Transcript of #249 MrBallen - Ouija Boards, Aliens Hijacking an Aircraft and Real-Life Horror Stories

Mr. Balland. Welcome back, man.

Thanks for having me, dude.

Dude, good to see you.

Yeah, man. I'm in your new... Well, it looks the same, but it's upgraded. A new compound, new studio. New color. I was in the attic the last time. Purple. Purple. It is purple. It looks dark, but it's purple. But dude, it's so beautiful. This compound is amazing. Thank you, man. This is so cool.

Well, I've been super excited to show you.

It looks epic, dude. I've heard good things, and it lived up to it, man. Thank you.

Thank you. Well, man, I'm pumped, dude. You've got a lot of good stuff going on now, but I thought it would be a really good idea to get you in here right before Halloween, get some Halloween content. We're the best storytellers in the world. But yeah, man, I'm just pumped to see it. It's been, what, probably about a year.

Yeah. The last time we We were here, we were in the attic, and you were talking about coming to this place at the time. But I remember we arrived and sprinted to the studio. We recorded, and then I went right back. It was like such a whirlwind. But that was a great experience, man. You're going to be back here, man. Yeah.

Just a quick introduction, not that you need one. But former Navy SEAL turned master storyteller, captivating millions with tales of the Strange, dark, and mysterious. You've got over 10 million YouTube subs. Wow, dude. Creator of the wildly popular Mr. Ballam podcast, which is redefined storytelling, a New York Times best-selling author. That's news since the last time. With your first graphic novel hitting the top of the charts, and the second one, Where Nightmars Live, fresh off the press. You just sent me that. Thank you. An innovator in content creation launching new formats like Story Time with Mr. Ballon on YouTube, a trailblazer in the podcast world, earning consideration for a Golden Globe nomination.

You, too, dude. Yeah, you as well. We both almost got nominated.

Isn't that fucking wild? Dude, it's crazy.

Did you ever... No. All the awards that we get, people don't know this, but you seamlessly put in for your own award. I should win this award. This is the first time that they're like, We've designated you win this award. That was cool.

Did you know that was coming?

No, I had no idea. I saw your name, and I saw our podcast, and I was like, That's amazing. Because I had no idea.

Two seals.

Look at that, dude. Just carving our own path post-service, dude.

Love it.

Yeah, man.

I love it. Are you going? Are you going to go in a matter of ways?

I guess I think that they're going to nominate six. There's 25 of us, 25 shows, and I think it's six get nominated, and then obviously one wins. I'd be pretty sick to get nominated, show up in a flannel tuxedo or something on the red carpet.

Nice.

Yeah, dude. But I would definitely go to that.

That blew me. I had no idea that... I think this is the first year they're even doing podcasts, and I was like, holy shit.

Look at us, dude. Main It's extreme. Is that crazy? Making it, dude. Yeah, it feels totally insane.

Well, if I see you there, I'll see you there, hopefully. But all right, let's get... So we're going to do some story time, some updates with you. But first, everybody gets a gift. Usually, I give the gummy bears I'm going to switch it up. We got these. You're going to like these, dude. And we got our campfire session tonight.

Yeah, dude.

What is this? Vigilance Elite Smoar Bites. Smoar Bites, dude.

All right, let me show the camera. There's like 700 cameras to show.

Yeah. Dude, you got to try those.

I got the gummy bears last time. Those were excellent. I smashed them immediately.

I got you another thing, too. Yeah, I can see. Because last time, I didn't get to do this because we were in a hurry, but I think you'll enjoy this one. So I got a buddy over at Sig. His name's Jason. Wow. Huge fan of yours. I think you're going to like it. You got any guesses?

I think I can guess. Full Sig action? Dude, thank you so much.

You know what that is?

That's The P226.

That is the updated Sig 226X Legion.

This is freaking beautiful, man. Thank you. You like it? Yeah, dude. I actually... I've been meaning to get a 226 because that's what we shot in the team. I think they went to a Glock now. I don't know. But in the team, it was a P226. Dude, this is beautiful. Is this even out yet? Is this the newest thing? It's out.

I think it is the newest. I don't know. Dude, this is...

It's out.

I don't know. Sig cranks a lot of guns out.

Dude, thank you so much, man.

Yeah, man, you're welcome.

Holy cow, man.

We'll have to break that thing in on the break. Hell, yeah, dude.

Thank you so much. My pleasure. I have a much lamer gift for you.

Oh, I love gifts.

It's not a sick pistol. But here you go.

What we got here? Definitely some clothing in there. There you go, dude. Maybe a boot.

I don't know. I think you got a book. It's the new book. Nice. It's signed in the inside there.

Where Nightmars Live.

Yep, the new anthology.

Dude, I love this, man. This, comics.

Yeah, dude, that's a labor of love for sure. Put those together.

Very cool.

Yup. And then the flannel. What is this? The flannel. So I got to give you the... I don't know if you dabble in flannels. I obviously do. And I'm not sponsored in any way by this brand, but Farady brand, which you may have already heard about. I know about these guys. They make the best flannels. And that, to me... And if you see, I got your own color there. So it's not like I'm not giving the red one where I wear... You can wear that in real life, and it's just normal.

You can wear that in real life. Dude, this is nice. Thank you, man.

Dude, they don't wrinkle. You can just throw them in a bag. Love it. There you go. It's pretty equal to a sick P226.

Hey, hey.

I love flannels. This is gorgeous, man. Thank you so much. You're welcome. You're welcome. That's nuts, man. Actually, I haven't shot since 2017. I got out of the teams in 2017.

That's eight years. You haven't shot a gun? No. Are you an anti-gun now? No. It's okay.

No, I'm not. I just have not shot it. So I got out and I dove into entrepreneurship Rorship. And that's all I wanted. Because for me, my story is I got medically retired in 2017, but the timeline was shifted pretty aggressively. It was like, Hey, you're going to get medically retired in part because of the injury I sustained in Afghanistan. I had some mental stuff going on, and they're like, Yep, you're going to get med boarded out. But they gave me... I want to say it was over a year was my expected, this is when you'll leave the military by date. But it just got moved way, way up really quickly, still got medically retired. For the folks who don't know, you get a retirement check. You leave and you have some level of income, but it wasn't a lot. And so I was suddenly out with kids and a wife and no plan. I was like, Oh, in a year, I'll figure it out when I get out because my retirement date's over there. I'll figure it out. And so when I got out, I had to find a job. And it was ironic.

In my effort to find a job for myself, I began networking a lot and meeting people in the city and in New York. And I ended up putting together these networking events with the help of this guy, Jordan, who I met in the city. He's a former investment banker, not a veteran. He's a civilian. And we put together these amazing networking events that were actually for me to meet employers and get a job. But we brought other veterans to these events. We brought other employers, and everyone's like, Wow, what a great service this is. And nobody was approaching me to get a job because they're like, oh, this is his job. He runs this networking event, and I ended up doing that. You're like, shit. And so I created a job that helped the people get jobs. And then shortly after that, I got into the Mr. Molen thing. And honestly, dude, it's just there's not a critical part of this. I sleepwalk like a maniac. And so my wife has always been like, I'm worried that you're going to shoot me. And so in that, don't worry, I have a place to keep this.

I've been thinking about it. And so she has been anti-gun because I Did I tell you about my prolific sleep walking?

I think you did.

I have. This is according to ChatGPT. This is not a true diagnosis, but I've gone to sleep studies. I've seen sleep doctors, and no one can figure out what's going on. Basically, I go to bed, and within about 30 minutes of falling asleep, I am up. This is most nights.

This is the majority of nights.

Okay, that's probably a stretch. It's at least two or three times a week, at least. I wake up and I'm in this half stoop. I sleep by myself. I have alarms set to the room that I sleep in that Antonio, who's here, who's my security guy, he set special alarms on the doors that lead out of the house from my room. So if I bolt in at night, he's alerted to it. And so I jump out of it and I start running, screaming, What the fuck is going on? Are you serious? Dude, it's like it's crazy. And so to me, it's so normal. But I'm like, oh, I was doing this in the teams. In Afghanistan, I was doing this, but I don't know how it got in. I don't think that's supposed to happen. But I get out of the military, and that was the one thing my wife was like, You can't have a gun in the house. You're going to do something crazy with it. So it's a combination of get out full civilian, full entrepreneur. But it's funny. I was actually going to say to you, it's the one thing that I have let completely fall off.

It's just shooting. I was going to ask you, how often are you shooting? Is this a thing you do every day? Because I feel like I want to reincorporate shooting into my life because it's just something that I haven't done since 2017.

Well, we'll start that today.

Dude, I'm probably the fucking worst shot ever right now, but I want to get back into it.

I'm not any good either. In fact, I don't really... I love shooting guns, but I'm not really into all the shit we used to carry in the SEAL teams. You know what I mean? The ARs and like, it's all good. I like them, but what I really like now is the old Western shit, like revolvers and lever actions.

Yeah, that's cool.

Dude, it's a lot of fun. That's awesome. But also, when I left, you know what I mean? And started my entrepreneur journey, I was in It started with tactics.

I remember watching videos of you out in the forest talking about your everyday carry. They were going like super viral. Yeah.

So I had to shoot for that. And then when I got tired of that shit, started the podcast, it fell off until... Well, it didn't fell off. It fell off. But then we moved here, and we got a shooting range right off the patio here. But I'm still pretty rusty.

Yeah. I remember When they were in the teams, they were dudes that just... What they did is they really kept dialed in. You can just see it. When a dude's shooting a lot, it's just they're so on point, they're so good. For me, I was good enough to pass the test because I was a team guy, but I didn't have that desire to really become a great shot. I think I was very average, if not below, but enough for the teams. Now it became this daunting task over time. Then I'm like, Well, if I want to get back into it, I got to do it discreetly, too. I can't go to an instructor and be like, Yo, I'm a former Navy SEAL, I got to learn how to shoot again. I was going to ask you, I want to shoot with you. Oh, shit.

Yeah, dude. Well, we'll do that on the break, bud. Dude, Halloween's right around the corner. Last year, we brought on an exorcist. It was awesome. That's cool. But you are the storyteller. Let's hear a story that you think goes along with Halloween, something that's going to scare the shit out of people.

Yeah, Actually, I was thinking about it, so I knew coming here, that was a big part of this, is having some stories. And I would say this story I'm going to tell you is... So I did it actually on the live tour. I don't think you heard this one, though. This one was added in. It gets a big reaction from the crowd. So I've told this in front of thousands of people, and this one just... It's a great story. It's a great story. It's a fucking horrible story, but it is a great story.

It's a fucking horrible story, but it's a great. A lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now, and everybody's trying to dig to the bottom of it and figure out just exactly what in the hell is going on. There's so much misinformation out there, just false stuff being spread around. It's getting to be impossible to dig and actually find a real truth. I mean, especially with social media and mainstream media, It's like, I feel like I'm put in this cage, like where everything I look at is just all the same stuff. It's the exact same narrative that it's getting harder and harder to find new ways to get to the bottom of stuff. And it's so bad that it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence, the division. This is how you destroy a country from the Inside Out. And so through this journey, I partnered with this production company called Ironclad, and we're doing an eight-part audio series on PSYOPs, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government, would conduct a PSYOP on its own people or people of a foreign government or whoever, right?

And I just think that this series is going to be extremely important because it's going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen. What's the motive behind it? Who's pulling the strings here? That's what we really all want to know, right? Who is pulling the strings from behind the curtain? Series comes out October 28th. You can head over to sciopshow. Com com. Order it, pre-order it today. But I think you're going to get a lot out of this. Who's pulling the strings? Who's pulling them? The cost of everything is still out of control, and many of us are relying on credit cards. If that debt is piling up, you're not alone. Americans collectively owe over $1 trillion in credit card debt. You might have considered reaching out American Financing but hesitated because you don't want to give up your low mortgage rate. Well, there's good news. They've created the Smart Equity Loan, a solution designed to help you take control of your finances without touching your current mortgage. Unlike a Heloc, which can have varied interest rates, the Smart Equity Loan offers a fixed rate. That means one predictable monthly payment, giving you peace of mind.

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All right, so in 1986, there's this family. Is this real? This is totally real.

This is a legit?

