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Dead Men In Lead Masks

2025/1/8
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Scared To Death

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Caitlin
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Dan
专注于加密货币和股票市场分析的金融专家,The Chart Guys 团队成员。
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Lindsay
创立并主持《All Ears English》播客,帮助全球英语学习者通过自然和实用的方式提高英语水平。
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Lynze
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Dan: 1966年8月,巴西尼泰罗伊市发现两具身穿西装雨衣、戴着铅制眼罩的尸体,现场有大量现金和写有奇怪公式的笔记。死者生前曾被目击在山上,并被目击者多次看到。警方最初认定死因为心脏骤停,但公众对此表示怀疑。此案与同一时期发生的UFO目击事件存在关联,引发了外星人绑架的猜测。后警方逮捕了一名与死者相识的人,并声称此案为一起谋杀案,但此说法漏洞百出,且与之前的调查结果相矛盾,因此被认为是政府的掩盖行为。 此案中诸多疑点无法解释,例如死者身上为何有大量现金,笔记的作者是谁,以及UFO目击事件是否与案件有关联。种种迹象表明,此案可能并非一起简单的谋杀案,而是涉及到更深层次的谜团。 Lindsay: 此案中存在大量的疑点和矛盾之处,例如警方前后说法不一,最初认定死因为心脏骤停,后来又声称是谋杀,但证据不足。巴西政府的腐败也为政府掩盖真相提供了可能性。此案可能与超自然现象、邪教仪式或撒旦教有关,而非外星人绑架。UFO目击事件可能只是巧合,或者被用来转移公众视线。 虽然警方最终给出了一个看似合理的解释,但这解释漏洞百出,难以令人信服。因此,此案的真相仍然扑朔迷离,需要进一步的调查和研究。

Deep Dive

Key Insights

What is the story of the 'Dead Men in Lead Masks' in Brazil in 1966?

On August 20, 1966, two men, Miguel Jose Viana and Manuel Pereira de Cruz, were found dead on a hill in Niteroi, Brazil. They were dressed in suits and raincoats, with lead masks beside their heads. The men had large sums of money on them, and handwritten notes with cryptic instructions were found at the scene. The notes suggested they were to take capsules, wear lead masks, and await a signal. Despite extensive investigations, no clear cause of death was found, and the case remains unsolved, with theories ranging from alien abduction to a government cover-up.

Why were the lead masks significant in the 'Dead Men in Lead Masks' case?

The lead masks found beside the bodies of Miguel Jose Viana and Manuel Pereira de Cruz were significant because they were part of the cryptic instructions found in handwritten notes at the scene. The notes suggested the men were to wear the masks after taking capsules and awaiting a signal. The masks have led to speculation that the men were involved in some form of experiment or ritual, possibly related to extraterrestrial communication or protection from radiation.

What were the key details of the handwritten notes found at the scene of the 'Dead Men in Lead Masks'?

The handwritten notes found at the scene of the 'Dead Men in Lead Masks' included instructions such as 'Sunday, one capsule after lunch. Wednesday, one capsule at bedtime,' and 'be at the place arranged at 1630. Take capsules at 1830. After feeling effects, protect half the face with lead masks. Await the agreed signal.' These notes suggested a planned sequence of events involving the ingestion of capsules, the use of lead masks, and awaiting a signal, which has fueled speculation about the men's activities and intentions.

What is the connection between the 'Dead Men in Lead Masks' and UFO sightings in Brazil?

The 'Dead Men in Lead Masks' case is connected to UFO sightings in Brazil through reports of an unidentified flying object seen by a woman named Senora Gracinda Barbosa Coutinho de Sousa on August 17, 1966, the same day the men were last seen alive. The UFO was described as an oval-shaped object with a band of fire around its edges, hovering over the hill where the men were later found dead. This has led to theories that the men may have been involved in extraterrestrial communication or were victims of an alien encounter.

What is the story of Stone's Public House in Ashland, Massachusetts?

Stone's Public House, originally known as the Railroad House, is a historic inn in Ashland, Massachusetts, with a reputation for being intensely haunted. Built in 1834, the inn has experienced numerous paranormal activities, including doors and windows opening on their own, faucets turning off and on, and sightings of a young girl believed to be the spirit of 11-year-old Mary Smith, who was killed by a train in 1863. Employees and visitors have reported hearing cries for help, feeling taps on their shoulders, and seeing apparitions, making it one of the most haunted locations in the area.

What is the significance of the bloody pinafore at Stone's Public House?

The bloody pinafore at Stone's Public House is believed to be the dress worn by 11-year-old Mary Smith when she was killed by a train in 1863. The pinafore is on display at the inn and is considered a significant artifact tied to the haunting. Its presence has added to the inn's reputation as a paranormal hotspot, with many believing it to be a tangible connection to the tragic event and the spirit of the young girl who is said to haunt the property.

What is the 'Hat Man' story shared by Caitlin?

Caitlin shared a multi-generational story about encounters with the 'Hat Man,' a shadowy figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat and cape. Caitlin first saw the entity as a child, and it continued to appear to her and her sister over the years. Their mother also admitted to seeing the same figure as a child. The family eventually had their house blessed, which reduced the sightings. Years later, Caitlin's niece also reported seeing the 'Hat Man' in the same house, suggesting the entity was attached to the family or the property.

What is the story of the elderly woman with the heavy suitcase?

In the late 1970s, Lisa and her brother Alan picked up an elderly woman dragging a heavy suitcase near a mental asylum in Texas. The woman had a strong, foul odor, and they eventually abandoned her at a rest stop after she mysteriously disappeared from the bathroom. Following the encounter, their car repeatedly broke down, and they experienced ongoing car trouble. The story suggests the woman may have been a paranormal entity or an escaped patient, with her disappearance and the heavy suitcase adding to the mystery.

Shownotes Transcript

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Get me Will Trent. ABC Tuesdays. I don't even know where he is. Will Trent is back. You thought you could hide forever? Time to come home. The series that's being called one of the best network procedurals. We're going to solve this case. Featuring new cast member Gina Rodriguez. I'm a prosecutor. We deal in truth and facts. Maybe everybody should try that, huh? Will Trent. The two-part season premiere. Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu.

Whether thou art a ghost that hath come from the earth, or a phantom of night that hath no hollow, or one that lieth dead in the desert, or a ghost unburied, or a demon, or a ghoul, whatever thou be until thou art removed, thou shalt find here no water to drink. Thou shalt not stretch forth thy hand to our own. Into our house enter thou not. Through our fence break through thou not.

We are protected, though we may be frightened. Our life you may not steal, though we may be scared to death. Welcome to Skirt-a-Dur, Peeps, Peepers, Robertson, Annabelle's Skirt-a-Dur 2025. Why did we start calling it privately Skirt-a-Dur? Where did that even come from? Skirt-a-Dur. Skirt-a-Dur. Welcome to Skirt-a-Dur. I don't know. Why did that happen? I don't know.

It's like, why do people talk to their dogs like babies? Why do we do these weird voices? I don't know. Yeah.

I'm Dan. This is me, Lindsay. Hello. Welcome back. 2025. Yeah. By the time you hear this, yep, we are all the way into 2025. And first merch announcement of 2025 real quick, and then we're off into stories. Introducing limited edition handmade wool felt camp flags and pennants from Oxford Pennant. These things are so cool. We've done them in the past. I love them. I'm so excited. I was like...

this is all my, like, I was like, Logan, make this happen right now. Please. And we've met people from Oxford Pennant, some fans, and they're very cool. They are very cool up there in Buffalo, New York. Yeah. Choose from a classic 21 inch triangle, scared to death pennant, or grab the 18 by 24 inch bad magic camp flag. Uh, and don't wait. We only have a handful of these custom made. Uh, we also have the Ichiwawa design. Yeah.

Featuring one of Lindsay's favorite non-words and some terrified peepers, as well as a cool esoteric-looking collection called As Above, So Below, featuring geometric patterns, spoopy hands, and some nice grungy textures, all available at badmagicproductions.com. Enjoy. Spend that holiday cash you got from your grandma. Yeah, perfect. I mean, that's what I'll be doing. Thanks, Grandma Betty. Thank you, Grandma Betty.

What fan-submitted, allegedly true horror do you have for us this week? I have two juicy tales. Okay. My first is a classic hat man tale. Oh, all right. It will make you giggle a little bit in the best way. Okay. I really love it, and I love the style with which the person wrote it. Yeah. And then my second tale is so strange. I think it's a real paranormal head-scratcher. Okay. Involves a brother, a sister...

