Transcript of Episode 114

Radio Rental.

So after I had told our agent, "I don't want to look anymore," eight or nine days later, a new house is on the market. And when this thing popped up, I was like, wow. It was really, really interesting to see something that was, you know, from the 1890s. So I called the realtor and I was like, look, I know I said that we should stop looking, but I really, really want to go see this house. What stood out about it, to me, was that the condition that it was in was untouched.

There was still gas lighting, flames running the overhead fixtures, and it looked like this incredibly preserved relic. And I just immediately fell in love with it. The rooms were so magnificent looking, and everything was so ornate. I remember saying to the listing agent that it feels like I just walked into the Magic Castle in Hollywood. I made the joke to the realtor.

I was like, man, this furniture is incredible. You guys should leave it behind. I didn't know that that was actually the plan at the time. The open house was a couple days later, and I brought Matt back. They had an offer deadline of, I think, Monday morning. We saw the house together on Saturday, and he agreed. It's really, really cool, and what how amazing would it be for our children to grow up next to this park. So we put in an offer, and to be honest with you, it was kind of a joke.

We've been beat out so many times already. There's no chance that we're going to be taken seriously. I grew up in a historic house in downtown Oklahoma City, and so I wrote a letter to the sellers saying that I have experience living in a historic home. I understand how important they are to preserve for the community, and if we have the opportunity to be the buyers, we would raise our family here. Our realtor called 48 hours later and told us that our offer had been accepted and that it was nowhere near the top offer.

We got chills. We were like, this is fate. We are so excited about this. I had a number of panic attacks over it because it needed so much work to make it livable. It didn't have even a bathroom or a kitchen that worked. But I was just so excited by the opportunity to, like, you know, preserve this piece of history and make it our, you know, family forever home. We moved forward.

We did our inspections. The sellers were a historic preservation nonprofit, and they were really, really involved with us showing up to all of our inspections and to our appraisal, and they were always there, which is a really unusual way of selling a home. Usually you never see the sellers, but they were always around us. So we thought, we know everything there is to know about this house because the sellers are here, sitting in this room with us while we're having our inspections. Surely they've told us everything there is to know about this house.

So we end up purchasing it, and we start, you know, taking things out of the house. Along the way, we're having a ton of fun because the sellers left everything in the house that was in it from not only them, but from the family before them who lived here from 1970 to 1993. So we're documenting this on our social media. We're talking about the things that we find in the closets and the antiques that are in every single one of the rooms, and it's very, very fun.

And then we get this letter. Matt calls me and he goes, I got a letter in the mail and it says purchaser on the envelope. It says it's come from Canada. It's the very first piece of mail that we actually got to the house that wasn't our mortgage statement. So I come over and open the letter. It's this very detailed, multi-page typed letter from somebody who claims that they used to live in this house.

It ended up being a room where the original refrigeration system for the house was kept. But that's not the way we cool homes anymore, so that's not what was back there. We initially thought, well, that was kind of okay. There was nothing back there as far as we could tell. It was as she said, but there was nothing back there. We posted a video about this online, and somebody in our social media comments said, "I think I saw a box in the back corner." We went back up there and there was not just one box.

There were about 12 boxes full of things. And it was passports with people in 1920s clothes in these passports. It was letters from famous magicians who toured all over Asia. It was all kinds of like antique perfume bottles and soaps and things like that. It actually took a while for us to find room three.

It was the only room that didn't have anything in it, but I think it's because everything from that room had gotten kind of dispersed all around the basement already. We found trunks that were on a sister ship of the Titanic that have the original room label in them. We have found an entire Victorian wedding dress and suit from somebody. There are paintings and portraits of people in our basement that I don't think we will ever know who they are.

There are dozens, hundreds of scrolls because the house came with a lot of music kind of equipment, like a Victrola record player and a piano from 1880, and then a player piano that you roll up in front of the piano, you put a scroll in it and it plays the music for you on the piano with these hammers that come out. Hundreds of songs for that. And then Matt has recently started going through letters between this person named Ralph and this woman named Angel, and she was communicating with him while he was in World War II.

And so she was sending him letters every single day, the entire time that he was in service. Who are Ralph and Angel to us? We still have no idea. We cannot figure out why their entire five-year-long, uh, letter writing pen pal ship is in our basement. Posters and travel diaries from someone who was affiliated with Frank James and Jesse James. One of the things that we found was a book by an author named Chan Thomas.

