MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - The Condition

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Today’s podcast will feature two medical mysteries that sound like they are straight out of a horror movie. The audio from both of these 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:#2 -- "Gasp" --  A very scary thunderstorm foreshadows a mysterious, unexplained disaster with horrific consequences (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09A7pjC3zhY)#1 -- "All in Their Heads" -- A mysterious disease almost wipes out an entire tribe, but where this disease comes from will make you squirm (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk_JTdngG9k)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 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. Today's podcast will feature two medical mysteries that sound like they are straight out of a horror movie. The audio from both 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 Gasp, and it's about a horrifying medical condition. that was discovered when multiple people began presenting these same life-threatening symptoms.

And the second and final story you'll hear is called All in Their Heads, and it's about a mysterious disease that almost wipes out an entire native tribe. But where this disease comes from will make you squirm. 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, please buy the Amazon Music Follow button a gift certificate

to a massage parlor, but before they go in, make sure to replace all the massage oils with honey and fire ants. Okay, let's get into our first story called Gasp. At 5.30 p.m. on November 21st, 2016, Jodi Santoro, who was a 21-year-old mother in Melbourne, Australia, woke up to the sound of her four-month-old son crying. Outside, there was this horrible thunderstorm going on. All this rain and hail were pelting the roof, and the wind. was so strong that all the windows in the house were rattling. Jody reached over and grabbed her phone on the nightstand and checked the time, and she saw right away that she had overslept.

However, it had been a really hot day that day, and she was so drained from the heat and also taking care of a four-month-old that she wasn't really surprised she had overslept. But as the sound of her son's cries intensified, Jody knew no matter how tired she was, she needed to get up and go tend to him. But the instant her legs swung off the bed and she actually tried to stand. up, she knew something was wrong, and it had nothing to do with being tired. She had this incredible sense of dizziness come over her, and then her chest suddenly tightened up to the point where she could barely even breathe in. She found herself grabbing the bed just to steady herself. However,

as alarming as this was, Jody didn't panic. She knew this feeling. She had been dealing with asthma for years, and she knew this was the start of an asthma attack. And so Jody reached over for her inhaler on the nightstand. She picked it up, brought it to her lips, pressed it down, and then took in a measured breath of the medication, expecting to pretty much immediately feel relief. But she didn't. The inhaler wasn't working. Jody again pressed down the inhaler harder this time and took a bigger breath in,

hoping that a bit more medication might do the trick. But again, it just was not working. And so now with panic rising inside of her, she's still struggling to breathe, her son is still freaking out and she can't tend to him. And all she was thinking is, I have to get my nebulizer, which is pretty much. basically a more robust version of an inhaler. It provides more medication more quickly into your body. However, the nebulizer, which was just over in her closet, required some setup. And she knew she felt so frantic right now and she was shaking so much that she didn't think she'd be able to set it up

or even set it up in time before she passed out. Just then, her fiancé walked into the bedroom, drawn there by the sound of their son crying. But the second he walked in, his attention was not on their son, it was instead on Jody, who by now was clutching the bed and kind of hobbled over and very clearly having some sort of medical emergency. Jody turned to him and began to say, I can't breathe. But her fiancé already knew she had asthma. He knew what these attacks looked like. And so without even needing to be told, he rushed to the closet, set up her nebulizer, and then put the mask right over her face. And as soon as it was, Jody took in the biggest inhale she possibly could, really believing this was going to stop the asthma attack. But,

But just like the inhaler, the nebulizer didn't work. It felt like with every breath she was taking, her lungs were shrinking, not expanding. And so Jody turned to her fiancé and croaked out, call an ambulance, her voice barely audible. And so her fiance, who also was now beginning to panic, grabbed the phone, and as he was talking to the dispatcher, trying to relay all the details of what was happening, outside this thunderstorm was only getting worse and worse. The hail and the rain were battering the sides of the house and all the windows were shaking. I mean, it was absolute bedlam inside of this house. The next few minutes were torture for Jody.

She laid on the bed waiting for paramedics. Her breasts at this point were so small, so shallow, like she knew she was about to pass out any second. And then finally, the paramedics rushed inside. She knew there were two people in the room, but it was so chaotic. And all she could say when they showed up in the room was, I'm going to die. I'm going to die.

