And That's Why We Drink - E15 A Sample of Our Outhouse and Catfished by Lucifer

Episode Date: May 14, 2017

It’s episode 15, and Em and Christine TOTALLY know that, despite what they may or may not have said in the intro… Listen, this episode is full of bad juju.We chat about the ghosts of St. Alban��s Sanatorium and the disturbing tale of DeeDee & Gypsy Rose Blancharde. There’s a goat-headed man who shoves people down stairs, a haunted bowling alley with a suicide bathroom, and a doctor named BERNARDO FLASTERSTEIN.Honestly, what more do we need to say?

Hey! Welcome. How are ya? Shit. I was gonna do what we did last time. Welcome. No, it's too late now. Sorry. Okay, wait. Welcome. To. Episode. Which one is it? Ooh, that's the trick question. Fourteen. Fourteen. Is that right? Yeah. Oh, good for me. How are you? I'm so fab. I'm just glad it's Friday. I got laid at work today, so I'm so happy to be gonzo from the office. I stayed laid at work today so I could finish these notes. Oh, wow.

Because I actually get out at 5 now, but I stayed, I like clocked out and then just like stay in an extra hour just have somewhere to sit and finish my notes nice so that's what i did on my friday we are so cool you know i think this is exactly what our parents dreamed we'd be like yes why do you drink this week let's just jump right the fuck into this totally uh i drank this week because oh my god it was horrible i got home from work yesterday and i'm on this like spiritual kick i don't know why but it's probably like every other episode you're on a spiritual i am and i go through phases and i feel like living in la does not help like living in such a hipster part of town um and so i was researching like, I was like, oh, numerology and guardian angels and spirit guides and crystals.

And I came home and my boyfriend was like in his scrubs from work. Where he's a legit scientific logical doctor. He's like a physician's assistant. And he like came home from the emergency room, like exhausted after a shift. And he's like, how was work? I was like, let me tell you about crystals and human design. The thing he cares the least about. Oh, and he hates that shit.

And I was like, human design readings and all this stuff. And he was like, interesting, interesting. And then finally I was like, oh, how was your day? And he was like, you know, I had to tell someone that they had cancer. And I was like, what do you mean? And that's why he fucking drinks. And I go, I like pulled a beer out of the fridge. I was like, here you go. How do you tell someone that's why he fucking drinks literally and i go i like pulled a beer out of the fridge i was like here you go because i thought how do you tell someone that terrible person and

i was like tell me it was skin cancer he's like it wasn't skin cancer and i was like oh no and i was like tell me they were like 90 and he's like he was 40 and his girlfriend was with him and it was does he have a chance say he told him stage one he doesn't have medical uh insurance so like they don't know what to do but i'm probably not supposed to even talk about it but i don't know whatever it's just sad it's horrible i don't know anyway why do you drink this week um i drink i didn't think of a reason before oh that's okay i mean usually i just have one yeah that's kind of a good sign earlier today i was homesick does that count oh yeah i was homesick over like weird things like one of the people at work was talking about how they were thinking about putting a couch in one

of their rooms like in their bedroom oh and uh in my hometown childhood room i still have a couch in my bedroom from when i was in high school. So I started thinking about it. And then the person I was talking to was like, but that's kind of tacky. And I was like, whoa, hold up. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Basically, I miss my couch. Oh.

I'm sorry. I know it's a stupid reason for most people. But I've had a lot of sleepovers on that couch. Home sickness is the worst feeling. But I get to go home two weeks from now that's two weeks oh that's exciting yeah okay anyway do you have news for me yeah i have a couple little things um so you know how we talked about the dibbick box a while back um so one of our listeners named kevin um hashtag classic kevin classic uh wrote us and said he lives near thirsk, which is where that chair was.

And he goes, I'm right by that museum. And he was like, oh, I'll go and take photos and send them to you of the chair on the wall. And I was like, you have to sit in it. I just want him to sit in it. What an asshole. But I told him I'm not liable for anything that happens. Right. And then he goes.

Take my advice wholeheartedly, but then don't think of me when the repercussions come. But I don't want anything to do with the outcome. But then he said that he would. I was like, oh, what I said was don't haunt us if something happens to you. As long as you promise you won't haunt us, go sit in the chair. He goes, oh, I'll just be hiding in the Dybbuk box if you need me. And I was like, okay. Classic Kevin.

Hashtag classic Kevin. Then, okay, just weird shit has been happening. Remember Carl Tanzler and his, like, funny corpse? Oh, how could I forget? Frosty the Snowman corpse. So apparently several people have messaged me and been like, oh, I had a crazy neighbor named Carl with a K. And then I thought about it and I was like, I also had a crazy neighbor named Carl with a K. And then I thought about it and I was like, I also had a crazy neighbor named Carl with a K in Cincinnati. And it actually gives me goosebumps.

It's like a ghost story. It's not really a ghost story. It's like a creepy story. When I was little, my brother and I were playing in like the sunroom and it was dark out and we were doing a puzzle. And I distinctly remember putting the duck puzzle piece into the spot. And I heard this knocking and it was like a room that had glass windows surrounding it um and we heard this knocking right above us and they were sort of like doors with glass panes and I remember I was probably five and my brother was three and we kept hearing this knocking and I was too scared to look up and my brother said like Christina what is that and i said it's just the wind because i

didn't want to scare him and i remember i was like doing the puzzle and i told him to like find this piece and i looked up and there was like a white gloved hand and that's all you could see shut the fuck up christine and it was banging on the window shut the fuck up christine and then it tried the handle and i didn't know what to do and all i saw and then like the person or whatever saw that I was looking at it and all I saw was a hand and it stopped and it waved at me and I that's a fucking clown it gives me goosebumps and all I said was Alexander let's go find mom and I like stood up and I was like come with me and I grabbed my brother and we ran to find my mom and she was on the phone with her friend in Germany and I'm like there was a white hand at the door and she goes I'm on the

phone I'm on the phone and I'm like mom it was and she goes you're imagining things like just totally not listening and I was terrified and um I guess the next day she went outside and in the snow there were like footprints and they went back to this creepy guy carl's house and she apparently so to me she was like oh it was nothing like blah blah blah right so for years i thought there was just like a disembodied hand like probably she should have told me but i guess it went back to that guy's house what was he trying to get was he trying to like break in nobody knows i mean he had a fucking glove on weird elderly man who like wandered around but if you don't talk to him why is he just trying to open your fucking door casually?

He's a crazy – I don't know. The wave is the creepiest part. Like you're interacting with him now. And then he waved. It really scared me. And so for years we talked about the white hand. Then I finally found out years later that this guy Carl was from Germany or Austria. I don't remember which.

And like just was a like kooky not nice old guy and my mom said she just did not have good experiences with him and he um so he did that to us and like tried to scare I think he was trying to scare us I don't really know and then um who knows what would have happened though if that door was unlocked I know I know he literally could have killed you and he had gloves to hide his fingerprints to do it fucking creepy so my mom was like okay don't ever like interact with him and told him to like go away and then years later I mean I'm talking after my parents divorced like 10 years later down the road at least 12 maybe so we're living in this new house in a totally different

neighborhood in a different part of the city and we live right off this like um graveyard it's like a jewish cemetery and it's like basically our backyard and one day I'm like wandering around and I found his grave like in my backyard shut the fuck up and you can see it from my bedroom window and my mom goes yeah I didn't want to tell you but he's buried like right outside our house like our new house that's a different part of the city and I'm with the glove lying on the I know so I like when I was growing up or when I lived there I would like look out the window I'm like if a white hand appears in my window I will scream

but apparently he died and was buried right outside my new house miles away anyway that's my story of Carl the crazy Carl so apparently a lot of people have crazy Carl neighbors I didn't have a neighbor like that I just had really nice neighbors I'm saying that because they might be listening I don't actually like carl's probably listening too no i had really

i had that that neighborhood where like all the parents raised the kids together i love that growing up we would just be watching tv at like nine o'clock on a weeknight and all of a sudden like 10 neighbors would just walk in and be like who's drinking i feel like i was meant to be born into that i think you were born to meet me so i could maybe that's it maybe that's it because i zero percent did not have that we did not we always got robbed and just locked all our doors and oh no it was not yeah no and carl would just show up at the windows at night so perfect great times any Great times. Any other fun things? Um, one more thing. Um, so one other user named Sydney Cray on Twitter wrote me and she sent a picture of

her dog and she said, this is my Gio. And I was like, oh my goodness, you have a dog named Gio too? I've never met another person. Yeah. Another Gio. And she's like, yeah. And he's so, such a cute cute i think it's like a beagle um and then i she goes don't make fun of me but um he's named after giovanni bernard

and i was like did you have to walk out of the room i just well for a moment i was like m must have like this is a prank yeah and i was like my dog's named after giovanni bernard i was like are you from cincinnati and he's a bengals player by theard i was like are you from cincinnati and he's a bengals player by the way i'm like are you from cincinnati and she goes oh no he was just on my fantasy football team and i was like yeah that's why i named my dog that because he was on my fantasy football basically you were looking in a mirror and having a conversation super weird and she's like i live in denver like i don't live in cincinnati but we both named our dog giovanni bernard and my dog or my brother every time he's mad at Gio will go Giovanni. Anyway that's all. I just wanted to kind of throw out some fun little facts.

