Transcript of Stranger Than Fiction Vol. XIV New

Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and today's podcast features 3 stories that demonstrate that. 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 Inkling, and it's about a homicide detective who stumbles upon a picture he can't believe is real. The second story you'll hear is called The Nosebleed, and it's about a woman's scary nosebleed that just will not stop after she returns from vacation. And the third and final story you'll hear is called "James 3," and it's about a toddler who has this vivid recurring dream, and eventually his parents look into it and they can't believe what they find. 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 4 times a week: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to fill up the follow button's new waterbed. But instead of using water, use quick-drying cement.

Okay, let's get into our first story called Inkling.

On a Friday afternoon in late August of 2008, a homicide detective in Los Angeles, California named Kevin Lloyd grabbed a cup of coffee from the break room and then made his way to his office, and he sat down at his desk. Detective Lloyd had already had a very difficult week, but now he had all this paperwork on his desk that he basically had to go through right now. He had put it off for too long. It was the end of the week, and so today was the day. And so Detective Lloyd took one more sip of coffee and then began sifting through all the papers. Now, this paperwork that Detective Lloyd was charged with going through was really just a huge stack of biographical information about gang members in and around Los Angeles. Basically, anytime a gang member got arrested for anything— could be super minor— their information was added to this big dossier of biographical information. and it was the job of the homicide detectives to periodically basically go through all of this information and just kind of make sure you're up to date with what gang members were doing in and around the city.

And so this was highly monotonous work, but it was necessary. So Detective Lloyd continued to flip through all these pieces of paper, and as he did, he slammed his cup of coffee, doing his best not to fall asleep from boredom. But after about 30 minutes, Detective Lloyd turned the page, and suddenly something he saw immediately stood out to him. And for about 30 seconds, Detective Lloyd just stared at the paper, having no idea what to make of what he was seeing. And what he was seeing was basic biographical information of a small-time gang member named Anthony Garcia, who had recently been arrested for driving with a suspended license. Now, to this point, many other detectives had seen this document about Anthony Garcia, and they hadn't thought anything of it. But when Detective Lloyd looked at this page about Anthony Garcia, a photo of Anthony immediately stood out to the detective. But before Detective Lloyd was prepared to run to his boss and tell him about this huge discovery he had made, he thought, you know what, I need to do a little bit more digging because this could totally be wrong. So Detective Lloyd left the paperwork on the desk, he put his coffee down, and he walked his way out of the office and down to the room in the police department where they stored all of the files for all the unsolved murder cases.

And so Detective Lloyd, he goes in there and he begins walking up and down the rows until finally he found the case that he was looking for. He grabbed it and he walked back to his desk. He sat down and he began to read it. Now, this unsolved murder case, which was from 4 years ago in 2004, did not appear on the surface to have anything to do with Anthony Garcia, but Detective Lloyd was reasonably sure that there were details in this unsolved murder case from 2004 that would prove his theory about Anthony Garcia. The file that Lloyd was reading described a murder that took place on January 23rd, 2004. That night, a 23-year-old man named John Juarez was standing in front of this liquor store called Mr. Ed's Liquors, which is located in a small neighborhood in Los Angeles. John was a devoted father to a 4-year-old girl, and he was also a devoted member of a gang. But on this particular evening, John was not doing anything criminal in front of this liquor store. He was just standing there near a street sign, kind of minding his own business. But at some point, two men walked up to John and asked him where he was from.

But before John could even answer, one of these two men drew a gun and began firing shots into John, and one of those rounds struck him in the head and killed him. Now, after Lloyd had read through this file and the description of the murder several times and felt confident he had gotten all the information he could, he still wasn't sure if this was enough to prove his theory about Anthony Garcia. So he decided he would actually go to the liquor store where this murder happened and see it for himself. And so Detective Lloyd, he hopped in his car, he drove to Mr. Ed's Liquors, he parked in the parking lot, and he just looked around. He kind of scanned around the whole area. He took in the shape of the parking lot. He looked at the doors on the liquor store to kind of look at the size and the shape. He also saw the nearby street sign that John had been standing near when he was shot and killed. And so finally, after looking all around and feeling like he had seen all that he needed to see, Detective Lloyd felt more sure than ever that his theory about Anthony Garcia had to be correct.

