Transcript of From Beyond Vol. III

Today's podcast will feature 3 spooky stories about messages from beyond. The audio from all 3 of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. The first story you'll hear is called Into the Coffin, and it's about a brother who comes up with a genius plan to catch his sister's killer. The second story you'll hear is called Another Nightmare, And it's about a woman who insists that her house is haunted, and then a séance reveals a secret hidden in her basement.

And the third and final story you'll hear is called The Gray Man, and it's about a couple who encounters a mysterious man in gray while walking the beach. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload 2, 3, even 4 times every week. So if that's of interest to you, the next time you're at the beach with the follow button, wait until they take their sun hat off so they can go run in the water, and while they're gone, fill their hat up with sunscreen. Okay, let's get into our first story called Into the Coffin.

At 8 AM on August 22nd, 1974, a young man named Leo Fung sat on a long bench inside of a public mortuary in Hong Kong. He was sitting with about a dozen of his closest family members, and they were all facing the front of the room, looking at an open wooden coffin. Inside of the coffin was the body of Fung's old older sister, 34-year-old Liu Fumin. Today was her funeral, and it was supposed to be a time for Feng and his family to come together and privately mourn their loss. But they couldn't do that because they were literally outnumbered by the amount of newspaper reporters who were also in the room.

And the reporters were milling around, taking notes, and even taking pictures of the body in the coffin. And this really upset Feng because in his mind, the reporters were not treating his sister like person, they were treating her like, you know, the salacious headline she'd become ever since her death. So, one week earlier, Fung's sister, Fumin, had been found strangled to death in a hotel room in Hong Kong. She had clearly been murdered, but that was not what had made her case such big news. What had made it news was the fact that Fumin had been found without her face.

Her killer had cut off her eyebrows, her eyelids, her nose, and her lips. And so now, as she lay in her open coffin, she looked grotesque. Since she didn't have eyelids, it looked like she was staring straight up at the ceiling with these huge glassy eyes, and without lips, it looked like she was baring her teeth in this horrible, morbid smile. But for Fung, and probably the rest of his family, the worst part of all of this was not even, you know, the media attention. It was the police response.

They hadn't arrested anyone for the crime yet. His sister's murder was still unsolved. And so as Fung is watching these reporters mill about, treating his sister like she's just some, you know, freak show, and he's thinking about how disrespectful her killer was to her body and how the police seem so incompetent, it made him just so mad. But there was one thing that did bring him comfort, and that was the fact that he had had actually come up with a plan that he believed would help him solve his sister's murder. And today, he was going to put that plan into action.

Fung sat quietly with his family throughout the funeral service and tried his best to ignore the reporters. And then finally, when it was time for everybody to say their final goodbyes to his sister, Fung walked up to the front of the room, he reached into the pocket of his jacket, and he pulled out a giant The next evening, on August 23rd, a police officer was doing her regular nighttime patrol through a neighborhood in Hong Kong that was not very far from where Liu Fumin's funeral had been held the day before. And as this policewoman was walking along, she glanced down an alleyway and she saw something that made her immediately stop in her tracks. There was a guy who was just laying on the ground, basically laying in this lake of blood. Limp heap.

And when she walked up to him, she could see there was blood all over him, and some of his limbs were twisted and contorted and obviously broken. I mean, he looked like he had fallen from a great height. The policewoman immediately called an ambulance and then ran to the man's side, and sort of unbelievably, she found he was still alive. And so she asked him what happened, and the guy, who was obviously in pain, he just kind of looked up towards, like, the building right next to them. And as he's looking up, he said a woman had pushed him.

When more officers arrived on the scene, they went to search for this woman who apparently was up on the roof, but there was no evidence of a woman or any kind of struggle at all anywhere on the top of the building or in the top floors of the building. There just was no sign that anything had happened. It was not until the police went to the hospital and reinterviewed the injured man and he gave them a fuller statement about exactly who this woman was that they understood Why? It all had to do with Leo Fung, the brother of the murdered woman, and what he had done with that knife at her funeral. So when the injured man sort of came to in the hospital and he had stabilized a little bit and the police showed up and asked him to give more information about who pushed him off the roof, this was his description of the woman, the woman who pushed him.

