MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - Butterfly Effect

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Today’s podcast will feature 4 stories that all demonstrate how one seemingly small action can have massive ripple effects on the future. The audio from all four stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel, which is just called "MrBallen," and has been remastered for today's podcast.Story names, previews & links to original YouTube videos:#4 -- "Orange Juice" -- A bottle of orange juice changed an African man's life (Original YouTube link -- https://youtu.be/zxmNm9vUgik?feature=shared)#3 -- "Overcoming Adversity" -- The ultimate revenge story (Original YouTube link -- https://youtu.be/Pzm-T_btfa0?feature=shared)#2 -- "Cowboy" -- A beloved Hollywood icon has a dark past (Original YouTube link -- https://youtu.be/OPfcCindxhg?feature=shared)#1 -- "Pick Your Poison" -- A very sick person inadvertently becomes the test subject in a highly controversial experiment (Original YouTube link -- https://youtu.be/xn7eaj36dUY?feature=shared)For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey Prime members, you can binge 8 new episodes of the Mr. Ballin Podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Today's podcast will feature 4 stories that all demonstrate how one seemingly small action can have massive ripple effects on the future. The audio from all 4 of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.

The first story you'll hear is called Orange Juice, and it's about how a bottle of orange juice changed one man's life forever. The second story you'll hear is called Overcoming Adversity, and it might be one of the greatest revenge stories of all time. The third story you'll hear is called Cowboy and it's about a beloved Hollywood icon who has a surprisingly dark past. And the fourth and final story you'll hear today is called Pick Your Poison and it's about a very sick person who inadvertently becomes the test subject in a highly controversial

experiment. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, the next time you're visiting the Amazon music follow button at their house, be sure to go into their bathroom and rub poison ivy all over their toilet paper. Okay, let's get into our first story called Orange Juice. From Wandery, I'm Raaza Jafri, and this is The Spy Who. This series we open the file on Eamon Dean, the spy who betrayed Bin Laden.

In 1994, 16-year-old old Eman wants to die. He heads to war-torn Bosnia to join the Mujahideen and save his fellow Muslims. He hopes to become a martyr so that he can be reunited with his dead parents in paradise. Instead he's about to be confronted by a cruel and bloody reality. A reality that'll lead him to turn his back on terrorism and become the West's top spy inside Al-Qaeda. Follow The Spy Who on the Wandery app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who betrayed Bin Laden early and ad-free with Wandery+. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan.

And in our series Legacy, we look at the lives of some of the most famous people to have ever lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve. In this series, we look at J. Edgar Hoover. He was the director of the FBI for half a century, an immensely powerful political figure, he was said to know everything about everyone. He held the ear of eight presidents and terrified them all. When asked why he didn't fire Hoover, JFK replied, you don't fire God. From chasing gangsters to pursuing communists to relentlessly persecuting Dr Martin Luther King and civil rights activists, Hoover's

dirty tricks tactics have been endlessly echoed in the years since his death. And his political playbook still shapes American politics today. Follow Legacy Now wherever you listen to podcasts. In 2018, a 56-year-old father of four named Tayeb Suyami was living in a quiet, modest town in New Jersey called Little Ferry. Tayeb had moved to the United States from Africa back in 1996 and after getting settled in New Jersey, he had landed a job as an accountant for a food importing company. At first, Tayeb's salary had been enough to provide for the family, but as his family

grew, his salary just wasn't enough and money became a real problem. And so eventually, Tayeb's wife also got a full-time job, but even then, with two full-time working adults, the family had to stay on a very strict budget just to make ends meet. And that year in 2018, one of Tayeb's daughters was getting ready to go to college and so Tayeb was forced to refinance his mortgage just to make the initial payments on his child's college bills. But despite his financial struggles, Tayeb did not let it bother him.

He was an eternal optimist who fundamentally believed that in the end, everything would just work itself out. On May 1st of that year, Tayeb was on his way home from work when his wife called him and asked if he would swing by the grocery store and pick up some orange juice. So Tayeb stopped at the Shoprite grocery store in Hackensack, New Jersey, which was only a couple miles north of Little Ferry where they lived, and he went inside, he went to the juice aisle, and he scanned the different brands of orange juice, and at some point he grabbed the most appealing orange juice that was still within their budget.

It was $5. He takes the juice, he goes to the front of the store, he pays for it, he goes outside, he hops in his car and he heads home. When he pulls into his driveway, he gets out, he goes into the house, he goes right into the kitchen where his wife was, and he proudly set the orange juice down on the kitchen table expecting a thank you from his wife.

