 24 hours, without the use of his car, without his ID, without any of his belongings, he winds up 1,600 miles away in Yokima, Washington, walking along a deserted highway, is struck and killed, and he's wearing top to bottom military fatigues. He has no identification on him, and no one, he has no connections in Yokima. The client, the high-profile client in the law firm had nothing to do with Washington, but that was definitely him on the side of the road. And to this day, no one has any idea what happened to David Lewis or why.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  They took him out.

• 53:23Mark Gagnon?

  Fire.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  They took him out.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  But how?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  We don't know.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  How do you take him out and then move him to Washington?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  What a convoluted way to take somebody out.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I mean.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  There he is.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Is it, I hope I have the name right, David Lewis.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  There he is.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  So what do you think happened?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, like, there's definitely cases. Have you ever heard of a thing called a fugue state?

• 53:44Speaker 00

  No.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Oh, man, you want to see some crazy stories? I got another crazy fugue state story.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Basically, there are these people who, there are not necessarily precursors that are known that can cause a fugue state. I'm not saying he was in the fugue state, but imagine you suddenly break from reality. Like, you, you wouldn't be aware of it, because if you break from reality, you don't know you've broken from reality. But you don't totally go crazy. It's almost like you just sort of become a different person.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  But your old self has no idea that this person ever, it's like the, the show Severance, you know the show Severance?

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  It's like, you snap, and you become this other person, and you're unaware of the old person.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And you're in this state for sometimes long periods of time. People have committed murders in their fugue state, and then be deemed, and they have been deemed not guilty because they were in a fugue state.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, we almost saw that happen last week.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, there you go. It happens. So, uh, so.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  I believe women call it having their period.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  It's just a little fugue state, guys.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  A little fugue state. So I, I think that could have happened with him, but then it just doesn't really explain how he gets there. The 1,600 miles is the issue.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  So it's not possible that they killed him, they took him there, and then they just dropped him off on the side of the highway?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  That's another way to look at it. Actually, you know what? That probably seems to be most likely it. He's killed somewhere else, dropped in Yokima.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  You know what's funny? I've never thought about it that way. That actually does sound like that's, unless there's some evidence that shows somebody saw the accident.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  They know he's gonna tell the truth. They can't have him tell the truth, right? Because then the law firm is gonna be, I don't know what's gonna happen to them. I don't know what.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  That feels like, unless there's proof that somebody saw him get hit in Washington, he probably got killed and dumped.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, they kill him at his house.

• 55:32Mark Gagnon?

  I thought he was a secret spy, and being the lawyer is just his cover.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 55:38Speaker 00

  He could be like a little.

• 55:39Speaker 04

  There were calls, there was someone wandering the street where he was hit, minutes before.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he, oh, yeah, if he's wandering, he could have been planted and then struck. You'll put him out there, we're gonna hit him in Yokima.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, can they prove that he was struck? Like, does he have entries on the body?

• 55:55Speaker 04

  Autopsy?

• 55:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  I bet you can find that, though.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  But there's a nut, so there's another guy.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  Autopsy is consistent with being struck by a vehicle. No evidence of drugs in the bloodstream.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no drugs, just everything, too.

• 56:07Speaker 00

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• 59:06Speaker 00

  Yes. We can all stop pretending to care about politics. Yes. Thank the Lord. We have 18 straight weeks of actually caring about something that is important in the world. Knicks in five. I think it's gonna be Knicks in five.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Don't you wish the Knicks just played every sport? Because I feel like that's the only thing you guys really get excited about.

• 59:25Mark Gagnon?

  It really is the only thing. We would do better this season if we had the Knicks on the field, I think.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  I mean, who do New Yorkers even like? You guys like the Jets or something?

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Depends.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  On what?

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Depends.

• 59:35Mark Gagnon?

  Which one plays better?

• 59:36Speaker 00

  I go worse. Jets or Giants, whoever's worse.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  I mean, who, like, what team's colors go best for you?

• 59:44Mark Gagnon?

  I go blue.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  You go blue.

• 59:45Mark Gagnon?

  Giants, Giants, all day.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  I'm going for 49ers. I'm going for the 49ers this year. They've, they've won me over. I, I, this is the team I've read about the most so far. It's like, this year is the team that I've been the most invested in.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Do you know the owner, the same week, got like a handjob and got arrested at like a massage parlor?

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Apparently, we were a part of the psy-op.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, you kill the story with a story. Because now every time somebody Googles 49ers, they're gonna hear about this other dude instead of the owner.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  But then we got you back.

• 1:00:15Mark Gagnon?

  What are these owners getting handjobs? Didn't the Patriots owner also get a handjob?

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  Man, can, why can't they get that? Why can't they get that?

• 1:00:23Mark Gagnon?

  Just buy some pussy.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  They, they are.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  That's the point. That's what they're doing.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  But the handjobs, like, come on.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  They're not from their wives. How do you think they're getting the handjobs?

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  They can't even risk it. They can't even risk it. Yeah. Also, it's just like a, whatever. It's a completion thing.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Do you know what I mean? Like, how can you really be relaxed?

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  All right, so who do we think's gonna win the Super Bowl, honestly?

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  I mean, Kelsey's got the Rams. They got them at 15%. But I think we need to go, I think we need to go all in right now.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  You know, where are the Giants?

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  Oh, they're way up. Keep going. 2%.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  And then Jets?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Even lower.

• 1:01:00Speaker 04

  Less than 1%.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  But you could come up. You could come up.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  How could you be negative 1%?

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  Less than 1%.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  But what, if you put a dollar on that, you make a trillion dollars? What's the math on that?

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you just win. You, you win everything. You become Elon Musk tomorrow.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  So, but that means is there's not even somebody willing to take on your trade. There's no trade volume.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's impressive.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Nah, that's the one.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  I think we gotta do that.

• 1:01:28Mark Gagnon?

  Right?

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  I'm going Jets.

• 1:01:29Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, now I'm all in on Jets.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  I'm going Jets.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Become the richest guy in the world?

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Ever.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fire.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  I mean, what's the likelihood that like an asteroid hits the world? Like, is it higher than that? It's more likely that the world doesn't exist than the Jets win the Super Bowl.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  Yo, that's crazy.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  That's crazy, right?

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  That is crazy.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Kind of impressive.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  But also, yeah. Like, I do believe that there's a higher likelihood of an asteroid hitting than the Jets winning.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  Because I can't see a course of action where the Jets could possibly win. But I can see an asteroid hitting the Earth.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  You can see God resetting this whole thing.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that seems more likely. The gods, like, hey, this is run amok. We gotta fix this.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  That's sad, bro.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  That's sad.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  But I would love for the Jets to win, just so they can clip this moment of you being like, I don't see it. And then to see that go viral.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Happened before. It's happened before. Jets, if it happens for you, you're welcome. Okay, I want tickets to that Super Bowl if you guys get there. Anyway, let's get back to the show, boys.

• 1:02:31Speaker 05

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  Okay, what's the other one?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  The other one, this one is better because the conclusion's a little bit harder, but it lands in the same domain. This one's more recent, too. So in 2018, there's this guy Danny Philippitis. Have you heard this name? Okay, great. It's a great story. Yeah, I wouldn't Google it, it'll give it away. So Danny Philippitis, he's a 40 something year old firefighter in Canada. And he and his firefighter buddies every year have this trip where they go to Whiteface Mountain in upstate New York to go skiing. It's like their retreat. They go there, they drink, they party, they have a great time with their family. And so in 2018, they have this trip. They go to Whiteface Mountain, and it's going great, you know, good day skiing up on the mountain. And at some point during the day, there's a ski lodge that's like halfway up the mountain,

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  or maybe it's a little restaurant or something, but the group of them, like 12 of them, they decide to stop and take a minute and get a cup of coffee or whatever. They go in the lodge. And Danny is like, oh, shoot, I left my, I think it was his cellphone or his wallet down at the main lodge down below. I have to go get it, so I'll be right back. And so they're, ah, cool, dude. So he takes off, and they see him ski down the mountain, and he's a good skier, you know. This is an easy stretch from here down, right? But he doesn't come back up. And at first, the guys that he was with weren't like, oh, my God, where's Danny? It was just sort of like, ah, what an asshole. Like, he sort of blew us off. Like, he's doing something else, right? But over the course of the day, they can't find Danny. They're calling Danny, he's not picking up. They're talking to his wife who was there. She doesn't know where he is.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  No one's seen him, but no one's really worried yet. It's broad daylight. There's been no reports of accidents or anything. Like, he's got to be here. But by the end of the day, as it's like time to wrap up, and they were staying there overnight. They had stayed, and they're all staying in the hotel that was right at the base of the mountain. They're like, man, like, where is he? And they're like, you know what we should do? Let's just go to his room. He probably just like got tired, went to his room. And so they walk over. This is the whole group, wife, everybody. They walk over and they see his car is still in the parking lot. And they go up to his room. And his wife had a key, or it was their room. Actually, I think it was separate. Either way, they go in. Danny's not in there, but all of the things that he would carry on his person were. His phone, his wallet, like he had a knife that he always carried, like all the things that you would take with you,

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  like he left them all in the room. But Danny's not in there. And so now, it's like, what happened? Now, really, what happened to Danny? There's no good reason for this. And so they tell the mountain, like, this is a big deal. The police get involved. And that night, a storm rolls in, and the police go out looking for this guy. And, you know, the search was sort of futile because of how bad the weather was. And so they end up packing it up for the night, and they're like, we'll just come back in the morning. We'll try to get the mountain to stop operations so we can really look for him. Chances are good, if he makes it through the night, we'll find him tomorrow. Next day comes around, mountain is like, no, we're going to run operations. It's peak season, we're not doing that. Like, there's been no reports of any injury. Like, you guys got to look on your own. So with a very crowded mountain,

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  which made the search really difficult. They're looking for Danny. They're asking anybody, do you have footage of this guy? Here's what he looks like. They're asking for anybody that might have taken photos of the parking lot to see if maybe he left at some point, anything. And like, they've got no usable leads. And so that day, and I think two more days, these were all the days that the whole group was still going to be in New York. There's this search that's happening on this very crowded mountain. Danny doesn't show up, there's no sign of him. And then comes the last day where they're checking out of their hotel. There's no sign of Danny, no one can find him. And they are like, well, we have to go back to Canada. You know, our lives go on, so they go back to Canada. And they're in touch with police in New York, and they're carrying on the search, but they just, they can't find Danny. But they're like, don't worry, we're going to keep looking. Like, we're not losing faith.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  But over the coming days, it's like the family sort of realizes very likely at this point Danny's dead. I mean, there's just, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where he's not dead if he was somewhere out on the mountain. Don't know why, but that's the reality. But seven days after he goes missing, so from the day, you know, things started getting weird, his wife is back home in Canada, and she gets a phone call, and it's fucking Danny. And she answers the phone, and Danny's like, I don't know why I'm calling you, but I know this number. Like, how do I know you? And she knows it's his voice. And she's like, oh, my God, Danny, is that you? And he's like, yeah, I think my name's Danny. He's like really confused, but he knew this number. And she, through this very broken conversation, comes to find out, according to Danny,