The paramedics lifted her off the bed. They put her on the gurney. and as they wheeled her out the door towards the ambulance, her world went totally black. The paramedics rushed Jody to Sunshine Hospital, and on the way they tried to stabilize her by squeezing these oxygen bags, forcing oxygen into Jody's lungs. And as they were doing that, Jody's fiancé was following the ambulance right behind, white-knuckling the steering wheel, praying his fiancé was going to survive this asthma attack. When the ambulance finally arrived at Sunshine Hospital, the emergency room was mayhem.

Paramedics quickly wheeled Jody in on her gurney, shouting out her vital signs to the doctors waiting near the door. Her fiancé, meanwhile, watched helplessly as the medical staff surrounded her and inserted IV lines, hooked up monitors, and began intubating her to force even more oxygen into her lungs. But fortunately, this rapid medical intervention once Jody got to the hospital appeared to work, because not long after getting there, Jody did begin to stabilize, not enough to suggest that she was actually all better, but her condition basically began to improve. However, the moment she began to improve, instead of the medical team, you know,

talking to her and figuring out what happened and making sure she really was on a path to recovery here, instead, the medical team literally ran out of her room back out to the front of the ER because by this point, the Sunshine Hospital ER was overflowing with patients. There were all these people in the waiting room and also outside, and basically everybody had the same symptoms as Jody. They couldn't breathe. There were people slumped on the ground against the wall, screaming for help. I mean, the medical team was totally overwhelmed. And on top of that, there were ambulances literally lined up around the block waiting to drop off patients. There just wasn't any more space. But nonetheless, doctors and nurses and the medical team at the hospital

worked furiously, moving from one patient to the next, sometimes in an exam room, sometimes out in the waiting room, sometimes outside. It's wherever the patients were. But the weird thing was, is all these people, they had the same symptoms, these severe asthma attacks. Yet many of the people that were showing up had never had asthma in their lives before. So how was this happening? This went on for hours and hours. And really, the situation in the hospital only continued to get worse, with more and more and more patients showing up with worse and worse symptoms. And so during this madness, Jody, who really hadn't gotten better, she just stabilized. She actually was moved out of the emergency room and over to the ICU, pretty much just to create one more space for new

patients. And so in the ICU, Jody's fiancé sat next to her, gripping her hand, listening to the sound of the monitors beeping steadily all around her. Outside the room, he could see doctors and nurses and medical staff sprinting up and down the hallways, looking frantic and worried. He had no idea what was happening here. He just hoped Jody would be okay. But it would turn out there actually was someone who knew exactly what was going on. A university researcher named Philip Taylor had actually predicted this the day before. Professor Taylor was an expert in atmospheric allergens,

a field so niche that barely anybody outside of a small research circle had even heard of it. And so on the afternoon of November 20th, the day before, Taylor had been at home in his office analyzing data when he noticed something very alarming. All of the ingredients for a catastrophic event were aligning in the forecast, and the patterns were so precise that it stopped him cold. Taylor was stunned. He'd spent years studying the effects of weather on public health, but he'd never seen anything like this before. And at the same time, Taylor also realized that as alarming as this was, very few other people, if anybody, would see this as a problem. He was like the one person in the world that had the expertise to see how catastrophic this

might actually be. And so desperate to warn others, he wound up posting a very urgent announcement on this weather website that he managed, but unfortunately, it just wasn't seen by enough people in time. And so now, as hospitals all across Melbourne overflowed with people gasping for air, Taylor sat in his backyard watching the storm unfold. The sky was pitch black, rain and hail was coming down, the wind was whipping, and off in the distance, all he could hear was thunder and sirens. And he knew, unfortunately, his prediction had been right. Just like Professor Taylor's weather models had predicted,

on November 21st, 2016, Melbourne, Australia was hit by an extremely rare event known as thunderstorm asthma. This deadly phenomenon can only occur when three very specific weather conditions align. One, high heat during the day, two, a very powerful thunderstorm, and three, extremely high pollen levels. Melbourne's heat that day had caused unusually high concentrations of ryegrass pollen to hang in the air. And then when that huge thunderstorm rolled in, the intense humidity, the wind, and the rain shattered the pollen grains into microscopic fragments. And then these tiny particles, which were way smaller than regular pollen, were carried by this storm deep into people's homes and into their lungs.