He said she had these big, horrible glassy eyes and this awful toothy grin, and she had no eyebrows, she had no eyelids, her nose was gone, her lips were gone. She looked Horrifying. Obviously, he was basically describing the murdered woman, Liu Fumin. But she was dead, like literally dead when he got pushed off the roof. And so the police are like, that's not possible.

A dead woman could not have pushed you off the roof. But wait, her brother, the murdered victim's brother, Liu Feng, at the funeral when he pulled out that knife, he then went on to perform this ancient Taoist ritual where he stabbed the knife into his sister's wooden coffin, which he believed would unleash her spirit so it could go go find and take revenge on her killer. And apparently it worked, because the man in the alleyway, after describing effectively the ghost of this murdered woman, then gave a full confession saying he was her killer. He would say that the reason he did it is because she rejected his marriage proposal. Fumin's killer was ultimately arrested, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Our next story is called Another Nightmare.

One night in April of 1919, A middle-aged man named Eric Marth woke up in his bedroom in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, because his entire bed was shaking. He saw his wife Margaret was lying next to him, and she was thrashing around and gasping for air. But Eric didn't panic because he knew exactly what was happening. So Eric and Margaret had moved into this house just a few weeks ago, but pretty much right away after moving in, Margaret had begun having these very intense nightmares that would wake her up almost violently, like what was happening right now. Now, from Eric's perspective, these nightmares she was having looked horrifying, but there really was not any physical risk to Margaret.

I mean, she would just have these horrible visceral dreams and kind of shake around, but that was it. And so, like he had been doing the past couple of weeks, Eric just reached over and gently put his hands on his wife's shoulders and began repeating her name very gently over and over again to try to kind of get her out of this trance she was in. And sure enough, a moment later, Margaret, who kind of stopped flailing, she let out this huge gasp, and then she sat up straight and panted for air, and she turned to her husband and she said, I saw the ghost again. And when Eric heard this, he wasn't like, oh my goodness, there's a ghost! Instead, he was just kind of annoyed.

And so he did his best to comfort her, but he's just thinking, what in the world is going on here? So a few years ago, Margaret had joined the spiritualism movement. Which was a very popular religious movement at the time, and spiritualists thought they could contact the dead. Now, Eric absolutely did not believe in ghosts, and he was pretty sure that Margaret's staunch belief in spiritualism was now effectively causing these nightmares. That it was not the house, it was just her belief system, it was kind of manifesting in these nightmares.

However, Margaret felt the opposite. She felt like it was the house itself that was haunted. And it was haunted by a vengeful spirit that attacked her every night in these dreams. Now, Erik, you know, it's the middle of the night, he's tired, he's annoyed, he didn't feel like discussing whatever she believed about this ghost right now. So after she said, you know, I saw the ghost, I saw the spirit again, he just told her to, you know, calm down, go back to sleep.

But on this night, Margaret didn't lie down. She actually turned to Erik and she said, No, I have to figure out what's going on. I have to figure out who this ghost is and why they're haunting me. A week later, a very resigned Eric sat at his kitchen table next to Margaret, and across from them sat a medium, which is a person who spiritualists believed could talk directly to the dead by conducting a ritual called a séance. The medium began to light some candles, and as they did, they told Eric and Margaret to close their eyes because she was ready to begin the séance, where she would ask the spirit haunting their their house what it wanted, and they needed, you know, silence and their eyes closed to do that.

So Eric fully believed that this séance would be a waste of time and money. He didn't believe in this stuff at all, but he knew his wife did, and it meant a lot to her. And so he's thinking, you know, maybe this can help my wife sleep through the night again. And so Margaret and Eric did as they were told, and Eric, you know, he closed his eyes and he listened as the medium began clearly rocking back and forth in her chair and began sort of dramatically calling out to the ghost and telling him to reveal himself. And at first, nothing happened, which was exactly what Eric had expected.

But after a minute, Margaret suddenly jumped up from the table and ran out of the kitchen across the living room. And Eric, not knowing any better, just got up and followed her. Margaret, she ran down the hallway and she threw open a door that led down to their cellar, and she raced down the steps. Now, Eric was doing his best not to ridicule what was happening here and just to play along, but it's like, what is his wife doing? What's happening here?

And so as he's chasing after his wife, he starts saying like, honey, what's going on here? Where are you going? What is this? But she didn't respond. It was like she was on a mission.

