MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - Under the Surface

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Today’s podcast will feature 3 stories that make you realize, not everything is as it seems. The audio from all three 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: #3 -- "On The Prowl" -- A local urban legend turns into a nightmare (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNbRksDBLHw) #2 -- "Call Your Mother" -- A mother is devastated after her son disappears one day (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwtXGiWSkQY) #1 -- "The Red Ghost" -- A horrifying creature terrorized people for years on the Arizona frontier (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7MaT5XFeoU)   You can WATCH all new & exclusive MrBallen podcast episodes on my YouTube channel, just called "MrBallen" - https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallen If 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 @mrballen Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today's podcast will feature three stories that make you realize not everything is as it seems. The audio from all three 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 On the Prowl, and it's about a local urban legend that quickly turns into a full-blown nightmare. The second story you'll hear is called Call Your Mother, and it's about a mother who is devastated after her son disappears. And the third and final story you'll hear is called the Red Ghost, and it's about this horrifying creature that terrorize people for years on the Arizona frontier. 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 place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So, if that's of interest to you, please invite the follow button to come on an all-expenses paid trip to Venice, Italy with you. But the second you're both in a gondola, push them into a canal. Okay, let's get into our first story called On the Prowl. On the night of October 20, 2021, two young couples were hanging out inside of a little home in the woods

in Henderson County, North Carolina. The couples were Rachel and her fiancé Chris and their friends, Autumn and Jake, whose home it was. Rachel and Autumn were in the kitchen, preparing to dye Rachel's hair over the sink. Jake and Chris were in the living room discussing the very strange sightings of a Black Panther that have been reported all over town in recent days. So North Carolina does have big cats, including Panthers. After all, their professional football team is named the Carolina Panthers.

However, the Panthers in North Carolina are typically of the brownish color, not the pitch black variety like the panther that was apparently prowling all over Henderson County in recent days. Nonetheless, Chris was absolutely convinced that he had seen this black Panther about a week ago when he was out walking his and Rachel's new puppy. He swore the Panther had been following him in the tree line around his property, and he had been afraid it was thinking about attacking his dog. Ever since, he told Jake he'd been nervous walking around his property outside, and so he'd begun to carry a gun for protection. Jake was in the middle of telling Chris that he too was now

carrying a gun around for the same reason, when they were interrupted by Rachel calling for Chris from the kitchen. Jake and Chris got up off the couch and walked into the kitchen, where Rachel told them that she'd been trying to show Autumn a YouTube video about how to dye hair at home when her phone had died. And so she asked Chris if he wouldn't mind going back to their apartment and getting her a phone charger. Now, obviously, Chris was not thrilled about going into the woods at night, you know, with this panther roaming around. But he loved his fiance and would do anything for her, and he had his gun. So he said he would go. And as Chris headed to the door to leave, Jake said, hold on a minute.

He grabbed his flashlight and grabbed his gun and told Chris he would tag along and watch his buddy's back. The two guys said they'd be back in a minute, and then they walked out the door. A light wind rustled the leaves of the trees as Jake and Chris set out on the little path that connected their two homes. They both stayed absolutely quiet as they walked, because they wanted to make sure they could hear any indication of this panther being nearby. But all they could hear was the wind, some crickets, and an owl hooting in the distance. But about halfway down the path, Chris suddenly heard something coming from the woods and instinctively shot out his hand to stop Jake in his track. They both froze, and then Jake raised his flashlight and shined it at the underbrush where Chris was saying he had heard noise. And for a second, all they saw were green leaves.

But then two eyes opened up and reflected back at them. The two men gasped and instinctively reached for their guns. But before they had to draw and do anything, this creature emerged from the underbrush, and it was just a raccoon. Chris and Jake laughed in relief and then continued walking down the path to Chris's house. They went inside, got Rachel's charger, and then they left and stepped. back into the woods. But now, as Chris and Jake walked along this dark path, something just felt different. The crickets seemed to have gotten quieter and the wind had picked up. The owl that had been hooting before must have flown away because it was now strangely quiet,

except for the sound of their footsteps and the wind in the trees. They were about 40 feet away from Jake's house when they suddenly heard a twig snap to their left. And so the two men turned to face the noise, and as they did, they heard another sound, a low, raspy growl. And so Jake aimed his flashlight at the bush where these noises had come from, and this time it was obvious it was not a raccoon, because the bushes were literally shaking like some enormous animal was inside of them. And so the two men looked at each other with wide eyes, and without saying a word, they both knew

they were thinking the same thing. It's the panther. And so the two men drew their guns and they aimed it at the bush, hoping that this thing would just take off back into the woods, but it didn't. The bush continued to shake like whatever it was was going to leap out. And so the men just opened fire, and they kept on shooting until they heard a new horrible sound. And the second they heard it, they dropped their guns. It would turn out, that was not a panther.

