And That's Why We Drink - E187 Lydia Chlamydia and Father Macaroni

Episode Date: September 6, 2020

Hi there, are you peeling OK today? Because we're not sure we are... this week on episode 187 we're pretty sure the fake haunted doll we made up cursed Christine's contact out of her eye. Em then takes us all the way to Romania for some poltergeist activity in the story of Eleonora Zugun and her Dracu (Devil) within. Then Christine brings new meaning to the name "Bambi" with the story of Laurie Bembenek. Also, it turns out potatoes are the rocks of the starch family... and that's why we drink! Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Go to buyphantomwine.com and enter DRINK for 20% off online purchases of Phantomwine! Go to thirdlove.com/DRINK for 15% off today!Explore your creativity and get 2 free months of Premium Membership at Skillshare.com/DRINK2

welcome to espm i'm still proud of that joke the red zone the red zone um hi m how are you hi i'm good uh just you know the exact same yeah uh still cockroaches in my house good um still no cockroaches in your house i mean i've left a puddle of blood in my wake just blood in your house so who knows they could have been drawn in i uh did you clean the blood off of your walls i tried to but then the next morning i found some more oh poor blaze i uh um also i showed you a tiktok last night that i feel like the whole world should know about so i'll try to save that so we can post it on our instagram later but there was a there's this tiktok of this uh girl showing off her boyfriend saying like oh well uh or my boyfriend who's literally getting a phd a chemistry phd at yale

and then uh it cuts to the girlfriend with like a like a big quartz rock and like uh something else it's like a crystal and something it's me again the rain is healing energy and i said i tagged you in blaze i've never seen a more perfect talk that represented a guy like cooking or something which is like minding his own fucking represented a couple. It's just this guy like cooking or something, which is literally. Like minding his own fucking business. And then just, it's me again. Which like we literally, Blaze did go to Yale and he has a Yale apron. And like he literally cooks.

He's the one who cooks. So I'm seeing this video of this person and she's like, look, it's my boyfriend who has a degree from Yale. And I'm like, oh. And then it turns and she's like holding a crystal and says the rain is healing but i went oh fuck m really called me out i saw that one and i'm telling you i saw it when i was and alice and i were staying over in the apartment and i so and alice had gone to sleep and i literally had never it was the only tiktok where i've covered my face laughing so hard because

i was like this could not i've never seen a more perfect i just was and when m sent me that i was like i'm pretty sure i told blaze that rain has healing energy like two weeks ago like those verbatim what does he do as your husband kind of stares at me when you come to him and you say i have something to say what does he expect is going to come out of here he usually puts everything down and leans back and waits because i'm like if he's still doing stuff i'm like you're not listening to the important information i have it really could be anything from the rain as healing energy to like i bought a dog or yeah yeah yeah i lost our baby i lost our dog lost all of our 15 dogs it's really quite a range that i bring to the table you know it is fun and scary to be your friend because when you're like i have something to say

it's like whatever it is it's gonna be a memory we're all gonna have to sit back put down our phone whatever you're about to say we're gonna talk about later at some point um did you hear the news about uh annabelle i was wondering if this was gonna come up apparently it's a hoax that's what i'm hearing i feel like i'm not totally surprised by that but what i don't know so again all i know is from tiktok but from what i'm understanding is that she literally at 3 a.m one night just literally went vamoose just vanished from like so on the nose yeah for a haunted doll like there i feel like fucking zach bagans said it i feel like he went to connecticut he went to the warren museum i mean bagel bites who doesn't have a lawyer that can sue us i mean this is all alleged and if i

were to throw a theory in the ringer it would be this one also a lot of our theories are all of our theories are very alleged because they're all wrong probably i've also said this many times a lot of and a lot of instagram lives people say like what's where's the number one haunted place you would love to go and i always say i would want to go to the warren museum it just looks like there it's just like condensed like concentrated haunting stories and stuff and that's where annabelle is in the warren museum or was or was and apparently she's on tiktok now because a lot of people have a lot to say about it they're pretty funny but um so i personally think and i've said it openly before i will be shocked if anything other than zach bagans buying that museum is involved right like he's bound to a lot of people

tweeted at us last time when you said that and we're like oh that would never happen because remember like you said something about oh maybe she'll end up with or maybe it wasn't annabella forget which doll you said like we'll end up with zach bagans and then all these people tweeted like no that won't happen because xyz and they're really against i know ptd zach already has P.T.D. Right. And H.T.D. He's friends with the guy who is the caretaker. Does he have S.T.D.? Oh, my God. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. You were talking about Harold, you silly goose. I'm talking about Susan the doll. Robert. I'm talking about Susan the doll. Oh, no. I popped out my contact oh no where is it does susan have it oh no i've been haunted what did i do didn't i tell you oh it's oh there it is catch it okay well now i can see out of one eye so that's good didn't i tell you oh it's oh there it is catch it okay well now i can see out of one eye so that's good didn't i tell you at one point i had a dream about personified stds yes you did

you see oh leah gonorrhea leah gonorrhea wait leah gonorrhea there was like a chlamydia. Oh, Lydia Chlamydia. Lydia Chlamydia. And I think it was just Sif Phyllis. Sif Phyllis, that's right. And they were like sisters. What was wrong with me? I don't know. I don't know. Anyway.

Anyway. Nobody draw a picture of that. Okay. So what's going on? There's a doll and she escaped the museum. I don't know what happened. But she like cursed my contact out of my eye and so now i can't see so things are going really well that's the first side effect of std possession

yeah susan um leave me alone i'm sorry i'm sweating that was funny i apologize to susan I don't know anymore, man. Anyway, there's a doll. Oh, so HTD, Harold, has... Who we love and will never say anything negative about. Not one. Not one. So he, I don't think his owner slash caretaker, apparently the person who is with Harold, they prefer the term caretaker. So I don't think Harold's caretaker so i don't think harold's caretaker

is interested in offering him to anybody i think that's what people were tweeting maybe robert the doll i'm shocked by i guess there's a whole museum or something right oh yeah he's like has his own place and a tour like i literally went on a tour in key west and it was like the robert the doll tour so i don't know maybe they make too much money where like zach doesn't like stand a chance but i feel like anything zach could grab he probably would try it his empire it's like alexander the great he just wants to like take over the whole empire he's like maybe i can't own harold but he is going to be a guest star on our show yeah yeah i'm sure he's done one with with rtd right oh that's what happened that's how i tweeted as okay hold on never mind that was the day when i

went on the robert the doll tour that was a day that zach blocked me on twitter right anyway long story but sorry okay so i've always thought at some point especially since the warrens have passed i always assumed zach would eventually at least try to buy their museum and if not their museum at the very least annabelle right right right and so my in my brain i like to imagine that he like played you know burglar and like kind of snuck in and took annabelle or he didn't do it he sent he sent aaron obviously um but i that's what i like to think happened obviously it probably most likely 99.99 did not happen but people say that she just vanished okay that's pretty freaky

though either way yeah it's not good news it's not good certainly not good news um and also everyone apparently there's a thing called annabelle twitter and annabelle tiktok now it's all hysterical like people are making up some real funny stuff about why she decided to leave now and they're like even annabelle's even annabelle's scared of 2020 i know i i like that uh i like that whole vibe that whole that whole meme world we've created yeah um can i give you a haunted update yeah okay so you know how my house i know okay it's covered in blood a that was my fault though um but b you know i have those haunted stairs right yeah okay so here's what i did you're not gonna love it okay what it wasn't a thing i realized i was doing until after i did it so i needed furniture for my house right yeah uh-huh and so i was like okay i need furniture um and i need a sofa

but sofas are expensive so then i went on this app that I love called Everything But The House, which is where you buy stuff from estate sales after people die. And so I found this couch that was like nearly brand new. But? But it was, you know, from a dead person's house. So then I bought it. I put it in my house. And then that night, that same night we got the couch because it was like a third of a third of the price. I was really affordable. So I bought this couch, right? And then my stepdad and Blaze went and picked it up and put it in the house. And then we put up a

TV that night in our little living room area. We put up a TV finally. And we were like, oh, perfect. And then this freaking TV keeps turning itself on and off and keeps like going crazy and we're like i don't know what it is the outlets are working everything's fine the cords are put like nothing's off was it working until the couch showed up well so we got them the same day so like i don't know but then i was like oh shoot i just realized i literally leaned this couch against that haunted staircase so now i have just like this weird vortex of like the haunted staircase is here then there's a sofa from this person who just died in the house and then how did the person die peacefully oh i don't know they don't like give you the i mean that would be i mean it could be

like a lizzie borden couch we're like it's not covered in blood as far as i can tell your window unit is i know i'm adding to the whole i i feel like a lot of people are really you're doing something real sneaky. Christine, I'm on to you because everyone is paying attention to what Bagel Bites is up to and how he's trying to like build this conglomerate museum of haunted items. But over in Cincinnati, something's happening. You're just the East Coast. Zach Bagans haunted. That's all the Midwest. That's all I've ever wanted.

Well, the ZB of the Midwest. Well, OK okay just slowly buying things from estate sales and being shocked i was like oh that's i was like that's so weird that like this tv i mean and of course i don't i'm not of the camp that oh something electrical happens it must be a ghost i get that um so it probably i know m is but the tv also was not used to be clear that was a new TV, so it shouldn't be going on the fritz like it is. But in any case, I was like, that's weird. And then I was like, oh, my God, I just bought this sofa. Oh, my God, it's like leaned up against these stairs is where I see stuff happening. So anyway, now my little living room area is just extra haunted.

