Pod Insights Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries 175. Terrifying True Urban Legends: A Toilet Stalker, a Demon Camel, and a Cursed Mansion About this episode Today, we're covering three terrifying true urban legends: a South African schoolyard legend called Pinky Pinky with an unnerving connection to a real case in Japan, the history of Summerwind Mansion, which reveals more about its owners than the house itself…and the true origins behind the Red Ghost.
TW: Stalking, mention of child abuse threats
Show Notes: https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/pinkypinky
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:03 Kaelyn Moore? Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your ghost, ooh, Kayla Moore. Today, I have some urban legends for you all and the true stories behind them. You guys have sent me some legends from all over the world to look into. Actually, one of the ones today comes from a listener whose username is False Bird. And actually, as I was just going through some of the ones that you guys have sent me, I saw an interesting suggestion from a listener, Kit the Historian. Kit writes, "There's been an interesting suggestion that the trolls of Scandinavian folklore, which I grew up with in Denmark, are some sort of folk memory of the Neanderthals. It makes a lot of sense to me, honestly, considering that these beings are always described
1:44 Kaelyn Moore? as different people rather than creatures or gods, especially in the really old legends." That's actually really interesting. Thank you for sending me that, Kit. Thanks also for giving me another rabbit hole to go down. You guys can always send me the legends and scary stories that you were raised with, and I will try to look into them more. I promise, Jinx and I will be on it. Okay, but for now, let's get into some of the legends that I have for you today. Growing up as a young girl in the US, I was exposed to all sorts of spooky rituals. Light as a feather, Ouija boards, and maybe you're like me and you were always trying to get Bloody Mary started at the sleepover. But in the 90s, young girls in South Africa had their own unique ritual. Pinky Pinky.
2:28 Kaelyn Moore? According to an old urban legend, you'll want to go into the school bathroom when you know you won't be interrupted. Then you'll look into the mirror and say this name three times. Pinky, Pinky, Pinky. At first, nothing will happen. You'll want to leave, thinking that the ritual didn't work. But then, you'll see him standing behind you. Red eyes with greasy, dangling hair falling around his pale, bloated face. It looks like he's been living in the plumbing, waiting for this moment. And then you'll hear his voice, crying that he's all alone, begging you to come join him. You won't be able to resist. You'll walk into the stall behind you to join him, and his voice will stop crying and start laughing.
3:10 Kaelyn Moore? Then Pinky will grab you by your throat and he'll unhinge his jaw. He'll open his mouth impossibly wide, revealing rows of massive, jagged teeth. You won't even realize it as he starts eating your insides. It'll happen so fast. And by the time the next girl comes into the bathroom, there will be no trace that you were ever there, and Pinky Pinky will wait for the next girl to summon him. Now, Pinky Pinky has been shared in schoolyards for decades. Girls in South Africa grew up terrified of him. But we can actually trace some of this legend. It's believed to have started in the 90s by teachers at girls' school in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was kind of a cautionary tale or urban legend that was meant to instill fear in young girls about going to the bathroom alone.
3:54 Kaelyn Moore? Pinky Pinky was supposedly a coward, and he would stay away if all the girls went to the bathroom together. And there's a few different reasons for this. Some teachers feared that actual predators were laying in wait inside of the bathrooms. I mean, there's one study I found that said 40% of women in South Africa are affected by sexual violence. So it makes sense that teachers were trying to protect their students. One Yale study actually suggests that a lot of the violence happened due to a lack of sanitary toilets, which leads to women being vulnerable when they have to walk long distances to find a functioning public restroom. Regardless, it seems like this was a way to keep young girls aware of their surroundings. According to different tellings of the legend, Pinky Pinky might take you to his lair beneath the toilets,
4:38 Kaelyn Moore? where he'll keep you prisoner with other little girls until he's ready to eat you. Or he might just claw out your guts or bite off your head right there in the stall. And in some tellings, teachers would even tell young girls to not wear pink because Pinky Pinky prefers that color. Now, young girls that were told the legend of Pinky Pinky grew up to understand that it was just that, a legend. There wasn't a horrifying monster actually waiting in the stalls for them to come in alone. No, they grew up to realize that the real monsters were people. See, there were a few major news stories being reported on at the time the Pinky Pinky legend was being created. And those stories might have influenced the way that this legend was crafted and shared.