And then finally, when Eric got down the steps and he's in the cellar, he saw his wife who was now standing in the middle of the cellar with her arms out wide. And slowly she began to point to a spot on the floor. And in this really weird and hollow voice with the sort of vacant expression on her face, she told Eric— To dig. Now, at this point, Eric was totally freaked out. Not because he believed that the séance had worked or that there was a ghost here, but because his wife genuinely was acting totally bizarre.

I mean, she was acting possessed. And even if that was an act, it was a terrifying one. And so he just said no. There was no way he was just going to start digging up the cellar floor. Like, what is going on here?

But then the medium came rushing down the stairs as well, and they said that— Margaret was in a trance, that the ghost in this house was channeling her, and that basically Eric had to do whatever the ghost said. Suddenly, Margaret's voice cut across the room again, and she said to Eric to dig, dig up the floor. And this time she was more forceful and almost desperate, like, you must do this. And so Eric, he's looking at his wife, he's looking at the medium like, what in the world is happening here? But he's like, you know what?

I don't know what's happening. I'm gonna do it. I'm just gonna dig. I'm gonna do what they tell me to. So he grabbed a shovel and just began digging up the cellar.

And after just a few minutes, Erik's shovel hit something in the ground, something hard. He thought it was just maybe like a big rock or something. But a few minutes later, after he and the medium and also Margaret, who's now come over at this point, they'd kind of cleared off whatever it was, they saw in the ground, you know, what had previously been covered by the earth, was this— A skull. Rotten wooden box. And so he and Margaret and the medium, they pulled it out of the hole and they opened up the lid, and all 3 of them immediately recoiled because inside of the box was a human skeleton.

And so after a minute of just, again, stunned silence, Erik just looked up at Margaret, who did not seem shocked by what she was looking at. This was like confirmation in some ways. And he says to Margaret, Is this the skeleton of the ghost that's been haunting you? And Margaret, with that same hollow voice, like it wasn't her voice, looked at Eric and just said, no. It would turn out, according to the story that has been passed down about whatever happened in this house, that the ghost was a doctor who used to live in the house that Eric and Margaret moved into.

And 18 years earlier, this doctor had performed an illegal surgery on a young woman, and this woman had died during this procedure. But again, because this surgery had been illegal, the doctor knew if word of what happened here got out, he would be arrested. So what did he do? He dismembered the girl's body and shoved it into this wooden box, filled the box with quicklime, and then he buried it in his basement. And amazingly, the doctor never got caught for what he did.

And so he basically spent the rest of his life feeling very ashamed and guilty. And then finally, when he did die, It was like his spirit couldn't actually rest until he confessed. And so this haunting was basically to get Margaret to go down into the basement and see what he had done.

The next and final story of today's episode is called The Gray Man.

On the afternoon of September 20th, 1989, a 70-year-old man named Jim Moore and his wife Clara walked along the beach on a tiny island off the coast of South Carolina. It was called Pawleys Island, and it was less than 4 miles long and only wide enough to fit one main road with beachfront houses on either side. Jim and Clara lived in one of those beachfront houses, And every afternoon, they would go out and walk the beach together. That particular day, as they walked, Jim could see some clouds gathering off in the distance right above the ocean, and he'd actually seen a weather report recently about this big storm called Hurricane Hugo that was supposed to be heading their way in the next couple of days. Living on an island, Jim and Clara were pretty used to getting warnings like that.

I mean, storms were sort of a big deal on an island because you're pretty isolated, and they were just planning to evacuate if the weather, you know, got pretty bad. But for now, it did seem like the weather wasn't too bad, so they were sticking it out. However, it did sort of seem like basically everybody else on Pawleys Island had taken the storm a little bit more seriously, and most of them had already evacuated. And in fact, as Jim and Clara are walking, I mean, normally they would see lots of people out doing what they were doing, walking the beach, but today there was just one person really far down the beach, just this one guy walking towards them, but that was it. The rest of the beach was basically deserted.

But Jim and Clara were, you know, veterans of Pawleys Island and certainly veterans of other storms that they had weathered in the past, and so they weren't worried yet. And they just continued to, you know, walk down the beach and chat and just kind of stare out at these growing clouds and just have a normal day. But as they're walking, Jim was sort of keeping an eye on this guy, this one other guy on the beach that was walking towards them. Now, he wasn't literally walking towards them, He was just sort of walking in the other direction. And so inevitably, both Jim and Clara and this guy were going to pass each other, and as Jim got closer to this guy, he realized he actually didn't recognize him.