And so he drove his car back to the police station, he walked right into his boss's office, and he would tell him that they have been wrong about Anthony Garcia this whole time. He is not some small-time gang member. He is a big player, and he's not even trying to hide it. The photo that Lloyd saw of Anthony Garcia that really stood out to him when he was going through all that paperwork was the photo of Anthony when he was being booked into jail. And in this photo, Anthony is shirtless, and Anthony has this huge chest tattoo that you can clearly see in this photo. The tattoo shows a liquor store, and to the left of the liquor store is this military-style helicopter that's coming in and firing its gun towards the ground, and on the ground in the line of fire from this helicopter is what looks like this man who's got the body of a peanut. And so he's being killed by this helicopter. All the other people who saw this photo or who saw Anthony Garcia in person chalked up his tattoo to just some weird depiction of a helicopter killing a peanut guy, and they didn't think too much of it.

But Detective Lloyd had actually been to the crime scene in '04 when John Juarez had been murdered, and so he had seen the layout of the crime scene, and then he's looking at this photo of Anthony Garcia's chest tattoo, and he realizes it is the same depiction of the crime scene. Anthony Garcia, his nickname was Chopper, which is often a slang term for a helicopter. And John Juarez, who was murdered in '04, he was a member of a gang called Pico Nuevo. And Anthony Garcia and the gang he was involved in, which was not Pico Nuevo, they used to make fun of people like John for being affiliated with that gang by calling them peanuts. Meaning the helicopter in the tattoo represented Anthony Garcia and the peanut guy was John Juárez. So this tattoo is literally like a confession that Anthony Garcia was the guy who shot and killed John Juárez. And there were other details in this tattoo as well that made it even more clear that this really was like a confession. I mean, just the angle of the peanut guy's body— so John Juárez's body in the tattoo— was the same angle as he was found in real life.

And also the decorations on the liquor store in the tattoo lined up with the decorations that were on Mr. Ed's liquor store when John Juárez was murdered in '04. So really, Anthony Garcia sealed his fate by tattooing that to his chest. Ultimately, Anthony's tattoo would be used to convict him of John Juárez's murder, and Anthony would be sentenced to to 65 years to life in prison.

Our next story is called "The Nosebleed." On a sunny afternoon in August of 2014, a 24-year-old tourist, who we're going to call Angela Lyons, drove a rented moped through a busy street in Vietnam. Angela had come here about a week earlier from Scotland, where she lived, and so far the trip had been great. She'd been going to nightclubs and partying and eating local food and swimming in local rivers. I mean, all in all, she was having a blast. And now she was just cruising slowly on her moped, looking at all the shops around her and kind of taking in the scenery. And at some point, as she was driving, she turned her head and then she felt her moped hit something really hard, and she actually fell off her bike onto the ground. She hit her head pretty hard, but luckily she was wearing a helmet, and so she was able to stand up and kind of assess that she was physically going to be okay. And she looked and saw what she had run into, and it was actually another moped. And fortunately, you know, the crash was kind of low speed, and so the other moped driver clearly was physically okay as well.

And, you know, their mopeds were not actually damaged at all. And so after she said she was sorry and the two kind of just acknowledged that they were just going to go their separate ways, the other moped driver hopped back on their moped and drove off. And Angela, just to make sure she really was okay here, because again, you know, she hit her head pretty hard on the concrete. And so Angela, she took off her helmet and kind of felt around her scalp, and sure enough, she felt a little bump on her head from where she'd hit the ground, but other than that, she seemed fine. Now, because it was a head injury, albeit a small one, Angela did consider just going to the hospital just to be sure. But, you know, as she felt it a couple more times, she's like, "You know what, it's pretty small. This is not a big deal. I'm okay." So, she put her helmet back on, got on her moped, and went on about her business. About a week later, Angela was back home in Glasgow, Scotland, and she was inside of her doctor's office about to be examined.

Following that moped accident, Angela had stayed in Vietnam for a few more days, and the whole time she had checked that bump on her head every single day, and it had gone away pretty quickly. However, when she landed back home in Scotland, almost right away she began developing this kind of startling new symptom that she couldn't help but feel must be connected to the moped accident, and it made her really scared. Scared, and so she had gone to the doctor. Her new symptom were these sudden, kind of extreme nosebleeds, and so she had made an appointment to go see her doctor to figure out what the heck was going on. And so finally, Angela's doctor came into the room, and he would examine her, and he would look at her nose and her head, and he would listen to her story about the moped, but after he was done with the exam, he would tell Angela that he did not think her nosebleeds had anything to do with the moped accident. Much more realistically, the nosebleeds were from her body adjusting to the weather in Scotland. Vietnam, it was a very hot environment, and Scotland was very cold, and so that shift was likely causing these nosebleeds.