After Chris and Jake had left the house, Rachel and Autumn decided to pull a prank. They had found some expired eggs in the fridge, and they had decided they would go hide in the bushes near that pathway and pelt the guys with them. When Rachel saw Chris and Jake approaching, she tried to crouch down lower in the bush so as not to be seen, but as she did, she stepped on a twig. And at the same time, in anticipation of their prank, the women started to laugh. They tried to stifle their laughter, but that only made them snort and shake the bushes. And that combination of noises, the snapped twig, the stifled laughter, which sort of resembled a short raspy growl and the shaking bushes, signaled to the guys that this was no prank. This was the panther, and if they didn't act,

it might attack them. And so they drew their guns and they began to shoot, until they heard Autumn scream out in horror. Tragically, by the time they had stopped shooting, it was already too late for Rachel. She had been shot to death. Law enforcement did an investigation into the shooting, and they declared it was just a horrible accident. Everybody was sober, and the two men were carrying their weapons legally. And so no one was ever charged with Rachel's death. And to this day, no one has ever gotten solid evidence that that Black Panther even exists. Our next story is called Call Your Mother. On the morning of September 15, 2016, an 80-year-old widow named Rita Wolfensen

shuffled her way into her kitchen inside of her brick home in Brooklyn, New York. However, Rita was basically blind, and as she made her way into the kitchen, she walked past her table, and her foot caught a basket of newspapers in the ground, and it caused her to stumble and fall to the floor. And the second she hit the ground, she heard a pop. And the second she heard that pop, she felt a shooting pain in her hip. And she knew right away, very likely her hip was broken. Now, of course, this is a huge problem if you break your hip.

But for Rita in particular, this was a very, very serious problem. I mean, this was potentially life and death, and she knew it. And she also knew the reason this was so serious was all her fault. Rita lived completely alone and basically had cut off everybody in her life. For like 20 years, she had not interacted with virtually anybody in her life by choice. And basically the reason for this all started 20 years. earlier with her beloved son, Lewis, who lived with her. But for some reason, 20 years ago, so basically right at the time when she cut off her whole family and all her friends,

her son, Louis, just kind of inexplicably packed up and left her house without saying anything, and that she never heard from him again. And so suddenly losing her son, for reasons unknown, sent Rita into the spiraling depression, and the way she coped with it was basically cutting off the entire world around her, and she just lived in this house, totally isolated, totally alone. And so now here she is, stuck on the kitchen floor with a broken hip, unable to get up or call for help, and nobody, nobody is going to come by to help her. Nobody even knows she's in trouble. She's all alone.

But despite basically being blind and knowing she's in this horrible situation, somewhere deep down redefines this inner strength. She knows that if she's going to survive this, she has to save herself. And so she kind of rolled over onto her other side, you know, despite the pain in her hip throbbing the whole time, She got herself onto her elbows, and she began low crawling her way towards the coffee table in the living room that was right near the kitchen. And she finally got over there, you know, the whole time she's got this horrible pain on her side. She gets to the table, she reaches up and she grabs her phone, which she basically never used, because she didn't talk to anybody or take any phone calls, but she managed to get the receiver off the cradle,

then she dialed 911. And so a few minutes later, the ambulance arrives at Rita's house, they come in, they find Rita, you know, she's still in the ground, they scoop her up, they put her in the ambulance, and they go to the hospital. And when they get there, you know, very quickly, they put Rita through a bunch of scans and tests, and they confirmed, you know, what Rita was already expecting, which is, you know, her hip is broken. However, after telling her about the fact that her hip was broken, the nurses and doctors told Rita that, you know, you're going to have to stay here for surgery, but then after you get out of surgery, you can't just go home. You know, you're legally blind, you're very frail, and you don't live with anyone,

and you nearly died from falling on your kitchen floor because had you not been able to reach your phone, you would have starved to death. And so they told Rita that what she would need to do is move into an assisted living home where basically nurses and a medical team would be able to care for her on a day-to-day basis. Basically, she wasn't going to be allowed to move back into her beloved home where she'd spent her whole life. And for Rita, this news was just unbelievably devastating. I mean, not only because that was her home, you know, that's where she spent all her time,