Unlike normal pollen, these microscopic fragments bypassed the body's typical defenses and embedded themselves deep into people's lungs, causing severe and sudden asthma attacks. Now, for people who already had asthma, this was catastrophic. But even perfectly healthy people found themselves gasping for air, overwhelmed by the sheer density of this microscopic pollen. The storm had essentially made the air everybody in Melbourne was breathing, deadly. As for Jodi Santoro, she would spend days in the ICU, hooked up to monitors, with machines pumping oxygen into her lungs while her body fought to heal. But she was lucky, she would eventually recover. And in the days that followed,

she would learn the full scale of what actually happened in Melbourne. Nearly 10,000 people had flooded the hospitals across Australia complaining of the same symptoms that Jody did. And unfortunately, of those 10,000, 10 people actually lost their lives. And many of them were totally healthy and had never had an asthma attack in their lives before. For Jody, despite surviving this ordeal, the awful memory of what happened on that night will forever be on her mind. She is now all too aware of how fragile life can be and how quickly things can change. What if I told you that the crime of the century is the one being waged on our planet? Introducing Lawless Planet, Wondry's new podcast exploring the dark side of the climate crisis.

Uncover shocking tales of crime and corruption threatening our world's future. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey listeners, big news for true crime lovers. You can now enjoy this podcast. ad-free on Amazon music with your Prime membership. Listen to all episodes of my podcasts, Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries and Mr. Ballin's Strange, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, along with a huge collection of top true crime podcasts, completely ad-free.

No more waiting through cliffhangers or dealing with ads, because let's be honest, ads shouldn't be the most nerve-wracking part of true crime. To start your ad-free listening journey, download the Amazon music app for free, or head to Amazon.com slash Ballin. That's Amazon.com slash B-A-L-L-E-N. Dive into uninterrupted true crime stories today. The next and final story is called All In Their Heads. On a sunny afternoon in the summer of 1953, a young woman

named Ahn, stood in the middle of a huge sugarcane grove in an isolated forest in Papua New Guinea. And around her were all her relatives and neighbors, and they were all there to mourn the loss of on's sister, whose name was Taun, she had passed away three days earlier from a very mysterious illness that people in An's village called Kuru. And in their language, the word Kuru meant trembling. Now, keep in mind, this particular mystery illness that was called Kuru only affected the people in Ahn and Taun's village. This is like a hyper-specific illness that only happened inside of this little forest to these people. But, Onn and the rest of the people in her village had seen this happen over and over and over again every year, and so they knew what happened when you

got Kuru because it was always the same. As soon as you began to tremble, that was kind of like the first sign, one year or so after that moment, you lose control of all the muscles in your body until you die. And so in Taan's case, so On's sister, she had watched this happen exactly as it did for everybody else that ever got this illness. She started with the tremors, and then before long she couldn't even stand up or walk around, and then finally her sister lost control of the muscles in her throat, and so she couldn't eat despite being hungry, and so ultimately she died of starvation, which is like one of the worst ways to die. It's incredibly slow and very, very painful. And so ever since Taan's death, three days earlier, the village had been

performing all these rituals and prayers in an attempt to assist Taan's spirit on its way into the afterlife. And this type of very involved funeral was absolutely customary in Aung's culture. Anne and her family and all of these villagers were members of the Foray people who were native to Papua New Guinea, which is an island just north of Australia. And in 1953, when the story is taking place, the Foray people numbered about 11,000 people, and remember, they live in a very isolated forest. they are basically cut off from the world for the most part, but they were beginning to fear that they were going to go extinct because of Kuru.

Every year, the 4A people lost 200 people to Kuru, and for the most part, the victims were women, like disproportionately so, which made it even more likely that the 4A people would go extinct, because if you lose all the women, you can't have any more kids. And in fact, by 1953, so many women had died from Kuru that by this point, there were three times as many men as there were women. In fact, the leading cause of death for 4A women was Kuru.