Totally real. Okay. There's this guy named Frank, and he's got two daughters. He has an older daughter. This is 1986. This is in Peproll, Massachusetts. So it's a dense Western Mass. He's got two daughters. He's got a 15-year-old daughter named Tina and a nine-year-old daughter named Karen. And this is in, again, the fall of '86. And around this time frame, this family, the Bowens family, they had suffered this really awful loss. So Frank's wife and the two daughters' mother had passed away pretty unexpectedly from cancer. So it came on suddenly, she passed away, and it was this horrible thing. And so this has happened within a few months of when the story picks up in the fall of '86. However, the part of the the dynamic here is that the wife, the mother, had been a working mom, and her income had been meaningful to the household. So the blue collar family Frank and his wife's income or how they flowed to the family. And so when she passed, not only is there all this grief in the household, of course, but there's also a practical issue. Frank now was 50 % of the income is gone, and he needs to find a way to provide for his family.

And so in the immediate aftermath of her passing, Frank began taking all these extra shifts at work just to make ends meet. It was just what he had to do. But as a product or a product of that was that Tina and Karen, who were just old enough for this to be okay, as they're dealing with this incredible grief of losing their mom who they were very close with, they began finding themselves alone quite a bit at their house, just alone, putting themselves to bed while their dad is out taking late shifts at work. But they accepted this. It is what it is. Their dad loves them, and he's just trying to do the right thing for family. So with that as the backdrop, there was this night where Frank was out at doing one of these late shifts. This is, again, sometime in September of '86, and the girls are home. And the girls The death of their mom is so new in some ways that they haven't quite moved to the point of acceptance. They still almost feel like mom's going to come around the corner. It just feels unreal that she's gone.

And they just felt desperately that they just wanted to have one more interaction with their mom. It's like they felt it in their bones. They just missed her so badly. And so with their dad gone for the night, the older girl, Tina, the 15-year-old, she asked the younger girl, Karen, Hey, do you want to get the Ouija board out and try to contact mom? So for those who don't know what a Ouija board is- This is never a good idea. Yeah, you know? A Ouija board, it looks like just a rectangular It's a regular game board, and it has A through Z on it, A, B, C, D, all the letters, the alphabet. It has zero up to nine, all the digits. And you put this, it's called a planchette. It's like this little dial that has felt tips, three-prongs felt tips that it sits on. And it's got a little viewfinder on the top of it that you can look through. It's like a little looking glass down onto the board. And when you use the Ouija board, if you believe that this thing works, you and whoever else, let's take Tina and Karen in this instance, they would their fingertips.

They typically sit on opposite sides of the board. They'd rest their fingertips on the edge of this planchette. And the idea is you don't move the planchette at all. You just rest your fingers on the planchette. And if there's spirits in the room, The idea is you ask a question with your fingers. Tina or Karen ask a question, Hey, mom, are you here? Their fingers are on the planchette. And if there's a spirit in the room, the idea is they will travel through your body and they'll manipulate your fingertips and they'll move the planchette around. Part of the reason why Ouija boards have become so popular is it's so easy if there's a group of you to be the one person that subtly moves the planchette and give the impression that there's a ghost in the room. So it is what it is. If you believe it or you don't, people say that Ouija boards are a way to talk to the dead.

What do you believe?

I don't know. I don't know if the Ouija board works. I think that there is- Have you tried one? I have tried, yeah. No shit. Where did you try it? We had one growing up. My sisters and I would always get out the Ouija board. Now that I'm thinking about it, that's weird. Me and my sisters as the young children are having seances in our basement. Actually, I'm open to it. I'm open to it. So anyways, these two, they're like, Okay, we want to try to contact mom. And so they get their Ouija board and their little planchette, and they go down into the basement, and they literally set up a seance. The basement is just this blank slab basement. There's a washer dryer. There's a couple of tools on a shelf, but it's a blank concrete slab basement. And they put their Ouija board down, they light some candles, and they sit down, and they put their fingers on the planchette, and they begin asking questions to the room. Hey, mom, if you're in here, give us a sign. And they look at the board and they're hoping it's going to move, but nothing happens.

And over the course of the next hour, these girls tried every combination of question that they could ask to try to inspire the spirit of their mother to come in here and talk to them. But no matter what they did, they couldn't get the planche to move. And in some ways, it was devastating. Again, they're grieving the loss of their mom. They haven't really come to terms with it. This felt like hope. Mom's going to come through. We know it. She loves us, but nothing happens. They end up packaging up the Ouija board, and they go back upstairs, and they go up to the second floor where their bedrooms are. And by this point, their dad, Frank, he's still at work. He's going to be out past the time they would go to bed. And Tina is the older, more responsible one, and she's, Okay, we need to go to bed. And so the two, they go up to the second floor, they get ready for bed, and they go to their respective bedrooms. And so they get in their beds, the lights are off, the house is quiet, and they try to go to sleep.

But after maybe only 20 or 30 minutes of laying in bed, they're both still awake, but they aren't aware of the other. They're in different rooms, but they're both awake. There's this tapping noise that begins to start in the house. At first, it was subtle, and both girls would report hearing it, but it wasn't clear if the tapping noise was just a house sound. Houses make noises. Is it something outside? Is it the wind? Whatever it was. But more than that, it was hard to pinpoint if it was coming from the floor they were on, the first floor, even the basement. Was it outside? It just felt like this almost omnipresent tapping sound. It wasn't rhythmic, it wasn't rhythmic. It wasn't consistent. It was sporadic, but it was constant. So there's a tapping sound that's just irregular but constant. And so it caught their ear. So Tina, the older one, she is just doing her best to forget about it and just try to go to bed. But Karen, the younger one, the nine-year-old, she can't sleep. She starts feeling worried about this tapping sound. They've just done a seance in the basement, and now there's tapping in the house.

She's a kid. It's scary. And so she leaves her bedroom, and she goes right over to the next room where Tina is, and Tina's in bed, and Karen goes in, and she's like, Hey, Tina, do you hear the tapping sound in the house? And Tina's like, Yeah, don't worry about it. It's no big deal. But the two, they're just sitting there, and Tina's trying to reassure Karen, but the tapping, it begins to intensify a little bit. And Tina, she has this almost epiphany. And she's like, as she's trying to tell Karen not to worry about it, the tapping is getting louder. And she's like, What if that's mom? We were just trying to contact her. What if the seance worked? What if mom did hear us? Maybe she's here. Maybe she's in the house. Maybe she's trying to get in touch with us. Maybe her tapping is her trying to signal us in some way. And suddenly that hope that was dashed as their Ouija board session, their seance hadn't worked. It's all back They're suddenly riveted with this idea that the sounds they're hearing could be their mom, who they just want their mom back so bad that they're prepared to believe anything at this point.

Like, Oh, my God, it's mom. Tina and Karen, they get out of the bed, and they walk into the hallway. Now, to this point, they still can't quite tell where the tapping is coming from. But by the time they got into the hallway, it's clear it's not coming from the floor they're on. It's coming from somewhere downstairs. They go into the dark stairwell in the second floor hallway, and they're looking down into the stairwell, I should say, that banks around down to the first floor. And all they can hear is just this periodic tapping, and it's coming from somewhere downstairs. And the two girls are standing at the top of the stairs, not really sure what to do. And Tina, the older one, just suddenly goes, Hey, mom, is that you? The tapping stops for a second, and then they hear a rhythmic, and then there's silence again. Oh, shit. So there's a clear response. The girls, they think at first that it's something that maybe it's a coincidence. It can't be this immediate. It can't actually really be her. Tina, again, says, Mom, really? Is that you? This time, even louder, there's three taps that come back from somewhere downstairs.

Clearly, something, someone is in the house, and they're interacting with the girls, and their dad's not home. But amazingly, the girls, remember, their mind state is, It's mom. This is a good thing. We're excited about this. To most children, this would be horrifying. But for them in this part of their lives, this was confirmation that their mom is here. It gave them an enormous amount of courage and happiness, frankly. They're like, Let's go down. Let's go downstairs and see what's going on. Let's see if we can... Maybe mom's down there. Who knows? Let's go down there. Down the steps the girls go. As they're going, they're asking more questions, and they're starting to sense that the tapping, which is louder now, they can tell that it's not somewhere in the on the first floor. It actually sounds like it's coming from the basement, potentially. There's a door in their kitchen on the first floor that leads down to the basement, and it sounds like the tapping is coming from down there, maybe even coming on the backside of that door. But they're going down the stairs, and they're firing off more questions like, Mom, the questions they're asking are all over the place, but they're asking these questions, and each time they're getting that three taps in response, they're sure it's mom.

They get to the kitchen, and now they've pinpointed the tapping is definitely coming from the basement. The door is shut to the basement. They go to the door, they open up the basement door, and they're looking down into this stereotypically terrifying basement. It's pitch black. It's wooden, creaky stairs. They can't see anything down there. And despite how confident they were that this is mom, this is where they drew the line. They're not prepared to go all the way into the basement where it's like, that's horror movie territory. But they stood at the top of the stairs. And for an hour, they asked their mother questions. In their mind, they're talking to their mom. They're speaking into the basement, and they're asking all sorts of questions. Do you miss us? Tap, tap, tap. Sometimes they'd get four or five taps, and they began to think that maybe that meant no, and three meant yes. But they had this whole thing where they're like, It's mom. It worked. The seance worked. But after an hour, their dad's still not home. They've had this unbelievable experience that they've chalked up to their mom. But then it just stops.

There's no more tapping. No matter what questions they ask, it just stops. The girls, they stayed awake because they're jazzed up by what's happened here. Around this time, around the time that the tapping has stopped, there's no more responses. Frank, their dad, comes home, and he's surprised to see his kids awake in the kitchen. He's like, What are you guys doing? They're like, Oh, you wouldn't believe it, dad. It's mom. We got the Ouija board out. We had a seance. They explain the whole thing that happened, but they're so excited about it. They're like, Dad, it's mom. We were talking to mom. We know it's her. It has to be her. Now Frank, Frank also is in the process of going through what is this unbelievably bad situation for him. He's lost his wife. He has to work all these extra shifts. He can't be around his daughters. He's worried about his kids. He's seeing his kids light up and be so excited at this idea that they're talking to their mom, that even though he does not think for a second that there's truth to what he's telling him, he doesn't think that there was tapping.

He doesn't think that their mom was in the house. He thinks that these are kids who've lost their mother, and they've come up with some coping mechanism, which is hearing random house tapping sounds, and they've convinced themselves it's their mother. Without any hesitation, he just goes, I bet that your mom. That's wonderful. She's looking out for you. She'll always be looking out for you. She's here with you now. She'll always be here with you. Your mom loves you. The girls are so pleased, and they run up to bed so excited to go tell their friends the next day. They go to bed, and Frank, frankly, doesn't think much of it. He just is like, My kids are coping with a terrible tragedy, and if they want to do that, that seems harmless enough. So he goes to bed. Over the next few days, the tapping sounds would to continue, except they would only be heard by the girls. Frank would never hear the tapping sound. The girls would hear it coming from the basement. They'd call their dad, he'd listen, and there'd be no more tapss. It was like they would disappear when Frank showed up.

But, oddly enough, the tapping was no longer just happening at night and just in the basement. The tapping was happening all over the house. It would happen outside the front door. It was in the kitchen. It was in the girls' bedrooms. It was everywhere. It was like the tapping It was always that tap, tap, tap when they were talking to it, but it was all over the house. But again, every time they'd hear it, Frank wouldn't be privy to it. He couldn't hear it. Frank's still telling himself that this is a relatively healthy coping mechanism, that it's not that big of a deal. But what ended up happening after about three days is the girls, they had convinced themselves that this is mom, right? This is a good thing. Well, by the third day, post-seance, when the tapping is happening a lot, the tapping had migrated primarily to the girls' bedrooms, and it was also happening mostly at night now. So by the third day, it's all the tapping is happening in their bedrooms, and it's namely under their bed. They would hear the sound underneath their bed. And for the girls, they began to wonder why their mom would do that, because it just feels almost stereotypically terrifying for our kid, something's under your bed.