And realistically, Polly's Island was so small that Jim and Clara basically knew everybody, or at least could recognize everybody. But this guy, who was wearing this long gray coat and this wide-brimmed hat, and he kind of had his head down, Jim didn't recognize, and he told Clara like, hey, who is this guy? As they're walking closer and closer, and she's like, I don't know, I've never seen him before. But, you know, there was no cause for alarm here. You know, it's broad daylight, and who cares if there's a stranger on the island?

I mean, of course people that live here have guests all the time. Like, this is probably just somebody visiting somebody who lives here. And so they're walking, getting closer and closer, and then finally, when Jim and Clara were about, you know, 10 feet away from this guy, the guy in the big gray coat, Jim, you know, to be polite, just said, hey, how you doing? You know, because they're the only people on the beach, you can't just ignore each other. But the guy in the gray coat, he just kept that big hat sort of angled down and just briskly walked right past Jim and Clara and didn't even acknowledge them, which is like, you know, there's nobody else here, what are you doing?

It's sort of rude. And so Jim and Clara, they look at each other like, that's weird. They keep on walking, and then for whatever reason, Jim just turns around And looks towards this guy, the guy who had just passed them, the guy in the gray coat. And when he looked, he just stopped because the guy was gone. And there's nowhere to go.

There is no, you know, shrubs or trees or anything. This is a wide-open, flat beach. And this guy has just passed Jim and Clara like seconds ago. He can't be anywhere else. He has to be on the beach.

There's nowhere to hide. And so Jimmy grabs Clara and he's like, look, he's gone. And she turns around and she's like, what's going on? That's not possible. And they're looking like, did he go in the ocean?

But they're looking out in the water and there's no sign of him. The only place, you know, maybe he could have gone is if as soon as he passed by Jim and Clara, he hard turned and ran inland and hid, you know, behind one of the houses. But that's pretty far away. It just didn't seem possible that in that short of an amount of time he could get up there and hide. And also, why would you do that?

That's such bizarre behavior. And so Jim and Clara, they're just standing there like trying to come up with some reasonable theory to explain where this guy went, but they just couldn't do it. It was like this guy just disappeared. And so eventually Jim and Clara just had to turn back around and finish their walk and make their way home. And the whole time, all they could talk about was this disappearing man in the gray coat because it defied any rational explanation.

Where did he go?

When the couple finally got back to their house, by this point the clouds that had been gathering outside were now very dark and it really did seem like a serious storm was on the horizon. And then when they turned on the TV, they put on the Weather Channel, and there was this bulletin that the South Carolina state government had actually issued an evacuation order to all inhabitants of Pawleys Island. Because apparently Hurricane Hugo was getting bigger and faster and more destructive, and it appeared like Pawleys Island was clearly going to be in the path of this hurricane. And so at this point, Jim and Clara forgot about the Gray Man and realized, like, hey, we gotta pack our stuff up and go. You know, we thought we had maybe a day or two before we'd have to evacuate, but no more.

We gotta go right now. And fortunately for them, they actually had an adult daughter who lived right on mainland South Carolina. And so they could stay with her on short notice, no problem. And so they quickly packed up, they hopped in their car, and they drove on the one main road until they hit the bridge that went over the ocean. They made their way across the bridge onto mainland South Carolina and over to their daughter's house.

And once they got there, their daughter was obviously very happy to see them, happy they were safe, and they would just spend the whole day basically just sitting there with the Weather Channel on, watching reports about Hurricane Hugo. And over the course of the day, the news got more and more dire. Hurricane Hugo was poised to be this enormous destructive storm that was not slowing down at all, and unfortunately, Pawleys Island was really looking like one of the main areas that was going to be affected by the storm. In fact, the meteorologist was saying like, it is not safe to be on the island at this point. I mean, there's a chance that all the structures on the island could be leveled by the end of the storm.

So Jim and Clara, they're obviously happy they are safe, you know, on mainland South Carolina with their daughter, but they live on that island. Their house, everything they own, it's on that island. And so the idea that they were just helpless and their house is going to be destroyed was sort of just terrible. Like, what can you even do? You're helpless.

