And That's Why We Drink - E280 Emothy Phantom and the Walt Disney of Ghosts

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

An exorcist, a medium and a priest walk into a bar... it's episode 280 and we've got the paranormal goods for ya! This week, Em dives back into their story on the Becker family and the first televised exorcism, closing out this creepy two-parter. Then Christine takes us to, you heard us right, Grubville, Missouri to cover Bertha Gifford, Missouri's first serial killer. Don't worry, we've already brainstormed multiple business ideas for if we ever lived in Grubville. And do you hear any EVPs in our podcast? How about EVAs? ...and that's why we drink!

hello everyone everyone today we today is a silly silly day my favorite part is that eva was like i'm just gonna let him figure it out like she didn't even like try to like like for good reason like was like i'm just to let them play this out. And the energy is the energy is crazy over here. It's a lot. I struggled to do things I should definitely know how to do. Christine helped me. And then we both got lost for a second inside of Zoom.

And it's been a little bit of not a nightmare, but definitely an uncomfortable dream. An uncomfortable dream. I was stuck in M's desktop imagine it was exactly as people think my desktop looks well the wildest part was like I was like it looks a lot like my desktop because I have a lot of pictures of M on my desktop for whatever reason for various reasons and so I was like I feel like some sort of kinship here although I did notice you don't have many pictures of me on your desktop so I felt a little bit I I regularly I do like a weekly like highlight everything and then shove it in a folder so I never have to look at it again. Isn't that fun? I do that too. I've got like about 50 folders. I know at least 10 of them are just pictures of you because I've saved them for random holidays

and projects. But yeah, this was obviously a a me week which is why all the pictures on the desktop are literally of me i love that for you though like a me week for you how are you christine i missed you so much i feel like i haven't talked to you in a while how are you i like your chartreuse background oh thank you so this is part of my childhood bedroom it's green it's very my brother's bedroom was that same lime green color yeah i was 15 it was a it was a summer break choice where i think i let a little too loose it's very 2000s thank you and also my mom didn't mean that as a compliment but you're welcome 15 year old me would be ecstatic just teasing um but uh yeah we're if you look at all of the if you could look closely they my mom this is my

first time she let me paint a room she was like if it's your room you can do whatever you want and it's just like the worst paint job ever there's drips everywhere be honest it looks i mean i can't see closely but like as you know i painted many rooms in my house at age 30 and it is just a disaster so the fact that 15 year old you even finished painting an entire room including stripes and stuff like i don't know how you pulled that off um i don't really i don't know it looks good to me thank you thank you yeah i've got nothing left in here except this bed and then this room is actually very small it's only like uh like eight by eight it's like the walls are here and the walls are here what's on the wall there this this is the

wall um it's like it's a like a row of little pictures from when i was a kid that's literally the only decoration still up here so nice and then yeah so um this was actually when we first moved in, I think this was supposed to be like a bedroom with a bathroom attached. And we never put a bathroom in here. So this was the bathroom. Oh, that's why it's so small. So this is the bathroom attached to my bedroom. So I was like the cool kid that had like two rooms. Oh, but you're saying this was not your entire bedroom you're saying like oh this is part of your bedroom that was going to be a bathroom but is now your cool

stripy yeah i like i made i made the bathroom that we never did anything with it was just an empty room i turned that into where i put my bed and so i've got like a little cave and then the actual bedroom part was just like where we lounge hung out as the kids yeah it was i know very swanky man uh i was like oh i get that feeling of having a closet for a bedroom oh that's not oh i see that's just the ensuite of your bedroom okay anyway so welcome to what should have been my bedroom and my bathroom in 1996. I love that. Yeah. How are you, Christine? I love your your room as always. It always looks very clean in that one corner. Thank you. I know. That's why I sit in the corner. I mean, you've

been here plenty of times by now. You know that if I were to turn the camera around, it would be really stressful for everyone's psyche. But thank you i'm sitting in the corner i'm uh picking off all my nail polish and yeah it's been a great day my mom is back from germany after six weeks and can finally watch the baby uh so that you and i can record which is just splendid um did she bring you back any treats she She did. They brought chocolate and chocolate and chocolate. And then they also brought some baby formula because there's that shortage going on. Yep. And I am fortunate enough to have been on like a subscription plan with the company I use. So I am not low.

So I found somebody to mail the formula to who's struggling to find food for their baby. So I'm mailing that out after we record um and my mom brought um my child her first doll uh so yeah it's cute thankfully i was a little worried knowing my mom's history with with creepy dolls that you find something scary looking but it's actually like fine um but yeah that's all i mean honestly i'm just so happy she's back to babysit christine you've got to tell us how your shows went oh they were super fun i fucked up the cincinnati one pretty bad why um i didn't plug the aux cord in all the way and so there was no music i heard the music but it was coming from my laptop

the first row heard it so we called it like a vip perk for the people up front sure and then a lot of people in the meet and greet were like oh i thought that was just a creative choice and i was like have you met me like obviously if something's wrong it's because i fucked it up not because honestly though when people have met you though they also know that you do make wacky creative choices it's true like you nail things to the wall uh you could have just been like oh those are our whale noises like that's the beachy sandy whale noises yeah so about 20 minutes before the show ended i realized there was no music and i was like oh well sorry everyone uh and so it was it was it music that was playing throughout no so i know you've never somebody on on the Beachy Sandy Facebook group was like, was it a bit that Em said they've

never listened to Beachy Sandy? And I was like, no. Oh, yeah. I hope it doesn't hurt your feelings. I just really... No, it doesn't hurt my feelings. Alexander doesn't listen to our show either. I just don't.

I just really don't listen to podcasts. And also when I do listen to podcasts, it's to be completely mindless and not really hear the whole thing so i don't know if listening would be any better but no no uh it was just funny because i was like oh man uh people thought you were like doing a whole bit because i was like describing the the premise of the show and they were like what i get you you read you read one star reviews of places and every episode is a different place or location or category right and so we have music i know we have like sad music under the one star reviews like dramatic piano music to like very uh celebrity reads mean tweets yeah yes exactly it's like melodramatic music we definitely didn't get the rights to rem which i think is what they use for dramatic or mean tweets uh but

yes so it's like dramatic music and then under the like positive reviews we have like redemption music but anyway it doesn't matter because it wasn't playing but then the next night in columbus i feel like we like nailed it yeah so it was it was really fun um we missed you i really i really did want to be there so badly it was so weird to be in a green room without me having a panic attack on the floor well actually it's kind of pleasant my brother and i played heads up on my phone oh that sounds so much lovelier than whatever i've dragged you into and never were in a green room you probably were like honestly sandy can this just be a you and me situation from now on because no and does not make it fun no no no no you do i feel like uh it it was weird because we've been

to the liberty township funnybone and the Columbus one. And so I was like, I've been in these green rooms before. It probably felt like being it probably I imagine it felt like being in a dream where like, yes, you're at the amusement park, but your high school teacher's there. And it's like, exactly. And that was also the example when you said amusement park. And I was like, yeah, but then your high school teacher's there. So clearly we have a similar. That's what it felt like. Maybe you were at the amusement park when I was dreaming about it too. Maybe our astral souls were trying to find each other.

That's so cute for us and so dumb that we couldn't figure it out. I probably ditched you at the amusement park in dream world because I got lost. You were probably hiding from me. Anne, are you here? I probably was having a panic attack on the floor just like in our green room so anyway but thank you for asking about the shows it was really fun but we missed you um and you're you're as we know in your en suite right now um back in back in the homeland i am i'm i'm here for a very brief stint but allison came with me and it's a it's just a it's just a quick little moment um

but it it's been it's been weird because while we're here it really has been 100 just working and it's weird to be in uh a building that i building a house but it's it's weird for me to think of this space as a place where i work thought your home was like some sort of skyscraper it's actually an abandoned factory it's a castle that checks out um but uh no we it's weird to be here and really like waking up doing work until like five or six o'clock and then just having dinner and going to bed and doing it all over because i'm used to coming here and it being like my vacation home anytime yeah literally since high I left after high school anytime I come here it's because I'm on break right right right right

it's it's weird and Allison's here so she's definitely keeping me in line with uh making sure that we're doing our work usually I feel like usually when I'm here I like am a little more lenient about like oh I'm not gonna you, mess around or I'll take an hour off. But at when Allison works, she's very type A. And so she's been like, Are you working? Are you working? What are you doing? So kind of like scared of my own home right now. Yay. But anyway, it's keeping me on track. I actually already got next week's notes done. So good for you. Thank you thank you well you've been absent from the slack m so i feel like i know i feel really bad about it i missed you in the slack chat i have um apparently nine notifications that i have to get back to yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we

miss you over there but um i'm sure uh oh and eva just posted another thing in there so now you have 10 my little ticker just went to 10 uh anyway by the way if you have a small business um slack is something we have tried recently and christine and eva can't stop screaming about it it has become very useful it's just like gets your brain your thoughts onto something else so like if you have like not an ad by the way but no i wish it were but if you have like a thought or an idea or like oh you want to touch But if you have like a thought or an idea or like, oh, you want to touch on something, you can just like throw it in there and either like set a reminder or just like leave it for someone else to look at later. I mean, it's just very nice to have.

And I know that I'm very, I was like, Alexander, let me show you Slack. He's like, Christine, I've been using this for like seven years. What do you like? I'm sure everyone else is thinking that right now. I know. I'm like, and nobody likes it because it's always like for work. But i just like it because i feel like our group chat used to be like eva sending 18 messages and then being like hey yeah i know like this was three days ago but you really need to respond to this specific thing and then we'd like scroll and try to find the link and

it's just a lot easier um yeah yeah yeah so yeah, yeah. So anyway, we miss you in there, Em, but I'm sure you'll be popping into... After we record, I'll probably catch up on all of it. I don't think there's anything urgent. Trust me, I'm aware of it, though, because when I woke up, I was looking at all my updates, and I was like, ooh, I really got to get back on track. There's some talk about horses in there, so I think you're not missing anything too vital, you know? I hope that's all kind of a notification a revelation that she was a horse girl growing up i think i did know that and i think i intentionally blocked it out this might be one of those like

what happens in slack stays in slack and i'm breaking the rule but even did announce that she was a horse girl i think my mom wanted me to be a horse girl. Yeah, I bet she did. That's such a Linda move. Well, she made me go to like summer camp where like you did horse decorating. Oh, you'd say. And it didn't work. Let's just put it that way. Doesn't seem like something you'd be into.

I rode two horses for like three years or something. And I got, I think I got four different ribbons and when i got yep and then hold on i'm learning so much about you and even this was completely out of like under duress like i did not want this to be fair um but so you're like being handed a rib and you're like i don't want it take it away yeah i don't know where they are i think i threw them away oh i bet linda knows where they are i you know she just might i don't want to know i don't want to have them for my own remind her of that uh but no i really like the summer camp but my mom i think lied to me at one point and said that a requirement

was to go was to do horseback riding there but i found out they were like all elective based like five years into going to this fucking place i think i'm offside you for horseback riding anyway i did not have a lot of fun but i do know how to ride a horse if uh something were to happen i know how to like set up a saddle and all that what yeah and like clean their feet clean their hooves and all that i didn't have that uh experience i played with a hose usually in the summer that sounds so fun it was for what is my mom thinking to be fair it was let's get into some spooky stuff christine because we have a part two i've got to finish oh yeah oh yeah i've got a score to settle what was it an exorcism oh yeah so this i'll catch you up sweet christine don't you even

worry thank you um oh so by the way i see your little what's it called coochie copie yes um i am seeing the movie tonight the boz burgers movie oh my gosh have fun i'm so jealous i don't know anything about it i know that apparently i'm going i again under duress but i'm it's not that apparently I'm going again under duress, but I'm, I, it's not that bad. I'm pretty excited. It's not that bad. Yeah. I wish I could go under duress, but I have an infant,

but I am also, I want to point out, I'm burning this candle that, um, the love is a lot lower. It's not going to burn your cabinet. right. I guess I shouldn't keep putting candles on here,

but you're right. This one is, Oh, you know what? Everyone's going to be mad. So I am going to move it before they like report me to youtube but eva gave me this beautiful even rachel gave me this beautiful candle this ouija candle for my birthday isn't it nice goodbye goodbye yeah it's lovely and it's hand poured in downtown la uh by purgatory candle company so ah hang on they're in la yeah downtown la it says well i

guess i am heading right over to purgatory uh candle shop you are heading to purgatory i already know that about you that's a fact that's a fact so um okay this is the second part of the becker family haunting which is what i named it but it is known as the first televised exorcism and uh to catch you up it's a couple uh edwin and marcia and they are uh they own a boarding house where they live on the top floor and the bottom floor they were renting out to people but they can't keep they really can't keep people in there because uh there are a lot of spooky things going on and to a point where when edwin goes to work marcia is staying uh hiding out in the kitchen because she feels the safest in that room and she is kind of losing her mind the couple is getting into a lot of fights and their relationship's getting damaged to a point where marha eventually leaves because she can't take it anymore. And Edwin stays for a month at the house by himself.

And I think he has some sort of aha moment, goes back to find Marsha and says, please come home. We are going to make this work. Let's seek professional help together. It was like when the ravioli burned or something. And he was like, I can't do this anymore. It was in the 70s. And he was like, the ravioli burned or something and he was like i can't do this anymore it was in the 70s and he was like one dinner i tried and it burnt to shreds i need my housewife back no i'm sure there were other reasons but uh it it is some very silly context suspicious timing

yeah very convenient timing so edwin and marcia they were fed up with their haunted house it was destroying their relationship and they decided to seek professional paranormal help keep in mind though that this haunting of theirs this was before the exorcist came out this was before amityville horror came out there wasn't really this boom in uh paranormal awareness i guess right um so they really had nowhere to turn to. There weren't any ghost hunters, you could just call at the time. It was really a very quiet community that they didn't know how to access because there was no internet. Right. So the best that they could do was Marcia decided to go through the phone book. And the first group that they find,

I don't know if I would even call them investigators or if they were there to bless the house um i think according to them they had good intentions but they were more or less just paranormal enthusiasts like thrill seekers love that they have a number in the phone book though honestly wait a minute can we get our eva put us in the phone book as paranormal enthusiasts i want to be a paranormal thrill seeker um make us a group and just give us one number a google voice number and people can do whatever they want with that from the phone fun um okay so they are they have this group come in and have them or try to have them bless the rest of the house and in interviews with edwin and marcia they basically say that uh they were more terrified of the house than helpful when they came over this

one group oh okay at the end of them walking around and like kind of getting spooked by all the activity someone in the group tells them okay you don't have any more spirits here to like calm them down i guess but as he says that the phone book flies off the table and slams to the floor in front of them not the phone book that's like the beginning and the end full circle and so they take off and they were of zero help so excellent so that was the first attempt. The second attempt at help from the phone book, Marsha finds this group called Illinois Psychic Research. Which, by the way, I feel like even if I didn't have a paranormal thing going on, if I had a phone book at the time and I was just looking at names, if I saw Illinois Psychic Research, I'd be calling it regularly anyway. Get them on the horn. Yeah.

Get the IPR on the horn. The IPR. Is that what they are?r yeah illinois psychic research psychic research okay um so they sent out this guy uh named tom valentine to the becker's house so illinois psychic research sent out tom valentine and here's why there was a well-respected i think like nationally well-acclaimed psychic medium at the time his name was joseph de louise and he had predicted like a bridge getting destroyed he had helped track down um victims of like the manson murders oh my god he was i think that was probably what really made him, you know, well known. Big time.

Yeah. And so Joseph DeLuise, he was very well known for his psychic mediumship. And Tom Valentine, he was fascinated with everything that Joseph DeLuise was doing. And I think Tom was a former like LA Times reporter or something, or he was still an LA Times reporter. And he went on to write an article about Joseph de Louise and his work with the Manson murders, because this piece that he wrote was about, quote, the correlation of people in the occult and people with mental illness. Okay, just to see where charles manson

fit in with all that sure that's interesting i thought it was interesting too i yeah i couldn't find the article but it seemed like a especially in the 70s probably a novel article oh yeah original so basically he ended up writing this piece in the psychic world or about the paranormal or parapsychological. And he kind of just fell into the parapsychology world. So instead of being an L.A. Times reporter, I think he quit his job to go work for the IPR, the Illinois Psychic Research. Wow. And because of his work with the correlation between mental illness and people involved in the occult, the IPR started sending out Tom Valentine to families homes that were allegedly haunted. And he would kind of be the first in line to interview these families and analyze them to see if they were really struggling or if they were just trying to exploit the IPR or if they were trying to bamboozle them or if they were doing this for fame. So he was just kind of there to do like a mental check in before the IPR took them seriously.

Okay. Interesting. So Tom Valentine. Sorry. I ate a PBJ and my throat is very itchy now. Are you allergic? I don't know anyways itchy okay anyway anyway we're fine okay figure itself out sure so as i go yeah i just keep an eye on you from over here yeah yeah text somebody if you see me fall over on camera okay uh so tom valentine was basically like the first

person to check out a family before the ipr sent in joseph de luiz to do his work especially because joseph de luiz was now so popular and renowned for his work they didn't want to just send him in hot to a family who might try to trick him or ruin his reputation sure that makes sense so tom valentine goes to the becker's house and he you know checks out the family and after he gives the okay to the ipr uh joseph de luiz came to see the home and while joseph was there edwin was very skeptical of mediums in the beginning of this day well the beginning you know ever since this day um but joseph brought along with him one of his like protégés uh and the protégé was the one who freaked edwin out a little bit because much earlier in this story something edwin hadn't told anybody even his wife was that when they moved in he was

looking around in the basement the room that's the scariest and most sinister and the creepiest, and his wife wouldn't even go down there. He was down in the basement and he found a jar full of bullets. Ew. And he didn't know what to do with it. Ominous. Yeah. He didn't know what to do with it,

and so I think he thought if I throw them away, like if someone put something flammable next to them, like who knows? He didn't know what to do with them. So he just put the jar up inside the ceiling rafters so he wouldn't have to look at it. That's such a Christine and Em move. I'll just tuck it over here so nobody will see it. Out of sight, out of mind.

It's like your desktop. Just put the jar of bullets over in this folder and we'll worry about it another day. Object permanence like a baby. Yeah, exactly. about it another day like object permanence like a baby exactly and so uh he so anyway now fast forward to now when joseph de luiz and his protege are there and as they're walking around the protege looks at edwin and says bullets and edwin just said where and the protege said in the rafters in the basement oh dun dun dun and so edwin was like oh my god that's very spooky yeah so that got him and so i think that was the beginning of him

being more open-minded to mediums uh throughout the night joseph determined that the house probably had four to five spirits um that were all probably members of the original family that lived there. Although Edwin and Marsha only felt that they had ever experienced two or three of the spirits. And Joseph was like, no, there's at least four or five. Wow. Of the two or three that Edwin and Marsha knew about, they had only seen one multiple times. And that was a woman who apparently looks as solidly human as any other person. Like if you took a picture of this ghost you wouldn't know it wasn't a human being right um and apparently whenever this

woman was around you could tell she was very kind but very sad oh and the eeriest part was that this house seemed to have zones where each spirit kind of lived and did their thing and they didn't really go into each other's zones which is interesting because they definitely had no problem going into the humans boundary zones for everyone else's zone yeah uh but apparently the darkest spirit was always on the first floor which we already kind of knew because it seems that that was where most the activity was right yeah um and it particularly loved to bother women so it bothered marcia way more than it ever bothered edwin when they had the tenants dan and diane diane was the one who always had trouble with it myra who was the last living family member to be there before

them she was definitely odd so we're gonna say that the spirit was probably affecting her yeah um or i think that's the understanding that the family had or what there it was just so it's a weird coincidence that she seems very unhinged and lived in that house for so long so i think the idea is that the house there might be a connection and so that was all that's very spooky, sinister entity is on the first floor. And so when Joseph DeLuise is doing his walkthrough and he is on the first floor, he says to the couple, there's a real dark energy here and I'm not prepared to deal with it. Oh, no. Which is so much worse because like you're here to deal with it. Right.

That's your job. Like, what do we do like thank you for the information but can you imagine if you finally found someone who's helpful and then he just dead ends you like that it's like he's like oh you're right it's bad here but i'm gonna go home now um so i think they were like so what do do we do? And Joseph said that the house, particularly the first floor, would require an exorcism. Yikes. And again, remember, exorcisms were not pop culture yet. Sure, true, right. Edwin didn't even know what an exorcism was.

He was like, okay, cool, let's do that. And he had no idea what he was signing up for. Cool, cool, cool, yeah. So Joseph knew a catholic priest named joe wood okay and joe wood happened to also have a christian radio program that he hosted on nbc oh so joseph asked joe wood for help with the exorcism but joe said no it would be too complicated and he didn't want to be affiliated which is like you're a catholic priest please please help i think you have to be like especially trained to like not

every priest can do that i think you have to be like i think you have to also be trained with like the certain rites and rituals yeah i think so i think it's like a big process um and well so then joe wood ended up saying i do know an exorcist so okay he was somewhat helpful um so he said reach out to reverend william daryl davis um who was an exorcist who agreed to help joseph de luiz so now this medium is trying to help the family goes to this christian priest or catholic priest who introduces him to this exorcism so now it's a medium and an exorcist trying to help walk into a bar oh yeah you get a different story okay got it uh and sorry it's hot i feel like i'm losing brain cells every second are you just sweltering 96 degrees outside i'm what about inside it's like 99 degrees inside no it's not

too bad i actually thought ahead to run my ac unit before for a few hours before we started so it's actually okay when our we our first summer in the burbank apartment um the air conditioning went out in the building and it was in the dead of summer and we bought like ice packs that you put in coolers like not the ice like the one brick ice pack but like the sheet where like oh yeah yeah you can cut the little cubes out and make your perfect size we just froze those and use them as blankets and just hold them oh no highly recommend though if your place gets too hot while you record it's actually kind of smart it It was genius. It was so helpful. Okay.

So now the medium and the exorcist have agreed to work together. So keep in mind, Joe Wood, the Catholic priest, he had a program with NBC. And so I guess when he had been talking to Joseph DeLuise about these problems, he either let it slip to somebody at work or they overheard,

but somehow NBC found out that he had turned down an exorcism. Oh, and you better believe the executives were not happy about that. They were like, you mean what? Like, can you imagine being a producer and finding out you could be in charge of the first filmed exorcism? And then the person turned it down? Oh, my gosh. So NBC was like, noc was like no no we are

going to get involved with this they wanted to film it for a segment and edwin uh has later said that this was the first time a major is a quote from him this was the first time a major network was going to take something paranormal seriously okay interesting and uh they had nbc had one of their lead reporters named carol simpson call the beckers and say we would love to film this whenever it happens at your house and edwin originally said no and i different sources said it was carol the news reporter or it was tom valentine from the ipr but one of them convinced edwin that they should film the exorcism because uh joseph the medium who had apparently according to edwin joseph's ever since he did the walkthrough he was very kind with them he was very patient with them he never asked for any money like they never paid him anything he never asked for anything he was just trying to

be of service and they ended up becoming lifelong friends oh that's nice um but so when edwin originally said i don't want to do i don't want you to film the exorcism the reporter or or someone was like you really should do this because um joseph de luiz is actually having a book come out and this would be really good pr for him oh and he's your friend so and he's your friend and he's never asked a single dollar from you so you know pay up yeah so uh joseph was like okay or edwin was like fine fine fine i'll do it so nbc came to the house and the night of the exorcism uh joseph de luiz the medium and reverend daryl davis the exorcist were going to lead it and they said at the beginning of the night once we start nobody can leave the house and they were like already starting to set up

filming and he was like nobody can leave the house once we started i don't care how scary it gets and all of the like white collar nbc execs fucking walked right out the door don't try to be a hero okay they were like but then they left all of the crew oh i see oh i see okay yeah all of the producers were like okay crew you've got this and i ended up i i saw in one interview that like the sound man he was like the most terrified and he was like so desperate to leave he was like i want to leave i don't want to be here and he basically said he would stay if he could carry around a bible with him all night oh my gosh and so that's what happened and by the way later like can you imagine i i so i'll tell you about it a little bit later. I'll hold on to it. But remind me of the sound band because I just feel so bad for him.

Okay. So the execs leave. The crew stays with the medium and the exorcist and the exorcism lasts about three and a half hours and I couldn't hear the audio properly. I don't know if he was saying 16

or 6D. Yeah, it's because I was carrying a bible around instead of this my instead of audio equipment well edwin said that in that three and a half hours nbc got 16 or 60 hours of footage oh oh yeah so uh just based on how many cameras were in certain rooms and everything so i don't know it's still a lot of footage for three and a half hours yeah um and edwin said there was actually a lot of tension between the media between joseph de luiz the medium and the exorcist oh because apparently which i hadn't really thought of before he said that mediums and exorcists their values on how to handle this are completely different or at least they were there so one of them joseph de

louise the way that he wanted to work this out was he wanted to contact the spirits and let them use him as a vessel and he wanted to open his mind and be vulnerable so they could speak through him oh dear and the exorcist was like no like we have to get this thing fucking out of here don't let it possess you so apparently there was a lot of friction and edwin said something in an interview like in case you ever wonder why mediums and exorcists like aren't doing exorcisms together like i watched it firsthand they really did not get along because they were like battling over like how to handle the situation so there were times where joseph would like let himself be vulnerable and let the spirits try to like talk through him

or he would go into a trance or something and the exorcist was scared the whole time that joseph was going to get possessed yeah he didn't know he'd do an exorcist on a person all of a sudden like yeah exactly well that was something he said that edwin said in an interview he was like right now he only has to exercise a house he doesn't have to exercise a person and this one person is willingly volunteering yeah i feel like that must be a personal choice because i feel like i know some psychic mediums at least that i've sort of interacted with who like are not into getting possessed willingly right yeah and i wonder i think there was like i think joseph de luiz was assuming he had enough control that like

he could toe the line of like you can use my body to speak through me but you won't possess me which i don't totally he was just a little game he was feeling risky that day and so edwin remembers when joseph would go into a trance they would be able to tell because his breathing and he was got heavy and is sweating he would start sweating heavily and uh the exorcist anytime he heard it would start freaking out that something was about to happen so he'd go he would very loudly be like come back joseph come back and that's one of edwin's big takeaways is he he remembers the exorcist keep telling joseph to come back whenever he went into a trance creepy shockingly um very little is shared or known about the exorcism because the nbc segment was very short um even though they

filmed for three and a half hours or the exorcism was three and a half hours we did not get three and a half hours of footage right so there was a program at the time which was competing with 60 seconds my family fucking ate up 60 seconds they love 60 minutes is it 60 minutes oh it is 60 minutes i'm so stupid it's like 60 seconds it's like a commercial break 60 seconds is us going buy rothy's shoes right now quick go 60 sorry 60 minutes it also my notes literally say 60 minutes and my stupid brain wow because you did say it like four times because i wasn't gonna say anything and then the fourth time i was like does it really say 60 seconds that's so weird it says 60 minutes but i think i said seconds and then my brain rode with

it i love that um honestly you know what? TM, TM, TM. But there should be a 60 minutes on TikTok just called 60 seconds. There might. They could just reboot it. There might be. That might be why you said it. Maybe it already exists. Oh, maybe.

Maybe I just think in TikTok rules now. Honestly. It clearly couldn't be 60 whole minutes. No one's attention would last that long. Who would watch that? As we have a 60 minute show but um as we have a four hour show okay so 60 minutes sorry uh but they had my family by the way really did eat up 60 minutes i remember like the classic it's a good one yeah um okay so there was a show at the time

that competed with 60 minutes called uh first tuesday and uh on first tuesday nbc released of a longer version of the exorcism that happened so when they went in and they they got like 16 or 60 hours of footage i'm unsure they got that during a three and a half hour exorcism. But all that they really showed at max was a 20 minute long segment. Oh, man. So and they only played that on the first Tuesday segment of NBC. But apparently that 20 minute segment of the exorcism only showed in a few areas. It didn't show everywhere because there were some FCC regulations where like you couldn't show something a certain amount of times it I don't really know what the rule was but basically in

a lot of parts of Illinois people did not see the 20-minute segment they saw a six-minute segment no including Edwin he was like I lived in an area where like I didn't even get to watch my own 20-minute segment on my on my exorcism stinks um so i don't think the beckers ever saw the 20-minute version because it only played for that week on nbc and then it went away they never played they never aired it but what was interesting and helped edwin in a way was that when the 20 minute version played on first Tuesday, apparently the switchboards at the studio were going crazy. People were freaking out. And they were like, we want to see it again. We want to see it again. And so they played it that week, like 10s of times. Oh my gosh. And so that in hindsight helped Edwin feel like okay, people are interested in this. And I'm not like being gaslit into thinking I'm crazy and yeah uh so anyway the longer version only ever aired for that week and that was kind of it and now the only one you can even find on YouTube is the six minute one no um I want all that footage I want those 16 hours of footage me too but can you imagine having 60 hours of 16 or 60 hours of footage and they're only being accessed to six minutes of it that's so sad or 60 seconds if you watch my tiktok

apparently the tiktok version um and so of the footage edwin saw the six minutes he can confirm that in those six minutes he could hear the sounds of knocking, a voice say mama, and you can see a ghost and a dress appear in the shot for a second. Ew. God. And it makes him wonder what else they caught that they were unaware of. Exactly. Since we only get six minutes of maybe 60 hours of footage. Give that whole thing to Zach Bagans' team of producers and they will find every little click or sound even if they there isn't that would be the one day that this very active ghost would be like i'm doing nothing

and you know what those adventures would still make a whole production of it something yeah find something so edwin thinks uh at the end of all of this at the end of the exorcism joseph de louise and the exorcist uh daryl davis probably only got rid of one of the spirits oh good job but definitely not all of them and whatever happened during the exorcism edwin says that joseph and daryl davis uh definitely failed and you could tell on their faces when they walked out that night that they weren't happy. Oh, that's too bad. It's too bad. Also, though, if I had this whole literal production come out to do an exorcism in my house and nobody looked victorious at the end, I'd be like, well, now I'm really not going in that house. I was going to say, now you have to go to bed in there?

Are you kidding? Yeah. Also, you have to go in. It was like not just a failed exorcism in my mind, but it's an exorcism where like the two people leading it couldn't even agree with each other so like it just feels like a bad group project um so after this night joseph told them to never mess with a ouija board he was just kind of giving them the rundown of like things to not like poke the bear right um well unfortunately edwin's sister and moves in with her husband and kids and one day she heard the piano playing by itself oh and apparently edwin's brother had also once been in the house and heard

the piano play on its own and he never stepped foot in the house again he was like that's too much i'm not doing this oh my gosh. So the sister was really into it. She unfortunately might have been a fan of and that's why we drink because she fucking ate it up. She was like, oh, this house has spooky stuff and the piano plays by itself. So she started bringing her friends over. Oh gosh. We're also into this stuff.

I like to think and that's why we drink fan base is a little more aware where they're like, let's not make this worse for people but like i'm that girl and then all my friends are like hey let's get fro-yo instead they're like no no no christine that's a really it's a very silly idea yeah i think like someone needs to ground you you know i i do think that's why we work so well together because i think there are times where i'm incredibly reckless and you go yeah but we could also not do that we could also do that and likewise i mean and then it flips and then it flips we're like you say something chaotic and i'm like you know what that's the best fucking idea i ever heard right right sometimes we don't really do the grounding

part of it we just do the other part we just embolden each other um and so anyway this so the sister hears about the here's the piano she starts bringing her friends over they're into spooky stuff and eventually they start playing with a Ouija board no um and when Edwin and Marsha find out about this Edwin storms in breaks the Ouija board which I don't know if that's good because I think they were in the middle of playing with it and never said goodbye. Uh oh. They never talk about that but I'm thinking that probably was not a good move. Probably not. But he just starts freaking out because he's

like how on earth could you let something back into this house? I would be so pissed. I'd be pissed. I'd be pissed. I have kids in the house too. It's not even your house. Get out of here. And I think the whole length of this experience was like 21 months. Like, can you imagine being in this place for over like, can you imagine being here for like a year and a half, almost two years and things are finally not good, but settled.

And now all of a sudden this is happening. Dumb little sister shows up. Are you kidding me? I'd be livid. So Edwin says that during her time in the house to her behavior completely changed um and eventually she ended up going really downhill oh no oh no um to a point where edwin has said in interviews she never never recovered oh gosh she apparently left her husband and the kids. She joined a quote, cult-like group. Uh-oh.

She apparently became abusive. She, and to this day now when she, I don't know if she's still around, but as of the most recent interview, to this day. Yep. I saw a notification from Slack. And so to this day, she refuses to leave her home she refuses to see anybody if you go to her home you can see through the windows that the lights and the radio and everything are on all the time um if you knock on the door she'll apparently shout out like go away demon oh um so her her mental health has taken a steep decline.

Terrible. And so, again, could just be good old fashioned mental health problems. But I think the belief here is that the house, maybe a part of it left with her and stayed with her. Oh, no. So people have also allegedly spoke with a little boy named Tommy down there in the basement. So that might have been another spirit that was affecting the home. One of the last people to live in the house as a tenant was I think she was the last tenant. Her name was Mrs. Scott.

And apparently scary things were also happening to her. And she had a noticeable personality change and it is interesting to note earlier i said that the first floor seems to affect women the most and now we can also add edwin's sister and mrs scott to that list that's true so after things didn't get better edwin and marcia wanted out of the house for good but the realtor showed it to a lot of people and couldn't find a buyer obviously i think people were taking a reading the room and being like this feels spooky also i watched nbc last week i watched this on 60 seconds and honestly tiktok tiktok tiktok uh really gave me a concise rundown

of how this happened so i mean realistically if 60 seconds on tiktok handled the segment on nbc it would only be six tiktoks it was only six minutes right that's true it's like you could just do like for part six like for part six and now i mean tiktok lets you do three minute videos right so now you can do two honestly 180 seconds it's not as catchy as 60 seconds 120 no for three minutes oh three minutes three minutes three minutes you're i was like god um don't gaslight me to thinking i'm that dumb at math like i'm bad at math don't get me wrong but anyway if i swear if we end up on tiktok later and there is a 60 seconds channel i'm going to be very uh i'm going to feel taken advantage of yeah i feel like um if it was created in the last 60 seconds i don't even know where i was going with my sentence

so i'm glad you kind of jumped in there so uh they were looking to get out of the house the realtor could not find a buyer and eventually edwin like breaks down to him and is like okay fine the reason you can't find a buyer is this place is haunted and it turns out the realtor and his wife were really into spooky shit oh my gosh they're like why didn't you say so yeah so they were like uh can you confirm for us that this is haunted and edwin said in an interview he was like i went to all my tenants and i had them talk to the realtor no and all i told them was just be honest like tell them exactly what happened because i think he was afraid they were gonna like cover for him yeah and say like oh no there's no ghosts but he was like tell him everything you know oh my gosh

and so when the realtor found out that it was really haunted he desperately wanted the house for himself but he couldn't afford it and so edwin made a deal with him that i guess in illinois they've got maybe everywhere they've got a thing called a quick claim deed where basically edwin sold it to him for ten dollars legally oh like he was like just take it take everything i don't want this anymore so sold time for 10 bucks and sadly after he bought the house the realtor's health and wealth took a steep decline um so just another another coincidence so i don't know how involved the house was in that but it is interesting i mean to be fair he is running around just buying random houses for

ten dollars because there are ghosts in them so i feel like his finances weren't gonna this might not be booming yeah right so when they left the home uh marcia was nervous that the spirits would follow them but uh fortunately they did not and since the nbc segment in 1971 the beckers didn't ever publicly talk about it again until 2011 so like 40 years later um and i think this was in the 1980s it could have been all the way up to 2011 but i think it was the 1980s because i saw in an article it said 10 years later um edwin was writing down his experiences so that one he wouldn't forget them but also to document it for his kids he was kind of considering get like a diary entry or family archive so he was writing down everything that he could remember and over time it somewhat became like a manuscript

and he'd even drawn like some like it's very like a very dad move that he had created some like first draft art to go with it it was very like michael scott threat level midnight where he like wrote a manuscript and had pictures he's like here's the jar of bullets i drew it myself and so uh it was like a as as if he was manifesting like this could be like a a poster or something and so he like drew a poster of what he thought the cover of his manuscript would look like oh my goodness and he even thought about getting it published a few times under like a pseudonym i think he was going to use like one of his friends or kids names or something um but the publishers wanted him to embellish the story because they thought it didn't sound juicy enough.

So and he didn't want to do that. So he just never got it published. But in 2011, his younger daughter read it, straight up, took the flash drive, uploaded and published it online with his art and his real name. Oh, that is such a daughter, like a kid move. Like, I feel like aside. I feel like the daughter is like, Dad, you don't even know what the world is like anymore. Let me just let me just throw this on and let's see what happens to the Internet. And just watch the world burn.

Also, I love the support of the daughter being like, people need to know this story. Yeah. And also, let's put your name on it, Dad. He was not stoked about that. He was not stoked that his name was on it. He also was not stoked because he thought was not stoked that his name was on it he also was not stoked because he thought nobody was ever gonna see it and he had written in there like who his favorite aunt was and then all of his aunts read the book and like oh my god wow so he called out he was like i wouldn't have at least edited a few things oh but um so he wasn't super thrilled about the

book being published uh online but then his friend called him and told him that the book was number one in new releases and the book was called true haunting and when the book hit number one in parapsychology it got the attention of the show paranormal witness on my dad's favorite network siffy siffy so uh edwin and marcia agreed to finally speak publicly about their story this was the first time they were ever going to do it it was probably because everyone liked the book so they felt safe to do it but also maybe pr for the book i don't totally know but so they ended up going on Paranormal Witness and it was the episode season two, episode 12 called The Tenants. Is this on Discovery Plus?

I think so. Because I think I've seen it and I only remember this because I'm putting it together now because I remember the baby walker scene because they did a reenactment. And I was like, no, don't reenact a baby falling down the stairs. The baby walker is part of the story. Okay. And I remember that. And then I remember the tenants thinking the other one was fighting. And then I remember the little sister showing up.

So I feel like I maybe have seen this episode. It's like starting to click a little bit. It's like you have 60 seconds of it right in your little head. Right. I just kind of summed it up for you. There's a baby. They're you. There's a baby. They're yelling. There's a sister.

She's yelling. This is a sister with a Ouija board. Classic. Classics. You're the sister with the Ouija board, by the way. I know. That's me, by the way. I feel like this was just Zandy's story.

And all of a sudden, you show up and you see the piano playing by itself. Since when? He never got his number one on parapsychology. It's not fair. fair did we by the way yeah we did i don't think it was parapsychology but it was uh ghosts and hauntings so paranormal witness i don't know why we haven't gotten a call yet yeah okay that was my next thought was like hang on it got the attention of whom oh i don't recall the network there i don't recall siffy wanting to speak to us but whatever if you work at siffy you could call us i'm just saying they're gonna be like you pronounce it

siffy we're not gonna call you especially if we ever did promo for them we'd be like welcome i'm emin christine welcome to siffy's favorite show siffy sci-fi siffy so uh okay so they decided they were going to go on Paranormal Witness together. And Edwin said that this experience was actually super cathartic because he never let himself talk about what happened. Sure. He kind of wrote it down all those years ago, but never one. He wrote it down to never think about it again, I think. And they ended up having to stop filming a few times because he got so emotional.