And they began to get this feeling that maybe this isn't mom. Maybe our seance worked, but we didn't bring mom's spirit into the house. Maybe we brought something malevolent or just something other. We don't know. They're starting to question if this is really a good thing or not. That's what Frank picked up on. It's been a few days. Frank picks up on that. The Girls no longer view this as a good thing. It's disrupting their sleep. They would hear the tapping in the bed, and Frank would come into the room. There'd be nothing there. He had no explanation. But the girls were really spooked. It was at this point that Frank began taking a harder stance with his girls. Around the third night, he just said, Look, I know you're going through it right now, and I understand that you're dealing with a lot with your mom, but this isn't okay. Whatever you guys believe you're hearing with this tapping sound, I'm telling you, you have nothing to worry about in this house, but it's not happening. You're working yourself up over nothing, and you need to stop it. If you can't, I understand, but we're going to have to seek out professional help, grief counseling or something, because it's not healthy for you all to be living in fear of a ghost in your house.

It's just not okay. The girls are furious because they believed up until the third night that their dad accepted that the taps were real and that maybe it was their mom. Now he's come out and been like, I don't believe you and forget about it or else you're going to go to therapy. It sparked real issues between the daughters and the dad. The dad's really trying to do his best, but there's real tension here. Following this confrontation, if you will, between Frank and his daughters or you want to call it, the tension between them remained. For the girls, they felt like they didn't have their dad's support anymore, and they started to really be fearful of even being in their house. They didn't even want to be home anymore. It's terrifying when you're there. You hear these tapping sounds. Over the next several days, so now we're looking at a week after the seance. About a week later, the girls are finding every excuse to sleep over at friends' house and just be out of their house. They're jarring with their dad about Did the tapping sounds happen or not? But when they're home, they hear the tapping sounds.

And so fast forward about a week, a week post-seance. And on this particular night, the girls didn't have a place to go. They didn't have a friend's house to crash at. Their dad was out working a late shift. And so they were there in their home that night. There was nothing they could do about it. They had to go to bed and just deal with it. And the tapping is happening pretty consistently at this point, not literally at this point, but it's happening all the time. And so they're just like, Okay, we just got to get through the night, whatever. So the girls, they're having their dinner in the kitchen. Their dad is at work. And at a certain point, the tapping starts, and it's coming from the basement. It's not the three rhythmic tapping. It's just this periodic tapping that was the precursor to they could ask questions and get those rapid responses. Tina looks over at Karen and she's like, Dad doesn't believe us. The last week, every time this would happen, he would never hear it. He doesn't believe us. We We have to look into this. He's not going to look into this.

We have to. There's active tapping in the basement. The door to the basement is right off the kitchen. Karen is starting to get the sense that Tina is saying, We need to go into the basement right now and go look, because they hadn't done that yet. They had never really actually investigated the sound.

Would you have gone down there?

Yeah. Would you really? As a child? No. No. I'm sorry. As an adult, me now? Yes. As a child then? No way. No way.

I'd probably send my wife down.

You get in there. And so Tina is looking at Karen who doesn't want to do this. But Tina grabs a knife off the kitchen counter, and she's like, We have to go into the basement. We got to see what's down there. And Karen, she doesn't want to be up here alone. And so she's trying to tell Tina like, No, we can't go down there, but she's like, Fine. And so she gets behind Tina, and Tina goes over to the door, and the tapping is happening downstairs. They open up the basement door, and the tapping stops right away. As soon as the door opens, the tapping stops. It was going all up until that point, tapping stops. Down the stairs, the girls go. They walk down into the basement. The light in the basement was one of those pull string lights you have to get to in the basement. It's dark in the basement. They're wondering through this dark basement to get to the pull string. They get to the pull string, they pull it, and they're both totally on edge, and they're looking around, and they would later say, On some level, we were like, There's got to be some logical explanation.

For example, a racoon got into the house. Wouldn't explain the responses we're getting with tapping sounds. But as a human being, we will go to great lengths to convince ourselves that we are okay in moments of crisis. A lot of times before you cross the threshold into, Oh, my God, this is a horrible crisis, your brain was like, No, everything's fine. Everything's good. It's just a racoon, and they're hoping for that. But they get down there, they pull the light, and Tina's got her knife, and Karen's tucked up behind her, and they're looking around the basement. And I told you before, there's nothing in the basement. There's a washer and dryer. There's a shelf with some tools on it over here, but there's not even storage down there. It's just this vacant open space. There's nowhere to hide, and there's nothing down there. It is an utterly vacant space.

It's got to be a hole in the floor or something.

Well, they looked. They looked all around the basement, and there's nothing there. They're looking for where a racoon could have gotten in. But it's like, as they're looking, it's dawning on them that there isn't a clear answer here. We've definitely heard the tapping. Dad hasn't. We have. We're down here at the source of the tapping in many ways, and there's nothing. They've mentally shifted to it could be malevolent. So they're having this big fear response. They're like, Okay, we can't be down here. This is just horrifying. So they turn and begin going back upstairs. And as they're walking up, they notice there's writing on the inside of the stairwell wall leading up to the first floor. They're walking up the stairs, and right on the wall, on the basement steps, written in red is, I'm in your closet. Come find me.

Oh, shit.

And so the girls see that, and obviously, they sprint out of the basement. They bolt out of the house. They were very friendly with their neighbor. They run to their neighbor. They're banging on the door. It's late at night. The neighbor opens the door. They're like, What's going on? The girls are hysterical. They're like, Oh, my God, there's a ghost in our house. There's writing on the walls. And the neighbor is aware of the fact that they've lost their mother and understands that this is a very difficult time for them. And so no judgment passed, has no idea what's happening. Just says, Get in the house. We're going to wait for your dad. You stay here, and we'll wait for your dad, and he'll know what to do. And so the girls, they're just happy to be away from their own house. Frank, not that much longer, comes home, and the neighbor sees him pull into the driveway, immediately flags him down, and as gently as he can, he explains like, Hey, so your daughters are with me. They're fine. I don't know what's going on in your house. They seem very spooked about something to do with writing on the walls in your basement.

I don't really know, but they're very shaken up. They're at my house right now. I just want you to know. And Frank is like, Okay. He knows what this is about. This has been going on now for a week. And really, all he's thinking is, I guess I better plan for therapy or something for my kids. And so he goes and he tells his daughters, It's like, Okay, I'm here. I'm going to go check the house. Okay, you stay here. I'll go check it out, and I'll talk to you guys. He goes to his house, he goes inside, and he searches his whole house, and there's nobody there. He goes into the basement, and sure enough, written on the wall, it does say, I'm in your closet. Come find me. But it's written in ketchup. It's someone put it there, but his first thought is my daughters clearly put it there. They're the ones playing into this delusion here. This is a really unhealthy thing they've done. Now they're acting out this whole thing with the neighbor, and it's becoming this big drama. This is clearly some huge grief response. And so he leaves the house not concerned in the least that this is a real problem.

He's thinking, This is an issue of my daughters. My daughters are struggling here, and they need professional help. And so he comes back over to the neighbor's house, and he tells his girls, Look, I know you're dealing with some tough stuff here, but enough is enough. We're I'm going to start grief therapy, literally tomorrow.

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And the girls, they did experience what they just experienced, and they don't even know what to make of it. I mean, now it's really gone from this tapping sound in the house to something very concrete, almost a threatening message left that clearly was designed for them to find. But their dad doesn't believe them. They feel trapped. Like, what do you even do? And so the girls are resigned. They've been worn down by this, and they're just like, Fine. We'll find out. We'll do therapy. And so the girls, literally, I think it was the next day, started therapy. And wouldn't you know it, over the coming several weeks, there was no more tapping in the house. It was like everything went back to normal. Peace returned the house, if you will. The girls were still terrified to be in the house, but even when they were alone, the tapping was gone. For Frank, he felt like, Obviously, you're in therapy now. It's always been that. It's nothing more. It's just been in your head. But it wouldn't stay that way. So one week after the seance is when the writing on the wall showed up. I'm in your closet, come find me.

And that's what starts the group therapy session. The following three weeks, it's like peace in the house returns. So at the end of those three weeks, so now effectively one month after first contact, if you will, the seance the girls had at the very beginning, we're about one month after. At this point, they haven't forgotten. They, as in Frank, Tina, and Karen, have not forgotten about the tapping. They haven't forgotten about the weird stuff, but it's no longer a thing, right? And they've returned to normal life. And on this day, this is in October, I think, at this point of 1986, Frank had taken Tina and Karen and one of their friends, a girl named Kathleen, out to get some ice cream. And so they went out. This is in the evening time. They'd gone out. They got ice cream. They're just living their lives, moving on with life. And they come back to the Bowen household where they were going to spend the next hour or so before Kathleen had to go home. When they got home, Frank went up to the front step of his house, and he's about to open his door when he realizes that there's something off about his house.

He looked into the window and he saw there was a couple of lights on inside the house that he just didn't remember leaving on. But this is not like such a big red flag that he's like, Oh, my God, don't go in the house. It's more like, That's weird. I don't remember leaving those on. He was pretty conscious, I suppose, of leaving his lights off and on whenever he left the house. He looked back at his daughters to maybe see if maybe they were going to say, Oh, we left those on, but they don't even pick up on him thinking about this stuff. He puts the lock in, and he puts the key, and he unlocks the door, he opens it up, and it gets even weirder because now he sees that there's a radio that's on that was on really quietly that he can now hear, and also a TV is on. Tv is on in the back of the house. So some lights are on, TV, radio. And he also couldn't help but feel like some of the furniture in the first floor had been moved, but slightly. Only so much that if you lived in a place, you would notice the difference, but that's it.

If you didn't live there, you wouldn't have picked up on it, but things seemed a little bit out of place. And so Frank, he turns to Karen and to Tina and Kathleen, their friend, and he's like, Hey, did you guys leave the stuff on? The girls, by the way, at this point, they're seeing these things. And Tina and Karen are immediately back in that, Oh, my God, it's happening again. It's this thing, whatever it is. And they're like, We didn't do that. And so they're immediately terrified. Kathleen has been fully read in by Tina and Karen. They've heard about all the things they saw. She believes it fully. And so the three girls are horrified. Frank doesn't really know what to make of this, because remember, he believed that his girls were behind this delusion. That's what he would refer it as. It's just a delusion. And therapy was the way to get out of this thing. So he's like, I think that's still true, but I also have to deal with the fact that this is hard to reconcile. They were with me. How could they have done this? And they seem genuinely scared.

And so he hasn't really decided as he's walking into the house how he's going to react to this. He's looking at his girls who are all scared, tucked up behind him and looking at the scene like, What's going on here? And so he does this half-invested search of his house where he's not really sure how he feels about it. He walks around the house, he turns off the radio, turns off the TV, turns on the lights because now they're home, but there's nobody there. He searches the first floor, goes to the second floor. The girls are right behind him the whole time because they're so scared. They go down in the basement, and no one's down there. The house is quiet. No one's there. But after he finishes the whole search, he realizes there's actually one room that he hadn't checked yet. Just when he had first walked in, there's this room right off the front door. It's like the front sitting room that overlooked the front of the house. And just because Because he half began the search, wasn't really planning it, he just overlooked it. And so he has one more room to search.

It's his front room of the house. And so he said, Okay, I'm going to go search that room. And so, again, he searched the whole house. Nobody's there. He walks into this front room, and when he walks in, he's basically looking at windows that overlook the front of the house. And as soon as he walks in, he sees written on the wall above those windows is the words, Marry me, written in shaving cream. And he walks in and he's just looking at the words, and he's thinking to himself, My daughters, I just don't feel like this was them. How could this be them? I would have noticed something like this. It just feels like this can't have been them, but he can't quite wrap his head around what that actually means. If you accept this isn't your daughters, then everything your daughters have been saying before might also be true. So he's stuck with this almost existential crisis of, What do you do with this? And he's staring at the letters, and his daughters, the daughter and friend, are right, literally, up against his backside. And then he hears something. Over to his left, out of his eyesight, still in this front room, tucked up against the back wall relative to how he's looking, was just a closet.