But his wife turned around and she looked at the orange juice and she saw the brand he had purchased and she immediately said, How much did you pay for that? And Tayeb said, $5. And she said, Well, you got to take it back because I know that brand is on sale for $2.50 at the grocery store right down the road. So go return this one. And so Tayeb was totally annoyed because he just got home from work. He thought he had done a good deed and now he's in trouble. And so he decided, you know what, I'm not going to fight her on this.

He just walked over, grabbed the $5 orange juice, and he went back outside, hopped in his car, and took off. A few minutes later, he arrived at the Hackensack, New Jersey, shop right. He went inside, and he went straight to the customer service desk where there was a teenager behind the counter, and Tayeb walked over to them, and he handed them the juice along with his receipt and he asked for a refund. And so while Tayeb is standing there letting this cashier complete the transaction, he looked behind the cashier at the wall and there was this sign that totally piqued his interest. And so he's staring at the sign and then finally the teenage cashier he finishes the transaction and he reaches out across the counter with Tayeb's five dollars and Tayeb he reaches out and he takes the five dollars but then he pauses for a second and he's kind of looking up at the sign and

he's thinking about what he should do and he knows that if he does this if he does what the sign is telling him to do he's gonna get in trouble with his wife because this is the exact opposite of what he was sent out to do. But Tayeb just couldn't help it, and he takes the $5, and he proceeds to hand it right back to the cashier, and he tells the cashier what he wants him to do with it. And so a couple minutes later, Tayeb leaves the shop right with no juice, with no $5, but two small slips of paper in his back pocket. And so Tayeb hops in his car, and he drives to the grocery store

that's right down the road from their house. He goes inside and he gets the on sale $2.50 bottle of orange juice and then he goes back into his car, he drives home, he goes in the kitchen and he sets the juice on the counter and tells his wife, yep I got the right one $2.50 and he's just hoping the whole time that she has not checked the bank account and has not discovered what he had really been doing while he was out because he had actually spent more money on the second trip than the first time. But apparently his wife had not checked the account yet and she just thanked him for being willing to go out and get the better deal and so Tayeb very happily left

the kitchen and he spent the rest of the night watching tv and hanging out with his family. And then early the next morning Tayeb got up and and he decided, you know what, I need to do something to curry some favor with my wife because she's gonna learn what I did with the refund money pretty soon. And so he decided he would just go out and do a bunch of yard work that day right in front of his wife to make sure she really saw that he was doing some good stuff. And so he goes outside, he opens up the garage and he's about to pull the lawnmower out when he notices his car is really dirty. And so he decides, you know what, I'm gonna go wash my car first and then come back and cut the grass and do some other things. And so he goes inside and he tells his wife what his plan is and she says, okay, you know, I'll see you in a little

bit when you come back from the car wash. And then Tay went back outside he hopped in his car and he left. As he was driving to the car wash he made a pit stop at a small store that was set back off the road and so he goes inside and he goes right to the back of this little store where there's this strange machine that looks like an ATM and it has a screen on it with text scrolling across it and at the bottom there was an opening where a barcode scanner was kind of projecting down. And so Tayeb walks up to this machine, and he reaches into his back pocket and he pulls out those two slips of paper he had got from the grocery store cashier the night before,

and he puts the first one under the scanner, and then he reads the text that appears on the screen of this machine, and after reading it, he kind of shrugs his shoulders and puts that piece of paper back in his pocket and then the second slip of paper he puts into the scanner and then when he reads the words that pop up on the screen, he thinks there's been a mistake because all it says is see receptionist and so he rescans the second slip of paper to see if something different will happen, but sure enough, again, it just says, see receptionist. And so he pulls the second slip of paper out of the scanner, he turns around and he walks to the front of the store and he hands the paper to the woman behind the counter. Over an hour later, Tyab pulled into his driveway and he sat in his driveway for a second, he was still shaking from what had just happened inside of that small store.

So he gets out of his car, which was still totally dirty and he made his way into the house. And he went straight to the kitchen where his wife was. And so as soon as he gets in the kitchen, his wife turns around and looks at him and says, where were you? The car wash is like five minutes away. Why were you gone for like two hours? But Tyab, he's got no expression on his face. And he looks at his wife and just says,

give me $100. And his wife scrunches her face up at him and says, no, where's your money? And Tayeb smiles, he turns around, he reaches into his back pocket and he pulls out that second slip of paper and he hands it to his wife and he says, here's my money. After getting that $5 refund at the ShopRite

in Hackensack, New Jersey, Tyab noticed a sign on the back wall that was advertising for a Moneyball jackpot lottery. And he had decided to use the $5 refund to buy two lottery tickets. And so he buys these two lottery tickets and the next day, that store set back off the road he went to was a convenience store, a 7-Eleven, and the machine he was using was a machine that scanned your lottery tickets to see if they were winners. And so the first ticket he scanned, it was a dud, it didn't win anything. But the second ticket when he scanned it, it couldn't process the amount of money he had just won. And so that's why

I told him to see the receptionist. And so he brought the second ticket up to the counter, he handed it to the woman, and after she scanned it and saw the amount of money he had won, all she could do was say, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. And when he asked her, you know, what are you looking at? What happened? She just goes, big. And so when he got home, Tayeb handed that slip to his wife, and on it was the amount of money that he had won. He was the jackpot winner. He had won $315 million. Tayeb would say that he and his wife and his kids all laughed and cried and celebrated in the kitchen all night and within a couple of days Tayeb had left his job, he retired, and he had paid off all of his family's debts.

And at his press conference for the New Jersey lottery, he was quoted as saying, I love orange juice now. Our next story is called Overcoming Adversity. In 1959, Ronald McNair was a very gifted nine-year-old African-American boy living in South Carolina. While he was good at virtually everything he tried, from music to athletics to schoolwork, the only thing that ever really grabbed his attention was outer space. And so as a 9-year-old child, he made the decision that one day he was going to become an astronaut. But he had no idea how to become an astronaut. And so he

decided the first thing he would do would be to go to his library and take out some books on NASA, the very famous organization that sends American astronauts to space. However, there was an issue with his plan. This library only served white patrons. It was a segregated library. Ronald knew this, but he figured, you know what, I'm a polite kid. I can get in there and get out before anybody notices me. But as soon as he walked into that library, everybody in there who were all white just stared at Ronald. Ronald could feel it, but he just kept his head down and he walked through the library, he got to the science section, he grabbed a couple books he wanted, and then he walked back to the counter and he put them up and he very politely asked the librarian, who was also white, if he could check these books out. And this librarian looks at him and says, young man, you better get out of here

before I call the police. And Ronald at this point looks up at the librarian and thinks for a second and then just hops up onto her counter and sits there and says, okay, I'll wait for the police. The librarian was totally outraged and would call the police and would call Ronald's mother. And before long, the police did show up and it was two white guys. They come inside and this librarian runs over to them and she's talking to them and she's pointing back over at Ronald, gesticulating that very clearly Ronald is the issue. That's why you've been called here. And the officers would be just totally annoyed by this librarian.

And they would say to her, why don't you just let the kid take the books out? And the librarian was totally offended at this and began defending her decision to call the police instead of letting him take the books out and as she's defending herself, Ronald's mother comes running into the library, she runs over to her son to make sure he's okay and then she looks up at the police officers and this librarian to try to figure out what's going on and at this point the police officers are just totally over it and they turn to the librarian and they say you know what you really ought to let him take the books out and then the officers just turned around and left. The librarian was not

about to just let him take the books she was still very upset and so she storms over to Ronald's mother and she says to her you shouldn't let your son come in here and at this Ronald's mother is looking at this librarian who's totally upset and she looks down at her son who's got his head down and then she notices the few books on the counter about space and she was aware of Ronald's love for outer space and she put together what had happened and after thinking about it for a moment she looks up at this librarian and she just says well since he's here already, can he take out those books? He'll take good care of them. The librarian is still totally furious, but knows this is a losing fight.

And so very reluctantly with a scowl on her face, she grabs the books and she jams them into Ronald's arms. And Ronald's mother nudges Ronald and says, what do you say? And Ronald, while holding all of his new books about NASA and space, looks up at the librarian and smiles and says, thank you ma'am, and then he and his mom turn around and they leave. Ronald would go on to earn his PhD in physics from MIT, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, and after graduation he was picked up by NASA to become an astronaut. And in 1984, Ronald went into outer space. He was actually the second African American to ever go into outer space. And while he was in orbit, apparently he played his saxophone for his crew. And then in 1986, Ronald was chosen again to go on another mission to outer space.

But tragically, 73 seconds after takeoff, their space shuttle, the Challenger, exploded, killing Ronald and the six other astronauts on board. Following his death, the library in South Carolina that had tried to turn Ronald away for his skin color renamed themselves the Ronald McNair Life History Center. Hey Mr. Bolland fans, here's some great news. You can now listen to all Bolland Studio shows ad-free on Amazon Music. That's right, you can listen to shows like Run Fool, Bedtime Stories, and Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries without any ads. What's more, you get access to the Mr. Ballin podcast, Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories,

one month early and ad-free, and all this is included with your Prime membership. You also get access to other amazing shows like Morbid, 48 Hours, and 2020 ad-free too. You know what that means, uninterrupted listening, so no more cliffhangers. Immerse yourself in the world of true crime with Amazon Music with the most ad-free top podcasts. And it's all included in your Prime membership. To listen now, all you need to do is go to Amazon.com slash ballin. That's Amazon.com slash ballin or download the free Amazon Music app. It's just that easy. If you're listening to this podcast, then chances are good you are a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious.

And if that's the case, then I've got some good news. We just launched a brand new Strange, Dark and Mysterious podcast called Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries. And as the name suggests, it's a show about medical mysteries, a genre that many fans have been asking us to dive into for years. And we finally decided to take the plunge and the show is awesome. In this free weekly show, we explore bizarre, unheard of diseases, strange medical mishaps, unexplainable deaths and everything in between. Each story is totally true and totally terrifying.

Go follow Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts and if you're a Prime member, you can listen early and ad free on Amazon Music. Our next story is called Cowboy. In 1963, when Tim Dick was just 10 years old, he went over to his friend's house and he snuck a bottle of whiskey from one of their shelves, he pulled it out and he poured himself a full glass to the brim with whiskey, and then he downed it in one huge gulp. Tim had grown up idolizing cowboys on TV, and time he watched them they would come galloping into some town, they would go into the saloon, and they would sit at the bar just throwing back shots of whiskey. And so Tim always assumed whiskey must be this totally amazing, refreshing drink for these guys to be drinking it out in the heat of the desert. But unfortunately for Tim, after he slugged this huge glass of whiskey, it was not refreshing.

It tasted like gasoline and his chest felt like it was on fire. But instead of being turned off by alcohol and waiting until he was older and of age to try it again, Tim instead thought, you know what, the next time I have whiskey, I just need to water it down a little bit. And so for the next year, Tim continued to periodically sneak whiskey out of his friend's cabinets and he would drink this watered down whiskey. And then when he turned 11 years old, his father, who he was very close with, died tragically in a car accident. And Tim really didn't have a good way to cope with the grief of losing his father. And so he turned to drinking

even more than he already was. And before long, Tim was like this young kid who basically was an alcoholic. But he hid it extremely well. He graduated high school, he graduated college, and really nobody knew he was drinking as much as he was. But after he graduated college and he was living on his own in Michigan, there was no structure in place or person in place to stop Tim from going overboard with his substance abuse. And so not only did his drinking get completely out of control, but he began using and selling drugs, namely cocaine. In 1978, when Tim was 25 years old, he and his drug-dealing partner were scheduled to take part in the biggest drug deal of their careers.

They would be selling about a pound and a half of cocaine to a guy named Michael Pfeiffer and he'd be buying it for $42,000 which when you adjust that for inflation would be like buying it for $175,000 in 2021. Tim and his partner were very excited about all this money they were going to make, but they were equally worried about the transaction. A lot can go wrong. And so Tim decided in order to mitigate their nerves and kind of make this a safer drug deal, he decided they would do the transaction inside of a public airport because Tim had seen that done on TV and believed that would give them an additional layer of safety. And so on the day this deal is going to take place, Tim takes the pound and a half of cocaine, he puts it inside of a brown Adidas gym bag, and he also throws a key lock inside of this

bag. He zips it up, he walks outside, he dumps the bag in the back of his car, and he drives to the Kalamazoo International Airport in Michigan. When he gets there, he parks in the big parking lot right outside of the front doors, and as soon as he's parked, he goes around to the back of his car, he pulls out this brown Adidas bag, he throws it over his shoulder, shuts his trunk, and then he waits for his partner to show up. A couple of minutes later, right on time, his partner pulls into the lot, he parks nearby,

and then the two of them very casually begin walking towards the front doors of this airport. They walk up the steps, they go in the front doors, and as soon as they're inside, they're looking around and they find Michael Piper. He's standing up against the wall right in the area he had said he would be. And so without making any sort of contact with Michael, Tim and his partner turn the corner and they go into a nearby locker room. Once they're inside, Tim pulls the lock out of the brown bag and then he puts the bag with the drugs in it inside of a locker, he shuts it and then uses the lock you just pulled out to lock the locker. And then he and his partner leave the locker room. As soon as they go out into the main terminal, they start

walking over towards Michael Pfeiffer and as they get closer and closer, Tim's partner breaks off and goes to a bench on the other side of the terminal and Tim continues walking on right up to Michael. And then when he reaches Michael, he very discreetly hands him the key to the lock on the locker, and he tells him which locker number the drugs are in. Michael doesn't say anything, he takes the key, and he heads off to the locker room. Tim turns, and he goes over to his partner, and he sits down on the bench and waits. Meanwhile, Michael goes inside the locker room, he uses the key, he opens up the lock, he opens the locker up, he checks

to make sure the drugs are still there. They are. As soon as that's confirmed, he takes the bag, he throws it over his shoulder, and he walks back out to the main terminal to meet up with Tim and his partner. Tim and his partner are sitting on the bench, they see Michael coming out of the locker room room and they're expecting Michael to walk over and basically hand them a bag full of $42,000 but instead Michael walks up to them and draws a gun and points it at them and says I'm a police officer You're under arrest It would turn out this was a sting operation Michael Pfeiffer the undercover police officer had been following around Tim and his partner for months in

police officer had been following around Tim and his partner for months. In Michigan at the time, if you were caught trying to sell 650 grams or more of cocaine, there was an automatic penalty of a life sentence. And Tim and his partner had just been arrested trying to sell more than 650 grams of cocaine. And so facing a life sentence, Tim took a deal that gave him a lesser sentence in exchange for information about other drug dealers. And so Tim would ultimately serve two years and four months in a federal penitentiary before he was released. Tim would say his time in prison was absolutely miserable, but it was necessary. It matured him in a major way and it honed his sense of humor. Tim was always a very funny guy.

He was always the class clown and the guy goofing around. But in prison, he found it a very difficult task to get these hardened prisoners and prison guards to laugh at his jokes. But eventually with enough practice and repetition, he could get anybody in that prison to laugh at him. And so by the time he got out, he was like an amazing comedian. And so he decided, you know what, why don't I pursue a career in comedy? Four years later, Tim Dick, better known as Tim Allen, landed the starring role on the hit TV show Home Improvement. And from there, he starred in dozens more movies and TV shows, but he's probably best known for his voice acting in the very popular movie series Toy Story where he plays Buzz Lightyear.

Today Tim is sober and has been for decades. The next and final story of today's episode is called Picture Poison. On June 14th, 2011, 42-year-old Ellie Lobel stepped unsteadily outside of her house in Wildemar, California and immediately she had to lean on her round-the-clock caretaker for support. This mother of three had just moved to this rural part of California so she could die in peace. For the last 15 years, Ellie had been battling Lyme disease, which is a chronic and debilitating condition spread by ticks. But now, after those 15 years of fighting, Ellie just had no more energy. She could barely those 15 years of fighting, Ellie just had no more energy. She could barely stand up on her own, her mind was kind of

always in this weird fog, and she just felt totally hopeless. And so Ellie had recently hired an end-of-life coordinator to help her plan for her death and also to make sure nobody attempted to revive or resuscitate Ellie if she fell unconscious. Ellie really thought she was going to die any moment and just wanted it to happen in peace in California in her bed. But dying can be complicated and Ellie, after moving to California, had laid in her bed for three days expecting to die but didn't. And so on June 14th Ellie decided she would just get up and with the help of her caretaker she would just go for a walk

in her new town. Every step was painful for Ellie as she clutched her caretaker's arm but the sun was out the sky was blue and flowers were in bloom all around her and just for a moment Ellie suddenly realized she was feeling something she had not felt in a long time. She was feeling grateful to be alive. But that feeling was very short-lived because as she stood on this sunny sidewalk in California, she suddenly felt something small and sharp smack into her forehead. And Ellie, she kind of looked up and realized it was a bee.

Now, she was determined not to let an insect ruin this rare instance of happiness in her life. Ellie just kind of reached up and tried to swat it away. But when she looked up again she noticed the bee was still there and worse there was now an entire cloud a swarm of bees over her head that were descending down on her. And as this happened, Ellie's caretaker, who saw the swarm, screamed, let go of Ellie, and ran away from her. And so poor old Ellie, who couldn't even stand up on her own, was forced to fall to the ground and kind of cover her head with her hands to try to protect herself, but within seconds these bees had descended on her and were stinging her head, her ears, her face.

I mean, she was getting destroyed and these were not normal bees. These were African killer bees that were known for stinging their victim dozens of times and Ellie was fiercely allergic to bee stings. And so instead of dying a peaceful death in her bed, Ellie was now going to die a viciously painful awful public death out on the sidewalk all by herself. Ellie's life had started out with so much promise. By the time she was just 18 years old, she had already earned her PhD in physics. And then by 1996, when she was 27 years old, Ellie and her husband had three beautiful children and they had moved into their dream home in New York's Westchester County. Her life really seemed perfect. But that same year they moved into their dream

home, Ellie suddenly noticed there was this rash at the top of her thigh and it kind of looked like a red bullseye and Ellie had chalked it up to, you know, some sort of weird spider bite and not thought much of it, not realizing that that bullseye marking is actually the calling card for ticks who carry Lyme disease That's what they leave behind after they bite you But Ellie didn't know that and so not long after seeing this rash Ellie began having night sweats and night shakes She had these flu-like symptoms that didn't go away for months and it left her totally exhausted and discouraged Doctors told her that she could have arthritis or fibromyalgia or MS

or heart failure or some other horrible condition, but it was ultimately a park ranger that Ellie just happened to meet one day who recognized that that rash she described at the top of her leg was very likely because she had been bit by a tick that had Lyme disease and now all of these symptoms that seemed like Lyme disease too, and then when Ellie went into the doctor and said, I think I have Lyme disease, they said, yup, you do, but now the disease has progressed so far, it's basically too late for you. And so for years, Ellie wasn't able to work or really even be a mother because of this disease, and then eventually her marriage fell apart and ended in bitter divorce. And so this disease really had just kind of wrecked Ellie's life,

and so at the 15-year mark of having this disease, she decided, you know what, enough is enough, I'm going to California and I'm gonna die on my own terms. But Ellie had envisioned a peaceful death in her bed, not an agonizing death caused by a barrage of African killer bee stings out on a sidewalk in some random town in California. The attack on Ellie lasted maybe about a minute but it was the longest minute of Ellie's life. The pain was just unimaginable and then after all the bees had left Ellie's caretaker actually came running back over to her scooped her up and began running with her back to the car and as Ellie was getting carried Ellie realized her caretaker was probably going to take her

to the hospital and she didn't want that. Even though she had had that kind of nice moment before the bee stings, when she was looking around at this beautiful town and the sun was out and the flowers were out, that wasn't enough to inspire her to want to live. She still deep down did just want to die. And so she figured you know with these bee stings I'm gonna have an allergic reaction any minute now and that's gonna take me out and I just want it to happen so I can be done.

And so Ellie made her caretaker drive her back to the house and put her in bed and then Ellie laid there waiting to die. But three days later and Ellie had not died yet. In fact she actually felt the best she had felt in years. There had been no discernible allergic reaction to all of these bee stings all over her head and all the chronic pain and discomfort that she normally felt all the time from Lyme disease was gone. And after doing some research about bee stings and about Lyme disease, Ellie came across this 1997 study done in Australia that found the active ingredient in some wasp and bee stings was powerful enough to kill the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.

But no one had ever really researched this because it was totally unethical to release a swarm of bees on a critical Lyme disease patient. But in Ellie's case this happened on its own and it really did cure her. The bee stings literally saved her life. And since her bee attack Ellie has become the leading advocate for bee venom as a treatment for Lyme disease. of our studios podcasts. They are this one of course, Mr. Ballin Podcast, and we also have Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, we have Bedtime Stories, and also Run Fool. To find those other podcasts, all you have to do is search for Ballin Studios wherever you listen to your podcasts. To watch hundreds more stories just like the ones you heard today, head over to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin. So that's going to do it. I really

appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya. ["The Last of Us Theme"] Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. And before you go, please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

Nancy's love story could have been ripped right out of the pages of one of her own novels. She was a romance mystery writer who happens to be married to a chef. But this story didn't end with a happily ever after. When I stepped into the kitchen, I could see that Chef Brophy was on the ground and I heard somebody say, call 911. As writers, we'd written our share of murder mysteries. So when suspicion turned to Dan's wife, Nancy, we weren't that surprised.

The first person they look at would be the spouse. We understand that's usually the way they do it. But we began to wonder, had Nancy gotten so wrapped up in her own novels... There are murders in all of the books. ...that she was playing them out in real life? Follow Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy or murders in all of the books. Did she was playing them out in real life? Follow Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy

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