And we thought, well, that sold very fast. Maybe we don't accept that offer. And so we took it off. We posted about it on social media, and people were like, we've been dying to read this book. Everybody's been looking for it. You have to upload it somewhere, which we have done. But we ended up selling the original one, and it sold immediately for $800. I had some kids from a, like, local high school reach out to me and say, hey, we're doing a project on Chan Thomas.

We really would be interested in knowing more about this book because we can't find any copies of it anywhere at all. Could you share it with us? And I said, sure, no problem. So I scanned it in and I uploaded it for them. I got an email from them about six to eight months after, uh, that they, after they sent me that email, and they said, you're not going to believe what we have uncovered. Three weeks later, I emailed them back because I'm not great at checking my email, and I said, hey, please, I'd love to know what you uncovered.

And the emails bounced. I have no idea what they found, but there's all these theories that the CIA actually bought the book from us. And if you think that's like a stretch, the CIA actually redacted a number of Chan Thomas books. And so you cannot, you, they now have declassified them. But for a very long time, a book that he had written was partially redacted and you couldn't get the full manuscript. So it is not completely out of the realm of possibility that the CIA actually purchased that book from us.

And a lot of people on our social media seem to think that that's the case. To this day, three and a half years later, we still have not been able to go through everything in that basement because it is just packed to the absolute gills with stuff. The story continues because we have continued to get these letters from this woman for three years.

And we get sometimes two a day. The person who wrote us the letter identified herself as essentially a foster sibling who lived here with, alongside Roger, the former owner, but they were not blood related. She took nothing from this house. So when it was donated to the nonprofit that we ultimately bought it from, we still had all of her pictures from high school in the basement.

We have this drawer in our house where we store all of these letters and we have dozens of them. I know she watches our social media and sometimes she'll send us gifts based on things that we're talking about on social media. For example, this very large music box was locked and for years we haven't been able to open it. Well, the next thing to show up is a bag full of skeleton keys to try. And I've gotten some very odd cookbooks and she has sent us a mugshot of hers and some sort of indication that she, um, works for the government.

We've gotten riddles. That one's always interesting. Really bizarre riddles about a man in space and essentially how long can he survive without oxygen. The one letter I think that really kind of scared Matt. You know, he was here at night alone. We were, we had a bunch of water damage. The ceilings were quite literally pouring inside the house. And he goes to check the mail and there's a purchaser letter.

She continues to write purchaser rather than our names. So he opens it alone here in the dark when we have no electricity. And it is a picture of a Petersmeter, which is a device used to identify, like, shorts, I believe, in your alarm system, like where people might break in or be able to break in. It's a picture of a Petersmeter. It's a letter about her being a fugitive from Arkansas and unable to return to the United States.

And it's a wanted poster. To this day, I don't know if it's real. I've tried looking these things up. I come from a background of being able to find people. I have cast reality television. I can find anybody. If they are to be found, if there is a scrap of evidence that they are a real person and exist online, I will find them. I cannot find this lady. I can't find anything about her at all.

And I know that she must have social media because, again, she watches our TikToks. And she's, as far as we know, in her 70s and lives in Canada. But what do we really know about her? Because all we know about her is what she writes about herself in these letters. The letter that we got two weeks ago, all it said was turkey, turkey, turkey, gobble, gobble, gobble, turkey, turkey, turkey, gobble, turkey, gobble, turkey, gobble, turkey for the whole page.

Why, why, why, why, why, why? Over time, we've posted some of these videos on our social media and it's created a bit of a frenzy. And I think she watches that. She does not sign her letters with her name anymore. And now she calls herself Secret Stalker. They all come from different mailing addresses. For example, the ones I'm looking at here say this one is coming from Captain Jack Sparrow, Dudley Do Wright, Al Capone, Elizabeth Windsor, um, B.

Smith. Some of them are sent from Alcatraz or from Rikers. A lot of people have told us we need to go to the cops because this is scary. She's actually sent us a photo of the outside of our old house when we used to live there. I, for the most part, think it's harmless and it's fun for me. Matt, it is unnerving to him. Again, I'm coming from this from the place of, you know, I grew up in an old house and people did this kind of kooky stuff.

