You Can't Run From This (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
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Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Today, I'm going to tell you two stories about two very different haunted places. Even though these stories take place decades apart and involve wildly different people, the message of both is the same. Crossing paths with ghosts can kill.

But before we get into those, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday, as well as this special episode of You Can't. So if that's of interest to you, please change all the hotkey commands on the Follow Buttons computer so that no matter which command they enter, they all simply restart the computer. Okay, let's get into today's stories.

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At about 2:30 a.m. on August 27, 2010, a 29-year-old man named Christopher Kaiser and his girlfriend Emily held hands and stepped out onto a railroad bridge high above the ground in a remote area of North Carolina.

It was totally dark out except for the beams of their flashlights. Christopher and Emily were only 15 minutes away from the big event that they had come out here to witness, and they were nervous and excited. They checked the time, then started walking slowly across the bridge, pausing every few feet to listen for the sound of a train rumbling toward them. But all they could hear was whispering and giggling and the occasional shout coming from the 10 other people who had all hiked out here as well to wait alongside them.

and who were now just standing in clusters all along the bridge. So usually this railroad bridge, which was called the Bostjian Bridge, was not a place that people went to. First of all, it was technically trespassing to be there, but beyond that, the bridge was way out in the woods and required a rocky hike to get to. And once you did get to it, there really wasn't much to see. The bridge itself was pretty basic as bridges go.

It had been built in the 1850s out of brick and stone with big arches underneath and it crossed a ravine that was about 100 feet deep. Train tracks ran the entire length of the bridge, which was about 300 feet. On either end, the tracks disappeared into the forest. And so the Bostjan Bridge was just a kind of boring, typical railroad bridge with no people on it except one night a year. And that night was tonight because tonight the Bostjan Bridge was supposed to be haunted.

Exactly 119 years earlier, on August 27th, 1891, a passenger train had somehow lost control while crossing this bridge and it careened off the side, plunging into the ravine below. The accident had killed 23 people. Now, Christopher and Emily knew that regular trains had not used this bridge in a long time.

But ever since the accident, legend had it that if you went to the bridge on the anniversary of that crash, at the exact moment the train went off the side, apparently a ghost train would appear speeding along the tracks and blasting its horn. People said you could actually hear the horrible screeching sound of the brakes as they tried and failed to keep the train on the tracks, and then you could hear the screaming of the passengers as they plunged to their deaths all over again.

This ghost train passing through was the big event that Christopher and Emily and everybody else had come out to see. Tonight, they were all ghost hunters. Just then, one of the people at the bridge checked the time and called out that there was only one minute left to go till the ghost train arrived. And with this, all the whispering and laughing and yelling stopped. Everyone on the bridge fell silent and waited.

Out on the tracks, Christopher and Emily looked at each other and squeezed each other's hands. The couple was deeply in love and considered each other soulmates. And one of the best things about their relationship was the sense of adventure they both shared. And tonight was exactly the kind of adrenaline-pumping thing they both loved doing together. And so as the clock ticked down, the couple turned to watch the tracks where they emerged from the woods in the direction they knew the ghost train was supposed to come from.

And as they did this, they actually began to feel the bridge tremble under their feet. And at the same time, they heard a few people start shouting with excitement. It was really happening. From the woods came a low rumbling sound that quickly turned into a roar. And for a second, Christopher and Emily couldn't believe it. Of course, they wanted to see the ghost train. That's why they were there. But they hadn't truly been convinced this ghost train was actually real.

But now, as they watched, a bright light emerged from the woods and flooded the bridge. The ghost train was almost right on top of them. Suddenly, the train blasted its horn, and then Christopher and Emily heard the screeching of the brakes, just like the legend said they would. But this was not fun and spooky. This was actually terrifying. The other ghost hunters on the bridge started screaming and running, and so did Christopher and Emily...

But suddenly Christopher just stopped running and turned to Emily and he looked her in the eyes and told her, "I love you." And then Christopher pushed Emily off the bridge. Not long afterwards, police and paramedics flooded the woods around Bostian Bridge and the ravine beneath it. A helicopter circled overhead shining a bright light down to help them search. And it didn't take long before one of the policemen working his way down the slope that led to the ravine stopped cold and called out for help. He had found Emily.

She was badly injured and barely able to move, but she was alive. The police officer looked up at the bridge over his head. He figured she must have fallen 30 feet or so. It was incredible that she had not died. As paramedics strapped Emily into a neck brace to get her safely on a stretcher, another police officer down in the bottom of the ravine shouted that he needed backup now. That officer had found Christopher.

It would take some time, but the first responders would eventually piece together what had happened on the Bostjian Bridge in the early hours of August 27, 2010. At around 2:45 am, members of the ghost hunting group waiting on the bridge had begun to cheer. They saw a bright light approaching the bridge and they knew this meant the ghost train had arrived. But just seconds later, those cheers turned into screams.

Christopher saw everybody else scattering to get away from the bridge and suddenly he knew exactly what was happening. Passenger trains hadn't used these tracks in decades, but freight trains still did. And by some bizarre chance, one of those freight trains came barreling onto the bridge at the exact time when everybody thought the ghost train would appear. On that freight train, the conductor frantically blew the horn and tried to bring the train to a stop.

But Christopher could tell the train was going too fast and there was no way it could stop in time. And so Christopher and Emily, they started running away from the train down the bridge like the others were. But Christopher saw Emily was lagging behind. And Christopher knew he might be able to outrun this train and get off in time. But from the looks of it, Emily, the love of his life, was not going to be able to do that. And so Christopher made a terrible decision.

He took a quick look down to make sure his desperate plan made sense. Then he stopped running, waiting for Emily to catch up with him. He looked her in the eyes, told her he loved her, and then he pushed her off the bridge. Christopher could see that where they were standing was only about 30 feet above the ravine, not 100. And so he figured by pushing her off the bridge, she had a better chance of surviving a 30-foot fall than of being hit by a speeding freight train.

However, what Christopher must have understood was that by waiting for Emily and pushing her off to try to save her life, it would not leave him enough time to save his own life. And he was right. Almost instantly after he saved his girlfriend's life, the freight train struck him and threw him off the bridge. When the police officer found Christopher a short while later, he was already deceased. As for Emily, she was airlifted to a nearby hospital and she eventually recovered from her injuries.

and so Christopher is remembered as a hero.

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Everybody who knew Arthur, and that was most people in this small town, knew him as an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. But tonight, Arthur clutched a hammer and a chisel in his hands and crept as slowly and quietly as he could because he didn't want anybody to know what he was doing. The moon and stars cast an eerie glow across the town. Arthur was not a superstitious person, in fact he was pretty much the opposite.

But the way the moonlight hit the trees along the road made it look like something was moving in the shadows, and Arthur couldn't help but feel creeped out. Still, the moon and stars provided the perfect amount of light for Arthur to see where he was going without being seen. So he took a breath, collected himself, and moved quickly through the shadows on the road. After walking for a few minutes, he turned onto another dirt road that led to the top of a small hill that was ringed by trees.

There were a few old wooden houses along the Sturt Road, and Arthur saw lights on inside a couple of them. So he crouched down a little bit more to try to hide himself in the dark and picked up his pace. Arthur stopped when he reached the top of the hill. A wrought iron gate and fence stood in his path, and there was a thick metal chain with a lock on it wrapped around the gate. Arthur scanned the darkness all around him and took another steadying breath. He knew everybody in town would think what he was about to do was crazy.

because this land belonged to a man named Carl Pruitt. And Carl Pruitt was dangerous. But tonight, Arthur didn't care. He was on a mission. Arthur pulled on the gate, but the chain and lock kept it closed tight. So he walked a couple of feet away from the gate and just tossed his hammer and chisel over the fence, which was only a few feet tall. And so Arthur grabbed on to the thin wrought iron bars that made up this fence, and very carefully he climbed up and leapt over to the other side.

When he landed, he scooped up his hammer and chisel and walked through some overgrown grass. Now, despite having the hammer and chisel, Arthur did not come to this place in order to work. Instead, he came here to vandalize the place. He had come here really to prove a point. He wanted to show the people in town that Karl Pruitt was not as powerful as they all thought, and they didn't have to live in fear of him any longer.

Just then, Arthur spotted the engraved stone marker he was looking for, a marker that declared in capital letters that this patch of land was Karl's. So, he gripped his chisel tightly and walked towards the marker. But just as he drew close to the marker and raised his tools to strike, Arthur suddenly froze. He couldn't tell if the moon and stars were playing tricks on him, but it looked like a shadow of a large chain had appeared on the ground in front of him.

Arthur instinctively turned around, but he saw he was way too far away from the gate for the chain on it to be casting a shadow all the way over here. However, when Arthur turned back around, the shadow of the chain was now gone. Arthur was shaken up, but he kind of laughed at himself and shook it off. Things always seem to look strange in the dark. And so Arthur placed the metal blade of the chisel directly on the stone marker and then slammed the hammer into the back of the chisel.

A piece of the stone flew off and fell to the ground. And right away, Arthur forgot all about that weird shadow he'd just seen. And instead, he just continued chipping away as fast as he could. He knew the noise he was making could attract attention from the people who lived nearby, and he had no intention of getting caught tonight. But just then, Arthur heard a sound over all the noise he was making. And it sounded like footsteps. Exactly what he'd been trying to avoid.

Arthur stopped hammering and crouched down a few feet away from the stone marker, trying his best to hide. But as Arthur looked around in the darkness, he didn't see anyone. And eventually the footsteps sounds disappeared, at which point Arthur told himself it must have just been the wind blowing through the trees or something. And a bit apprehensively, he got back to work with his hammer and chisel. But suddenly, the sound of the footsteps came back. And this time they were so much louder and they seemed much closer.

Whoever it was, they were clearly making their way towards Arthur. And so Arthur had no idea if it was someone from one of the nearby houses or if a local cop had shown up or something. But either way, he wasn't sticking around to find out. And so he turned around to make a run for it when he froze because something was standing right in front of him blocking his way. Arthur began to shake with fear and then without thinking, he dropped the hammer and chisel and took off running.

Minutes later, in a house located about halfway down the road from where Arthur was, a man was sitting in his front room when he heard a blood-curdling scream coming from the top of the nearby hill that belonged to Carl Pruitt. The man just froze for a second. The sound frightened him, but it also confused him, because people just did not go up to the top of that hill anymore.

But in the eerie silence that followed that scream, this man sort of snapped out of his confusion and shouted for his wife to stay inside and then he ran to the kitchen and found his flashlight. The man stepped outside, flashlight in hand, and ran to the dirt road that led up to the top of the hill. And as he did, he saw a beam from another flashlight a couple yards ahead of him. He quickly recognized that it was his neighbor, so he called out to him.

The neighbor turned around and walked a few steps back down the road, and the two men quickly exchanged notes about the scream they had heard. And then, together, they rushed towards the top of the hill. Once they got there, they arrived in front of the wrought iron gate. And when they shined their flashlights through it onto the ground, they saw something lying just on the other side of the gate. They both just stared at the ground for a few seconds in silence, transfixed by how gruesome the scene was.

Finally, one of the two men said he'd go get help. And then he turned and ran back down the hill and headed straight into town. A little later that night, the man who had gone to get help returned to the top of the hill to the gate now with a police officer. The neighbor who'd been there before hadn't moved. All three men lifted their flashlights and shined them on the ground just beyond the gate. And together, they all stared at the dead body of Arthur Lewis.

The metal chain that had been used to keep the gate locked had been removed and was wrapped around Arthur's neck, and Arthur's face had turned a sickly bluish-gray. The three men looked up from the body and they all just nodded to each other. In most circumstances, the discovery of a dead body like this would cause shock and alarm, but these three men felt nothing but resignation and sorrow. They weren't surprised, panicked, or afraid, because they already knew exactly what had happened.

Everybody in town knew the kind of violence Carl Pruitt was capable of. This is why most people in town would never have set foot on the piece of land where Arthur had gone, and why they would definitely never have vandalized something that belonged to Carl. And this was because of the horrific chain of events that began back in 1938, a few years before Arthur made his fateful trip up the hill.

Back in 1938, late one afternoon, Carl Pruitt had finished a hard day's work in town as a carpenter and headed home. Like most people in this small town, Carl knew pretty much everybody and seemed to get along well with his friends and neighbors. Most days, he worked hard building and repairing things for other people, and then when he got home, he would often find his wife cooking dinner for both of them. But today, when Carl arrived home, he didn't smell anything cooking, and he didn't see his wife in the kitchen.

Instead, he heard a strange noise coming from his bedroom at the back of the house. He ran there to make sure his wife was okay, but when he stepped into the room, he found his wife in bed with another man. Carl began to scream and the other man leapt out of the bed, climbed through the window, and fled across town. As for Carl's wife, she just stayed in the bed, covering herself with a blanket and trying to apologize to her husband and trying to get him to calm down.

But Carl, filled with rage, grabbed a metal chain he used on his job, leapt on top of his wife, wrapped the chain around her throat, and strangled her to death. After the murder of his wife, no one in town ever heard from Carl again. Even though there had never been an arrest or trial, the townspeople were glad Carl was gone. They tried to quickly put this horrific event behind them and basically stopped thinking about Carl Pruitt.

However, within months of this murder, a series of violent deaths began taking place in town and most people did not think these deaths were accidents. The first death that caught people's attention involved a young man who had been seen happily riding his bicycle towards the dirt road that led to the top of the hill. But later that day, someone found the boy back in town lying dead on the street, strangled with his own bike chain.

Days later, after the boy had been buried, neighbors found his mother dead in her own yard. She also had been strangled but with a clothesline while she was out hanging up laundry. These two deaths put the whole town on edge. Even though nobody had seen him, many people suspected that Carl Pruitt must have come back because the boy and his mother had been strangled to death just like Carl's wife had been.

And not long after that, a farmer turned up, strangled with the reins from his own horse-drawn wagon, which prompted a police investigation. However, before he could finish it, that police officer was strangled to death as well, found in an open field with a large chain wrapped around his neck, looking like it had almost decapitated him. After the death of this police officer, combined with all the other strange strangulation deaths, the town had had it, they were terrified, and they went into full panic mode.

Soon, stories began to surface that people had seen Carl wandering through the shadows on this small patch of land he owned on the top of the hill, just waiting for his next victim. And now, Carl appeared to have found his next victim. Arthur Lewis, the man who said he wasn't afraid of Carl, who had traveled up the hill with his hammer and chisel. On top of the hill, the officer and the two men who'd found Arthur's body stood at the gate. The officer told the men to step back and wait over there.

Once they had, he opened the gate, walked through, and stepped directly over Arthur's body. He made his way through the grass and found Arthur's hammer and chisel on the ground. And right next to them was the engraved marker that Arthur had come out to deface. However, when the officer shined his light on the marker, the marker had no damage to it whatsoever. It was completely intact. Not a single piece of the stone had been chipped off by the chisel.

The officer crouched down and moved his light over the stone. And he saw very clearly that on this stone were the words "Carl Pruitt." And next to it were dates. The date Carl was born and the date Carl died. Because this stone marker that Arthur had come up here to deface was actually Carl's gravestone. Because Carl had died back in 1938 on the day he found his wife in bed with another man.

It would turn out, Carl Pruitt not only killed his own wife, but also after seeing what he had done, seeing her dead body, he grabbed a pistol, put it to his head and fired, taking his own life. Soon after the murder-suicide, Carl's wife was laid to rest in the cemetery near her church, but her family demanded that Carl be buried somewhere else. And so Carl was buried in an isolated grave in an old cemetery at the top of that hill.

And of course, since the man was dead, everybody in town assumed he was gone for good and they would never have to deal with Carl again. But that all changed not long after Carl was buried, when people in town reported seeing strange shadows around his gravesite. And these shadows always took on the same form: a large chain like the one Carl had used to murder his wife. The story spread and soon a morbid curiosity about Carl's grave arose in town.

And that's around the same time that the other strangling deaths began. And when people started to claim that maybe Karl's ghost was responsible for them. But being strangled was not the only thing that connected all these victims. It would turn out, not long before their deaths, they had all tried to vandalize Karl Pruitt's grave. Some had done it on a dare, others did it out of anger.

As for the police officer who eventually launched this investigation following all these strangling deaths, well, he didn't vandalize Carl Pruitt's grave, but he was so intrigued by the idea that Carl's ghost could be responsible that he went to the gravesite and began taking photographs. And it was not long after that that he died.

As for Arthur, he did attempt to vandalize the grave, but he was not doing it out of anger or some vendetta against Karl or Adair. He was actually doing it to prove to the rest of the townspeople that there was no such thing as ghosts and that Karl Pruitt was dead and could no longer hurt anyone. However, the instant Arthur began to deface that headstone, someone or something strangled him to death. And many people believe it was Karl Pruitt's ghost.

And despite all those attempts at defacing Karl Pruitt's headstone, that headstone was always found, at least according to local legend, in perfect condition. Following the discovery of Arthur's body, people in town really began to fear Karl Pruitt's ghost and his cursed headstone, and they demanded that the cemetery on the hill be closed. And so family members with loved ones buried up there had their bodies removed and reburied in other cemeteries. However, nobody dared touch Karl's grave.

So, Karl's body remained in that cemetery until 1958, so 20 years after he had killed his wife and taken his own life. At that time in 1958, a strip mining company dug up the ground on the hill, destroying Karl's body and his headstone, and so the curse was said to have finally been lifted. And so, if these two stories tell us anything, it's that if you think you can go searching for ghosts without consequences, you can't.

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

Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. If you enjoyed today's stories and you're looking for more bone-chilling content, be sure to check out all of our studios' podcasts. This podcast, the Mr. Ballin Podcast, and also Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Bedtime Stories, Wartime Stories, Run Fool, and Redacted. Just search for Ballin Studios wherever you get your podcasts to find all of these shows.

To watch hundreds more stories just like the ones you heard today, head over to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya.

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