And a hitchhiker. Nice. Yeah. All right. Hitchhiker. Hitchhiker. Yeah, hitchhiker story is always creepy. Uh-huh. No surprise here. I also have two tales. What? My first, a very, very strange story set in Brazil in 1966 that reeks of an alien abduction. What's that drink there that I love? Cipriano? I don't know. I've never been there. Yeah.

Yum. For my second, we explore what seems to be an intensely haunted inn in Massachusetts, Ashland, Massachusetts, Stone's Public House. Okay. Once you got your spoopy socks on, I'll just get into it. I felt like these nun socks felt like appropriate for January. January, yes, the nun, the horror movie, but also January feels like a time of repentance. Oh, okay. You know, starting over, begging forgiveness for how you fucked up in the year before. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.

All right, so we'll get started now. Time now for the tale of Dead Men and Lead Masks. On Saturday, August 20th, 1966, an unnamed boy, some sources say unnamed young man, was walking by a hill in Niteroi, a city just across a big bridge from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. According to some sources, the boy was hunting birds. According to others, he was just out walking on his way to somewhere or another.

Or perhaps, and I think this is most likely, he was coming back to the place he had been two days prior because he was curious about what some men he had witnessed were up to. August in coastal Brazil is pretty pleasant, usually not much hotter than 78 degrees Fahrenheit or so, typically cooling off to around 60 degrees at night. There was no reason to think that this day would be anything other than another pleasant southern hemisphere winter's day.

But as the boy passed a hill known as the Morro de Vintém, Portuguese for the Hill of Twenty, he noticed something. It stunk. Bad. The smell of rot was in the air. The thick fungal tang of matter breaking down piece by piece. The boy, probably covering his nose, went up the hill to investigate. Maybe he thought there was a dead animal on top. There wasn't. When police were later summoned to the area, they found one of the strangest scenes in Brazilian history.

Two dead bodies lay atop the hill decomposing. Both men dressed neatly in suits, both also wearing raincoats. And what was especially strange was what was beside their heads. Each man had a lead eye mask lying on the ground beside them. Each man also had a lot of money on them. One had $4,000 in Brazilian reals, or about $663 in U.S. currency, which would be well over $6,000 in today's money.

The other man had a lot more, $157,000, or a quarter of a million U.S. dollars in today's money. Making the scene stranger still, there was also odd handwritten notes found at the scene. Some of them had some kind of electrical formulas written on them. Two of the notes were deeply disturbing. The first translated as, Sunday, one capsule after lunch. Wednesday, one capsule at bedtime.

The second read, be at the place arranged at 1630. Take capsules at 1830. After feeling effects, protect half the face with lead masks. Await the agreed signal. Baffled, authorities removed the bodies from the hill and set about identifying them. Soon their names would be revealed. Miguel Jose Viana, age 34, and Manuel Pereira de Cruz, age 32.

Both men were from the town of Campos, about 170 miles away, and they didn't seem like people who would meet their demise on a hill almost 200 miles away from home. They were both married, both had young families, were quote highly regarded in the city, according to one source. They'd last been seen by their families on Wednesday, August 17th, when they boarded a bus at nine o'clock in the morning. They had told their loved ones they were headed to Sao Paulo, 430 miles away, to buy some electronic equipment and a car.

But when the bus arrived at Niteroi around 2 p.m., the men got off still about six hours from their stated destination. It was raining, so they purchased raincoats. They went to a bar, purchased a bottle of mineral water, keeping the receipt. When police questioned the clerk who sold them the water, she said they seemed agitated and concerned about the time.

Around 3.15 p.m., they set off up to the Morro de Ventim on foot, the top of that hill. Around 5 o'clock, a boy, the one who would later find their body, saw the two men sitting at a point high up on the hill. The next day, August 18th, that curious boy returned. And this time, as I mentioned, he saw the men lying down. They were already dead. He just didn't know it. Two days later, August 20th, the boy came back yet again. And this was when the police came in and found the strange tableau.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all was what was found in the remains themselves, or rather what was not found in the remains. To the surprise of medical authorities, there wasn't any sign that the men had met their demise through foul play. There were no traces of toxins in their systems, no chemicals that suggested they'd been poisoned, no drugs to suggest they'd overdosed. In the absence of a conclusive cause of death, authorities assumed they had both gone into cardiac failure.

But a lot of the public doubted this immediately, as do I. They were both healthy young men in their 30s. To experience sudden heart attacks at the same exact time, no less, seems wildly improbable, especially to experience them in such a weird location. So had they expected to die? Had they killed themselves in a way that somehow evaded the detection of whatever they used to do so by the medical examiner? There was nothing on them to suggest that they had intended to end their lives, except perhaps for those strange notes.

But if the strange notes were some kind of instruction for suicide, they weren't written by the men themselves. The police determined that the odd notes did not match the handwriting samples of either victim. So who wrote the notes?

Adding to all this strangeness, the deaths of Vianna and Cruz weren't the only odd occurrences that had taken place in that area around that time. On August 17th, the same day that Vianna and Cruz had climbed up Morro de Vintame, a lady of quote high social status named Senora Gracinda Barbosa Coutinho de Sousa from the Niteroi neighborhood of Fonseca claimed to have seen an unidentified flying object.

Sousa had been driving that evening with three of her children when they all saw, quote, an oval-shaped object of an orangey color with a band of fire around its edges hanging over the top of a hill and, quote, sending out rays in all directions. Sousa stopped the car. She and her children watched the object rise and fall vertically in the air for about four full minutes. When she got home, she told her husband about the sighting. He immediately drove back but saw nothing himself.

But then just a few days later, he read a newspaper article about the decomposing bodies of the two men found on that very same hill where his wife saw this UFO, apparently. Reports of the sighting appeared in local papers on August 25th, along with some claims that the Sousas knew more than the police were letting on. Some of these reports mentioned how four years earlier, in 1962, a TV technician named Hermes

had been found dead on a different hill called Morro de Cruzeiro, Cruzeiro Hill in English, and he too was found with a lead mask. The Morro de Cruzeiro is about 170 miles from the Morro de Ventim. It's also 84 miles from Campos, the hometown of Viana and Cruz. So did all three of these men know each other, or had they been contacted by something totally separately? Something that had told them all to climb a hill with a lead mask.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the police were not looking into otherworldly explanations. They soon arrested a friend of the most recent two victims, a man named Eliseo Gomez, for, quote, making contradictory statements. Cruz's widow had told the police that Gomez and her husband had had an argument, and perhaps that argument had boiled over into deadly violence. But Gomez told them a very, very different story.

Gomez claimed that he, Vianna, and Cruz were all members of a secret society of, quote, scientific spiritualists who regularly attended seances and that apparently many other electronic specialists and enthusiasts in the area were also these so-called scientific spiritualists. Gomez claimed that Vianna and Cruz collaborated on many strange electronic experiments, all carried out in the hope of communicating with extraterrestrials, specifically with beings on Mars.

A further statement by Gomez, one confirmed by Cruz's father, was that he and Cruz had worked on some sort of experiment in Cruz's garden that had exploded violently. There was also another odd incident. Two months before their deaths, Gomez said on June 13th, Gomez and some others had been invited by Viana and Cruz to visit the beach in Atafona, 24 miles from Campos. Just as Gomez arrived, he said an intensely luminous object came down from the sky and hovered over the beach.

It allegedly hovered in place for about five minutes and then began to rise. Suddenly there was a blinding flash and an explosion that shook buildings allegedly over nine miles away. Fishermen too claimed to have seen this flying saucer and they said they watched it dive down into the ocean. One newspaper would claim that the Navy intercepted a strange set of messages on June 12th, a day before the Atifona explosion, transmitted by stations using identifications that didn't actually exist. Did that have something to do with what happened to Vianna and Cruz?

They make the masks because they had seen that flash of blinding light and they wanted to protect themselves from it. For 11 months, there were no further public reports regarding the mysterious deaths. But then in August of 1967, the police said some very confusing things to two newspapers. On August 19th, the newspaper Ultima Ora announced that the police were trying to find a car that they believed had transported the bodies of Vianna and Cruz from Campos to Morro de Ventim, meaning they didn't think they actually died there.

If they succeeded in finding the car, they said, then the bodies were to be exhumed for further examination to determine if the two men died of violence, an overdose of, quote, chemicals, which they were using to make extraterrestrial communications, or if they'd made some kind of suicide pact. And this was weird because the police had already reported that the two men had died of heart failure. So did they now doubt the original ruling? Did they have new evidence now? Was the original ruling always just a cover up? And who did they think transported in there?

On August 26th, the newspaper Last Minute, which I believe is just the English translation of Ultima Ora, announced that the bodies had indeed been exhumed and their organs had been removed for examination. Police chief Sergio Rodriguez claimed that, quote, important pieces of evidence were disregarded at the start of the inquiry and that his team was now closer than ever to solving the case.

Then on September 3rd, 1967, the newspaper Morning Mail stated that detectives were planning to investigate spiritualist circles. Authorities now claim that Vianna and Cruz had stopped at an electronics store before they stopped to buy that mineral water, and that they likely met their murderer at the electronics store before they climbed the Morro de Ventim. But the newspaper also stated that the men had climbed the hill on August 21st, 1966, a full day after their bodies had actually been discovered.

And this new theory also disregarded the heart failure conclusion and the supposed piece of evidence about the car. Did the police really forget most of the previous investigation, including the actual date that the bodies were found? Was it just a matter of newspapers reporting exciting but ultimately false information not doing their fact-checking? Or was someone now deliberately trying to rewrite past events, and why? Whatever was going on, police would not stop looking for a rational explanation to this very irrational case. Or at least, that's what they said publicly.

A year later, newspapers would report that police were now trying to find a foreign man with blonde hair who had been seen talking to Vianna and Cruz from a Jeep near the time of their deaths. Additionally, samples of both victims' hair were undergoing tests for signs of poisoning by arsenic, mercury, barium, or thallium. No traces of those chemicals were ever found. Then in February of 1969, now it's been three years, without a conclusive resolution to this weird case, newspapers suddenly reported that the case was solved.

And this is very suspicious. A relative of an underworld figure named Hamilton Bazzani, who was already serving over 50 years in a Sao Paulo prison. So essentially, this guy was already going to die in prison. Now he just randomly confessed to being complicit in a double murder. Upon being interviewed, Bazzani stated that he had been asked by three other well-known criminals from the area to assist in a crime.

Bazzani said that he and his three associates were regulars at a spiritualist center in Niteroi where they had met Vianna and Cruz. During the seance, these criminals learned that the two men were carrying lots of cash on them. So after the seance, Bazzani said he drove the whole party, including the woman who ran the center, to the foot of Moro Dave and Tame, where Vianna and Cruz were forced to march up the hill. Bazzani said he stayed behind to watch the car. And when his associates returned, Vianna and Cruz were no longer with them.

The criminals said they'd forced the two men to take poison at gunpoint. Bazzani said the party planned a time to meet up the next day to split the money, but Bazzani didn't show up, fearing he might be killed. All of this was yet another rewrite and a poor one, one that made zero sense. Given there was no poison found in the men's systems, and this is the big, ridiculous reason that this cannot be true, if those men were killed for money, why was a bunch of money found on their dead bodies?

These guys already had a bunch of money on them, and now these people have killed them and can now take that money. Why also would they be waiting for the next day to divide up said money? The story of these two men being taken for their money obviously makes no sense and is an insult to the intelligence of any rational person hearing this story. The Zani story was so obviously fabricated that many Brazilian UFO researchers knew it was a lie right from the start, and not only a lie, but an obvious cover-up.

It had clearly been released in a pathetic attempt to provide a rational explanation to a case that appeared for years to be unsolvable. But despite being such a bad cover-up, it worked. Pazani's story ended all known public coverage of the strange Moro Davin Tame case in the Brazilian mainstream press. It was no longer reported on. And though it's been passed around in UFO circles in the years since, nobody has ever been able to conclusively say what happened to Vianna and Cruz, the young men who had climbed up a hill only to lay down and die.

Had they expected to come back down? Did they think they were going to be picked up and taken somewhere else? It appears they did. Somewhere perhaps far away from this planet. Did they travel somewhere else but just not in their physical bodies? Did their consciousness leave the Earth to travel with whatever super-intelligent entities had been stalking the beaches of Brazil for years, waiting for the right time to make contact?

That is so weird. It's a weird story. It's a weird story. And we just had another story from Brazil.

Is that a bonus episode with the woman? No, that was a regular episode. The woman on Big Brother Brazil. Oh, yeah, that's right. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Just hanging out down south. Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, correct me if I'm wrong, please. Yeah. But Brazil's government is pretty corrupt. Yeah. I believe, I don't know currently. Back in the 60s, I'm going to say probably. Yeah. Yeah. So to me, it just feels like some, it feels like an endless amount of cover-up.

in this story. But I don't know why. Yeah, that's the thing. Why are they covering this up? I guess it could be like some sort of like government experiment or like these guys were onto something that I don't know that the government and its agencies didn't want getting out. I don't know. It does feel very peculiar. It does feel very like... It's X-Files-y. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know if it feels... Well, yeah. It feels like Unsolved Mysteries to me. I

I don't know if I believe that there's an alien element to this. It almost feels like fabricated, like that's how they're guiding you. It feels more satanic, culty, seance-y, like that whole kind of like...

black magic on wrong sort of space. True. But it's interesting that there was these UFOs spotted by that hill, you know, around the time. Just by that one woman, right? Yeah, by the one woman and her kids. And if she was, what I don't know, is like, was she part of some sort of

satanic underground or... Yeah, that's true. And so was that all part of the cover-up? Now I'm getting real deep on the cover-up. And the two guys who did die on top of the hill, they supposedly, according to a third guy, had seen a UFO on a beach, you know, a ways before they died. So there's like UFOs in the periphery of this story. Okay, okay. I think I missed that. Sorry about that. No, that's okay. Um...

Okay, well, like taking that... And the seance thing, I will say, seance almost always is, you know, correlated with, you know, trying to talk to the dead relatives. Sure. Ghosts of people. But sometimes people have used seance in like ufology kind of circles in an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial beings. So they call it seance, but really it's like they're trying to... Like a summoning? Yeah, it's like they're trying to access some other, you know,

plane or dimension, what have you. Yeah. Where they feel like these, there's like this belief. It makes me think about like Lemurians and like a theosophy kind of beliefs, like new age type old beliefs where there are aliens that are around us, extraterrestrials, but we don't see them because they don't exist on the same exact plane as us. And that's what they start talking about. Vibrations and frequencies. They're vibrating at a different frequency. And, and so some people will, for lack of a better term, like they'll call it a seance, uh,

perform some ritual to try and communicate with these things that they think are already kind of around us. Okay, well, that's interesting because I don't think of a Ouija board in any space other than... Oh, and they won't necessarily use a Ouija board. Oh, okay, because you started with that. You can have a seance without a Ouija board.

Sure. Okay, great. Yeah. We led from the Ouija board, so I was very confused. Oh, okay. I forgot that detail was even in there. No, no. You just said out loud. I don't think it was in the story. It was just you said. Yeah, you just said Ouija boards. Oh, okay. Yeah. Or at least that's what I heard. Yeah. Maybe that's not what you said, but that is what I heard. So I apologize if I... Yeah, sorry if I threw out some confusion with that. Yeah. Sorry if I misspoke. But...

Yeah. Anyways, I've lost my train of thought. No, but you were saying like satanics. I mean, oh, yeah. Oh, I know what I was going to say. Both. Yeah. Yeah. And just like the the UFO piece of it. I had a thought. I had a theory would be interesting to explore the idea that if you see a UFO or that there are some alien sex, let's just say. Yeah.

Mm.

Like, you know, this is an interesting thing where it's like. They have mind control powers. Yeah. And just like a different way of them capturing your body for their own experiments. Instead of coming down and abducting you and doing experiments and bringing you back or abducting you and you never come back. It's like, well, instead we are going to convince you to take your own life. And then like, I don't know, maybe they're accessing your body's like data in some other way. You know, almost like you're a hard drive that they can access. Yeah. Like an external hard drive. Yeah. Yeah.

So many possibilities with this story. I just... So bizarre. Something weird went on here to me for sure. Who knows what. Just based on that... Just based on that shitty cover-up story. Yeah. Where it's like, why would you do that? But that just feels like weird government corruption-y. Like... Uh-huh. That...

I don't even know if the cover-up really even has anything to do with anything other than maybe they just didn't want mass hysteria. Or they just wanted to... Make it go away? Yeah, not looking competent for not solving this. I don't know. I don't know. Do you have photos? I do. Great. So this first one, that's just a photo of the two men found atop the hill. Okay, listen, I don't want to be a dick. Miguel and Manuel. But Manuel...

His eyes freak me out. Well, they're very intense in this photo. Yeah. I'm like, buddy. Like he's staring like, yeah, yeah. Also like if you, if you, uh,

He photoshopped his outfit into an orange jumpsuit and then put like the traditional height measurement chart behind him. Oh, yeah. It looks like a mugshot. Maybe it was. He looks a little angry in this photo. No, it feels like a work badge photo, but just based on how he's dressed and Miguel is dressed. I just did what you did.

I know. And you know what it is? I think I figured out where I got that switch. Yeah. I think just because of the pairing of these two names, Miguel, Manuel, I think my brain would think like Manuel. So there's a W sound. Yeah. And I transfer that to Miguel and wanted to go Miguel. I've literally never said Miguel ever in my life. I'm just sitting in proximity to you and your mush mouth is transferring to me. Anyways.

Yeah, so what was I going to say about these guys? Oh, I wanted to say that the guy, Miguel, he looks a little bit like an alien. You know like the traditional alien with the skinny neck? Yeah, yeah. And then like the shape of his head? Uh-huh. He reminds me a little bit of an alien. He's a man in black. He's an undercover alien. Maybe. Maybe.

Uh, this next photo, those are those lead masks. Okay. I was like, why are these guys boxer shorts up there? Um, Nope. Just some little, like, uh, I had so many questions about these lead masks. I'm like, so it's just a basic sleeping mask made out of lead. Yep. Exactly. Bizarro.

Okay. Super bizarro. And then that's like one of the notes, you know, that was found by their bodies. I mean, whatever. There are jade eye masks out there that are like really good for balancing chakras and things. According to Gwyneth Paltrow. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I heard goops going down. Good. And then now this is a, oh, there we go. This is a photo of the hilly area around Niteroi, Brazil, across the little bay there from Rio de Janeiro.

Been there. Yeah, that's so cool. And then finally, it's so beautiful. It is actually really beautiful. And then just because I think it's cool, this is a photo of the Rio Niteroi Bridge that connects Rio de Janeiro and Niteroi. This bridge is eight and a quarter miles long. Yeah, it's crazy. Wow. Do you remember driving over that? Well, I wonder if you did because you might have flown. You might not have had to. You might have just seen it. Yeah, I'm trying to think because we were in Rio, Sao Paulo, Mexico.

Oh, shoot. Brasilia, I think is. I don't know. We were in four different parts of the country and we flew in, but then we got on tour buses. And so I can't remember, like, I think we flew into Sao Paulo. So it's possible. Yeah, I could have drove over this.

What I would need to know is where Jesus is. You know, the... It had the big statue. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if Jesus is in those mountains over there to the left, then I drove over that bridge because I'll never forget Poppy reaching over and going like, hey, it's Jesus. Hey, it's Jesus. Massive statue. Because we're like sleeping in our little tour bed bunks. Yeah. And then I had the great fortune to also see Jesus in Portugal. Portugal, yeah. You know, the sister... Yeah, the sister statues. And so we were... I have like terrible...

tour bus photos just through the window of both Jesuses. I think I've seen those. I think you showed them to me years ago. It was just so silly. It was just so silly. Are you ready to leave a very strange, maybe UFO abduction, maybe a cult tale set in Brazil for a haunted old inn in Massachusetts? Oh, yeah. Anything to get away from this bridge, because really what I'm terrified in life is bridges. Big, long bridges. I fucking

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Thanks for listening to our sponsor deals, Creeps and Peepers. For my second story, yeah, we're going to be traveling to the historic town of Ashland, Massachusetts. Visit a little inn called Stone's Public House. Unlike so many other haunted houses, which stand out like rotten thumbs amongst their neighbors, from the outside, Stone's Public House is painfully normal. Boring, even. If you were to pass by today, you might not even give it a second glance or really a first for that matter.

The building looks just like any other relic of old America you might find in the Northeast, a three-story standard New England colonial reinforced with thin columns encircled by a wraparound porch and ornamented with white picket railing. The unremarkable red facade of Stone's Public House betrays nothing of the extraordinary horrors that have endured within. It is only once you have stepped inside and felt its oppressive air weigh down upon your lungs that you realize something very bad has happened here.

Time now for the tale of We Are Not Alone. Stone's Public House was not always called that. When it was first opened in 1834, its proprietor, John Stone, actually christened the inn with the name of the Railroad House. John Stone was a former militia captain and a successful farmer. And in addition to his beloved Railroad House, he also owned almost all of the land that now makes up Ashland, though back in the 19th century, the town was called Unionville.

When John learned that a new railroad was going to be built and that it would run right through the center of his property, he decided to take advantage of the opportunity and construct a hotel directly next to the tracks. His plan worked. For two years, the railroad house made loads of money, accommodating weary travelers the train deposited in town. However, for reasons unknown, in 1836, John Stone sold his inn to a new owner but continued to live there.

Over the following decades, the inn was passed from one set of hands to another until eventually it was no longer an inn at all. It was simply a worn-down, decrepit house that no one paid much mind to. That all changed in 1976 when a man named Leonard Cappy Fournier purchased the building with the intention of restoring it to its former glory, which to his credit, he actually did.

He renovated the inn into a restaurant historical landmark, renamed it John Stone's Public House, and brought tourists and locals alike back through its doors. However, as Fournier set out to resurrect the old inn from the disrepair it had fallen into, he seemed to have also unearthed more than he bargained for. According to an article that appeared in the Boston Globe on October 29, 1987, as soon as Fournier purchased the building at 179 Main Street, he and his staff immediately began to experience inexplicable phenomena.

An excerpt from the article reads, They'd locked the place up at night and return in the morning to find doors and windows wide open, and things moved around inside. Nothing was ever missing. Faucets would constantly turn off and on at will. One morning when he was alone in the house, Fournier relocked all the bolts. When he returned moments later, they were all unlocked. That's when I decided we were not alone, he said.

Fournier went on to describe one evening when his bartender rushed down to the basement to get some more ice, only to return moments later empty-handed, with a look of complete and utter terror plastered on his normally stoic face. The bartender told him that he was filling up the ice bucket, and when he was, he distinctly felt someone tap him on the shoulder, but when he turned around, no one was there. Intrigued, Fournier went down into the basement himself to investigate. He stood in the middle of the dank, dark room and waited for the phantom to show itself.

but nothing did. He casually walked around the room now with his arms out wide saying, hello, is anybody here? But no one responded. Finally, he shrugged and gave up. But just as he took his first step up the wooden staircase, he felt it. It was unmistakable. It was deliberate. Something or someone tapped him three times on his left shoulder. Slowly, Fournier turned around. The basement was still entirely empty. He was alone, but was he?

In that same article, the then general manager of the restaurant, Butch Adams, told the reporter that one time when he was alone in the building doing some office work, he heard the voice of a young girl distinctly crying, No! No! Help me! Help me, please! coming from the dining room. The sound was so convincing that Butch bolted from his desk, ran into the dining area to help the girl, but when he got there, the voice had stopped and the room was entirely empty.

Everything was exactly where it should be except for a single chair that has somehow been placed directly in front of the wood-burning stove in the corner. Butch shook his head in disbelief when he got to the restaurant earlier that morning all the chairs had been stacked upside down on the tables, just like they always were after the closing shift. No one had come in since he had arrived and he definitely didn't move the chair himself. He'd been in the office for hours trying to figure out payroll. So how did it get there?

In the mid-1980s, two more unsuspecting victims unwillingly bore witness to the paranormal activity that plagued Stone's public house. They weren't employees, like so many of the other witnesses, but were police officers. In the middle of the night one evening, officers of the Ashland Police Force, Joe Magnani and Steve Zanella, were called to check out Stone's public house. The restaurant's back door, which had been locked at the end of the dinner shift, was dangling wide open.

The two officers arrived on the scene and immediately felt that something was wrong. There was no evidence of forced entry, no footprints in the freshly fallen snow, but their own, excuse me, leading up to the door, but still something felt off. They both sensed a presence and not a living one. As they made their way upstairs, both officers reported hearing odd sounds like moaning and creaking and the icy hush of the wind, but it was an old house. Old houses often make noise.

Zanella and Magnani entered the top floor which had been shut off from the rest of the restaurant remained in a state of decay a century before the top floor had been where weary guests would spend the night at the hotel but now it was just an old attic and the living rarely stepped foot in it they went from room to room looking for anyone that might have broken in found nothing but then when they got to the very last room something terrible happened

Zanella gently pushed the door open, asking if anyone was there. Then suddenly the officer jumped back as if he had been electrocuted, colliding with his partner behind him. Magnani asked him what was wrong, but all Zanella could do was point in the dark room and whisper, you don't see her. Magnani aimed his flashlight at the room. It was completely empty. See who? Asked Magnani. As they made their way outside the building, Zanella explained that he thought he had seen a little girl standing in the middle of that room, staring at him from the shadows.

They both decided it must have been a trick of light until Magnani turned around to take one last look at the building. Sure enough, the officer explained, I saw the silhouette of a young girl in the window. I said, Steve, there she is. Many believe the girl in the window is the spirit of 11-year-old Mary Smith. In 1863, Mary had been staying at the hotel with her mother and asked if she could go play outside. Her mom said yes. The little girl went on her way, but she went a bit too far.

Mary had been playing on the railroad tracks outside the hotel when a train roared past, killing her instantly. What is supposedly the bloody pinafore Mary had been wearing when she died is currently on display at the restaurant. Eventually, Leonard Fournier sold Stone's Public House to new owners who were subjected to the same horrors as their predecessor. When Vernon Northover purchased the restaurant in 1997, he didn't believe ghost stories.

Though he found all the tales of dead girls that live in the shadows and poltergeists that rearrange the furniture amusing, he's a born skeptic and thought all of it was bullshit. Spooky but fictional stories told to drum up business. But then all that changed when he spent his first evening alone in the building. As he told a reporter for the Boston Globe in an article published on October 28th, 2001, it was about 10 p.m. and I was upstairs working on the computer for about two hours.

I felt a presence in the office. I didn't even save my work. I had to leave the place immediately. It was eerie. I was never too sure before, but I've got much more of an open mind now. Too many things have happened that you just cannot explain. Bum, bum, bum. Bum, bum, bum. So many haunted places on the East Coast, just because of time and history. I guess. Ah, yeah.

I thought that last thing was interesting where he didn't actually see anything. This guy, Vernon Northover, he just said he felt like a presence that changed his mind. And it did make me think, I didn't even tell you this. Do I want to know? I think so. It's a little creepy. But two or three nights ago, you know, I often wake up in the middle of the night

Oh, fuck. To go to the bathroom, to get a snack or whatever. Yes, your middle of the night eating is hilarious. I know. I have a hard time going back to sleep. Last night, I tried not to, and I just laid in bed awake forever being like, I don't want to eat. I don't want to eat. Why? Just get up and have your damn yogurt. I know. No one eats more yogurt than our household. We're keeping the yogurt business alive in the Cummins household. We are.

And so anyway, I walked up in the kitchen, which I've done so many times, usually don't care at all. Yeah. And I just like my, my skin tingled. Fuck. Like, uh, you know, like my hair raised a little bit. Yes. Yes.

And then I looked at the stove and it was exactly 3 a.m., which is like a weird time, like the witching hour. Yeah. And then suddenly I got so creeped out and I had the distinct sensation that I was not alone in the living room. Holy shit. And I just tried to like focus. I tried not to look around too much. I ate my yogurt as fast as I could. And then without looking, like I couldn't tell if something felt like it was like in like near like the couch, like that area or something.

What I really thought it probably was upstairs. I'm telling you. Towards Kyler's room. Yeah, I need to get up there and cleanse. And I was like, nope. And just avoided looking up there and went back down and went to bed. But I was, until I fell back to sleep, I was pretty creeped out. It is so interesting about our house. Like, okay, so I know we've talked about this a lot, but, you know, we live in a split level. And so it's like if you've ever been in a split level house, you know, you can kind of stand there.

On the landing, and then you can see just a little bit up and a little bit down those two sets of stairs, right? Yeah. I never feel anything icky towards the downstairs. Yeah. It's always towards the upstairs. Yeah. And I just...

Again, I know we've said this before, but the person that owned our home before... And they died in the house? No, we don't... Didn't they? No, we just know that he had a heart attack there. He was living in his brother's house. He had moved in there with his children after a divorce. This is all hearsay, like from neighbors. And I forget exactly how we found these things out at this point. Oh, from Barb. So it is possible that he died on the way to the hospital. The man could be alive for all I know, but I don't think so. Because just based on some things that have been shared, but...

I just have to wonder if it's not him every so often coming to check things out. Yeah, maybe. Because it doesn't, it feels scary in the what the fuck is that? But it doesn't feel nefarious. Like, I don't feel threatened. It doesn't feel dark, if that makes sense. This one scared me, but it might have just been my imagination. But scared you in what way? Scared like it's going to hurt you or scared and just like, what the fuck is that? No, scared like something bad is near me. Oh, okay. Yeah.

All right. All right. Well, let's, you can help me cleanse the house this weekend. Okay. I have some photos. Okay. This first one. You just show pictures of our house. This first one is Stone's Public House. Okay. Yep. Very much. Looks like a little New England pub. Yep. Nondescript. This next one, Ashland, Massachusetts Railroad, 1918. So that's where this, you know, sadly, the little girl got ran over. Oh, by the way, I did make a note. That's fucking disturbing. The bloody pinafore was hung up in this place. I'm like, that's terrible.

tasteless I know and I wonder if that's true I'm like is it I'm like why would you have that why would they just leave that there even if it was like a replica or just a weird yeah I know it's so like tactless I know yeah this is a little girl uh this next one the stones public house sign uh that's a funny picture of John Stone yeah it is yep

And then this is just some AI that Molly Box made using Canva of like, you know, a creepy faceless colonial girl like the spirit those cops might have seen. And then another one. Just bloody hands. Yes. I can't tell if it's blood. Oh, I think it is blood. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's all I got. Ichiwawa. Uh-huh. Well then, sir, I've got some tales for you. Good. Have you brought, now I asked you to switch back to traditional Layla, but you've brought in black Layla, and that's fine too. I was just over red Layla from the holiday season. Totally. I was like, get out of here, red Layla. I've had enough of your shit. All right. Well, let's revisit our not-so-friendly friend, the hat man. Okay.

Hey, Lindsay and Dan. Hello. I want to share with y'all today a bit of a multi-generational tale. This is great. I love this first sentence. Growing up, I was convinced that I was being haunted by the McDonald's Hamburglar. Ha ha ha!

That is such a distinct image. I know. It took me multiple times. I couldn't even get past that first sentence. I was just like, oh, this is going to be good. The Hamburglar, if you just take away any associations with French fries and everything and just saw him as a kid, yeah, he's fucking creepy looking. Yeah, he's creepy. All right. I know, I know, I can already hear you guys laughing. But in my defense, I was eight when this all started. And like all kids, I was a little dumb.

My family lived in a one-story ranch-style house that had a slightly weird design. And since I was the youngest of two kids, I got the short straw when it came to room selection. My bedroom sat in the exact middle of the house with two doors on opposite walls. One door led directly into the kitchen, while the other connected to the end of our small hallway. While the door to the kitchen usually remained closed so I could...

have some semblance of privacy, the door to the hallway was always propped completely open in order to let in the cool air from the hallway air conditioning vent.

My bed was arranged so that the foot of the bed was right next to the open doorway, and if I was lying down and opened my eyes, the door would be the first thing that I'd see. I spent a lot of time in my room as a child, mainly because I hated the outdoors and I read a ton. And although we're very close now, my sister is five years older than me and at the time wasn't interested in playing kid games—

or hanging out with me much at all. I also had, and still have, pretty serious insomnia, so I'd lie awake for hours and hours most nights, making up fantastical tales in my head until I was eventually able to drift off to sleep. With that context in mind, I can still remember the first time I saw this entity so clearly.

It wasn't that late, probably only 9 or 10, but as the youngest, I'd been banished to bed before the rest of the family. I wasn't even slightly sleepy, however. I could still hear everyone else watching TV in the den, and whether out of insomnia or just sheer spite, I was wide awake. I also had the light on in my room because I was still afraid of the dark. So lying there fuming, eyes wide open, lamp bright,

I was in the perfect position to spot a dark figure peeking around the corner of the door. I froze, not believing what I was seeing. The figure came about halfway up the doorframe and wore a wide brim hat and a cape. It was also entirely black, except for what I can only describe as the impression of eyes. We stared at each other for what felt like minutes, but in reality was probably only seconds.

Then its head tilted to one side and two black gloved hands crept around the doorframe. I was overwhelmed by a kind of terror I'd never felt before. And I let out an ear piercing shriek, which didn't stop until my parents came rushing in.

They, of course, didn't believe me when I told them about what I'd seen. In fact, my mom seemed to become irrationally angry about the whole thing, telling me that if I kept this up, she wasn't going to let me watch X-Files anymore. Intense kid resentment chased off the last of my lingering fear as they left the room, and I spent the rest of the night trying to make sense of what I'd seen.

I had an answer by the morning. Short figure, big hat, and what had to be a mask covering his face? Obviously, this was the Hamburglar.

Over the next few years, I continued to see this entity. Sometimes months would go by peacefully, and sometimes I'd see it every other night. But it was the same pattern every time. I'd be wide awake in my room when a sense of being watched would creep over me. I'd look at the doorway, and there it would be. We'd lock eyes for a few moments, and then boom. Terror.

If I closed my eyes, the entity would disappear. I'd stopped screaming about it because it made my mom so upset with me and it solved absolutely nothing. And as crazy as it sounds, eventually I kind of got used to it. The Hamburglar never touched me or tried to hurt me and it always vanished. This was manageable. The only thing that stood out as odd to me was that the figure got taller as I got older until it nearly reached the top of the doorway.

Then when I turned 12, things escalated. Where I once only had to worry about seeing this entity in my room at night, I started seeing it all over the house at different times of the day. I'd be eating breakfast before school and suddenly feel a frisson of terror, only to look up and see a dark hat duck behind a kitchen doorway. I'd be doing homework in the living room and then feel something staring at me from behind the computer desk.

This went on and on until I felt like I was never safe in a room alone. And since my mom and dad were both working, me and my sister were home alone a lot. Still, I didn't tell anyone in my family what was going on. I couldn't deal with my parents not believing me, and my sister and I still fought like only teenage girls can.

That all changed one gloomy September Saturday. My mom was out running errands and my dad was at work, leaving me and my sister home alone once again. I was bored and kept bugging my now 17-year-old sister to please drive me to the bookstore. She finally agreed, but had to take a shower first, which made me groan. She always took forever to shower, and I was impatient. I

So true to my annoying baby sibling self, I kept popping my head into the bathroom every couple of minutes to tell her to hurry up. And she'd yell back from behind the shower curtain to leave me alone.

After doing this three or four times, I finally stormed into the bathroom to tell her to get out of the shower already. The shower curtain, however, ripped open all on its own, and I felt that all too familiar feeling of terror overwhelm me. I was still in the doorway, and my sister had both hands in her hair. To this day, we both swear that neither of us touched that shower curtain. I fully expected for her to yell at me for ripping open the shower curtain, but instead, my sister just looked scared.

Finally, all of these years of bottled up emotions spilled out and I told her about everything that I'd seen over the last four years. To my complete astonishment, my sister told me that she too had been seeing this exact same thing since she was about eight as well. When she'd first tried to tell our parents, our mom reacted the same way, getting angry and telling her to never bring it up again.

We did leave the house that day to go to the bookstore because like hell were we going to stay home alone in that place. And by the time we came home, our mom was back. We decided to confront her together. And to our surprise, she did not get angry this time. Instead, she proceeded to tell us that she'd actually seen the exact same figure when she was about my age and it hadn't gone away until her parents had their pastor come by and bless the house.

Over the years, she'd convinced herself that it had all been her imagination. So when we told her about seeing the figure, she reacted out of fear. The very next Sunday, my dad talked to our church pastor and had someone come over to pray over the house. Things did calm down after that. I didn't see the entity anymore, and I was now pretty certain that it was not, in fact, the Hamburglar, though I would occasionally get scared and feel extremely uncomfortable alone in the house.

Once I moved out for college and then got on with my life, I eventually stopped thinking about this entire experience and I almost forgot about it.

Fast forward 18 years. I'm married, living in my own house with my husband, still in the same city where I grew up, but on the opposite side of town. My parents are divorced and for unrelated reasons, unrelated reasons, I am also blissfully not in contact with my mother. My older sister has recently gotten remarried and lives with her new husband with their blended family, including my 12-year-old niece.

They had lived with my dad for a while before this, so my niece had spent many years in what she calls Papa's house. She's a delightful little weirdo and a definite creeper that takes after her aunt's heart.

One day, a few months ago, she was showing me videos on TikTok, and we found a bunch of them about the hat man. Several people had mentioned participating in the Benadryl challenge, which, if you're not familiar, was a wildly stupid and incredibly unsafe trend where people would take too much Benadryl in an attempt to see the hat man. After scrolling through a bunch of these videos, my niece rolls her eyes and says, you don't have to drug yourself to see the hat man. All you got to do is go to Papa's house, and he's right there.

I immediately was covered in goosebumps. Uh, what did you just say? I asked, trying to let my voice sound too panicked. My niece looked at me like I was dumb. Oh, you know, the hat man that looks around the doorways at Papa's house? I used to see him all the time, but haven't since we moved. I'm just saying that only idiots take Benadryl to try and see shadow people. I immediately told my sister, who did confirm that my niece had told her about seeing the exact same entity multiple times.

We'd both heard about the hat man in passing before, but I don't know, somehow we never put two and two together to realize that that could have been the figure that haunted us all throughout those adolescent years.

When we told my dad, he informed us that after my mother had moved out and, according to him, quote, taken her evil energy with her, he'd had several friends in the church come over to pray over their house for hours, and he hadn't felt creeped out since then. But I still have so many questions. I did some research but couldn't find tales of the hat man appearing to the same family over multiple generations, but admittedly, I didn't want to look that hard.

Was this thing attached to my mother somehow? Is it attached to my family? I still don't have that answer, but at least now I feel capable of handling the situation a lot better than when I was a kid, which is a good thing because of what prompted me to finally share my story. My husband, bless him, is one of the most stone-cold skeptics I've ever met. He teases me over my love of ghost hunting shows, and I regularly play a game with him of, what would it take to convince you that the paranormal exists? Okay.

A few weeks ago, I was out with some friends for a girls' night out when I got a text message from my husband asking just how much longer I would be out. This was pretty unusual for him as he normally loves a chill night home alone. We were about to pay the bills, so I let him know I'd be back in less than an hour. Once I got home, I found him sitting on the couch downstairs with every light on. This man loves saving money, so this was definitely weird in its own right.

When I asked him what was up, my sweet, logical husband looked at me and said, okay. So I was watching TV when I started to feel weird. And when I looked over towards the kitchen, I swear I saw a figure with a hat peeking around the corner. It must have been my imagination though, right?

I did a smoke cleanse of the house the very next day and we walked around telling whatever it was that it wasn't welcome there and it had to get the fuck out. I haven't felt anything weird since, so fingers crossed. Keep up the scares and thanks for listening to my long ass story. All the best, Caitlin. Thanks, Caitlin. Caitlin's funny. Caitlin is funny. Uh-huh. The fucking Hamburglar. I know. But it's so accurate. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

And, like, you know, take, like, you know, Hat Man or any kind of, like, name out of this entity. It's just so creepy that multiple people from three different generations of the same family are all seeing the same thing. Yeah. And around that same age, like somewhere between, like, 8 and 12. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's really creepy. Just like that part of the story when Caitlin talks about like her and her older sister then confronted her mom and then their mom does admit, okay, I actually saw this thing too. Yeah. That just made me think about like, oh, I mean, I didn't have any like recurring creature or anything terrorize me, but I had some like weird dreams and stuff as a kid that were like really spooky. Sure.

And that would be so unsettling to then, okay, Kyler Monroe, they're screaming, you run upstairs, they've been having a nightmare. And then you ask them, like, they're talking about the nightmare and it's the same dream you had when you were a kid. Totally. That would be terrifying. But then obviously next level, if you thought you kept seeing this little creature, spirit, entity, whatever, as a kid...

And then it goes away. You know, once you make it to like, you know, 13, 14, you're like, oh, maybe that was my imagination. Yeah, totally. And you try and put it out of your mind. Sure. You're like, I was a little kid. I was clearly making a big deal out of nothing. Yep. And then 20 years later, your own children are like, hey, here's what we've been seeing. Oh, my God. And they describe exactly what you saw. That would freak me the fuck out. Well, yeah.

compound that with you talk to Donna, your sister, and then she's like, oh yeah, that no, you know, Eleanor, like your niece or Emerson, your nephew, they too. They too. Yeah, years later, they're seeing it. That's so strange. And then I also had like a thought during that story of just, okay, let's say an entity can choose to present itself in whatever form it wants to be seen as. Okay.

And how creepy that would be if it picked like a, well, like a, like a Hamburglar, like it picked something that was already out there to maybe make it seem like less creepy and less real until it really gets close to you or something like that would be terrifying at first. You're like, Oh, it must be my imagination. Cause I've, I've watched these commercials, I've seen the hamburger and now I think I've seen the hamburger in my house, but it's some terrible thing.

masquerading as the Hamburglar. I think that's kind of like why it is so creepy because it's like generally, or just like clowns and dolls. It's like, generally speaking, we think of them as like childlike figures, things that you have at a kid's birthday party. A doll is something that a child asks for to play with. So it's not inherently something that should be creepy. So when it shifts, morphs, expresses something

a different thing than happiness, it really fucks with you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Okay. Hear me out. Yeah. Halloween 2025, you can be a creepy Ronald McDonald and I will be a creepy hamburger. That'd be so great. If you can remember that, are you going to write that down? No. Okay. Because I have a different idea that I actually want to do. Oh, okay. That would be fun though. It would be silly. That'd be a good Halloween costume, like evil Ronald McDonald. But I think you need the whole cast of characters. Yeah. Evil Ronald, evil Hamburglar.

Those are the only two I can remember. I know there was like a purple guy that like... Grimace. Grimace. Grimace. You have evil Grimace. And then I think, isn't there a girl? I can't remember who the crew is. I thought that there was like a, I don't know. Oh yeah. Birdie the early bird. I don't remember Birdie. And Officer Big Mac. I don't remember him either. I think a lot of like, well, I think Ronald and the Hamburger were the only two characters that really had staying power.

I feel like the Grimace hung around a little while, and then I think the other characters just kind of fell by the wayside. Yeah, Grimace is like the purple guy. I remember Birdie, and then Hamburglar, and then Ronald McDonald. I mean, I did go for Boo Buckets this year, so it's on brand for me. Some Mickey D's Boo Buckets. I love my Boo Bucket. It's so fun. Okay, uno mas? Yeah, uno mas. All right, let's go.

Hello, king and queen of the STD. My name is Lola, and I come from a very long line of women who have what my great-grandmother called the sight.

We have tons of stories from multiple generations of women knowing when someone would die, seeing things with zero explanation, or simply knowing something they couldn't possibly know. But this particular story is much more of a physical story, however equally unexplainable. I first heard this story from my mother when I was about 12, and it has stuck with me all these years.

In the late 1970s, my mother Lisa and her brother Alan were driving home to Benton, Arkansas after visiting my grandparents in Irving, Texas. It was a late, rainy winter night. They were getting close to Terrell, Texas, near the Terrell State Hospital, a mental asylum that had been in operation since 1885. Side note, it was originally known as the North Texas Lunatic Asylum and was built according to the Kirk

ride plan. This hospital is still functioning today. They were just driving along, chatting, and listening to the radio. As they rounded a curve in the highway, they noticed an obviously elderly woman walking along the side of the road, dragging a large orange suitcase behind her. Being concerned for her safety, they pulled over and offered her a ride. She gladly accepted, and Alan got out of the car to help her into the backseat.

Once she was in, he turned to pick up her suitcase and realized it was incredibly heavy. He couldn't imagine how this elderly lady, regardless of her round build, could have made it very far dragging this thing. He wrestled it into the back seat next to her and then ran back around to the driver's seat.

When he slipped behind the wheel, he was immediately hit with a horrible org odor. He glanced at Lisa and she had a, oh my God, look on her face. But he assumed it was just a byproduct of the poor woman's physical exertion. They made polite conversation with the lady and learned that she was on her way to Little Rock to visit a boyfriend she had not seen in 50 years. Oh my God.

They were about 300 miles from Little Rock, and they were surprised she had decided to make this a trip on foot. As they drove, the smell grew progressively worse. It was definitely more than body odor. The sickeningly sweet smell of decay and rot mixed with rotten eggs. Eventually, Lisa couldn't take it anymore and told Alan he needed to find a rest stop so she could go to the bathroom.

They whispered quietly, hoping the lady wasn't able to hear them from the backseat over the radio. They decided she had to get out and stay out of the car. Eventually, just before they got to Texarkana, they saw a rest stop and pulled in. It took a considerable amount of coaxing from Lisa to get the elderly woman to go to the ladies' room, saying this would be the last opportunity to go for a long while, and even if she didn't necessarily feel the need to go, she should try.

She agreed finally, and they went into the ladies' room together, with Lisa following along just behind her. There were three stalls, and Lisa chose to step into the one closest to the only exterior door. The elderly lady went into the one next to the far wall. Lisa did her business quickly and ran out to the car. She gets in, and then Alan reminded her about the ladies' suitcases.

She jumped out of the car and drug it to the ladies' room. As she chunked it into the main area of the bathroom, she yelled to the lady that she was sorry, but they had to go. There was no response. She looked under all the stalls and didn't see any feet. Thinking maybe the lady was standing on the seat, she walked down the short row of stalls, but there was no one in the bathroom.

She'd come in the only door, and the windows in the bathroom were small, maybe 18 inches tall and at least 9 feet off the ground. There was no way this woman could have left the bathroom without Lisa or Alan seeing her. Lisa felt a horrible sense of dread and ran out the door back to the car.

The rain had picked up, and as they pulled out of the rest stop, Lisa told Alan how the woman was missing. Alan told her that maybe they should go back. I mean, actually, there could be money or jewelry in the suitcase. Lisa absolutely refused his suggestion and climbed into the backseat to roll the windows down a bit to air out the car. The smell seemed to continue to get worse as they drove.

Eventually, they just rolled down all the windows, deciding that wet upholstery was worth it if it meant they could kind of breathe through the stench. They got close to a truck stop just outside of Benton where their car died while doing 55 miles per hour. Alan coasted to the shoulder and decided to walk across the median to the truck stop and get a couple gallons of gas, thinking maybe his gas gauge was just not working properly. The car wouldn't start after he got back in and had added the gas.

By then, none of the lights would come on and he couldn't even get the starter to turn over. He walked back to the truck stop and asked the mechanic on duty to come over with his tow truck. They towed the car to the mechanic's bay and popped the hood. The mechanic got in and assumed he would turn the key and get no response. But the car fired right up. He shut it off, got out, told Alan and Lisa the car was fine. Alan got in and turned the key. Nothing.

The mechanic looked to see if maybe there were loose wires or maybe the car was overheating. However, there was nothing he could find wrong. He got back in and again, the car started up immediately. They went back and forth like this a few times. And anytime Alan or Lisa attempted to start the car, it wouldn't start. Lisa went into the restaurant and called her uncle to come and pick them up. Alan sold his car to the mechanic for 50 bucks and apologized for the horrible stench and told him about the elderly lady they had picked up.

The mechanic said he couldn't smell anything, and Lisa and Alan both looked at him like he was completely crazy. How in the world could he not smell that horrific stench? The mechanic mumbled something about kids and drugs and drove his new-to-him car around to the back of the building. For months afterwards, they both had car trouble regardless of whose car they were driving. Even a brand-new car that belonged to a cousin would die for no reason with either of them behind the wheel.

Was it the spirit of the lady seeking revenge for abandoning her? Was her boyfriend's corpse actually what was in that heavy old suitcase?

Would they have been the source of more rot if they hadn't gotten her out of their car? Was she an escaped patient from the asylum? Something strange happened, and all these years later, nothing about Lisa's story has changed. And every time I think of it, I just can't make sense of how the lady got out of the bathroom or what could have been in that suitcase or why cars refused to operate around Lisa and Alan after so long.

That's a very unique story. I liked it. Uh-huh. Yeah, very strange. Just as I was tracking other details, I may have missed one detail. Sure. When they went back, when Lisa goes back into the bathroom, they're getting...

I have some comments about wanting to ditch this lady. They're ready to ditch this lady because she stinks so bad. And she carries the suitcase into the bathroom and now the lady's gone. What happens to the suitcase? I think she just leaves it there. Oh, okay, okay. I didn't know if that was explicitly mentioned. Because then she goes back to the car, Lisa tells Alan, like, hey, the lady's gone. And Alan's like, well, maybe we should go back for the suitcase. Maybe there's money or jewelry. Like, he's insinuating that...

Maybe we shouldn't leave that suitcase behind because maybe there's something of value. And then they can't find the suitcase, right? They don't know. Lisa's like, I'm not going back for that. Just go. Just go. Okay. Because I wondered, is the suitcase real? Because it's like entity just disappears. But it's very... They didn't go back. Okay. Because I... She chunked it into the bathroom and then never goes back. So we don't know. I would guess...

just based on the rest of the story, that if they went back, that suitcase is also gone. I think so too. I think it's a paranormal entity. I think it's... That's a weird one though where it's tactile, where you're like, you're touching it, you're smelling it and you're holding its things. I know, I know, but I just... And this...

Go ahead. No, no. Be my guest. The stink part was killing me. I was really having to struggle to focus for a while. Yeah. Because my mind kept drifting to like, on the surface, it sounds so mean. You've picked up this elderly woman. Yeah. You're giving her a ride. Maybe she has dementia. She thinks she's going to see a boyfriend who doesn't exist.

I mean, first time in 50 years. I know that alone. I was like, okay, that's creepy. Uh huh. But you're like, you know, she has no one. Yeah. You're trying to help somebody out. It would be such a horrible thing to just abandon her at a random truck stop. But then when I think about the stink, I don't know that not, I don't know that everybody has smelled something so bad, but I think about there was a time on the, on the subway in San Francisco where,

where there's that lady and I remember I made that joke about it like several albums ago, comedy-wise. Were you with me? Yes, I was with you because it was after I led with my face. You fell down the escalator. Yeah, exactly. Same trip. It was crazy that we had those two experiences. Not only same trip, it was like all part of the same... Same journey. Yeah, like the same portion. It was like I fell down off the... Yeah. Going down to the BART. We get in the BART and then that is what happens next. Yeah, that lady comes in. Oh my God. I'll never forget that young kid and he was like, God damn.

Damn. That's right. This like, okay. That's right. Yes. That's like very like unwell looking woman. Yeah. Enters the BART train and immediately you are hit with a wall of like death and decay. Like it smelled so strong. And urine and like, like she had like shat her pants and just, I mean, she was very clearly unwell. So you feel bad, but,

But you also, I don't know if you've ever been around a smell like that. It wasn't just BO. No, it was beyond BO. The one smell on my own body that it reminds me of, and this is so gross because this is the worst thing I've ever smelled of myself, is when I had, I tried to do a stupid, this is so stupid. Oh God, this is going to be so gross. I tried to do a home surgery. I thought you were sexy like two seconds ago. This is not going to go well. This is a long time ago. I tried to do a home surgery on myself and I had this pilonidal cyst on my tailbone and

I'm literally throwing up in my throat. It becomes wildly infected. Oh, God. Like, where the doctor is mad at me, like, why? Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. And then it has to drain. It was... Stop. Powerful. Stop. Oh, my God. I feel nauseous. Okay. It's a very specific, powerful smell. That lady on the tram... I literally think I'm going to throw up. Okay. It's just... Try to plug your ears. It's the smell of infection. I know. I know. Stop talking about it. I don't have to. I'm telling the people listening. They know. They know. Okay. Um...

And if you've ever smelled that, you can understand why a couple would be willing to abandon an old woman at a truck stop because it is so fucking powerful that if that lady from the tram would have been in our car with us, I would have had to. I would have been like, I'm so sorry, but like, I literally can't drive.

I can't drive. I can't like, I can't drive under these circumstances. Like I feel dizzy. Yeah. Like I feel like my, my, my vision is blurry. Like it's, it's, it's crazy. It's a crippling amount of smell. Yeah. So wait, just to finish our story about San Francisco. So we're like, I have fallen down. I've eaten shit. I'm fine. Yeah. I'm not bleeding, but I am like shooken up and I'm in a lot of pain.

And then this unwell person enters the train and sits down. And then this like young man, he's just a couple subway seats ahead of us, like over to the left. It hits, it's almost like you can see the wave of smell hitting people one at a time because, you know, if you've ever been on an airplane and someone's farted and everyone is kind of like looking around like who fucking did it.

It was that kind of vibe. And it's slowly hitting one row after another, after another. You're seeing people's faces. Yeah. People putting their shirts up over their nose. And then this young kid, he goes, God damn. Yeah. And then you're trying not to laugh because it's also very funny. Uh-huh. He said what everyone was thinking. Oh God. It was so brutal. What album is that? Hear This? Hear This. Yeah. Okay. Well, Hear This. She led with her face. Oh boy. Go enjoy that.

But yeah, that was a great story. That was a great story. Yeah, it's just super weird. It is super weird. And there's just no explanation. She's either a paranormal entity or a psychopathic killer. Right, right. And there is a dead body in that suitcase. Yeah, I just, based on her description, she wasn't strong enough to carry a dead body around. And she definitely wasn't agile enough to sneak out of that little, I can picture those, I've been in a million truck stops. I know, I can picture exactly those windows, yeah. Or that window, yeah, there's no way. No one's coming out that window, but definitely not her. But where did she go?

She wasn't real. She just went into the ether. But then what you said, but then there's the tactile thing. There's the smell. There's the suitcase. Sometimes that does happen with spirits. They have a conversation with her. Yeah, absolutely. But then the car thing. Yeah, yeah. The after effect where it's like she's punishing, her spirit is punishing them for abandoning her. Definitely felt like that. Yeah, I thought so too. I thought so too. Cool story. Well, well, well. Happy 2025, Annabelle's. We would like to do some Annabelle shout outs to continue to thank you for your support.

Making this all possible, keeping the wheels on the bus. I'd like to thank F Butters. F Butters. F Butters. F Butters. M and Joe, Gage Simmons, Alexis Stovall, and Robert Abbott. Awesome. And I'd like to thank the following Annabelles. Howard Whipple!

His last name might just be Whipple and he might not even listen to Time Suck. He might not even know what the fuck just happened. Yep, that was a, I'm guessing it might be a nod to Time Suck. Okay, wait, could you also, what if he is an enjoyer of Whipple Chill? Howard Whipple Chill. Thank you. Or it's Whipple Chill.

Jamie, I'd like to thank- There's so many non-Time Suckers who are listening who are like, what the fuck is happening? I'd like to thank Jamie Barnett, Xander Stevens, Lil Taco 5. I love it. Love tacos. Me too. Jessica Meinfie and Addison. Awesome. And I have just a few spoopy shout outs this week.

To Allison, Brayden, and Carson from your dad, Anthony. Allison, you're smart and beautiful. I'm so proud of you. Brayden, you probably think I'm too hard on you, but it's just because I love you. When you find your path, you're going to do great. And Carson, you're so young, but I can see your potential. Just like your siblings, you will do great things. To Rudy from Rudy, happy 37th birthday to myself because I am the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas.

To Shaden from your dad, Chad, I am always on your side. I love you more than you know. And in our little world, happy birthday to St. Joan. Happy birthday to Kyler. Happy birthday to Monroe. Happy birthday to Monroe. I mean, I could keep going. Grandma Betty. Grandma Betty, Cousin Vince, Cousin Tony, Cousin Shelly, Rafal, Chris, Younga, Tobias, Maddie. Wow. I think that's everybody.

Wow. A lot of birthdays. A lot of January birthdays. And that is our show. Thank you for continuing to send in your personal tales. Oh, happy birthday Aunt Judy. Okay. I'm sure she's a regular listener too. Oh, yeah. Thank you for continuing to send in your personal tales of terror to mystoryatscaredtodeathpodcast.com. You can email us for everything else, info at scaredtodeathpodcast.com.

Thank you to Logan Keith for scoring today's show. Thank you to Heather Rylander organizing the My Story emails, to book editor Drew Atana polishing and preparing listener stories for book number six.

Thank you to Sophie Evans, who found the first story I shared this week, and to Molly Box, Molly Jean Box. Molly Jean. Fine in a second. We're on Facebook and Instagram, where we post pics that accompany episodes and more at Scared to Death Podcast. We also have a private Facebook group, Creeps and Peepers, full of horror lovers. Big thanks to the All Seen Eyes, the Creeps and Peepers moderators for making that group so fun.

Enjoy your nightmares, creeps and peepers. Hope you're having a great start to 2025. Thank you for starting the year with us, and we hope you were scared to death. Bye. Bye.

If spirits threaten me in this place, fight water by water and fire by fire. Banish their souls into nothingness and remove their powers until the last trace. Let these evil beings bleed through time and space. Evil may pass through but have no home here within. Scared to death. Mad Magic Productions. I heard goops going down. Good.