5:23 Kaelyn Moore? And one of those stories, probably the most bizarre if I'm being honest, didn't actually happen in South Africa, but somewhere totally unexpected. It was the night of February 28th, 1989, in the small mountain village of Miyakoji in central Japan. The sky was dark and snow was falling, the air was freezing. And 23-year-old Yumi Tanaka, an elementary school teacher, was trying to get warm in her small apartment after coming home from work. Then, her phone rang. Her heart sank and a pit formed in her stomach. She knew she shouldn't, but she answered the phone anyways. The voice on the other end was strange and muffled. It was a man's voice, and kind of high pitched and irritated.
6:07 Kaelyn Moore? The man went on to say horrible things about Yumi's body and how he wanted to do equally horrible things to her. Her heart started racing and she quickly hung up. This wasn't the first time this had happened. She had been getting these calls for weeks, and nothing she said on the phone ever made them stop. Her friends could see how much this was affecting her too. She was always stressed out, she was losing the light in her eyes, it seemed. So, one day, one of her friends, this young man named Naoyuki Kano, came to her. He was willing to do anything he could to help. So he offered to use his contacts in the local government to try and trace these calls. This was so nice of him. He definitely didn't need to do that, but Yumi really appreciated it.
6:52 Kaelyn Moore? Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it, but it was still so nice knowing that Naoyuki really cared for her. Later that night, Yumi made sure that the door was locked and she tried to relax. She walked across the living room to her bathroom. She flipped on the light. The simple, dark room wasn't very inviting. Her toilet wasn't necessarily a nice, high-tech toilets like you see in Tokyo. It was a squat toilet, basically a hole in the ground that led to a septic tank outside. She was about to use the toilet when she noticed that there was something unusual in the hole. She peered over and there, at the bottom of the toilet, was a shoe. A man's shoe.
7:35 Kaelyn Moore? She jumped back and surprised. How could that have gotten there? Had someone been inside of her apartment? She looked around, almost expecting to see someone in the corner, but there was nobody there. The only other thing that made sense to her was maybe someone had thrown the shoe through the lid of the septic tank outside. But to do that, they would have had to open the lid, which would have caused more issues. So she had to go outside and see for herself. She put on a scarf and a coat and unlocked the door. It was freezing outside as she trudged through the snow around to the back of her apartment. And there she found the large pipe of the septic tank sticking out from the ground. And for the second time tonight, a pit formed in her stomach. The lid at the top of the pipe was askew.
8:20 Kaelyn Moore? Someone had tampered with it. She almost just ran forward and closed the lid herself, but something inside of her told her to look down inside of the tank. And it was far worse than she could have imagined. The pipe went down a few feet and then off to the side where it opened back up under her toilet. It formed kind of a U shape. And this time, when she looked down, she saw more than a shoe. She saw a foot sticking out from the bottom of the pipe. Someone was stuck inside of her septic tank.
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9:55 Kaelyn Moore? Yuki immediately called the police, who arrived on the scene a short while later. They tried reaching down into the pipe to pull on the foot, but it was way too narrow of a fit for most of the officers. Then they tried tying ropes to the foot and pulling it out that way, but that didn't work either. Whoever was down there was stuck. And there were no movements or responses when they called out to the person, so they were pretty sure that whoever was down there was dead. After a short time, they managed to get some digging equipment on the scene. The police had to tear up Yumi's entire backyard as they removed the whole U-shaped pipe that made up the septic tank that led from her toilet to the outside. It was really nasty work, and it was pretty embarrassing for Yumi to have her toilet
10:40 Kaelyn Moore? literally dug out of the ground by a whole squad of police officers. Once they had the pipe out on the lawn, they used the tools they had to crack it open. The pieces all fell away, and Yumi screamed.