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  that he's in Sacramento, California. So like thousands of miles away from Whiteface, very far away from Canada, too. And so their conversation ends up getting broken up, and he hangs up or something. But he had imparted to her Sacramento and airport. Those things came out of his mouth. And so she immediately calls police, and the police, actually in New York, and she tells them, they get in touch with the police in Sacramento, and they're like, go to the airport and see if you can find this guy. Maybe he's got a head injury or something, we don't know. And so they go to the airport, and they find Danny really quickly. Because Danny is wearing ski gear, top to bottom, walking around the airport, ski boots, ski pants, ski top. He's still had his helmet on, goggles.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  But like, you know how people are when they see really crazy people? We just ignore them, completely ignore them. I'm not going to engage with you at all. And so Danny's just wandering around the airport in full ski gear. And then inexplicably, he also had a haircut, although he didn't have his phone. He had a new phone. He had a phone that he had recently bought, an iPhone. He had $1,000 cash. He had no bank transactions whatsoever over those seven days, but he had new credit cards. And he had no idea how he got there. And they scoop him up, and they bring him back to Canada. And they like do all this testing on him, and he kind of like comes back to reality, if you will. He had no brain damage. He didn't show any drug use. Like, he's okay now, but he has no fucking clue

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  how he got off the mountain, how he inexplicably traveled to California, got a haircut. They asked all the barbers in Sacramento, did you give the guy in ski gear a haircut? No one knew how he got the haircut. They checked the stores that sold iPhones, no one knew. The only thing he said is he thought maybe he hit his head, but he was like, I don't even know. I might just be saying that because it seems to answer the question of what happened to me. And he remembers being, he was sleeping somewhere that he thought might have been a truck. But they interviewed all these truck drivers that drove in that area, and not one person recalled a man in ski gear sleeping in their cabin. But Danny has fully recovered. He's fully, the other thing that's funny is Danny was super collaborative with the New York State Police

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  because they were sort of embarrassed that Danny shows up after this huge effort to find him. It was like, wait a minute. So Danny in ski gear is just wandering around Sacramento? You missed that one? And so New York was like trying to save face, the state police. And Danny was like doing interviews, being like, I want to know what happened. I don't know what happened. And like, the state police were like, yeah, he talks to us constantly. He's given us everything he can, but we have no idea what happened.

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  How long was he away for?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  It was a week.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Sometimes that's all you need as a dad, man. Sometimes that's all you need.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  You're seeing the reset, dude.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Like, women will just kill their kids, but men, we just need a fugue state. We need a week away in Sacramento, California just to get our head together, and then we're back and locked in.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a changed man.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. That's really all you need, is just a little bit of a break.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, we got to investigate the family and see what was going on.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  You said there was no bank transactions?

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  So how'd he get the money?

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  No one knows.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  How did you get without your car to Sacramento?

• 1:10:42Speaker 00

  You don't think that he planned, like, when we're going on the ski trip, and then he just left? You don't think he knew exactly where he was going?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Hitting a fugue state real quick.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Exactly, I'm hitting a fugue. I'm hitting a little fugue state. I got a thousand bucks that I took out my wife don't even know about, right? And now I'm in Sacramento. Where can you go where for sure she won't come? You know what? This is fantastic. And then he had to like make it obvious. He had to like buy a fucking ski outfit in Sacramento. He called his wife, he's like, they're really not going to find me? He was getting tired.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Did they go through like planes? Like, they can see if he flew, right?

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  A week you could drive. Police, they, you can tell they wanted to show they tried really hard because it seems like you just sort of missed the guy. Yeah. But no, they did all these press conferences where they're like, he has been nothing but collaborative and we don't have a good explanation. Holy shit.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  That's what we do, man. There's a lot of deaths that went on a few.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  I'm gonna plan one of these.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  All right, Mark believes in demons.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. Nice demons.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  He believes in them though, like.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  So any stories you have with demons, he, he, he watches them and he goes, this is proof that what I already believe is real.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Well, I've never seen one. I've never seen one, but I do, I don't want to see one. Cause I, I think, I think that's a fair position.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  No, that is a fair position. I don't know. The crazy thing is with covering so many stories is I, I don't, I don't know sometimes whether someone's perspective is true. And we're talking about like demon stories. A lot of times you're dealing with somebody's perspective, which whether it's true or not, like it's their perspective. They're saying this is what happened to me. But oftentimes the stories that are the most compelling are people that are almost in denial that it happened to them, but they didn't want it to be true. They're looking for an out. Yeah. People that want you to see the demon in their story are people that are harder to believe. Yeah.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Or if there's an outside observer.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Like there was this one, uh, yeah, or an outside observer. There was this one, and this is, this is a story that to be honest, I don't know what to make of it. Uh, I think it's a creepy story nonetheless, but it, I don't know if it even falls into demon or not, but there was this, this wildland firefighter out in, I think it was Iowa. He was a smoke jumper. You know what those guys are?

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  They jump into the fire.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  High speed dudes. Yeah, those guys are like special operations firefighters. They're very cool. So they jump in, uh, I think it was this huge fire in Iowa and where they landed apparently was like not the ideal drop zone. And so one thing led to another and one of the firefighters who, who ends up telling the story, I think his name is Mike. He, uh, he sees there's a property that's like sort of nearby and there's an ATV that's outside that he was able to turn on and there's an access road. And for whatever reason, this is off the cuff here, he knows that if he takes this ATV and, and like blazes down this off, this, this road over here, he can apparently get a vantage point on the fire that is really valuable to make sense of where they need to go next. So like strategically, if I just go down this road, I can grab this ATV, take a look,

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  come back and we can make a decision. So his team, they're relatively safe. They stay in this like field, waiting to see what's going to happen. Mike's like, this will be super quick. And so he hops on the ATV and he takes off into this forest and it's like a logging road or not a logging road, it's an access road, but it's very densely forested on either side. And so he's burning down this trail. He's, it's broad daylight. He's, he's not thinking about anything other than this fire, but he, he said that he started hearing these screeching sounds coming from out in the woods, like really distinct screeching sounds. And I think he was a hunter. The impression I got was he was a guy who spent a lot of time in the wild. Because he was like, it wasn't like an animal that you would hear out on the trail. This was something different.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  And to the point where he stopped on his ATV to just listen and he's got places to go and he's stopping to listen to this thing, but he, he couldn't hear anything. And so he's driving along, he's driving along and then he sees, what is it? Uh, I think it's a cougar, a mountain lion. That's what it was. So he ends up seeing a mountain lion and mountain lions apparently make a really bizarre screeching noise. I think it's a mountain lion. I guarantee, I think I'm like 99% sure it's a mountain lion.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  They sound like, like women screaming.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  Okay, then that, there you go. Okay, perfect. Then this is the right animal. So he sees this cougar, this mountain lion, it comes bolting up onto this branch that's sitting over the trail he's on. It's pretty high up, but it's a branch that's just overhanging and it's this mountain lion and it's perched and it's staring right at Mike as he stopped looking around for it. He sees this thing and he's like, oh, fuck, like that's, it's kind of gnarly that I'm in the middle of nowhere, this mountain lion staring at me. But he knew he can just blaze right through it. He's on his ATV, it is what it is. So he stares at this thing. He's fairly convinced that has to be the sounds I was hearing, although he couldn't really tell if there was more than one. He drives underneath the, uh, the scree, the, the mountain lion and the mountain lion doesn't do anything. It turns around and watches him, but Mike carries on down the trail.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  And then he eventually reaches where he can tell the trail is bending too far in the wrong direction. It's not going to put him in the position where he can get a good look at this fire or the smoke or whatever he needed. He could just tell, eh, this was a good idea, but I'm pretty much going to have to turn around and go back. But right at that point, he notices that off the road on the other side, like tucked away in the woods is this cabin. And there, this is protected land. There shouldn't have been anything built out here that wasn't official, like parkland. And so it just seemed odd that there looked to be a cabin that somebody was living in. This didn't look like a facilities building. And so he, he thinks that's weird enough that he stops and he gets off and he goes over to just tell if there's somebody in there like, hey, there's a fire, you gotta get out of here. So he walks up to this cabin, which is again, it's right in the middle of a pretty thick forest.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  And he sees that right away, it looks like it's in bad, bad repair. Like it's badly beaten up on the outside. It's got glass windows that are intact, but the door, which is like this old heavy door, has a fresh padlock on it and the padlock's been snapped. Like it's like a, it looks like someone had like screwed on a brand new, like with the eyelet and cover thing plus a padlock. And the lock is, is either on the ground or it snapped, but it looked like it had been forced open, but the door's still shut. And he's like, that's weird. That's, all of this is weird. He's thinking, maybe somebody like had to break the lock to go inside to make sure like nobody was in here, like what's going on? He goes up to the window and he looks inside and he sees that there's like, you know, clearly

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  like furniture and there's like chairs, there's no one in there, but it's, it looks lived in. Someone's definitely living here. It's not a facilities building. And he's like, man, that's, that's, that's fucking weird. Like this whole thing is just weird to me, but he's like, ah, you know, no big deal. I, I just gotta go back. Like this, this doesn't concern me. So he hops back on his ATV. He's stopping quite a bit. He's spending a lot of time. He's wasting a lot of time here. And he goes back up the trail and he starts hearing that screeching sound again, but he knows like it's probably that fucking mountain lion. He turns the corner and as he's driving, expecting to look up and see the mountain lion probably still on the branch, she sees that there is something on the branch, but it's not a mountain lion. It's a woman, a woman who was perched on the branch who was looking at him and she's vocalizing the sound that he's been hearing.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  She's, she's like screeching into the air.

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  Native, Native American?

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Like it looked indigenous. Yeah, it looked something like that. And so he, he sees her and he's so scared because he's like, what the fuck is this? That he just blazes right underneath it and like she turns around and she's watching him from the branch, almost like she's an animal on the branch. And he drives off and reconnects with his team and they ended up actually not even going in to fight the fire. They had landed in such a bad spot. They were pulled out. But, so that story in and of itself creepy, but the dude, his team, they had to stay in that area because they had to go back out like the next day to actually go try to quell this fire. And so he goes to a local tavern, this guy Mike, and he's just like, he's got this crazy story about, oh, this fucking weirdo out in the middle of the cabin, the screeching lady. And he sits down next to this guy, a local, and he starts talking about this, this fire

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  and he doesn't bring up the lady. He just has this story in his mind. And at some point, Mike talks to this guy, how he's a firefighter and that the area they were in, in, in the forest was over here, we need to go over here. And the guy's like, oh, you were over in whatever the name of it is, that section of the, the park. And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the wrong spot. The fire was over here, so we gotta go tomorrow over here. And he's like, oh, have you heard the story of like what's out there? And he's like, what do you mean? And he's like, oh yeah, like apparently there's this, there's a cabin out there and there's apparently a skinwalker, which is like this old native folklore thing about this woman who can shape shift, who lives in the cabin out there. And everyone says you don't go out to that part of the forest because there's a skinwalker out there, but that's probably bullshit. You know what I mean?