I think we both are very interested in our stories and they're both very long and god forbid you have to edit any more videos. So I'm going to skip milkshake and wine facts today. Dun dun dun. Because they're just going to put us on a tangent that we can't escape before we forget though what are you drinking oh i'm actually drinking white wine today i'm drinking a toasted head chardonnay which is my favorite one of my favorite chardonnays but the reason i don't drink it is because it's kind of pricey it's like 11 12 bucks out here um and my brother went to coachella and like stole it from the, not stole it, but he took it from the house of the people that he was staying with. And he like brought it back for me.

So now I have this nice Chardonnay. So thank you, Alexander. I am drinking a chocolate milkshake before you, don't ask. House of pies. Again, house of pies. I feel like that's just going to, why don't they sponsor us? They will. It's a matter of time i

already talked about them on my instagram and i got nothing from them hop we'll do some grassroots marketing over there okay perfect so i did a story um that's actually i realized i hadn't done of like a virginia story yet hometown speaking of being homesick. KF. I was looking up the most haunted places in Virginia. Cool. And one of them actually is on a campus of and when I looked it up this one happened to be

on the college campus that one of my best friends went to. Cool. So my friend Cece, who has written into a listener story at one point. Yes. She went to a college, Radford University. Okay. Isn't that where my friend Lindsay went?

Mm-hmm. Ah! Hey, Lindsay. I don't know if you're listening, but... Oh, yeah. Hi! Also, Christine failed to totally tell me that she had another friend out here from Virginia.

And this random friend and I sat next to each other when we both went to Christine's improv show and we were making small talk. This was before she told me she was from Virginia. She was like, oh, I went to a school called Radford. I was like, like in Virginia. And she was like, yeah, from Virginia. And I was like, I'm from Virginia. And then I told her like the town I was in. We had a whole. And then after the show, Christine shows up and is like, oh, you guys met. And I was like, why the fuck didn't you tell us we're from the same town? It doesn't occur to me.

I don't know. Of all the places you meet two people. She and I don't talk about Virginia. Like, I don't know where she, like, I didn't remember where she was from. We won't get into that. Okay. Okay. This is the St. Albans.

Albans? I should have fucking asked. I think it's Albans. A-L albin's sanatorium oh i feel like i've heard of that but i don't know why it's one of the most active locations on the east coast and uh there's several chunks to the history of it that go back to the 1700s so So in 1775, there was a woman named Mary Draper, and she immigrated to Virginia in a colony that her and her family and a couple other families that made this community called Draper's Meadows. And it was on land that is now, it's on the site of where Virginia Tech campus is now. Okay, so so in 1775 this was during like the french and indian war and

they were living on uh land that belonged to mainly shawnee tribe of native americans and one day the shawnee natives attacked draper's meadow and they killed um five different people they killed so they tried to kill anyone that was in the colony, but a lot of people had gone out for the day. Oh. And so they killed who they could. Anyone that they didn't kill, they would take captive. But the five people that they did kill, three were men and two girls. One of them was Mary's mother and one of them was Mary's niece.

Oh, no. mother and one of them was mary's niece oh no and then so there was an like a journal piece that she left behind to tell the colonists like what happened like the colonists that luckily weren't there right they ended up coming back and the man one of the men that they killed they had decapitated him and left his head in a bag on their front porch. Oh, no. So that the colonists could come and they literally saw a bag with one of their colonists' heads. Oh, no. And then they wrote, her mother was tomahawked and scalped. No. And then Mary's sister-in-law's infant child was brained against the side of one of the cabins.

And brained means literally grabbed by the baby ankle and swung. And then smashed its head into the side of one of the cabins and brained means literally grabbed by the baby ankle and swung and then smashed its head into the side of the cabin wait who wrote this art this is what the colonists wrote about that day like the aftermath oh no so um like i said if anyone survived then they ended up being held captive if they were there right so mary got held captive with her two sons and then a man and another woman who all the stories only know her as the old dutch woman so you know that's the title she has now um so mary her two sons who were two and four at the time and then the old man and the dutch woman and uh once they were held captive mary was taken as a servant and her sons were sent away to be adopted by the

natives. So she had to like serve to her own fucking kids while they were being raised by someone else. Oh, holy shit. So like in the same tribe they were. Oh wow. And so Mary like couldn't do anything about it.

So she went to escape. She couldn't take her kids. So she had to like, she couldn't take her kids. So she had to give that up. But she ended up escaping with the old Dutch woman. And they escaped by, in 40 days, they made it 500 miles to the next colony over. And they brought no food, no supplies. It was just like a spur of the moment this is our chance, escape.

And so they just scavenged during the whole trek there. To a point where the old Dutch woman got so hungry that multiple times she tried to eat Mary. Okay. Like, alive and raw. Okay. They then ended up finding the other colony where Mary's husband was and they got back together and moved to the land that is now Radford campus. Okay. And, uh, they, I guess said, see you to those other kids.

Cause they had five more children in its place. They're like, they'll be fine. They're like, okay, let's just try that again. But one of those kids ended up being sent back once he turned 17. Like, I guess they just... Really? I don't know if they were both supposed to, but one died. But all I know is that one of them at 17 got back to them.

Wow. How crazy. So that's one story. And that's just like some like bad juju of like a lot of indian wars and decapitating people and putting their heads in bags just the whole land is fucked up in that way but then in 1865 during the civil war one of the more gruesome battles happened uh right on radford's campus too at the site of cloyds mountain and uh in only an hour this battle killed over 1200 men so holy shit immediately lots of bad juju bad juju now they're now that it's um a little time's passed it's now been

30 years later and professor george miles is now buying part of the property to build a school on it called the St. Albans Lutheran School for Boys. And this was 1892. Professor Miles favored admitting wealthy and athletic boys to the school. A lot of websites I saw said that he kind of had that forward-thinking way that colleges now do where they kind of put athletics at a higher standard right um so he really encouraged men to be strong and by men i mean like fucking boys children so he ended up not favoring the weak which ended up encouraging a lot of bullying it reminds me of not to put that out there but it reminds me of the hitler youth before world war two when they oh yes because they like recruited like healthy fit boys and then they would

encourage the children to like bully the weed out yeah the kids who couldn't survival yeah it was like the like strongest race i mean it was more extreme to like race but it was a similar concept of like no that's definitely the same idea uh even though it wasn't talked about during that time there were a lot of kids who ended up uh killing themselves so there was a lot of suicides on the property oh no um there was also a maintenance man there named donald but he apparently also went by smoky and this maintenance man was a homosexual pedophile oh no and he had raped and killed at least one of the students maybe more raped and killed definitely raped and killed probably raped more maybe killed more holy shit i mean if people were just committing suicide he probably could have just killed them and said it was a suicide or something like that yeah and back then it wasn't as right like i mean

it's not like there was like dna like you could just say he killed himself and people would be like okay oh no who knows but here is a quote from one of the yearbook editors in 1904 i guess there was a quote about the school in a newspaper article specifically that said the atmosphere at the school is rough and competitive it clearly favors the stronger and made short work of the more cerebral types such as one student mr runyon and then the yearbook editor in 1904 had a picture of mr runyon in the yearbook and the caption was e blackburn runyon did not return after christmas much to our sorrow as it put a stop to the football games on the terrace and which he figured prominently as the football no they just kicked the shit out of him all the time a dickhead yeah what is wrong with these people? Also, what a fancy way to, like, cover up the fact that you're talking about.

Right. Oh, yeah, he was bullied and killed himself, but we're just going to still call him a fucking football. Oh, we're so sad. We're so mad that you took away our football games, asshole. How dark and twisted. And a lot of kids, if they didn't kill themselves, they just ran away. And they would just report them missing and they never found them. God.

So when the stock market crashed, Miles ended up losing funding for the school. And admissions started depleting. And after only being open for 12 years, it closed in 1911. Oh, wow. Probably for good reason. So four years later in 1915, Dr. J.C. King bought the school and saw potential for it to be a new state-of-the-art mental hospital. Oh, no. Of course.