And he hears the sound of the closet opening. And he knows his girls are right behind him. And so he turns and out of the closet walks this figure that's wearing a dress. They have clown makeup painted on their face. They have a hatchet over their shoulder. It's this man who walks out and he stares at Frank and the girls, and he just points and he goes, Up upstairs. And he starts walking towards them with this hatchet over his shoulder. And Frank, who is in complete fight or flight response here, he just protects the girls. And he's like, Go, just do what he says. And they start going out of the front room towards the stairs to go to the second floor. And this dress-wearing, hatchet-wielding, makeup-wearing maniac also is the dress of his dead wife. He's staring at Frank intently, got this hatchet, and he just keeps telling him, Go, go up the stairs. And so Frank keeps the girls between the guy. He stays between the guy and the girls, and he gets them to go up the stairs. And as soon as they get to the top of the stairs, Frank is still staring at this guy who's right in front of him with the hatchet.

He tells the girls, go into the first bedroom. And so Kathleen goes in, Tina goes in, Karen goes in. And then when Frank goes in, this guy with the hatchet is just methodically, slowly walking after him like he's just taking his time. As soon as Frank goes in and all the girls are in with him, he slams the door shut and he holds it shut. And suddenly there's this struggle between the hatchet-wielding maniac and Frank to open this door. And so they're battling at the door. And Tina, the 15-year-old, immediately just turns, runs to the window, and jumps out of the second floor window, leaps out of the house. She slams to the ground. There's screaming and all this chaos happening up in the room right above her. She just takes off to that same neighbor's house. And now she's in full hysteric, screaming that somebody's in my house. They're attacking my family. And the neighbor now consents. This is not some delusion these girls are having. Something horrible is happening next door. And so they call the police. Police show up a couple of minutes later, and when they get there, they look up at that second floor bedroom where Frank and the girls were, and Frank is leaning out the window screaming that, There's somebody in my house.

They were right at the door. I don't know where they are. They're gone. They're in my house. And so the police immediately, they get the ladder put up, and they get the girls and Frank out of the house, and they usher them over to the neighbor's house. And they're all safe. They're all fine, traumatized, no doubt. But the guy never got into the bedroom, and at some point took off. And so Frank and the girls were okay. And so Frank, Kathleen, the friend, Karen, and Tina, they're all fine. They've been moved over to the other house. But now the police, they go in guns drawn to search the house for whoever this person is who broke into their house. And so in they go, and they search the house, and there's no sign of any disturbance of any kind. I mean, there's nothing there. No one's in the house. They searched everywhere. They did ultimately, though, find a hatchet that was leaned up against the back sliding glass door, and that door was partially ajar. And so it gave the impression that this person, whoever it was, is gone. And so after the search of the house, the police are like, look, Frank, to Frank, they're like, We don't really know what to tell you here.

We don't know where this person is. Your description of them, unfortunately, it's like you describe somebody wearing a costume. We don't even know what they look like, realistically. They had clown makeup on, a dress. We think they're a man. They could be a woman. We don't know how old they are. We don't know what to tell you other than it seems risky to have you stay in your house. For right now, while we continue to investigate and try to figure out who this is, we want you and your family to just stay with a relative. Just don't stay at your house. What we're going to do is we're going to basically stake out your property and just assume that maybe this guy might come back, and maybe we'll catch them then. Then in the interim, we're going to be canvassing the town and trying to figure out who did this to you. Frank's like, Fine. And so really, without taking anything from his house, he and the girls, just, they leave. They go to a relative's house. And over the next few days, the police do canvass or they stake out Frank's property. And nobody goes in or out.

It's just the vacant home that no one's going in or out of. There's nothing. Nothing's going on. And police are communicating that to Frank the whole time. Like, Hey, we've asked in town, too, and no one seems to know who this could be. Again, limiting with the description of this person. We don't really who we're even looking for, but no one's gone into your house. We think at this point, they're probably not going to come back. But just for safety, give it a couple more days before we let you go back in. This is a couple of days into this, and Frank, he and his girls, they had to leave pretty abruptly, and so they were not able to take any supplies with them. They had their toiletries and their pillows and all their nice things. They're in the house still. It's broad daylight on the third day of this. Frank's like, You know what? I think I can pretty just go over there, run in the house real quick, and just get my stuff, bring it back, and then we'll have a couple more days, and we'll move back in. And so he drives, Frank does, broad daylight on this third day of the stakeout.

He gets to his property, and he doesn't see any police anywhere. He doesn't see any cop cars anywhere. He's thinking, Oh, maybe they're unmarked or something. I don't know. But there's nobody parked anywhere. It just looks like his house is here and no one's watching it. And he's like, Okay, well, they're probably here somewhere. I'm just going to run in real quick, get my stuff, and leave. And so he parks in his driveway, he gets out of his car, and he starts walking towards the front door. But before he even gets to the porch, he thinks he sees something moving in his house, up on the second floor, that same bedroom where they had been. And he stops immediately because he's thinking, Oh, wait a minute. What if they're watching my property from in the house? They didn't specify how they were going to watch the house, and I don't want to just walk in there to potentially an armed police officer who's waiting for an intruder. I don't want to just barge in. So I better take a second and call them and really let them know, Hey, I'm here before I go in.

And so he goes to the neighbor and he says, Hey, let me use your phone. He calls the police and he's like, Hey, I know you're staking out my house, but can you just confirm that you have officers in my house? Then that's how you're watching it because that's who I think I just saw in the house. And they're like, No one's watching your house from in the house. They're outside the house. And Frank is like, Well, I didn't see anybody outside the house. And the guy he was talking to was like, Well, then you must have caught them at turnover. I bet right now the police officer who's supposed to be on duty probably just arrived, and you must have got there right in that couple of minute transition time, which unfortunately does happen sometimes. But we promise somebody's there. What you ought to do is just go over there. I bet right now there's an officer watching your property. Why don't you talk to them? I'm sure they can go in and check the house for you if you want. Frank's like, Okay, that's weird because I definitely saw someone in the house, but I'll go check.

He hangs up, he goes outside, and sure enough, there's a cop that's parked right outside the house. He goes over to the cop and he explains the situation, and the guy is like, Okay, no one's in your house, but I will go in and look around before you go in and get your stuff. Frank stays out on the curb, and the officer goes up to the house. Now, remember, this house, no one's going in or out. With the exception of a couple of minutes of turnover, when there's a little bit of a gap, sometimes this house is just vacant. Nothing's happening in this house. The cop walks up and he gets to the door, and he unlocks it, and he opens it up, and he just cannot believe what he sees inside the house. There were pennies glued to the ceiling all across the first floor. Just like- Pennies? Pennies, like the coin, pennies, glued to the ceiling all across the first floor. And there are all these half-full champagne glasses positioned all over the first floor. And the furniture has clearly been maneuvered and arranged in bizarre ways. It's totally inexplicable. And all the guy's thinking is, We've been watching this house.

Clearly, somehow someone's getting in and out of this house, or Or they're still here. I don't know how that's possible, but something's off here, obviously. And so instead of searching the house, he pulls out, calls in backup, and they do yet another complete search of this house. They're going to tear this place apart and figure out how the heck someone's getting in and out and doing things inside the house with nobody noticing. What's going on here? They search the whole house, top to bottom, and it's a much more thorough search this time. They cannot find anyone. There's no sign of anybody in the house, how they in, how they got out. It's just this total weird mystery. At the end of it, there were a couple of officers that were down in the basement, that blank basement, and they're standing there frustrated. How could this be happening? What's going on here? One of them was leaning on the washing machine, and he's like, I just don't understand how we could have missed this. As he's talking, the washing machine suddenly moves from his weight being on it, and he looks down and behind where the washing machine had been, now that it's been moved, is a little cutout on the wall.

It looked like it was where the vents of the washing machine and the dryer would go to, but he moved it a little bit more, and he realized that there was a big enough cutout behind these two, the washer and dryer. A person could realistically fit through the hole in the wall. And so they pulled the washer dryer away, and they poke their head in, and they see with their flashlight, there's a tunnel that's been burrowed into the wall in the basement. And crouched down in the corner, looking back at them, is this dude wearing a dress.

Holy shit.

And the dude in the corner, his name was Danny LaPlante. I'm going to tell you about Danny LaPlante because the story, it takes a horrible turn. This is already bad, but it gets exponentially worse. Danny LaPlante was this 16-year-old kid, and he clearly had humongous issues, huge issues. Six months earlier from when he's discovered in the wall, he had had some of fleeting interaction with Tina Bowen, the 15-year-old. Apparently, he made some move on her, and he felt rejected. Tina didn't recall it at all. They apparently went to school together, but she does not have a memory of interacting with this guy ever. It's like, I didn't even know that he felt that way about me, but he felt spurned by her. He felt rejected. The way he handled his rejection is he snuck into their house right after that, so six months earlier, burrowed a hole in their wall in the basement and was living in their walls. And what he was doing is, by the way, he did not have access to their whole house from that hole in the basement. He only had a little crawl space in the walls in the basement.

He was leaving the crawl space all the time and just wondering their house with the family there. He was spying on the family 24/7. And then at a certain point, when the girls went downstairs and they had that seance, Danny could tell they were having a seance to try to contact their mother. And all those tapping sounds he made were intentional. He was trying to pretend to be their mother to make them feel like it's mom. He snuck into their bedrooms and was flicking the underside of their bed. This guy was asking to get caught. He never did. But it was him pretending to be their mom And then eventually, he mixed it up and decided to be evil and pretended to be a malevolent spirit. So this guy's completely psychopathic, right? So he gets arrested and he's put in jail. And 10 months later, as he's awaiting trial, he is given He's given bond. He's allowed to leave jail. He's given bond. That's the framing, right? Yeah, bond. And while he's out on bond, he sneaks into another family's house. And for reasons that we still don't even understand now, he murdered three of the four people in that family after living in their walls.

Now, he's currently in jail, and he recently was put up for a parole hearing, and he was rejected. During the parole hearing, they determined that he's arguably One of, if not the single most sociopathic member in the entire prison system. So that's the story of Danny LaPlante.

Damn. How did he kill the other family?

He drowned them. He drowned them? I believe the mom was strangled and the two children, he drowned. Jeez. Yeah. And so if you look at this guy now, if you look at videos of Daniel LaPlante now, I mean, if you were to imagine somebody capable of doing that, that's what he looks like. So not good, dude.

How do you find this stuff?

Well, that one's pretty well publicized, I suppose. People know about that. Yeah, but the thing that, and this is not to toot my own horn, but I think that the thing that I will do to stories that I think brings them to life a little bit is there are stories that are told by loads of people on loads of accounts and channels and movies and TV shows. But a lot of time, there's a formula for how each one gets told. For example, this is completely random, but like, Roswell, New Mexico. I don't even have the story in mind, but the way that story is often told is, Roswell, New Mexico is like, we're aliens by the government or kept. And that's how you start the story. And then you back into it. And that's how everybody tells that story. If I was going to tell, and I've never done this, a story about Roswell, I would start with some anecdote that led to this theory even existing. I would start with somebody's experience in real time that was potentially paranormal. And then I would begin to connect it to Roswell in some way. Maybe the government comes in after the fact, and suddenly the sighting this person saw, the government's asking questions, and it turns out it's the agents from Roswell, New Mexico.

And so I like to find a way to tell a story where the payoff is only at the end. It's like, especially in true crime stories, which we do a lot of, so many times when you tell a story like that, it becomes, one, fixated on on the antagonist, the killer, because they're the most obscene, they're the most memorable in the worst ways. And you lead with, today, I'm going to tell you the story of the murder of so and so. And so going into it, you already know what the story is, and you're fixated on the killer. And so the way I tell these stories, it's designed to be like you're in the POV of the normal people that are meant to feel relatable to you. The people who, like the Bowen family, were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's all That's it. And the other family that were killed, the Gustafsins, wrong place, wrong time. I want you to inhabit their point of view and have the killer be almost anonymous. This is a story where Danny LaPlante gets really named, but the killer or the bad thing that happens always needs to feel like this thing that always happens in a Mr. Ballin story.

It's this ambiguous bad thing. It's the character in the story that I can relate to. I can feel their emotions. That way, by the time the bad thing happens, it's heart-wrenching. You're like, Oh, my God. I feel for those people. So that story gets told a ton, but it's often told with, I'm going to tell you the story of the guy in the wall.

Man, we do a phenomenal job. Thank you.

That was a long one. Wow.

Holy shit. Living in the wall?