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  And Mike was like, holy shit. I think I saw a skinwalker.

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  Mark will believe these things. I believe, I believe it's Native American.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:19:33Speaker 00

  And I believe they're capable of being animals or whatever.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Wait, what? That's, that's. What do you mean, like spirit animals?

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, like they can be whatever their name is, like.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Like screeching lady.

• 1:19:44Speaker 00

  Screeching lady, cougar foot or whatever their things are. So I believe they're capable of doing that sort of shape shifting.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Probably should have done that a few hundred years ago.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  Maybe should have shape shifted into a gun or something. That would have been helpful, but now that we're here, you know, you shape shipped into a cougar, whatever, and you scare the people away.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  Who knows what the screeching was? Could have been a rain dance. That's how you get rid of the fire.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  That's, you know what? I feel like that's the angle no one's considering.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  That's actually super smart.

• 1:20:16Speaker 00

  What happened to the fire, guys?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  It didn't seem the fire was a priority in that story. It really felt like it was down the list. So many times.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  And heavy rainfall came immediately after it put the fire out.

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  Immediately after.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Protected the cabin.

• 1:20:27Speaker 00

  Let her cook. Let her cook. Now you believe in skinwalkers.

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  No, well, hold on, hold on. I don't, I don't know if I believe in skinwalkers, but I believe there's.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Is there anything you don't believe in?

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  The, the true story about nine 11? But that's not, that's not here or there, okay? That's not either here or there. I'm talking about like demons might be out there and might be doing some fishy stuff, maybe. I've never seen one, but there's people be talking about it.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  I believe in demons.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  Right, why not, dude? What about like the Ammons haunting? Latoya Ammons? You know about that one?

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  I mean, this one's corroborated by a nurse and a doctor. Stop smiling like that, dude. This is serious scary stuff.

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  Okay, go, go. Where is this?

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  Um, I think it's in Indiana.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  Or like Illinois, maybe out near like near Chicago. I mean, I can pull up all.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Is this the, the one? I don't, I don't wanna, I don't wanna spoil it, but is this like that, the house that is like very famous for what happened in there in Indiana that like, like some crazy stuff was actually corroborated to have happened in that house?

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  That's why it's weird to me, dude. It became a movie. It became Deliverance.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  Oh, squeal like a pig.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Not Deliverance.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  The Deliverance 2024 American super supernatural horror film. It came out in 2024.

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  No, that's not a supernatural horror.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Wrong, wrong Deliverance.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Different Deliverance.

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  The Deliverance we're thinking about is the Appalachian Mountains.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  Not the seventies.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Not that.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  The Deliverance.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  The guitar riffs immediately. Yeah, that's the one.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  So this is 2011. Latoya Ammons is living in a house with three kids. They're describing a poltergeist activity.

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  They get a priest over there. They got all these people to go over there and start like trying to exorcise these demons.

• 1:21:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  And they're getting like weird stuff. Door knobs are shaking, hearing creaking, typical kind of ghost activity.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  Well, could it be the baby daddy? Maybe he goes.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  Why would you assume baby daddy based off the story and the names?

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  Just saying, it's possible, right? All these things are possible.

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Her name's Latoya Ammons and you're assuming a lot and inferencing a lot about who she is.

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  I thought she was native.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  Thought she was native.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  We don't know anything about her background or socioeconomic status or race.

• 1:22:26Speaker 00

  Probably a great, great granddaughter of Samuel.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Samuel.

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  Samuel.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 1:22:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's where I was going with it.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  I said Ammons, but I like where your head's at.

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  Hey, alright, go on.

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  And the reason why it's weird to me is that according to the story,

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  I'd see you already have this unbelievable affect.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  What do you want me to do?

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  This belief and just kind of just be like, demons are real?

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  There's, you should do a Ouija board.

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  Okay, I wouldn't do that.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  Oh, why not?

• 1:22:56Speaker 00

  Because I'm superstitious.

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  But how is that different than demons?

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  It's very different.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  It's the same.

• 1:23:02Speaker 00

  No, because it's like, it could happen.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  That's how I feel.

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  I don't feel that way about demons.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  But it could, if you do a Ouija board right now, what happens?

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  I, I, bad luck exists. Demons, I don't know if that exists. You've seen bad luck before. You've seen someone miss a field goal that could, should hit.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, fair, but that could be demonic. That could be demonic, dude.

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  If demons are related, maybe. I just don't even understand what a demon is. It's too, um, too conceptual for me.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  Anyway, tell your story about Latoya Amens and her three children and the ghost.

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  According to the story.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  The nurse that was there reported to Child Protective Services. So they get moved to the hospital because they think that maybe the kids are having like epileptic episodes. There's some type of like material type of medical cause that's causing these children to act and behave strangely. Cause doctors and nurses and even child protective services are going to the house and the kids are like growling, their eyes are rolling back in their head. They're behaving very strangely. It seemed like demonic possession. So they get moved to a hospital. At the hospital.

• 1:24:01Speaker 00

  This is where?

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  This is in Illinois. No, this is Indiana. This is India. United States of America. Recently, first world country. The doctor that's there and the nurse both independently report that the child, in their words, I could find the New York Post article, climbed up the wall, did a flip, and then they had to restrain the child. And they reported this to the police. Medical personnel that are not necessarily stitious.

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  Asian? He, what are you talking about? I see you guys on the fucking six train do this all the time.

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  Very normal.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Showtime.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  Backflip on the subway. This is a very normal occurrence. Okay?

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  And they corroborate the story. They eventually move out of the house. And then the haunting stops and then the house gets demolished. To this day, the nurse and the doctor still maintain the story that the child did something that was inexplicable and supernatural, such as climbing up the wall. What was the reason? Who knows? Maybe they're athletic. Maybe they did a little flip. We don't know the whole story, but all I'm saying is it could be demonic. Who knows? I don't know if it is. You don't know either. That's the point.

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  But if you were a demon, like that's what you would make a kid do?

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Well, you have to, you have to, you're commanded by the spiritual domain.

• 1:25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, but what I'm saying is as a demon, the worst thing that you can make a kid do is a backflip off of a wall.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  I don't know what demons are up to. They're, they're instilling fear and then they're feeding off the fear.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, but wouldn't you make them like ma, you know, sew together clothing and sneakers?

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 00

  Doing a kickflip. Yeah, there's also that.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  What I'm saying is there's way better things that you can make a kid do.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  Demons aren't concerned with capitalism, dude.

• 1:25:33Speaker 00

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• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  I was asking like, what's one that you've recorded that after you've recorded, you go home and you go, ah, I wish I, I wish I didn't have it in my brain right now.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  I covered a story actually about 9/11, which, you know, obviously I've seen all the documentaries. I have my feelings about it as well, but like.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  What are your feelings?

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  I'm not getting into it.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Well, I'll say this. I'll say that that was a huge proponent of why I wanted to join the military. So played a massive outsized role in my life. And then I found when I came home from Afghanistan, not immediately, but years, years later, I'm like, hmm, things don't feel that connected anymore. So, but neither here nor there. The reason that story stuck with me is I actually didn't really expect, I didn't really expect the 9/11 story. It's something that's been so prevalent. It was all over the news. We watched it in real time. There's been so many documentaries. It's talked about relentlessly and that's great, but it's like,

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  it's, it's not something that would be necessarily shocking, but there was this one guy who now I feel bad that I don't remember his name, but there's only one story I covered like this. Where I, I broke from the model that I had been using. This is like back in 2022 where basically the only stories I would tell were if I could find like reliable source material and I don't need to talk to the people involved. Great if I can, but I can just do the research on my own because I need to turn this around in like a day.

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  And so really just from this, this, the space of doing it quickly. But I read this guy's POV in a magazine from having been in, I think, the North Tower. And he survived, obviously. But it was one of the most just gripping and devastating accounts of, of the attack because it wasn't really about the actual attack. It was about what were people doing inside of the building? And the, I read it and then I spoke to him and I got more context and he's not someone that did interviews. This is a singular time that he'd been pushed to tell this story. He, uh, he has this part where he describes what it was like to see people jumping.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  He had made it down to the lobby before the tower collapsed and he's looking out at the other tower. And, um, I'm probably getting the details a little bit wrong, but he was there as impact. People are hitting the ground. And the way he described it was not like the gruesomeness of it. He talked about, I looked up and I, like, he described seeing people in their last moments. They're falling to their death. And there are these people, these mothers and fathers who have like went to work that day and like, it's just a normal day for them. And now they're leaping to their death. In their final act, it's like this one woman as she's falling, she's pushing her skirt down. As she's tumbling towards the ground. And he just said it was like, people are, they were put in the most impossible situation.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  And to just see them making that choice and watching them end their lives over and over and over again. He was like a hauntsome, you know, to this day. And so I think that like, when I told the story, a lot of it was about his perspective of watching people jump to their deaths.

• 1:31:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  When you think about people ending their lives, a lot of times it feels like it's over there. It's some story, but this felt like intimate. And it felt like something we all, you know, for better or worse, experienced because we were, I certainly was alive for 9/11 and I've watched that stuff on TV and it was like, you're seeing a side of it that's the really human side. And I think about like somebody who just goes to work, dropped their kids off at daycare, goes to work. And then that day, your choices either burn to death or jump out to your death. And in your last moment, you're holding your skirt down before you die. It's just like really striking.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, the little details are, are the most disturbing in a way.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  Brutal, brutal.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  I weirdly feel the same way when I read about Pompeii.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  I've not read much about Pompeii.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  My bro, by the way, saw people jump out.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:32:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. He was down there at school. He was like in middle school or something like that. And like he went to like call the family because you're, you know, everybody gets to go to the payphone. I guess the payphone was like near, you know, window or the entry to school or whatever, but like, yeah.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  Holy shit, dude.

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 1:32:49Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  The loudest snack ever, by the way.

• 1:32:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. I was thinking they would mute my mic.

• 1:32:56Speaker 00

  I was thinking they would mute my mic.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Loudest Jimmy telling the saddest story ever.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  Well, I got, I got some ear bleach, whatever.

• 1:33:03Speaker 00

  I'm starving, dude. I had a overnight oath, but they can just mute my mic.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  What are you doing? What are you doing with these cords over there?