That's not a good sign. Because if it wasn't an abusive school, it might as well be a mental hospital in the 1900s. Same difference. So this was during, this was 1915. So this was like the beginning of psychology and psychiatry being taken seriously. And so he vowed to make this a mental facility that worked towards actual rehabilitation, which was unheard of at the time. Yeah. Because back then it was like, you could put them somewhere and then expect to A, never

see results, B, never see them again. Right. Just leave them there. Just like be like, see you never. And this was the first one where he vowed that he wanted to see like recovery results wow okay in 1916 the first four patients were admitted um and had like on the cusp like cutting edge therapies for its time um including which is actually like not a bad idea they had a fully functioning farm with

a vegetable garden flower garden dairy herd and poultry coops wow so that way they had i think there was let me see if i found if i wrote it in here there was an article there was like a brochure from the time that talked about it and it had some very old timey way of phrasing it of like a sample of out of door activities and that was the moment where i was like is outdoor short for out of door that like literally reading this out of door the brochure said gives them a sampling of out of door activities and i was like weird i was like i'm pretty sure that's the long version of outdoor and i'm just learning this today i guess i never thought about that yeah yeah i was like out of door i guess outdoor would mean that you're out of the house but you can't

call it an outhouse because this is a sample of our outhouse we could in the brochure we could go on about that forever anyway so that's something i learned today is that outdoor is actually shorter than what it used to be you know this was also to offer them employment and recreational therapy basically it was giving them a sense of purpose and that they were helping and very progressive super progressive than a lot of like this was night this was literally over 100 years ago and someone was doing something smart even currently they're trying to get that yeah prisons and yeah yeah i mean that was like the one thing in this whole story i agreed with i know i see a light but i feel like it's going to be extinguished very soon yeah you see the light thinning um so the sanatorium i mean if

you're going to call it a sanatorium that's your first fucking problem totally but they also had these new revolutionary methods to help patients, you know, get better. No. Oh, no. In quote, get better. Because their favorite choices of method were electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomies, hydroshock therapy, and insulin coma therapy. And all other forms of current mental torture, I'm sure. So since psychiatry

was so new these patients were basically considered lab rats at the time because all the doctors were just excited to have someone to like experiment their new procedures with and didn't they just assumed oh well because it's new it must be better than the old stuff but it was actually really fucking bad like hydroshock therapy like you would either be mummified with icy cold towels and then left overnight and you're like strapped to like a table are you serious yeah or they would just shoot you with a fucking fire hose of iced water that like literally burns through your skin why would they ever think that that was a revolutionary treatment because it shocks you out of being whatever level of quiet like i don't oh i don't know i don are. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. So the dead usually outweighed the living. No fucking surprise. Well, great. So much so that the sanatorium also built their own morgue on site. Great. So that was a cool thing to do.

Fabulous. For those who survived, there were long-term effects such as skull fractures, seizures, severe memory loss hysteria no shock here long bouts of depression oh no and also can you believe it ptsd so oh my god wouldn't you fucking yes to all of the above so there were um a lot of documented suicides here too so that just adds on to the suicides from the boys that were there bad juju and by the 1940s they had treated over 6 500 patients wow but in that time they had only had 48 staff members and 25 years that were taking care of 6 500 patients shit so like no one was actually really

being like watched or monitored or really cared for and these are the people who need them it's like they're basically grabbing patients and being like we haven't experimented experimented on you recently and then drag them into a room oh for god's sakes so in 1980 they began to expand to keep up with new facilities with like new methods and stuff like that right during this expansion there was a murder oh no um gina hall had allegedly been murdered and buried under the building because while it was all open because they were building a whole new section of it they started in the basement and she knew this guy named stephen epperly and stephen epperly his job he happened to be a construction worker on

this site where his job was to pour the gravel like for the foundation pits yeah and i guess he was friends with gina hall or they somehow knew each other beforehand people saw them out the night before and then she just miraculously went missing so the cops found a whole bunch of her bloody clothes and items all around town oh no but her car was only like a hundred yards away from this construction site so the cops like found enough evidence to know that steven epperly probably killed her and so they were able to put him away anyway and fun fact this is the first conviction in virginia history where they didn't have a body during any part of the investigation and were still able to convict someone for murder wow so on top of all

that horrible history there's a murder of someone now just like buried under there okay so then in 1990 another health clinic bought the facilities and basically the hospital became vacant so by 2004 this whole facility was totally closed and it ended up getting bought by a previous patient of the hospital named tim gregory and he made it a mission to renovate it back to its original like how it looked like every inch of it he wanted to totally refurbish and he wanted to build an enlightenment center for people to see what the patients went through oh my god good for him and so he does all these different events to try and save up money

so he can personally put it back to as good as he can yeah his like main um event that he puts on is during halloween they do a lot of like haunted tours and stuff like that so anyway here's all the ghost stuff yes the first one i thought was worth mentioning was donald or old smoky yeah the pedophile oh fuck him a group of male paranormal investigators went in because i guess the story goes that donald will only talk to men because he's most attracted to them and he like stays in this i don't know if he like if that was where he worked if in this closet i don't know if that was like his workspace or if that's where he like would take kids oh no we don't know but that's like where the most activity comes from him and so people say the closer you are or if

you're even willing to sit in the closet then sometimes he'll talk to you and so all these investigators were like we'll talk we'll go into the closet with you if you talk to us and they gave it maybe 30 seconds. And all of a sudden, the only words that came out of the spirit box were each of their names. Nope. Nope. I thought that was pretty cool. Holy crap.

And they hadn't been saying their names. So, like, it had to know. Holy crap. So, I thought that was cool. There's also full body apparitions in the ward of the old hospital that was for just the alcoholics you can also hear clinking of like at least at least once they're dead they're drinking and my people and then um tourists and uh investigators have both experienced um disembodied conversations screams footsteps and they've seen objects move they've been pushed cc also told me that there's

a ghost on one of the higher levels that will literally throw you over the stairs like not push you down but toss you over the fucking railing what wait what there and i i watched a couple interviews online and there is a guy who said that he got thrown over the railing a few times and he works there did he break his leg um i think it's a low landing i didn't really he didn't go into it okay he was kind of an off kind of guy oh i would throw him down the stairs too no no like i was watching the interview and i didn't really know he was taking a really weird path with it like he kept explaining things in a really weird way so it was kind of hard to catch up with him so uh there was also a bowling alley somehow in this sanatorium because why not apparently it was a reward for the patients who were doing well um but also one of the hospital patients daughters was down there and died um either she died there

or someone killed her down there or like another patient kind of had like a, like kind of snapped and hurt her. But somehow a little girl's spirit is down there and her name is Allie. And I don't know if they just like, if her name's Allie or if they named her after the bowling alley. And I'm not, I don't want to like be that person that says it,

but I thought about it. But it is definitely the first thing that came into my head. Right. So the bowling alley is also where Gina is said to be buried under. Oh, wow. So there are two ghosts there. There's also a, it's called the suicide bathroom, where at least four different people killed themselves. There were two different, like pipes like water heating

pipes on either end of the room yeah and someone had hung themselves on either end oh no it's like there was one person who killed themselves over there there's another person at one point who hung himself on the other side of pipes i don't know how one of them died and then the fourth one was a woman who uh she broke the mirror and tried to swallow the glass shards. No, no, no. To kill herself. Don't do that. So that seems to be a really heavy place to do some.

Yeah. A lot of people will leave a camera there and just kind of leave it running for the night. And then they'll go investigate other rooms. And when they come back, the camera is like moved at a very obvious angle. Wonderful. Like it's almost like someone just took the camera and just of like pointed it somewhere else but you can see it do the shift oh no that's creepy yeah like when you watch it later on the playback that's creepy it's moving as if someone behind the camera is moving it but then you remember you left it alone so

creepy um there's also a boiler room of course there is always also is super dangerous for women because i guess a couple women were raped down there as well no when it was a hospital that um the people who claim to be helping you would bring the woman down there no no and because they're crazy no one will believe them it's really fucked up it's so sad so uh usually if women go down there, there's like an angry kind of gravity towards them. Also, a couple of women were killed down there. And when one investigation group went down, they like sprayed luminol to like see if there was any stains anywhere. And you could literally see a giant blood puddle. And then like something had dragged through it out the front door.