But the 4A people did not view Kuru as just an illness. They actually viewed it as a curse. In fact, that was completely accepted that that is exactly what it was. This is not like getting the cold. Somebody did this to you. Like a sorcerer somewhere, some unnamed sorcerer that's like coming into the forest is targeting these women and cursing them with Kuru. And so the 4A people put on these really elaborate funeral

mostly to ward off these dark magic sorcerers that were casting Kuru spells. And so the four-A people believed that if they just nailed the funeral procedure for somebody who has just died from Kuru, the kind of three-day-long, all these rituals and prayers they have to do, if the village is able to nail it perfectly, then the deceased who's passed away from Kuru, so in this case on Sister Taun, her spirit, as a result of this perfect funeral, would be able to kind of rise up and actually seek revenge,

on the sorcerer who killed the person. And so these funerals were basically like kind of taking the dead, rising their spirit, and sending them off to go kill the sorcerer. And so, Ahn and the rest of her villagers, they went through this very elaborate process for Anne's sister, Taun, and at the end of it, they did feel like they had really nailed it. And so they felt confident that Taan's spirit was going to rise up and get her revenge. A few weeks after, Ahn's sister's funeral,

On was standing over in open fire, and she was cooking some pork and sweet potatoes, and as she went to flip the meat over, she reached her hand out, and she noticed her hand was trembling, which is the first sign of someone with Kuru. Now, Onn told herself that, oh, no, I don't have Kuru. It's just because I was working really hard today, and I'm tired, like, that's all it is. But she knew deep down she may have been cursed. On did her best to kind of hide her trembling hands. However, after about a month from that first time she noticed her hand shaking, she noticed

she wasn't really able to stand up without kind of losing her balance because her legs were starting to tremble. And finally, when she basically couldn't even stand up without assistance, this is again only one month after that first tremble, she knew she had Kuru. And On already knew that there was absolutely nothing anybody in her village could do to stop this from killing her. Kuru was a 100% death sentence. And so if you got Kuru, it's like the whole village just began prepping for your death because

they had to be ready to do this big ritualistic funeral. And so imagine that. You have this mystery illness or curse or whatever you want to think it is, and you're just counting down the days until you die. But for Ahn, even though she had seen this happen so many times before and just kind of knew there's nothing she could do, she couldn't stand the idea of having this horrible, slow, painful death. And so she decided, you know what, I'm going to do something drastic that basically nobody else had done before who had Kuru.

So for context, at this time, the 4A people had been totally isolated from other people in the world for thousands of years. They basically lived in this little part of Papua New Guinea in the forest, and nobody else contacted them. They were totally isolated. However, starting in the 1950s, some Australian colonists and researchers and police actually began kind of making their way in and around the 4A people's area. So they were making contact, albeit not necessarily direct contact, but the 4A people were

seeing basically white people wandering around in and around their forest from time to time. And it was always very shocking when they would see these people because they dressed completely differently, they looked totally different, I mean, it's like two worlds totally colliding. And generally speaking, Ahn and the rest of the people in her village, they did not like having these Australian people kind of wandering around, but on is thinking, you know, the people in my village, the 4A people, they have no solutions for me. So maybe these Australian people that have kind of popped up, maybe they have some answers about what I can do to stop myself from dying from

this horrible curse. Keep in mind, by going out and seeking help from these outsiders, it was like on would be breaking a huge custom. This is so taboo for the 4A people, and very likely, even if she was able to find a solution from these outsiders, it's not clear if she would have been welcomed back into her village. And so this is a truly desperate measure she's taking, but she really felt like she had no choice. So, even as her body trembled from Kuru, Ann managed to stand up using a stick, and she began kind of hobbling her way quietly and discreetly out of her village, something that she really never did. And eventually, after hobbling her way out of sight of the the four-A people, she began making her way through the woods, and she eventually came to a clearing

where there was this house, and it was obvious. This is not a house that the four-A people have built. This is somebody from the outside who's built something kind of near where they were living. And so Onn wandered up to this house, not really sure what to do, but she went up and knocked on the door, and a second later, it opened up. And it's this Australian anthropologist named Ronald Burnt, who actually Ahn had seen before. He had been coming through her village a couple of times, attempting to interview people to learn more about the foray people, she knew that nobody wanted to talk to him, but, you know, she had seen him before. And so she was relieved, this is someone that I'm somewhat familiar with.