Great. Anyway, what's next? I don't know. You're going to buy a haunted truck or something. It was like a third of the price. And it's like a very, very new couch. what's next i don't know you're gonna buy a haunted truck or something it was so it was like a third of the price and it's like a very very new couch i mean i'm happy for you that you're furnishing your home but like the way you're choosing to do it i'm mad at myself for being shocked and uh the so when i bought okay so then we bought it and we picked it up and it has

like a tag that's like it's been like fully sanitized like they go through like a really professional obviously for obvious reasons very professional sanitizing process so it's been fully sanitized before anyone gets nervous um it was just it was used um because couches are expensive folks i don't know if you know this but wow these are expensive they are and like holy shit i didn't know that and then that's one of like the the price of everything is definitely one of like the top tier things you really learn to respect your parents on once you become an adult yourself very true like now i get why you didn't want shoes on the couch i was a piece of shit number of shit i spit there

are a number of things i spilled all over my parents couch and i'm like why would they sound mad at me now like oh my god if my cat even like puts one claw out i'm like no well my mom did tell me uh when i was getting this apartment she was like well this is probably one of the last places you have before like you have your own family so what i would suggest is like get all the nice shit now because like don't even think about in your 30s getting nice furniture like just appreciate what's going on and then in your 30s just kind of like play it low play it safe just be allow them to trash the things that looked nice at one point because at least you embrace

that they once looked they once were nice yeah that's the thing with this couch with the i was like well it's used i feel less bad if like the dog lays on not that he was gonna lay on no matter what i bought but like not that i you know i feel less bad if if i bought like a two thousand dollar couch and juniper was like right scratching i'd probably freak out um just because it's so expensive but yeah so i it made sense at the time and then it didn't occur to me until later when i was sitting on it like oh weird this was just in a dead person's house anyway but then again i'm like a lot of people die all the time and it's not like i'm sure there are a lot of things someone died in your last house um or did

i make that up i don't think so so people definitely died in this house did i tell you it was i found out it was built before i thought it was no so we thought it was built in the 1890s probably was built in the 1870s so it's like ultra old it's like 150 years old i mean you just tell me it was like you have tenement housing and stuff yeah yeah a lot of different like multi-family unit whatever so yeah a lot yeah i did actually do some digging and i found out that the first owner's wife died at age 30 in the house bye great um her name was mary oh no it was laura her name was laura yeah and she was 30 so she was like right around your age and probably wants to hang out with you great yep she's figuring out what a tv is it's okay she's probably having

the time of her life it is the age of the spinster bingo the year speaking of death if there is anyone out there who happens to work for this kind of service i'm looking to get some graves cleaned um i know i'm taking like a real sharp turn really cool a pretty slow left turn i think um so my ancestry stuff we all know i love looking at doing my ancestry stuff um and i found a few graves of like very distant relatives and they are worse for the wear probably because where are they you know what's interesting is that well i already knew and i've told you this, I'm actually the first from either family line, my mom's or my dad's, to not grow up in New York. Everyone, my dad's side and my mom's side both came over many generations ago. Everyone stayed in New York.

Right. that shocking but everyone every one of my ancestors that has uh died and been buried in america and uh in this country are all within like two or three cemeteries in new york that's weird so next time we go to new york i plan on doing like a cemetery tour and seeing all my ancestors but i was looking at a couple of them and they looked like trash and i was like i feel like i will not abide by this i was like i'm too bougie for this not my ancestors look at my article i was like look how far we've come family line i'm gonna clean you're like well also my thing too this is a little more sentimental and it sounds very sad but it's we're allowed to have a happy positive attitude of it just before you're like oh like okay i'm at peace with. So we're allowed to talk about it and be fine. But my grandmother has Alzheimer's and it's pretty gnarly. And the last time I got to hang out

with her when she was able to live on her own, I was 15. And I remember, I even then I was super about ancestry and learning all about, you know, our family line. And so she drove me up to she was still in new york so it wasn't too far but we took a train to her old neighborhood where she like met my grandpa and where like both of their families had storefronts and all that and interestingly right across the street from one of their storefronts is the cemetery where they end up getting buried and so she took me to the cemetery and i got to see like her parents graves. And you know, it's weird. My grandma, she was one of four, but all three of her siblings had died before she was born.

Oh, weird. None of the I guess her parents were super overprotective of her because none of her brothers, she had three brothers, and none of them made it past the age of seven. So then when she was born, they were like, oh, fuck. You are. And it wasn't negligence. It just like truly well sure but i mean i don't want anyone thinking like all three of like it is weird that all three of them died but it was in just like freak accidents and so they were really my grandpa was the only one of his five i think he had four brothers and he was the only one that the youngest and he was the only one who lived past like isn't that crazy i don't know what was going on at that time in my history it was germany during world war ii

but ours was just like weird americana things right but i mean even back then it was like i want spanish flu i'm trying to think of the timeline well one of them one of them the the one that lasted the longest he died at seven because he uh truly was just like riding a a bicycle outside and then a car wasn't paying attention and hit him yeah and it wasn't like he was in the road and a car hit him it was like the car wasn't the driver wasn't driving properly and like came up on the sidewalk where he should have been safe so like just weird things but so uh anyway her parents were she took me to the cemetery where her parents were her brother was her grandparents were and i remember her crying when we were there and i

thought it was because she missed her family but she was crying she was like when i'm not here anymore no one's gonna come clean their graves like i did because she took me to clean their graves and so um she got really sad about that and now she's uh in an assistant home and like she is pretty far gone she doesn't remember any of us um but i feel like i should like carry that on so i anyway this is a very long-winded way of saying i know exactly where those graves are and i know how important it was for her for them to stay looking sharp and they probably haven't been touched in like 10 years now yeah so if anyone knows what the pricing of that looks like because i'm i'm sure that's like kind of an expensive thing so i don't know what the maintenance like a very niche uh i'm sure it's like a i wonder

if it's a year-round cleaning that they do or like you can just pay like a one-time restoration fee or something yeah anyway i would like to do that in honor of my gammy so if anyone knows the pricing on that let me know let us know hit us up and also it's like probably fun information that we could somehow find a way to use it yeah yeah i'm curious um anyway so you've got a ghost in your house i'm trying to clean graves this is all very on brand nothing has changed in the last three years of our lives absolutely pretty much still exactly the same even a little bit christine we're still buying like discount haunted furniture because we i'm you you don't want to pay full

price for a couch me yeah that's all me your your your furniture is lovely i'm just like i buy my stuff at uh stores you buy yourself at stores oh weird yeah instead of your estate sales that's cool which like i don't mean to knock estate sales but like i love estate sales but of course you would only pick the things that dead people have correct and also i bought this other cool thing i bought multiple things but i bought this other cool thing this is actually really neat last thing i promise speaking of like history so i bought this um prescription from 1926 and it was the fourth prescription it's from cincinnati and it's the fourth prescription written under prohibition for whiskey and that's dope i know and it's a local doctor it's like a

four by six or five by seven i think and um it's a prescription and it has like uh i forget the name of it but it's the like traditional name for whiskey so it looks more professional but it's basically a prescription for whiskey and it was the fourth one written in the united states under prohibition and it was written by a cincinnati doctor who then like later became pretty famous for like working with like the bengals and stuff but um wow it's really cool and it like says the address of like the guy who lived in cincinnati and like needed whiskey i guess um and on you should go to that house and then take bring your flask of whiskey like here and take here. And take a picture and be like, full circle. Just pour it out on the porch. Full circle.

And then on the top, it's like really ornate. And on the top, it has like these flowers. And then I read kind of the history of this paperwork. And they're poppy flowers. It has like opium. Sure. And so back then, you could literally get prescriptions for opium, cocaine, booze. And so anyway, I just thought that was really cool. So bought that as well super from an estate sale so okay you're

you're changing my opinion we should go to an estate sale together i would love that but i decide what we purchase because fine you're gonna show me a bunch of things and be like i don't want to tell you the story you take the emf and just like wave it over stuff and tell me if it's safe we'll just bring uh we'll just bring all of our ghosts from all of our many homes over the years and have them give us the nod of approval just drop them off on the sofa and say stay here okay so my story um is interesting because i have known about it for a while but um i felt like i needed to give everyone a break because my main squeeze uh is in this story mr uh harry price yay out of feeling um and so i wanted to give everyone a little time because harry price i think was the

only story i've covered right at three full episodes multi-parter and they were long as shit too like every one of those episodes were very lengthy so um i wanted to let everyone take a breather but he's back we always knew he wasn't gone for good that's not just a trilogy we've got a fourth here um he doesn't make too much of an appearance i wouldn't necessarily call this a i wouldn't say this is like harry price part four like i would consider the other he's just like tangentially part of it this yeah this is just like to insert himself in a lot of these topics i respect him for that yeah yeah it's pretty familiar i don't know why but i will say this is a case that he is i don't know if i would say he's super well known

he's super well known for it but in this case it's well known that he kind of wrote about it in his books of like he was he was aware of the case but he just wasn't as invested as like jeff the talking mongoose or rosalie like he wasn't the only person involved i guess okay so this is the story of the ghost girl of romania or uh what she's probably best known for her name is eleonora zugun oh i wanted to say it was eleanor zugan but apparently it's zugun it's not zugan z-u-g-u-n so i thought it was a gun or whatever but whatever i that's just me being ignorant and american so um it's eleanora and some of the sources and in other sources it was eleanor and i had read most of my notes as eleanor so that's how i'm gonna pronounce it a lot of people though say that um apparently in romanian text i