And so the doctor recommended that Angela put some Vaseline inside of her nostrils to keep it moist and just wait for this to clear up as her body transitioned back to Scotland. A few days later, Angela was back home inside of her bathroom looking into a mirror. She was applying some Vaseline to her nostrils. Now, she had been doing this every day, multiple times a day since the doctor had made that recommendation, but despite following the doctor's orders, her nosebleeds had persisted. If anything, they were getting worse—I mean, she was having these things multiple times a day. But for now, Angela simply turned on her shower and waited for the water to warm up, and then she hopped inside. And after a few minutes of just kind of standing under the water, Angela began just kind of touching her nose—something she was doing a lot of, you know, since these nosebleeds had begun. Except as she touched her nose, she began to feel something weird sort of deep inside of her nostril that she maybe hadn't noticed before. And at some point, she actually pushed pretty hard on whatever this was inside of her nasal cavity.

And when she did that, it sent this blinding wave of pain over her. And then simultaneously, blood began pouring out of her nose and she couldn't get it to stop. It was like this flood of just constant bleeding and it terrified Angela. I mean, she'd had these terrible nosebleeds, but this was the worst one. And it was clearly connected to something something inside of her nose, and so she's starting to panic, blood's getting everywhere, and she's thinking, "This has gotta be connected to that moped accident. Maybe I have some horrible brain injury. Maybe I'm dying here." And so in a panic, she jumps out of the shower, towels off, gets dressed, and rushes to the nearest hospital. When Angela got to the emergency room, a nurse quickly brought her into an exam room and had her sit down and tilt her head back so the nurse could look into her nostrils to see what was going on. And so Angela, she's got all this gauze to kind of trap the blood, and she's got her head way back, and she's letting the nurse do this exam. And after a while, Angela starts to realize that this exam is taking a really long time.

The nurse is just kind of standing there, clearly looking at her nostrils, but not saying anything. And, you know, from Angela's perspective, she can't really see the nurse.

Her head is tilted too far back.

But the silence that's grown in the room is so loud at this point that Angela finally just kind of sits up and looks at the nurse to see what's going on here. And she sees the nurse is kind of frozen, like she's looking at Angela's nostrils like she can't believe what she's seen. And then the nurse kind of snaps out of it and looks at Angela and says, "Stay calm, I'm gonna get the doctor." And Angela's like, "I am calm, what's going on here?" But then the nurse just turns around and speed walks out of the room. It would turn out Angela's primary care doctor had been right when he said he didn't think her nosebleeds had anything to do with that moped accident. You know, this was not a brain injury or anything connected to the trauma. However, her nosebleeds were connected to something else she had done while in Vietnam. Because in Vietnam, in between, y'know, going out to nightclubs and partying and trying all that great food, Angela was also swimming in these local rivers. And at one point when she was in one of those rivers, something found its way into her nose: a 3-inch-long blood-sucking leech.

It had been living deep inside of Angela's nostril and sinus cavity for over a week, separated from her brain only by this extremely fragile bone that's only about a half millimeter thick. Hospital doctors would spend about 30 minutes painstakingly pulling this leech out of Angela's nose, and then once it was out, she would go on to make a full recovery. The next and final story of today's episode is called "James 3." On the afternoon of Sunday, August 27th, 2000, a 50-year-old husband and father named Bruce Leninger sat in his living room in Lafayette, Louisiana. He and his wife and his 2-year-old son James had just gotten home from church, and now Bruce was just trying to relax. However, it was proving very difficult to relax because as Bruce is trying to sit on the couch and just kind of close his eyes for a second, his son James, the 2-year-old, has his toy plane, his favorite toy plane, and he is repeatedly smashing it into the coffee table as loud as he can, saying, "Plane crash, plane crash, plane crash." And while of course, like, you know, James is a kid, he's gonna be loud and noisy and obnoxious, that's what kids do.

But for Bruce, he's watching his son do this and he couldn't help but be really concerned. Because lately, like over the past few months, James had become unnaturally fixated, not on planes, but on plane crashes. And even more specifically, James had begun having these recurring nightmares, like 4 or 5 times a week, where he'd wake up terrified and he would say he, James, had just been in a horrible fiery plane crash. And it was like every night that was the nightmare. And it was like Bruce and his wife didn't even know what to make of this. Like, where is he getting this from? James was a pretty sheltered kid, like he wasn't being exposed to, you know, horrible plane crashes either in movies or TV shows or books. I mean, he's a 2-year-old. It just made no sense that he was having this recurring nightmare. But what made it even more kind of unsettling is that James wasn't just fixated on the plane crash aspect of this nightmare. He also began to tell Bruce and his wife these weird details about the plane crash, because it was always the same plane crash in his nightmare.

He began telling his parents that "The Japanese shot me down." And Bruce and his wife are like, "What is he referencing? Like, is this a World War II reference?" But again, he's 2. Like, developmentally, it's not something he would say even if he was exposed to it. Like, it just didn't make any sense. Now, over the past few months that this behavior had really ramped up, Bruce and his wife had taken James to the doctor to say, "What's going on here? Like, what's my kid doing? I don't understand any of this." And the doctors were all like, "Eh, he's a kid. Like, yeah, it's a weird fixation he's got." Scott, but he'll grow out of it. Like, don't worry about it. But to Bruce and his wife, it just seemed like James was not growing out of it. He was just getting more and more fixated as time went on. And so as Bruce is sitting there on the couch watching James for the millionth time smash his toy plane into the coffee table and pretend it was this plane crash he couldn't stop thinking about, Bruce decided he had to do something about this.

And so over the next couple of months, Bruce, instead of trying to figure out what was wrong with James that was causing him to fixate on this plane crash, you know, instead of doing that, he began sort of like leaning in and asking James to give him more information about whatever he was seeing in his nightmare. Like, "Give me all the specifics you can possibly recall." And James would eventually let on that it wasn't just the Japanese that shot him down, it was the Japanese military. And also, the type of plane that James was flying in apparently was a Corsair plane. Bruce had never heard of that before, and again, he's looking at his 2-year-old son thinking, "How do you even know what a Corsair plane is?" But nonetheless, that's what James said. And so Bruce doesn't know what to do with this information, but again, he's just trying to learn. And so in November of that year, Bruce found himself sitting in the living room, and he had this World War II coffee table book that he had actually purchased for his father, but he hadn't given it to him yet. And he saw James, you know, playing with his plane, smashing it into the coffee table.

And Bruce, he grabs this coffee table book full of pictures of pilots and combat and war, and he flips to pictures of pilots from World War II. 'Cause now, you know, Bruce is thinking, "Maybe my son somehow is imagining a scene from World War II." You know, a pilot has crashed in World War II, the Japanese military shot them down, I don't know. No idea how he got this image, but that could be what he's thinking about. And so he's like, "Well, maybe I'll just start looking at pictures from World War II of pilots, and maybe somehow or another James will look at this and something will click for him." Bruce really didn't know what he was trying to get out of this, but either way, he called James over, and he shows him this book and he's like, James, do you recognize any of these planes? Like, are any of these planes the Corsair plane that you flew, you know, in your dream? You know, is any of this stuff sort of lining up with your dream? Again, he's talking to a 2-year-old, but the 2-year-old sort of got it. James looked at the pages, but nothing clicked.

James sort of reached down and was just kind of flipping through all the pages and there was nothing. There was no connection with James. But towards the end of the coffee table book where Bruce is thinking like, what am I even I'm doing here? I'm like prompting my 2-year-old to research World War II with me? Like, what is this? What is going on here? But as James is flipping the pages, he suddenly stops and he points at one of the pages and he says to his dad, "That's where I was shot down," and he's pointing at the Battle of Iwo Jima. And so Bruce, you know, again, he doesn't really know what he's trying to accomplish here, but, you know, clearly his son has pointed out this particular fact that sort roughly tied in with the other things he's brought up. You know, he's had this dream about being a pilot who crashes because the Japanese military shot him down. He's highlighting a battle in Japan during World War II where, you know, the Allies were fighting the Axis powers and the Japanese, you know, could have been shooting somebody down. So it sort of made sense.

Okay, fine, maybe my son's dream is about something that happened at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Don't know how this even happens, don't know how this is possible, but I'm going to do some research. And so that's what Bruce does. He begins researching the Battle of Iwo Jima. Doesn't even really know what he's looking for, but he just wants to see if there's anything connected to what his son has been saying. And what he eventually discovers actually is sort of a relief. He discovers that there is no record of any Corsair airplanes crashing during the Battle of Iwo Jima. In fact, no Corsair planes at all were flown during the Battle of Iwo Jima. And his son James had been saying specifically, "I flew a Corsair plane." like that was the plane that crashed. And so he's thinking, "Okay, there's a hole in my son's story. Like, he clearly must have latched on to some event somehow, somebody said it to him, he heard it, whatever it is, and in his 2-year-old mind he sort of warped it and that's what he believes happened, but it's not real. Like, he's not actually recalling something that happened in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Like, this is just, you know, a false memory or something." However, Bruce was unable to definitively find the names of pilots who actually flew in the Battle of Iwo Jima. He wanted to find if there was any pilots named James who potentially crashed, you know, during that battle, but he just couldn't find the information. You know, maybe it existed somewhere, but he couldn't find it. And so Bruce had this idea to get in touch with this old veterans group, all these old guys who had served in the Battle of Iwo Jima that were still alive. They were based out in San Diego, and they got together periodically and just sort of had social hours and stuff like that. And Bruce, he goes out to San Diego And under false pretenses, he basically tells the group that he's shooting a documentary about the Battle of Iwo Jima and he needs some information, you know, about certain pilots that flew during the battle. He goes out there and he goes to one of their social events and he begins asking around, asking if anybody knew about any pilots named James who were shot down during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