10:54 Kaelyn Moore? Inside the pipe, covered in sewage, was a man, lying flat on his back with his feet underneath one of the entrances to the pipe, and his head facing upwards underneath the other pipe entrance to Yumi's toilet. And just like the police guessed, he was dead. The man was only wearing pants, which didn't really make sense considering how cold it was outside. One shoe was left above ground and the other was with him in the pipe. He also had his shirt folded and clutched lightly to his chest, as if he was worried about it getting dirty. The body was then transported to the local morgue. It was so covered in filth that it was impossible to tell who it was. The coroner had to slowly and methodically clean away the grime,
11:39 Kaelyn Moore? which revealed more and more about this dead man. Wiping down the torso, the coroner didn't see any obvious wounds. So then he moved on to the legs and there was nothing there either. So he wiped down the arms and those were also free of any obvious signs of trauma. The coroner basically came to the conclusion that this man was not murdered and put in the pipe. And beyond that, he probably hadn't been stuffed into the pipe against his will, period. He would have had some trauma to his body if that was the case. No, from what the coroner could tell, this man had put himself in that septic tank of his own free will. The next thing he had to do was try and identify this man. So he started cleaning away the grime from his face.
12:23 Kaelyn Moore? He wiped it down and then dropped the cloth and gasped, because he recognized this man. It was a small town and everyone was going to. It was Naoyuki Kano, Yumi's friend, the man who had supposedly been helping her trace the harassing phone calls. But now, it didn't really look like he was actually trying to help her at all. It looked like he was trying to peep on her by crawling into her toilet. A few days earlier, on February 24th, 1989, Naoyuki, who was 26 years old at the time, left his family home, telling his family that he would be back later that day. But he never returned. His family went on to report him missing, but a major national event delayed the investigation.
13:06 Kaelyn Moore? The emperor actually passed away that very same day, and almost everyone took the 24th through the 27th off to mourn him and attend his funeral or watch it on TV. So no one really thought to look for Naoyuki. As far as the coroner could tell, he probably died on the 26th and then had been in the septic tank until Yumi found him after returning to work on the 28th. But police were completely stumped as to how he found himself in there. It was almost physically impossible to get into this tank. It was only 36 centimeters across, and the average Japanese male had a torso width of 40 centimeters. But Naoyuki had clearly chosen to go into the septic tank. His car was even found nearby with the keys still inside.
13:51 Kaelyn Moore? Once he was at the tank, he must have figured out a way to wiggle his way in. And then he must have figured out how to navigate the sharp 90-degree turn to where the pipe turned towards the apartment. According to the coroner, he must have gotten stuck there and froze to death. It was officially ruled death by misadventure. Naoyuki was a well-respected member of the community, known for organizing youth sports and giving political speeches. He had a good job at the local nuclear power plant. And as I mentioned, he was seemingly friends with Yumi. So why would he do this to her? Well, his father refused to believe the police's explanation, and he started a petition to reopen the case as a murder. And he got 4,300 signatures from local townspeople
14:35 Kaelyn Moore? who also could not believe that Naoyuki would do something like this. But the police had no other evidence that it was a murder. And again, there were no signs of trauma on Naoyuki's body. They had no reason to reopen this case. And the really bizarre nature of the case led to it spreading throughout Japan. And a lot of people started forming their own conspiracy theories to explain how some nice young man could have ended up inside of a woman's toilet. Now, personally, I think he was probably a weirdo. I don't think there's much more to it. In fact, the whole story does start to feel like an urban legend. However, it's not. We found a pretty detailed Namu Wiki article, which is a Korean pop culture Wikipedia.
15:17 Kaelyn Moore? It links to firsthand sources and goes through a ton of detail on this case. Some of it is hard to parse through as the English translation is pretty rough, but it does appear that this actually happened. And this is just a weird, dark rabbit hole I went down that I figured I'd share with you guys. But that same Namu Wiki article also brings up a meme that roughly translates to "The Four Great Perverts of Japan." These are similar cases describing incidents from the 2000s where Japanese men did very, very gross things just to creep on women. One of these men broke into a girls' school's swimming pool and tried on a bunch of the girls' swimsuits. Another man broke into a bunch of different girls' schools and stole shoes just to smell them.
15:59 Kaelyn Moore? The third man collected saliva samples from over 500 different girls over the course of years. I have no idea why he would have done that. But the most recent of these was a 28-year-old man who was arrested in 2015 for hiding in storm drains to take pictures up women's skirts. He was a very, very bizarre and disturbed human being, and he went on record saying that he wanted to be reborn in a second life as a road. But what's most disturbing about this is he was otherwise a very successful office worker who lived in a nice apartment, and no one saw that coming. And that kind of has some parallels to Naio Yuki's story. And that Naio Yuki was also successful, and no one really expected that he would do something so gross.
16:42 Kaelyn Moore? It goes to show that some people are harboring significant issues that they are very good at hiding from the world. But despite all of this, maybe the strongest piece of evidence against Naio Yuki is what happened after he died. Remember those harassing phone calls Yumi was receiving that I told you about? The ones that Naio Yuki was supposedly trying to help trace? Well, after he died, those calls stopped, and Yumi was never bothered again.
17:11 Kaelyn Moore? It's always interesting to me how these stories can travel around the world and change from culture to culture. Humans have this way of combining fact and fiction to create even darker legends that tend to take on a life of their own. And that's never been more true than in this next urban legend I have for you. A place in Wisconsin called Summerwind Mansion. It's a haunted house where it's rumored that anyone who lives there goes mad. Summerwind Mansion sits on the West Bay Lake in northern Wisconsin. It's an old place where early British explorers first came into contact with members of the Dakota Tribe. Dark green trees loom over the black water. The house itself sticks out from the trees, kind of like a giant human skull. Its many gabled roof and upper
17:55 Kaelyn Moore? story windows give the impression of empty eye sockets looking out over the lake. Add in the chipped gray wood siding, and Summerwind is a little reminiscent of Amityville. The local children would tell stories of the previous owners of this place. Legend says that the house drove anyone who tried to own it mad. One after another, these families would break down and flee, or would have to be committed. And according to this legend, if you were to step foot inside, you too might feel your mind start to warp. Now, maybe this was just a way for the neighborhood kids to dare each other to go in. They would tell each other these stories while sitting in the abandoned house's basement, surrounded by the decaying furniture and the drug and alcohol paraphernalia from the partying teens
18:40 Kaelyn Moore? that would go there. But most of them were ignorant of the house's real history. These legends might have been a lot more accurate than they could have ever guessed. The previous owners were strange, but kind of in ways that the kids could not have imagined. Before this house was known as Summerwind, it was just a fishing lodge. It was purchased in 1916 by a wealthy businessman named Robert Lamont, who would go on to be the Secretary of Commerce to President Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1932. He spent $125,000 on renovations, which today would be about $4 million. As he transformed the house from a lodge to a mansion, the contractors that were working for him immediately- began to notice that there was something odd about this place.
19:23 Kaelyn Moore? Something that was making it really hard for them to complete their work. They would measure out part of one room, but when they came back to re-measure it, it would be a different length. It was like the house was changing dimensions on them. But the mansion still ended up being finished in 1918, allowing Robert and his family to move in. And together they called it Lilac Hills. Locals, though, called it the Lamont Mansion. One night in the early 1930s, Robert and his wife were having dinner in the dining room. Their servants had been sent away for the night. And as they ate their food, lit by dim electric lamps of the time, they heard a loud banging noise in the kitchen. Robert and his wife looked at each other in shock.
20:04 Kaelyn Moore? And he ran to another room where he retrieved a pistol, fearing that they had an intruder on their hands. He walked into the kitchen, his gun raised. Everything was still and quiet before another loud bang made Robert jump. He pointed his gun at the basement door, which was glowing in the dim light of the kitchen bulbs. And the door started shaking. Something was clearly behind it, wanting to get out. But Robert couldn't think of any natural reason why someone would be down in the basement. The servants were gone, his children were grown and living on their own. So he kept his gun raised, just in time for the lock to give and for the door to come crashing open. The room filled with bright blue light as a strange translucent being floated into the kitchen from the basement.
20:49 Kaelyn Moore? Robert couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, but he didn't care. He fired two shots at it. The figure disappeared in an instant and the blue glow went with it, returning the kitchen back to normal. Robert stared ahead, trying to process what it was he saw. The figure was gone, but there, embedded in the basement door, were his two bullets. Had he just shot at a ghost? The Lamonts didn't stick around much longer to find out. They moved out of the house and left it empty until Robert's death in 1948. The house was then purchased by a man known only as Mr. Kiefer and his wife, Lillian. But reports say that the house was even more unkind to them. Mr. Kiefer died of a sudden heart attack only a few months into staying there.
21:34 Kaelyn Moore? No one knows why, but after that, Lillian became so frightened that she left the house in a hurry, saying that her neighbors could have all of her things. Her parting words were that she didn't want to be responsible if anything happened to anyone while they were in the house. Next, Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw moved in with their six children and their pet raccoon in the early 1970s. Yes, they had a pet raccoon. They hoped that they could renovate the old place and make a life there, but they should have done a little bit more research, it seems, because the house would go on to torture them more than either of the previous couples. It seems like they both began to change. Ginger became obsessed with the color of the walls and she would constantly paint and repaint them.
22:16 Kaelyn Moore? And Arnold would stay up all hours of the night playing strange music on an organ. And he claimed that spirits were telling him what to play. When they tried to get people to come help them repair the house, most refused. So the couple became desperate and things like the water pump and the heater started breaking down. When they finally did get a repairman to come, both of those things mysteriously repaired themselves. After that, Arnold was at the end of his rope. He felt like there was something wrong with the house, like there was an unusual force about it. He wanted to figure out where it was coming from. So he searched up and down until he got to the closet in the guest bedroom. Inside, there was an old chest of drawers, which he pushed to the side.
23:01 Kaelyn Moore? And there, hidden was a small entrance to a crawl space. He swung the little door open and peered inside, but it was so dark he couldn't see how big the space actually was. Then he had an idea. He called one of his children and told them to go look around inside. The child was inside for only a minute before they started screaming and ran out. Arnold grabbed them and asked what they saw. And they said that there was a skeleton with dark hair clinging to its skull, deep inside the crawl space. He then sent all of his other kids just to be sure, and they all claimed that they saw the same thing. That night, the family huddled together in the living room, too afraid to be alone,
23:42 Kaelyn Moore? and suddenly, blue light flooded in from the direction of the dining room. They looked to see an ethereal woman dancing in the air above their table. And that seemed to be the thing that sent Arnold over the edge. The next morning, when Ginger found him, he was chasing after the family's pet raccoon with a large butcher knife. Ginger said she had no choice but to have him committed. It was him or the raccoon, and I guess she picked the raccoon. After that, she divorced Arnold and moved herself and her children in with her parents, and she put the Lamont Mansion behind her. But that was hardly the end of the story for the Lamont Mansion. Ginger's father, Raymond Bober, was fascinated by what happened to her, and he himself moved on to the property, staying in a trailer.
24:25 Kaelyn Moore? He apparently hoped to witness some of the same supernatural things that his daughter had seen. And according to him, he didn't have to wait very long. He claimed to have been visited in a dream by the ghost of Jonathan Carver, a British explorer who was one of the first Europeans to scout the area. He told Raymond that the house was actually called Summerwind, and that a deed to much of the land of northern Wisconsin was buried there. Raymond never found the deed, he looked for it, but he promptly wrote a book about the house called "The Carver Effect" and started making money off its sales. And here's some context that even a lot of modern locals have forgotten, but most of the legends we've discussed up until this point come from that book.
25:08 Kaelyn Moore? Before this, the house was not called Summerwind, and there weren't any written stories of its hauntings. The explorer, whose ghost Raymond claimed to see, Jonathan Carver, was a bit of a shady character from the early 1800s, who abandoned his family in Wisconsin to start a new one in London. He died there 125 years before the mansion was even built. His descendants were left high and dry, but they created a story about how the Dakota tribe had supposedly left their family a huge part of northern Wisconsin. They said that they had the paperwork to prove it, and they called this document "The Carver Deed." And they said that whoever held it would supposedly own all the land. Judges recognized it as a con then, and "The Carver Deed" became its own kind of urban legend.
25:53 Kaelyn Moore? And some people have suggested that Raymond Bober was just dredging it up years later for his book. In order to better sell the legend, he colored it with new, maybe made-up details about the newer inhabitants of the land. Raymond published this book first in 1979, two years after the Amityville horror book was published and had become a huge sensation. So, you know, maybe he was chasing his own version of that story. And so that would seem to be a conclusive source for this urban legend. However, there is one strange thing about the house that is hard to explain. So the house sat empty for years after the Hinshaws lived there, becoming a popular hangout spot for neighborhood kids like I mentioned before. It was mostly intact until one day in 1988,
26:38 Kaelyn Moore? when dark storm clouds appeared over the lake. A heavy thunderstorm pelted the area with wind, rain, and lightning. And out of those dark storm clouds, a lightning bolt struck Summerwind, lighting it on fire. The flames grew and grew until they engulfed the entire house. By morning, all that was left was the basement and two chimneys. And firefighters thought this was strange because the house's lightning rods were still intact at the time of the fire. And since then, any investor that has tried to do something with the property has been scared away by local legends or met with misfortune. So even if Summerwind isn't haunted, it sure seems like it wants to be left alone.
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29:40 Kaelyn Moore? Time can be a funny thing. Communities can forget their own history and come to prefer the legends that they tell one another. Just like how Pinky Pinky is, in some ways, a more palatable monster than the real horror of sexual assault in South Africa, Summerwind is a more interesting legend than the con artistry at the Le Mans Mansion. But sometimes, the reverse can actually be true. Sometimes history can be stranger than fiction, and we come to believe the legend just because we can't fathom that reality is just as weird. Our final urban legend is from the American West, and it proves this in more ways than one. The story of the Red Ghost begins in the dry desert hills of Eagle Creek, Arizona, in 1883.
30:24 Kaelyn Moore? One night, a family of American sheep farmers was eating dinner when they heard horrible sounds coming from the pasture where they kept their sheep. It was too dark to see outside, but they knew that this must be an attack from the nearby Apache tribe. There was nothing the family could do, though, because they would be killed immediately if they went outside to stop the attack. So instead, they sat around their table and listened to the sound of their sheep being massacred. First thing in the morning, the two oldest brothers peeked their heads outside to find that the Apaches were gone. They went up into the hills surrounding the ranch house with their father to try to find what was left of their livestock. Their mother didn't love the idea of being left alone with the other children, but she had no choice. She planned to stay inside as much as she could to wait
31:07 Kaelyn Moore? for the men to return. But soon she realized that the family needed fresh water from the outdoor pump, and that meant walking around as an open target. As she walked across the field, she could see the horse hoofprints in the grass. All of their carefully stacked firewood, their tools, their fence, it was all destroyed and laying in bits and pieces around the yard. She could also see streaks of blood where her sheep had been carried away, and some of the streaks looked like they had this red hair in them. The woman tried to not think about it as she made her way to the pump, but as she got closer, the sudden snort of a large animal caused her to stop in her tracks. She looked up
31:48 Kaelyn Moore? to see something horrible hovering over her. Back in the house, one of the daughters heard a scream. She ran to the window and looked outside, expecting to see more Apache warriors, but instead, she saw something she almost couldn't believe. Across the yard, near the water pump, was a giant red buffalo, and seated atop its back was what looked like a dark-eyed, sharp-toothed demon, straight from hell. The men soon returned, and the young girl told them exactly what she saw, so they quickly went out to investigate the water pump. And there, at the foot of that very pump, was the broken body of their mother. Every bone in her body was shattered. Thousands of bits of bone stuck out from her skin,
32:32 Kaelyn Moore? and blood soaked her dress. Her hair was tangled and matted with blood. It was like something massive had landed right on top of her. And strangely, the area around her body was covered in the same bits of red hair that was in the sheep's blood. An official inquiry was opened into the death, with law enforcement believing that the family might have just killed her themselves. But a jury found no reason to bring charges when the cause of death was so strange and there was no real motive. They ruled it "death in a manner unknown." But soon, whispers of this creature that the family saw started spreading, and they started calling it "the red ghost." A local newspaper, the Mojave County Miner,
33:14 Kaelyn Moore? became obsessed with reporting on any further sightings of this creature. And over the next several years, they shared accounts from other locals who had run-ins with this thing. And there were a lot. One day, two local miners were camped next to a river where they were searching for gold. They were sound asleep in their tent when some sort of animal hoof came crashing down between them. It continued to trample the tent with hooves stamping all around them over and over. And they were lucky to not be trampled themselves. And when they climbed out of the tent, they saw a massive, red creature thundering into the dark desert. The Mojave County Miner next reported that a group of miners caught the sight of the red ghost and cornered it, firing at it with their rifles.
33:57 Kaelyn Moore? It escaped up a hill, but not before one of the miners landed a shot on it. The bullet didn't hit flesh, though. It hit something on the creature's back and knocked it off. And when they went to go investigate, they found something white and round in the dirt. It was a human skull. It wasn't until February 1893, which was 10 years after the first red ghost sighting, that the legend finally came to an end. An Eagle Creek farmer named Mizzou Hastings woke up one morning to find something large and red in the back of his garden. It was the red ghost. He grabbed his gun and he fired a shot at it. And this time, he hit it, right in the eye. It fell down, dead. When he got close, what he saw was almost more confusing than scary.
34:42 Kaelyn Moore? The red ghost wasn't a buffalo after all, but a camel, like the ones that are found in Africa. And it had old leather straps on its torso, as if some saddle had been on it for years. I mean, the whole thing sounds like a legend, that an African camel had been terrorizing a small community in Arizona. But the wild part in all of this is there actually were camels in Arizona in the 1800s. So in 1857, adventurer Edward Beal led an expedition from Fort Smith, Arkansas to Los Angeles. This was one of the first American surveys of the Southwest. But he didn't use horses in this expedition. He used camels imported by the US Army for this purpose. They had thought that camels would be better travel companions because
35:26 Kaelyn Moore? they could go for three days without water and they made really good time across the desert. But the reality was much less ideal. Camels are actually kind of jerks. If one of the explorers tried to put one more pound of cargo on a camel than the camel was comfortable with, that camel would spit directly in their eye. And if they tried to lasso a camel, the camel would charge them and trample them. That's all to say, camels are partners, not servants, and they demand to be treated like it. The camels were used by both the Union and the Confederates during the Civil War, but they were all sold and spread out across the desert in a variety of jobs. The camels were used by both the Union and the Confederates during the Civil War, but afterwards they were all sold and they spread
36:07 Kaelyn Moore? out throughout the desert in a variety of jobs. Some were involved in skirmishes with the Native American tribes. In the case of the Red Devil, it's possible that an unlucky soldier had taken an arrow or a bullet to the head, but stayed tied to the saddle. And as this camel wandered, maybe for decades, it's possible that his body stayed in the saddle and just decomposed until his skeleton became confused with some sort of devil creature, and thus, the legend was born. Now, urban legends are deeply psychological. We can use them to avoid facing our real fears head-on, or to build up something in our head that actually isn't that scary in real life. It's avoidance or catastrophizing that can
36:51 Kaelyn Moore? snowball over the years until a lot of people accept legends as fact. And sometimes, they're just born out of ignorance. These poor Arizona settlers truly had no context for why a giant Mediterranean camel with a dead man on his back would be attacking them. And I love being able to bring some of that context to you all now. These stories are still kind of... Spooky even without the supernatural elements. But now I turn it over to you guys. What were some urban legends that you were all raised with? You can let me know wherever you listen to this podcast. And you can join me over on the High Council tier on Patreon, where I'm going to go through a little bit more of the research that didn't make it into the episode, including kind of a rabbit hole I went down on camel attacks because they're very serious and they happen quite often. So if you want to know more about that,
37:35 Kaelyn Moore? you can join me on the High Council tier on Patreon. I will be back next week with another episode for you all. And until then, pinky, pinky, pinky.
37:49 Kaelyn Moore? Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobs. Additional research and writing by Greg Castro. Sound design and mix by Red Rome Creative. Special thanks to Travis Denlap, Grayson Jernigan, and the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Go to heartsarts pounding.com. Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heart starts pounding.
38:33 Kaelyn Moore? But whatever you do, stay curious.
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