But she is, I think, takes kooky to a whole new level. I do think sometimes, uh, I have to be careful when I share what she's written to us on social media because people genuinely, you know, like I said, we have young children and people do get kind of concerned for us that we are feeding into her, um, desire for tricks and the intrigue of the whole story by reading them.

And maybe that's right. But I don't know. If she hears this, I don't think any of this will surprise her one bit, to be honest with you. I mean, we've read all of her letters and like I said, she watches everything, so I don't think anything here would surprise her.

Like I had a, I had a wooden statue and it was almost like a, like a tradition, you know, like you'd come into my home, you'd take the machete out of the, the wooden statue and you, you just slash it. It was very satisfying. It sounds a bit wild and I'm a very peaceful guy. That machete saved my life, I think. When I was a, I was a teenager, I was living with my mom, just me and my mom.

She was dealing with some, some medical issues, so she had to take sleeping pills. She would sleep like a rock. Like I would, I would use that time to like produce music, go crazy, you know? I guess the sleeping issues kind of ran in the family too because I had some issues sleeping. So I started taking some natural sleeping meds, like with Valerian and a bunch of stuff. But it wasn't as hard as what she was taking, you know? One night, I, after I took my meds, I went to bed.

For some context, my, my bedroom was set up in a way that's like, uh, it's like a U shape, you know? The entrance is, is at one end of the U and my bed would be at the other end of the U. And in the middle of the U, there would be like a, like a bookcase that's see-through. I could see through it, like through the DVDs and the books and all that stuff. I'd fade to sleep, that drugged out kind of sleep, you know? I basically wake up to a muffled voice in my room.

Right next to my bed, I had a machete. I would jam that machete into like a wooden statue that was like, it's sheet. So I just yanked it out of that wooden statue. And that guy kind of saw that happening and bolted out of the house. And I ran after him with my machete in the hand and boxers, like just wilding out. By the time I reached outside in my room, he was already out of the apartment.

And I realized the door was ripped off the wall. It was kicked off the wall. Like the, the sides of the walls were ripped off. The frame was completely destroyed. The door was on the ground inside the apartment. I was about to chase the guy, but then I realized my mom's is in the apartment. Her door is right next to the entrance. My whole focus kind of switched at that moment.

I ran into her door. The door was closed. I opened the door. She was sleeping. Thank, thank God, you know, like, he didn't do anything to her. Woke her up and I called the police. And as the adrenaline was like starting to wear off, I realized that it was even weirder than what just happened. The guy came in the apartment. He didn't open any doors except mine. There's a bunch of doors that he could have opened, but he just opened mine and went directly to me.

And then I realized also that he spoke to me, right? He was talking to me.

The police showed up and they couldn't do anything basically because like if they don't catch you getting murdered, they don't, they don't do anything, you know? That's, that's how it works. So I just stayed up all night, machete in hand, guarding the door. Teenage me, trying to protect my mom. I told her to go to sleep. It feels like it might be either someone I knew or someone my mom knew. It just felt like he knew the apartment just for the fact that he skipped like three doors to get to mine directly, didn't open any other door.

Yeah, it feels strange. That thing stuck with me for a while because I was, I think, 16 more or less when that happened. And then I lived another year with my mom there. I lived two more years alone there because it became an apartment. It never kind of left me. Today I'm 34 and I'm still a bit like messed up by it. I wake up very easily. I'm, I'm, I'm like always sleeping with one eye open.

Whenever I move somewhere new, I always make sure I have some kind of weapon next to my bed. It's still an issue to this day. Like I think I might have like a mild form of like PTSD or something because of it. If I hear a tiny noise in the night, I'm, I'm on my two feet, you know? I'm not a big guy. Like I'm like 5'7" on a good day. The best deterrent, other than a gun, to me is a machete. Like, like if I see a guy with a machete, I'm going to run because that's, that, that is a devastating type of knife.

I'm going to do some breathing exercises. One, two, three. Okay, let's take a break.

Hey, PO, you were wrong. Just punching myself out of this one. Okay, yeah. I, I, yeah, Malachi, I know, I know. I will need to patch this hole later, but at least my mouth gets to breathe right now. It is nutso back here. Swear to God, it's like way bigger here than you'd think. Kind of feel like it goes on forever. I swear I see a little bit of neon light shining from somewhere. Feels like I can hear something too.

Look, if you can pass me my flashlight, I'm just going to scoot on out of here. No, now, man. Now, please. Okay, there is something back here, bro. Oh, shit.

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