And basically all the men he talked to directed him to go talk to the group's historian, this one guy who kind of had all the information about what had happened during this battle. And so Bruce goes over to this guy and he starts asking him questions about, you know, any pilots that, you know, were shot down during the battle, do you know? And the historian, he tells Bruce that, you know, during that battle, virtually no planes were shot down. However, there was one plane that was shot down. A single US Air Force pilot was shot down during the Battle of Iwo Jima and he was killed, and that pilot's name His name was James Huston Jr. Bruce couldn't help but be truly shocked that the only pilot shot down during the Battle of Iwo Jima happened to be named James. Like, that just seemed like a coincidence that couldn't be possible, considering what his son was saying. And so suddenly Bruce doesn't know what to make of this information he's been given. For so long, his 2-year-old son, named James, has been talking about how in his dream he's shot down by the Japanese military during the Battle of Iwo Jima, and now he's being told there was a single pilot shot down in real life during the Battle of Iwo Jima, and his name was James?

Like, how is that possible? That just seems impossible. And so at this point, Bruce is really holding on to the fact that his son had said his plane that he was shot down in was a Corsair plane, and this guy James Huston Jr., who was shot down, The plane he was shot down in was not a Corsair plane. And so Bruce is telling himself like, okay, this is just a crazy coincidence. Like, this didn't somehow happen to my son. He's not like channeling somebody else who died years ago. Like, that can't be what's happening here. This is just a wild set of circumstances. That's all this is. But he's freaked out now. And so he calls his wife and he tells her about what he's learned, and he kind of downplays how much this has really unsettled him. But he ultimately tells his wife, and the two of them decide, okay, you know what, let's just do a little bit more research and just figure out what's going on here. Like, this is just so crazy, we gotta do a little bit more research. And in doing research about James Houston Jr., they discover that James has a sister who is still alive.

And so they decide to contact her, not really even sure what they're gonna say, but they figure, you know what, let's just get in touch with her and just tell her what's going on. Who knows, maybe somehow she can explain this, who knows. And so kind of on a whim, James and his wife, they send a message to this woman, to the sister. And the sister, when she finds out there's this 2-year-old who's sort of referencing her brother's death in some way, for whatever reason, her reaction was to send actual physical photographs of James Huston Jr. when he was a pilot, when he served in the military. She just sent a whole bunch of pictures to Bruce, his wife, and James to look at. Like, there really wasn't a clear set of, "What do we do now?" And so that's what she did. "Here are some pictures." And when Bruce looked at these photos, it was like his whole world was completely rocked. Because in one of the photos that clearly showed James Huston Jr., he is standing in front of a plane. And that plane was a Corsair plane. And so at this point, for Bruce, it felt like the set of circumstances, the coincidences here, were simply too much to ignore.

This is no longer coincidence. This is something else. And also, there's one other small detail that now was sort of bubbling up in Bruce's mind, and that was periodically his son James would talk about how he really wasn't named James. He was named James 3. Just periodically his son would say that. Not every time, but he brought it up enough that it was sort of a known thing that he was James 3. And now Bruce is thinking, James Houston 3. Junior? That's James 2. My son? How could he possibly know all these things that happened to James Huston Jr. if he was not James 3, James Huston Jr.'s reincarnated soul? Bruce would eventually take his son's story to the news, and the family would film a primetime segment on ABC about it. James was soon invited to the Battle of Iwo Jima veterans reunion, where he would shock the group with his knowledge of the battle. James also met James Huston Jr.'s sister, and when he did, he called her by a nickname that only her late brother ever used. After that, even she was convinced that her brother's spirit had come back to Earth in James III.

If reincarnation is real, James' story is one of the most credible and well-documented cases in history. 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 Hoos, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fasciano. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Locascio and Jordan Stidham. Production support by Antonio Manata and Delaina Corley. Artwork by Jessica Clogston Kiner. Theme song "Something Wicked" by Ross Bugden. Thank you 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.