And so as they began to sort of spiral into all their anxieties around what's going to happen, you know, eventually one of them said, hey, let's just accept that we're in this position and let's just change the subject. You know, we're safe here. Don't worry about what the storm's going to do. Let's just change the subject. And the first subject that was raised was Jim and Clara's encounter with that strange disappearing man in the gray cloak.

And so Jim and Clara, they told the story to their daughter about this weird guy they saw and how he just kind of vanished. And their daughter was like really interested listening to the story. And when they were done telling it, she looked at her parents and was like, I think you might have seen the Gray Man. Now Jim and Clara had lived on Pawleys Island long enough to know about the legend of The Gray Man. As the story goes, 150 years earlier, there was this sailor who was making his way to Pawleys Island to see his fiancée who was there.

And when he got to the island, he unfortunately basically fell into quicksand and died. And so the fiancée is totally heartbroken. She's basically losing her mind over the sudden loss of her love. But a couple of days after her fiancé, the sailor, had died, she saw him walking on the beach, On Polly's Island, and he was wearing this long gray coat and this big wide-brimmed hat, and he was walking towards her, and she was so overjoyed. She knows it doesn't make any sense, but she runs to her beloved sailor, and right as she reaches him, he disappears.

Now, Jim and Clara, they couldn't help but see the overlap here. I mean, they saw, you know, a guy wearing a long gray coat with a big wide-brimmed hat who, you know, was walking on the beach, who then Disappeared? It did sort of seem like the legend of the Gray Man, but neither Jim nor Clara really felt like that actually was the explanation here. But at the same time, Jim did feel like, man, that is a weird coincidence. Over the next couple of days, Hurricane Hugo made landfall and it was absolutely vicious.

And then finally, when it passed and it was safe to go back to Pawleys Island, Jim and Clara loaded up their car, they said bye to their daughter, And they made the drive out there. And as they were crossing the bridge to get out to Pawleys Island, along with all the other inhabitants that were going back, they immediately could tell that Pawleys Island really had been leveled. I mean, the roads themselves were badly damaged. There were street signs and trees everywhere. And as they're getting closer, they can see that basically their whole community has been leveled.

All the buildings are destroyed. I mean, it's like a war zone. Now, Jim and Clara had sort of braced themselves for this because they had heard on the news that sure enough, this hurricane had been as bad as expected and Pawleys Island had taken a direct hit. And so they drove across the island until they reached their property. And when they got to their property, they could not believe what they saw.

So there's actually one more part to the legend of the Gray Man Ghost, and that is when the woman saw who she believed was her dead fiancé walking up the beach with his gray coat and his big-brimmed hat, and she runs up and he disappears, and it's so tragic. That's not the end of the story, because the woman was so upset by seeing what she thought was her fiancé again— he's back from the dead, oh my goodness— and then he vanishes. It's like she had to experience his death a second time, and it made her go crazy. It was like so much grief, it was so overwhelming that she couldn't live with it. And in fact, quickly after seeing, you know, his ghost disappear, She was sent off the island to a hospital.

She was basically institutionalized. And while she was off the island, immediately after she left the island, this huge storm rolled through and leveled Pawleys Island, and only one building survived. It was her house. Inexplicably, her house was untouched, completely untouched. Everybody else's, ruined.

So keep that in mind, because when Jim and Clara returned to Pawleys Island following Hurricane Hugo, whose house was the only house left standing? Theirs. Utterly untouched. Their neighbors' houses, all the local businesses, everything gone. Their house untouched.

And just so you know, the legend of the Gray Man— people believe if you see the Gray Man, he's warning you to leave the island in advance of a storm, like he apparently did for his fiancée. He warned her, get off the island. And if you heed his warning, the legend goes, your house will be spared. And people believe that's exactly what happened to Jim and Clara.

A quick note about our stories: they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

The Mr. Ballen Podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballen. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone and Cole Locascio. Research and fact-checking by Shelley Xu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fasciano. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced Production support by Antonio Monada and Delana Corley.

Artwork by Jessica Clogston-Kiner. Theme song, Something Wicked, by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballen Podcast. And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballen Podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballen YouTube channel that very same day. And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe.

Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballen. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad-free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So that's gonna do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya.