Endless Thread - Pile Of Crockery

Episode Date: July 11, 2019

The thrilling conclusion to an internet mystery surrounding a massive pile of dishware in the middle of the woods.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in health care so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. Hey, this is part two of a two-parter. If you haven't listened to our previous episode, we want plates. You should go do that first. Okay, you've been warned. Previously, an endless thread. A three-hour, 30-minute drive to huge pile of plates. Are you sure you want to navigate there?

Oh, I'm sure. What are we looking at? The text reads, I was driving through the back woods of Pennsylvania on the way to a camping spot and found a mountain of ceramic dishes and tea cups in the middle of the woods. We're now officially driving through a creek bed. Your destination is on the right. There's no place. Never has been.

Well, we came a long way for to talk to you. I'll tell you, I'm hoping you knew more than I did. We want plates. I agree. Hey, is this Matt? Yes, this is. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sebertson, and this is Endless Thread.

The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Today's episode, Pile of Crockery. Yeah, hi. Can I have, sorry, I want to get some chicken McNuggets. Here we are in a car on our way home from a sad fail of a Pennsylvania road trip, where we searched high and low for a mysterious, enigmatic, thoroughly unexplained and unfindable mountain of dishware in the woods.

We asked to like everybody we could find and their mother. Yeah, like dishware. I don't know what you're looking for, but I know we have never found any kind of plates around here that I know anything of. And we're now pulled over on the side of the road in the rain because the only guy who knows anything about it has finally, after months of giving us the runaround, called us back. He was also driving around with his girlfriend, who was also with him when he found the plates a year ago. Matt is from Hubbard, Ohio, near Youngstown. He's not an avid Reddit user, and when he posted this plate mountain photo, he was completely overwhelmed with the online response.

Tens of thousands of people. But he's ready to tell us his story, now that things have died down a little. His story goes like this. Last summer, he and his girlfriend went driving through Ohio into Pennsylvania to hit up a campsite to meet a relative. an aunt who was up from Florida. It was just kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing, which is probably why Matt doesn't even remember the name of this camping area.

And this is the beginning of what we in the old journalism business like to call a fishing expedition. Was it near train tracks? Yes, I do. How far from the campsite were the plates would you say about? I'd probably say, yeah, like 45 minutes. That was via graveyard, if that helps. Okay.

We would later learn that pretty much every small town in this part of Pennsylvania has this feature. But Matt was giving us some breadcrumbs, at least. He also mentioned a big old building of some sort, run down. It almost looked like, I don't want to say factory, but like a big place like it was abandoned. Matt promised he'd chased down his girlfriend's aunt and get the name of that damn campground. and that was something. I really, I don't give you. No, this is great.

I personally, I'd like to know if it's still there, you know what I mean? We're going to find it for you, man. We're going to try to find out. Yeah, we're going to find it. Yeah, good luck. We're going to need it. Back to the drawing board, baby. When we got back to Boston, one of the first things we did

was re-enlist a small army of Redditors to help us. We now had some more specific details, the school, the graveyard, the train tracks. Also a kind of loading dock that the Plate Mountain sat on top of and was visible in the photo. And a slightly different general area to search. We had been in north-central PA. We needed to go further west and maybe south, too. We needed map nerds, who we found, with the help from some moderators at the maps, map-making, and where is this communities.

And remember in our last episode when I said I used something called a G-I-S, or geographic information system? Well, our post asking for help on the GIS subreddit took off. It said, looking to combine railroads, campground locations, and more data to find a mountain of dishware in the great state of Pennsylvania for a very weird map quest. He. Any ideas? Many ideas.

50 comments later, we had some new theories and locations, some new kinds of maps and datasets to search, the hunt was on. We even roped in one of WBUR's developers, Will Smith. We knew distance from a location where this person started a trip, which gave me a sort of a search radius to work within. I was told it was in a specific state, so I was able to further limit it to that. Meanwhile, we were getting to the bottom of one of the most popular theories for the Plate Mountains existence, with the help of the guy from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. That guy's name is Keith Ruhl. Keith, whose info we got at the House of Cliff Cross, that landowner who didn't shoot us and add us to his taxidermy collection, nice guy, really.

Cliff had even let us go through his business card collection. Here we go. Keith Ruhl, Department of Environmental Protection. Solid waste specialist. Yep, that's him. We called Keith because he was one of our only remaining leads in the Great Plate Quest of 2019. And he might have already gotten to the bottom of this whole mystery while we were all just peering at satellite imagery like a bunch of NSA agents. Well, cool Keith Ruhl called back. Hi there. I'm Keith Ruhl from Pennsylvania DEP and Williamsport, PA.

I am a solid waste specialist. And what is a solid waste specialist? Actually, I call myself a garbage man because I deal in garbage. And a lot of my work is actually citizens' complaints. It's just amazing. Every time the phone rings, it's a new world. But it's all in the world of garbage. And when Keith gets a report about illegal dumping in his jurisdiction, he takes it seriously.

So about three months ago, a tip made its way to you about a giant pile of plates somewhere in the middle of the woods. Yes, indeed. In Pennsylvania. How did that make its way to you? I believe it came in through the DEP website as a complaint saying, hey, you know, this looks like illegal dumping. Now, we think that person may have come from Reddit. And just like us, Keith took that internet commenter's tip and ran with it. So you had the coordinates.

You knew who owned the land. Right. Did you just call up the landowner next? Well, that's not quite as easy as it sounds. because if the landowner has any stake in actually doing the dumping, calling them on the phone may or may not be the best thing to do. So I thought, well, I'll see what I can find, and I started walking back this unplowed road,

and it was a beautiful winter day and quite a long walk to the point where I actually found the area where these plates might have been, and there was nothing. Oh, Keith, we feel your pain, dog. We do. We so do. I would like to point out that even though I definitely let us on a wild goose chase to Pennsylvania, my thinking matches Keith's here. You can't call a landowner and say, hey, have you been doing some illegal dumping?

Right. But unlike us, Keith wasn't very surprised he didn't find the plates. It's not your typical illegal dump site. The typical illegal dump site is generally on a dark country road over a bank where the public can dump whatever they want and get away in the dark of night without being caught. So what you find in a typical illegal dump site is a little bit of everything. Lots of tires, household garbage, appliances, dead animals, you name it. But a massive pile of one type of material just doesn't really fit the scenario of a typical illegal dump site. What about Cliff Cross, typical illegal dump site? What about Cliff Cross, typical illegal dumper? And was Keith buying Cliff's pile of lime explanation? Oh yeah. He didn't really say anything

suspicious like he was trying to hide something. He said, yeah, that was a pile of lime. There was nothing else in Tyoga County that would lead me to believe there was ever a big pile of plates there. And if I don't have a specific place to look or somebody that says, hey, I saw those things there, it's a needle and a haystack. and you're never going to find it. Needle in a haystack. Never going to find it. Cliff Cross might have had a whole wall in his house of the animals he had killed.

Keith, however, was killing our dreams. He couldn't narrow our search. Even with our whole group of hunters, team endless thread, the developers, a host of Redditors, all scouring the state of Pennsylvania for industrial sites, weird white splotches. We still couldn't find the spot. Our only hope was the original poster, Matt, who seemed to have barely any recollection of where he was when he saw the Plate Mountain.

But then, again, at the 11th hour, Matt, how's it going, man? Matt called me late one night. He said that there was a reason he hadn't been in touch for a few days. No biggie, we could get to that. But first, new questions for Matt, thanks to the Redditors who had been helping in our search. Do you still have the original photo? Yes. This was one of the ideas we had.

We could pull the metadata from the original photo. It's called EXIF, or exchangeable image file format data, and it is attached to any photo you take with your phone. But most social media sites delete that information from the photos that get uploaded. So we needed the original picture Matt took to get the location. So we tried that. So click on the picture, so it's up. Okay.

Now, try this. I don't know if this will work for you, but try just swiping up on the picture. Okay, yeah. It says July 5th, 2018, Thursday, 9.50 a.m. And then it has the JPEG number and like the megapixels and stuff like that. And then it says Samsung S.M. G95 in my phone and then that's it. Shit. Foyled yet again.

It was almost like everything that could go wrong with our quest continued to go wrong. So I had to ask Matt the troll question. No, I'm not fucking with you. I'm not messing with me. That would be a huge, pointless waste of time, and I'm not a guy like that. Plus, Matt had some proof he wasn't trolling. More info on the location of the plates. He had been trying to get the name of the campground he had gone to

with the help of a relative, the aunt, who had been visiting from Florida. and she had had some life changes. From the time that we were there last year, she actually got a divorce. Oh, wow. So that was, yeah, so that was the whole. He didn't know exactly where. They'll find out what the name of the place was, and you won't believe. Yes, this was huge.

I talked to Matt for a little while longer, and he revealed all sorts of juicy information. I had to tell Amory and our producer Josh. And yes, I was definitely going to string him along for a bit. We just had a very long conversation. What happened? Are you sure you're ready for this? What? Okay.

I have a couple pieces of news. The reason... Why are you taking so long? Just because I'm really enjoying it. I'm savoring, knowing more than you right now. It really feels good. All right. Spit it out.

First of all, the reason that it took so long for us to get this information is that Matt's girlfriend's aunt Josh is calling me back. Should I conference him in? Yeah, conference them in. Keep waiting, Emery. I dislike you so much. Okay. This is a piece of information that was actually already given to us, but we, because we are bad detectives, we kind of glossed over it. Okay. This was 4th of July.

Oh, my God, he was totally wasted. He just blacked out that entire day. Absolutely. That makes so much sense. Clearly, he was drinking. Well, that's good. It means the place are real, right? Amory, I have a question for you. Okay.

Do you miss home? We are going to Ohio, baby. Really? He didn't even leave Ohio. He never made it to Pennsylvania. No way. Are you kidding? I am not kidding.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. What is the campground? Where is it? The name of the campground is Austin Lake Campground in Ohio. I'm literally running to my computer right now. The good news is I think we're in the zone, dudes. Oh, my God, we've got to find you's freaking plates. I can taste the plates.

I can taste them. Okay, let's practice. When I say OH, you guys know what to say? I-O. Very good. Now you're ready. We'll be back in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

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Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay. We were close. Closer, at least. We knew the plates were in Ohio.

We just didn't know exactly where in Ohio. But we did finally know which campground we should be starting from. Austin Lake, located in Toronto, Ohio. A little confusing, but we started looking all around there on satellite imagery for big white splotches. We also updated our Australian Van Dwelling investigator James, the Redditor who initially thought he'd found the plates in Pennsylvania, except he hadn't. James was feeling a little guilty about that, so he continued searching on his own with the new information we had. I kind of went looking for train tracks in the area and then just followed the train tracks. And then he found a school next to a graveyard.

And then a little further up, he found a piece of land with big piles of stuff on it and a business called Maryland Refractories. Once I found this place, I was pretty certain that was the right place. I was less certain. From the satellite imagery, Maryland Refractories looks like a junkyard. There's lots of piles of stuff. A lot of them look like rocks. Yes, some of those piles are white,

but they're not isolated by themselves in the woods, as Matt the O.P.'s memory would lead us to believe. Of course, Matt's memory. Fair. Well, what did make me feel like James was on to something was that he called Maryland refractories, and they told him they have handled ceramics there in the past. Right, and they were like, listen, Jay Dogg.

You're calling about Matt, aren't you? you. No. No, that's the thing. So, James, we are on opposite sides of the world, and I have not heard back from him as to what he told them, how much information he's given them. So we needed to feel it out ourselves. We needed to call Maryland refractories. You starting?

You start. Hi, is this Maryland refractories? Yes, miss. Hi, my name is Amory Sieverts. Pretty quickly, we were on speakerphone with a guy named Roy. and a woman named Janet. And you saw it on the what website? Reddick.

R-E-D-D-I-T. R-E-D-D-I-T. And I can email. Roy and Janet were clearly intrigued. Also, they said they don't get many visitors. They're on 77 acres of woodland in their location, just outside of a town called Irondale in Ohio, has some special properties.

We're located in the premiered a triangle of the Google Maps. You don't say. Different zip codes within five feet. No way. Is that true? Yeah. That's amazing. Wow.

So maybe we shouldn't feel too badly about how long we've been looking for this spot? Sure. I mean, whatever we want to tell ourselves. We're really trying to arrive at these plates, like actually go to the plates wherever they may exist. And we'd love to. Why? Do you want to buy them? That's a great question.

Yeah. Basically, this person posted this picture on a website. called Reddit, and it became this great mystery of what is this giant pile of dishware doing in the middle of the woods. It looks like it's kind of in the middle of the woods. It is. But you'll definitely get on an adventure if you try to find it. Oh, wow. It sounds like you're saying this pile of plates, it does exist and you know where it exists. I can't confirm or deny. Oh, no. Nobody disappears if they come to see you, right? I can't confirm where to...

No, Roy. You're killing me. Roy and Janet, the non-confirmers, non-deniers, put us in touch with someone else at the company who could make the call of what to tell the press. His name is Brad Knock. And after a little bit of phone tag, Brad got in touch. And he had some big news to share with us. We are the owners of the big pile of dishware. Oh, my God, my quest is maybe almost over.

I guess the next question for us is, would you all be okay with us coming to visit? I would just encourage you to let us know what day to make sure that somebody's here. The date was set and we promised we wouldn't return without hard evidence. We got on a plane, landed, rented a truck, just in case, and drove from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through West Virginia to Irondale, Ohio. Emery? Emery? It's just bricks.

It's just bricks. but it's a pile of bricks. That is very exciting, though. There's more piles of stuff. We're coming up on the piles. Amory, what is that? What is the white stuff? It's not by itself, though.

Oh, but it's up on a thing. It's up on a thing. Yes. This is it. Amory, this is it. It's here. It's reflecting in the sunlight. And it's up on a loading.

It's glorious. Oh my God, it's huge. We got to it, dude. How do you feel? I'm so happy. Are you happy? It was everything we had dreamed of and more. It was even bigger than it had been when Matt took a picture of it a year ago.

The mountain had grown. It was part of a big industrial site. There were piles of bricks and stone everywhere. There was some big machine with a conveyor belt. There was a massive wooden building that looked like it had been built 100 years ago. There was dust everywhere. Forklifts were moving pallets covered in bags of white powder and a little construction office where we saw a long-haired orange cat that seemed to run the whole joint,

rolling in the sun and the dust, and a couple of dogs that were very happy to see us. Maybe they would have been happy to see anyone. Oh, hi. Hi. Hi, Jake and Bella. You Roy? Ah, it's Roy.

We also met one of the owners of the business, Clark Carlson, and our new buddy, Brad Knock. Hi. Brad, very nice to meet you. I'm Amory. Ben. Nice to meet you. Thank you for having us. Did you see the pile?

Did you see the pile? We saw the pile. Turns out, one of the favorite theories during our whole quest that this plate mountain was some kind of illegal dump site, the truth is kind of the opposite. We think that Maryland refractories is probably one of the oldest industrial recycling companies in the United States. You were recycling before it was cool? Long before it's cool.

And it still isn't all that cool now. We wish it was cooler than it is. What do you mean? Recycling is something that most companies do when it's. convenient when it doesn't cost them anything. Brad and Clark know their business, and it's pretty science-y, like industrial sciencey. At a basic level, they're taking bricks and other materials and reducing them to their most elemental form, literally, using a big machine called Bertha.

So that's where the first crushing here happens. Big Bertha has this long conveyor belt and huge wheels in this big crushing chamber with metal teeth. Those teeth have seen some things. Those teeth have chewed some things. She's a hungry beast. After the material they put through the machine gets broken down further, it gets sold off to specific industries.

For instance, Brad says as the steel industry goes, so goes Maryland refractories. That's because those big smelters that molten steel gets poured into in the steel plant. Those smelters are made of steel, but they're coated with the material that Maryland refractories makes from old bricks. It's kind of fascinating. Okay, buddy, but we weren't there for bricks. We were there for plates. So Brad and Clark walked us over to Plate Mountain. It's actually plate and toilet mountain, because there's a bunch of toilet parts mixed in there, too. The full circle of digestion. Think of this mountain as where all the misfits, the miss prints,

and defects go. There are hundreds of thousands of plate and toilet pieces here. And Maryland refractories got this stuff from two companies with a plan to eventually send the whole pile through Big Bertha's gnashing teeth. And since it's all going to get busted up anyway,

we really want to break a few plates. Brad and Clark, say go for it. Yes. Yeah, I guess it's helpful, right? It's almost helpful to make them smaller. All right, Ben. I totally... Go ahead, Amy.

You can do it. I underestimated your toss. Eventually, Brad and Clark join in, and there's this whole period of time where we're all just chucking plates and cups at the huge pile. This is cathartic and beautiful. And it is actually beautiful.

They're like shells or pearls glinting in the hot June sun. A gorgeous, cacophonous, seemingly endless splotch. Yes. visible from satellite. But you'd never find it unless you knew where to look. It really is in the Bermuda triangle of Google Maps, and we got here, against all odds.

And even though Brad and Clark do not want people coming and pilfering their plates, don't do it. They do want people to know about this part of their business. These plates are being smashed to dust, just like the bricks, in hopes of making a new building material for everything from kitchen counters to a kind of cladding,

for big buildings. You can imagine it looking something like marble. But this is a new idea. It is not their bread and butter business. The recycling company you probably never heard about is trying to innovate with plates. And it's not easy to innovate in this kind of business. You know, it's been a tough road and we talk about it. It's a hard industry to get into. It's a hard industry to get into. Inherently, everybody wants to be green. They just don't want to pay for it. So, you know, we're still plugging away, and we hope maybe with this piece more people can find us. I need new countertops. Me too. So we bid farewell to Brad and Clark. There was only one thing left to do. We were worried that we were going to come here and have to

eat humble pie. But this feels almost more like just desserts. There we go. Victory. Victory pie. Victory pie. We brought you a... Coconut cream pie. The only problem is we didn't bring in any plates. If you want a piece, I think we're going to find some plates for it. Well, thank you again. You're welcome. It's our pleasure. But we have to stand near Big Bertha, the crushing machine, one more time. And, of course, the plates. And soak everything in before we get out of the Google Maps Bermuda Triangle. Part of me wishes that there was a more salacious explanation.

You know? Why? I don't know, I guess I'm just like... I know that that makes for like a juicier story, but doesn't this make for a better world? I hope so. Wholesome Amory delivers again. Ugh. I'm not wrong, but truly, neither are you.

This is something we have talked about while chasing this story, this pattern of waste. We've talked about illegal dumping, but we're making piles of rejects all the time. These are just unused dishes. These have never had a job because their logo was printed half an inch too far to the right. That sucks. Yeah. But hey, Maryland refractory is trying to figure out a solution. Cleaning it up. Clean it up, man. Get big birthday going. And now I have a new set of plates. I have some plates too. Yes, Clark and Brad told us we could take some souvenirs and please if you want one, don't go to their pile, do us a favor and write us a review on Apple Podcasts.

Screenshot that review and email it to us at endless thread at wbUR.org. If you've already written a review for us, just use that one. We will pick one person at random and send them a beautiful plate straight from the pile. We'll even wash it for you. If you want to find out more about Maryland refractories and their plate upcycling business Earthfire surfaces, head to MRC grog.com or Facebook.com slash earthfire surfaces. Also a huge thanks to Matt, the original plate photo poster. Hope your Fourth of July this year was great too.

Also, thanks to all the Redditors who had good ideas and posted them on WTF, including our brother from down under, Agent 641, aka James. Thanks to WBUR web developer Dave Moore for his late-night Google map scouring. Thanks to Cliff Cross for not shooting us. Pennsylvania DEP specialist Keith Rule for being cool. And special thanks to Redditors Peony Chalk, Peltzy, Cepra, and ExB-999, who, by the way, was the first Redditor to suggest we look into Maryland Refractories. We saw their comment after hearing from James, but they did.

did technically beat him to it. Amazing. Amazing. We have photos of the infamous pile of plates on our website. That is WBUR.org.org slash Endless Thread. We even recreated Matt's original plates photo to prove that, yes, we actually found it. Please go there. Check it out.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer who thought learning about Big Bertha was... Aw, educational. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and when we challenged her to find an illegal dump site, she said, Hold My Cosmo. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus, and when I told him we found the giant pile of plates, he just asked if I took a picture. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit who thinks that mysteries in Ohio make for great. Writing prompts.

Extra production assistants from James Lindberg. Our interns are Magdea Mata. Maggie's fine. And Noah Boston. It's like Austin with a beat. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. if you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip

so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Siebertson. I am senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.