Yeah. And you know what's crazy? Is like there's- This guy had parents? I think he did. He was a very, I don't quote, I want to say a very dysfunctional family, if you can imagine. But actually, these are far less good good stories, but there's a shocking number of, because we research this stuff, shocking number of people that have found people living in their walls. And honestly, it's not like you can live in someone's wall. It isn't like your walls magically connect all over your house. That's not really how it works. But there are definitely instances, especially in major cities, of squatters finding their way into these apartment complexes and different people's homes. Actually, this is not even a full story But there was a movie based on this, and I'm not prepared to tell this whole story. But there was this apartment complex. I want to say it was in New York where there were all these people getting killed, just in this massive Section 8 style housing, people packed on top of each other. Super big high rise. All these people were getting killed. They were just turning up dead in their apartments.

And nobody knew why. They just would be found dead in their apartment, inexplicably. And it would turn out that the way this apartment was built was really, really cheaply, in particular the way they insulated the walls between each of the different units. So in essence, if you wanted to, there was a way from, I think, the basement where you could get into the inner workings of every single... You could get into the space between every single apartment. There was effectively scaffolding very near. Oh, my gosh. And even worse than that, every single apartment, their mirror was just placed into the drywall. It wasn't anchored at all. And So these dudes began sneaking into people's apartments by just climbing inside of the wall, this high-rise building, and punching open the mirror. Now they're in your apartment and killing the people in the apartment and then going back in through the mirror.

Jeez.

I don't know if this one was true or not, but there was one about... In a way, it's not heartwarming at all. It's bad, but it's the closest thing to heartwarming.

I don't know if you have any heartwarming stories, John.

This one is like, there was this guy who I want to say this might be, I don't know if this is a true story or not, but it's a great... You can probably look it up. It's one of the more viral clips that's out there, and I think it's true. There was this guy who he lived in the city. He was in New York. And I think he shot content for a vlog or something. I don't think he was a big influencer or anything, but he was a type of guy who filmed himself a lot. And there was this... Someone put together a compilation of all these videos of him. Over the course of these blogs he was doing, he was mentioning that he's like, Man, the weirdest thing happened to me last night. My toothbrush was on the other side of the counter. It's little things that in the vlog, he's clearly not making a big deal out of it, but he's saying them. He's like, That's so weird. I feel like I'm losing my mind. Here and there, he just mentioned that there were all these weird things happening. He lives alone. He lives in a big apartment building in New York.

And he eventually starts to question his own sanity. He begins to say to his followers or whatever you want to call it, he's like, Something weird is happening to me. I keep forgetting where I'm putting things. I keep buying things, and they're disappearing, in particular, food and weird stuff is happening in the kitchen. And so he eventually sets up a camera in his kitchen. It's a very small New York City apartment kitchen. He sets up a camera. And over the first couple of nights, he's filming. Nothing happens. He doesn't even know what he's looking for. He's not going to, Oh, someone's living in my apartment with me. He's just like, What? Am I sleep walking? What am I doing? And then there's this one clip that's gone crazy viral. It'll be easy to find. It's the middle of the night, and this cupboard opens and this little woman, this little woman, climbs out of the cupboard and she's looking around and she goes over to a sink. She hasn't even got off the counter yet. And she squats down and pees in a sink. Then she jumps down and she goes to his fridge and she starts He's eating all this food in his fridge.

Then she goes around the house, she comes back with a toothbrush, sure enough. She cleans her teeth, puts everything back, and then she goes back into the cupboard and puts everything back. The guy discovered it and he was horrified.

This is real, too.

Well, I don't know that I've seen this video, and I believe it's true. This guy did an interview for it. He was like, Yeah, it turns out in that cupboard, you could basically climb up into the ceiling of the apartment and hide. But it was this woman who, and this is the heartwarming part, if you will, I think that she had no money. She was down on her luck. She was this elderly woman who had literally walked into his apartment when he left the door open one day and just magically found this hiding spot and had been there for a year. So he was living in this one for a year. It's like crazy.

Holy shit, dude. You uncovered some wild shit.

Yeah, man. Wow.

Do you believe in paranormal stuff?

I don't know. I do. I I think that what's happened is in virtue of constantly searching for stories that are credible enough that we would share them on our shows, you are exposed to a lot of stuff that's clearly not true, especially when it comes to user submissions, a lot of that stuff. It could be true, but there's just no way I can prove any level of credibility. It's one person's perspective type of thing. But there There's definitely some things that are tough to explain. I think that where I go to is it's almost a cop-out to say, Paranormal doesn't exist, only because all you have to do is just Zoom out. Zoom out a little bit on our species. Zoom out a little bit on Earth. It doesn't matter what you think of how we got here or whether there's God, whether there isn't, or whatever your interpretation of existence and our place in it, it doesn't matter. It is undeniably the case that we are this little tiny thing in this vast space that we don't really understand. Even through every religion, we still don't really understand. We don't really know with absolute clarity who we are and what we're doing here.

We have good ideas, we have great theories, but it's undeniably part of the human experience that we were like, Yeah, we don't really know. We think so. I believe this, but I don't really know. And so because of that, why is it so outlandish to think that there could be, for example, supernatural activity? I told this story, actually, on the Story Time with Mr. Ballon, the new show we've been doing. I told it to Tom Seguro on our first episode. The shortened version of it is there's a story of this Mexican pilot who's this young civilian pilot who was learning how to fly just as a civilian, he's a 21-year-old kid. Forget his name. And there was the day where he was going to fly solo for the first time. So he shows up to the airfield. I think it's called Chimilacan, Mexico. I'm butchering the name. He shows up. He's done all his tandem or whatever you call it, flights with an instructor. Today, he's going to fly on his own. And the flight path that he was going to be on was very simple. Take off, do a couple of turns, come back and land, just show us you can do it, and then you're certified.

So he's not nervous. He gets in the plane. He takes off. He takes off. I think it was 9: 15 in the morning. I want to say this is in the '80s or '90s, I forget, but it wasn't super recent. He takes off and everything's going fine. And he begins making his turn. And then at a certain point, there's this fog that rolls in. And they were aware of the fog, but the fog, it really came in fast. And as he's entering this fog, he loses his visibility. And this is also at a time where the instruments in the aircraft were pretty rudimentary. It was basically dead reckoning. You're looking out the window to see where you're going. This might even have been in the '60s or '70s now that I think about it. It was not recent. And all he's got is his compass and his altimeter. He doesn't have much going on, and he's just looking out the window, and he's seeing where he's at. And he said, okay, I'm good. He's making his turn. But at a certain point, he knows he needs to begin to descend to land. And he basically knows where he is.

He figures, once I go below the fog, I'm going to see the runway and I'll land. But as he tries to descend, he realizes his craft, his airplane is not responding. It's flying, it's steady. It's not faltering, but it's not descending. And he tries to pull the yoke to one side. It's not turning right, it's not turning left. He can't do anything. He's not panicking. But as this is happening, he realizes that the plane is not just leveled off. It actually is beginning to climb, and he has no control over it. He's just going up. And so he goes over the radio. He's trying to tell, I guess, the air traffic control of what's going on, but he doesn't really even know what's going on other than he's lost control of his aircraft. He's in this big cloud of fog. He's losing sight of anything. And as he's rising, he begins to lose consciousness and finally just passes out. So he's riding up into the clouds with no control, and he passes out. And so Raphael, pretty sure his name is Raphael. For the sake of this story, I'm going to call him Raphael from here on out.

So Raphael, he wakes up, abrupt, and he's looking around, and immediately he takes stock of what's going on because he just passed out in the cockpit a minute ago, and he's flying solo. Pretty dangerous. And he sees that his plane is still flying. He's flying level. His plane's fine, and the mist is all gone, the fog is all gone. And he looks out his window and he sees that not only is the fog all gone, but he's actually over a very new-looking environment. He's flying over water. Now, in every direction, it's water. And he's really just happy that he hasn't crashed. And he can't really picture how he got here. But as he's taking stock and taking back control of the plane, and now he does have control of the plane again, he realizes there's somebody trying to talk to him on the radio. And they're like, Hey, Raphael, Raphael. Hey, what's going on, Raphael? And he's like, Oh, my God. I don't even know what to say to you. I don't even know where I am. And the guy over the radio, it was air traffic control off the Coast of, I forget where it is, Some coastal city in Mexico.

They're like, Hey, I've been talking to you for the last hour or so. Are you okay? And is somebody with you right now? And Rafael is like, What? No, it's just me. I fell asleep. I don't know how I got here. And so the air traffic control guy is very suspect of what's going on. And he's like, Hey, do me a favor. Turn around. Come over here. You're going to land right here at whatever city this is. You're going to come land right here and We're going to talk to you. He's like, Thank you. He turns around and he lands. Where he is, and now, I think it's three hours away. From where he took off, where he lands is a three-hour flight away. Let's just put it that way. I forget the name of where he lands. So he lands, and as soon as he lands, he's thinking like, Oh, my God, I'm getting in so much trouble. I definitely didn't pass my test. This did not go well. He gets out of his aircraft, and there's all these people waiting for him, these stereotypical in suits, like government officials. They show... That's what it looks like.

That's the way he reports it. And they take him. And before he can even ask questions about what the heck just happened. They're like, Hey, you're going to come with us. We're going to screen you and see if you're on drugs. And also, we want to give you a psychological test to make sure you're sane. And the whole time, he's like, What is going on? He's trying to ask questions. Nobody's given him an answer. It's these people in suits that just whisked him away to this hospital. And he gets to the hospital, and they give him drug screening, and he's totally sober. And they have a psychologist talk to him who determines that he's shaken, but he's sane. And it's only at that point that they're like, All right, Raphael, we're going to tell you what the heck is going on here. And he has no idea. He's totally clueless what's happened here. So he took off at 9: 15 AM. This is what they told him. They're like, you took off at 9: 15 AM. You flew up into the cloud, and then no one could find you again. And then at I want to say it was, I forget the time exactly, but it was an hour later or an hour and a half later, call it like 10: 30, 10: 45, air traffic control off the Coast of Mexico, they picked up this blip on their radar, flying in circles out over the water.

And was Raphael. They're like, What are you doing here? The guy who was like, Hey, are you alone in the cockpit right now? That guy, that same air traffic control. He got on the radio with Raphael, and he spoke to him for an hour, and they recorded his conversation. At some point in this conversation with Raphael that Raphael doesn't remember, there's a recording of this. I wish I could play for you right now, where Raphael, it doesn't sound like him, but he's the only one in the cockpit, and it's recorded on air traffic control. He says something to the effect of, This is not Raphael. We come to you from another planet. We're using his body as a microphone. You need to understand that your species is on the brink of destruction, that you're using nuclear weapons. You're about to on yourselves, and you're going to violate yourselves if you don't stop. And if you don't stop, the insinuation was entities other than people on Earth are going to intervene and stop you. It was basically like, Stop fucking around on Earth. And blowing shit up and killing each other, or else someone's going to have to intervene.

It's like the message, but it's said through Rafael. If you listen to it, even though it's in Spanish, it sounds horrifying. His voice sounds deep, and it's garbly, and you can tell the air traffic control guy as he's talking back and forth to him, he's unnerved by it. Then magically, at like 10: 30 or 10: 45, when Raphael comes to in the cockpit, his voice totally changes on the recording. He's like, Hey, what's going on? I just woke up. I just woke up. Raphael has no memory of it, but there's a couple other anomalies that don't really add up. One, you have just the fact that there's a recording of the conversation where for an hour, this guy is getting this weird feedback from Raphael that sounds like another alien species talking to him. But also the plane itself, it's a three-hour flight to get to that body of water. He had enough fuel in his plane, I want to say for an hour's flight or two hours flight, it was less. When they recovered his plane, he had three quarters full tank of gas. So just to get to where he was, even if he had flown straight, one, he didn't have enough time because it was 9: 15-ish takeoff, 10: 45 or whatever it was he's found over the body of water.