No. Like something had dragged through it out the front door. No. They'd also done some like EVP sessions where they were talking to them and then playing it back later to see if they heard anything. They've done spirit box readings to see if there was like an immediate intelligent response. Right. And during one of those events, an investigation group asked them, where did you take the bodies? Like once you killed them, where did you take the bodies like once you killed them where did you take the bodies and later when they played the evp the next day you could hear right away

some like a voice says over the fence no it's so fucked up one of the things that you're about to get really like about is half of the next page is all just responses that they have gotten this thing is like this whole my favorite thing about this story is that the thing that seems to work the most there are spirit box responses oh no and so there's literally just like lists and lists and there's um there's all these clips there's like a whole website of clips oh god oh god oh god that people like will bring in of shit that has been said holy shit so people can see nurses walking around the halls where the nurse station used to be and there's one nurse who's like all about intelligent responses so wow my favorite thing when i was an investigator was the flashlight sessions where you would take you know those like yeah and then

you take the battery and unscrew it yeah like bit. Yeah, like, so those... The mag lights. Yeah, the heavy black flashlights where you have to twist the front of it with the actual lens on it. You have to twist that off to get to the batteries. If you twist it and get it so it's just ever so light that when you touch it, it can go on or off. And then leave the flashlight somewhere. You can use that as a yes or no game of turn the light on if it's yes or no. Because it doesn't use much like it doesn't take much it's like so light that if there's no draft essentially it won't go on or off by itself unless someone's pushing on it just a little bit creepier ones i've done that it was

my favorite that was i love that kind of stuff so the nurses are really good at the flashlight game and um i was watching a couple sessions last night that people had done where they the best way to do it is bring in multiple flashlights that way you can say okay can you turn this one off or can you turn this one on or can you turn both of these on that way you know it's not like random it's like oh well maybe it was a draft maybe it was it turned off by itself right You can see like an intelligent, like one time we had, um, we had like an EMF detector going off where it was like green to red baseline. Right.

So if there was anything near it, it would go all the way to red. But if there's nothing there, it would go green. And we had all of the EMFs in a circle around the room. We had like 12 of them lined up all around the perimeter of the room. And we asked, if you're here, can you run around and hit all the machines machines and it was so cool to watch each one go red by itself as if like you could see someone running around holy shit so anyway that stuff gets me but the the nurses are very nice but they'll totally listen to you during the flashlight stuff wow that one was really cool that's crazy um also there was this one's really There was, he doesn't die before you like make a weird thing, but there was a service

dog that someone brought in because they wanted emotional support. I don't blame them. Yeah. And the dog who, like those things, they have to be trained. Like they have to be, if they're like a real, real, real service dog. Oh yeah. They go through a lot of training. They are super obedient and disciplined.

And this dog refused to go upstairs. Like there's video footage of this dog lying down so he was heavier to drag then he got up and was desperately yanking on it and then he ended up grabbing his own leash and just booking it and like let his like owner drag behind him was like i'm not going in there smart pup um so just more proof that animals know everything they do they're smart people get scratched on the staircase people will get thrown off of the stairs um oh there were a couple guys actually who have all interviewed at different times not knowing each other um saying that they had gotten thrown off the stairs but right beforehand they blacked out and saw like this giant muscular man like but a beforehand they blacked out and saw, like, this giant, muscular

man, like, but a clear body, like, you could see through him, like Casper, but, like, they used the phrase like, a ripple-jacked muscle man with the head of a goat. Oh, what? Yeah. Wait, what? And that's the thing that shoves you over the railing. No!

What the fuck? And these were, like, big men, like, one of the guys was, like, clearing 300. Wait, and they all said that they saw that same thing they all and different occasions in different years where they didn't know each other had all said this that is not okay and uh that was the thing that like threw them over the stairs don't ever go in there um another thing is a priest came at one point and the people that came with him went blind. Temporarily. Temporarily.

Uh, this priest was also shouted out by name down the hall where nobody was. And he wasn't even dressed like a priest. He hadn't told anyone he was with that he was a priest. Oh, ew. Like, it just knew. It was like, Father Johnson. Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew. There's a man in a 1950s suit with an old camera who will walk

around the perimeter taking photos of the house ew like a lot of people have come in and been like who's the guy taking pictures downstairs and he looks like he's wearing like a really like old jacket that he must have gotten from a thrift store yeah exactly and they're like oh no he's been around since like almost a hundred years yikes uh oh there's also a whistle room what where a lot of people have heard a whistle um like someone like whistling a song oh and because of that other people over time have gone in and like whistled to hear if something would do anything back so they'll whistle a random song and when they leave all of a sudden they'll hear a whistle of a different song like in the room that they were just in nope there was also a guy who was on his very first investigation so

clearly he you know go big or go home went to the most haunted fucking place on these for real and he didn't know what to say because he had never tried talking to a ghost before he didn't really know like what to ask so he just sat in a room by himself and he's like what's your favorite music and you could hear someone say blues and he got it on his on his uh recorder holy shit you can hear someone say blues and then as he was leaving the room he heard a banjo play no yeah like only like only a couple chords but like you could hear a banjo as he left oh Oh, that gave me chills. Okay, so this is the last thing. I also have a link that I can put on my Twitter or social media. But it's a link to a couple of these EVPs that were pretty neat. I will listen to them, but not tonight.

Tomorrow in the daylight. Perfect. So this is just a list of some of the many things that has been said. Okay. this is just a list of some of the many things that has been said okay so this is all through the spirit box or through um evp sessions where they listen to the recording later cool but these are all at least class a um evps so um class a is like they didn't have to really alter it at all if anything they just put the volume up so you can hear it better wow okay because like there isn't like there's although there's

like a b and c and then there's a d and then there's a fucking g which literally stands for garbage but yeah i was gonna say what the hell is g like pretty sure i'm a class g person amen so these are all at least if they're not spirit box and recorded so like there's video footage of the spirit box saying these things, they're at least class A EVPs. That's crazy. Are those like rare? Yeah.

Most are class B, but that they're up to suggestion because you could, you could tell someone it says something and then because you told them about it, they're like suggestible. Yeah. Like they're going to hear it. Sure. But class A is usually like everyone hears and hears the same thing oh see i feel like i usually hear the class

b one just because it's people who like write them on the internet and they're like this is what i hear yeah i'm like it says i'm awesome yeah and i'm like okay so the first one is uh there and these are just responses i don't really know what the questions were okay but there has been um there's footage of them saying what's your name in a response to someone asking where you are there was a response that said radford oh which is fucking creepy yeah um another one said don't come back oh no another said i'll kill you oh oh shit another said i want to play yeah that's enough i don't know if shit. Another said, I want to play. Yeah, that's enough. I don't know if that's like a little boy wanting to play. Or if it's like the little girl wanting to play like bowling.

Or if it's like, oh, you want to play a fucking game? I am a demon and I will kill you. Yeah, I'll play. That's how I take it. There's another that said, please get home, which is a very proper way of saying get the fuck out. Is that what that means? Please get home. Oh, I just wanted to say, please get home safely safely but like no it doesn't seem as nice as that uh one tour

brought a woman in who was also investigating and as soon as she came in they weren't hearing anything all night but when she walked in the room they got who is she who um when asked how many of you are here it said all around you okay i don't enjoy that another one said die another one said kill them as if like there's it's not just they're not talking to one ghost at a time it's like all of these fucking soldiers and natives and little boys and people like patients from the hospital the hospital. And suicide victims. And suicide victims. They're all just, like, high-fiving each other being, like, kill them. Or, like, I'll get this one. Why?

There's one here that does say, like, someone says, like, I'll kill them. And then you can hear another one. Like, on the EVP, you can hear two different voices. No. And one says, I'll kill them. And another one says, no. Which was nice. Oh, good. And then, like, you can hear, I don't know if it's one says, no. Which was nice. Oh, good.

And then, like, you can hear, I don't know if it's the first one or if it's a whole other one, but it said, let me do it. It's so fucked up. M, what the fuck? Another one said murder. One of the investigators sat, like, on a, I guess, like, an old industrial pipe or tank or something like that. While he was like trying to interview, he just kind of leaned against it and you couldn't hear it at the time. When they went back and played it, you could see him sit down and then the,

um, their devices pick up them saying, get off of that. Um, there's some like curmudgeon-y ghosts, dude. When asked to reply, um,

one of them said, sure you want me to. like what a sassy bitch sure i guess fucking attitude another one said get her to a female no uh investigator who no that was another one you couldn't hear at the time she was just talking and in the middle of her talking you can hear something off the machine say get her nope like and that's so sad like she couldn't even hear it another one just said hello which is like oh hello like you're currently the nicest that's nice to an intern by the way oh no there was an intern by his fucking self investigating this haunted house and you could hear uh a whisper you can but you can hear it's a definitely a clear

whisper and something saying what a weak kid am like funny and that they're being judgmental but then you remember it's probably like the like the president or the professor from that school being like what a weak kid or it could have been one of like the stronger bully no who was like what a weak kid like we can get him we could take the stronger bully no who was like what a weak kid like we can get them we could take them that's so fucking sad it's not funny anymore and then when asked how many spirits were in the room a different time they got a this was the one that's i want to show the link to because this was very very clear um when asked how many spirits were in the room on a spirit box so it's like a direct voice you can hear it right away you could hear something say seven and then they ask again because they wanted to like confirm that

they actually heard something yeah can you tell me again who's here and you can hear like a growl scream go seven you could not miss it my god um when this was this one's always cool i think but instead of asking how many people or how many spirits are we talking to? Like how many of you are there that we can't see? Um, one of the investigators said, how many of us are here to try and get like a, an answer that they could confirm. And they said, uh, there were five in the room, but they came with 10 people and said

they got a spirit box reading that said five. And then you could hear something else say no 10 oh that was the creepiest like they knew about the other five that weren't in the room oh my god yeah and then uh this was this is who i imagined was probably a sassy gay um an investigator walking through the room was like, it's dusty in here. And a spirit shouted, fuck yeah. Wait, it just said, fuck yeah. Yeah. Like you could hear it in the machine being like, girl, I know it's dusty.

I live here. Oh my God. Uh, the investigator then turned on their spirit box and said, are you in this room? And then there was an answer of no. Um, and then the investigator asked if you're not in here, how can you answer me no? Because you could hear it directly. It was through the spirit box. Oh, yeah.

So he heard no, like I'm not in the room. Right. And so playing his game, the investigator was like, if you're not here, then how can you answer me? And you could hear him again say, I'm not stupid. Oh, my God. This is so creepy. And then the last one, which is heartfelt is one of the female investigators.

I don't know why I keep saying female investigators when it's like, I'm not saying male investigators. Fair point. But I think it's because everyone that's involved, like, like anytime, like it's, it's meant something for the story. I don't know. I just feel like i'm saying it a lot so i sound kind of yeah i feel like i have to but it anyway don't okay you'll

understand why in a second uh there was a female investigator who was walking around and over time she stopped feeling creeped out but she said it out loud to the other female investigator and um she was like oh like now that we've been here for a little bit i'm not feeling too creeped out and they didn't hear it then but when they checked the recording later they could hear in a very southern accent say sorry you felt that way ladies that's a long that's a fucking that's a long one holy shit but it's long and kind in a southern southern drawl. And a southern drawl. Oh my god.

Okay. You have been talking nonstop about how much this story is freaking you out. I gotta take my bra off. Yeah, that's what you're... I'm sorry. Hold on. We're at a whole new stage in our friendship now. Here you go.

It's been a long time since I've seen a girl take her bra off in front of me, by the way. So thanks for giving me that experience all over again you're welcome i do what i can for you perfect now let's talk about something pretty horrifying okay so you say okay i'm gonna tell you the story of dd bland dd and gypsy rose blanchard do you know about them nope great so they lived in springfield missouri um dd was a 40 year old 48 year old woman uh she was a larger lady she wore a lot of like bright cheerful clothes um people described her as generous and friendly extremely loyal to her friends she was just very much loved in the community and her daughter was named gypsy um and Dee Dee worked, she didn't work a job

because she was a full-time caretaker for Gypsy Rose, her teenage daughter. So Gypsy was tiny. She was about five feet tall, confined to a wheelchair, wore these big glasses, was pale, skinny. Her teeth were in terrible shape, and she had a feeding tube. And a lot of times she even had an oxygen tank that she would take around with her. And Didi would tell people,

you know, my daughter has several illnesses, including chromosome defects, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnea, and eye problems. So she had been this way since she was a baby. She was in neonatal intensive care, suffering from leukemia as a toddler. So she was just full of all these ailments. But Gypsy was, the daughter was really sweet, talkative,

but she had this high childlike voice and her illnesses had taken a toll on her. And her mom often reminded people that her daughter had brain damage and had the mind of a seven-year-old. Okay. But she was a really sweet girl, and the two of them were really close. The house they lived in had actually been built by Habitat for Humanity. Aw. And it had amenities, so it had, like, a wheelchair ramp.

It had, like, a jacuzzi tub for her muscles um and that kind of thing uh and dd at the time became very close with a woman who lived across the street named amy who had four children of her own and they kind of became like really close family friends and they confided in each other um she told everybody she told amy and she told people in the neighborhood and people she knew that uh gypsy's father was deadbeat, who was an alcoholic, and who didn't support Gypsy and her illnesses, and who called Special Olympics a freak show and that kind of thing. Well, this guy deserves to rot in hell. Yeah. Let's just start there.

Just not a good start. But they did seem really happy the two of them and people described them as just being extremely close uh and wonderful people uh they went on trips to disney world like charity trips for her illness uh they met miranda lambert through the make a wish foundation hey um and then one day uh in june of 2015 um a status was posted on d Dee's Facebook profile that read, That bitch is dead. What?

What are you talking about? I found the post on Facebook. It's still there. No. They didn't take it down? Nope, it's still there. Oh my gosh. You can't comment, but you can see all the people who commented when it went up.

Yeah. And so a lot of family and friends were A confused be upset with like the language of it right see just convinced either like her account was hacked or even like maybe they'd been watching or like a weird joke or something yeah they thought maybe she's watching a weird movie even like i read through the comments and people were just not believe in it yeah or like just disturbed right um so then there was a new comment that came from dd's profile on like in between all the concerned family friends that said it's disturbing by the way anybody okay who has children or anything around it said i fucking slashed that fat pig and raped her sweet innocent daughter her. Her scream was so fucking loud, LOL, in all capital letters.

What the fuck? So everyone was like, holy shit. They called the police, obviously. A group of concerned neighbors went to her house, Dee Dee's and Gypsy's house. They noticed that Dee Dee's van was parked outside and it was the only van that she could transport Gypsy in because she had the wheelchair. Right. So they were like super concerned. Um, the search warrant came, uh, at 1045 that night and the police found Dee Dee's body in the bedroom.

Oh. The mom. She'd been stabbed and had been dead for several days, but there was no sign of Gypsy, the daughter. Oh my God. dead for several days but there was no sign of gypsy the daughter oh my god one of their neighbors organized a vigil and a go fund me account to take care of didi's funeral expenses um and possibly gypsies if they found out where she was right um so everyone was freaking out obviously they were like how can anybody prey on this girl like yeah of all fucking people yeah and like she didn't have her wheelchair so she literally was the most helpless.

Like, there's no worse kind of person. It's very fucked up. There was this one girl who... Remember Amy, who I mentioned, who was best friends with the mom? Right. So one of her daughters had actually gotten really close with Gypsy and said she had felt like a big sister to her. But since Gypsy's mom never, like, left her side,

apparently Gypsy had confided in her through a secret Facebook account. Oh, shit. And told her, under the name Emma Rose, and had told her that she had a boyfriend, an online boyfriend. Oh, no. So the police, she told the police, like, listen, I think you need to know this. And so the police like listen i think you need to know this and so the police obviously

looked into it and it turns out uh she had met somebody on a christian single site and said she was in love with him gypsy hadn't told her mom because obviously her mom was not going to approve oh my gosh and she was upset because she longed to to grow up and have a boyfriend like other girls her age. So the new boyfriend they found out was named Nicholas Gojohn. And they'd been dating, talking for over two years. Two years? Uh-huh. Must be nice.

I wish I had a relationship like that. Two years. Go on the internet, man. Oh. They hadn't met, but they were talking for two years on the internet. And Gypsy said she planned to marry him. They were both Catholic, had both agreed to for two years on the internet. And Gypsy said she planned to marry him. They were both Catholic, had both agreed to the names of their children.

Wow. Yeah. And she had planned for her mom to, like, romance and dating, even though her mom kept claiming, like, that she had the mind of a seven-year-old, but she still had these, like, right, she had, like, sexuality and romance on her mind. She told Aaliyah that, so she was 18, and she told Aaliyah that Nick was 24. So the police took down his name and then they traced the ip address uh to dd's facebook post the address was registered to a nicholas go john in big bend wisconsin so that's he's his real name where the posts were coming from well it was like his ip address linked to his wi-fi or whatever

so the posts for a second i thought she wasn't getting catfished well she wasn't it was him oh yeah oh yeah it was him i thought his name was gonna end up being like tracy i was thinking like lucifer i feel like that's like the least likely thing that could happen out of this story. I mean, it sounds like he's already Lucifer. So, they dispatched officers to Nicholas's slash Lucifer's home in Wisconsin. He surrendered quickly. They found Gypsy with him, safe and healthy. Really?

That is not the story I thought I was going to hear. I know. Everyone was super relieved, but then they were like, wait. Yeah, what the fuck, what is happening it turns out that in fact gypsy hadn't used a wheelchair from the moment she had left her house a few days earlier because she didn't need one what did her mom have Munchausen yes oh she could my psychology degree much out of a proxy but yeah close enough oh yeah she would she could my psychology degree. My child's my proxy, but yeah, close enough.

Well, yeah, she would, she could walk just fine. Um, there was nothing wrong with her muscles and she had no medication or oxygen tank with her. Her hair was short and spiky, but she wasn't bald.

Her head had simply been shaved all her life to make her appear ill. She was well-spoken, but shaken. Um, and she told the police it was all a fraud, all of it, every last bit. And her mother had made her do it. So it turns out Dee Dee, the mother, her name was actually Claudine, but she had gone by various aliases and misspellings over the years.

For a while, she went by Claudinea, which I just don't even know. Get over yourself. That is not even a discrete name like if you're gonna hide from the law ruth yeah literally be like julie and like something really claudinea is not subtle you're asking to be noticed and then she added an e to her last name because she was like oh that'll hide me but it did i guess so i mean maybe the most obvious ones are actually the most subtle ones um they found gypsy's father who uh had been only 18 when gypsy was born it turns out he had been involved in her life all along had been sending payments

like money did the daughter know this though uh-huh so wait the daughter knew about this whole scam the whole time uh- knew she was fine. Yes. But she had been, I mean, her mom had been training her to do this since she was two. No, I get that. For a second, I super sympathized with her because I thought she had no idea her dad was in her life. It had no idea that she wasn't sick. Her mom just told her. And so she just believed it. Not that she knew something was up the whole time.

Her mom just told her, and so she just believed it, not that she knew something was up the whole time. Well, there was a moment where actually her dad asked her, like, what did your mom tell you? Like, did she – because he found out that her mom had been, like – Doing this. Like, well – Calming people. But, like, bashing him and being like, he's an alcoholic. He doesn't support her. Like, da-da-da.

And so he found that out after her death and so he asked his daughter like what on earth has she been saying like why did she let why was she so friendly with me on the phone and all her daughter all uh that gypsy said was mom said keep your enemies close and that's all that what a shady bitch she could like tell him she's like that's just what she told me um so it turns out that like when uh gypsy was born um her dad was only 18 and her mom was 24 um and so her dad kind of panicked they got married but then he realized like i can't be in a relationship with you this is not like what i want so they got separated but he uh gave her money throughout her life helped support her medical bills etc um he said later that gypsy was healthy at birth but when she was three months old dd

became convinced that her baby had sleep apnea and that gypsy would stop breathing in the night and that's when dd began taking her to the hospital uh rod remembers that the doctor couldn't find anything in spite of three rounds of tests and a sleep monitor what what dd would tell people is that gypsy had a chromosomal defect and that's how she explained to people how bewildering like her illness was because she wasn't diagnosed with anything um and a lot of her, uh, health issues she claimed stemmed from like her chromosomal defects, as she put it. Right. What a diplomatic way to say there's nothing wrong with my child.

Yeah. And the crazy thing is that a lot of Munchausen by proxy, um, cases start with sleep apnea. A lot of times parents will say, Oh, they have sleep apnea and it'll like stem from that. Yeah.

So it's just really fascinating um apparently it spiraled really quickly um dd would always come up with a new idea of what was wrong with her daughter she'd find a new doctor she'd find a new drug um and she had actually once worked as a nurse's aide which i guess is another sign of munchausen's is like the parent learned it all had worked in medicine because a lot of times that's part of like their mental i don't know awareness of illnesses and their terminology and that kind of thing uh so she was good at like remembering the terminology and like spitting it back at doctors and nurses and that was part of the way that she kept people like in this right like with the wool over their eyes yeah um and i guess the way she used those terminology

was like a wall like she would just spit all these words out and nobody can argue yeah nobody can like argue with that um so rod her dad um gypsy's like biological father eventually remarried had children other children but would like have family outings with her when she was growing up, and then eventually Dee Dee, like, stopped visiting and said she's too sick, you know, but he would still, like, support them financially and that kind of thing. So Dee Dee would tell doctors that Gypsy had seizures every couple of months, so they started putting her on anti-seizure medications. Dee Dee told multiple doctors that her daughter had muscular dystrophy even after a muscle

biopsy. But really, she wanted a jacuzzi. Well, maybe. It's quite a roundabout way to get it. I mean, it's like how a lot of people go to doctors to get pills. It's like, can I just tell you I have muscular dystrophy so I can have a hot tub? Yeah. And will you pay for it?

Really roundabout way to get a hot tub. But yeah, so DeeDee would tell people that her daughter had muscular dystrophy even after a muscle biopsy proved that she didn't she said there were problems with her eyes and ears also and insisted that she had poor vision and frequent ear infections so doctors would frequently operate on her to do what um like they would just like they did put tubes in her ears and shit when she didn't need it she had tubes in her ears she also had um multiple eye surgeries fuck fuck fuck because her mom talk i'd be like let me be blind into saying that she had like vision problems and couldn't see and da-da-da. And so they did actual surgery on her eyes and ears. Ugh.

I'm over the story officially. It is too late. Da-da-da-da-da. And this is too dark. So after Katrina hit, she told everybody that her daughter's medical records had been washed away in the hurricane. Oh, that's fucking convenient, isn't it nice they moved to missouri um chipsy had been involved with charities for children um with disabilities from the time she was small they stayed at like ronald mcdonald homes um and apparently that was the biggest benefit that dd had gotten is that they

stayed at all these Ronald McDonald houses. Oh, what a treat. Over the years. What a treat when there's actually nothing with your child. Yeah. So it kind of, again, spiraled from there. They got free flights from a volunteer pilots organization. They stayed at a lodge for cancer patients.

They got free trips to Disney World through charity organizations. When Gypsy's dad called for her 18th birthday to wish her a happy 18th birthday, he wanted to make like a joke about, because her mom always listened in on the phone calls, and he tried to make a joke like, oh, you're a grown-up now, like, I better watch out, you know, as a dad, like typical dad jokes. Like dad jokes, even though you haven't been around this whole time yeah well no but he was like he still paying visited regularly they did family vacations together he paid so was he at least under the impression that she was really ill yeah because when he said when she was three months old that the mom was like no she's so sick like she's right ready to tell me and so he was like oh my god so he paid for like all her medical treatments

he and his new like her step mom were taking her on trips like jesus took care of her there it just was that's a father by the way no idea like that she was bashing him i mean he knew she was sick but he didn't know about any of the um they did like local video like um local news stories and things like that on the two of them right and the mom never told him like anything about that. So they were like known in their town because of all these news stories. Right. Right.

Right. And they were, I guess she didn't tell him about all like the charity benefits they were getting, obviously. So he just thought, you know, I'm supporting my family.

But so anyway, so he called on her 18th birthday to make like dad jokes about like, Oh, you know, like every girl's 18th birthday dream. Fabulous. You're like, you're where do I sign 18? And Didi said, she thinks she's 14.

You can't talk to her like that. And it's like, it was like, that's strange. And that was the first one of the first signs where he was like that. Like, what does she mean? Like, yeah, that doesn't seem normal. like what does she mean like that doesn't seem normal um so the first time rod her dad saw gypsy walk was in a news report um on gypsy's arraignment hearing in wisconsin nobody had prepared them christy his new wife her stepmother saw the video on facebook and rod said when he saw gypsy walking on her feet his first reaction, I was so happy that she was walking.

It didn't even occur to him that like, why? Like that she wasn't sick. Right. It was like, oh, it's a miracle despite her illnesses. One of the things she said was like, the most frustrating thing was when they would go to doctors when she was younger. And her mom would tell them like she had muscular dystrophy and she was like i had perfectly healthy muscle mass in my legs i didn't have yeah how do you lie to doctors about that i she was like i didn't have really skinny legs like like most people do

and she was like it was so frustrating that doctors weren't like hmm what like yeah it says a lot about all the doctors you ever saw but at the same, they interviewed a lot of the doctors, and they were like, you know, if the mom is insisting that in other, like, she's been diagnosed with this since she was a baby, and, like, her records got washed away, and she's super ill. Wouldn't it be somewhere in her, like, blood, though? Like, couldn't you do, like, a test? Like, draw some blood? They did muscle biopsies. But, like, I feel like it's a line as a doctor of being like you can't be like you're faking and then like you're like oh i don't know i don't know i this

is just too fucking weird to me so gypsy doesn't know the full story like she's still confused about things because her mom didn't explain everything did her mom really believe this shit though i mean if you're gonna let your daughter get fucking biopsies performed on her well munch house my proxy is like a mental disorder so it's like you're not saying though did she like so she definitely saw like she was in this world where this was like she had no sense of having conned anyone oh no i think she knows it wasn't real i just think the way that it works is like you have this compulsion to like it's weird she's really really wanted to believe the way they explained it is that so there's malingering which is a different thing which is where you purposefully like cause that's like you just that's like you'll feed your child too much salt so that they get really really

sick yeah you like like you're fully make them ill to like con people and then but that's not considered a mental illness but that's just abuse yeah but munchausen by proxy is considered a mental illness so i don't know like the distinction but i guess it's like i don't know if she really like if in her heart like she like no she's actually really sick or if she was like part of her knew this was a big fucking lie i think part of her knew it was a lie and also she had like somewhat of a criminal record and would change her name a lot and yeah deceive people and wouldn't tell her husband you know she kept a lot of secrets from people so i think part of her at least part of her new like sounds like a real good con job i'm deceiving people. Yeah.

So it's just caused all sorts of controversy, obviously. So Gypsy doesn't know the whole story. There was a lot that her mom kept away from her. For example, when she was arrested, Gypsy told the police that she was 19. They found her birth certificate. It turns out she was 23 girl she had no idea she really didn't know no idea um she didn't know what medication she had been on in her lifetime oh that's fucked there was a pile of medications um some of them weren't even prescribed to her

at all her mom was just able to get her like certain meds um one of them was a tranquilizer that she had put her on the fuck and um so she had been i mean since she was three months old so oh my god fucks with your body especially when you spent your whole life and you don't actually know uh-huh what's been in your system you're just completely on drugs for forever for your whole lifetime yeah um so that obviously i mean she was only five feet tall who knows if that had anything to do with it but her mom was like very tall and so was her dad so who knows if that like fucked with her development right whatever probs there's most people say yes yeah

it's not like there were flintstone vitamins yeah imagine a tub of flintstone vitamins that would i hated yuck be like swimming in shock those used to make me throw up i don't know why well at least they wouldn't make you five feet tall amen i can't talk i'm six feet fucking tall it's not great you ate way too many flintstone vitamins i know um so okay munchausen by proxy so the person feigns or induces the physical and psychological symptoms on somebody else for no other obvious reason except for sympathy and attention um and it is like a psychological disorder so i guess it does kind of remind me of like like narcissism or something that like you can't explain it's just like an inherent thing where they just want the attention um like geo basically geo has it and thank god he doesn't take care of me because he'd probably

drive me like don't you know don't you know all of the problems with her let me count the ways so ill um so like as we said munchausen is when you do it to yourself so you make yourself ill for attention um and not to be a spoiler but it's been enough years like six cents right just saying great movie uh most whatever cases yeah most cases uh sorry most cases with the syndrome are mothers um but they have also documented cases of fathers doing this to their children husbands doing this to their wives uh nieces doing this to their aunts which is just super weird oh i guess well like i would imagine an elderly if you're taking care yeah that's true that's true like elderly abuse um

and doctors often don't detect it for months or years because it's like extremely rare. Like typically nobody comes in and says like my child is so ill. Right. It's just a very rare thing. You don't assume as a doctor that like they're making it up. Right. And like one other thing I read was that the longer you do it, like especially if you're a parent with a child, the longer you kind of engage the child or even an adult in it, the more likely they are to cooperate. So they'll just jump on board with you, especially as a child, because their whole goal is to like get approval from the parent.

They're not thinking like they think you're right. So if you're going to listen to whatever you say, you're sick, sick you're sick you're sick or like pretend you can't walk or whatever right you're just gonna do it um so it's just very twisted and like must cause psychological damage beyond all i can't even imagine oh yeah it would be crazy like if someone was like oh do you want to go do this you know this random activity and now after like 20 years of your life it's like i don't know can i yeah i have no idea what i'm actually not capable i'm not supposed to tell you i can walk like yeah what someone's like you want to go swimming it's like do i i have literally like you have you've grown up with nothing but someone else controlling your whole life you have

no idea and like limiting you completely yeah like pretending you're seven years old when you're 15 and actually you're 18 you don't even know it like yeah twisted so she just had a horrible she kind of had to be hanging out with other seven-year-olds and be like what the fuck like why is she even giving me this number like i'm not yeah can't she pretend i'm at least like 10 yeah but yeah so apparently this happens in the adult world too and there are people who study it um obviously it's like it hides in plain sight because again people don't assume that you're faking right right um i mean you can just run around on crutches all the time and yeah especially if it's your child like you don't assume that a parent is lying about. Yeah, putting them in a wheelchair for no reason.

Exactly, exactly. And the weird thing about this, too, is that they can't diagnose the mother because, obviously, she's dead. Which reminds me of my line of, like, she's a dead fucking corpse or whatever. But, like, she's a dead fucking lady, so they can't diagnose her. Why would anyone want to talk to her? It's like she's basically dead. She's, she smells so bad probably i wouldn't even want to be in the same room seven grader is back um but she didn't leave behind any sort of diary or anything like so they can't the only way you could diagnose someone with a mental illness is if you speak to

them fucking be there right so they can't technically diagnose her, although she had, like, a binder of medical information on her daughter, and, like, some of the information she gave to various doctors and some, like, parameters that they usually cite as red flags did fit her pretty clearly. Like, the medical training that she had in her background is a very common thing. Do you think, like, I wonder if she sat down was like oh she must have this this and this and decided it all in one night or like every couple years she'd throw in a new thing

well that was what they that's what her um her ex-husband uh gypsy's dad said was that she would kind of just create this gigantic web of lies where so it just kept getting worse yeah so she would lie about something then like someone would question her about it so she would just add on to it and create like all these diagnoses um and one like another thing is that she would always change locations so they would move around a lot which is another sign of munchausen by proxy because you don't want to get caught. And you don't leave a clear medical trail, especially with like, oh, the hurricane took all our... Which, by the way, turned out not to be true because they found the binder of all her medical records. Right, valid.

So clearly she knew what she was doing, like she was lying. So there is a doctor named Caroline Burton who works for the Mayo Clinic. And she studies like adulthood Munchausen by proxy situations. uh there is a doctor named caroline burton who works for the mayo clinic uh and she said she studies like adulthood munchausen by proxy situations she said she's never seen a case go on for that long so like where she was a baby all the way till she was 23 years old i mean so she said she had never seen anything yeah go on for so long um and the crazy thing so they looked into gypsy's medical records um all the way back in 2001 so she was born in 91 which is the year i was born um so she's our age at this point great um well your age i'm not fucking old oh i'm sorry

i'm sorry she's my elderly age oh um all the way back in 2001, doctors at Tulane actually tested her for muscular dystrophy and her tests all came back negative. Typical. All scans of her brain and spine were clear. All of those records survived Katrina, unlike her mother had said. Hmm. Nonetheless, Dee Dee continued to insist to doctor after doctor that Gypsy had muscular dystrophy. Most of the doctors appeared to take her word for face value, which you're right, like is questionable.

I mean, it's one of those things where it's like you see so many patients every day and you don't necessarily think to be like, I'm going to question you on your daughter's health. But at the same time, like, sure, there were signs that she probably wasn't ill. A lot of the doctors, so they took everything for face value and proceeded to treat her for her vision, hearing, sleep, and, quote, salivation problems that her mother said she had. Which her mother said were... Salivation problems? Like, me with fucking ice cream. Yeah, I mean, I already called my friends at tufts and we're gonna do surgery on you yeah so her mom told um doctors that she had a salivation problem that needed to be taken care of

um so gypsy's eye muscles were repeatedly operated on for alleged weakness of her eye muscles. I know, it makes me want to scream. Tubes were put in her ears, like you said, for alleged ear infections. She was given a feeding tube. She ate very little by mouth, surviving on cans of Pediasure. There had to be a doctor somewhere being like i feel bad for this fucking kid we don't need to be doing this oh is his name blaze how did you know my boyfriend was involved so long ago there is one but so she ate basically she ate pediasure into her 20s like into her early

20s i knew someone who ate pediasure into their like teens and we were all like girl you gotta quit whoa i knew people who took it after or that was pedialyte are they not the same thing no pedia sure is like for infants what's pedialyte for toddlers it's like an electrolyte thing i don't know oh whatever it was all weird and it all looked gross it's disgusting but yeah so she basically survived on Pediasure. It's like a meal replacement, sort of. Like Slim Fast. Yeah, well into her 20s.

Her salivary glands were injected with Botox. Then her mother complained that she drooled too much. So they took out her salivary glands. They surgically removed them. I'm going to lose my mind. Gypsy's teeth rotted out and had to be extracted um but it wasn't clear whether that was just poor dental hygiene or the mix of medications and severe malnutrition i'm gonna guess the medications i'm gonna guess all of the fucking above sorry infinity and beyond so most doctors didn't pick up on any

of these hints that anything was wrong um or at least if they did, they didn't act on it. But there was one exception. His name was not Blaze. I'm sure it would have been Blaze if you were practicing medicine back then. But in 2007, a pediatric neurologist named Bernardo Flasserstein. Of course that was his name my second guess really generic you could have guessed it right it was actually it's on my list of baby names bernardo flasterstein just flasterstein actually i hadn't thought of bernard bernardo though

the italian bernard bernardo is not bad um okay so he was consulting on the case in Missouri, and he became suspicious. He said he had his doubts from the first time he saw Dee Dee and Gypsy. Dee Dee's stories about Gypsy's myriad illnesses didn't fly with him, and he actually wrote a note to her primary care doctor after the first visit and wrote in bold underlined type in the note the mother is not a good historian so like she's not telling right like her medical history correctly or something's off um she said or he said there was an unusual distribution to gypsy's weaknesses for a muscular dystrophy case um and he said that he gave the case the benefit of the doubt sent her for all the usual tests

um the mris the blood work and everything came back normal and he said i remember having her stand up and she could hold her own weight exclamation point yeah um flaster scene actually diagnosed the mother with munchausen by proxy um someone finally had to yep so he told her that and explained his assumption and he said i assumed she got my notes but she never showed up again um and the nurses said she was really upset left never came back um there was actually a time that gypsy tried to escape her mother uh they went to a science fiction convention and she met a man uh and they started talking online and uh at this time dd was telling everyone that uh gypsy was 15 when she was actually 19 great um but the man was 35 he took gypsy who was actually 63 yeah we're all living in like an alternate right time universe yeah i'm 49 by the way oh that's my

lucky number is it really wow i knew it i'm 22 stop it um so he took gypsy back to his hotel room um and dd found them apparently she knocked on the hotel room with papers that showed gypsy was a minor so the man let her leave and she later said gypsy later said that was the moment where she was like this isn't okay like right yeah this isn't normal i should be able to hang out with people i want to be yeah and i guess that's where she got rebellious and found this other guy online and all that um but except weren't we all rebellious at one point and found someone online yeah yeah and it was always stupid well but hers went a little too far i mean only a sprinkle only a little bit only a dash mom i promise i never plotted to murder you okay so can you tell me who killed or who wrote the facebook thing because i really like i'm just itching and an itching

needs to get scratched you know yeah tell me more about that it's tall ass okay so actually somebody at one point called the police to do a wellness check because one of the neighbors actually believed that the mom was lying and was like, called the police to check in. The police wrote a report that said clearly Gypsy does suffer from some type of mental handicap because she had been taught to act so well. Could it be Stockholm syndrome? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. That's really more sympathizing. Yeah.

I don't know. I feel like it could just be being brought up to be thought. She just said that was her life. syndrome or maybe i don't know that's really more sympathetic yeah i don't know but i mean i feel like it could just be being brought up to be thought she just said that was her life she was told this is what's wrong with her and so she just did it um but anyway both gypsy and nick her boyfriend were charged with first degree murder um they investigated the crime and it turns out that there were text messages between the two that appeared to discuss and plan dv's death um one time go john or nick uh texted her honey you forget i am ruthless and my hatred of her will force her to die holy crap and you want to be with someone like that it's my

evil side doing it he won't mess up because he enjoys killing what the fuck so this wasn't even his first kill i don't know who the fuck knows apparently he enjoys killing most people who haven't killed don't know that i don't know whether or not they enjoy it yeah i have a hunch i don't like killing people but go john apparently referred to his evil side because he and gypsy had constructed this elaborate online fantasy life where they had these crazy all these facebook accounts they were into like bdsm imagery and would send each other meanwhile mom thinks that she's fucking seven she's seven years old and doesn't know like i mean well maybe that helped her play into that kind of role of being, like, submissive.

I mean, if you think you're seven, obviously you don't think you're... This is so fucked up. I don't know. Holy crap. If you think you're seven, you're not having violent sex with people. Valid. You should not be having hand holdings with anyone. No. So they had specific...

No. No, no. If you're 12 and you're my sister you should never hold anyone's hand until you're 25 okay they have not even 25 exactly m listen to my words of advice probably a good move actually i've made a lot of mistakes maybe i shouldn't hold hands until i'm 25 i'm very wise okay they had specific names and roles for each other uh would take pictures of themselves in like costumes um gypsy would dress up as harley quinn uh and pose with a knife so they were just like in this weird world of like reality and fantasy mixed together um

actually go john had no history of violence he had no history of violence. He had no history of any assault, anything, murder. He was just in this weird fantasy world that they created. The only thing he had ever been arrested for was lewd conduct at a McDonald's in 2013 where he was watching porn on his tablet. They told the police he was the one to wield the knife um she said that while her mother was being stabbed she was in the other room listening oh did she feel bad at all well they planned it for months yeah but i feel like even if i were to plan that i would back out really quick i mean if you think about it it's sort of like an abusive response like that's true those people who are in abusive relationships where they like have no control and you just get to a point where you're like well there's no other

way out i almost feel like it was that kind of thing where she was like do you think she like wanted her mom to die and like or do you think she was just in an abusive relationship with this guy and just went along with what he wanted no i think she was in a relationship abusive relationship with her mom and okay that makes sense i do I do. I mean, that's just bad. I mean, she 1,000% was. Right. I mean, I'm obviously not in the place to say, but. There's just so many weird half factors.

It's all wrong. Yeah. So on July 5th, she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. The judge gave her the minimum sentence of 10 years, so she'll be eligible for parole in about seven and a half years. And at that point, she will be 32 years old. She's now at the women's Eastern reception, diagnostic and correctional center in Vandalia,

Missouri. Her hair is long. Her skin is clear and healthy and she wears proper glasses instead of these giant. Her legs are fully functional. She's off all her meds and there have been zero health problems since she has been out of her mother's control for about a year. Oh, good. Nothing.

Does she regret the murder? Well, one of the people at the prison said, most of my clients lose weight in prison because the food is so bad, but Gypsy gained 14 pounds in the first year. That's like me in college yeah no because everyone gains their weight yeah nobody loses weight in college uh about her mother her opinion seems to waver um the doctors she what she told uh this journalist was that the doctor saw her mom was so devoted and caring i think she would have been the perfect mom for someone that actually was sick but i'm not sick that's a big big difference isn't that sad um she still gypsy doesn't think she actively deceived anyone she said i feel like i was just as used as everybody else she used me

as a pawn i was in the dark about it the only thing i knew was that i could walk and that i could eat as for everything else well she'd shave my hair off and she'd say it's gonna fall out anyway so let's keep it nice and neat gypsy said her mother told her she had cancer and would tell her that her medication was cancer medication so she just accepted it if your mother tells you since you're three years old that yeah you believe it so gypsy was actually the one who had the idea to post about the murder on facebook because she wanted the police to take note and go find her mom so she was like so she had some like there was a reason she was because it was several days later and she was like she told her boyfriend like i needed um i need to post something alarming on facebook right to get alarming indeed attention and she said she told him that but then he decided what to write so it was like that bitch is dead or whatever

um in terms of her prison sentence gypsy uh is like just in a super accepting state and she tells people she feels freer in prison than she did when living with her mom i don't blame her at least they let her walk everywhere yeah and she has probably a friend not on like 30 medications at once yeah she's on zero medications now that tells you something um and she said i was raised with what my mother taught me to do and those things were not very good and then she said something um along the lines, my mother raised me to be a liar, but all I want is to be an honest person. And I feel like I can be that here. So whatever.

Now she's, and she gets out at age 32. So hopefully she can rebuild a semi-decent life. But yeah, it's just wild how like that even enters a parent's mind of like yeah oh this is and i don't think it's like a oh i have a great idea i think it's i really do think it's like a mental illness of like a compulsion of yeah this will get me attention i don't know oh yeah it's just crazy it's so sad it's like one thing to do to yourself but then to do your own child when they're like three years old and put them in a wheelchair and shave their head i mean it's just so twisted yeah but she got so much out of it news stories and trips to disney world and meeting miranda lambert like i would do

many things to meet miranda lambert fair point i kind of get that a little on that end if you want me to shave your head i'll do it yeah just get me to miranda lambert who's around right now i think because stagecoach is going on that's right well that was a great happy way to end my week hello how how well let's listen to a horoscope for geo oh my god i have such a good one oh my god i have such a good one okay so here is geo's horoscope for the day i'm ready i'm ready you're not gonna like it oh is someone being a bit greedy in regard to you right now their non-stop attention and eagerness to spend time with you has been quite flattering but today you might be starting to feel a bit claustrophobic. No. You've got a more introverted personality than you might realize, and it's wishing for some peace and quiet.

Of course, you don't want to hurt this person, M, feeling by rejecting them. But you need to tell them to give you space. If you don't, they could start to annoy you. I think that's wrong the stars are wrong they have not aligned mercury is in retrograde literally we're best friends today when i showed up i didn't even say hi to him yet and he had already leapt on he was like i'm ready for that hug that's so if i'm being claustrophobic maybe he needs to needs to not send me those kinds of signs. Yeah.

I'm just telling you what the stars are saying. I give him ample wiggle room to leave if he's not interested. But he will sit still and let me kiss on him and love on him and give him compliments. He's a lucky, lucky guy. You're acting a little defensive, Em. Because I don't want to let him go anyway i saw that it was the first one i opened and i was like holy shit that's so real uh on that note i don't we never know how to end these things so listen we love you guys so much in it like i

can't even deal the affection that we show to geo we also show to you yes be lucky that you're not in the same physical location as us you can find us on facebook you can find us on twitter and instagram and you can find us at our website and that's why we drink.com you can also find our patreon there uh our uh handle is atwwd podcast and you can email us your stories for our next listener's story that comes out the first of every month at and that's why we drink at gmail.com and we want to hear from you so get in touch please and we love you very much and thank you that's why we drink i don't care what you had to say and that's why we finally had it okay one two three and that's why we drink jesus