but also because it was the last place she had been before Lewis had left inexplicably. I mean, 20 years later, she's still dealing with the trauma of losing her son. And that house was kind of like the last memory of her son. I mean, his bedroom had basically been untouched since he left because she was so holding on to his memory. And so after the nurses and doctors left, Rita was left in the room all alone, kind of unsure what to do. And it dawned on her, she would need to do something that for 20 years

she had completely avoided doing. she would need to call her family. So she grabbed the phone and she still remembered the number of her younger brother, Joseph, and so she called Joseph up. Now, the reason she called Joseph is, you know, over the past 20 years, the one family member who had basically tried really hard to stay in touch with Rita after she cut everybody off was Joseph. And so she figured if there was anybody in her family who would not judge her for the silence and, you know, being cut off, it would be Joseph. And so a couple of seconds later, a phone rang inside of a house pretty far. far away from the hospital, but still in New York, and this was Joseph's house, and he was sitting on the couch reading a book, and his wife was in the kitchen doing her thing. And Joseph, he answers the phone, and when he hears Rita's voice, he couldn't believe it. You know, he was shocked to hear her after so many

years, but immediately the feeling he had was relief. You know, he and his sister, before, you know, Lewis had left and kind of destroyed Rita's life, you know, Joseph and his older sister had been very close, and it had really broken his heart when Rita had cut him off. I mean, he felt like if there was one person that Rita would have stayed in touch with, it would have been him. But he didn't judge her, you know, he was ready to hear whatever she had to say because obviously something big had to have happened for her to call him. And so he asked her, you know, what's going on? What's going on? And Rita would explain, you know, she fell and she needs help. And Joseph was like, I will be there as soon as I possibly can. And also, I'll have my wife swing by your house to grab, you know,

your toothbrush and some toiletries and a couple of things from home to make your stay at the hospital a bit better. But we're going to get through this. I'll be there as soon as I can. A few hours later, as Joseph was making his way to the hospital to see Rita, Joseph's wife was on her way to Rita's house to pick up her things. And so she pulled up in front of the house and she looked up at the big brick house and it looked the same as it had, you know, 10, 20 years ago. She made her way up to the door. She didn't knock because she knew nobody was home.

And so she used the key that Joseph gave her. She unlocked the door. She opened it up. And immediately she was hit with this horrible smell. So Rita was basically a hoarder. And so she had lots of, you know, plates of food and all the stuff just kind of jammed inside of house and it was all rotting and so her house really smelled horrible not to mention Rita basically never went outside remember she kind of was a hermit for the past 20 years and so

Joseph's wife was kind of bracing for a pretty disgusting living situation but this was far more repulsive than even she had braced for but she knew she had a job to do you know get in there and get some things for Rita and so she kind of began breathing through her mouth only to avoid the smell and so she stepped into the house which again you know is piled high on either side of the hallway with newspapers and just kind of junk. And so she began walking through the house and she eventually turned toward a flight of stairs. She went up to the second floor and the second floor is the same as the first floor, you know, there's plates of food and junk and all this stuff. And she didn't know which bedroom was Rita's. So she just went to the first door that she saw and she opened it up, kind of hoping

that maybe this would be Rita's bedroom. But the second she opened up that door, not only was she hit with more horrible smells, but she saw something in this room that she was not braced for, something that terrified her to the point where she shut the door, turned around, and sprinted out of the house, practically screaming, and then as soon as she was outside, she dialed 911. It would turn out Rita's understanding of what actually transpired 20 years earlier with Lewis inexplicably leaving, you know, the event that basically caused Rita to shut down and cut her whole family off, her understanding of that was totally wrong. Rita had always believed that her son had just kind of stopped loving her or didn't like her anymore or something,

like there was some sort of falling out, and that's why he'd just kind of packed up his stuff and left without even saying goodbye. But that wasn't true. Lewis loved his mother. He didn't just randomly abandon her, but 20 years earlier, when Lewis was 29 years old, while he was still living with Rita in her house, he died somewhat unexpectedly from natural causes. It's believed he had some sort of terminal illness that he may or may not have known about, and it's unclear if he even communicated that he was sick or that he had this illness to his mom. And so 20 years earlier, he went to into his bedroom one night, and he passed away in his bed. And his mother, Rita, instead of going into his bedroom and checking on him,

just didn't go into his bedroom, and instead convinced herself that her son must have abandoned her because he didn't love her anymore, and it sent her into the spiraling depression, and she cut off her whole family, when in reality, Lewis had never left her house. He was still laying in his bed upstairs all those 20 years. And so when Joseph's wife went into Rita's house and went into that first bedroom she saw, on the second floor, what she saw was Lewis's skeleton still wearing a shirt and pants, laying in his bed, obviously deceased, and that's why she went running out of the house and called 911. And so in a very bizarre and morbid way, it was this discovery by Joseph's wife that