see which are the sources i cannot read really um she was known as eleanora um so eleanor i'm just gonna make her a little american girl apparently ellie was born may 24th 1913 in talpa romania may 24th is that gemini that's on the cusp right i think isn't 21st yes gemini sorry it always mixes me up with the i know it's somewhere in the 20s yes okay so she's a gemini um so she is described as quote Let me know if this sounds familiar. I can already say yes. I don't even know what you're gonna say. No, no, no. This one's this one's mean. I was just being silly. Oh, I described as quote, just a normal, simple peasant girl. And there was nothing particularly special or remarkable about

her. Yeah, that sounds like what my parents would say when they put me good at night. Sure. Yeah. If our parents had to write a biography about it don't forget you're not special they would delete that they would delete that sentence before they officially posted it but it'd be there it would be in there for sure so uh this story takes place for eleanor's 11 okay um and she was sent to stay with her grandparents in northern romania i think the town was called buhai um and this was in 1925 she was 11 so early 1925 eleonora is taking a walk she finds some money on the street and she's like oh great i can't imagine it was that much money because she says i'm gonna spend it and she spent it at the candy store oh cute then again it could have been a lot of money i was gonna say how much money could we spend at a candy yeah okay i've spent a lot of money

at candy stores um so she goes back and she tells her grandma about her day she's like oh i found some money on the street so i went to the candy store precious that's that's what eleanor was thinking she was like grandma's gonna say this is precious oh grandma was pissed what and said like you took money that wasn't yours and you selfishly used it oh my god and apparently said the quote that money was probably left by draku aka the devil why would you say that to your granddaughter and by taking the money and using it for yourself you have invited demonic forces into your life well you have now that grandma's decided it. Geez.

Now that she's manifested the demon warrior. Exactly. But so anyway, everyone thought that it was gonna be just like a fine comment. Like, oh, I found like, I'm imagining it was like no more than- A sentence or something. Yeah, like maximum, like five bucks.

Oh my God. If I had a $5 bill, absolutely I'd take it. To the candy store. For the candy store. Or Starbucks in our case but like same thing it would be absolutely one for each hand um so apparently grandma was right or at least she manifested something or invited something in because after that experience we kind of say that the um going to the candy store and then telling her grandma

about it that was opening a portal in a way oh no and if it wasn't then grandma invoking this where grandma had already done and she's like let's throw the blame somewhere else i like that twist oh you went to the candy store forget this forget that weegee board i was playing with upstairs your candy store kick that one behind the couch behind christine's haunted couch from the estate sale oh no um so anyway all of a sudden some really weird shit started happening in the house so uh that night the family was sitting together eating at the dinner table and out of nowhere a shower of rocks fell onto the house oh dear okay um just like essentially like a waterfall of rocks okay um the rocks keep falling they get more and more intense the rocks are growing in size

it's basically like hailing stones um two pieces that came flying at them was quote a piece of porcelain and half a brick oh they were smashing through the windows a brick jesus i and i'm unsure if it were if it was like coming out of the sky and landing on the house or if it was coming out of the ceiling and landing on their table oh i see but it it meant it uh it came it materialized out of nowhere and was sure on top of it and it's not just hail it's like literal bricks and literal rocks yeah okay okay um and so the family goes outside and they don't see anyone or anything that could have thrown that many rocks that were that heavy and so quickly right at them without being seen sure um so they're like what the hell is going on so they go back and they see that most of the debris

settled around okay so it must have materialized from inside the house and fell onto the table. Because they go back in, and they see that most of the debris settled around where Eleanor was sitting. Oh, no. So it all seemed to be aiming at her. Oh, no. After that, it just kept happening.

Wherever Eleanor went, things were flying off the shelves. They were either hitting her or landing really awkwardly close to her. And many witnesses confirmed this saying that it wasn't just rocks it was like if you were at a store just items just fly off the cases at her oh my god um and so eleanor's grandma calls a priest um and the priest comes to the house and notices that most of the rocks were wet that were being thrown at her, I guess from the first incident at the dining room table. So he marks one of the rocks and puts it in a stream nearby,

because he noticed that the house was next to a stream, puts the rock in the stream, and then seconds later the rock shows up again out of nowhere, wet, and it's marked. But it's going into the water and then just like dissipating out of the water and just showing up over here. So I don't know what his plan was or what he thought he was going to learn from that. I'm just more confused now. Maybe just to like determine that that's where they were coming from, the river. Or that, that's what I thought too.

But like even if it's coming from the river, how is it showing from your ceiling right like that doesn't answer any questions yeah and like now that he marked it i feel like that was supposed to make me feel better but it's like okay so now we know that the same rocks are appearing but like how is that possible like even if it was a rock that wasn't marked i'd still wonder where it came from so i don't know how that was helpful it seems clearer than when you start pulling it apart and you're like actually i guess this doesn't tell me much at all hang on a second so all i am is more confused yeah yeah yeah um so anyway he they see rocks nothing ever really comes from that except for the priest being like i can't explain that this house is clearly evil

um there's nothing more to it. He also apparently saw objects moving and dishes breaking on their own. Oh, God. And so he says that the house is evil and it's because of a demonic force that's been let in. And so the grandparents are like, oh, well, that's obviously our grandchild. Obviously. And very quickly in this story, they're already completely over it and they send her back to her parents they're like we want nothing to do with this oh grandma's not very nice

grandma's uh she's a straight shooter she yeah she's not messing around she's pretty direct with what she wants and she makes you brought draku into grandma's house and you are in trouble take draku with you back home it's just like a no uh what do you call it a no business no no no tomfoolery no tomfoolery uh i would say no tolerance policy you bring dracu here one time and you are done i've said it once to christine i've said it twice to christine but you know what she keeps buying shit from estate sales keep bringing into our apartment dracu and all all of his furniture. So she moves back to Topa with her parents and nothing changes. Oh, no.

Rocks keep flying at Eleonora or they at least try to get to her. They're flying into the house. They're breaking windows. The parents are probably pissed about their windows. Yeah. Objects are flying off the shelves in public at her, including a plate that accidentally hit another person when it was trying to hit her. Oh, no. The furniture would shake.

And this was all only when Eleanor was around. So a lot of people thought, OK, well, this has to be following her. Sure. Because when she's not around, there's nothing. If I were her parents, I'd be like, go have a play date over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me sweep up all the crap you caused. You stay in there.

Then come home. And let me just take the windows out of the house, actually. No windows. It doesn't make sense. And also, like, knives. I think they're just flying around the house. It's very frightening. Especially if they're hitting other people, too.

Yeah. Yeah. So at one point, this is my favorite sentence of the whole thing. At one point, even potatoes were flying around. Okay, well, that's a little more appealing to me. They fly right into my mouth. Appealing? They, uh, appeal.

Sorry. You nailed it. Thanks. No, you nailed it. Thanks. Um, they, quote, materialized from under the bed. God, they're like fucking lemon. Wait a second.

Wait a minute. Why were they under the bed? Very appealing. Shut up, Christy. Hey, how are you peeling today? Wow, really bringing it back. Sometimes I ask Blaze all the time. Sometimes I ask him all the time.

And all the time I never ask. Sometimes I ask Blaze all the time, how are you peeling? And he doesn't find it amusing. And then he shows you the divorce papers. It's the funniest thing to me, how are you peeling? And nobody thinks it's that funny, but I think it makes me cry laugh whenever I say it. So let's change subjects really quickly, please. Before your tears are all over with your one contact in your eye it's true i can't see did you take your contact out no it fell out i don't have a contact in my

eyeball i can't see half of my i remember those days it's it's really a gummy yeah it's hot i just should have brought more but uh you knew this would happen here we are uh so at one point the potatoes quote materialized from under the bed and flew across the room to hit eleanor's father in the shoulders which like a hard potato hitting you in the back it's gotta hurt that's a rock someone chucked that at you yeah that's he's not peeling okay you know what they say rocks or potatoes are the rocks of the starch family that is what they say at christine's house that's what i say always now wild blaze is literally trying to like do work that's what i say yes yeah yeah i say hello it's me again the rain has healing energy and rocks are me again the potatoes of the rock to the earth but isn't it true okay you keep talking now help okay so

eleanor also started waking up with scratches bites puncture oh we talked about that one asmr no no abrasions pretty much all the bad stuff she was waking up with all of them all over her body and a lot of them weren't places where she could reach, but there were also in places where she couldn't reach herself. So a lot of people say maybe she was doing it, but then you have to explain like where else they were on her body. Let's see. So now her dad and apparently 14 other people in town brought her to a priest. Even the town's like, fix this. So they take her to a priest named Makarasku.

Makarani. Sorry. I need to keep my mouth shut. Makarani does save me. It takes me out of a lot of bad situations. Makarani is a spiritual experience. So maybe that's the priest I need to be looking for this whole time. Father Mac.

Big Mac. Big Mac. I'm so sorry. I'm going to be quiet now. So apparently when she went to go see Father Macaroni, this is in Harry Potter. Not Harry Potter's book. This is in the Chamber of Secrets. This is the dumbest show show why does anybody listen to this

okay so the goblet of fire it says yeah yeah yeah um okay harry price's book called poltergeist over england so this he wrote this in 1945 and i think this is, it's interesting because the Rosalie seance, he wrote that after having a firsthand experience. And he like couldn't, he like in the same day that he had the experience, he like went to a pub and wrote all this shit down. Like he couldn't not talk about it. This sounds more like he's narrating something that happened before he got there. So it's more storytelling. Historical telling. Mm-hmm.

So, but he also heard it directly so it sounds really personal but i don't think he was actually involved yet i think he's just reporting what other people said um so when they took her to see macaroni yeah yeah um harry price's book says soon after eleonora had entered his room an iron vessel suddenly burst into many pieces this is a long quote by the way this is like a little paragraph immediately afterwards a vessel which had been on the hearth also burst the splinters were thrown into the court scarcely had the people recovered from the shock when both inner windows broke and one of them one of the splinters fell into the room. The outside windows remained intact. And during the events,

the old priest, his son and a school, a school teacher were all present, all startled. They ran out of the room and the teacher looking through the window alone, saw a big chest, like a trunk. Yeah.

A trunk. I was thinking like a barrel, a big chest. Oh, like when I first read it, it was like two in the morning and I was like a big chest. Why was he looking at that? Okay. When I first read it, it was like two in the morning, and I was like, a big chest? Why was he looking at that? Okay.

Anyway. Jeez, keep your eyes up here, my friend. Like I said, Father Macaroni. So, okay, yeah. So he saw a big chest, and it stood against the wall, but it started moving backwards and forwards by itself, as well as from side to side of its own volition. Only one young man had remained in the room and when he saw the chest moving a plank hidden in a corner sprang upon the young man and injured him oh then all again

entered the room and one of them proposed going on a pilgrimage to a saint johannes at the convent of sukzaba sure sure sure so they're saying like let's go to a convent let's take her there like we don't know what we're doing drop her off somewhere else us 14 strangers in town don't know what we're doing we're getting smacked in the face with wooden planks and there's like somebody's big chest is outside the window it's std's unholy it's susan so at the name and this uh continuing at the name of the saint being pronounced because he said saint johannes johannes at the name at the name of the saint being pronounced a stone was thrown against aannes johannes at the name at the name of the saint being pronounced a stone was thrown against a picture of him that hung on the wall picture

of saint johannes yeah oh no destroyed the picture and remain lodged in the wall oh no only the teacher was sufficiently courageous to remain in the room after that oh shit he sat opposite a bench uh of which was a can of water suddenly this can of water was levitated 18 inches and came down on the other end of the bench without spilling a single drop of water like look what i can do yeah i guess so basically like all this is happening and there's many witnesses coming to harry price later and being like this happened and we don't know what's going on that's frightening especially when the i mean listen being raised catholic they do instill some quite some fear in you especially when you're like we said the name of a saint and the devil threw a rock at his photo like that is

some creepy catholic shit and harry price he was one of those healthy skeptics so um i don't know if you remember from earlier episodes but he was open-minded but also like prepared to debunk whatever he could um right and so at this point i'm pretty sure he was like okay well this wasn't done in a lab there weren't really any proper experiments or observations so like who knows um so going into it which i'll mention later going into this story he did come with doubts because he heard stuff like that and he was was like, okay, well, like, surely there were wires or something. Yes, the water just, like, moving. It seems very, like, basic stuff.

Right, like someone must have, when you're looking over here, someone else threw the rock. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So from here, they said, like, oh, let's send her to a convent. So they took her to a convent where numerous exorcisms were performed on her. And things got worse. The exorcisms didn't work. She started snarling growling she herself started levitating oh and the exorcisms uh because they weren't working

i guess the convent was like it's not our fault she's just insane oh that's nice yep and apparently i wish i knew more about this but i tried looking into it and i couldn't find anything they said that at this convent um she was treated quote comparable to the witchcraft persecutions of the 17th century because like they didn't know what else to do they were just like treating her like she was a witch a witch apparently they put her in the water and like if she floats they were ducking or whatever yeah yeah maybe that's what was happening to her but there was no you would think that sentence alone would lead to a really interesting paragraph of notes nope nope figure it out yourself i guess um so the press starts covering her story and it gets noticed by this psychic researcher

named fritz grunwald oh man um who set off to meet Eleanor right away. And he interviewed her. He observed her. And he saw these forces for himself. He wanted to study her more. He moved her back to the convent because at one point I think she had like a little hiatus in a mental hospital. He moved her back to the convent and he witnessed, quote, moving or levitating objects, other objects that seem to materialize out of nowhere. Mysterious knocks or bangs. Match matches that seem to light by themselves, and even physical attacks which seem to indicate unseen hands pushing or slapping her. Oh, my.

His goal was to keep researching her as long as he couldn't eventually write a whole book about this or do some research presentation about it. But three weeks into his investigation with her her he just drops out of a heart attack fritz did yep oh no um oh no and her parents are like well we don't know what to do and so they send her back to the quote asylum girl she's like i just wanted a snickers bar and now look what's happened this is what happens when you eat candy when the devil buys you some can't devil's lettuce some candy devil's lettuce that's weed well listen just let me have this i don't speak english you know that i know that uh so uh yes they sent her back to the asylum so like her grandparents don't want her her parents don't want her the convent doesn't want her priests don't want her very sad so she goes to this mental hospital where they're treating her like a witch cool cool cool cool cool and so grunewwald who like absolutely

believed everything that was going on drops dead great one of his uh friends who happened to be a very rich countess in vienna named zoe wasilko serecki jesus we're gonna call her zoe big z big mac and big z coming in hot for the screen adaptation of the story that i'm inventing in my head it's gonna have something to do with uh i don't know oh yeah it's not you it's not me yes i don't even remember it'll be a song in there somehow it's not you it's not me it's big z um so yes so i she's a rich countess from vienna and she was one of grunewald's friends and apparently she was also really interested in this research and so she reached out to eleanor and said i'll take you out of this mental institution if you let me continue grunewald's

work oh um and so she's like i'm just stuck in this awful place of like i'm either here or i have to be like studied outside of here by a rich countess then again if a countess came to me and said like i'll take care of everything that's true i'd be like all right let's go so uh this is now almost a whole year later this is 1926 so at this point now zoe paid eleanor's parents so that she could have like which could be like her guardian uh took eleanor to vienna and she stayed at the countess's place um probably much nicer than a mental hospital um and zoe scientists and physicists from all over austria were studying her and all witnessed the same phenomena that grunwald did originally the countess had some doubts um but her original

belief in taking eleonora out of her home or out of where she had already been and taking her all the way to vienna was that because she thought that the to take a poltergeist or a demon or some sort of force that's manipulating you to take them far away kind of detaches them proximity wise to where they feel comfortable and therefore maybe they lessons their power lessons their powers that was her thought okay that's interesting nope oh apparently wrong never really not right so the first big activity was that uh she had an ink pot that threw itself across the room and smeared ink that's a mess and a half what a mess what a mess she also she then locked all the ink away because remember she still had her doubts that maybe eleanor was doing like curling this across the room exactly so she was like i'm going

to lock away all the ink so that can't happen again um and limited where eleanor could go in the house so it's like you're only limited to these spaces the other places don't have ink on the fucking walls so yeah just stay here where you've already made a mess so soon uh water mysteriously started filling in eleanor's boots what i don't know if she was wearing them or not but oh good good question they started like just having water fill up standing water in them that's gross and weird and i wonder how far up like all the way to the top or where they slosh them calf or yeah that sucks though that's the worst feeling wet socks who right yeah if that ain't some devil's lettuce business i don't know

what it's the theories you could come up well on the devil's lettuce would be interesting no comment um so zoe saw uh zoe saw that this was happening she also saw that most activity was happening near eleanor so she was like okay this is kind of confirming that like maybe this is bullshit like it's only happening when she's around and by herself so like maybe she's setting something up yeah um so the countess started limiting more and more rooms that Eleanor could actually go to and she basically ended up only living in the hallway in the servants quarters so she really it wasn't like that great of a of a deal um yeah that sucks the hallway the hallway eventually zoe actually began uh witnessing these things herself though and she started being more and more convinced that it wasn't eleanor's fault this was just like there really was some sort of

demonic force following her and she started logging all the activity that happened to Eleanor in the Countess's house. And the Countess slash Zoe, I keep interchanging the names, but Zoe wrote 141 pages worth of activity and turned it into a book. Whoa. And while Eleanor was in Vienna, Zoe recorded over a thousand events and her record was 67 incidents in just one day whoa so things were just going on left and right and some of the things were objects materializing out of thin air and dropping from the ceiling things were disappearing and then showing up behind locked doors that eleanor didn't have access to creepy um furniture was moving there were strange

voices and she heard knocking all over knocking and banging all over the house um so zoe also wrote this in the 1927 british journal of psychical research quote once i entered my room and once as in like one time yeah one once i entered my room i'm saying it once i entered my room and looked at the window. Eleonora was standing behind me. Suddenly I saw a shadow which glided down slowly in front of the window. No, thank you. Not straight, but in a zigzag line. Oh, no. Then I heard a sound of something falling.