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  I'm sorry.

• 1:33:15Speaker 04

  Michael Wright, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  Michael Wright?

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Oh, is he okay? I mean, he's okay in the sense that he lived.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  No, that was his name.

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  Michael Wright?

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Yes. Did you look that up?

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  I did, yeah.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's Michael Wright. You should read it. His, his perspective is crazy. The article he did is crazy. But I have a, I have a clicky that is, that is, that is way better on.

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  Is that disrespectful?

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:33:41Speaker 00

  To be crunching on popcorners?

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  And our guest.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  No, dude, eat away, man.

• 1:33:46Speaker 00

  This is, we're by the fucking bonfire.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  This is chill, dude.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  Honestly, it's probably weird to tell these epic stories without the crunch of a graham cracker or the chew of a marshmallow. I'm trying to supplement that right now with some popcorners.

• 1:34:01Speaker 02

  Describe the most horrific day of modern America.

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  You didn't think people were eating during nine eleven? I mean, that's what's lost. Those are guys selling falafel and celebrating that morning. Okay, no, that's racist. No, it probably wasn't celebrating. He was fucking furious about it.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Nine eleven is a couple of days away, bro.

• 1:34:23Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  This comes.

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  Wait, again? I wouldn't stop it out. Wait, what the hell? Listen, if you were there and you endured it, you get to eat whatever you want during the time of the stories. If you're not from there, yeah, obviously, you know, treated with a little bit of respect, but like, if you were there and you endured it, we endured it. Yeah, it gives you eating rights. You got eating rights. What about a soft snack? What about just a marshmallow? You could do a marshmallow. Then they win. Then the terrorists win. Because why did they hit us? Because of our freedom. Well, I'm not free to have a popcorn. I'm not free to devour a popcorn while you tell these stories of gravity.

• 1:35:03Speaker 00

  Popcorn's ass.

• 1:35:06Speaker 00

  The crunch you can hear. Don't listen to it. Don't eat it. It's a sad story. Yo, just mute my mic unless I'm chewing. Then turn that bitch as high as it goes. That popcorn's commercial of you at a funeral and someone's giving a eulogy and you just hear.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  Good for every occasion. A crunch for every occasion.

• 1:35:24Speaker 00

  That's a great commercial. Oh, God. All right, all right. So go, go. Absolute.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a good, good, easy, nice one. Uh, yeah, so there's this one.

• 1:35:31Speaker 00

  Well, huh?

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:34Speaker 00

  We don't go with nice, yeah?

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  This one, this one doesn't feel nice, though.

• 1:35:38Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  It, it, it ends up having a really startling and surprising end.

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  Okay, do you need special effects?

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Crunching sound.

• 1:35:46Speaker 00

  I'm here for it.

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  So this, uh.

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  I like dark and fucked up.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this feels like that. You'll see the direction it goes is not that, but it feels that way the whole time. You'll see. It's a good one. So there's this lady, Ellie Lobel, who in the nineties, she's like this high-powered attorney. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two kids, and she's just like living the American dream, right? She's, she's making good money. She's like moving up in her firm.

• 1:36:13Speaker 00

  Where is she? What part of this?

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Connecticut. I don't know. I don't know what part of Connecticut.

• 1:36:16Speaker 00

  Connecticut, Connecticut.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  So she's a big health enthusiast. In addition to working a bunch, she's a big health enthusiast. And one day after her run, she comes home and she just feels a little bit off. She's a little sick. She, uh, she ends up like going to work as is the next couple of days, but over the next couple of days, you just, you can't shake this, this malaise that's come over her that she kind of attributes to when she went on this run. And, uh, so she ends up going to the doctor and the doctor's like, oh, you know, you're overworked. You just gotta take some time off. You know, you're, there's nothing wrong with you. You just gotta, you just gotta rest. And she's like, I don't know. Like, I feel, I definitely feel physically ill. I don't feel overworked, but it's so bad. I'll, I already took the last couple of days and didn't really work much. I'll just take the week off. So she takes the rest of the week off and her symptoms don't really get worse, but they don't get better.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  And she just, she just doesn't feel good. And so she is, again, like a very high-powered lawyer, like she doesn't want to take more time off. She also feels a little bit embarrassed that her symptoms are not so pronounced that it's easy to point to what's wrong with her. It's like, yeah, I just don't feel good. And so she like goes back to work after a week, but she's just like fumbling around at work. She can't focus. And she's being told by her boss, like, hey, you know, go take a little more time. You're, you're doing fine. You're, you're in good standing. And so she takes more time off. She goes to see more doctors. And really no one's giving her any like concrete sort of diagnosis. It's all like, well, you know, maybe when you went on the run, you overdid it and it taxed your system, whatever. It's all this stuff around like, eh, you just need to rest. That's what everyone's saying. But she's like, yeah, like.

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  What'd you say?

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  Tick bite. You never know, dude. So she's like totally fucked up and she can't seem to like figure out what's wrong. No doctor has been able to give her anything. And months go on and it just never really gets better. And she ultimately has to take time away from work for so long that she ends up doing, I guess, a furlough or whatever. She, she ends up like leaving her firm and like at the same time for her kids and her husband, it became sort of awkward for them because no one really believed outside of the family that there was something seriously wrong with her. It just sort of seemed like she was faking it to a degree. Which, you know, that's just the way people felt. And so there, everyone's like awkward about it and she's like taking time off.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  And then her and her husband actually get into a really big fight about it and they get divorced over, over this spat they're having. They were already struggling. So they get divorced and then like the kids who are like teenagers, they sort of side with dad. Not aggressively, but they're like, come on, mom, yeah, get your shit together. And so before long, like Ellie's living alone. She's not working anymore. She's still a lawyer, but she's not practicing. And like her whole life is sort of falling apart all around her. But her reaction is, well, I still feel horrible all the time. I really just need to solve this problem. I gotta figure out what's wrong with me.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  And so she, you know, goes to all these specialists and again, still, no matter who she goes to, no one give her anything. And for years, it just persists. She just, her life just gets worse and worse and worse over time. And the, the symptoms never get horrible, but they're always there. She's always like, you know, lethargic and sore. And so she basically loses her whole life. Her life has just gone down the tubes. And, you know, her kids, it's sort of, they're sort of estranged from her at this point and her husband's moved on. And she's, she's single and at about, I think it was like the 15-year mark from when this all began, she began going into much more serious symptoms, or symptoms that she assumed were the same ones she's had. Like they got worse, this mystery illness she had, and she began showing signs of organ failure.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Like she, and she was going to the doctor and they're like, we don't really know. This does seem pretty serious now. Still don't know what it is. And, uh, they told her like, we don't know what to tell you, but you're, you're showing signs that you could be shutting down here. Unfortunately, you're in your 50s, but unfortunately that's the end. That's going to be the end for you. And they gave her all these options for basically palliative care or hospice care, because at this point they didn't even know how to treat her.

• 1:40:08Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's like she's devastated, but in a way she actually was so bitter about the way her life had gone that she was actually sort of relieved at the prospect of fuck this, like I'll just die. I'm done. So over the coming days, you know, she decides I'm actually going to lean into this like end-of-life position I'm taking. And so she doesn't tell her husband or her kids. She just up and moves to this house in Southern California, because that was like her favorite place in the world and she'd not gotten back for years. She goes to this house and she, she rents it out and she hires an end-of-life care person whose job is to be with you when you die, sort of take care of your affairs. And she gives them the instructions of like, I'm just gonna go to this house.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  You know, she's very frail at this point. She needs help moving around. And I'm just gonna die there and I want you to just allow me to die. And so they're like, okay, they go to the house and she, she literally gets to the house and climbs into bed and just waits to die. And she's like laying in bed, you know, waiting to die. And for three days she lays there, you know, it wasn't clear if she was this close to death, but it felt like she was close. And she, she doesn't die. For three days she just doesn't die. And at that point, she's like, well, I'm gonna take a break from active dying. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out and take a quick walk. Uh, you know, and she tells her care person to, to come with her and go for a quick walk and then I'll come back and I'll die. So out the door they go and it's a beautiful day and they, they're walking very slowly because he has a supporter and they're walking down this road.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  And on the right side, there's this wooden fence and this beautiful field full of flowers. And it's just like gorgeous, beautiful day. And Ellie is so struck by the beauty of this field and just like the flowers, she stops. And she's like, I'm gonna just look at the field for a minute and take it in, you know?

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  And so she's just looking at the field and the care person's next to her. And at some point Ellie hears a buzzing sound above her head and she looks up and she sees there's a bee over her head, which is, you know, if you're near flowers, it's not that weird. But the bee was pretty big, but Ellie's like, okay, whatever. Goes back to looking at the, the field. And then a second later she hears like a much louder buzzing sound and she looks up and she sees it's a, it's a swarm of what would actually be these African killer bees, which are like the really nasty ones. And almost like for no reason, they just swoop down and they start stinging Ellie Lobel, predominantly on her face, over and over and over. And she falls to the ground.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  She's getting attacked by these bees and the, and the, and she, the care person just turns and runs, just bails.

• 1:42:39Speaker 00

  A little bit overweight?

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  She, she was like riddled with this mystery illness and couldn't reasonably run. She sort of like collapses to the ground. And so the care person, he bolts.

• 1:42:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  And so she's getting stung, but then the, the care person, he, he realizes this is like an ethical dilemma. I'm the end-of-life care person, but this seems pretty fucked up.

• 1:42:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  So he comes back and he scoops her up and he's running with her now to get her back to the house. And she's telling him through all these bee stings now, she's like, don't take me to the hospital. Let me die. Put me back in bed. And so he rushes her in the house. He puts her in the bed and, and she's just like, well, at least now I'll die faster. I might have an allergic reaction to this. And so she's laying in the bed with a puffed up face from getting stung all these times. And for the next few days, she doesn't die. She actually starts to get better. Not, not a, not hugely better, but a little better. And she is not thinking, oh, it's a miracle. I'm magically cured. She's like, what is going on here? Like that, if nothing else, should have shocked my system and likely like put it into overdrive. Fuck, it killed me. You know, why didn't it?

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  And so she starts doing research and she discovers there was this really obscure study that was done in Australia in the nineties. And it was about the effects of Lyme disease, ticks, Lyme disease. And they had concluded that very likely certain bee venom could cure Lyme disease, but it was unethical to run the trial. So they never actually stung somebody with end-stage Lyme disease to see if it would cure them. And so Ellie Lobel accidentally conducted the study on herself. It worked, fully cured, made a complete recovery. And now Ellie Lobel tours the country advocating for bee stings for Lyme disease patients.

• 1:44:16Speaker 00

  Whoa. Didn't Lyme disease get?

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  She got bit by a tick on a run. That wasn't already apparent.