And so as Ronald is staring back at her, and Ronald's pretty tall and skinny, he's got glasses on, he's dressed like a typical Australian in the 1950s, and he's looking at On, and On begins to try to tell him what's going on with her. And as she began to talk, the words she was saying were coming out all garbled, and she realized that the Kuru curse was now affecting her throat, the muscles in her neck, and she was not able to speak. But as it happened, Ronald, who was very familiar with the Foray people, he could tell, based on just the way she was acting and how desperate she looked, that very likely this woman was here because she believed she had Kuru. And Ronald, who had learned about Kuru after studying

the Foray People, he had done some research on it, and he believed it was entirely psychosomatic, that this was not an actual illness. Basically, he believed Kuru, was acute hysteria, that these four-A people were just going crazy and convincing themselves that they had this illness, and I guess that kind of manifested their death a year later. And so Ronald interrupted On, who again is struggling to talk, and he was able to communicate to her in her language that, you do not have Kuru, you are hysterical, this is in your head, and you should go now. And then he shut the door on her.

And Anne had no idea what to do, she was embarrassed, She was terrified that maybe somebody from her village had seen her come out here, and so just trembling and feeling so alone and so scared, she turned around and just went back to her village. Nine months later, On's condition had severely deteriorated. She basically was following exactly the process of every other person she had seen with Kuru. She had lost virtually all the control of her body, she could barely sip water, she was feeling absolutely horrible, I mean, she knew she was closing in on death, and she had not gone

back out to try to get help from outsiders, that interaction with Ronald had kind of destroyed her hope, and so she did go back and just was kind of waiting to die, just like everybody else in her village did. But for Anne, the physical symptoms of Kuru that she was experiencing were undoubtedly terrible, but they were not as bad, at least to On, as the other side of Kuru. So in addition to referring to this curse as Kuru, which meant trembling, sometimes foray people would refer to this curse, this illness, as the laughing death. And it's because during the terminal stage, so the end stage of Kuru, when you're just

about to die, you just begin laughing. It doesn't matter what you're thinking about. This is not an actual laugh. You're not thinking something's funny. It's like you could be weeping and totally depressed because you know you're going to die, but you keep hysterically laughing, which makes your whole body soar from constantly laughing over and over again. And Anne was beginning to experience that. She would be weeping and laughing at the same time.

And think about this, everybody else who's in the village, they know what this means. And so their preparations for her death are only getting more and more ramped up. They're getting ready for the big ritual. holistic funeral they're going to give to On. And so On, as she's hysterically laughing, is fully aware that everybody's just waiting for her to die. And finally, just a few weeks after she had begun the laughing side of Kuru, on would pass away, almost exactly one year from when she first noticed the trembling in her hand when she was cooking over that fire. After On's death, more and more people just kept on getting Kuru. And over the next

seven years. It was like clockwork. 200 plus 4A people died from Kuru every year, and nobody had any idea how to stop it. It just became a part of their lives, and again, they kept getting closer and closer to being extinct. It was this really terrifying time.

Seven years after On's death, so in 1961, a medical anthropologist named Shirley Lyndenbaum, was sitting in our office at City University in New York reading over old scientific articles. And as she was just kind of flipping through them, she noticed there was an article from an Australian anthropologist named Ronald Burt,

the same guy who had turned on away and told her, no, you don't have Kuru, that's not real, it's psychosomatic. And in this article, Ronald outlined these symptoms, these symptoms that the 4A people were exhibiting, that obviously were not real. They had tremors, loss of muscle control, and huge mood swing, but Ronald was like, it's all in their head, it's not a real disease. But to Shirley, as she's reading this, she's thinking,

why has Ronald decided this has to be psychosomatic? These symptoms seem like a real disease, like a neurological condition. Something must be attacking their brains, causing them to have these symptoms and then die. But when Shirley, just out of curiosity, began to do some additional research on the Kuru disease or whatever you want to call it, she discovered that there was basically no real research other than Ronald's about this weird illness. And so she decided, you know what, there's a gap in the research, and I'm going to fill it. I'm going to figure out what's going on with the Foray People and this weird thing called Kuru.

So, the following summer, when Shirley finally had some time, she left New York and flew to Papua New Guinea, and she made her way into the forest to contact the Foray People. And eventually she reached some of these small villages that contained Foray People, and the four-A people, even if they didn't necessarily embrace Shirley, many of them were open to at least speaking to her and talking about their culture, their customs, their history, and of course talking about Kuru, this curse.

And eventually Shirley made her way into this one particular four-A village where she actually saw a white man just walking around in this village, so he really stood out. And so immediately Shirley walked up to this guy, and he introduced himself as Dr. Michael Alper's, and he told Shirley he had been living in these days, villages with the Foray people for several months because he was studying Kuru. He wanted to figure out, you know, what's actually causing it?

Because he also felt very skeptical at the idea that this is just psychosomatic. That did not seem very plausible. And so Shirley and Dr. Alpers were totally aligned, and they're like, hey, let's swap notes and do this together. And so Shirley began telling Dr. Alpers about what she had learned so far, and she said that when she showed up in Papua New Guinea, she believed what this was, what Kuru was, was a genetic brain disease, meaning it would be passed down from, you know, parent to child and so on and so forth. But she quickly discovered that after conducting research and talking to the

4A people in these villages, that was not the case. This was not something that went from parent to child. Instead, Kuru appeared to spread amongst tight-knit social groups within these villages, which seemed to indicate this was actually a contagious disease, not a genetic one. And so she told Dr. Alpers that now her working theory was that Kuru was actually a contagious type of encephalitis, which is inflammation of the brain. But Shirley also said to Dr. Alpers that that did not explain why so many victims of Kuru were female. And Shirley also said to Dr. Alper's that, you know, I've been around loads of people

with Kuru and I don't have it, so how can it be contagious? Dr. Alpers agreed with everything Shirley was saying and in fact had come to a similar conclusion himself, which meant he also had the same questions. Why only women and why wasn't he getting it? But he told Shirley that when he began trying to answer this question, he discovered that actually, in addition to lots of women getting Kuru, also lots of kids got Kuru. Not necessarily parent to child, but also children in these villages seem to be slightly more susceptible to getting Kuru than men. And in fact, Dr. Alpers told Shirley that right now there was a 12-year-old boy who was in the final stage of Kuru, so the laughing stage, the terminal stage, and because

this boy's parents knew their son was going to die. They were so desperate and grief-stricken that when Dr. Alpers came by and offered to do an autopsy on their son when he passed to try to learn more, parents agreed, even though that meant totally breaking 4A custom. So this was like major taboo decision. But again, the 4A people are getting more and more desperate as they go closer and closer to the brink of extinction from Kuru. A few days later, Dr. Alpers found Shirley, and he told her that the 12-year-old boy had passed away, and so now it was time to conduct the autopsy. And so he led Shirley to a clearing in the woods that was kind of far away from the eyes of the villagers, and there was a makeshift autopsy

table with this boy's body on it. And while Shirley really could not stand to watch this actually happen, She did go over after Dr. Alpers had opened up the boy's skull, revealing his brain. And he yelled to her, hey, you have to come over here and look at this. And so Shirley walked over and she looked down. And even though she had not seen a human brain before right in front of her, she knew right away there's something terribly wrong with that brain. His brain was completely shriveled up and covered in holes, as if like a worm had drilled through his brain.

And so Shirley and Dr. Alpers immediately knew this brain has to be sent off for further testing because something's happening here that's not psychosomatic. This is a real disease that is killing these people. About a year later, Shirley was back home in New York in her office when she received a letter from a research team at the United States National Institutes of Health, or NIH for short. And the NIH is one of the largest medical research facilities in the world. And it was where Shirley and Dr. Alper's had sent off that boy's brain for further study.

And so by getting this letter, Shirley knew she was going to get information about whatever they discovered in this boy's brain. And so she ripped it open and pulled out the report and began reading. And the researcher said they'd spent the last year, you know, studying this brain tissue, and while they still didn't really understand how Kuru either. happened and what caused it, you know, was it a virus or an infection? They didn't know, but they had discovered something about how Kuru spread. During one of their experiments, the NIH researchers had injected some tissue from this boy's brain into a chimpanzee, and very

quickly that chimpanzee developed Kuru. And so this told the researchers that, yes, Kuru was contagious and it spread through infected brain tissue. But how one person's infected brain got into another person's brain was the big mystery. But at least they had found something. But I surely read this, because she had done all that research when she went into the forests of Papua New Guinea and spoke to all these four-A people, she had learned a lot about what they did on a day-to-day basis

and what their various customs and rituals were. And she actually knew exactly how something like this could happen, something that only the four-A people were doing. During her research in Papua New Guinea, Shirley had learned that four-A people believe all humans have five distinct souls. There was that one soul that four-A people believed they could basically summon up out of a deceased person that would then go avenge that person's death. So think about how all those people who died from Kuru, you know, they believed that was a curse from some sorcerer. And so a big part of that funeral process was to call out that soul to go avenge their death, go find the sorcerer, and kill them. but that was just one soul.