I looked and saw an iron box with dominoes. The box was closed with some of the dominoes now laid next to it on the floor. As if it like climbed out of the box. Eleonora also started going into trances and began automatic writing um and one of the messages which she wrote apparently in perfect romanian was the location of a set of keys that zoe had lost a long time ago and later zoe went to go check in the keys with her she's got chills some sources also say it's extra creepy because they believe eleanor was quote completely illiterate although other people including harry price say no she could read well they called her a simple peasant girl which

it gives the impression that they really are not estimating her intelligence at a high level not that that's necessarily true right exactly exactly but it is more interesting to me when a child is automatic writing than when like a full-grown man like that last guy she's 11 or dan or whatever the hell his name was you were you remember i remember you remember dan but so uh so a lot of people like to add to it saying that she couldn't read or write but apparently she could okay um at least according to harry price um some oh so this is also uh the next two things i have to say are long quotes from harry price's book um so basically after all this is happening she's still in the press people are still trying to get updates about what's going on with like the ghost girl of romania and through the press um grunewald before he died also had written a report about her

okay for the press to be like i'm the one on site this is what's happening right and harry price read that and read that report and that's how he found out about i see um so he was kind of interested but then his friend who actually was a professor at vienna university said like no like she's over here now and like i'm hearing about stuff like you have to check out this girl wow so harry price goes to vienna and this was their this was what he wrote about their first meeting okay the countess and i seated ourselves on the couch and watched eleonora playing with a toy that fascinated her a spring gun that projected a ping pong ball, which was caught in a sort of conical wire basket attached to the gun.

Suddenly, as we watched, the ball came into pieces, falling at our feet. The girl ran to the countess and asked her to mend it. She jumped up, and so did I. As I watched my hostess examining the join, a steel stiletto with a handle used to open letters about 10 inches long shot across the room from behind me and fell against the closed door. Oh, my God. I instantly. So a letter opener is now.

So a knife is flying. Yeah, those are very sharp. Sharp enough that if it's flying at me, I'm scared. Yeah, those. I mean, I say that as someone who injures themselves on every item, but like a letter opener is not dangerous, is dangerous. Definitely enough for us. I instantly turned around and it revealed nothing and no one that could have possibly projected the stiletto, which was normally kept on the writing table behind us. Let me say at once that no one in that room and certainly not Eleonora could have thrown the paper knife.

Uh, we were at least 10 feet from the table. I had both Eleonora and the countess in full view. Eleonora had one half of the ball in her right hand and the gun in her left. The countess had the other half of the ball in her hand. And I was actually watching both my hostess and the child. Um, and the stiletto came from behind into the right of us. And I was between the missile and the door it was a brilliant introductory phenomenon whoa and then he says this i will not describe the

many other manifestations i witnessed during the days i spent in vienna as they have been detailed elsewhere in this book but the phenomenon included he's like i'm not gonna talk about it yeah he's like find it yourself but the phenomenon included the precipitation of a small mirror a large black cloth dog that i guess she used to cuddle with yeah shot from the side of the room over the partition and fell onto the coal scuttle near the bed no one was near the dog then no one was more near the dog than 10 feet and eleonora at the moment of the flight was pushing a table against the wall using both of her hands then i saw a cushion on one of the chairs begin to move and as i watched

it slid slowly off the chair and fell to the floor no one was near it after the after each of these phenomena and many others i examined the room the furniture etc but everything was normal i reiterate that there were no wires threads spring releases rubber releases, rubber bands, or compressed air tubes. You know he was looking. He was looking hard. At this point, he's been doing this for a while. And he's keeping an eye out for who could be doing this. Yeah, and he had doubts.

He was like, I want to debunk this. What the hell? So he, basically, if you remember from my previous stories about him, he created the National Lab the national lab for psychical research right which i think is now nomas i think didn't he all of his stuff is now part of like the the library there yes and i said that sounds like the coolest library ever yeah they have like it's called like basically like dark arts or some shit like it's like all of his personal chamber of secrets um so uh they brought her to that lab with the countess she came along and uh they observed her in his lab so that way they could do like real experiments and have it all you know completely

observed right um and the activity continued in the lab and there was nothing they could figure out objects would disappear and reappear in locked cabinets he one time saw a coin that moved across the table and fall by itself and everyone was at least like up to 13 feet away from the coin when that happened so he said that that event was, quote, the first telekinetic phenomenon of Eleonora's witness at the lab. She also kept getting injuries on her body. There's one article from the Sunday Mail that said a party was taking place in the laboratory when Eleonora, in the act of raising her teacup to her lips, gave a cry of pain and rolled up her sleeve. On her forearm appeared what seems to be the marks of teeth deeply indented into her flesh as if she or someone else had bitten fiercely into her arm the marks turned from red to white and finally took

the form of white raised wheels uh what they gradually faded but were still noticeable after an hour or so and everyone's together They would have seen someone bite her. If she bit herself, too. Like, that's not a subtle movement. Especially when, like, your job is to observe her. Especially under a sleeve. Yeah. Ugh.

God. Apparently. So Harry Price then said that Eleanor was experiencing, quote, telekinetic phenomena. Duh. Which was confirmed by many, many witnesses in the lab. One of them was Captain Seton Carr, who said, I was present on October 5th when the so-called stigmatic markings appeared on her face, arms, and forehead. Uh-oh, here we go.

Catholic shit again. Under conditions which absolutely precluded the possibility of Eleanor producing them by scratching or other normal means. The marks were photographed in my presence so like other modem freaks me out like that whole thing freaks me out and everyone's saying like i mean this is just one account but so many people are like i saw this shit and like nobody did it there's no reason for this poor child um there were still skeptics um there was someone who led this big theory that um eleanor was scratching herself with like a like a bad setting on her ring so they were they thought like when

no one's looking she could just be itching her arm but she's like really scratching up her skin um but i forgot i didn't get to add this in but there was um a documentary that was filmed about her and original footage if you look at it she was never wearing jewelry so that kind of debunks that argument yeah unless she's like using fingernails or something right um so uh let's see and apparently Harry Price the National Lab for Psychical Research and the Countess of Vienna were all like, no, that's not true. And they sued him for libel. Oh, really?

For the jewelry thing? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. And they said, this is a quote from them saying, I could, or Harry Price, I could fill my pages with accounts of the phenomena we witnessed under scientific conditions during Eleanor's stay in London. Her visit caused the greatest interest among scientists and others who attended the observational

periods and uh in 1926 there's so there's one article called um there's this one site called euro paranormal and they said that the the bite marks that they that they looked like um they were wondering like oh could that have been eleanor's teeth or someone else and so they checked the teeth marks to make sure that it didn't match with anybody in the rooms anytime they were and they'd never matched anybody um which was super gross and creepy it is creepy and uh apparently zoologists also tested the saliva and apparently quote according to euro paranormal the substance was found to be teeming with microorganisms different to those found in the mouth what though there was some doubt as to whether it was spittle at all because swarming in the white substance were bacteria for staph infection.

STD. Oh my God. Just kidding. Wow. That's horrific. So they're like, we don't even know if it was spit. It was somebody is foaming at the mouth with staff.

Yep. And it's not, it doesn't bite anyone's teeth marks and it doesn't fit the, the chemistry of someone else, like a human mouth. If she's like doing this with her fingers or whatever, like why would that do any sort of liquid or teeth mark looking things like it doesn't even look like teeth marks oh my god ew so uh basically harry price's final theory is kind of a common theory today where um eleanor he says this kind of, depending on who you are, you could see this as like a total bullshit theory.

Because basically, it's an unsolved mystery. They never figured it out. They don't know to this day what happened. But the way psychologically that Harry Price explained it was that basically she was prepubescent and going into puberty. And that's usually the time when spirits are most drawn like to to kids because they're impressionable and vulnerable and have a lot of anxiety stress and hormones their chemistry is already totally fully out of whack that they're kind of just easy prey for dark spirits right um and so he believes his like final theory on all of it was that because she was um younger and she was

prepubescent and she was going obviously through a lot of stress and anxiety and like it was being called a witch and a mental i mean this is a lot but she was just easy prey and he also said that she was probably producing subconscious um telekinetic energy due to a troubled past there's allegedly a storyline where eleanor told zoe the countess that she had been assaulted as a child no um we don't know if that was true or not but that has led a lot of people to think that she became obsessed with the devil as a way of channeling her rage. Right. Oh, God. Oh, God. So Harry Price calls this the Jakku complex. Oh, yeah.

So this is a quote. During her early childhood, when the phenomenon became first apparent, the people in town threatened her so often with Jakku for all the things she did, like taking candy and stuff. I mean, really? They threatened her with Jakku and what he would do to her that she subconsciously became obsessed with the and what he would do to her that she subconsciously became obsessed with the idea of what would happen to her um manifesting it yeah like grandma did

yeah basically you tell her enough she's gonna start believing it yeah it's kind of a self-fulfilling and that she deserves whatever right terrible demonic stuff is happening she basically he basically said if you remove the dracu complex the girl would probably no longer be troubled um even if but then he did add even if we discovered the cause of the stigmata and this you know if that is really what it is it's just her brain creating this we still cannot claim to have unraveled the mystery of the telekinetic movements of the coins etc we have merely proved that they happen yes it's true so he's like we still can't explain a lot of the weird rock wet rocks are coming from right he basically said that like i can give you a psychological reason for why things might be happening but it doesn't explain not physically what's going on right um and so it basically just supports the normal poltergeist theory. It's called RSPK, the recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, which is basically it's just like when you're younger and you have all this energy, you're unaware of what you're able to manifest.

And it's like channeling. And it's coming out it's basically like you have sub subconscious telekinetic powers that you're able to use because you're still younger and impressionable right what you're doing so a lot of people that go through that they don't realize that they are subconsciously power enough to actually powerful enough to actually manifest things in weird ways and they're usually unaware that they're the cause of it right and so they're afraid of something which is they're afraid of what they're actually creating and so they think this thing is going to attack me and because they

manifested it and control it it actually does hurt them so it becomes this cycle god i'm scared of this thing i don't understand it's going to hurt me and then it does because it's all coming from the same person to hurt me right yes oh my god um so uh basically you're the own you're the target of your own energy essentially awful so the theory has been supported especially because this is like where people really believe like okay like that's a theory but it turns out that it could be pretty valid at least in this case because in 1928 upon hitting puberty uh eleanor's activity completely stopped so they think that a combination of her just kind of like having this like weird you know mental power and on top of it being a prepubescent impressionable kid, once she hit adolescence, it was just like, wow, it just stopped.

Yeah, that's good. So there there's a research paper out there called Eleanor Zugun, the reevaluation of a historic RSPK case. And it was in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1999. And the case called this whole, or the research paper called this whole case a unique experience in several aspects, but primarily in the sheer number of phenomena recorded because there were over 3,000 incidences. Incidences. There were 3,000 incidents.

Yeah. Now I don't know. Over 3,000 events were recorded and almost 900 of them were according to scientific conditions they were extremely well established so there's it wasn't just like hearsay it was like we wouldn't right witness like almost a third of the events scientists just cannot figure out um and also there's another quote from euro paranormal that eleanor became the most closely observed investigated and tested poltergeist girl of the 20th century she's the first poltergeist case in which freudian psychoanalysis came to be applied because they

were thinking oh because she's an she's an adolescent and she's got she's hormonal and she's like doesn't she's not even thinking straight there's also stuff about like being abused as a child or whatever. I don't even know if that was Freud, but I'm sure Freud got a field day with that one. Everything's from childhood, right? Right. And then apparently this case was the first to link, like I said, adolescents and poltergeist activity, which is now a common theory. Really? Yeah.

That if you're an adolescent, you're more inclined to. More susceptible, exactly. This was the first one. That's interesting so what ended up happening to her is she studied hairdressing moved back to romania got married and she died in 1999 or 1998 and to this day she's still one of the most mysterious poltergeist cases ever recorded with no explanation from many scientists and witnesses. She lived to be almost like 100, right? Because she was 11 and 25. So she was born in 14.

So yeah, 14 and 98. I don't want to do that. 80 something, but 90. At least she lived a long, fruitful life after puberty. Yeah. Without Dracu over her shoulder. That is horrifying. Anyway.

And I'm glad I am no longer in that phase of my life because i didn't need dracu i was my own dracu in that phase of my life i believe just read my journal on my poetry i believe it i believe it's really bad i can't i'm dracu like is it dracu or you just listen to a lot of fallout boy it's like it could be either they're really similar i have a hunch you were just the american eleanora oh no surprise there i guess um well thank you m that was scary uh i have a case for you here now this is very interesting because i started researching this and then i did that thing where i went why is this so familiar crap have i covered it oh i hate that i know it's awful have you covered it before so then i went and i was like,

I swear I've covered this. And I looked in like the list of our cases and I was like, I haven't done it before. And then I realized I had covered it in Milwaukee at our live show. But so then I was like, well, shit, I still want to cover it.

Cause we've never, I don't think we've ever released. Yeah. Or they were, I redid them for like, you know, you, you enhance them.

I shushed them up. I shushed them up. Yep. Cause they were shorter when we did for like you know you you enhance them i just them up i just them up yep because they were um shorter when we did a live show but so and i like re-listened to a bunch of old podcasts and stuff um that covered this what were we doing in milwaukee eating cheese curds that was me you're not a cheese person but i was eating cheese and drinking beer was that wine and crime did they come to that show um minneapolis minneapolis right i know it's an m sorry i just wanted a chance to talk about the haunted bears again that's the haunted bears were that trip this is right before the webbies yeah so last may um and

you know what so one of the episodes i listened to was my favorite murder covered this live in milwaukee also oh really i remember when i did it i don't know if they did it before or after me probably right around the same time because it was near the end of their tour um so i feel bad also oh really i remember when i did it i don't know if they did it before or after me probably right around the same time because it was near the end of their tour um so i feel bad for anyone who came to both shows heard it twice and now you're hearing a third time but i just love this case and i don't think you're gonna remember it because there was a lot that i didn't even remember okay and had to re-research so um i'm excited to just tell you all over again i certainly don't remember a single thing we barely remember what happened yesterday, let alone what happened in Milwaukee.

Exactly. I thought it was also Minneapolis. Yeah. Milwaukee was great. And Madison. I loved Wisconsin. Anyway. Okay.

This is the story of Lori Bembenek. Do you know it? Probably not. Okay, good, good, good. So. I just went, ah, I remember it. Not at all. Yeah, you went, mm-hmm.

You did the very knowing nod. I just wanted you to feel included or heard. I wanted you to feel heard. You know, I remember it. Not at all. Yeah, you went, mm-hmm. You did the very knowing nod. I just wanted you to feel included or heard. I wanted you to feel heard. Yeah, I do feel heard. So this took place May 28, 1981. Sometime around 2 a.m., 11-year-old Sean Schultz, I know, and his 7-year-old brother, Shannon Schultz, wake up to the sound of an intruder in their house.

Sean gets on the landline, calls a family friend and says, someone hurt mommy. Oh, crap. Yeah. The boy's mother was named. Do you have a guess? M. Schultz. Christine Schultz. Shut up.

I'm not making this up. And I know I told you this at some point on stage, but I don't remember. I don't remember at all. It must have been the exact same scenario playing out as right now. But probably they're probably the people who came to the show were like, we know what's happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We already saw Em react this way.

Christine Schultz. Christine Schultz. It is really unsettling to hear other people tell this story. And they're like, and then Christine Schultz. And I'm like, huh? It like throws me off every time. It's like you're not supposed to know about our future yet, Christine. I know. When we get hitched when we say alice in blaze and hopefully i don't get murdered

because that seems to be the outcome maybe we're supposed to know about this so we change our own future that's right let's just not get married this is the only reason we're not getting married i guess that's it i guess the only one i don't feel like getting married i'm murdered me either yeah i don't want to deal with it it all all sounds messy. It's not really. I already bled all over the window. The window, you know, was enough blood for the month. Yeah. I think we're okay. So the boy's mother was named Christine Schultz.

She is. I know. Is it Schultz without a T? It is with a T. Okay. I know. So. Oh, well.

Makes it a little different. She was a single mom who had recently been divorced from her husband, Fred Schultz. Alfred. But Fred Schultz. And he.red schultz and he alison alfred okay listen nope alfred schultz a local cop who went by fred so as fucked up luck would have it the cop who happened to be on duty and is called first to the scene is none other than fred himself to the scene of his ex-wife's murder and his children are there i always thought there was like a rule where i maybe i'm thinking of hospitals where like you're not allowed to perform on your own family i think that's a hospital okay i don't know if that was a cop

thing we're like i mean i think it's your address you don't get to go or something maybe if they had known i don't know if it was intentional but he just happened to be on duty so i i don't know i mean you're right you you'd think that wouldn't be necessarily protocol right but then again if like if i heard my if i were a cop and i heard my address i'm not gonna sit around and like you know your sons are there your kids are there exactly so he went to the scene he arrives he's attempting to comfort his distraught kids and investigators are asking the boys what they witnessed so sean who's the 11 year old yeah says he heard what sounded like a firecracker, but was soon identified as an execution-style bullet. Oh, no.

Yeah. So the boys had followed the noise, which is just like out of any horror movie. I mean, they followed the noise and had found their mom in bed. Her arms and legs were bound and a bullet was through her back. She was like face down in the bed. Oh, my God. Yeah. arms and legs were bound and a bullet was through her back she was like face down in the bed oh my god uh yeah he said he and his brother had tried to bandage their mother's wounds before calling for help yeah it's really that's really fucked up dark sean also described the man he had seen

as being around six feet tall wearing a green tracksuit with a red ponytail that looked sort of like a wig oh i remember the green tracksuit and pony yeah that one's very specific um that's kind of where i started to be like i know this story a wig okay i feel like i remember the wig the wig comes into play okay so this was by the way i remember at the live show after you said like the children are bandaging their own mother up yeah that was when we said i hope you enjoyed the funny part of the show because it's over now yeah yeah yeah this is one of those that that uh straddled the line of yeah is this too much i gotta say i've never met anyone more brave than you at least 50 different cities you've gone on the stage and bummed everyone out made everyone feel like shit and you just and then you just went home afterwards and then i pulled out my old notes and did it again because i just can't stop myself

yeah exactly so here we are um so of course so he's wearing this so they said he was wearing this green tracksuit and had a red ponytail that looked sort of like a wig so of course one of the first people i look into is the husband or the ex-husband in this case um they questioned fred about his whereabouts he said he and his partner had been on duty and called to a burglary but fred had lied because when they looked into a story they realized he and his partner had not been called to a burglary they were actually out drinking on duty just showed up at his house no they were on duty but they were they were like oh we were at a burglary scene when you called us in no they were at a bar i see i see i see so they had been out getting drunk drinking on the job drinking on the job but it was still an alibi

because people at the bar were like yes fred was at the bar with us drinking he was just hoping his own like boss probably didn't yeah he was just like that wasn't supposed to be part of the plan yeah it's like okay it really wasn't me but also please god don't tell my boss it really wasn't me i only had one beer. Let's just leave it there. So next they examined both his service revolver and his off-duty gun, and they determined that his off-duty gun was the murder weapon. So strange.

Not a good look, buddy. Not a good look. Fred swears up and down he had nothing to do with this. The gun was kept in a gym bag in his closet, and only one other person had access. His new bride, 22-year-cia laurie benbenek okay so he's like i didn't do it i was at the bar they're like who else has access to your gun he's like oh nobody but my new wife so they interview laurie and she said she was home night, but that she doesn't have an alibi. Nobody had seen her or like could confirm this.

She's really cool, calm and collected, but she swears she did not kill her husband's ex. However, on June 24th, 1981, she's arrested for the first degree murder of Christine Schultz, her husband's ex-wife. So Lori Benbenek was this young beautiful woman she's 22 she had no history of violence um on the surface didn't seem to fit like the classic profile of a murderer um she actually was a former police officer uh and actually like the story about okay she's a former police officer but while training at the milwaukee police academy she had met and become friends with another trainee named judy judy zess and at a concert Judy Zess was arrested for smoking marijuana and because Lori was with her she was also fired even though she claimed she hadn't been smoking it so she had been fired from

the police force despite her history in law enforcement what really caught the attention of the public were Lori's brief stints modeling and working as a waitress at a local playboy club at a local playboy club on Lake Geneva. So she's this like young, gorgeous blonde woman. She had been featured as Miss March in the Schlitz beer brewing company calendar. Like she was then. So they harped on even though she had been a police officer, they harped on this like playboy aspect of her past where she had just framing her in the worst framing her as like this like beautiful young blonde who was now a murder suspect like because it just was such a media since it became this media sensation because like it's just a wild

story to see this like tiny blonde like kind of uh you know playboy waitress character it's definitely more interesting yes it's definitely a story yeah yeah so uh newspapers started calling laurie bambi benbenic because she had these like big eyes doe eyes i don't remember that yeah so they called her bambi um which a lot of people still call her but it was not ever her name like that was just what the media called her so uh so they started calling her bambi um the prosecution portrayed bambi as a loose woman addicted to expensive living who wanted christine schultz dead so that her new husband would no longer have to keep paying her alimony i see so they claim that bimbenic was the only person with the motive means and opportunity like she had access to the gun

she has no alibi and she has a motive so. So they're like, well, here you go. Not a cute look. Not a cute look. So they also had evidence. Two human hairs were found at the crime scene and they matched ones taken from Lori's hairbrush. Okay. So her hair was found at the scene. Okay.

Not a good look. Still definitely not a good look. No. So they're like nailing this shut. Closed case. In addition to her access to the murder weapon, Lori also had a key to Christine Schultz's home. Wow.

Fred had seen. It's just stacking up. It's not good. Yeah. It's just keeps adding to it. Fred had secretly made a copy of his son, Sean's key without telling his ex-wife that he was like making a copy from his own kids. Keyset.

Not good. For what it's worth. Sean, the 11 year old said he did not believe his stepmom was the one that he had seen in the house and he said that on the stand but he's 11 so it's like right is that enough to outweigh right her hair was like you're potentially going to jail like yeah and you're like it's only determined on an 11 year old stepson's yeah some money right and he said like oh i don't think it was her but also like you know if she had been wearing a wig they were like well you don't we can't trust that you

knew that um so it gets worse for laurie's case so witnesses testified that laurie had often spoken of killing christine at dinner parties ding ding ding yeah she just like casually told everyone she wanted her dead so there we go ding ding ding wow well that's it sorry bambi the prosecution produced a witness who said laurie offered to pay him to carry out the murder and according to multiple witnesses laurie owned a green jogging suit similar to the one described by schultz's son sean okay it gets worse like literally there's more is it just her is that what happens more evidence. It's like, how does it?

I'm waiting for you to be like, but wait. But wait, there's more. But wait, there's another person. But it just keeps going. Okay, great. So they found in the plumbing system of Lori's apartment, they found a red wig. Bye. In the pipes.

Okay. I feel like I've said bye a lot. Bye. I'm just like, I'm just writing off the whole point i'm like i'm over bye bye bambi we're done with this yeah so she they find a red wig in the plumbing system it's like okay well bye um on march 9th 1982 laurie bambi van benig was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison um she so this seems like an open and shut case as we just said but there is a twist.

That's what I thought was going to happen. I know. It's too short. I was like, there's no way. Are you just this story could have been done in five minutes. What are you talking about? No, it keeps going. So although Fred had initially stood by his wife's side, championing her as innocent,

he later changed his mind and publicly stated as soon as she was in jail that he believed Lori was, quote, guilty of sin. Oh, so he just turned on her uh-huh and meanwhile while she's in jail uh fred wrote lori a letter in prison saying he had moved in he had moved to florida and moved in with a 19 year old uh oh and a spinster and was now ending their marriage and actually according to my favorite murder episode actually he wrote her a letter that said goodbye and good luck oh shit the first night she got to jail also i'd be scared like if i thought that my current girlfriend had killed my ex-wife yeah and that i

would not be so bold as to be like also i'm breaking up with you like i'd be like i'd let the situation die down a lot right i guess he waited till she was in jail and he was in a different state and he moved to florida right also i wouldn't tell her i would be like moving to like kentucky and tell her i moved to hawaii yeah yeah exactly that's a good point you know what i mean yeah that's a good point but he just felt really confident he was really bold he was very bold and he basically wrote her a letter that said goodbye and good luck and then uh moved to florida with a 19 year old and said fuck you basically okay um so after her imprisonment so while she's in jail she starts to kind of put this the pieces together and

realizes she thinks she's been framed by fred for his ex-wife's murder huh so she's starting to think like somebody framed me because i thought my husband this whole time was like championing for me whatever and then the second i'm in jail he's like nope she's guilty bye and like piece yeah it seems like oh he he looked like he was on my side until all of a sudden he was in the clear he got what he wanted or and now he uh-huh that he was unclear right exactly so she's like something's off somebody is planting something i got framed for this is what she starts to believe so she filed three unsuccessful appeals of her conviction, citing police errors and handling of key evidence and the fact that one

of the prosecution's witnesses, Judy Zess, the one who she had used to work with, had recanted her testimony stating that she had made the testimony under duress. So she had made a testimony saying, oh, I heard her say she wanted Christine dead. And then after Lori went to jail, she said, I'm recanting my testimony. I was pressured into saying that and it wasn't true oh okay so now laurie's writing these appeals and saying like listen this one witness is literally recanting her testimony yeah like we need to reassess this case um so laurie and her supporters also alleged that milwaukee police may have singled her out because she was currently a key witness in a federal investigation into police corruption in Milwaukee. So it turns out she was like a key player in this big police scandal.

Sure. And she was sort of like a whistleblower. And so now she's saying like, OK, clearly, like this is just a big conspiracy against me. And that's what her supporters are saying. So there's a little background here after she was fired for that marijuana charge even though it was not proven that she was actually smoking marijuana um she had found all these like photos of these male cops and they were like naked and they were at this like picnic and i think like drunk or on drugs i don't know what they were doing but it was like very incriminating photos of these

officers and so she sent them to the milwaukee police basically being like you fired me for like saying i was at a concert smoking weed right like these people have these photos evidence of them like behaving this way and they're not getting it kind of like it can be corroborated too of like what like wasn't fred like drinking on the job and stuff too like yeah that's true he was also exactly so i don't know if he was fired for that but like it's like at least proven that like he had there's other signs that he was not entirely professional and she's the only one being fired right uh so she's she'd found these photos sent them to the police and saying like you fired me but not them and then the federal government heard about this and open investigation opened an investigation into the milwaukee police department based on her findings and they believed

this is alleged they this is what the government believed they believed that the department was getting money from the government to hire women and minorities and then finding reasons to fire them during the probationary period so that they would get the money for hiring minorities and women oh yuck and then fire them so that they could just get rid of them and so she's like well you fired me and judy right while i was going through training right for like allegedly smoking pot right and now there's all these male cops just running around being like crazy and they're not getting in trouble so it's just not not a good look as we like to say um so quickly quickly it's turning into something we say often devolving and by often i mean always sometimes always you know what i always sometimes

say potatoes are the rocks of nature i frequently never do it but you know yes thank you i'm glad finally someone understands me i often get it so so laurie is a key player in this like federal investigation and while this is going on like before this murder of christine suddenly her car is being keyed rats she's finding rats on her windshield like people are harassing her the um her supporters are essentially now saying police set her up for this because they wanted her put away because she was drawing attention right and opening this investigation so um her supporters also suggested that f Fred Schultz may have arranged to have someone else murder his ex-wife. And one possible candidate that they were eyeing was a guy named Frederick Hornberger.

And he was a career criminal who briefly worked with Fred on a remodeling project and happened to be a former boyfriend of Judy's ex. Aha. So that's Lori's friend who had testified against her and then recanted her testimony and her ex-boyfriend is this guy frederick who also knew fred they're all intermingling in some way a lot of friends very degrassi very degrassi um and so uh chris um i have sorry i have one eye that i can see out of i keep i keep forgetting Which one it is. It's your left one. Thank you. So it's getting fishy.

It turns out Frederick Hornberger had actually robbed and beaten Judy Zess several weeks prior to Christine Schultz's murder. And what was he wearing during the attack on Judy? A green tracksuit and a red wig pulled into a ponytail. Bingo. So he went to jail for that attack. And a number of witnesses say he boasted to other inmates that he had been the one to kill christine and like people have been known to like say things and brag about things that aren't true but it didn't help didn't help

didn't help what's more the evidence itself which seemed so solid during the trial started to raise some doubts as well so remember how they found that hair at the scene that matched lori's yes well a hair analyst analyst from a crime lab in madison named diane hansen refuted the claim saying she had absolutely no idea who decided these were similar hairs because they were different colors oh blonde they were the hairs found were brown and lori is blonde and she's like i there is no she said i do not like to suggest that evidence was altered in any way but i can find no logical explanation for what amounted to the apparent appearance of blonde hair in an envelope that contained no such hair at the time it was sealed by me so she was like i don't know what happened i'm not saying you've screwed with evidence but you

screwed with evidence and um i'm not saying i'm just saying i'm just saying it sometimes never though oh yeah yeah i would never always say that exactly what i sometimes often say it that's exactly what i was thinking i'm glad you get it god it's like not even funny anymore but i can't stop doing it it's really like weirdly mind-bending um so remember the wig they found in laurie's plumbing that was also very dam, right? So there was a wig in the plumbing. It turns out that the plumbing system in Lori's apartment was shared by the neighboring apartment. Okay. And the woman who lived there said it was the strangest thing. This woman had knocked on my door around the time of the murder and asked to use my bathroom.

So I let her use the bathroom. And after she used it, the plumbing was like totally destroyed. Ew. And who was the stranger at the door it was judy's s i so essentially judy's us had gone to laurie's neighbor's house and flushed this wig down the toilet to get it in the plumbing which is like very involved yeah a lot of thinking went into a lot of planning that's not an accident yeah and it the wig was found in laurie's plumbing just like they wanted you know um wow and so judy had basically been put up to to this task of going to the neighbor saying can i use your bathroom and flushing a red wig down the toilet i don't even know you could flush a wig down the toilet it seems like a you can't clearly i mean proven please don't because it doesn't end well um so even more shocking was that a fresh look at the

case revealed that six of the eight swabs taken at the scene had semen on them. But that evidence had been completely suppressed during the original trial. And if that's not so, she is not producing the semen. Right. Purportedly, you'd think so, at least. Right. And so even though there was semen found at the scene, they just like shoved that under the rug and said no it was lori okay discounting where the semen would have come from sure so um if that's not enough a team of four experts compared the size and shape of the

muzzle imprint to the alleged murder weapon the one in the the duffel bag and they said it was irrefutably impossible for fred's off-duty gun to have been the murder weapon okay so this essentially dismantles the entire case which is so weird because for a long time everything was so stacked up against her and now it's all now none of it is true it really was a perfect plan they really had it until someone like like until judy recanted and said i take it back and then all of a sudden it unraveled right um especially if judy says i was the one who flushed it down the toilet yes next door you know full-blown admitting whoops um so this is just all very crazy so alas laurie's so she's appealing this case saying like clearly this is all not true her appeals were rejected over and over again so even though she's appealing and saying look at this like clearly this evidence

was mishandled um her appeals are being rejected but she did the best she could she made the most of her time in prison she earned a bachelor's degree uh in prison she helped found a prison the prisoner's newspaper um so she's like you know living her life even though she's clearly very frustrated she can't get out um she also and had been framed clearly she also met and became engaged to her cellmate's brother a factory worker named dominic giulietto then on july 15th 1990 the unthinkable happened what laurie escaped from prison oh she had climbed through a laundry room window and was picked up by dominic her fiance from the outside and they were spotted two days later in wauwatosa wisconsin but she and dominic

fled to thunder bay ontario in a car that said just married even though they weren't but they were like playing play a ruse yeah they drove into canada being like oh we're newly married we're just like going on a honeymoon whatever and they got into canada and um laurie's escape reignited publicity surrounding this whole bambi case like bambi has escaped from jail like she became like a folk hero because there was a song written about her t-shirts were sold with the slogan run bambi run there were bumper stickers that said run bambi run like why don't we have a shirt like that? No, we should. So while on the run, Lori used the name Jennifer Gazzana and got a job working as a waitress and a fitness instructor. And then on October 17th, 1990, just over three months after her escape, Lori and Dominic were arrested after a tourist noticed that her waitress looked a lot like the woman who was just featured on America's Most Wanted.

I see. Yeah. that noticed that her waitress looked a lot like the woman who was just featured on america's most wanted i see yeah so dominic giulietto was deported to the states and sentenced to a year in prison for his role in her escape but laurie refused to go down easy her attorney advised her to seek refugee status in canada so she was like i'm i'm being persecuted by a conspiracy between the police department and the wisconsin judicial system so the canadian government showed some sympathy for her and before returning her they did send her back to wisconsin but they made the state promise they'd conduct a judicial review of her case before just throwing her right back in jail god damn i love that i know so thank you canada um though they didn't find evidence of crimes by the police they did detail seven major police blunders in laurie's original trial so she won the right to a new trial at this point oh nice but rather than risk a second conviction which obviously she's like i'm not doing this again um she pleaded no contest to second degree

murder and because she had already served 10 years she was released only three hours after the hearing so she had already put in her 10 years of time right and was like okay um so after her release laurie had it's it actually ends pretty sadly because after her release she had a lot of legal and health problems she was diagnosed with hepatitis c ptsd alcoholism and as a way to cope with her ptsd laurie started uh her she revisited her childhood hobby which was painting right um so after several years she had amassed about 30 paintings and they were put on display at a local art gallery so bad I'm not laughing because it's funny but it's just so awful you can't make this up then the gallery immediately burned down and every single painting was destroyed what like you just can't even make

up all this that's happening to this poor woman it's so sad oh my god she's been years like amassing these 30 paintings she's like coping with her ptsd they're like probably her pride and joy the only thing that's like gotten her like creation and then she puts them up in an art gallery like proudly and it just burns to the ground wow so just awful um she won the right to have murder scene evidence tested for her dna because she was like i need somebody to prove this was not. Cause she still had this terrible rap that like she had done it and escaped from jail and somehow, but like,

she's like, no, I want someone to test this DNA and prove it's not me. But even that took a weird twist. So I don't know if you remember this. This is one of the only things I remembered actually. In 2002, guess who decided to agree to conduct and pay for this testing of the DNA evidence?

Do you have a guess or do you want me to tell you? I don't want to pressure you. Chris Hansen? Dr. Phil. Oh, okay. He's not far off, like TV personality. It was either him or like I was going to say Mariska. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, good point. Good guess. That would have been been good guess too but dr phil says we agree to conduct the testing as long as we can reveal the results on air which is like the most like hollywood thing ever it's like that awkward thing where you have to you want to you need to accept the help but you have to say thank you yes afterwards like that that viennese countess who is like i'll house you but i'm gonna study you like an animal i guess like that's like the not the way i wanted this it's the like less bad option i guess yeah so the show's producers now this just gets sad again the show's producers kept laurie in an apartment

with a bodyguard and videotaping apparently according to her attorney to shield her from the media because she's still like this big media figure and so they're trying to like shield her from that but apparently she suffered a panic attack and flashback to prison confinement tried to climb out of the window and injured her foot so badly it had to be amputated holy shit yeah and then the dr bill said burnt down and then dr phil said everything on fire yeah so and despite all of this her appeal efforts were still not successful and her name was not cleared like they wouldn't take her name out of this situation and like clearly her asshole fred x who's now with like a teenager had put her up to or i'd like said i don't blame her for

and not that i would anyway but like all that trauma is like so wildly valid imagine and being in jail for that long whether you're guilty or not but then like not even being guilty after all that oh my gosh so on november 20th 2010 laurie died in a hospice facility in portland from liver and kidney failure and she was only 52 years old oh no i know um there was at the time of when i did the notes originally there was like this really recent update which was like last spring um wisconsin's new governor governor jesus governor governor uh said he will once again consider granting pardons um because his predecessor uh hadn't issued a single pardon during his eight years in office so the new guy the new governor said he was considering um granting

pardons and laurie's uh attorney announced that that she hoped the new governor would finally grant laurie a posthumous pardon to clear her name even after death and i did look into that no update yet so hasn't happened but i guess there's been a lot of other things going on in the last year so hopefully uh that still happens um even though it's after death i would like to think at least she may be able to rest a little easier knowing that her name was finally cleared fucking finally jesus so this is me saying sorry bambi you didn't deserve all that you do not no no no anyway that's the story of run bambi run bambi's had enough bambi's had enough leave her alone wow so that's that i don, I didn't remember that story at all.

Isn't that wild? That's still bananas. Yeah. Wow. When you tell me in another year, I'll be just as shocked. What if we just kept doing that? I mean, no. We should have a spinoff show where we just tell stories that we already have, but the

other person has to fill in the blanks like Mad Libs. Like where I said Dr. Phil. And whoever's more right wins the prize. We could like vote. Yeah. I actually kind of like that we do a mad libs yeah a mad libs yeah we're going mad libs yeah um yeah anyway so that's that thank you for listening well to our podcast i'm ready for some cheesecake me too let's go get some cheesecake all right for those of you who would like more information about any of this. Why? You can go to and that's why we drink dot com.

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