• 1:44:22Speaker 00

  But the tick, I like Lyme disease is even manufactured, right? Isn't that like a lab leak? That's a story. Is it kind of conspiratorial? I don't know. We're getting to conspiracy land. But it comes from like Lyme, Connecticut or whatever.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  I actually have no idea where it comes from. All I know is ticks can give it to you.

• 1:44:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's like, uh, I mean, the, the, the conspiracy is that, uh, the CIA is developing a way, you know, some sort of bioweapon and it leaks and, but it's interesting that it. This, she gets bitten in Connecticut.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Oh, weird.

• 1:44:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, because isn't Lyme, Connecticut?

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Speaker 00

  A place?

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's weird, actually.

• 1:45:00Speaker 00

  It's all connecting.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  That's why, so now do they do this as therapy?

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  I, I believe that she is one of the main reasons that that is now an act, that's a treatment plan. You can get stung by bees if you have Lyme disease.

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  And so she doesn't just tour the country advocating, she like gives speeches about it.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:45:17Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, I gotta put my system on this.

• 1:45:19Speaker 00

  She got Lyme?

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  She got Lyme?

• 1:45:20Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:45:22Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, yeah. That's why I was like, I was hearing some of the symptoms, like, yep.

• 1:45:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, she got Lyme.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Dude, check it out, Ellie Lobel, she's, she's like famous in the Lyme disease world.

• 1:45:30Mark Gagnon?

  Wow.

• 1:45:30Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, one more banger, I know we've gone on for a while, but this has been very interesting. A banger and then we go.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  I got a, I got one, it's, I don't know if it's a banger, but it's a good one, it's a, it's a demon centric. It's quite good, if, if nothing else, it's a fucking weird story.

• 1:45:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Um, so there's this dude, uh, actually before I do, let me think, there's a better one to tell. Cause I have a few that I.

• 1:45:48Speaker 00

  Well, you can go, you can, we can go more than one, like, we need, we need.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  I got a quick one, a quick one, and then we'll do the demon.

• 1:45:54Speaker 00

  Free throw line, dunk.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  There was this, there was this aid out in, uh, in South Africa called the Stirkfontein Cave. Uh, it's an underwater, it's an under, underground cave, but what was noteworthy about it is there was this huge underground lake within this cave, so imagine, I think you really come up to this hole in the ground, this nondescript hole in the ground that looks like a manhole, and you go down into it, and probably people are gonna chew me out for being wrong about this, but you basically go underground and it opens up to this like huge like lake. And there's separation from the surface of the lake to the underside of, I guess, like the, the ground, the floor, whatever. But it's like you're looking out at, almost like an indoor swimming pool, if that makes sense, it's huge. And I believe they put lights down there, because it's a really, you look it up, Stirkfontein Cave.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  S T E R K F O N T E I, and Stirkfontein Cave in South Africa.

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  Whoa, this looks crazy.

• 1:46:49Speaker 00

  Let me see that, let me see that, okay.

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  All right, so Stirkfontein Cave, this is back, I think it was in the eighties or nineties.

• 1:46:59Speaker 00

  So, South Africa.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  South Africa, right there, that's, that's a good one, that's a good way to look at it. So they call the inside of this cave, uh, Swiss cheese. Because underwater, and also, so you can, you can do two types of caving in this cave, there's wet caving and dry caving. Uh, wet is just cave diving, scuba gear, go underwater, search the caves, or just walking around and spelunk in other parts of it. Anyways, it was very, very popular, and there were these three guys, uh, Peter Verhustel and then his two buddies that came to Stirkfontein Cave, I think in like the eighties or nineties, I think it was, whatever, either way, to go wet caving, to go cave diving, and this was something that they did on a fairly regular occasion. They, they're the crazy dudes that would like go in these crazy underground, yeah, crazy.

• 1:47:42Speaker 00

  Just retarded, these.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  And so, this one in particular, it was called Swiss cheese, because as you went down, there was like sort of a main cavity that went straight down in the water, and there was a guideline that was anchored to the, I think the ceiling that went straight down, so you could always hold it and get back up. But as you go down, there's all these holes, like everywhere, that could branch off into like miles long tunnels that hadn't been explored, or they dead ended like six feet away, you didn't know. And so the, the allure of Stirkfontein Cave for cave divers is, if you wanted to, you could leave the guideline and go explore uncharted territory in the water. And now, and, and, not that I've done any cave diving, but having covered quite a few cave diving stories,

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  it's sort of a known thing that you never let go of the guideline, you actually will clip yourself onto the guideline if, if you, because have you done any scuba diving in like nada pool?

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, like silt gets kicked up, see ya.

• 1:48:36Speaker 00

  You can't see.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  It ain't going away anytime soon.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  You can't even tell which way it's up.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Can't do a flashlight, nothing.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  You have like really space to figure out where.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  Yes, so the, it's really to protect you in those types of environments, there's a famous picture actually in Florida, if you wanna look it up, there's like, do underwater cave Florida warning sign. Cause it's one of the most intense images when you put it in context, you go down to the bottom of this underwater cave.

• 1:48:59Speaker 02

  This is Devil's Den.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  Devil's Den, is that what it is?

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  I've seen this.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  And there's a picture that's underwater right now, that is a real warning sign telling you not to like, like death will follow if you go past this point, this is a true sign right now underwater, that's actually for cave divers when they get down to this point.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  I've seen this sign.

• 1:49:17Speaker 00

  In real life?

• 1:49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:19Speaker 00

  You've gone to this thing?

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  No shit, this is underwater?

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Speaker 00

  So you, you were snor- dude, that's intense.

• 1:49:24Speaker 02

  Scuba diving in Devil's Den.

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  You've been in Devil's Den?

• 1:49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's like a popular scuba diving spot, but we did this for a scuba diving certification in college.

• 1:49:31Speaker 00

  Holy cow, dude.

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  And we went there, and it's like freezing cold, and you go to the bottom, and they tell you like, you can't use your fins at the bottom. Cause if you use your fins, you kick up all the silt, and then not only do you fuck it up for you, but there's other people. So now, like for the next hour, like you can't go down, lowered to a certain point.

• 1:49:46Speaker 00

  Dude, I can't believe you've seen that, that's such a famous sign.

• 1:49:48Speaker 02

  It's crazy.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's a, it's a very intense thing, so these.

• 1:49:53Speaker 02

  I hate people's shit.

• 1:49:53Speaker 00

  No, cause I'm white, and I think they deserve what they get.

• 1:49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so these, these three, they show up to Stirkfontein Cave, and they go in, they put on their equipment, and they go down, and Peter was known amongst his two other buddies as being a guy that would periodically leave a guideline and go rogue on their dives, and it was really frustrating for the other two, because they would have to be like, come on dude, stop, like you're putting us all in danger, and so they're going down, and twice, they saw him begin to, to veer off, and they literally grabbed him and pulled him back, like stop fucking leaving the guideline.

• 1:50:25Speaker 00

  Don't do it.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  And then finally, when they got fairly deep into the cave, where, you know, you're relying entirely on artificial light, they turned and, and Peter's gone, and they didn't see him leave the guideline, and so he's just gone. They considered doing, you know, some sort of search for him, but they're like, can't really do that, it's too many different places you could go, so they waited for a little bit, but they're watching their gauge, they're running out of air, and they're like, I guess we'll just surface and hope that he figures it out, right?

• 1:50:51Speaker 00

  I would hope he would.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Learn his lesson, dude.

• 1:50:54Speaker 00

  I would hope he would, I would leave him so fast, it's unbelievable.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  They go to the surface.

• 1:50:59Speaker 00

  What an asshole, did I even tap you on your fin and be like, hey, I'm going over here? Cause now you're putting me in danger for your selfish exploration.

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  It is pretty bold to do that, you're kinda fucking everybody in a big way.

• 1:51:10Speaker 00

  It's like being on Columbus's ship. We're going, I'm sorry, where?

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's bold, it's a bold move by Columbus.

• 1:51:20Speaker 00

  But the guys on the ship don't know, right? They think they're just going out, fishing for whatever they're fishing for, and he's like, no, we're going to India, and they're like, what is that?

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  We don't know.

• 1:51:30Speaker 00

  We don't know. Anyway, continue.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  So he leaves the guideline, they go to the surface, he doesn't come up, and so they, they get in touch with authorities, it takes forever for them to get out there, they only have so much air, they know he only has so much air. And so the police finally show up, and it's like, you know, the, there's no way he could be alive at this point. So ultimately, they leave the cave, they, the, uh, rescue diver does go down and does a cursory check, but they're like, look, it's too dangerous to just be looking for him, if we're gonna really recover his body, we need to really plan this out and come back with a bigger team. So the decision is like, let's just leave, and we'll come back and recover his body later. You know, you, you play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  So they leave, the friends are devastated, you know, they don't give up hope that maybe he'll turn up, but like, you know, at this point, it's, it's done. A few weeks later, there is a group of dry cavers who are in Stirkfontein Cave, the, the, the, the lake section at this point has been shut down, but there's all these other areas within the cave that are just first blunkers, regular dry cavers. And they're making their way, you know, down into the earth, and at some point, they're navigating this narrow section, and either because they pushed on it, or their body pushed against it, but the wall in front of them crumbles, so just like collapses in front of them, and it reveals this passageway, like underground, there's like a tunnel right in front of them that was only exposed because this wall came down, and they shine their light,

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  and they see there's what appear to be footprints on the ground that are like going around the corner. And like this tunnel sort of trails off, it goes somewhere, and so they, they're like, oh my god, like what is this? So how, how, who could be down here? And so they take their light, and they walk through the crushed wall, and they go down this tunnel, and they turn the corner, and it opens up to this like, you know, cavern, if you will, and there's water in the middle of it, like another underground lake, if you will, and in the middle of the lake is what appears to be like a mini island, like six feet across by six feet, it's a little jut of, of land, and there's someone on the land. And it's Peter Verhustel, and they go over and he's, he's dead.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  But the water in that room connected to the main diving area, that it was unexplored, and no one had been in here before, he had gotten lost, dove up into this air pocket, came out of the water, was perfectly fine, and then documented while he was in the room, that he was alive and well and waiting for rescue, and knew his friends would come get him, and he was there for two weeks. He was found like two and, two weeks and a couple of days, right after he had died.

• 1:54:11Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Speaker 02

  That is awful, pitch black, pitch black in the cavern.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, pitch black, not good.

• 1:54:18Speaker 02

  That's a brutal way to go.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  There was, you ever hear the, uh, there's a super short one, but it's a better one in terms of the ending. There was a ship off the coast of Africa, this is like in 2000, and you've already heard this one. Uh, so the ship off the coast of Africa, fishing vessel, there's 12 people on board, um, what the hell is the guy's name? He's a Nigerian guy, uh, there's a, a rogue wave or rough waters, either way, the ship capsizes.

• 1:54:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  And the, uh, the, the bedrooms in this, in the ship were all locked.

• 1:54:49Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, this is unbelievable.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:51Speaker 00

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  Six to the bottom, 11 of the guys die in their bedrooms, one guy survives, they sink, and he's caught in this air pocket and in the ship, 100 feet down, uh, and for 60 hours, he stayed in this pitch black.

• 1:55:04Speaker 00

  60 hours?

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  60, six zero hours, and he's, he's alive, and the re- body recovery divers went into the ship to go pull the 12 bodies out, and they filmed it, and why would you think someone's alive down there?

• 1:55:17Speaker 00

  Imagine how fucking terrifying that is for the recovery divers.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  They're filming, and they're swimming up, and this is what they say.

• 1:55:27Speaker 00

  I mean, way too calm.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, way too calm, way too calm.

• 1:55:39Speaker 00

  And then they gotta get him out.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Speaker 00

  Which is interesting because now he's pressurized for.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:55:46Speaker 00

  He's, wait, is he pressurized for depth or is he pressured?

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  No, he's pressurized for depth.

• 1:55:51Speaker 00

  Even though the bubble was at the surface?

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  He's been breathing. Oh, actually, you know what? I don't know. I think you're, I think you could be right on that. Cause the bubble is that depth.

• 1:56:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right.

• 1:56:02Speaker 00

  Now, he's been breathing out carbon monoxide or whatever into this air. So his air quality is super low, but I imagine he's still pressurized for the surface, right?

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. But he fucking lived and he, I don't know if this, this is sort of something that I don't know where I got this from, but I believe this happened. So but take this as could be total bullshit out of the story. There was a report somewhere or I saw something that while he was down there, it's like quiet, right? Cause there's, there's no noise pollution. You're in this bubble a hundred feet down at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. But he could hear the sound of large fish.

• 1:56:38Speaker 00

  Eating.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  Bumping into the walls as they were eating the other 11 people.

• 1:56:42Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 1:56:42Speaker 01

  And so he was waiting to either be eaten or the bubble to collapse and kill him.

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  USS Indianapolis?

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  Oh God, the shark attacks?

• 1:56:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like the same, similar like eeriness.

• 1:56:54Speaker 00

  I mean, go, go, go, go.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  Just terrible. I mean, similar to this, the, have you heard the stories of the catacombs in Paris?

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd covered one of those stories out there.

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:02Speaker 02

  Well, the one that I heard, they told us this when we were there, but like around the time of like, I think like 1700s is when they really start to like, set up all the bones and like the actual like, like the actual like art pieces that you see. They had people going around, I think in like the mid to like late 1800s, maybe even later. And they're going through one of the sections that's kind of like cordoned off where no one can go in. And they go in and they find bones, which is not uncommon, obviously in the catacombs. But the bones are laying completely parallel with the rest of the path. And there's like fabric on the bones.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  Oh, weird.

• 1:57:33Speaker 02

  And it's a full skeleton, not just like femurs and skulls. And they're like, what is this? And they discovered that it was someone that was keeping like the maintaining it when they were originally building it. They got lost.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:57:48Speaker 02

  And got trapped in the catacombs and then eventually just died of starvation. And was left there and his body was never found for like 150 years.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:59Speaker 02

  And he just died in the darkness of the catacombs.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  That's such a horrible thing.

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 1:58:02Speaker 00

  There's this story that, I mean, they made a documentary about it, which is like absolutely unbelievable, but about Chris Lemons. Have you heard of him?

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:58:09Speaker 00

  He's a saturation diver.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I watched it. Holy shit. That story's crazy. Holy shit, dude. Yeah. He got, he detached from the thing and he's like wandering around the fucking ocean.

• 1:58:18Speaker 00

  So there's these things called saturation divers, right? And basically what they do is they do like, um, mechanical repairs.

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  Like underwater welding.

• 1:58:28Speaker 00

  For underwater welding for like, uh, gas lines, etc. Where they're like extracting like the North Sea. They're like extracting oil, whatever. And what they, what they do is like, they bring them to depth while they're on the ship. And then you stay in these like chambers that like adjust your depth for like 30 days at a time or something like that. And so you're basically on sea level, but they're adjusting so that you're at the, the whatever the, I don't know what is it? Is it the oxygen level? Is it the pressurization?

• 1:59:01Speaker 01

  Just the pressure.

• 1:59:02Speaker 00

  Pressurization of being deep in the sea. Doesn't matter. And then when they go down and they do the welding, there's an umbilical cord.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:59:08Speaker 00

  That provides them their warmth, everything that they could possibly need. And they can be down there for an hour or whatever it is, and they come back up and then they exist within this chamber. And you're doing it off of a ship and the ship is using these different things to maintain its balance, I guess, like in the water. And as the waves start to do it, and there's all these different thrusters on the ship that are maintaining, you know, its course. Because God forbid it start to move away and then the divers get, you know, pulled and whatever. Something happens with the waves where it can't maintain its course and his umbilical cord gets severed. So now he has five minutes of oxygen or whatever the fuck it is. And he has like another partner that I think is in the boat at the time or something. And

• 1:59:55Speaker 00

  he's dead. I mean, that's basically what people think. He's, he's absolutely dead.

• 2:00:00Speaker 00

  I don't know. I want to like, I'm trying to think about how to tell the story because they tell it in a really compelling way. His partner goes down and just starts to look for him.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:07Speaker 00

  Right? And five minutes goes by, 10 minutes go by, 20 minutes, I think like 30 minutes goes by, right? So he's no oxygen, nothing. Apparently what he managed to do was in pitch black, work his way back towards what they were working on. And then just kind of like sit on it. And because of the cold, they said that like it reduced, I'm going to completely butcher this.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  That's pretty good.

• 2:00:33Speaker 00

  But it put his body in some sort of like catonic state or like, you know, when you can like, kind of like freeze something and like it will maintain this livelihood, I guess. I don't know what it did, but his partner finds him, they bring him back to the surface and he ends up fucking living.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:50Speaker 00

  30 minutes without oxygen.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 2:00:52Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:00:53Speaker 00

  Like you gotta watch the documentary.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  It's an amazing documentary.

• 2:00:56Speaker 00

  He went diving three weeks later, went back in, but like you're looking at someone that shouldn't be alive. It's creepy. Like you shouldn't be alive because of the grenade. That guy shouldn't be like, there are people who have had like explosions happen to them and live. We don't know anybody that's been dead for 30 minutes.

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  That's, that's up there.

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  That's wild.

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  The North Sea in general is like a vicious place.

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  Terrifying.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like the oil rigs out there, holy shit, like that, that, that is one of the gnarliest water bodies. Like, I don't think people appreciate it. That's one of the most treacherous spots in the whole world.

• 2:01:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  And then he would go back three weeks later.

• 2:01:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, these people love it though.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 2:01:30Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? This guy want to go back to Afghanistan.

• 2:01:34Speaker 02

  Have you ever had a supernatural experience happen to you or something that's inexplicable?

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  I sort of I did. It would take me an hour to tell it, you know? So probably a little too long for this, but I had a, I had something happen to me when I was 16. And I went up to this cabin in New Hampshire. It was a snowboarding cabin with some friends. And going into the trip, one of my friends of the two buddies I was with, his father had very recently passed away. And it was just, it sort of cast a pall over the whole trip. And when we got up there, um, the first night I was laying in bed and I, I heard somebody come into the cabin and I'm like laying in bed. And I hear footsteps through the cabin and I thought it was a relative who, who we were expecting to show up to the cabin.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  But this thing comes in the room and it was like this dark silhouette that I, it looked sort of human, but it definitely didn't look like a person. And it sort of bowed into the bed that was next to mine where Nick, the, the son of the deceased father was, and he disappeared into the ground. And I'm like a 16 year old kid. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Like, I think I'm dreaming. I don't know what this is. But the next morning when I got up, I was like, I fell asleep at some point after that. I go into the kitchen and Nick's mom is out there. And I'm like shaken up from this whole experience because I've discovered now that the relative didn't come last night. Like what the fuck happened? And I began asking her questions like, hey, did your older son, did he come by last night? And she just lost her husband, you know?

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  And she just looks at me and she doesn't say anything. And I'm like, I just, I could have sworn I heard something last night. And she's like, oh, don't worry. That was my husband. I heard him here last night too. And I was like, oh, great. And I like fucked me up and I didn't want to talk to her about it. Cause I'm like, that can't be real. Maybe she misheard what I was saying, you know, maybe, maybe this is wrong. And so I tell the other Nick and Wolf, that's my other buddy, and they're like, oh, that's, that's fucking crazy dude. But eh, it's probably nothing. We go out, we snowboard for the day, we come back. I try to go to bed super early and I tell my buddies that let me fall asleep ahead of you so I can be like asleep for the night, you know? And they, they were like, fine, but then I couldn't fall asleep that same night. The second night I'm out there, same time, like three in the morning, I'm like wide awake.

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  And I had like stashed a knife in the springs of the bunk bed above me, like to protect myself. And I, again, were expecting this relative, the older brother to come by. So if anybody shows up, I'm telling myself that's who it could be. I hear footsteps out on the wraparound porch. I hear the door open. I hear a pot fall in the kitchen. It's like clearly someone's coming into the cabin. We're in the middle of fucking nowhere in New Hampshire. And then I hear the footsteps come through the house. I hear them come down to our door again. I'm so scared. I can't even move. Like the idea, I'm going to like fetch my knife and like protect myself was hilarious. And again, the door opens and this dark shadowy figure comes in and stops next to me and sort of bows into the ground again and disappears.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  And you know, you're not like, oh, good. Last night the ghost vanished into the ground. It's happened again. I'm safe. You're more like, where did it go? Like people, people don't do that. And so again, I'm like up all night. Eventually in the morning, I hear the sound of Nick's mom out in the kitchen. And this time I go out there and the day before I was a little cautious about how I brought up the subject of did some weird shit happen? Cause she just lost her dad or her husband. I didn't want to even talk about ghosts. Although she sort of brought it up on her own. And then this time I'm like frantic and I'm like, I heard someone last night. Like what is going on? And she's like, don't worry. I heard him again. Like it's just my husband. He's walking around the house. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on here? I'm like so scared. I, I thought that I would like call my parents and just have them come get me, but we got one more night left out here.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  I'm like, there's no way this is actually happening. This whole thing feels like a fucking fever dream or something. And I ended up convincing myself mostly out of embarrassment, like I don't want to call my parents. Be like, hey, you know that trip that I love doing every year? Come get me 24 hours early because ghosts are wandering the cabin, right? So I'm like, I'll stay one more night. That day we went out and got a coffee table and we helped load it into the car for the cabin. And we dropped it off at the cabin and then we went out to the mountain for the day. Come back and it's our last night. I couldn't, can't wait to just like get up and be done. And that's probably the fucking ghost right there. And, uh, again, I can't sleep. 3am rolls around, I hear footsteps again, door open, pot falls again. I'm like, oh my God, it's happening again.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  But this time the footsteps, they don't come down the hallway to my room. They continue through the cabin and they end up walking up the stairs to the second floor. And then they stop and I'm actually thinking, oh, fuck, like that's right above me. It's going to like bow into the floor and like come through the ceiling.

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  And so I'm laying there so scared. I eventually do fall asleep. So I barely slept the past two nights. And I wake up at some point at like 5 a.m. and I hear Nick's mom out in the kitchen and I just wanna get the fuck out of here. Like it's like it's the end. I don't wanna do this. And I go out there and I'm ready to be like mad. I don't even know what feelings I had. I was just so exhausted. And I hear that she's crying. And I go out there and she's standing over at the foot of the stairs that leads to the second floor. And the new coffee table we had got the day before was sitting at the base of the stairs. It was like a wood, wood nice coffee table. And I look at her and she's crying. And I thought like, what the fuck's going on? And then I could tell she was crying like happy, happy tears. And she's pointing at the table and she's like, come over

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  here and look at this. And I walk over to the table and scratched into the table were the words, I love you. And she was like, I didn't write that.

• 2:06:57Speaker 02

  No fucking way.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  And so, my interpretation is either the guardian, who I love and respect, has picked up on my nightmare I'm having, and has turned it into a cope for you losing your husband and are acting out that your husband's ghost is traveling around the house at night and you're going so far as to scratch stuff into tables to fuck with me. Or ghosts are real. I don't know.

• 2:07:27Speaker 02

  You saw the thing in the coffee table?

• 2:07:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it actually ruined my relationship with my friends. It was like, I don't wanna be anywhere near this. I don't wanna talk about it. I like, it wasn't, I'm 16. It wasn't like I had an adult perspective. I was like, I don't even know what to do with this. I told my, my parents about when I came home, didn't believe me in the slightest. No one believed it. They're like,

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  oh, really? It's like, dude, ask, ask her mom, ask his mom. She's, she'll say she saw it.

• 2:07:55Speaker 02

  And you tell Wolf, your snowboarding buddy?

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, he was there. They all saw it.

• 2:07:59Speaker 02

  And he looks at it and what does he say?

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  He's like, no, that's, that's fucked. He's like so chill. He's like, man, it's crazy, dude. That's fucking crazy, dude. And then Nick.

• 2:08:08Speaker 02

  Handwriting match?

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  I mean, it was like crude. It was like, it definitely looked fresh. It definitely, someone did it, for sure. For sure, someone did that. But like, the, the only, if I really dig into it, the only issue I have, well, there's several, but one is like, okay, let's pretend that she's clearly in mourning, you know, she's lost her husband. This cabin was very special to me. He had like built the place, I think. And every time we went to that cabin, every winter, he would come with us. So it was like really felt that he wasn't there. And so I guess it's a place that's associated with him. Like I'm, in fact, we kinda still went on the trip so close to his death. I think it was like to honor him or something. That's sort of how it felt. But I definitely knew that like, okay, she, she's obviously in grief. She's, she's not even really processing

• 2:08:54Speaker 01

  it yet, because this is so recent. Like, it, it makes sense to me. And even if she wasn't doing it maliciously, it makes sense that maybe she's so desperate to like, believe her husband's somehow still around that, you know, maybe she picked up that I had had a nightmare and like was able to construct this narrative that like allowed her to believe her husband was there. Fine. The problem with that is on the morning that I came out, the first time, I didn't wanna be offensive and say, hey, I heard footsteps in the, in the cabin last night. Do you know what that was? Because invariably, it lends itself to talking about ghosts and you've just lost your husband. It just felt really inappropriate to even breach the subject. So I said, hey, uh, did your, did

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  your older son ever come by last night? Did he ever come by? Like, that's it. I didn't tell you, boy, you wouldn't believe the nightmare I had last night. It was like, a fairly innocuous question. And also, we were expecting him the night before. That's a normal question to ask. How could you go from that to, oh, I, I heard my husband here last night?

• 2:09:54Speaker 02

  Was Wolf in the room with you?

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  They all, yeah, Nick and Wolf. Wolf was in the bunk above me and Nick was in the bed right next to the bed.

• 2:09:59Speaker 02

  Okay, so it makes sense that the dad is visiting that room.

• 2:10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, if, if, if we are to believe that's his, that's him, it sort of tracks. Uh, but the other, I, I have tried to, in no way did that experience lead me to this. It's just sort of coincidental that I tell stories that fall into this camp. And I have a story that sort of resides in the strange, dark and mysterious. Never have I had anything before or after. And even this, I, I'm relatively sure there's gotta be some play here with like grief dynamics. But the problem is there's just enough in terms of like corroborating something odd happening in the house. Namely, I didn't tell you about really the specifics of what I heard or saw. I just asked, had your older son come through? And your reaction was, don't worry, I heard my husband

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  here last night too. That's a very quick, devious reaction, if that's what that was.

• 2:10:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:54Speaker 01

  You know?

• 2:10:54Speaker 02

  And then also like my, my skeptical thought is like, okay, she's walking around the house. She's in grief, doing stuff, who knows? Drop stuff, maybe it's part of a ritual, maybe it's a sleepwalking thing. Again, like she's in a like a bizarre kind of like period of her life. And then is playing out this thing again to kinda like cope with the fact that she had this loss. But the issue is that you saw the door open.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I saw a dark figure. Granted, I've, I've told myself that it's like, I was so scared because I was actually thinking, if it's just an intruder, forget ghost, forget anything. Lay in your bed and hear a fucking door open and wait for a stranger to walk into your room. Not a good feeling. And so I can totally believe that my mental state was so intensely like fearful. I'm a 16 year old kid. It's a pitch black room. And I'm seeing the, the space between the bed. My, my feet are closest to the bed. The door's like here, it opens inward. And you'd walk by the foot of my bunk bed. I'm in the bottom bunk. I can only see like this much space as whoever walks into the room. And then there's a little gap on the right side of me between the bed where Nick,

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  the deceased guy, his, his son is, is sleeping and me. And so there's just this little space here. And even a person, if they walked next to me, I'm laying in the bed, but the bunk above me obscures my view. So I can't really see the head of someone who was walking right here. And so like, my view's obscured, but I can, I can infer the size of someone based on the, if you walked next to the bed and all I saw was like your hips, I could probably infer roughly how tall you are. And so I picked up that someone who was really fucking tall was in the room. And they were so dark that even in a dark room, that only, the only illumination was the little alarm clock, little red alarm clock, that I could clearly break out a very human like silhouette

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  of a very tall person. I would say Nick's father was quite tall, not through the roof tall, but he was like at least 6'2", 6'3". So I'm like, okay, maybe, maybe that adds to it, but.

• 2:12:51Speaker 02

  And the door didn't open on the way out. Like, it wasn't like the mom coming in to like,

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's.

• 2:12:55Speaker 02

  Give her kid like a kiss on the forehead, dealing with grief and then leaving.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  No, even if it was her, she didn't leave the room. You know what I mean? Like, someone came in.

• 2:13:04Speaker 02

  Just went into the bed.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Bowed, like bowed, that's how I would describe it. And then they were gone. And if it happened one night, you're like, oh, I must have been imagining it because it was a dream. It played out identically the second night. And then the third night, the change was it didn't come in the room. It went upstairs and lo and behold, the next day, she's calling out the, the scratching. And I also think it's like, okay, before I go out there on the third day, and I'm going out there, how could you know that my experience had changed the night before? Because the first two nights, it came into my room. You're, if she had scrawled that into the table, it wouldn't have matched my interpretation of what happened. Because the first two nights, they didn't, the, whatever it is, didn't go over to that part of the house, the cabin. It just came down the hallway

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  and vanished into the bed. When would it have gone to the other side of the cabin? So if she's guessing, like her grief coping mechanism, that's a bold guess. Because I walked out and you didn't even give me a chance to say, oh, my gosh, guess what? Last night, this is a detail I've never thought through. I didn't tell you, oh, boy, last night it changed. She, they went over there. Oh, check it out. Look over here. That was the, she told me that.

• 2:14:13Speaker 02

  And what did Nick say? Like, did he have any dreams or any types of weird experiences?

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  Nick, Nick was very stoic, is very stoic. Like, one of the more stoic dudes I know, he really wouldn't even engage with it. I, I looked at it as like, I'm not gonna push you to talk about, but me and Wolf talked a lot about this. And he was very freaked out about it. But like in that way that he's not gonna do anything. It's like, oh, wow, that's, that's crazy.

• 2:14:34Speaker 02

  Who names one of their kids Nick and the other Wolf?

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  Uh, Wolf is his nickname. He was actually named Nick as well. And they weren't brothers. They were his friends.

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 2:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I end up telling you basically the bastardized version of that story.

• 2:14:46Speaker 02

  Fuck, dude. That's crazy.

• 2:14:50Mark Gagnon?

  Fully believe it, bro.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy, man.

• 2:14:52Speaker 02

  Would you, would you have been able to tell if it was a person, you think? Like, did it have sort of like an opaque sort of a?

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  It was opaque, no.

• 2:14:59Speaker 02

  Think it was a demon?

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  I don't know, dude.

• 2:15:02Speaker 02

  Think it was a ghost?

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  I don't know if it was something that we know about. I don't know, man. I, I will say that like, even though I professionally tell stories in this domain, I, I've never had anything even remotely close to that. Save for one time, uh, that I actually told a story that went pretty viral on Instagram. Uh, and I think, I think this was just sleepwalking. So that's another, that's another thing that I should tell you is I have really pronounced sleepwalking, like deeply problematic sleepwalking. I sleep in a, in a different room than my wife with alarms on my doors, because I literally get up and run out of my house. And like, it's, it's, it's a, it's a very, it's an extremely bad person.

• 2:15:42Speaker 02

  Nah, I don't believe it.

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  The thing is, is like, I, I've told myself, well, that's all it is. It's, I was sleepwalking. That's all it is. It still doesn't comport with the way she behaved and the things she called out.

• 2:15:53Mark Gagnon?

  That is true.

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  So like, I want it to be sleepwalking. Yeah, this, I can still.

• 2:15:58Speaker 02

  You, you run out of your house?

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've jumped down stairs and hurt myself. Like, and it, and you'd think, they're like, oh, well, clearly, you know, PTSD. But no, this is pre-military.

• 2:16:12Speaker 02

  Do women ever sleepwalk?

• 2:16:15Speaker 01

  It's a fugue state thing.

• 2:16:17Speaker 00

  But they don't, right? Like, isn't it, it's only men who are married with kids who are like, I just ran out of my head.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  I was gone for a week, dude.

• 2:16:26Speaker 00

  Give me one story of a woman who sleepwalks is never once, right?

• 2:16:30Speaker 01

  No, it's just dudes.

• 2:16:31Speaker 00

  It's just us. We need a little bit of a break. That's all it is.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it is. I think it's just fugue state.

• 2:16:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  But I, the other day, I, not the other day, this is like last summer. I, so when I sleepwalk, it's, I know exactly how, do you guys sleepwalk at all now as adults at all?

• 2:16:50Speaker 00

  No, but I know a bunch of dudes that sleepwalk.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, so it's, it's a.

• 2:16:55Speaker 00

  It's just easier than saying, hey babe, can I go hang out with my friends?

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  Not sleepwalking.

• 2:17:00Speaker 00

  It's so much easier. It's so much easier, right?

• 2:17:04Speaker 01

  But I, I typically will sleepwalk one time a night. And once I sleepwalk the one time, I won't do it again. It's almost like you get it out of the way. Get that you hit the fugue.

• 2:17:14Speaker 00

  Right to the strip club. You go right to spirit.

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  Exactly, dude.

• 2:17:18Speaker 00

  And then you're good after that.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  Then you're good. You're reset. You come back. You don't gotta deal with it again. And so I had this experience where I'm sleeping in my bed and I hit the fugue. I wake up. I'm a little sleepwalky. But I have these weird moments where I don't necessarily bolt from the room. Sometimes I just like open my eyes and I can't, I cannot figure out, like, not where I am, but I know like there's something wrong. Like my, my mental state is not correct. And I'm like sort of aware of sleepwalks. I sleepwalk so much. I can identify like, oh, just, just lay here. Don't do anything. Just wait. It'll pass.

• 2:17:53Speaker 00

  Can I just point out one thing?

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:55Speaker 00

  Earlier in this podcast, you said the best sleep you ever had in your life was in Afghanistan.

• 2:18:00Speaker 01

  I didn't sleepwalk.

• 2:18:02Speaker 00

  Your wife was 10,000 miles.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  I was in a pretty solid fugue.

• 2:18:05Speaker 00

  I'm just pointing this out. The best sleep you've ever had in your life was with a bunch of your brothers in Afghanistan where you could play video games all night if you want. You could do whatever you want. Just, I'm just pointing out this information.

• 2:18:20Speaker 01

  That's facts, dude.

• 2:18:21Speaker 00

  Continue, continue.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  I, I wake up and my dog was sleeping in the bed, like on the, on the covers, like next to me.

• 2:18:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:18:28Speaker 01

  And I, I sort of wake up and I'm like, all right, I'm sleepwalking. Okay, fine. And there's a bathroom sort of like in the corner of my room. And in my sleepwalking state, I know I'm asleep, I know I am. I kind of like look and I can swear. I see someone standing in the bathroom that sort of vanishes out of view. Doesn't freak me out because honestly, when I'm sleepwalking, very typical to like think there's people around the corner and I just, it goes away. You realize what it is and it's not that big of a deal. But it like, I, I took note of the fact that, ah, it's weird. Someone was like in the bathroom, but like you're, you're sleepwalking. And I'm like, all right. And I see Maggie is, is my dog. She's, she's just still laying there. At least she'd react if there was like a fucking person in the room.

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

  And I'm like, okay, it's been like 30 seconds here. I sort of realized, okay, I'm good. Just doing my little nightly sleepwalking thing. It's not even sleepwalking. It's sleep confusion. And now it's passed. And I'm like, okay, I'm good. I'll just go back to sleep. And at that point, and I also look at the time, this typically happens in the first 60 minutes I go to sleep. I'll, I'll have my, my event. So I'm like, all right, no big deal. So go back to sleep. Then I wake up again and I, and I know that it's not morning. It's like something's off again. I, I feel like I'm sleepwalking, but it's so rare to sleepwalk twice in a night for me, but this one felt like it could be real. And I, I open my eyes and I sit up in bed and it's like two in the morning or something.

• 2:19:47Speaker 01

  And I immediately look over at the, the bathroom and I, because I'm remembering that I had seen someone in the bathroom and there's no one there. And I'm like, phew, like, okay, I'm, I'm hypervigilant or something. And then I start to notice that there is a, there's a pillow that I put under the sheets next to me. That sort of bunkers me from rolling over in my flailing sleepwalking state from hitting my dog. She sleeps in there a lot. And I feel the pillow is like pushing against my leg, like a little bit, like just imagine if someone on the other side of the pillow is like nudging the pillow. And I, I'm sort of looking at the bathroom, but I'm sort of subconsciously aware of this pillow moving at my leg. And I had just in my mind thought, oh, Maggie is moving around on the bed. She's pushing, she's pushing the pillow because she's moving.

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  And then I just like look at Maggie and Maggie is like far away from the pillow and like completely still, not moving at all. And then I look at the bed and remember, I could easily be sleepwalking. I imagine things. I see something moving under the covers near my bed and I completely like freaked the fuck out. I jump out of bed. At this point, this is a long sleepwalk. Normally it's like 15 seconds maybe, and it just goes away. I'm, I'm, I'm well into 15, 20, 30 seconds now. Jump out of bed. I flip on the lights and I rip my fucking covers back and there's nothing there. And I have a shit ton of cats. I got six cats. And I'm thinking a cat must've gotten in the bed. And like, there's really not much in my room in part because I sleepwalk. I don't want to trip over stuff. So there's not much like hide in my room. There's like a desk.

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  There's nothing under the bed. And so I flip the lights on and I, I look under the bed. I'm like looking around the room and I'm like, I'm not sleepwalking. Like I, this is weird that I just felt that and saw that. There's no cat in my room and Maggie's like on edge now. And so finally I'm like, I'm still a little freaked out by it. I go in the bathroom. I check in there. No one there. And I come back over to the bed and I'm like, man, like, I don't feel good about this, but I'm gonna go to bed because I'm convincing myself that it's odd. I've had two episodes, but I'm convinced it's sleepwalking. But I'm like, one more time. I'm just gonna look in the fucking bed and make sure nothing's in the bed. So the lights are on. And the bed, when I flipped the covers off, it had only like half folded over. There was a chunk of the bed that was still covered by the sheets.

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  And as I'm going to grab the sheet, I see something move. Like imagine a cat like under the sheets moving. You would see like a lump moving in the sheets. I convinced myself in the light, I'm awake now for over probably a minute or two. I see something moving under the sheets towards the foot of the bed and I rip the covers off. And for a second, I am convinced I see eyes looking back at me that go down the backside of the bed. And I'm like, it's a fucking cat. There's a cat in my bed. And I fucking throw the covers off and I'm looking all around. No cat, dude. So that's it. That's the whole story. That's, that's sort of how it ends. But I'm convinced it couldn't have been sleepwalking, but I will say that that fucked with me and I told that and people thought that was pretty crazy.

• 2:22:38Speaker 00

  I'm gonna say sleep paralysis.

• 2:22:40Speaker 01

  I mean, almost certainly.

• 2:22:41Speaker 00

  I want it to be that.

• 2:22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that doesn't feel like much more than that, but it was very, very, felt very real though. I'll say that, that fucking demon cat in my bed felt very real.

• 2:22:50Speaker 00

  What a horrifying experience. Did you go to sleep after that?

• 2:22:53Speaker 01

  No, I slept in, I, I was up for a while and then I, I slept on the couch. So I just didn't want to be in there. I, then I began to think, fuck, like, I've never even thought like, what if there's like a spider in my bed? I began to like think that there was like creatures in my bed. I was like, I can't be in there.

• 2:23:06Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 2:23:06Speaker 01

  Somewhere else, yeah.

• 2:23:08Mark Gagnon?

  You went to war.

• 2:23:12Speaker 01

  Do you think cats are the big problem here?

• 2:23:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. All right. Well, listen, John, you're the man. Thank you so much for indulging us for all this time. These are absolutely amazing stories. We, we didn't even start, we didn't even talk about your graphic novel.

• 2:23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got a book.

• 2:23:24Speaker 00

  Where is the book?

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  I actually didn't even bring it here.

• 2:23:27Speaker 00

  You signed it. We need someone to bring in the book.

• 2:23:29Speaker 01

  There's a book. There's a book.

• 2:23:30Speaker 00

  There's a graphic novel that you are releasing and.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  It's called The Terror Within and it's coming out October 6th. So we have, uh, we've done two graphic novels so far. They're a compendium of nine stories that honestly, there are a lot like the stories I'm telling now. There it is. Thank you. So this is the, the Terror Within. Here you go. It's, it's amazing. The other two were near times bestsellers. You can pick it up and, and very easy to flip through it.

• 2:23:58Speaker 00

  And they're stories like the ones you've told.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Basically what you heard on this podcast, those types of stories put to, to visual format in a book.

• 2:24:08Speaker 00

  Oh, this is awesome.

• 2:24:08Speaker 01

  I mean, the goal really was to like try to mimic like the art of what I'm doing on camera, but like we were gonna do a narrative book. But like just text on a page.

• 2:24:18Speaker 00

  Pictures are fantastic. Oh, wow. That's awesome.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  So yeah, it comes out October 6th. You can, you can look it up anywhere. It's on Amazon. You know, you name it. Uh, it's called The Terror Within. And there's two other graphic novels. They're all great. Huge fan.

• 2:24:31Speaker 00

  Make sure you check out Mr. Ballen's YouTube, his podcast. I mean, you're putting out like four stories a week sometimes.

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  Four app uploads every week.

• 2:24:39Speaker 00

  Unbelievable.

• 2:24:40Mark Gagnon?

  Where'd you get Mr. Ballen from?

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so random, dude. I, when I was doing the Navy SEAL posting and like I'm Mr. Navy SEAL drawing the negative attention. The username that I just happened to have was John B. Allen 416, just the one I had forever. But because I was doing a lot of posting about being a Navy SEAL, even though I got a lot of negative attention, there was quite a few aspiring Navy SEALs, kids who like wanted to be SEALs and they want information about the pipeline and what was this like? And they would send me these messages on Instagram where all they see is my username and there's no dots in it. It just looks like John Ballen 416. And out of an abundance of being very kind and polite, they'd say, dear Mr. Ballen, I have a question about da, da, da, da, da.

• 2:25:25Speaker 01

  And so when I made my account on TikTok, I'd sort of needed a new name, you know, I was like, ah, fucking Mr. Ballen.

• 2:25:31Mark Gagnon?

  Got it.

• 2:25:31Speaker 01

  Doesn't have anything to do with what I do and it's sort of a stupid name relative to what I do. It's like a basketball channel that went a different direction.

• 2:25:40Speaker 00

  Um, well, listen, dude, you're the man. Thank you so much, brother.

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you, guys.

• 2:25:46Mark Gagnon?

  Thank you, man.