There were four others. And of these four others, there was one called the Quila, which was the most dangerous. Quila meant flesh in the four-A people's language, and this soul was like a manifestation of death and decay, because that's what our flesh does. It just kind of gradually dies all the time.

And so they looked at the flesh as being a really bad thing. And so they believed after someone died, their flesh needed to be stored, properly, otherwise it would pollute the air and cause more death and decay for other people that were still alive. And the safest place, according to the 4A people, for the Quilla to be stored, so human flesh, was inside of a woman's body. And the reason for this is 4A people believe women's bodies are much more resilient than

men's, and so if anybody could withstand holding Quila inside of them, it would be the women. But there was a very specific process that the 4A women had to fall. in order to kind of put this quila inside of themselves. And multiple four-A women had explained this totally bizarre process to Shirley when she was out there talking to the people in the village. The way it worked is a few days after a four-A member has passed away, this huge feast is prepared, except the feast only consists of the quila. Basically, the person who is dead is chopped up and prepared by the women, like their entire body

gets consumed. Now, keep in mind, anybody hearing about this who's not a member of the 4A people would be like, oh my god, that's horrible. But to 4A people, this ritualistic cannibalism was actually an act of love. The idea was by having these women consume the quila, consuming the dead person, you're protecting the living because you don't want the quila out and about polluting the air, and you are respecting the dead. But remember, Kuru got spread through infected brain tissue. And it just so happened that during these funeral feasts, when they were consuming the quila,

the brain of the deceased person was an absolute delicacy. And so the brain was reserved for close female relatives of the deceased person. And so during Anne's sister's funeral, so when Taun passed, what do you think On ate? She ate Taun's brain. And then also, critically, Shirley had learned that a lot of these women who were given the brain this delicacy during these funerals, they would often sneak little pieces of the brain and hand it out to kids as like a little treat.

They would take the brain and eat it. You know, nobody knew. That's why the kids were also getting Kuru. And so a few years after this incredible discovery by Shirley about how Kuru was being passed along, the Australian colonial government banned the practice of ritualistic cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. Basically, they were telling the 4A people to stop eating the dead.

it's what's killing you. And the 4A people who were very desperate to stop being killed by Kuru, they took to it, stopped eating each other. And so Kuru was virtually eradicated, and the 4A population, instead of sliding towards extinction, actually began to grow really fast. And today, the total population has at least doubled. And also, just to close this out, one final note is it took until 1990 to actually figure out what was going on inside of these people's bodies, when they had Kuru. Because back in the 60s, when they figured out how not to get Kuru, nobody understood what was even happening. It was just like, don't eat other people and you'll be okay, but that's all they knew. And while the process in the human body that caused Kuru

remained a mystery for many decades after Shirley's big discovery, in the 1990s, researchers did finally figure out what's actually going on. Basically, somebody with Kuru has these proteins in their brain, called preons, that fold wrong into the wrong shape and then cannot function properly? This loss of protein function rapidly kills brain cells, which in turn shrivels up the brain and causes all those holes all over it. A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events. But we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballin podcast, Strange, Dark and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin.

Our head of writing is Evan Allen. Our head of production is Zach Levitt, produced by Jeremy Bone, research and fact-checking by Shelley Shoe, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, and Camille Callahan. Research and Fact Checking Supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Witt Lacasio and Cole Lacasio. Additional audio editing by Jordan Stidham. Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain. Production Coordination by Samantha Collins. Production Support by Antonio Manada and Delana Corley. Artwork by Jessica Klogsten Kiner.

Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast. If you enjoy today's story and you're looking for more bone-chilling content, be sure to check out all of our studios podcasts. There's this one, the Mr. Ballin podcast, as well as Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries, bedtime stories, wartime stories, run-full, redacted, late nights with Nexbo, and a twist of history. All you have to do is search for Ballin Studios wherever you get your podcasts. To watch hundreds more stories just like this one, head over to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin. So that's going to do it. I really

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