Oh, no. Because it was just really affecting him to think about in hindsight everything he'd gone yeah and when it aired for the first time he cried too and this was a quote from him about the first time he saw the episode it captured me and it made me well up when i saw the initial scenes and the initial scenes were them moving into this house very happy uh because when i saw those scenes i was that young man looking at this building and thinking this is my future i'm a landowner i'm a landlord we have a home and it just all went south and it went really really bad oh that makes

me want to cry yeah i just feel so bad for him yeah um here now we're going to go back to the NBC exorcism segment for a second, because fun fact, Paranormal Witness is owned by NBC. And so when they were going to do the show, they were like, oh, we're going to use some of the archived footage from your exorcism and put it into the episode. Yeah, genius. Paranormal Witness goes to NBC, tries to get the archived footage, doesn't exist. What? Completely missing. No official record of it what all 16 or 68 hours of it completely gone yeah how does that even happen i don't know just completely missing maybe there wasn't even digital back then it was on these

giant like reels yeah which means it was probably easier to steal if someone was maybe i mean they literally had to steal so many of them to get like 16 or 60 hours of it i wonder if it was because i mean they also remember the only person who knew about this uh before it aired was a catholic priest maybe he like did something not so christian and felt like he needed to hide that footage maybe someone else stole the footage maybe someone who's a big ghost fan thought they could steal it as a collectible maybe someone didn't agree with it being aired and i don't know it's completely gone though and there's no record of it being there so paranormal witness was like shit we

already said we were going to produce this and now like we don't have the footage so that sucks that sucks it all ended up being reenactments um and all that's left truly is that six minute segment on youtube wow and edwin still has no idea what other activity they might have caught on camera during the exorcism oh that makes me so mad i wish they knew where what they need to get that other guy who found the jar of bullets to find the tapes yeah oh yeah the protege the protege like he knew where the bullets were in the rafters that's actually such a good idea the protege is still around you need to tell us where those rails of footage are find them so uh fyi if you did watch paranormal witness which i know you did the episode is incredibly embellished um i'm unsure if the hauntings were embellished but the family's history was certainly inaccurate they said that instead of there being like that ghost ben there were four siblings and

they all died in the house and there was a wife who died by suicide to get away from the abusive husband uh one of the sons was killed by the dad in the basement like the it was all stuff that i had just listened to like i'm not kidding like 20 hours of interview audio and then i watched paranormal witness and i was like i don't recall any of that's not a good look paranormal witness i'm gonna be honest with you maybe they needed like filler after they realized they didn't have i guess they went we're gonna be as legitimate as as we can oh never mind i guess we're gonna do the opposite of that now yeah and so um they i think they were just trying to tie up all the loose ends

because um like edwin mentions in this that he found the jar of bullets and i think they were trying to say like oh someone died in the basement and that's why you found the bullets in there like they tried they talked about how like you know how in um in the first episode of this or the part one of this i said that he had gone downstairs and found like a storage space full of porn they trapped they said they trapped the kid down there didn't they or something yeah i remember that they said instead of it being a well it might have also been a stash of porn but they found a false wall that led to a room where the kid had clearly been living because they were so shamed of him they locked him down there and then they shot yeah and all the cut up body parts and

stuff yeah okay i'm actually comforted that that might have been embellished because that made me feel really weird i didn't like that part well also in hindsight now i feel like well they also said that uh ben died in the bathtub and that would explain why all the weird things in the bathtub were happening which i talked about part one um so they were just trying to like true like yeah like tie up the loose ends i guess yeah they also they also embellished i think i don't know because i heard such little information about what happened in the exorcism i don't know what's true or not um but they might have embellished the exorcism i also remember saying um last week that diane's or dan and diane apparently diane ended up leaving i don't remember edwin actually saying

that in any interviews in hindsight so i don't know if she left now that i'm thinking about it she might have i don't i the show really threw a fucking curveball at all of the work i've done seriously what the fuck so um if you watch it know that it is not super duper accurate grain of salt grain yeah um and so i will say they they called the family in the show i don't know if i'm pronouncing it right the verders the verdiers v-e-r-d-e-r-e verdure dear for dear um so they were saying like oh he would always like hang out with his neighbor and the neighbor would tell him every night like new information about how bad the verdure family was when they lived here blah blah blah on edwin's personal website he has in all caps there is no verdure family it was made up for tv oh so don't try and find the verdure

yeah so um i think they just ran with the fact that he had named the ghost ben and that was and then also because myra the original family member that lived there and was very unhinged uh i think they were combining them as siblings and then added a few more siblings and then created this whole family dynamic in the show. And it was very made up for TV. Wow. Okay. But one good thing came from Paranormal Witness, which was that they even interviewed Dan, their tenant, and he came back for the show.

And Dan and Edwin reunited after 42 years and finally got to sit down and talk about everything they were experiencing. That's pretty cool. Because remember, when they lived together, nobody was telling each other the things that was going on so they finally got to talk about everything and when edwin heard dan side to what was happening in the house he realized that he had all this recent success because of his book but his book never told the whole story wow and so he decided

to write a second book with everyone's information in it wow so he ended up writing true haunting 2 where he sat down he has dan's information in there he also sat down with his wife and like heavily interviewed her and got all the nitty gritty details out of her um about what she had to deal with and this is where he realized that he feels like he wasn't the best partner at the time. He was already kind of aware of it in hindsight, but this really nailed it in for him where he was like, it took 42 years for me to realize everything my wife was going through because I never asked because I was too scared to ask. And so he found out that she was being touched by something. And so he found out that she was being touched by something. He found out that she was she was so paranoid about the children and never let the children out of her sight. She he found out that she had taught like their nephews to read and write during that time, like all these random things that like she just never told him. Most importantly, she was able to fill him in on how many times he had had angry changes in behavior where he got like relatively violent and he had blocked them out oh no so the it's almost like the house was

but then again who knows if he blocked them out and you know i don't know what the full story is there but right the theory we're going with was that um this house was changing his behavior to a point where he was losing memory. Yeah. And she was able to tell him that like he had like smashed his own guitar. He was destroying his own stuff. And like he couldn't he said he was like, oh, yeah, I did do that. I totally forgot. Oh, yeah.

Good times. And so she was able to help fill in some of his blank spots. And after the second book, I think he's written other books. And now he's hosted co-hosted guested on several podcasts about it he put out a youtube mini series called true hauntings season one and then there's no other seasons um fun fact many say that in his interviews when he's talking about his experiences uh they were mainly from 2012 to 2014, because that's when he was promoting his book.

But a lot of people say that in those interviews, you can hear EVPs within the audio tracks of the interviews. That's cool. And he was like, I can't confirm or deny, but people say they hear stuff all the time in these interviews whenever I'm on. Do you guys hear EVPs on our podcast? Insert EVP here. Wouldn't that be cool?

Eva, put an EVP right here. An EVA. An EVA. our podcast insert evp here wouldn't that be cool eva put an evp right here an eva so another fun fact as of next year the book true haunting is getting a movie adaptation called true haunting and it comes out next year so that will be maybe even more embellished than the maybe maybe it'll just be paranormal witness again um put on the big screen and it's gonna star i never know how to say her last name but aaron moriarty moriarty moriarty moriarty moriarty is it i mean i don't know who that is but if it's m-o-r-i-a-r-t-y then it's moriarty okay okay well her uh she is from she's was in the boys. She was in Jessica Jones. She's in. So it's going to start her and then all of those shows. And I still didn't know I'm terrible at

people's names. I'm sorry. Uh, well, it's going to be her. And then Jamie Campbell Bauer, who was in the Harry Potter franchise, the Twilight franchise, he's in, uh, stranger things for, Oh my gosh. Oh yeah. I like this girl. She this girl she's she's she's really um good in the boys um and so they are going to be starting it together and people assume it will be they'll be playing edwin and marcia because it was they're like in their 20s and just starting their life together that's exciting yeah and as for the beck, Edwin did stay in touch with Joseph DeLuise, the medium after the exorcism. He reunited with Dan and became friends after Paranormal Witness.

And he got to know a lot more mediums. And he now says that he is much less skeptical of mediums due to his friendship with Joseph. And he says that there are a lot of people out there with real gifts. Wow. And he does, however, believe that you should not go looking for trouble if the paranormal is not

bothering you. And if something, and if something, however, believe that you should not go looking for trouble if the paranormal is not bothering you. And if something is happening in your home, but it's not scary, he says not to mess with it because you might get it acting up or be more powerful or trying to test the waters if it knows that you're interested in playing games. Oh, yikes. And as for their theories on how the like just the spirits in their house and like what they meant, who they were, why they were there. Edwin thinks that they could have been the previous family members that allegedly had some mental illness. He also thinks they could just be family members from the previous,

from the previous family that are mad that new people live there. He thinks they could be conjured spirits from either the previous family or his sister playing with a ouija board yeah uh he thinks it could be the land itself is haunted and not the house because another house nearby allegedly has a lot of activity um and both homes were once owned by the same landowner so he might have caused something um and also edwin says that might also be a coincidence because a lot of older homes at the time like had funerals in their parlor room so like right all houses of that time are probably haunted so he doesn't really know where it came from but whatever these spirits were edwin admits that in hindsight he was very disrespectful of

their belongings in the beginning he remembers throwing a lot of things out he also knows it was wrong to challenge ben with like tying the door closed and telling him like you can't even break a string oh yeah i forgot about that yeah so he realizes in hindsight that he was just not being respectful and he gave ben room to stir the pot and marcia follows more of the blueprint theory where she thinks that the spirits could on their side of the veil they are seeing their own things and their spaces being messed with by these strangers and they just hated it um but as for the last update we know on the house it was in foreclosure in 2017 and shortly after their nbc segment the exorcist and the amityville horror came out

which led to a boom in the fear and interest of the paranormal that's for sure and that is the first televised exorcism wow that was a good story um thank you wow that was a lot oh my gosh yeah i feel like i have to go re-listen to everything because i i that was and to think that that fucking topic was supposed to be like the shortest topic i ever covered and it ended up being too long two-parters you were gonna do it in one episode it well it really i'm impressed by the way with the amount of digging I did because I really couldn't find anything for a while until I was like there there must be something to this if they're literally making a movie all I had seen when I first got interested in this topic was that oh a movie next

year is coming out about the first televised actresses and I was like if it was televised why on earth can't I find it right fair point so it just became like a real goose chase and then i ended up finding way too much information oh crack it open i know well for and that's why we drank i'm drinking some liquid death um can liquid death can you sponsor us because sponsoring us one time i dm'd them they were not interested well that's not the way to do it, Em. I know, I know. That's silly. That's really silly. It's worked before. I just wanted to see if they would be interested.

But I think their vibe is, you know, probably a little more hardened and tough. So, not me. We're tough. Yeah. We're tough. Anyway, Christine, I hope you enjoyed that story. I really liked it. I did not like how much research I had to do for it, but I did really like it.

I did like it a lot. And it's funny because it started to sound so familiar. And I was like, this seems weird. Why would I know about this? I really did hold off on talking about the show aspect. That must be what it is because I feel like I must have watched that. about the show aspect that must be what it is because i i feel like i must have watched that i feel like i go through phases with these ghost shows where i watch like all of like an entire season in like two days of one of them and then like find a different one so oh yeah i must have

just been in a paranormal witness phase i don't even remember watching that show but i must have been into it for a second i'm currently re-binging uh danny phantom i think it's my speaking of ghost shows i was in love with that show and also when i was 14 show i like i know i was late to the game because by 14 most people probably weren't doing this like i think it was much more like of a younger thing to do but in my mind i thought i could be danny phantom i was convinced I would be Danny Phantom. You're kind of an incarnation of Danny Phantom, I would say. Don't you dare. No, but you don't think? I don't think I'm half ghost.

I do think I'd like to be. Emothy Phantom. That doesn't quite work. Emothy Phantom. Maybe it does work. Emothy Phantom. Well, I know. I just I always wanted to be.

I really idolized Danny Phantom phantom i there was something a little wrong about it i was like i i will be you one day i loved danny phantom i was so jealous of every power i yeah he was a cutie i didn't even well that was obviously not on my radar but i well i thought he was like idolizing him maybe like i certainly thought he was just the coolest and he's kind of like what i envision captain america today where i'm like i just want to be you i don't understand what's so hard about that what is so hard about that you know yeah well um here's what i have for you. I have a story from St. Louis. And the reason I have this for you today.

Why is that funny? It's not funny. The problem is last night we had a really bad thunderstorm and we lost power in our house for the first time ever. Oh. And I had zero way of doing any research. And for many hours I just i cooked spaghetti by flashlight uh and we read leona books by flashlight and then i was like well shit now i don't i can't prepare my uh my notes i take it you have a gas stove i do have a gas stove yes uh and blaze was like very

alarmed when i was like oh i'll just light it and he was like you can't do that and i was like i mean watch me see this is what i'm talking about christine like you well who wants to eat spaghetti then i gotta light the damn stove no you're right but i also like i know i would have been on your side in that case because i've seen it done before but i also know that like the anxiety blaze had in that moment was sky high like for you to just say i'm just gonna light something of gas on fire it's fine give me the lighter some matches he was like what the fuck i am zero surprised that his blood pressure probably soared for that moment he took the baby in the other room just in case which is that'll do it yeah yeah

yeah yeah um but so yeah i did uh i did have a gas stove i did not have a gas wi-fi router so i was not able to research so what i did was being my savvy self is i pulled our by the way new york times best-selling book off of my nightstand. Okay, Christine, we haven't talked about that yet. And I just feel like I want to say I'm very proud of you. And congratulations for being a New York Times bestselling author. That's pretty fucking badass. Oh, my gosh, I'm so proud of you. I we really haven't talked about it at all. Our manager even was like, I didn't think this would happen. I was like, Oh, me neither. And our when our book agent told us she was, it was actually I think the sweetest part of the whole thing. So her name is Sabrina. She's a doll gem. And I don't she said that she'd never gotten to tell someone before that they were New York Times bestsellers. She was like she cried. She cried. She was texting us like, get on the phone urgent, urgent. And I was like, oh, all of our books burned away. I was like, our books caught on fire. Why is that what we think?

I don't know. But that's what I thought, too. But no, she she was very excited. It was I think I was actually more excited for her excitement than to find out that we were actually bestsellers. She was like, we're having a party here. And she like turned the camera and people were like drinking champagne. I was like, damn, I wish I was invited to that. I've never had someone throw a party about me and me not even be invited. Not even be invited. I was like, good for you. I feel special in a weird way.

No, but it felt it was very it's obviously an honor. But I like I still haven't processed it. No, me neither. That doesn't feel like not me. Couldn't be me. Couldn't be me. creator of 60 seconds on tiktok could be that could be me that one's you um no but but also we should absolutely say thank you to everyone because the only reason that we were able to become bestsellers is because so many people went out and got the book right and so yeah thank you to everybody who bought a copy uh signed or not signed it uh

really put us in a place i don't think i ever thought we'd be which is on a in a tizzy as as well but on the like new york times list which dream of mine that i didn't even think was a possible dream so thank you to everybody who bought a copy and uh last night i got to read it by candlelight um it was well i'm glad you got to i feel like that's the only way to do it you got to do it yeah candlelight and like a morticia adams dress we're drinking blood or something even a coffin candle would be a good option yeah that's good too just be careful because apparently there's nowhere i can put it that's safe uh open air open access space is where you can light it you just refuse to do it open access

what do you mean like a spot where squidward isn't nailed to the wall right next to it like in a space where you could do this with your arms you know well i thought i could but then my microphone said what about this arm? And it swung directly into the flames. So that was my fault. Okay. So anyway, I was going through the book and I was like, well, I guess I'll just cover one of these stories because I legitimately don't have internet or, and I didn't want to use it, my phone battery. So I was like, I'm going to find a story that I haven't covered yet on the podcast. And I was, let me tell you, shocked when I realized I had not covered this one because I was convinced. And maybe I have, but I looked through your handy dandy list on the website and it wasn't there.

So hopefully. Unless you have any memory of covering it in the last few weeks. Because I feel like once a month is when i go in and update yeah no it's definitely like four episodes behind yeah no it's not uh a recent story so i i must have just like done it i don't know i thought i had covered it but i didn't so this is the story of bertha gifford missouri's first serial killer oh okay cool and yeah this is a story that was in the book for saint uh saint louis and i have more information in this episode now than is in the chapter because we had to unfortunately keep

our our verbiage shorter than usual to hit a page limit yeah we were told like five to six hundred words and i was like do you know how hard it is we were like you mean 12 000 right and they were like no we've only we've already used up like 600 words like a thousand times in this episode like yeah exactly it was just a very very big ask of us uh and we did it uh we had to chop out a bunch of stuff just to make it all fit uh which ended up being the right thing to do because it's still quite a long book but i now have like a more, I still have this like more informational set of notes. So this will have more in it than the book. But the book is a fun little illustration. So, you know, you might as well get both.

You know, the only thing that completely infuriates me is that now that book won't have a QR code next next to it that story won't have a qr code i thought about that too and and i thought it's not your fault it's just like if you have a printer at home just print your own and tape it in there link it to this episode and tape it on in oh my god that's actually well i would do that because i'm a crazy person yeah i don't i wouldn't but if you have the print if you have the ink and the wherewithal to really go for it then like by all means you edit that book yeah please go for it however you need to

yeah so yeah so I'm just flying in the face of M's you know neuroses right now and creating a QR list chapter for us I'll be fine okay we'll see so this is the story of bertha gifford she's missouri's first serial killer and was born in october of 1871 in a place called grubville

missouri as one of 10 children sorry grubville grubville uh so here's my thing about grubville sure sure sure i feel like they have to have a monthly buffet for the townspeople called Grub. Get your grub at Grubville. Get your grub at Grubville. Get your fill at Grubville. You gotta say grub. The grub is the is the play on words. Right.

But I feel like if you say get your fill at Grubville, like you're already doing. Oh, maybe not. I don't know. I know what you're saying grub it gets a grubbin at grubville no that sounds not fun grub grub time grub it up baby grubville are you listening i need your mayor to figure that out grubville umubville. Mayor of Grubville. Get your fill at Grubville. That's what I'm going with. You would think at least like a local mom and pop restaurant there, their menu, like they've got sections like sandwiches, starters, desserts. They've got to have a grub section, right? They gotta.

Yeah. If they don't, we're going to be small business owners in Grubville, Missouri pretty soon because if you like. I feel like every restaurant in Fredericksburg has a fredericks burger like you gotta play with it you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway grubville if you needed um unsolicited advice on how to run your city step one are we helping you no probably not uh so grubville uh and watch it not even exist anymore because this was 1871. But if it does, you better. It's now called like the food court or something.

I don't know. It's called the local food court. So then the information about her is very limited up until her marriage in December of 1894. I guess back then they weren't just like keeping records on things that happened in random children's childhoods. So in December of 1894, she married a man named Henry Graham in Hillsborough, Missouri. records on things that happened in random children's childhoods so in december of 19 nope 1894 she married a man named henry graham in hillsborough missouri and after his death in 1907 she married a man named eugene gifford and so now she has his last name so henry graham just kind of got swept under the rug and eugene gifford, she married him, took his last name.

And that is how we got Bertha Gifford. So Bertha was alleged to be, despite her not traditionally sexy name, was one of the most beautiful women in the whole county of Jefferson County. She had dark hair, dark complexion. She was very swarthy. I don't think that's even the right word. You know I love it when you say swarthy. I just couldn't help myself. I think that's usually reserved for the male persuasion.

But she was, you know, dark hair, dark complexion, just a beautiful woman. Swarthy is what I'm going to say. I got to say, from Thneed to Swarthy, there's a real range of things I'm willing to tolerate. Yeah, they're all Christine jargon. From Thneed to Swarthy, there's a real range of things I'm willing to tolerate. Yeah, they're all Christine jargon. From Sneed to Swarthy. Well, that's a tongue twister. So she and her second husband, Eugene, moved to Catawissa after their marriage. And this is now in Franklin County, Missouri. I looked this place up on Trip Advisor, just for funsies. And there is a restaurant. I didn't look up.

Of course, I didn't look up Grubville restaurants, but I looked up Catawissa restaurants. Problem one with this story, by the way. Problem one. I've already made a big mistake. And the restaurant there is called Tavern. And it is described as pub. So that's the only thing on TripAdvisor. Please, God, step two on how to improve the city i need there

to be a place called pub and the description is tavern you're so right that would be just oh beautiful stuff um so yeah it seems like uh even to this day of extremely small town um and so at the time i imagine this was pretty rural. Neighbors reported that Bertha was an extraordinary cook, as well as being very beautiful. She was reported to be friendly and caring. She would wear this white dress and carry her satchel to any neighbors who would be ailing. And she basically adopted the role of nurse and would tend to sick people all over town to help them recover, because back then you didn't really need a medical license to be running around healing people.

So she was called the Good Samaritan of Catawissa, and she would often jump out of her bed in the middle of the night, put on her white nurse's uniform, which she would keep by the chair, by her bed, and then she would drive her horse and buggy through any sort of weather, even blizzards to make it to a person's house, often before the doctor like the county doctor even arrived. Wow, that's like, it sounds like a superhero when it's like, oh, I keep my suit right next to my bed ready for a quick change. Yeah, exactly. She like has it at the ready. And so she would, if anybody was sick, she would be called upon and she would often get there yet before the doctor even got there. So Bertha was not a trained nurse, like I said, but she was a very considered a very competent volunteer whom the local doctors truly appreciated because she would get there very quickly. symptoms and drugs and therefore they allowed her to administer medicines to patients when they weren't there which i'm like okay now you're verging into like dangerous reckless reckless

behavior i agree um so when she would take a case on she would basically take over the household uh she would like order people around and say like this in and out of the sick room uh she would impress the family by how this is a quote she would impress the family in countless ways with her superior knowledge and experience so okay she basically like showed up and was like all right everybody listen up i'm gonna order everybody around and make sure we take care of this patient uh and i feel like she ends i know it ends badly but right now it sounds like she i'm totally on her side local hero yeah like i know like girl boss is out but she sounds like she's girl bossing like she sounds like she's the original girl boss yeah i mean she just sounds like someone i want to root for so badly like she's just doing all the right things oh you know i love a swarthy same i'm into it um so

there was only one problem with bertha and i'm so glad that you brought this up right as this bullet approached me uh and my scrolling because there's only one problem. And that is that Bertha's patients always died. Which then made. Okay. Well, first of all. Ring, ring, ding. But also. The big problem.

Like the only problem that really just can't be remedied. It's a super duper problem. But also. The fact that they just kind of trusted her enough. I know. like just start giving her medicine like i feel like that's something you do on an incredibly trial basis and if it goes well then maybe you up her responsibilities even more but like if you're letting if this is the trial basis situation and everyone's dying like shocking take a hint like take a hint take the medicine away from her

take the drugs away and so i say always died technically almost always but like shockingly a lot like enough of them enough to like probably yeah have hinted at a problem um so she would go to people's bedside she would spend the night with them tend to them and in the morning she would tell the families that unfortunately their loved one didn't make it through the night uh and part of this whole charade was that she would weep harder than anyone else so people like she just acted so devastated that people were like well she can't have had anything to do with it like how broken up she is about this that she wasn't able to save them really um if one of her patients this part disturbs me uh seemed to rally and start to recover they would mysteriously take a turn for

the worse when she was spending the night with the patient so big yikes yeah uh and people started to notice that it was strange whenever bertha now here's a lovely quote. Quote plunks herself down in a sick room. The patient never gets well. So what a fun pattern to start noticing. Hopefully people did start to notice it. There's this article from 1928 that was super sexist and super fun to read because it's like, yikes. But here's a quote from that. The article said, it should come as no surprise that women noticed this first the men scoffed but the women kept right on putting two and two together so basically they were like of course the gossips of the town noticed and it's like well who cares if they're gossips if they're the ones like i also i feel like they that was like such a it was like so sexist it became feminist it was like yeah it was like exactly of course

the women and where's the problem yeah of course they're women in their feeble minds notice this first and it's like sorry are you just admitting that men didn't catch on to very obvious things exactly exactly it's like you just like shot yourself in the foot with your backwards argument it's like you're welcome i think is what you're trying you're trying to say thank you women are so stupid that even men couldn't figure it out women yeah the silly women figured it out with all their gossip well yeah you're fucking welcome and so it's like it's such a backwards argument it's not even an argument like you're right it just kind of proves the women know how to communicate while the men don't and therefore the men the women solved a crime saved a lot of lives yeah exactly oh those stupid stupid women of course it's so the feeble-mindedness just runs

rampant god it's embarrassing it's embarrassing isn't it better so embarrassing oh god eye roll um so it was of course when a man named ed brinley died the 17th person under her care who died that the men finally listened to the women and demanded an investigation into bertha gifford's behavior so uh the way bertha had defended herself in the past was by saying each of her patients deaths were caused by something called acute gastritis caused caused by the, quote, rural habit of eating a heavy dinner at noon and then laboring on a full stomach instead of having the main meal at night after the day's work is over, as the city man has learned to. The city man. So basically she's saying, well, out in the country here, these people are eating such big breakfasts or lunches like at noon. And then they're working afterward on a big, heavy, full stomach.

And this is why they're all dying. So the logic there, I guess, worked for some people. Okay. It seems like a lot of this non-logic is working for a lot of some people this is clicking for somebody not i but somebody else um and so every time a patient died uh this is what she would say and they would write a death certificate and issued it and said it was yep it was acute gastritis that's what bertha told us and that's how that's how it went every single time but also if it's acute i mean i don't know enough this might be a legitimate medical

thing i'm unaware of but i feel like wouldn't you at least want to lie and call it like severe gastritis because i feel like acute makes it sound like like you would have been fine also i think the word acute in uh in um medicine is different Like it's not like a – this has always confused me as well. But acute means – I just looked it up to get the right definition. In medicine, describing a disease as acute denotes that it is of short duration and of recent onset. So basically like – Oh, so it's time-wise, not severity-wise. It's severe and sudden.

Yeah. So it's sort of like, oh, this happened. It's not like a chronic condition like you have your whole life. It's sort of like acute onset. Like it just happened out of the blue. Oh, OK. See, hey, I actually did learn something today. Listen, sometimes I know a little bit.

And from a woman? Wait a minute. My little feeble mind concocted that sentence for you. I did. I did know that acute meant something different because i would always get very confused by that phrasing because in geometry we learned an acute angle is a very little one so that's how i always thought about it literally today so it's a little i'm just gonna say it doesn't make sense folks whoever made that up doesn't make sense well i bet it was a man i bet it was a man uh if it was

a woman i'm sorry um you betrayed us i'm sorry okay so every time a patient died she would say this acute gastritis thing and they would write a death certificate without question and from that same 1928 article there was a quote could a lot of ignorant gossips know more than the doctors yes and i'm like she wasn't a doctor she wasn't even a nurse she literally didn't have a medical degree so like yeah i don't know the argument there it doesn't there's at least three different chunks i want to scream about like none of it makes sense exactly ignorant gossip so i'm like they're pretty aware yeah it's like what's the ignorant part also she was not a doctor also yes gossips can be on top of argument overall doesn't really

make sense exactly especially because well spoiler alert they were right so anyway um state health commissioner dr james stewart did not trust her so at least he was on board um at least not uh enough to check into what was going on so he would take he went and got the records of drug stores in the neighboring towns to examine them and see like what the pattern was and he learned that mrs gifford had been a steady customer of arsenic rat poison oh well i don't know why that surprised me because i feel like that was the only murder weapon back then it's always arsenic rat poison oh well i don't know why that surprised me because i feel like that was the only murder weapon back then it's always arsenic huh it's always some sort of poison it's always every time yeah and uh basically she would buy this and feed his people and the symptoms that

arsenic produces are very similar to gastritis so So the upset stomach, all that. And in many cases, she had made her purchases just before the patient's death. So it was pretty obvious that like this is what was going on. Weirdly enough, too, she also attended every single funeral held in the town over a span of 18 years. She only ever missed one, I guess. And she took command of the funerals and liked to make sure everything was done right uh she would even pay for the embalming of one of her victims so like extra disturbing it's like when like the criminal like goes to the scene of the crime to like watch yeah i also i do wonder like do you think she had some sort of guilt or do you think it was all a cover

i don't even know if it was i think she enjoyed being like involved in it it almost seemed like because she would go to a sick person's house and kind of like take charge of the household and then at a funeral she would step in and be like make sure that they are the most you respect them and give them the burial they deserve and it's like you put them here i don't know i don't know if there was a disconnect in her mind or if she was i don't really know honestly no clue it's just kind of creepy behavior um so she was arrested in eureka missouri and charged with the murders of three people at first and she was brought before a grand jury the entire time she was claiming innocence of course and threatening

to sue for slander uh when they presented the case it turned out it went all the way back to 1909 which was 20 years before and guess what happened that year that was the year henry graham her first husband died and mysteriously he had died of cramps in the night before the doctor in the night before the doctor arrived. So they were like, wait a second. This goes all the way back to literally bring it at home, bring it home. Like her first victim was her first husband. The next known death in her care was in 1913, which was four years later after Bertha had remarried.

And this time it was her mother in law who happened to die of something called tomain poisoning aka food poisoning uh the article said bertha's grief was i like this quote so i kept it not so great but considered adequate for a mother-in-law so she wasn't sad but like sad enough considering it was just her mother-in-law. Like she did what she had to do. And, you know. She shed a tear or two just to like keep up appearances. Right. And then a year later, her 13-year-old brother-in-law, James Gifford, also passed away. And in her arms with those same symptoms of stomach cramps and vomiting.

Yeah. It's not feeling like guilt at all at this point. I think it's just. It almost feels like an addiction of like yeah it's it is it's it keeps happening and it keeps happening closer and closer together like we see i feel like with serial killers yeah um and also i don't also i don't know enough about addiction i don't know if no yeah i don't know but but it feels like like maybe compulsion is that the right better word for it yeah i don't know it just feels like like she cannot stop herself it sounds like she doesn't want to either yeah yeah yeah yeah that's true she um she what was i gonna say uh oh it reminds me of those

like angels of mercy or whatever the fuck where they like kill people under the guise of like they're in a better place now and it's like they weren't even gonna die like they weren't sick yeah you know like in hospitals and stuff when they there are people who you know take people's lives and it's like a weird power trip i don't know there's a lot there that i'm sure i'm misrepresenting, but it's all very creepy. So she kills her first husband, remarries, kills her mother-in-law, then kills her 13-year-old brother-in-law. So one man took to the stand to tell the grand jury how Bertha, this is very disturbing, had helped nurse his three children when they were six. Bernard was 15 months old. Margaret was two. And Irene was seven. seven uh they had like small ailments so they called bertha to help and all of them

passed away of acute gastritis in her care i feel like at some point like just come up with a different poison and a different diagnosis it's getting really obvious like yeah after 17 i mean i guess she got through 17 without i guess so but i feel like like at least stir it up so people don't see how clear it is but it's the same thing she was like oh it was food poisoning and i'm like that's i feel like the same thing and also not very convincing yeah but i guess it worked i mean i don't know um so it seemed this is again disturbing and might speak more to her psychology uh she seemed to prefer to have children for patients whenever possible because they were more easily talked into taking whatever substance she gave them so she had like more control basically yeah uh one man who worked for the

gifford family for 18 years testified that while living in the gifford household both of his young boys lloyd and elmer contracted acute gastritis out of nowhere and both passed away like under the roof she just kills her employees kids uh so only a month later bertha learned that a local woman was suffering of tuberculosis so she showed up in her nurse's uniform and took charge the woman rallied so strongly that they were trying to tell bertha like to go home and they didn't need her anymore uh and they were like oh we we don't want to take advantage of your kindness and then suddenly the patient developed alarming stomach pains, nausea and died. Oh, yeah.

I mean, it just it just feels like dominoes. Like, yeah, yeah, it's nonstop. And so instead of assuming birth had something to do with it, the family of the woman believed like this must just have been some unlucky stroke of like bad fortune. But they took one more chance when another woman in the family became ill they called bertha again and she too died of gastritis so no wonder people are gossiping so to speak yeah like the fact that anyone's calling it ignorance like or gossip even it's like that's not gossip it's like people are straight up nervous right now like reporting basically yeah uh yeah so another man who worked for the giffords had complained that they hadn't paid him the money they owed him so bertha the way they phrased it was bertha paid

him in time for it to be spent on his funeral so she paid him back and it ended up going to his own funeral because she killed him okay yikes yeah i got nothing uh-huh a local man named s herman pounds considered one of the quote strongest physical specimens in the neighborhood was known for indulging his hard cider so bertha brought him inside to give him something to sober up uh the doctor arrived too late and bertha told him that pounds had died of acute gastritis super induced by alcoholism. So I guess she's adding booze into the mix now. Okay. One woman described driving from East St. Louis to Catawissa to visit her ailing relative.

Bertha seemed annoyed by this relative's presence, so she suggested that the woman go lie down and take a little nap. And when the woman woke up, Bertha was like, oh, I'm so sorry. Your relative has passed away. I feel like this MO is just so obvious to us, I guess. But why isn't anyone else picking up on it? I have no idea. So Bertha's last victim, like I said, was this guy, Ed Brinley.

He was also heavily into his hard cider, and he made the fatal mistake of leaning against bertha's mailbox for a few moments and uh while he was drunk she spotted him from inside and said to her husband please carry him in uh he's he's clearly drunk and he needs to be sobered up carry him inside but when he was dead two hours later everyone finally was like what the hell like he was just wandering through the neighborhood and all of a sudden he goes into her house and winds up dead so this is when they finally admitted it uh-huh okay that's when the gossips were finally onto something you know but gossips are like like elbowing each other so hard they're like look at this what did we tell you so the grand jury indicted bertha for murder but she still insisted she had done

nothing wrong uh her priority during the trial was not getting photographed and she apparently would sit in her cell with a blanket that she threw over her head whenever she heard someone walking down the hall oh my god oh my god it was like i don't even know where to start with that like in the book i'm pretty sure i mark this as like this is m because uh because it says she refused to eat anything but ice cream she would literally just hide under a blanket and only eat ice cream i mean that honestly that is me i would just like ostrich my head so nobody could even see me i'd be like as dramatic as possible don't look at me where's my ice cream sundae i'm not me without my bowl i uh wow what a dramatic uh

silly silly woman what a silly i mean it in the bad way but yeah in the worst way like like was she hiding out of it wasn't embarrassment right or no well i don't know i think she just didn't want her photo in the paper or something i'm not really sure why but she wasn't proud of what she'd done maybe maybe maybe she didn't have her powder and so she couldn't press her face i have no idea press her face is that what they used to do i don't know i think i just made that up so i was hoping you wouldn't pick up on it but here we are press their face i don't think that's right it sounds right though like i know they like they powder their face the powder press would be used to powder their face maybe that's what i'm thinking that makes sense to me yeah thank you

i'm anyway she only had ice cream and no makeup which also sounds like me so hit her a blanket i'm kind of love i'm kind of loving this vibe if it weren't a serial killer obviously uh but the vibe i can get on board with if i needed like a really fucked up halloween costume i'm glad that i have one just built in by just covering covering myself with a blanket and eating ice cream i mean it's all you need you're like don't you recognize me i'm bertha i'm swarthy bertha one look. You'll know exactly from the start. You'll know it's me. But don't take a look. That's why I'm under this blanket. Don't look at me. Okay, so there's this chief of police of a St. Louis suburb called Webster Groves. And the chief of police's name was Andrew McConnell.

Andrew McConnell, he noticed that Bertha seemed particularly annoyed at the suggestion that she had poisoned the three-year-old daughter of S. Herman Pounds. He was the strong physical specimen who she said died of alcoholism. When he continually pressed her about this, because every time they mentioned the three-year-old daughter, she would get all bent out of shape about it. She finally snapped at him. Well, anyway, I did not give any arsenic to that pounds child when he asked okay to whom did you give arsenic she confessed that she had poisoned a number of neighbors and their children so she's like but this one i didn't do so he was like this kid hurts my feelings but the other kids yeah i dare you insist that i yeah it's it's wild um but so when asked why she explained that she wanted to put them out of their misery which again reminds me of these like

heroes the workplace heroes in medicine uh obviously very rare i'm not like calling out people in medicine but like you hear of these like serial killers who like kill their patients and say oh they're trying to make keep them out of their misery put them out of misery it's very disturbing um especially when they're not even sick you know oh yeah so two of her victims bodies were exhumed both showed traces of arsenic poisoning uh however bertha was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was instead committed to the missouri state hospital number four um have you covered that didn't you just cover that or was that something different

it was in missouri i feel like missouri state penitentiary oh okay yeah so this was the uh quote-unquote asylum uh because she was uh found not guilty by reason of insanity. So she went to the state hospital, number four, where she remained until her death in 1951. And while there, she worked at the hospital's beauty shop before being transferred to the kitchen as a cook. She died on August 20th, 1951. Her husband, Gene, arranged to have her buried in Morse Mill Cemetery, and her grave is unmarked uh and

interestingly enough if you look up the undertaker records uh it shows that the service and burial cost uh of 266 dollars uh and 69 cents had only been covered up to 166 dollars and 69 cents so to this day the balance is marked is marked as unpaid so her burial is literally unpaid wow never getting paid by the way it's all right i feel like they should just kind of scrap any chance of getting that back um and although counts vary most historians and family members agree that bertha gifford killed at least 17 people over a period of 21 years and some consider her to be america's third serial killer ever and definitely missouri's first so that is the story of bertha gifford you know i don't know if it's because the timing is that it's so far removed or if it's because the mo was

just so clean clear cut i don't know what it was but that felt like a much more palatable serial killer story yeah compared to like last week's was fucking rough to be fair last week people were writing like this is the first one i couldn't listen to and i was like well that's saying something i think yeah it was that was brutal episodes yeah that was really rough and uh it was more i feel like like more detailed, like more gruesome. Maybe that's why, because I feel like I, I feel like I, it's one of those things where I don't want to say like, one's a better serial killer than the other, but the story felt like there was, I don't know, it didn't, it didn didn't feel as dark even though literally 17 people died

including children i know it's it's sort of like i think part of it like you said is a it's removed a little bit because of the time period like we just can't relate to it as much as like oh 20 30 years ago um and and yeah i kind of glossed over some of the details too. Like it didn't go into really explicit detail. Yeah, I feel like the more details, the worse. Yeah, for sure. So it's, yeah, it's disturbing. Yeah. But.

This, it was, it's disturbing, but also I, I definitely had less of a miserable time than last week. There were no smoothies, you know, made of animal, rabbit parts. Oh, I forgot about that. I can't forget about that. I wish I could forget. I think it's just, it feels, I mean, it was definitely less gruesome. Yeah. I don't know.

It's one of those things where it's like, there's no, you know, accurate way to say. There's no good true crime or murder. But I know what you mean. But anyway, I appreciated this story being less traumatic. Kind of a little break from last week. Yeah. Yeah. I feel you.

So thank the thunderstorm, I guess, that came through and forced me. That was God saying, you've had enough. That's enough. Turn off all the lights. Pull over. Pull over. We're going to just focus on something else right now. Well, I already have next week's story picked out, which is rare. But I am excited to get that done when we record next.

Awesome. Well, I don't, but I'm going to get it done soon. I feel like I've been on a ghost train lately. Usually I do like two ghosts, couple aliens, maybe a cryptid, throw in a conspiracy theory. And then I go back to ghosts. Like I feel like I usually mix it up. I feel like I've been on like a heavy ghost train. I kind of love the ghost train. I'm not gonna lie. That is the mainstay of the show. But i usually i just usually have a harder time finding so many solid ghost stories all at one time i don't know how because zach bagans finds them every single

week for i know batman is the walt disney of ghosts because he really he will always find new content i don't know how he does it just follow just jump on his bandwagon take his episodes run with them oh well i well can you imagine the day where there isn't an episode of his that I having, that scares me. That scares me. That's not going to happen. He's literally making more shows, like not even just more episodes, but like multiple branches of shows.

I'm telling you, he is his own Marvel Cinematic Universe. He's his own universe. It's true. The Zach Bagans Cinematic Universe. It's kind of amazing, actually. The SBCbcu as i call it the zbcu yeah yeah well i guess we got to do our little um after chat after chat i can't wait all right well i'll see you over there okay sounds good and that's why we drink