That's not three hours. That's an hour and a half. So it's less than three hours. So even a fast plane couldn't have got there in three hours. And the fuel was literally too full to be there. And so the only way you can get this story, this is dramatic, but it's good for the story. The story is not really widely talked about because it's a very scrutinized story in Mexico because people are like, this is the best It's a piece of evidence that something weird is going on. There could be aliens out there. This feels like proof. The story has been buried in an archive in this library in Mexico. And the way we got access to it, I kid you not, is we had to write a handwritten letter to this Mexican library to request to use the story in the recording because it's the recording. That's the transcript in the recording. And then when we asked, they had to interview us to figure out what we were using it for. I swear to God. Are you serious? Yeah. They were like, Whatever you do, don't make a video about it. Here we are.

Here we are. Yeah.

Oh, shit.

Right?

How did you find that one?

We have a pretty amazing team of researchers, and we have one, Sam, who's our Spanish language researcher. And so she will specifically read news sources that are Spanish language that we don't necessarily have access to. And she just found it. I guess people were talking about it on the interwebs, if you will.

That is wild.

Yeah.

Have you had any paranormal stuff happen to you?

Yeah. I mean, I had the It's a long one. If you want to hear a long one, I have a long story. How much time we got?

We got all the time in the world.

Yeah. I do. I have one thing that to me that I don't even know if it's paranormal or not. I would say that it likely feels close. And in a way, people think it's the reason I started doing Mr. Ballen, but it's totally coincidental. I have exactly one time that I had something strange happen to me. And it also happens to be one of the first stories I told on the internet that went pretty viral. But it's not why I do this. It's just happenstance.

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So when I was 16 years old, I was big into snowboarding, and I had these two buddies of mine who both were named nick, and one of them, his nickname was Wolf, like the animal Wolf. And so for the sake of the story, there's and there's Wolf. And the three of us, we snowboarded together all the time. So I grew up just south of Boston, Massachusetts, and I lived in a town called Quincy. And Massachusetts is not known for its rugged mountain peaks. And so there's really nowhere to go snowboarding. But there was this place called Blue Hills. It's this little ski resort. It's literally a hill, hence the name Blue Hills in Milton, Massachusetts. And they pump snow onto it. And it's no kidding, just a little tiny hill. And we loved it. We were there all the time, taught snowboarding there. It was like that was our place. In the winter, me, nick, and Wolf were there all the time. But every winter, from the time I was maybe 12, so 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, The one big trip we would take is nick. Nick's family had a cabin in New Hampshire, up in the White Mountains.

And for us, that was the one time where we'd go stay at the cabin. And for a weekend or a few days, we would go snowboarding at real mountains in New Hampshire, which compared to Blue Hills in Massachusetts, these were like Mount Everest. It was amazing. And so we really looked forward to that trip every single year. But when I was 16, we had a trip planned to go up to this cabin. And their cabin itself, it's located up on this old abandoned ski resort, which matters to the story. Basically, they built all these little cabins. I think it's called King Pine was the name of the resort before it shut down. But there's all these cabins that were built for the ski resort. But then the ski resort shut down, and a lot of the cabins got demolished. Nobody really kept them, or they were sold off or whatever. But there was a few that kept their cabin on these old abandoned mountains. And there's really very little in the way of public service that goes up there. So the roads get all nasty and stuff. But it was cool to be living on the side of the mountain.

But anyhow, we had a trip to go up there planned. And out of left field, Nick's father passed He passed away. Honestly, I think it was a heart attack, but it was very abrupt. And when we would go to this trip, this annual trip up to this cabin, it was always me, Wolf, nick, and then Nick's mom and dad. And they were this perfect couple. They loved each other so much. They were so much fun to be around, just like the most motherly, fatherly group. And they loved that cabin, especially the dad. The dad, I don't think he built it, but he was always... He was handy, fixing it up. He's a mansman, rugged guy. And so when I found out that Nick's dad had died, I really didn't care about the ski trip, snowboard trip. I'm like, of course, we're not doing that. How could we It was literally a couple of days away. There's not a chance we're going to do that. I remember I talked to Wolf separately, so not the guy whose dad died. And I said, hey, just between you and I, obviously we're not going to go, right? And he's like, Yeah, no way.

But I ended up getting a call from nick. And nick, he was always a very stoic guy, a tough, quiet, reserve guy. And he's showing almost no emotion or anything. He's like, Hey, we're just going to go. We're going to go on the trip anyways. And I remember thinking that I actually really didn't want to because I'm thinking about how uncomfortable that's going to be. The absence of his father is going to be so obvious. But I also was thinking that for all I know, this is their way of honoring his late father. He loved the cabin, and maybe it's one of those things where it's like he would want us to go, still do the trip. And so I called Wolf separately, and he agreed that he's like, I feel like it's our responsibility to go and be supportive and just let this be whatever it is. It's not meant to be a fun vacation. It's meant to be there for the family and just go. And so Me and Wolf agreed to go with nick, and the deal is it's going to be the three of us, the three friends, Nick's mom, like usual.

And then she had two much older sons. They were in their 30s at the time. We're 16. I hadn't met them before. I knew they existed, but the rumor was that they would be joining us at the cabin, presumably the night we got there. We were going to be there for three nights. They were going to join us. Without even telling Wolf or I, we understood that they're going there to fill the obvious gap left behind by Nick's dad's absence. And so that's what we think we're walking into. And so the day comes, it's just a couple of days later. Nick's mom comes, picks me up, and it's me Wolf and nick in the back seat. It's a big SUV, and Nick's mom is driving, and the front passenger seat is conspicuously empty. That's where the dad would sit. And so up to New Hampshire, we go. And At this point, I've embraced the situation, and I'm just looking to be a good friend. So is Wolf. We just go up there. It is what it is. So we go up to the cabin. A couple more points about the cabin that are important for the story is the cabin itself is situated on a mountain.

It's built on a mountain. If you think about how you'd build a level house on a slope, you got to put half the house, if you will, out on stilt to keep it up, supported, and then the other half is effectively built into the mountain to to build something on a slope. I guess. I hope that makes sense. And so that's how this one's built. Basically, half the house was jutting off the mountain with big stilt and a big wrap around porch that went around the outside. And then a section of the house was burrowed into the mountain. And when you drive up this mountain, you'd turn onto a little access road, and you'd be approaching the house, looking at it from a profile view. You'd see on the left side is the stilted side, and the right side is the side buried in the mountain. The door is right in front of you as you pull up to it. The door to get into the cabin, you actually have to step onto the wrap around porch and take a few steps. And then there's a door that leads directly into the side of the cabin.

And once you step inside, you're standing quite literally, between the kitchen on your right, where there's linoleum under your right foot, and on your left is this shag carpet where the dining room is. So you step in and you're straddling these two rooms. There's also sleighbells that they kept on the door. So anytime you opened it, you could always hear it opening. And so you walk into the cabin and there's just one big open room. It's an open floor plan. It's a very small cabin. So kitchen over here, dining room here with a table in it. And if you just kept walking straight towards the back of this cabin, again, not very big, you'd enter the living room. There's no wall demarcating it. You just get to a couch with a TV on the back of the cabin. And if you turned around in that back of the cabin and looked up, you'd see a lofted second floor. And basically at the backside of the cabin, there's stairs that go up to the second floor. It's just a lofted second floor. That's where the mom and dad, that's where they would sleep. Then where we would sleep is when you first walk in and you got the kitchen on your right, you got the dining room on your left.

If you walk like halfway through the cabin and you stopped, and you turned right, you're now looking into the mountain that direction. There's a single hallway that goes straight down and then makes us tiny little left. And there's one bedroom that is where we would sleep. And when you go into that bedroom, you'd walk in. It's a corner-fed room, if you will, for our military days. And immediately on your right is a bunk bed. I would sleep on the lower bunk, Wolf would sleep on the top bunk. And then with basically all the remaining space in the room, it's not a very big room. It was like a queen-size bed where nick would sleep. And there was just enough space where you could walk between the queen-size and the bunk bed, a little row there. So all that will make sense once we get into the story or what really happens. So anyways, we get up to the mountain We get to the cabin, we put our stuff down, and right away, even though it's midday, we head out to Adatash. I think that's the name of the mountain we went to, and we snowboard all day, and it's great.

Even though it's a sad trip, it was wonderful to be out on the mountain. And then we come back. And at this point, we were told that one of the two older brothers was likely going to be there late at night. He was coming in from some trip he had. And so basically, He was going to get there, but it was going to be late at night, likely after we fell asleep. So there's no reason to stay up for him. And so we were at the cabin, and the three of us are like, Man, let's just go to bed right now. It's seven or eight o'clock. Let's just go to bed and we can get up super early and hit the mountain and snowboard all day tomorrow. It's going to be awesome. And so we go in our bedroom, and the other two fall asleep immediately, but I just can't sleep. There's no reason for it. Just couldn't sleep. Maybe I was excited. And I had a PlayStation One in there, and I was playing SSX tricky, that little snowboarding game, just crushing video games. I just couldn't sleep. But finally, I'm like, All right, I got to go to bed.

So I turn it off, and I get into the bunk, and it's truly pitch black inside this room where the room has been built into the mountain. It's not some secret room. It's just the way the cabin is constructed. There's no windows. It's bunkered in the mountain. And so there's no light coming in. And it's the middle of the night. And the only light in the room was just a digital clock that had a little red dial to a little red digital face. That was the only light in the room. But it's truly like a pitch black room. I'm laying there, and I still can't sleep. And my feet are closest to the door. And Wolf is the same orientation above me, and nick is the same orientation next to me. I'm laying there. And at a certain point, I hear footsteps out on on the wrap-around porch. And I didn't hear a car approach. I also wasn't actively listening for sounds outside. I was trying to fall asleep. But I remember hearing these footsteps on the wrap-around porch. And I think that, as I mentioned it before in another story, it's amazing what your brain will do.

I've seen this in this particular story, and I've also seen it in the military, where you're met with overwhelming evidence that something bad is happening, but your brain is like, Nope, everything is fine. It's the middle of the night on a mountain, and I'm hearing footsteps on the wrap around porch. My brain immediately jumps to, Oh, it's next brother. It has to be next brother. It's like 2: 00, 3: 00 in the morning right now. We knew he was going to be here. I've never met him. And it's funny. My go-to thought was, I'm going to pretend to be asleep because I don't want to have a social interaction I have no connection with this dude right now. Never met him before. It's like 3: 00 in the morning. He was going to walk in and be like, Yo, get up. Let's chat. Let's meet. He's not going to do that. But that's all I'm thinking. I'm like, All right, just do your best, a sleep impression. And so I'm sitting there and I hear these footsteps, and they're out on the porch, which is elevated off the grounds. It's pretty echoey, and it's like, silent in the house beyond that.

And so the footsteps, they stop outside the door, the door that leads in to the kitchen in the living room. And I hear the door open, and I hear the sound of the sleighbells on the door ringing. So it makes sense. The door is opening. He's here. And the first thing that I noticed that seemed off was I didn't hear the door shut again. I just heard it open. And the footsteps, when they're out on the wrap around porch, that is an elevated wooden platform, makes sense that they would echo, in a sense, or you would hear them. The cabin is not echoey. There's shag carpet, and it's like cement slab. It's You don't hear people's footsteps. But when the footsteps came into the cabin, I continued to hear them like they were echoing, almost like they were out on the wrap around porch. And so footsteps wrap around porch, the door opens, the sleighbells, the footsteps come into the cabin, and they're echoing. Echo is not even the right word. They're loud. I can hear a thump with each step. And I'm telling myself, it has to be one of the next brothers. That's all it can be.

There's no other explanation here because any alternative is awful. There's no other good alternative. And so the footsteps are moving. And I had this weird thought that I can only describe this way. It was almost like I could see in my mind's eye where they were in the house, whoever, whatever this was. It was like I was intimately aware, probably because I was having a fight or flight reaction and my brain was going crazy. It was like with every step, it was like I could see the feet moving exactly where they were in the cabin. And I could tell as As the footsteps hard stomped through the cabin, they stopped. I knew they were stopping right at the point where you would turn. And if you wanted to, you'd walk down the hallway that led to us. There's no other... Once you'd come down this hallway, we're the only room that's left. I'm picturing in my mind, Okay, this has got to be next brother, but what's going on here? Why do I have this weird thought about this? The footsteps stop at that point, and they turn, and they begin walking down the hallway towards our room.

Our door shut. It's pitch dark beyond the little red light in the room. And at this point, I'm starting to wonder, Okay, I don't know if this could be next brother. This feels awkward. It feels wrong. The door's not shut. What's up with these footsteps being this loud? Is this an intruder? Is it a predator? I don't know. Is it an animal that's come into the house? All these thoughts are going through my head, and they're all bad. And I remember having this almost paralyzing fear come over me as the footsteps began coming down the hall. Because all I'm thinking is, in a moment here, invariably, it seems like the door is going to open, and I'm going to have to have some interaction with whoever, whatever this is. Wolf and nick are dead asleep, and I'm so scared with fear. I can't make a sound. I'm so scared. And so I'm laying there, and the footsteps come down the hallway, and then they stop right outside the door. So it comes down the hallway, and it turns, and it's facing the doorway that's shut. And I'm looking towards the foot of my bed, the bunk bed now, and there's a space between the top bunk and where I'm laying.

And so I have a little bit of a view on this door that's on the wall here. I can see the door, and the door opens inwardly, and it's so dark. But my mind, I'm like, I know where the door is. I know, even though I can't see it, I know if anybody comes in, they're going to be right there. And so I'm laying here staring down through the slat in my bunk bed. The door opens, and this dark, tall figure walks into the room, and each step is this thunderous boom as it's walking into the room. It's echoing through the whole house, it feels like. I'm amazed no one else has woken up to it. And I see it walk past, and I'm going to explain this. I see it walk past the slats in the bed or that space in the bed, and The room is pitch black. There's really no light coming in even when the door opened up. There's a tiny bit of light from the digital clock, but there's virtually no light. And I could practically perfectly make out a dark silhouette within a dark room. It was like I could see it clear as day, as if there was a light being shown on it, this tall dark figure that walks past the bed.

I'm laying here, and my view is partially obscured by the top bunk over here. I can see nick on the bed there. I can basically see the whole room. But if you're standing real close to the bed and you were to walk down the row and you were taller than the top bunk, let's say, I couldn't actually see you unless I moved my head and looked up at you. I'm laying here and this thing walks into the room, it turns at the foot of the bed, and it begins marching down the space between where I'm laying and where nick is laying. It's so tall that from my perspective, I can only see its thighs, if you will. It's hips would be above the top bunk. It doesn't feel physically possible that it's so tall. And it marches right next to me and it stops. I'm laying there, sweating bullets. I honestly don't think I've been more scared in my life. I don't think I've ever been more scared. And all I remember thinking, I said it in the YouTube video that I told, and it became like a meme within my community of fans. I was like, very earnestly, I was like, all I could think was, please, God, whatever or whoever you are, don't bend down here and look at me because it'll ruin my life to have to interact with you.

But I'm laying there. All I'm thinking is, oh, my God, don't interact with me. I know this is not your next brother. I don't know who or what this is. But it turned away from me, almost like a military-facing movement because it had marched down the way, and it turned away from me. Now it's looking out over Nick's bed. I'm frozen, paralyzed. I was helpless. He could have destroyed me. I couldn't do anything. And it bowed forward into nick. It bent forward into nick and then disappeared into the ground. Just was gone. In a movie, let's say, I think you might be like, Oh, now it's safe. The ghost melted into the floor. We can run away now. All good, everybody. But in real life, I'm like, Where did it go? Where is it? That's not normal. There's so many questions. What do I do now? And so I'm laying in bed wondering if it's going to poke its head up and look at me. And again, it's this horrible, horrible thing. And so I just laid there in bed waiting for whatever or whoever this was to reemerge. And I didn't move. And I'm frozen solid, just so scared.

At a certain point, when nothing happened in the room, I must have fallen asleep. That's the only explanation because it's this gray area post seeing it to when I wake up. But I basically come to or wake up very shortly after this. I only could have slept for an hour tops. I realized that nick and Wolf are both up out of the bed. It's just me. There's a little bit of light in there, and I can hear out in the kitchen the sound of Nick's mom doing her morning routine. I'm so relieved. The room is safe again. I'm up out of the bed, and I go running. I'm sorry, nick and Wolf, they're still in their bedroom, but I can hear Nick's mom. That's actually important. So I wake up, I hear Nick's mom. Nick and Wolf are still in bed. I know it's safe now. I pop out of bed, and I run into the kitchen or I go into the kitchen. And I'm about to tell her. I had all these questions I wanted to say to her. I'm 16. I'm a kid. I need some reassurance from an adult. But I instantly was like, wait a minute.

She has just lost her husband a couple of days ago. And I am going to come dangerously close to potentially having a offensive conversation. If I start being like, Oh, I think I saw a ghost last night in my room. Who do you think it is? You know what I mean? So I just was like, How do I approach this? How old are you? I was 16. But I was like, Oh, I have the perfect thing to ask. So I go in the kitchen and I'm shaken up because I know this happened. This was not some fleeting dream. Something happened. I say to her, I'm like, Hey. And she's making coffee doing her thing. I'm like, Hey, did your sons, your older sons, did one of them show up last night? And she looked at me and she just didn't say anything. I'm like, Were they here? Did they stop by at any point? She goes, No. I clearly had a reaction to that. She could see a reaction from me. I was let down. That was my one silver bullet. Maybe that was Nick's brother being really weird last night. She looks at me and she's like, John, it's okay.

It was just my husband. I heard him last night, too. I got to tell you, that was not a reassuring thing to hear from a parent. It caught me so flat-footed because it's like, I haven't even... I came out there looking like shit. I came out there looking I had seen a ghost. I clearly was probing about something that happened last night. I'm doubling down on, Was your son here? She just said it, and I didn't even know what to do. And so I just was like, I can't talk to her. I don't want to talk to her about this. I don't even know what to say or do. I'm just going to sit down. I began drinking 10 cups of coffee, just doing anything to take my mind off this. And then not long after, Wolf and nick came out of the bedroom. And they came over, and Nick's doing his own thing. And I pulled Wolf aside, and I just told him outright. I was like, Dude, this is what happened last night. And he's like, Fuck, dude. I don't know what to tell you. That's horrifying. Sucks, dude. I don't know what to tell you.

But I told him, and I'm like, I'm telling you, I don't know what to make of it. And I said, That's what Nick's mom said. I think she's referencing whatever happened to me. And he was like, freaked out by it. But he's also like, I don't know, man. There's got to be an explanation here. And so I took the stance of, This is something I'm not going to understand, and I'm just going to act like everything's normal. Let's just have a normal day of snowboarding and assume that this is okay. Somehow or another, this is okay. And so we do our morning routine. We go snowboarding for the day. And pretty quickly, once I'm out of the cabin and we're snowboarding, it all evaporated from my mind. I forgot about it. Had a great day of riding. And then at the end of the night, when it was time to come home, the one thing I did do, as I said to nick and Wolf, I'm like, Hey, tonight, when we're back there, because we have two more nights at this cabin, I'm like, Can you guys just let me fall asleep first before you?

Let me enter the slumber realm ahead of you. And they're like, Oh, yeah, definitely. We'll definitely do that for you. And so we get back to the cabin, and I checked in with Nick's mom. I said, Hey, tonight we're expecting your sons or one of them. And she's like, Yeah, they're probably going to be here night. And I'm like, Okay, these elusive brothers, I guess they're going to be here tonight. And so I'm in bed at seven. I'm in my bed. I barely slept the night before, and I'm just trying to go to bed. And I remember the one thing that I did that made it feel more real as I put in the springs underneath the bed above me, I put a knife slotted into the springs to protect myself. But I'm like, Nothing's going to happen. I'm fine. And so I lay there in bed, and I cannot fall asleep because I'm doing That whole, Oh, my God, I need to fall asleep before then. I can't be awake. And so it was impossible to sleep. And eventually, nick and Wolf were like, Dude, we're going to bed. It's like, Midnight. We're going to bed.

We're not just going to sit here until you do. And I'm like, Fine. I'm kicking their bed and trying to keep them up. But eventually, they fell asleep. And once again, I am alone in the room, wide awake. It's dark. With a knife. Oh, I got my stupid knife right above me. And I'm laying there and time was just going by. And at some point, maybe 2: 00, 3: 00 in the morning, I remember hearing the sound of the steps out on the wrap around porch. And it was the same.

It was like- It happened again?

I'm laying there and I hear the sound on the wrap around porch. And because I've now had one experience the first night, this feels the same. And it defies everything we think we understand about the way the world works, the way things work. And I was just instantly in that paralysis state, so scared, I can't move. Like, I'm dead, and I'm looking up this fucking knife that I can't even move my arm to get. And I'm laying there, And I hear the footsteps on the porch. I hear the door. It opens, the sleighbells. One other thing that I failed to mention the first night is another thing is as soon as the door opened and there were sleighbells, I also heard a pot fall to the linoleum floor. That was the first night that did happen. It happened again, second night. So it's like a mirror image. It's the same thing happening two nights in a row, exactly the same. And then I hear these loud footsteps as this thing, I can see it in my mind's eye as walking through the house, the cabin. It stops, it turns, and begins walking down the hallway towards our room.

And it's the same as the night before. I know it's not one of Nick's brothers. This is an intruder. I don't know what this is, and I'm horrified.

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The door opens up, and again, it's this tall figure that walks into the I see it's like hips, if you will, through the slot of the bed above me and mine. It's so tall, I can't see it. It marches past me next to the bed. And then again, same as the night before, I'm praying it doesn't look at me and ruin my life. It turns away from me and bowes into nick and vanishes. And so it's really the same thing in a row, the same thing two nights in a row and not comforting. Like, worse, it only made it more real that it had happened again. And I'm still I'm still laying there wondering where it went. It isn't like, Oh, don't worry. Yesterday it vanished. It'll vanish today. It was like replay. I, again, laid there, could barely sleep, eventually out of sheer exhaustion from snowboarding all day, barely sleeping. I did fall asleep. And then I woke up at a certain point. And again, I hear Nick's mom out in the kitchen. This time, that morning, when I got out of bed and went in there, I didn't care at all about being offensive.

Didn't care in the least. I walked out there and I was hysterical. I don't even know what to say to you. Please tell me your sons were here. And I just tell her everything. And the whole time, she's looking at me. She's a wonderful woman. She's so motherly. Really so nice. I could almost feel like she felt bad for me or something. She's listening to me. She's not dismissing me, but she's just letting me do my cathartic ranting about how terrified I am and what the fuck is going on here. I want to leave. And at At the end of it, she's just like, John, it's really okay. It's just my husband. I heard him here last night. I heard him here the night before. It's fine. That's what I'm hearing from the adult in the house. And it was just like, This is not all right. I remember on that morning, we have one more night at this house still, and it gets worse, actually. Somehow it gets worse. I was like, I want to go home. I just want to fucking go home. I don't want to be here. But this is a trip that I have looked forward.

This is the one big trip. My family didn't have a lot of money or anything. This was a big deal to get to go do this big trip. This was awesome. And it was all I talked about. And so the idea that I'd be calling my folks up, like, Yo, drive to New Hampshire, pick me up and bring me home because I'm seeing ghosts in the cabin.

There's a fucking ghost.

It just felt like two... And then also it was like, I don't know how this will be interpreted long term. Am I being totally incented? Sensitive to the fact that I went here to support the family who's lost their dad? And I'm claiming a ghost scared me off. It was a lot. And I grappled with it. And I remember I talked openly to everybody, to the mom, to nick, to Wolf. I'm like, I'm just going to stay. I was openly saying that I wanted to get the fuck out of here, but I'll just stay. It's one more night. I'll stay with you guys. It is what it is. It was a weird morning. It was so weird because she's almost reassured to hear me confirming what she thinks she's hearing. I even know. It was good for her. She wanted to talk about this, and I didn't want to talk about it. And nick, the son of the deceased, he's totally doesn't want to hear any of it. And Wolf is very scared now. He's getting worked up by. It was just a very weird thing. But anyways, we got one more night. And I'm like, God, just got to get through one more night of this awful experience.

And so that day, after doing our weird breakfast routine, we found out one that the brothers were not going to be stopping by after all. It turns out, it didn't really matter, but they were not going to be stopping by. So that night, the one more night I had, I didn't even have a thing to cling on to that could be the reason behind these sounds. But before his mom, Nick's mom, drove us to the mountain that day, we made a very small pit stop at this woodworking shop that was near the cabin. She was picking up a new coffee table that they were going to place in the cabin at the foot of the stairs that led up to the second floor of the lofted area. And she just needed me and nick and Wolf to literally lift it, put it in the Jeep. And so we go to the woodworking shop, we get this new coffee table, this beautiful wood coffee table. We put it in the SUV, we go to the mountain, we do our snowboarding for the day. And I honestly was so checked out. I didn't really care. I just wanted to It was time to pass.

I just wanted to be done. We come back from snowboarding, we get picked up, and when we get back to the cabin, Nick's mom had us offload this heavy coffee table and walk it in, and we put it by the foot of the stairs that led to the second floor. And then we went to bed. And I, again, instructed nick and Wolf, Stay awake. Let me sleep. But they didn't. They fell asleep. I'm awake in the room by myself, and I'm just furious. That was that. Anger was the feeling I had. I felt so mad. I'm in this position. How can I be in this position? What have I done here? This is the third guy in the world. This is the worst. And so I'm laying there. And sure enough, it's three in the morning, and I hear those fucking steps on the wrap around porch, and it's like, I'm losing my mind. I don't even know. There's no way to react to this. This is awful. And so I'm terrified. I'm looking at my stupid knife, and the door, it opens. I hear the sleighbells, the pot falls, the linoleum. It's the third night in a row.

This is like, crazy. The footsteps come into the cabin. But this night, something new happens. When the footsteps reach that point where they would turn and come down the hallway to where our bedroom was, instead of that, they kept walking to the very back of the first floor of the cabin. And again, it's almost like in my mind's eye, I could see exactly where they were moving in the house based on how loud the thumps were or whatever. And it was really, actually surprisingly, way more terrifying when I figured out or when I could sense here that this thing was not going to be following the pattern. As awful as the pattern was, come into the room, bowing to nick, and I'm terrified all night. I didn't die at the end of it. Things were contained, but now it's like something new is happening. And it suddenly was like, this thing has the capacity to sink into the ground. Like, what's going on here? And the footsteps go past that turn point, and it goes to the very back of the first floor, and there's a pause. Then I hear the footsteps going up the stairs to the second floor where Nick's mom is.

I hear the footsteps, and it's basically right above us. And at a certain point, the footsteps just stop. I spent the rest of the night laying there, looking up at the bunk above me, waiting for this entity to float through the ceiling and come down to me. Because it bowed into the ground the day before. It's all night. I'm just laying there so scared. This is the worst night of the three. I didn't hear any more sounds after that. At a certain point, I must have dosed off again because it's like I'm on fumes at this point. I wake up, it's super early, earlier than the past two mornings I'd gotten up, it's probably four in the morning. And nick and Wolf are still asleep in their bed. It's still pretty dark, but I can hear something out in the living space. And it sounded like Nick's mom, and it sounded like she was crying. Frankly, didn't fucking care. Just wanted to leave. Got out of bed, and I went out there, and it was like, I'm not even looking for explanations. I'm not looking to talk about this. I can just be done. I can go out here, and we can just leave.

I go out of the hallway, and I look over to the kitchen where I expect her to be, and she's not there. She's over on the stairs, leading up to the second floor, and she's definitely crying. I look over at her, and before I can ask anything, she just goes, John, come here. And she's standing over that coffee table that we had put at the foot of the stairs the day before. I walk over to her and she's crying. I sense that she's not crying tears of sadness. She's happy. These are happy tears. I'm getting ready to ask questions here, but she just stops me and points at the surface of the coffee table. I look at the coffee table and etched into the wood is the words, I love you. She goes, I didn't write that.

Holy shit, dude. What?

I will say the conclusion to this story is this ended my relationship with everybody in the story. This is it. That's the end of the relationship with these people. This was so traumatic for me. It was like, Well, I'll just never I'm not going to talk to any of you again. I'm thinking, the answers for what could have happened range pretty much. It's like, okay, let's go through the exercise of perhaps Nick's mom in the state of grief that she is in, somehow picked up on that I had had some nightmare or whatever, and took it upon herself to pretend that she, too, had seen a ghost or something, right?

Mm-hmm.

Why would you do that to me? One, would be a question. But two, I didn't give up that I saw anything on that first morning. It isn't like I walked out and said, Hey, last night, I heard somebody walking around the cabin. Was it your son? I tried to ask as diplomatically, I'm sure I had a look, I'm sure it looks scared. How could she have possibly thought, Oh, I know what this is. He must have had a thought that somebody was walking around the cabin last night. I'm going to capitalize on that and pretend that it's my husband. It was so immediate that she agreed with me and said, That was my husband, then it's okay. It doesn't mean it's not possible. In fact, if there's any rational explanation, it's that she, out of grief and sadness, did this to make it feel like her husband was still around. But even that, I don't know. I don't know if you could do it that quickly and that well. It's possible. It's certainly possible. But then it's like, what's the alternative? It wasn't me. Certainly wasn't me. I'm the guy that sleepwalks. I'm the guy that has all the reason in the world to say, Oh, no.

This was my mind, but it's not. It was corroborated.

That is wild. You've never spoken to them again.

Wolf a little bit, nick, zero. His mom, zero. I mean, the little bit is about the fact that I've told this story.

Yeah. Holy shit.

It's funny. The reason we ties, or I did, it wasn't malice. It was like, Dude, we can't get over this. This is not something I'm able to get over.

Dude, we've had some stuff happen.

Yeah?

Yeah. We had Tim, who's behind one of these cameras here. He was there for it. Elijah, he's upstairs. He was there for it. Before I did the podcast thing, I was basically throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck because I was so tired of tactics. I was just done with it. One of my ideas was, Oh, I know we're going to do this reality TV survival scenario series or whatever. First one I did was Tim was there. Like I said, Elijah was there. Tim was one of the participants. It was like, Hey, you got 50 bucks or 100 bucks or something. End of the world's happening. We're going to Bass Pro, and you have to buy everything that you would need to survive on a time limit. We rented this cabin, this old Civil War cabin out in this area called College Grove. It's like 20, 30 minutes from here. But this is Franklin, this area. This is frontline Civil War. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Lots of confeders Confederate Union cemeteries around, lots of buildings that were shot up, blood stains on the floor, lots of ghost stuff around here. There's ghost tours all over town.

Anyways, we go to this old cabin. A little bit of a back story. It took my wife and I over a year to find a place to live here. When we were moving up from Florida, we just kept getting out of bed by Californians. This is the big migration. Oh, really? And we just couldn't afford it. And so I looked at my wife and I was like, I'm getting tired of putting in offers on houses and getting outbid. The shit's getting depressing. This is our seventh trip up here. Let's just go get a cabin out in the woods, enjoy Tennessee for the rest of this trip, and then we'll go and find some place to move in Florida that's out of the city. We go to this cabin, run it. It's awesome. It's out in the middle of nowhere. It's in this cow pasture, out in the rolling hills. Family owns it. It's an Airbnb. Family owns it. Who knows? The farm has been in their family for generations. I'm like, This is pretty fucking cool. It's like one of those old-school log homes. I woke up and I woke up in the middle of the night and I just kept hearing this banging on the roof.

I'm like, Wait, Katie up. I'm like, What is that? Nothing. She didn't hear anything. She's like, Maybe it was a squirrel. I'm like, No, there's no squirrel that makes this sound on the roof. I'm like, All right, well, whatever. Maybe I'm dreaming. Maybe I had a dream or something, but who knows? I don't really think much of it. Fast forward a couple of years, we're out there for this event We're doing the survival series. We set up this cabin and we put the Vigilance Elite sign up for some branding, and we're getting it ready to shoot the debrief because we're going to grab all the shit from Basbro, come back, they're going to present it, I'm going to grade the two consistents. We're trying to plug in the sign, and we're plugging in these lamps and trying to build a set. None of the electricals make it sense, but it doesn't hit me. I'm like, That's It's weird. I plugged the sign in here. It doesn't work. Plug the lamp in, does work. Plug the sign in over there, it does. It'd be just weird electrical shit going on, but I don't really think anything of it.

We go out, go to Bass Pro. Bass Pro is probably an hour away. We do the exercise, come back. They're presenting all this stuff, all the stuff that they bought with the budget. We had only rented the Airbnb for What? It was for the day. We're in the middle of this debrief. We're supposed to be out by 6: 00 PM. I'm facing the window. A similar cabin sounds like Very similar to what you were in. It's one big room, right? Kitchens in the room, dining rooms in the room, TV, fireplace. Then there's a spiral staircase that goes up to a loft, but the loft isn't enclosed. You could lean over the-Yep. See downstairs. It's all one big room, minus the bathroom. We have this little table set up, and we start hearing footsteps. I thought the footsteps were outside. This shit's on camera. Oh, really? Because we're filming this stuff. Yeah, there's a video up on our channel that shows this. You see me in the debrief, and these guys are talking, and you just see my face all of a sudden, and I go like this, and I'm looking out the front door, but I see my...

I thought I saw somebody else's reflection, but it wound up being mine while I'm hearing footsteps, and you just see my face go like, What the fuck? And then the reflection turns into my reflection. But on the camera, so the footsteps were upstairs. I thought it was the porch. It was a wooden porch out there. It's past 6: 00. I figured this is probably the owners coming to say, Hey, guys, We got a wedding coming up tomorrow. You got to get the hell out of here.

Oh, my God.

We pull the camera footage. Well, first, then I look up. All three of us that are on camera all look up at the at the exact same time, and you hear these fucking footsteps. I look at Tim and Adam, and I'm like, Did you guys just fucking hear that? My wife was there. Elijah was there behind the camera. We had a marketer there that was behind. Every single person in the room is looking up going, What the fuck was that? We packed the shit up. I'm like, Get the fuck out of here right now. Fuck this. We're not even going to finish. Get out of here. So we load up all the camera shit, load up the microphones, put the furniture back. I can't even remember. Did we go upstairs and even look?

I had to go upstairs to get one of the lights.

He goes, Yeah, so we pack all this shit up. Dude, I did not even want to look at the cabin because there's on the top in the loft, which is where the bedroom is where me and my wife were sleeping when I heard the banging on the roof. There's a little window, and you have to close this gate. I'm like, I'm not even fucking looking in that damn window. I don't give a shit. I have guns. It's not going to kill whatever's up there. We high tail it back to my house, immediately pull the footage. I'm like, pull the footage. Let's see what that shit was. On the footage, if If I remember correctly, you do not hear the footsteps. Do you remember this? Do you hear the footsteps? We have it. We'll pull it. I'm going to have a question. I'm going to have both of you step outside. I'm going to bring each one of you in.

Upstairs.

And this fucking place is haunted as fuck. Every time there's a footstep, you can hear the static in the camera. So it'll be like, God. I call my best friend. We're all blown away. We're like, Holy shit, there's a fucking ghost in there. And I call my best friend later that night and I'm like, Hey, John, check this shit out. Listen to this. What do you think of this? I tell him the whole story. He goes, Look, pull up the Airbnb, pull it up right now, and just see what the reviews say. I'm like, Oh, great idea. We pull up the fucking reviews, dude, and it is, Don't bang on the walls. They bang back. Don't show up after dark because the entire place comes alive. It was just review after review after review of people's haunted stories in that cabin. Haven't been back there since. Holy shit. Fuck that. Dude, that's crazy. I know. I could have swore I told you this. I may have told you this in the last episode. No, I never heard that. Because I was like, We should do John's episode at that fucking cabin when you came here.

But, dude, yeah, true story. The fact that there were those reviews, that's crazy.

It's wild, dude. We'll put the footage in the episode so you can see it.

That's nuts. I'd love to see that.

Yeah, but I believe in paranormal stuff. It scares the shit out of me still today at 43 years old.

See, that would be to feel like, Oh, maybe it was something, maybe it was this, but then to see the reviews, that's what confirms your nightmare. Dude. Yup.

That's the thing. I got more for you. I'll tell you.

I'd love to hear it.

I'll tell you, tonight at the campfire session. Well, hey, man, I really appreciate all the stories. It's good to get in the Halloween spirit a couple of days beforehand. So thank you. Thank you for coming.

Thank you for the sig, dude. You kidding me?

Hey, let's go burn it down real quick.

Let's do it. Thanks, bro. Cool. This is awesome. Thank you. Thanks, bro.