would ultimately bring Rita back together again with her family. The next and final story of today's episode is called the Red Ghost. On a spring afternoon in 1883, a young woman named Sarah tidied up her farmhouse in a tiny, settlement called Eagle Creek in Arizona. While Sarah cleaned, her sister Elizabeth took a bucket outside to get water from their outdoor spring. So Sarah and Elizabeth actually lived together in this farmhouse along with their respective families. The American West at this time was sparsely populated and dangerous, so it was not uncommon for families to kind of band together like this. Their husbands herded the sheep and worked the land, while Sarah and Elizabeth looked after the house and also took care

of their collective four kids. And so on this day, as Elizabeth was out getting water, Sarah continued to tidy up the house with one eye on the kids making sure they were okay, when all of a sudden, the family's dogs who were leashed up outside began barking really aggressively. Now for Sarah, this was really alarming, because the dogs typically were pretty docile and didn't make a lot of noise. So clearly, something was going on outside. And so Sarah told the kids to stay inside, and she quickly went outside onto the porch to see what the dogs were barking at. And so once Sarah was out on that porch, she immediately surveyed the area out in front of her, and off to her left and off to her right, was just rocky scrubland.

And then right in front of their house was this big sandy hill that kind of obscured their view off into the distance. And the dogs who were leashed up right in front of the property out in the front yard, they were all looking right at that hill and barking at it. At first, Sarah couldn't understand what the dogs were even barking at. I mean, she looked around a few more times to see if she was missing anything, but there was nothing happening out here. But then, as Sarah continued to stare at this hill where the dogs were still barking, she suddenly saw this huge creature emerge over the top and begin coming down the hill in her direction.

It was this massive four-legged creature with red fur and its back was all twisted up. And on the back of this creature was this man, except it was not a normal-looking man. His face was horrible and sunken and his mouth was in this huge grin. And as she stared at him in total shock and disbelief, she saw he was missing eyes. Now, Sarah was a deeply religious person. And so as she's watching this creature being ridden on by this person come charging towards her, all she could think was, this is the devil. The devil is riding on this red creature and it's coming to get me and my family.

And so instinctively, she just turned, bolted inside the house, barricaded the door with the kitchen table, and then rounded up the four kids and sat in the and huddled over them, praying to God to save them from the devil. But as she was doing this, Sarah suddenly heard this blood-curdling scream come from somewhere outside. Then she knew it sounded way too human of a scream to be coming from the devil or the creature it was riding on. And then she remembered her sister was out there getting water. That scream almost certainly came from her sister. But Sarah was so scared. She couldn't move. And she had these four kids to look after. And so instead of going out to try to save her sister, she just held the kids

closer and continued to pray, hoping her sister would survive. Hours later, Sarah was still inside the barricaded house, clutching the children, praying, and her sister, Elizabeth, had not made another sound. And she had not come back to the house. So she's been gone for hours at this point. And Sarah feels horrible. All she wants to do was go out there and find her sister, but she just feels like She can't leave her kids, and she knows the devil is out there, so she can't go out there. But just then, she hears footsteps out on the porch, and then she hears the sound of the doorknob turning and then bumping up against the barricade. And Sarah immediately thinks, it's the devil.

The devil's come back, and so she screams and the kids are screaming. But then, on the other side of the door, Sarah hears the sound of two familiar voices. It was the sound of her and Elizabeth's husbands. They had come back from her hurting the sheep, and they're calling into her like, hey, what's going on here? Let us in. And so this huge wave of relief came over Sarah, she rushed to the door, she got rid of the barricade, flung it open, and immediately began sobbing and telling these men about what had happened, about the devil, about hearing that scream, which she believed was Elizabeth.

And oh, by the way, Elizabeth is still not back yet, no idea what happened to her. And so the two husbands are immediately so concerned, they have no idea about the validity of the story, but Elizabeth is gone. They have to go find her. And so the two men, they grab their guns and lanterns, and they head off towards the outdoor spring, to hopefully find Elizabeth. And so the two men, they began making their way down this path towards the spring, and at first they were walking, kind of keeping their composure. But quickly, as they're calling out for Elizabeth and not getting a response,

they just took off running. And as they turned the corner and they finally saw the spring, they also saw Elizabeth. And she was face down on the ground with blood all around her. She was dead. And so as Elizabeth's husband wept over Elizabeth's body, Sarah's husband rode off into town to get. at the local coroner to come out and investigate to see what happened to Elizabeth. The only thing

that seemed fairly obvious about Elizabeth's death, at least to the two husbands, was that Elizabeth looked like she had been trampled to death. There were all these hoof prints all around her when they found her. And so the coroner, he comes out and he looks at the scene, he sees Elizabeth, and he agrees that it looks like she was trampled to death. However, when he examined the hoof prints that were all over the place, they were way too big to be a horse's hoof print. And so the coroner looks at the corner, literally said, I can't say she died by being trampled by a horse. This was not a horse. And so the coroner wound up speaking to Sarah, who would tell him all about, you know, how the devil came over the hill on this big four-legged creature that was all red,

and she heard the scream, which must have been Elizabeth. And so the devil has trampled her sister to death. That's what happened. Now, the coroner agreed with Sarah that very likely her sister had been trampled to death by something gigantic. However, he didn't believe the actual details of Sarah's story. He did not believe that the devil killed Elizabeth. And so ultimately, because the coroner just couldn't be sure what actually happened here, he wound up listing Elizabeth's cause of death as just unknown. But the coroner's doubts did not stop the story of the devil from spreading. Before long, basically everybody on the Arizona frontier had heard about the devil and the strange creature he rode to the point where they were given a nickname. Together, they were called the Red Ghost.

Still, most people who heard the story didn't really believe it actually happened. They figured it was kind of a joke or maybe an exaggeration, you know, just sort of lore passed around town. But over the next few years, following Elizabeth's death, sightings of the so-called Red Ghost became much more frequent and more strange. Many campers claim to have seen the Red Ghost trotting through the Arizona Wilderness. In fact, some of these people claim that in the middle of the night, the Red Ghost would appear and trample on their tents.

One cowboy claimed he got close enough to the Red Ghost that he was able to actually lasso its neck. However, the Red Ghost in turn took off so quickly and so powerfully that the cowboy got dragged and had to let go. And so stories like these, run-ins with the Red Ghost out in the wild, persisted for years. Until about a decade after Elizabeth's death, this farmer in eastern Arizona happened to look out his window and there, standing in his turnip patch, was the so-called Red Ghost. And this farmer had heard all the stories about the Red Ghost, and he had already made up his mind about what he would do

if he ever ran into the Red Ghost, and that would be to shoot it. And so what did he do? He grabbed his rifle, he leaned out the window, and he fired. The Red Ghost crumpled to the ground, right in the middle of the Turnip Patch. Once the creature was down,

the farmer rushed outside and ran up to the carcass to finally see what the heck the Red Ghost was, what was causing all these stories to spread over so many years. And when he got out there, and actually looked down at the Red Ghost. He knew immediately that all the stories about this creature had been wrong. It would turn out, the Red Ghost was not the devil riding some supernatural monster. Instead, the Red Ghost was a combination of two very mortal beings.

The first of these two beings was a creature that, if you saw it today, you would know what it was, but for folks in Arizona in the late 1800s, they would have no way of knowing what this creature was. They had never seen it before. had red fur, a long neck, and a humped back. It was a camel. It had been brought to the United States from the Mediterranean to help haul supplies through the western frontier, and it had escaped captivity. But this camel alone was not responsible for scaring the people of Arizona. What terrified the people of Arizona and created the legend of the red ghost was the rider of the camel. When Sarah saw the rider on the camel, at first she thought it was a person,

But when she looked more closely, she saw they didn't have eyes and they had this disgusting, toothy grin. They just couldn't be human to her. And so she had decided, this must be the devil. But it would turn out her first instinct was right. This was a person. There was a person on the back of that camel. The devil on the back of the camel was a man's decomposing corpse.

And because he was a decomposing corpse, his flesh and eyes had rotted from his face, making it look like he had no eyes and gave him this huge toothy grin, because there was no flesh there. Now, we don't know who this man was or how exactly he died. All we know is at some point he was riding this camel. This camel escaped. He died and somehow didn't fall off and his dead body remained in an upright seated position on this camel. And then this camel just roamed around Arizona for years with this corpse on its back, giving the impression that it was the devil riding on a monster. Today, the Red Ghost remains a local legend in Arizona. In fact, there's even a permanent statue of the camel in a small Arizona town called Quartzite.

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, 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 Lacassio, Jordan Stidham, and Cole Lacassio. Production Coordination by Samantha Collins. Production support by Antonio Manada and Delana Corley. Artwork by Jessica Klogstenkiner. Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast.

And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out, on the Mr. Ballin podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballin YouTube channel that very same day. And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballin. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So that's going to do it.

I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya.