33.18 - MU Podcast - The Agent of the Dreamscape
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Welcome to Mysterious Universe, Season 33, Episode 18. Coming up on this show, we've got more dreams of future Tokyo, the Wu family possession, and the wave of the metal-oids. I'm your host, Benjamin Grundy. Joining me is Aaron Wright. You've been having some unusual dreams this week, I hear. I haven't been sleeping this week, but when I have been...

pretty unusual dreams. Well, you sent me this text message out of nowhere and you're like, I just had the most crazy lucid dream. I'm like, okay, I'm intrigued. I'll tell you on the show. It's the first lucid dream I've ever had in my life. I've never had a lucid dream. No, neither have I. I mean, maybe I've come close, but not complete and out of control. But you mentioned that you use some technique of looking at your hands. Well, a couple of weeks ago, we covered that great story from

who was at Samantha Treasure. She had that new book, Out of Body Experiences, and she described her trips to future Tokyo. That's right. She'd been having these dreams ever since she could remember of arriving in this mall in some future Tokyo scenario, some weird parallel universe. But as she got older, she got into out-of-body experiences through Robert Monroe's techniques, and she found she kept on going back to the same place. It was like a stable, recurring universe, but

just in her dreamscape and in her out-of-body experiences. Or an actual place that through those experiences she was accessing. Yeah, it was very, very strange. And she...

She also had a friend who just on an odd chance mentioned her strange dreams of going to this weird future Tokyo and they matched notes and it seemed like they were going to the same place. Absolutely bizarre. And so I'd never had a lucid dream before. I barely remember my dreams. Not really my thing. I've tried a dream diary over the years, but they never last more than a week. It's like a week, yeah. It's like too much work to write it down. But the other night, it was after the show on Tuesday night, the Plus show,

I had a really late night and I finally get to sleep. It's like three in the morning. Did you take anything like melatonin? It was the first time I'd had a coffee after midday in like a year. Yeah. And you're pretty super sensitive to caffeine. Super sensitive to caffeine. I usually never sleep on caffeine. For some reason, I was so tired, I fell asleep though. And I'm in this dream and I'm walking out of an electronic store and I come out of the store and I'm in future Tokyo.

And it's bizarre. It's like all these glowing blue and white neon signs and there's people walking everywhere. And I just have this feeling it's like some weird future Japan. I was going to ask you that. Like, why did you know that it was Tokyo? Was there writing that you could see or it was just that? I couldn't read anything. Just the feeling. It just was, it was Japan in my mind, this knowing. And so I crossed the road and I'm not lucid. This is just a dream. I'm not even lucid in this experience. And you know, when you cross the road in any country in the world, there's the sounds.

Yep. Of the light and the little man. Yeah. And the sound goes off and it's the same in Japan. There's a particular sound when you cross the road. Like a chirp. I start crossing the road and all the sounds are kabuki sounds. What? Yeah, like kabuki sounds. Like a soundboard. Like this. It's like this when I'm crossing the road. And everywhere I walk, there's these little like...

Yeah, turn the volume down on that one. There's these little ads everywhere, like screens with ads and rolling displays. They're all making kabuki sounds. Like everything in society is a kabuki sound. And it's so hilarious. It's so ridiculous. Like the yoink goes off.

And I just start laughing in the dream. And then it occurs to me, I'm in a dream. This is a dream. And I remember that trick to look at your hands. Because we'd heard that time and time again from people that have OBEs and out of body experiences and weird lucid dreams. You look at your hands and it's a technique.

to get lucid, to get focused. And for some reason it works. So I look down at my hands after having this thought and it worked. I'm just like instantly locked in. I'm instantly lucid. I've got full control. Now, for those of you listening who have had this experience, you might be thinking, well, big deal, but this has never happened to me before. This is the first time in my life I've been in control. Well, and imagine the fact that you've suddenly realized that you're in control. Yeah.

You can do anything you want. That's the first thing that occurs to my mind. It's like, I can do anything. I can go anywhere. I'm in total control of this dream. So it's a populated street and there's people walking by. There's like a little Japanese business woman walks past and I start walking down the street. Like I'm ecstatic looking around at all the buildings, listening to the kabuki sounds. And I passed this businessman who's going on the other side of the street.

He's on the other side of the footpath and he's a Westerner. He's wearing a gray suit. He's carrying a briefcase. And I remember he kind of looks like Tom Cruise in that movie where he's like a gritty assassin with gray hair. Okay. He kind of looks like that. He's got light gray hair. And I walk past him, don't pay much attention to him. And I'm still thinking, what can I do?

And I think, I'm going to fly. I can do anything. It's a lucid dream. I'm going to fly. And so I start running down the street. Matrix style. And yeah, I jump and I take off and I start flying and it feels incredible. I'm whizzing past. Are you still in the same city? Yeah. And after about, it would have been about two seconds of flying, of like ecstatic flying, something from behind crash tackles me to the ground. And I feel it, like it feels real, like something's grabbing me.

And I scramble up to the ground and this businessman I'd walked past on the street is trying to choke me out. Like he's got his arms around me. He's like trying to hold me down. He's trying to get me in a headlock and choke me out. I'm struggling with him. It's like he's some type of guard for this dream. And I turn around and I make eye contact with him.

And suddenly it just pops into my mind. You're an agent. Like, you're an agent. What are you talking? Are you high? Did you go to sleep watching The Matrix? No, I hadn't thought about The Matrix, but it just pops into my head. I'm like, you're an agent and you're trying to stop me. And he just looks at me and continues to, like, choke me out. See, the one thing that occurred to me as you were describing this is that, like, we've often heard about people experiencing flying dreams. It's only because I've been reading about it this week. But it's actually a very...

And they are common, but you have to be very careful for people that experience flying dreams because they're commonly associated with screen memories for abductees. Oh, really? Yeah. Abductees commonly report that they have these flying dreams, but the flying dream is some type of... Them being whisked out. Yeah. It's like somehow how the body somehow processes what's going on during the abduction. The feeling I got that...

I was forbidden to be lucid. I wasn't permitted. He's like a portal guardian. It's like he wanted me to just stop. I had to stop. I wasn't permitted to experience this. Did you engage with him? Did you talk to him? I was struggling. I was fighting him. And I woke up. I got so excited, like the adrenaline rush. Because it felt real. It was like me having a fight with you right now in this room. It felt real.

And I wake up from the adrenaline surge and I'm terrified, like this feeling of immense fear. And I had to like pull the blanket up over me. I was really scared. And it doesn't make any sense. Like there was nothing super scary about the situation, but it was the feeling. No, no, but being tackled by someone that would cause everything to go. It's like that wasn't even what I was scared about. It was something else. No, no, but your adrenaline would go up.

Like obviously if you're thinking that you're fighting someone and you're defending yourself, it would cause a rush of all those chemicals. So it makes sense that when you wake up, you would still have those chemicals. My heart was pumping. I was sweating. You know, like what you always hear with these weird dreams. And what was interesting about it is the feeling of waking up with that terror. It was familiar. And I realized that I had woken up, I've woken up like that.

probably countless times over my life, but never remembered why. This was the first time I'd woken up and had that feeling of this fear and understood what it was connected to because I'd never been lucid like that in a dream before. So I wondered how many times this has happened where I've been tackled or attacked in some dream state. But because I haven't been lucid, I don't recall it when I wake up. All I remember is this feeling of fear. Well, it sounds like you've been suffering from

from night terrors, but not able to, as you're saying, able to recall what's taking place. But maybe you're going to some same space. I don't know. So the next day I was like, it's on, let's go. Like, I'm going to go back and take him on. I haven't been able to recreate it. Yeah, you can't. And I wonder though, you've got a question. Is it just simply because of the nature of what we've been talking about with those topics recently? In fact, it's been a couple of weeks. Is that incorporated into your mind? But for you to have that experience of actually lucid dreaming,

That's a little bit different. And I do question whether or not, see, when I, remember how I told you I ate a bunch of chocolate-coated coffee beans? Yeah. And then I took a melatonin that night. And I kid you not, it was DMT kind of experiences. Wow. And it was just simply because of the substances that you take. Nothing that's illegal. It was just, it was this bad combination and it was nuts. I think the coffee had something to do with it. It does. I can never sleep on caffeine at all.

But because I was psychoactive, because I had a few nights with hardly any sleep, I was just so tired. I zonked out, but still with the caffeine high. And I think that's what helped. Or my theory is it's purely kabuki sounds that put you in a lucid state. So I'm going to, I'm going to put together a kind of dream tape where it's just kabuki sounds that trigger the

in my REM state. Again, you probably just fell asleep with our soundboard playing. Three hours, like three hours into my REM state, I want to hear this. And I reckon, like I find it's so funny.

I'll just be like, I'll snap out. I'll snap away. It's a dream. But no, that's the, that's a technique that lucid dreamers use. They use like certain audio and sounds to cause them to, you know, like they hear it externally, but it incorporates into the dream. And that is a notice to wake up in the dream. It's one of the lost Robert Monroe tapes, the Kabuki edition. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's that, but.

But isn't it weird that you ended up in that kind of futuristic city? Yeah. I mean, I've got to obviously say I was influenced, even though it had been two weeks since we covered that segment from, what was the name, Samantha. I hadn't thought about it in two weeks, but it is odd that I was in some weird future Tokyo. I don't like these things, these agents. The agents.

Yeah, it felt like he was a policeman in Dreamworld. Well, he's a portal guardian. And he was keeping an eye on me. Just like the Matrix, he walked past appearing to be a normal guy in the world, but he wasn't. He was watching and he was making sure that I didn't take off. See, I could like...

belittle you and make fun of you for being so scared at, you know, a man in your 40s of being, you know, waking up from a bad dream and being terrified. But that's what happened to me last night. Really? Yeah. But it was like, you remember I kept on saying, like, for whatever reason, and it just must be because of this, this situation,

sleep stages that I go through and like you and I haven't been sleeping and work's been crazy because our office is being kids are sick kids are sick it's everything like that but I've always had these weird sensations that there's like something standing next to the bed and it stopped for so long and I was like this is awesome this is great and like I've stopped like

reading any of this stuff outside of work. And I was like, okay, great. Last night, I have this dream, this thing, I can't see it, but it's standing next to the bed once again. And it comes over with this finger and it just goes like that. You couldn't see it, but you sensed a presence. I sensed a presence, right? And it flicked my face here. And so, of course, I wake up and I'm like, my face is hurting. I did the same, like pull the blanket over. I'm like, you start crying. Mommy.

Yeah, it's terrifying. It's terrifying. I haven't thought about turning the light on. I'm like, should I turn the light on? But I'm like, if there's something there, I don't want to see it. I don't want to deal with it. I think it's purely because you're in that semi-hypnagogic state that makes you...

so, so fearful. Yeah, it really does. It's like a physiological thing. Yeah, it is a physiological thing. And like anything that's like rational, like, oh, come on, it's ridiculous. Like I'm not scared of the dark. I'm not scared of anything like that. But when you're in that state, for whatever reason, it's not that you're physically vulnerable, but I think you're, you're psychically vulnerable, which is why so many people report like the sleep paralysis experiences. It's around that time.

And I think that's far more dangerous than the physicality of these things because once you're back in the full physical, if there are these entities, these non-physical entities, they can't really get to you in the physical. Is that what you're going to be talking about today? No, actually, I'm going to be going into this really great little pamphlet that I picked up. When I say pamphlet, it's 113 pages long. But it was this publication that was put out by David Webb back in the late 1970s. Okay. And it's called 1973 Year of the Humanoids.

And I thought, oh, hang on a second. Like, we know 1973 because we often reference the work of Stan Gordon and the great deal of research he did through Pennsylvania of this weird connection of Bigfoots being associated with UFO activity. And it really took off in 1973. Like, it was huge. Did I say 83 before? 73. You said 73. Yeah, it really, really took off. But funnily enough, David Webb...

has done something that I really like researchers doing. He's tried to critically analyze the reports and the data and get like a map out of them, get some type of information flowing. And I just have a heap of like histogram charts and stuff, which I won't bore you with.

But he's found some really intriguing similarities in these cases that suggest that, yeah, this is what it is about with paranormal phenomena. Yes, it is about the stories and people having their individual experiences. And of course, we have to listen to them and we have to describe those stories. But it's also looking at the bigger picture. What the hell is going on? I returned a UFO book I had this morning. Did you? Which was all about 1973. Really? By whom? Yeah.

I can't remember. It was just like a Kindle Unlimited book. I just returned it because I wasn't going to cover it on the show. But it's funny, like if you search 1973 UFO, you get all these results. Like that was the year. 1954 was the year in France. There was a French wave. 1973 was really, I mean, even though stuff did happen globally in 1973, it was the United States and it was awesome.

October of 1973, which coincides with Stan Gordon's work. A lot of that weird Bigfoot UFO ball of light activity was October of 1973. The portals were opened. What is it about that date?

The portals were opened. Maybe. Maybe. So what are you going to come up with on this episode? Well, I thought my weird lucid dream I was so excited about would be the perfect end to an amazing segment. And so I started to look for things that were related, you know, something we could sink our teeth into, a nice juicy story. Well, I see you've got a big foot with a taco here. So I...

Is that what you're trying to sink your teeth into? I didn't really get any hits, you could say. I mean, we've been doing this show for what, how long is it now? 18 years? I don't know. The hits are getting rarer in terms of how many times you find something that you haven't done before. Like often I'll find a book and I'm like, this is awesome. I'll start reading the story. I'll get like 30% into the story. And I'm like, it sounds kind of familiar. It's really good. It sounds familiar though.

And then I look up my notes and I did it like 12 years ago. I know the story back to front or I load up some book and it's got all my highlights in it. Yeah, I do that. I like get a Kindle book and download. I'm like, oh, this is going to be great. I'm like, oh, highlight. Like we're really at the tip of the bull's horn. We can't dig any deeper. Guys, keep going. Keep going. No. But occasionally you do find these diamonds amongst the rough or you just find rough.

Uh, so I found this book that was, I can't remember the name of the author because I trashed it. Right. It was a woman who, uh, she started having lucid dreams. And so I thought, here's my in, I can connect it. But she started having lucid dreams about Bigfoot.

It all started when she had this knee injury. She did a ligament twist or something and she was- Bigfoot attacker in the woods? No, no, nothing to do with Bigfoot. She wasn't even interested in Bigfoot. And she just was, you know, on crutches and couldn't get out of the house. And she was just getting so frustrated. She thought one day, like, I've got to get out of the house. I've got to go and just walk a little bit somehow. But it was just excruciating to move. And so what she did is she got on Google and she started to look up

How do I walk without bending my knee? And because if she bent her knee. Yeah, I get it. I'm just thinking like. Or no, how to walk without straightening your knee, I think it was. Anyway, she Googles it. And one of the results was about the ancestors of great apes and how they move. And so she starts reading it.

And it's an article and it mentions Gigantopithecus and Australopithecus, like the ancestors of the great apes. And us. Yeah. And some of them were supposedly bipedal. And she starts reading. They both were. Well, she starts reading this article.

this article about it and it links to another thing about Gigantopithecus and it mentions that they could be responsible for modern day Bigfoot sightings, that there's some kind of surviving Gigantopithecus or ancient relative. I don't buy that. Yeah, obviously it doesn't fit in with the evidence, but...

That's one of the ideas that it's this surviving population. And so she reads it and she's like, oh, that's really interesting. Now I know the answer to Bigfoot. That's cool. Just like, okay. And that also tells me this technique so I can walk and not be in as much pain. So that afternoon she drives to the mall and she tries this new walking technique she's learned from the internet and it works. She gets about 30 feet from her car and she's like, this is actually working. She's got this weird gate going, but it's working.

Until she gets to about 35 feet into the mall and there's this, oh, and she's like, ah, she's in so much pain. It's like those gym videos you see where it goes, oh. She's in so much pain. She can barely move. And all she thinks is I've got to make it back to the car. Like, please God help me. I've got to make it back to the car, but she can't, she can't, she can't move. She's just collapsed on the floor. She's in so much pain.

She feels some force unseen come and lift her up. She's suddenly here. Yeah, come from underneath her arms and like give her support. And she starts kind of screaming.

semi-walking, semi-gliding back to the car. And she can't understand what... She can feel something touching her shoulders. She looks. There's no one there. But like a third man effect. Yeah. She can feel someone lifting her up. She looks. There's no one there. And she's about 10 feet from her car and she looks down because she can feel something swishing beside her legs. And she looks down and she claims she sees two sets of thin, hairy legs walking beside her. Just the legs. Like they stop at the hips. Yeah.

And they got big feet and they're walking next to her. And it suddenly clicked. She's like,

This is somehow Bigfoot. Oh, my God. Bigfoot is helping me get back to my car. Let's look what's happened. For whatever reason, she's gone and Googled how to walk like a tard, and it's given her this Ostalopithecus and Gigantopithecus. And she's like, oh, that answers Bigfoot. We'll put that to the side. And then yet somehow this invisible Bigfoot is now carrying her? Well, it turns into a full-on psychic Bigfoot contactee experience where...

He's showing up in her bedroom at night. She can see him, but the husband can't see him. The husband's really supportive. He's like, whatever you say, honey, I believe it. You say it, I believe it. So tell me, so she obviously, he gets her back into the car.

Yeah, she drives home. She doesn't know what it is. She starts to get really involved in the Bigfoot scene. Like she goes to conferences. She starts reading alternative Bigfoot books that talk about them being the forest people and being psychic. So she's reading a lot of corny lapserooks. Yeah, she hires a psychic and the psychic's like, oh, they want to make contact with you. Like all the usual stuff. And her house is just plagued with poltergeist stuff. Like it's just a pure poltergeist experience, but she's just convinced it's Bigfoot.

And ultimately I didn't cover it because the big kind of the big coup de grace, the big reveal at the end, like the pinnacle of the story is that this ghost Bigfoot reunites her with her dead cat, a ghost cat. And this is like, this is meant to be the whoa part of the story. So I naturally my face when that happened was like, whoa, wow. Yeah.

This is a banger for the show. So at this stage, I'm like, I'm hours into this story thinking, where do we actually go from here? But yeah, that was the big reveal. So I...

I get to work. I drive into work, right? And today, man, you know how you're trying to read, you're trying to concentrate and any little noise just throws you out. Yeah, I can't function with any noise. I get into work and these ethers over here behind you, Aaron, on the other side, they're doing renovations today. And so the entire morning is bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, rock music going. Oh, this studio has been the biggest mistake. Biggest mistake ever. So?

So I'm like, I've got to go to the library or something. This is just insane. I can't work here. So I go to the local library. I go to the Marushi door library. Oh, that would have been fun.

Was it a bit meth-y? Yeah. It's like you look up the reviews for the Maroochydore library and most of them say it's really good, but you might have a crackhead ask you for spare change. It's right near the courthouse. Oh, is it? Yeah. So it's like you just get like, oh, yeah, I cut my car card off because I was drink driving again. I'm like, oh.

A couple of the reviews were from young women who said there's creepy old men that crack onto you and try and touch you. Other than that, it's a really good experience. But I did find this book on the shelf. Where is it? Oh, it's not, not sinking. Why isn't it sinking? No, but the image that came up that people could, what's this other image you've got? What the hell is going on with you? Well, it's from this book, A Hundred Weirdest Tales from Across Australia. I'm like, sweet. Thanks, Ben. Ben Pobjie.

has saved me and i was looking through it's like the usual stuff we would expect it's got the big cat emu war big cat stories emu war thank you it's got uh you know like haunted australian shifts that you've covered a billion times yeah we stories you know a billion things that we we've seen before and then i get to this uh chapter entitled the perplexity of the poo jogger

do you know this story i do know this story this is from brisbane i didn't even know this story the poo jogger yeah so andrew douglas mcintosh of green slopes brisbane will forever go down in history as the man who made green slopes a little less green andrew mcintosh was a silver fox of 64 years with a good job at a major retirement village company he had a place on the infrastructure board at the brisbane city council

Well, that explains everything. Ben writes that many in such a comfortable position live out their lives quietly playing by the rules, refusing to make a splash or rock the boat for fear of threatening their cushy bourgeoisie existence. Andrew McIntosh was not such a man. He felt himself chafing at the bonds in which middle-class Western civilization had ensnared him. So here's a guy who is a revolutionary at heart.

But as Ben writes, constrained by the norms of Western civilization. And pants, apparently. But one day on his morning jog, he had a slight urge to go and he saw a brand new apartment building that had just been constructed. And he realized that there was a temptation burning inside him. And much like, you know, Bilbo in The Hobbit, he said, why shouldn't I? Why shouldn't I?

And he took a massive dump on that particular apartment building. And that wasn't the last time he did it. He loved it so much. He really enjoyed it. Every single morning after that, he would go on a jog in the morning and he would take a dump on a different brand new apartment building in Brisbane. Wow.

There must be something psychosexual or something going on here. Because why do you... I get it. I've heard... Have you heard of the runner shits? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like people... He's just going for a 30-minute jog. Yeah, but there are people that do marathons and they literally shit their pants from the physical exertion, right? But this guy just couldn't hold on for 15 minutes and has gone, oh...

desecrating this new building has just somehow excited me. I'm going to do it to every building I can find. Yeah, he did it so often that the media dubbed him the poo jogger and no one could catch him. Police were on the lookout. No one could catch the guy. He was doing it at different times, hitting a different building every week. And poop is really hard to get DNA out of. Is it? Yeah, it's really hard. So it's like,

And so basically all these buildings that were being affected by the poo jogger, they had stakeouts. Like there was a community effort to stake out and try and catch him. And one day they caught him. They got him. Macintosh was taken into custody, given a hefty fine, lost his job and subsequently never poo jogged again. And that's when I realized that Maroochydore Library is not the hot spot to get banger stories. Yeah.

It's not.

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There was one in Sydney too. Was there? Yeah, there was one in Sydney and she kept on like, you know in Sydney how you've got like all those laneways? So she would just get up in the morning, another jogger would go for a run, poop in the laneway. And it was only after they set up cameras that they're able to catch it. And it was near where you and I used to be. It was just St. Leonard's. Did you see the guy in Sydney who was just going for a swim?

No. There was this couple, this family, they had a pool in their backyard and on their camera. I did see that. Guy would just come and go for a swim in their pool. Yeah. And he'd just do it every afternoon. Rather than complaining about it and giving it to the media, put a lock on your gate. Put a toaster in there.

I don't think electrocuting someone is probably appropriate. It's probably not proportionate. Well, it is appropriate for this show because obviously I couldn't finish on the poo jogger, a bit of a throwaway story. To be honest, Ben, you couldn't really start on the poo jogger. So I started to look around for something else. I needed more. And I liked the segment you did on the last plus show on the classic story of Jeff the talking mongoose. And while you were talking about that segment,

This famous case of this family that had poltergeist activity, but they saw this strange spirit that appeared as a weasel or a mongoose. Some of them described it as a weasel. And as you were describing that, it made me think of the classic yellow weasel from Chinese mythology. Right. Well, you were referencing the idea that's like the kitsune or the fox spirit. These are low-level entities which you have to beware of.

And so that particular weasel, the yellow weasel, is one of these dangerous entities that you should be fearful of. Supposedly the most associated with spirit possession in East Asia. And we've covered a bunch of the Kitsune and, you know, fox spirits possessing people in these older and new stories, new experiences from the East.

I wanted to investigate this a little bit more and I found this post from a prolific Reddit poster who we've covered a couple of times in the past, Moondog151, he goes by. He's a Canadian guy, I believe. And most of his posts are true crime stories, but he's done a couple of paranormal ones over the years. Remember the guy who was in a Chinese village and he just went to sleep one night and woke up like three hours train ride away in a different city in China? No.

He was teleporting in his sleep. Oh, yes, I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And ultimately, we discovered that it was two strange immortals that would appear to him. And take him flying. And take him flying at night. And a lot of this was verified by police reports. He would turn up

Well, he was a farmer, wasn't he? Yeah, he was a farmer. He would turn up in cities that were impossible for him to get to in the amount of time he traveled. Right. Even with high-speed rail, which wasn't there at the time. Also, because of the draconian sort of citizen monitoring as well, there would be a record of him utilizing their public transport network, and there wasn't. I remember even if he caught a plane, he still couldn't have got to this other city in time. So it was a real mystery, a couple of great cases like that. And I came across this fairly recent post he did,

on what I'll call the Wu family incident. And it reminded me of this, you know, topic we've been talking about Jeff, the talking mongoose and this idea of possession. So this goes back to April, uh, the 11th, 2005 in Taiwan, there was a man named Wu Shan. He's left his home in the, the Gushan district in Kaohsiung in Taiwan. Uh,

It was notable that he had come out of his home because he and his entire family had become complete recluses over the last couple of weeks. No one had seen this guy or any family member leave the house in over a month, actually.

When he finally did step outside, he looked completely changed. He was disheveled. He was emaciated. Were they eating? I guess if you're not going out. He looked like he wasn't. He walked up to a neighbor straight away. And without any explanation, he just said, the home. Go inside the home. He added, call an ambulance. And he just walked away. It's like he was in shock.

He didn't say who the ambulance was for. He didn't offer any more details to this neighbor. So obviously the neighbor's like, this is bizarre. I've got to go and check this guy's house. So the neighbor that she enters the residence, which I've got on the screen here, it's just this little, you know, little duplex. And the neighbor goes in and immediately it just reeks of rot in there.

uh it didn't take long before the neighbor found 28 year old wu jing who was the eldest daughter of the family lying on the floor they claimed they could see foam around her mouth uh her body had already gone stiff and she was in rigor mortis yeah so she'd been there for yeah how long the neighbor calls the police uh they summon an ambulance but obviously yeah it's too late 12 hours she's stiff she was pronounced dead at the scene but at the hospital they do a forensic examination she's been dead for two days

Her body showed signs of prolonged abuse. She was covered in bruises. She had burn scars. More shockingly, her mouth, esophagus, and stomach were filled with human feces. The cause of death was listed as multiple organ failure due to prolonged starvation. The bruises were extensive, but they weren't severe enough to be the cause of death. It wasn't like huge hits with a blunt object or anything. So what was it? Well, some of them appeared self-inflicted, some of these wounds.

So what did she die from? Well, no one from the family came to claim the body. Well, they, they, she, I think she'd just been dead from starvation. That was the initial, the initial ruling. But yeah, no one from the family came to claim the body. The hospital tried to contact the relatives. They couldn't get through to anyone. So it wasn't until April the 13th that the police got back on the case. They suspected abuse and feared that the, you know, the rest of the family were on the run. Yeah.

So investigators start interviewing the neighbors and the hospital staff and a picture begins to form of what took place. The Wu family had become reclusive shortly after moving into the home and no one in the neighborhood had seen them outside since. The injuries to Jing's body could not all be self-inflicted because many of them were consistent with beatings. So someone was beating her up. When police enter the home, again, this foul stench is in every room.

Thick curtains are blocking out all the sunlight. The windows are all shut tight. There's no fresh air in there. And there's a shrine to the third prince, a Taoist deity in the living room surrounded by all these weird statues. There's these strange talismans I've got on the screen here that are above every single window, which might be reasonably common in some East Asian households. It's like you're warding off spirits or something.

But in the context of this scenario, it's especially weird. They had these scrolls and other talismans on all the windows as well. So police interview the neighbors and they start to describe this family. So Shan, the father, he's in his 50s. He lived with his wife and they had four adult children, three daughters, one son. Wu Jing, the girl that died, the body they found, she was the eldest.

She had graduated and moved to Beijing. And later she opened a bento shop, lived with her boyfriend. Her siblings remained in their hometown Kaohsiung. One son worked at a factory. The other two daughters were both nurses. Pretty normal situation. At the end of February 2005, Jing suddenly returned to Taiwan from Beijing.

Less than a month later, the entire family started acting strangely. This is what the neighbors said. The family just got weird when the eldest daughter came back from China. Neighbors noticed their behavior deteriorating. Even extended relatives kind of cut contact with them because they were acting a bit bizarre. Once the case hit the news, though, all five family members turned themselves in. They went to the Kaohsiung District Prosecutor's Office. They were all questioned.

The story is when they were questioned by the police, they all said the same thing. They said, our sister or our daughter, Wu Jing, isn't dead. What died was the demon possessing her. So, okay, nice excuse. Well, her body would say otherwise. Believing the family might be inventing a bizarre story to avoid accountability, as you would, the police start separating all the family members. They start interrogating them separately. Individual, sorry, the investigators notice something striking.

Each family member has similar bruises, like up their arms, on their chest, their faces are marked, nearly identical to the kind of wounds that were on the woman that died, Wu Jing. Obvious signs of abuse on all of them. Shan and his wife, Yang Ying, had always lived in this area in Kaohsiung. They worked manual labor jobs, but unlike their parents, their four children were well-educated, held good jobs.

Neighbors recalled the family as very normal. They were a little bit superstitious, but so were a lot of people in Taiwan. I mean, they had the shrine and all that sort of stuff. But the shrine they had was a little weird. They had a shrine to the third prince, Nezha. What's wrong with that? Well, Nezha, I think I've mentioned Nezha on the show before because it's one of my favorite ancient Chinese legends.

And here's on the screen, oh, that's the statue there. That's the shrine, right? They had all these other unknown ones, but that was the main shrine. So they don't have a Buddha or anything. They don't have the usual Guanyin or anything like that. They got this Nei Zhan. So Nei Zhan, this kid was born during the Shang Dynasty. His father was a military commander, Li Jing, famous military commander.

The story is his mother got pregnant with him. And after nine months, you know, she was showing the big bump. She was still pregnant. And after 18 months, she was still pregnant. And after 24 months, she was still pregnant. Finally, after three years and six months, she finally gives birth. And what comes out is a giant slimy flesh ball.

This is very similar. I do remember this story. And it also reminds me actually of what we were just talking about with possessions last week. And I was referencing that work of the, what was it? The psychosexual activities of a cult, which is, I can't remember exactly what the book was. Remember how I was telling you the stories of,

that thought that they were copulating with demons and the Satan entities. I forgot to look that up. Yeah, and that she was... See, that's your show content for today, Ben, not going to the library. But regardless, if you recall, it was believed that they were copulating with corpses and demons, but then they realised it was something like an instrument. It was a machine of some kind. There's other stories in there that describe women...

that get pregnant, right? But they get impregnated by like a demonic force or an entity and they have it for a certain amount of time and then the entity comes back and then the entity, like they have some vision and it leaves and they're no longer pregnant. Except they had

like physical presentation of pregnancy. And then suddenly it's like they weren't pregnant at all. Well, it's like the father, Li Jing, he had heard your segment and he knew all these stories. So as soon as he sees his wife give birth to a giant pink, slimy flesh ball, he gets his sword out and he's just, he thinks it's a demon. So he goes to slice it.

And he does a perfect- It just actually sounds like it's a growth or it's like a fibroid or something. It was huge, according to the story. Yeah, but they've misinterpreted something which is very much biological. Well, he chops it open. A fully formed 13-year-old boy jumps out. Okay, that's not a fibroid or anything similar. He's like, ha-ha! He jumps out.

And he's fully formed. And apparently, according to the legend, he's glowing with divine energy, right? His name's Nejar. And the story goes that he's a, it's like similar to what you're describing, but he's not a spawn of demon copulation. He's a spawn of divine energy. It's like some higher being decided to place him in the egg and put him in his mother. So he ends up being trained by some Taoist master, right?

And according to the story, he had all these supernormal abilities, like he had fire wheels that he could spin on his feet and it allowed him to fly. There's all these cool stories. That's why I love it. It's a great, great legend. And he ends up battling one of the dragon kings. Why would they have a statue of such a deity in their home? See, I don't know. Like, why do you worship Nejar? Is he considered a fertility god because he comes out of an egg? Or is he a protector?

Well, yeah, he's like some kind of warrior protector. Anyway, that's, I just thought I should tell the background between, because people look at this statue and think, what is that? But yeah, that's the story of Nejar. What's going on with my mouse today? So this all goes back. So all of this change to the family before, you know, the eldest sister, the eldest daughter was dead. Something happened in February of 2005.

The youngest daughter, Wu Ling, suddenly came to her mother and said, Mother, I'm no longer myself. I'm possessed by Nezha, this entity from the statue they worship. She says, Mother, he's controlling me.

And she starts to speak to her mother, but this weird male voice comes out of her, this kind of deeper, gruff voice. It says, your eldest daughter, Wu Jing, is in grave danger. She must return to Kaohsiung by February 28th or she will die. And so the mother, obviously worshipping this being and believing in all this, is immediately terrified, obviously believes the entity, but

The entire family traveled to Taipei to retrieve Jing. And they track her down. You know, she's running her business. And they track her down and says, listen, a spirit possessed your sister. It's Neijia. The third prince says you're facing catastrophe. You have to come back with us or you're going to die. So you'd think she'd be skeptical. She's got her whole life in Taipei. She's got her business going. She's got her boyfriend there. She's been brought up in this household that worships Neijia.

So she's like, all right. It's time to go. Drop everything. She leaves her boyfriend. She leaves her business, drops her entire life, moves back to her hometown with her parents and moves into the home. Now, her mental- Are they then awaiting to hear? As soon as she moves in, her mental health just rapidly deteriorates. She starts having vivid, lucid dreams. She believes she's being sexually assaulted in these dreams.

She becomes too afraid to sleep at night. She rests during daylight hours or tries to sleep during daylight hours when everyone else is, you know, awake and up. Now, naturally, the family sought out a Taoist priest because they want to remove this possessing spirit that's taken over the eldest daughter. They still believe that this Neji is protecting them and had warned them about a real dangerous demon.

So the Taoist priest comes, they do this ceremony. It seems to work for a few days, but then the nightmares continue. But this really reinforces what we were talking about last week with this idea that you perform an exorcism and then you give yourself over to this higher power. And this is what this family's doing. They go, oh, it's something that we worship. It's something that we revere. It's going to protect us.

Clearly, it's an entity masquerading, pretending. Yeah, the whole thing sounds like a setup from the get-go. And it's like, she was fine, but now she's entered the domain of this spirit.

That gave the message in the first place. And she's being attacked. And physicality, as much as it sounds to be silly, it's like, because there can be shared psychotic breaks. Like families can, but it's rare, right? But that can occur. But also in demonology, it seems like physical presence makes a big difference as well.

Yeah, if you're within the field of this entity, you're vulnerable. Yeah, it certainly seems to be the case. Well, she starts to grow disheveled. She's not sleeping properly. She's not eating properly. She looks withdrawn. She looks like her energy is being sapped. Well, if there really is an entity, of course the energy is being sapped. In early March, the family said they got this strange phone call.

And the eldest daughter answered and then had a strange look on her face and then hung up. No one knows what the call was. No one knows who was on the other end. But after she received this phone call, she declared herself to be Bodhisattva Guan Yin.

like the goddess of mercy like one of the main higher beings of the panther well it's kind of the equivalent of someone like putting the phone down and saying well i'm now the reincarnation of jesus yeah or the virgin mary or something right uh she has used uh the eldest daughter's human form to descend to earth so this is when she starts self-harming she starts striking herself hitting herself with a broom like jabbing herself with sharp instruments

After this, the entire family becomes possessed. Every single one of them, one after the other. With what, different entities or the same entities? Yeah. So the father declares himself as the Jade Emperor. He now has the Jade Emperor inside his body to try and combat this evil spirit. The wife, Yang Ying, a few days later, she claims she has the Queen Mother of the West inside her, controlling her.

The next day, the daughter, Wu Qian, calls us the second daughter. She calls herself one of the seven fairies. These are the daughters of the Jade Emperor. She's one of them. The son, feeling left out, claims he's the Taoist master. Where is he? Monk Ji Gong. He's possessed as well. The entire family is possessed. They all believe the house is filled with demonic energy.

And the divine spirits that have now possessed them are there to battle the evil within. Did anyone ever check for like a mold outbreak in the home? It's funny. Is there something in the water? That's what everyone says. It's like, okay, so there's some kind of food, gas leak. Yeah, some kind of mold poisoning thing.

uh nothing was revealed like no i don't know if tests were done in that vein you would expect something like that would be pretty obvious well and you would imagine with the daughter who sadly died there would be toxicology that would be run so surely that would show up you know most substances no mention of that from early march to april this delusion consumes the entire household the family believed violent exorcisms were necessary to combat this evil so the

Because they all believe each other is possessed by demonic energy, they're all trying to exercise each other at random intervals. So is this the infliction of bruising? They do this by throwing rice and salt at each other, which you can see in this image on the screen. Oh, a wonderful recreation there, Ben. They beat one another with brooms, crutches, mops, even ancestral tablets from their home shrine they used to crack each other's skull with.

Eventually, they begin stabbing each other with burning incense sticks to get rid of the demons. Works every time. Weirdly, none of this works. Wu Jing, who had first shown signs of possession, was seen as carrying the most demonic energy, so she endured the worst abuse, which is probably the girl in yellow on the screen there. She wasn't allowed to eat afternoon, could only drink water, and was limited to just a few hours of sleep each day.

Their behavior continued to spiral. They stopped working, rarely left the house. So this is when the neighbors notice, okay, when they're not coming out, we haven't seen them in weeks. They only wore black clothing because they believed the black fabric would absorb the yin, absorb the evil energy. And so the neighbors took pictures because they would dry it. All their clothing they hung up to dry was all these black cloaks and black hoodies and stuff. They're just hanging out with Kanye West. It's weird, isn't it?

When not worn, the garments were hung over the balcony. Talismans, again, covered every window and they burned gold paper daily at the doorway. So they're going all out to try and stop these spirits and the neighbors could hear them.

It was like a kung fu movie in there every day. Look, why is the neighbors though, why are they not contacting the authorities or reporting it to someone? You don't want to get involved in other people's business. Look, I know you don't want to, but if you see an entire family starting to behave in a very erratic fashion. But they're not seeing them. They're just hearing them. They just said they're burning paper at the door every morning. Superstitious. Just superstitious.

Uh, apparently the neighbors could hear them. It was like kicking and punching and fighting. So yeah, maybe that was, yeah, maybe they should call the police. Uh, one night Sean wandered, this is the father. He wandered to a neighbor's door, ranting, rambling incoherently. He declared himself the Jade Emperor to the neighbors. Okay. That's also a point where it's maybe you should contact someone. Well, his daughter dragged him back inside, uh, beating and kicking him and punching him on the way back in. So maybe the neighbors thought, well, everything's under control here. Uh,

The neighbors, terrified they might be the next demon, chose not to intervene. So that's the example. That's the answer. They didn't want to get possessed as well. So best to stay away from the demon-possessed family. The diet became even more disturbing. They stopped eating regular food, convinced it was tainted by demons. Instead...

They smeared one another in their own feces and urine, forcing each other to ingest it. The reasoning was they believed this would disgust the spirits enough to leave their bodies. So that Brisbane pooping guy really was just the equivalent of Uber Eats. Yeah.

You see how everything connects? It makes all sense. You see how masterfully planned this entire segment was from start to finish?

So Wu Jing consumed the most feces, which is why they found it in her system in the autopsy. Even the extended relatives noticed something was wrong because Jing, I think that's the wife, visited the aunt's home, one of the aunt's homes, to perform an exorcism. But on the way there, she was apparently spitting and kicking at strangers on the street. Which is what demonic possessions do. They spit. Everyone's asking about mold and ergot poisoning. I'm like, how about demon possession?

Well, I don't know. That seems like the obvious thing that's going on. I'm not familiar with Taiwanese culture. Do they recognize demonic possession? Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah, spirit possession. So by April 9th, Wu Jing had been starved, beaten, sleep deprived for nearly a month. That night she collapsed on her bed, foaming at the mouth. Her heartbeat faint. Now, the two sisters who were both nurses...

When her sister lost consciousness, when their sister lost consciousness, for some reason they snapped out of it. It's like they were momentarily with it. They got their right mind back and they attempted CPR. They tried to revive her, but she died. And after she died, the family just went on with life.

just left the body there and went on with their normal routine. Well, whether it's a psychotic break or a demonic possession, it's really two of the same because they're not going to be rational and go, oh, there's a dead body in the house. We should do something. Well, it was rational in a way because they still believed that the body had a demon inside it. And so they didn't want to touch it because the demon would then jump out.

But then you have to question why. I mean, I know that they got in a Taoist priest earlier, but if you've got a demonic body lying in front of you, wouldn't you contact some type of like another Taoist? Well, it was like the daughter dying snapped the father out of it. It's like he gained control momentarily. And that's when he's kind of stumbled out and told the neighbors to go inside. So it took him two days to kind of come out and do something about it.

So police obviously arrange psychiatric evaluations. And what did that determine? That they're all totally fine. No signs of psychosis. Again, that's what Ed and Lorraine Warren were talking about in the number of times that they dealt with demonic possession cases. One of their first approaches was to ensure that the person is not suffering from some type of psychotic condition.

And nine times out of 10, they weren't. No signs of mental illness, you know, nothing in their history. Not even extended family members had history of mental illness. It just wasn't there. That's not to say necessarily that perhaps, you know, they've had an environmental exposure to something and that's where it comes back to mold, contaminants. Well, they said there was no medical defense. So you would think that that would have come up, right? Police charged the family with abandoning a helpless person resulting in death.

After their arrest, the neighbors returned and pulled their funds for a Taoist priest to cleanse the house and the entire neighborhood. So it's like everyone around them believed it was some kind of spirit possession. The court delivered the verdict on April the 12th, 2007. Not guilty. They're all not guilty. Through what means? Because obviously it can't be through means of mental deficiency. They ruled mass hysteria. So it's like a temporary psychosis. Yeah.

Which again, you're just like, well, spirit possession makes the most sense. When viewed through that lens, it reminds me of that story of, was it the Trump family here in Australia? Yeah, it wasn't that weird. That was weird. And it was like, it made national headlines and they wanted their privacy afterwards. But from what I recall, the reason why it got so much attention is because they just seemingly all got into their car one day and took off. Yeah, left all their mobile phones. Everything. Left their wallets. Meals.

Like hot meals still sitting on the kitchen table. And then got in the car and started driving. Yeah. This whole family. We cross country kind of crazy trip. And didn't stop driving. No.

And didn't a couple of family members like throw their phones out the window as they were going? And it was like they were being pursued by something. We thought maybe it was gang stalking or something. But now when you hear cases like this and I go, well, clearly this is like some sudden, you know, shared psychotic episode. But is there more to it? Is there something spiritual attached to it? We never got any answers. Never. And they obviously didn't want to talk to any press. So they just said, leave us alone. It's the same with this Wu family. They just...

Said, we don't want to talk about it. Give us our privacy. In that case, if I recall correctly, also the reason why it came about was because one of the daughters, I think, kind of snapped out of it. And it's the same thing. What are we doing? Yeah, why are we doing this? Didn't she call the police from a gas station like three states away or something? Half the way across the country. That's right. Yeah. It's very similar. There's lots of parallels in that. Luckily, no one got killed. Yeah. That's the difference. They didn't throw rice and poop at each other. They didn't fully get their...

They didn't fully get their privacy in the end because they made a movie about it. It's called Incantation. I thought I had an image of it, but I don't have an image of the poster. Oh, there it is. I do have it. Yeah, they made a movie about it. It's on Netflix. And they made a video game about it as well.

Uh, so I don't know if they got their privacy. Apparently it's one of the most well-known mass hysteria cases in Taiwan. There's all these people that say, well, have their own takes on what happened. The, the mold poisoning idea is very popular, but obviously the angle from the film is that it's a full on demonic possession, which is what I'm leading to. What's what I'm leaning to. I think it's a real possibility, especially cause they're just, that's their thing. They're worshiping the statue. Yeah.

You worship a statue and a spirit gets on it. You don't know what you're worshipping. You don't know what you're paying your... I don't think it was that though, because you said something that just really rang a bell with me. And it was that the daughter had gone, she'd gone to Beijing or Shanghai or she'd gone to China to study. And she came home. Opened a business. Opened a business, right? Yeah, sorry. I mean, even though they were being told to go and get it, did she bring something back with her? Did she permit access to something? Well, remember, it was the youngest girl.

daughter who initially said, mom, I'm possessed. We need to bring back the eldest. We need to bring back my sister because she's possessed. She said, I'm possessed by Nejar, the guardian deity that we worship every day. I really wonder, and we won't get the information, but I do wonder like what was the initiator? Like what did she do? Was she performing some type of divination practice? Well, yeah. I mean, everything they were doing was some kind of weird occult event.

Eastern occultism. But I mean, that's kind of normal to a degree. Well, if you recall, it was like the story of Robbie, which was the, you know, the premise for The Exorcist. Right. It was because he'd been taught how to use an Ouija board by his aunt. Right. So I'm like,

Young girl, once again, it's like a young girl connected to poltergeist cases. I just find it a very weird deity to make your main point of worship. Like I get- Well, that's what I'm suggesting. The Bodhisattva of compassion. I get Buddha, obviously. Even the cat with the arm. Even that's better. The Neijar who came out of a slimy flesh egg.

That's the guy that you worship every day. You leave out your little fruits and incense for him, the fleshy egg guy. It's strange. It is a bit strange. So I want a moon dog always with the great stories. And I just wanted to mention one more, which isn't super paranormal.

But I thought this is an incredible story. It's also from Taiwan. This one occurred in October of 2004. Rail workers in Taiwan's Taitung County made a chilling discovery. An iron derailer block, so one of these objects that's used specifically to derail a train, had been placed on the Jiahe Tunnel and they spray-painted on the tunnel hate. What, a terrorist group? Well, no, they just spray-painted hate on it.

So the train didn't derail, but then two months later, on December the 21st, this time near Neisha station in the country, there were fasteners securing the rails that had been deliberately damaged. And two days after that, graffiti appeared saying, hate, hate, the one stealing the rails is Jin Da Xing Engineering, some kind of local company.

Emergency repairs followed, but then there was more sabotage. June the 21st, 2005, a train finally derailed near Neyshire. Thankfully, no cars overturned, injuries were minor, and again, it was confirmed that one of the rail joints had been tampered with. So there's some serious sabotage going on.

In August, a few months later, an electrical cable was slashed with a blade. In September, 70 rail clips were destroyed. Another message was left behind. We steal things for Jiang Daxing Engineering. Why don't you arrest them? Question mark. Very strange. And this graffiti that blamed this engineering company is a real company.

Investigators obviously zeroed in on this company. They had recently let go 40 workers and they had a labor dispute. So the police- Oh, so it was disgruntled workers. Yeah, but it's almost like, that's what they really wanted them to think. You know, it's a little bit suspicious. It's a little bit suspicious that they're just playing. Like if you were one of these workers and you just put a big banner that says, it's one of us.

Obviously, you're going to get caught. Why would they do that? Yeah, you wouldn't do that. It doesn't make sense. But all the former employees of this engineering company, they all had alibis during these sabotage dates, so they were fine. Then came the night of March 17, 2006. A passenger train departed Taitung News Station, and exactly 9.46 p.m., just after exiting one of the tunnels, the train derailed.

Cars 1 through 5 stayed on the rails. Car 6 derailed but remained upright. Cars 7 through 10 tumbled over the 10-meter embankment, which is what you can see on the screen there. I think I've got another image. There were obviously injuries, but were there any mortalities? No, no serious injuries. Wow. It was amazing. Everyone was fine. You know, a few bumps and bruises. They're like, everyone's fine. And then they found her. Who? One woman.

She was unconscious in car seven. Her name was Chen Thai Hong Tran. So Tran, sorry, she's a young Vietnamese woman. She had married a Taiwanese railway worker named Lee Shuang Chuan in 2003. She'd been planning to fly back to Vietnam the next day. Her husband and his brother, Lee Thai Anh, were both on the train. That's her in the image there. And that's her husband and that's the brother.

So they're all in this train. She's the only... Is that the guy that tackled you? Yeah. No, the guy that tackled me was a Westerner. Oh. He was a, yeah, a Westerner. Oddly, neither man tried to rescue her. Neither man had tried to help her. Oh, God.

This isn't some weird murder case, is it? Attempted murder. At the hospital, Fran regained consciousness briefly. She complained of dizziness, but within hours, her condition worsened bizarrely. By 4.15 a.m. the next day, she was dead. Her injuries didn't match the crash. She didn't die from the train crash. She had no fractures. She had no bleeding. She had a really suspicious internal hemorrhage.

And they couldn't figure out what was wrong. Despite all this, police still ruled her death an accident, right? Well, she was involved in an accident, so. They wanted to wrap it up. That changed when investigators realized that this was the second derailment that Tran, her husband, and the brother, Chun Chuan, had both survived. The first one had occurred on June the 21st, 2005.

And there was more. Chung Chuan had previously been married to another Vietnamese woman, Pham Thai Giao Ngu, who also died mysteriously days after their wedding. In a train derailment? Cause of death? Snakebite. Hmm. Weird. Look, I know people are unlucky, but you have to wonder that that's more than a coincidence. What is a snakebite cause?

What do you mean? Internal hemorrhaging? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole, well, it depends. It depends on what the snake, the toxin is. It can cause clotting. It can cause, what's it called? Disseminated intravascular coagulation. So basically your blood clots and thins at the same time. Her husband, from this previous Vietnamese wife, collected 6 million yuan in insurance. Oh, it's an insurance scheme.

Suspicious, a family friend confronted the brother. Tyon allegedly replied, she's already cremated. What are you going to do about it? Good answer, bro.

On March 19th, 2006, prosecutors learned that Shangguan had taken out a 76 million yuan travel accident only life insurance on his wife Tran just six months after marrying her. It's pure evil. It's absolute pure evil. Not just for the fact that, you know, they were trying to kill her. That's dreadful. And they killed her. That's dreadful. How do you think you're going to get away with it when the insurance is like, okay, I want insurance.

But only train derailment insurance. Yeah. Nothing else. And also, though, how many people's lives did you put at risk, you scumbags? When his previous wife died, he demanded immediate cremation. Immediate cremation. Of course he did. No repatriation to the family. When this new wife died, guess what he demanded? Immediate cremation. Immediate.

Obviously, they didn't get that. The autopsy, ordered without his consent, found traces of ipratropium, FM2, and several unknown anticoagulant agents in her blood. So she bled out. Yeah, she'd been poisoned.

On March the 23rd, police arrived at Shangguan's home to bring him in for questioning while they followed his brother sneaking out the side. Oh, so it wasn't a snake bite, the first one. It was because like the, it sounds like they're using warfarin or blood thinners. Yeah, I thought the second one was a snake bite as well, but maybe he found that the snake bite initially was a little bit too complicated, maybe hard to obtain. Yeah.

No, what I'm saying is he probably just injected her with something and said it was a snake bite. Yeah. So they say there's eyewitnesses that claim that when she was in the hospital trying to get over the train crash, he tried to get in to see her. And apparently he convinced and basically broke through the medical team that was there. And he had like a few minutes alone with her. So they say that he, um, he must've poisoned her when she was in the hospital. He had access to her IV. So the police go to arrest the guy, um,

Uh, he's dead. He'd committed suicide. He was hanging from a banyan tree nearby and that's his brother there next to the tree where they found him. Because he knew he was caught. Well, he left behind several notes. One note said, I deeply loved my wife. I believe the autopsy will clear my name. And he said, I hate the railway saboteur. I hope they die in hell.

The public turned on the media and police. So the public believed this was them being wrongly persecuted, that these two brothers had been framed by the cops. They just wanted to get them for something.

I don't think anyone knew the details of his previous wife dying from a snake bite. Yeah. And as far as I'm aware, like I'm like, I have a friend who, um, his father used to be, uh, a long time ago in the Taiwanese police. It's kind of like what happened here in Australia back in the eighties. Like there was corruption and, you know, like too much power, but all of that got washed out.

There's oversight bodies and a whole heap of things now. So it's like, I doubt that the police would go to this effort of framing this guy and derailing a train. Who knows what things were like back in 2006. So the police go and comb through this guy's computer, the Shang Chuan, the guy that killed himself. They find all these Google searches on snake venom. Yeah, of course. Poison. How can I poison my wife and make it look like an accident in a train derailment? Yeah.

Then there was a huge breakthrough. This third man came forward. His name was Huang Fulai, and he made a deal with the prosecutors in exchange for full immunity. He confessed that Shang Chuan, the husband, had orchestrated all the derailments to murder his wife Tran and make it look like an accident, which is pretty obvious at this point.

Um, the, the authorities press forward and investigators, uh, yeah, made this breakthrough. The brother convinced, tried to convince everyone he was innocent. Um, and it came down to the brother, basically this guy that came forward and confessed, he was originally hired by,

to be on the train and to administer the poison. Right. He backed out at the last minute, maybe, you know, guilty conscience. And then the brother stepped in and said, I'll do it for a cut of the insurance money. Is that why they were getting Vietnamese women? Because it's, it's easier to bring in a foreigner. I don't know. Like maybe that's was the plan. Like he's just remarrying every couple of years and doing this same insurance job and

So the brother was never on the train that derailed. He bought a ticket for it, but he never actually got on the train. What they discovered was he had parked his car near these like mangrove trees where the derailment occurred. Soon as the train derailed, he sprinted out from the trees. Some eyewitnesses saw him and thought he was coming to help, but really he was coming to poison her for some reason. I think the biggest problem with their initial plan, because they wanted to poison her on at the scene, um,

The car that she was in didn't even derail. So what they did was while everyone's like in the chaos of this crash, he meets his brother with the wife and they'd given us some sedative or something and

They both pick her up and carry her to one of the derailed carriages. And so all these eyewitnesses are like, yeah, we saw these two guys carrying this woman to one of the... Towards one of the derailed carriages. We couldn't figure out what they were doing. Another young girl said, oh yeah, I saw his car parked over there and I saw him running before the train even crashed.

So ultimately he got done and, you know, happy ending to the story. He got thrown in prison and there's a couple of pics of him there. Was there any history with his wives? No, I think he was just using his brother's wives, but he's still in prison to this day. It's funny because there's a bit of a following for these guys where there's some people believe that they were set up and that. Yeah, but I'm sorry. Once people see you carrying the body, um,

And your previous wife died of a snake bite. I don't know if you've got all that data, how you can come to the conclusion. So yeah, a couple of great stories from... What's his name again? Moondog151. He's a great poster. I'll link to his...

to his user profile, Moondog151, in the show notes, mysteriousuniverse.org. Again, he mostly posts true crime. Sure. But yeah, it's pretty good stuff, like pretty interesting stories. There's a lot of stories of one of the other ones I was going to mention, but I won't talk about the full case. But it was just, it reminded me of Missing 411. It was, again, in Taiwan. It was a woman with her young daughter, and she got on this elevator in some office building that had a few apartments, and

And she was never seen again. She got on the lift and she was never seen again. There was footage of her getting on the lift, but there was no footage of her getting out. So the footage of the, like the camera on the hallway, it's like no one ever got off that lift. It's like she vanished in the lift. But what was strange about it is next to the lift or inside the lift, both of their shoes were removed. Their clothes were taken off and folded and placed on top of the shoes and they vanished.

Did they climb out? Did they go into the shaft? Well, there's this famous story or famous case from the country where they found a woman stuffed into an air vent. Like she crawled into an air vent and died or she got murdered somehow. I can't remember, but...

It was like she was in this really bizarre position. That's not like the Eliza Lamb case, is it? I think it might be. Where she was found in the water tank. Yeah, they mentioned the Eliza Lamb case. Yeah, but she, if you recall, if you see the elevator footage, it's like she's fleeing some invisible assailant. Yeah, they mentioned that. And so the police had that in mind, and so they checked everything.

everything in the building. I checked the water tank, checked the pipes, checked the vents. They came back and did it two or three times, but no one ever complained of a smell. There was no trace of them. No one ever complained about the water. No one saw them leave. No one's seen them since. They've just vanished off the face of the earth after they entered this lift.

It's really bizarre. This sounds like the johatsu thing, though, like in Japan where people want to disappear. Yeah. And they do. They go to these extreme lengths. In fact, there was a television show that was based around this of a woman fleeing her abusive husband. I think it's called Light of My Lion or something, or Ryan, just Japanese for lion. But basically, she sets up this scene of this woman who...

she disappears. She and her kid disappears. And the way that they disappear is that their shoes are left on a bridge over a gully where there's this flowing water. And it's like, she clearly jumped. If you haven't seen it, go watch it because I won't tell you what happens. But yeah, like it comes across. They've clearly jumped. Fun stuff. That's a wrap for this show. What a banger.

Another banger. Never go back to that library ever again, okay? Even if there's literally banging going on here from renovations. What if I want to go there and harass some young underage girls? That seems to be the place to go according to the reviews. Probably not a good idea either. You know, I would stand against that. Don't clip that. Look, I let a few things slide, but I'm sorry. Our values differ on that one. But the Google reviews say that's where you need to go to do that. That's it.

That's the place? Are you serious? Yeah, if you want to get meth or if you want to harass women, the Maroochydore Library. Apparently, allegedly. I just figured it was any public library in Australia, to be honest, but okay. According to the Google reviews. That's a wrap for this show. Thank you so much for listening and watching. If you want to get access to all the good stuff coming up, remind us what is in store for our plus members. The metalloids! We're going to be following the strange saga of the wave or indeed the flap of humanoids that crossed the US in 1973.

From an entirely new perspective, it's not just the Pennsylvania stuff we reported in the past. It was compiled by David Webb, and we're looking at some of the strange similarities in these reports of...

craft, entities, weird electricity-stealing creatures, all that kind of stuff coming up in the Plus extension. Are they robots? Yeah, they're some robotic beings. Why didn't you just call them robots? Why are they metal-oids? They're not all robots. They're not all robots, so that's why... Some of them are sentient metal-oids. Yeah, look, I'll explain it in the Plus section.

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