RedHanded - Episode 372 - Halloween Special Part 1: Pennhurst Asylum & The Mummy Next Door

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

The winter solstice is almost here – the time when the threshold between the living and the dead is at its weakest. And here at RedHanded towers, that only means one thing: spooky story swap time!Hannah and Suru have once again searched high and low for the spookiest, most bone-chilling cases they can find, to tell each other for the first time. For the first of our two story-swaps this year, Hannah takes us through the gates of the monstrous (and monstrously haunted) Pennhurst Asylum, and Suru tells the tale of a mummified savant, lying in a house on the North Yorkshire moors – and her two siblings, who reeked of death…Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti.

And welcome to Halloween. Yes. One. I'm Saruti. And welcome to Halloween 1. If you are new, welcome with me on the new. What we do in Halloween times, in October times, our high holiday here at Red Handed HQ, is try and find the most disturbing stuff we can. Uh-huh. And ruin your day with it. Uh-huh.

But you keep coming back for more. So Saruti doesn't know my story. Mm-hmm. She has one for me later on but i'm gonna start let's do it i think it's one you've probably heard of and it's walks the line between spooky and sad oh yeah oh no i love spooky i hate sad yeah me too i'll do my best okay in southeastern penn Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of somewhere called Spring City, is an abandoned asylum.

Over eight decades, it became the repository for 10,000 people, people deemed undesirable by the rest of society. Those with profound disabilities were separated from the communities in which they lived and largely totally forgotten. A contemporary newspaper described the scenes in the asylum and they said, 1,700 human beings stored away in crumbling warehouses, the urine stench of decades soaked so deeply into the walls and floors that it can never be washed out. The asylum was vastly understaffed, to the point that severe mental health crises and psychoses

were left untreated for days on end. Abuse and violence were rife. And one staff member went on to commit one of the most brutal crimes the county had ever seen. I don't know this. Do you not? No, I don't know this. Do you not? No, I don't know this even a little bit. I'm upset already.

I'm telling you the story of Pennhurst Asylum. More than half of the people who were sent there never left. And some say they're still there. Okay, look. Haunted houses, one thing. Ha wanted asylums we will get onto this is it i know i'm jumping ahead is it still an asylum today or is it like a scary rundown place it is a scary rundown place oh my god yeah why do i want to go i also want to go but within very strict parameters which I will take you through with prophylactics

demonological prophylactics it's not even that okay yeah you'll understand when we get there can I just have you seen the film Session 9

no oh my god when you get home tonight this evening or download it for one of our many plane journeys that we have coming up it is on Amazon Prime I thought it have coming up, it is on Amazon Prime.

I thought it was on Netflix, but it's on Amazon Prime. It's called Session 9. It's only got 6.4 out of 10 on IMDb, but I do think that's quite high for a horror film. Okay. I do think that's quite high. And it's basically about an asbestos crew that have to go into an abandoned asylum to rip all the asbestos off so it can be developed. And they find creepy tapes.

It's so good and that is what i'm going to be thinking of while you're telling me this entire story and it's got that weird ginger guy who was in csi let's go okay i'll do my best to live up to such a a raving review it is lofty heights you have to hit uh though i will say, one of the parameters I will set if we go to this place, if we find any coins, don't touch them. No, no, no, no, no. Just like in Lizzie Borden's house. Exactly.

Put them the shit back. Don't fucking take them. And Penhurst Asylum has such a reputation for paranormal goings-on that a couple of years ago, it was the site of the most extensive paranormal investigation in history.

So come with me. It's time. Come one, come all. Come one, come all. To open the creaky gates of Pennhurst Asylum. Who needs a soundboard? That's the scary cat that runs across you as you walk in. But before we get to ghost stories, we're going to go back to the 1900s, early, early 1900s,

where there was one word upon everybody's lips. Eugenics. It was the answer to all of society's problems. The key to the advancement of the human race. Whether you like it or fucking not, that's what everyone thought. Not just the Germans. No. Everyone.

Central to the eugenic philosophy is that you can breed out disease, disability, and anything else you don't like. Leading the charge on eugenics was Henry H. Goddard. A leading eugenicist, segregationalist, shit scientist, and really, really bad egg. He lobbied the government to tackle what he called the rising tide of feeble-mindedness, and warned that a, quote, hereditary taint could ruin society as we know it. People with disabilities were at the sharp end of this criticism. Goddard

went as far to say that every feeble-minded person is a potential criminal. So it was decided that any individuals who were deemed to be defective would be separated from everybody else. And that was a law. And actually, the government started to recommend something they called perpetual quarantine for these people. US legislature appointed a commission for the care of the feeble-minded. And they stated that disabled individuals were both unfit for citizenship and also a menace to the peace. And this commission called for such people to be taken into custodial care by the government. New institutions were cropping up all over the place and they were pitched as treatment centres but the main thing they were doing was removing people

from everyone else. And just outside Spring City in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania, stood one such hellhole. In 1908, the doors opened of the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic, later known as Pennhurst Asylum. I believe it actually spent a period of time being called a state school. Oh no. Hmm. Oh no. I have Google imaged it, and I not gonna lie when it opened up it might also because we have the aircon cranked up in here but i did feel a shiver anybody in that period of time

in the early 1900s in the area surrounding penhurst that was deemed by anybody to have a mental or physical disability was carted off to the asylum and deemed feeble-minded. That could be anybody at all, mute, deaf, blind, even people with offensive habits or imperfect speech. The building was designed to house no more than 500 patients, but it was overcrowded very quickly. And soon enough, the institution was being pressured to also house immigrants, criminals and orphans, all undesirable people. Pennhurst covered 633 acres when it first opened, but it doubled in size. It had more than 30 buildings and was intended to run as an entirely self-sufficient complex.

It even had its own power plant, and they policed their own grounds. Everything else, upkeep, etc., was down to the residents to carry out. They grew their own food, they made their own mattresses, they made their own shoes, they did their own laundry, sewing, baking, butchering, painting, everything you can think of. I'm just like, they sound pretty useful then. Everything they couldn't make themselves was brought in by a private railway that only went to the asylum so there was no interaction with the community around them over eight decades more than 10 000 people were institutionalized there when they arrived they would be sorted into categories everyone was either an imbecile or insane they were epileptic or they were healthy 10,000 people were institutionalised there. When they arrived, they would be sorted into categories. Everyone was either an imbecile or insane,

they were epileptic or they were healthy, and they had good or poor dental health. It was built for 500 patients, as I said, but at its peak, Pennhurst had more than 3,000 patients filling its walls. And quite a few of the inmates had no pre-existing mental health issues at all. They were just orphans or abandoned or migrants. But they were locked up in Pennhurst for the rest of their lives with people who very much did have

severe mental health issues. Big yikes. Mm-hmm. Cleanliness and hygiene plummeted in the overpopulation as it always does and for decades and decades what happened behind the walls of penhurst asylum was just not thought about by anyone who didn't live there it's much easier when you take everybody you don't like or think is worthy and shove them into a big house and close the door and just

yeah then they were totally self-sufficient. They had their own private train. Didn't need to think about it. Yeah. Until someone called Bill Bandini, a young reporter at Philadelphia's TV10, followed a tip and decided to investigate the institution. In 1968, a series of five news segments aired on TV10 called Suffer the Little Children. Oh, yes, I've heard of this.

Which is obviously this series of TV episodes, also a Stephen King book. And it's a quote from Matthew in the Bible. And I can't remember the exact thing, but Jesus says something like, suffer the little children, don't reprimand them, send them to me in heaven, something like that. America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry.

But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media.

To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. And once these episodes aired, the nation was appalled. That was in 1968. We're not talking turn of the century. The world had changed, but Pennhurst had been left behind. But even worse than that, even after Suffer the Little Children came out, the asylum didn't close for another 20 years. Bandini reported that Pennhurst Asylum spent less on its patients per day than a zoo would on its animals. And even if you haven't heard of Pennhurst Asylum specifically, you have probably seen these pictures.

Bandini's reporting showed naked, emaciated inmates rocking, pacing, twitching, curled up in balls on the floor. It's absolutely horrifying. Children were locked in cages and adults were chained to giant cribs for days on end. Oh my God. It's like that documentary, Titty Cut Follies. Exactly that. Exactly that. That was enough for me. I don't need to watch another one. But I'm there, mentally, seeing it. And we've got a quote from Bandini here.

Think of a ward of infants and children from the ages of six months to five years old. There are 80 of them in metal cages. And they had to attend to them all day, every day. These people were literally lying in their own feces for days. Oh my God. Injuries, accidents and brutal violence were very common. Whilst Bandini was filming, a patient bit off another patient's earlobe while he slept. Ugh.

How did it stay open for so long after this came out? No one cares about these people. Ugh. And one patient choked her roommate to death and this is all in the time that he's filming which is only a few weeks some residents were so desperate for human attention that they hurt themselves or they were so desperate for a bath that they smeared themselves with their own shit and no psychologists worked at evenings or weekends so if a patient had a mental breakdown or was in some sort of crisis out of office hours they were on their own until the doctors came back

and some people who worked there would volunteer their time on weekends to like clean up the patients and stuff but not much so it's it's so understaffed that it perpetuated an atmosphere of like harsh discipline. Yeah, I mean, exactly. The fact that anybody at all volunteered their spare time to go clean it shows that not everybody who worked there was some sort of monster. But if you are in a situation, and I'm not making excuses for them, that you are so underfunded, so understaffed, there are so few people there. It's like one person to however many people that are there who are not even sounds like receiving any sort of care for their mental illness. Yeah, the default is going to be, well, I just have to keep as much order as is possible.

Yeah. A doctor told Bandini that in order to punish a patient for bullying another one, he found out which injection would hurt the most, but leave the least permanent injury. And that's what he would do to punish them. Wow. This one's even worse. Oh, no. The protocol for when a patient bit another one. First time round, reprimanded, told off.

Second time round, they'd be sent to the dentist oh no and they would sit in a rusty chair and the dentist would pull out all of their teeth

one by one oh my god thousands of teeth were removed over the years inside that asylum it's just like that thing we say right when you watch horror films or whatever,

and they're like based on true events and they're like, nothing is as bad that anybody could think of that hasn't already happened. And that chair is still there today. Oh, how much money to spend the night at Penthurst Asylum? But you have to sleep in the chair. I have to sleep in the chair. Or sit in the chair. I do have five grand.

Nice. Naturally, restraint was a punishment as well, chemical or physical. They would sedate them for as long as humanly possible, or they would chain the patients to their beds for unthinkable stretches of time. And there's one report of a female patient from 1976 that really sticks out. She had been so extremely self-destructive that she totally blinded herself. Her medical files show the number of hours per month that that woman had been restrained so i have done the maths oh no no sad maths sad very sad maths maths makes me sad anyway this is even worse

before i tell you how many hours this woman was restrained i'm going to tell you that a month has between 672 hours and 744 hours, depending on how long it is, obviously. In 1976, this woman who went on to blind herself was restrained for 651 hours. Oh, my God. In August, she was restrained for 720 hours. In September, 674 hours and then in october she was restrained for a total of 647 hours when you said the first month i misheard you and i thought you were saying that's how long she was restrained for the whole year so i was like one month out of the year not that that's okay okay so she's basically just completely restrained the entire time yes um and to be clear that is

just gonna make you lose the will to live i i'm getting there it's just so i know we've been doing a show for a very long time but the levels of evil fucking depraved shit humans are willing to do to each other maybe it's a good thing that we're still shocked by it i don't want to get to a point that i'm not shocked by it yeah that's that's true i've also got more horrible medical facts for you it is recorded that inmates at penhurst were attacking raping and killing each other in the 60, only 200 of the 2,700 people in there were in any kind of educational or care program. A lot of the patients were high-functioning

and could have improved elsewhere. Actually, in 1974, a legal dispute was filed by former resident Terry Lee Holderman. She had visited her parents at home and they saw that she had some unexplained bruises. Eventually, Terry told her parents and police about intense physical, emotional and psychological abuse that she'd suffered at the hands of her supposed caregivers. And she also said that the workers hadn't just been hurting the patients and residents themselves, but in a classic defied and conquer move, they were also arranging for patients to bully and assault each other. Oh my god.

And after that, finally the institution's days were numbered, after decades of growing legal pressure, plummeting funds, abuse and neglect. In its final years, Pennhurst had a budget shortfall of $4 million, thousands of patients and nine doctors. Fucking hell. A newspaper headline read, The Shame of Pennsylvania, A Vast Junkyard of Wasted Humans. Yep, it's like when we wrote the book and we were talking about the Romanian orphanages.

And how in Romanian to English they translate to slaughterhouses of the soul. Yeah. So this one, Pennhurst closed. It closed in December 1987. That's two years before I was born. I like I think that's the most shocking thing about this. This isn't some pastos, 1800s, like just, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. What's a brain?

Just chuck these people in here. We're acting crazy. 1987. Yeah. Horrific. And I've got one more horrifier for you. Richard Greast started working at Pennhurst when he was just 19 years old. Oh no.

And he worked there for eight years. Until May 1978. By then he was 27 years old. He was a dad, he had two kids, and he and his wife were expecting another one in just a few weeks. And they all lived with Grease's grandmother and his brother's family as well. On the 10th of May, 1978,

a neighbour saw Grease and his wife's family as well. On the 10th of May, 1978, a neighbour saw Greaston, his wife, in the morning. They looked very happy. Greaston has his arm around his wife, and they seemed in pretty good spirits. But that very same day, at around 1pm, something snapped. At 1.30, Greaston's brother and his family all ran out of the house and rang the police.

An hour later, as police prepared to storm the house, Grease emerged, covered in blood. During that hour, Richard Greased had picked up a screwdriver and walked up to the second floor bedroom of the house. There, in a wild frenzy, he stabbed his pregnant wife, Janice, to death with the screwdriver. And then, he cut her body open, retrieved his unborn son,

and mutilated her. And he kept going. He went through the house to find his six-year-old daughter, who's called Beth-Anne, and he stabbed her in the eye. And then attacked his own grandmother with a butcher's knife. At trial, a psychiatrist testifies that Grease was suffering from extreme psychosis. Okay. Yeah, no duh.

He thought that he was killing demons. He thought that all of the women in his family had the devil in them, and he was going to kill the devil and then resurrect them. He was actually found not guilty by reason of insanity, so he managed to pull that one off, but I think it's pretty... Yeah, the question for me there is like, why all the mutilation? If you think that all of these people,

all of these women in your life are, you know, whatever the fuck he was saying, by demons or whatever in league with satan why do you have to horribly mutilate them he went on to spend about 40 years in a state hospital and he was let out in august 2022 wow yeah i did not expect that so he's just out there living his life yep he's on his fourth wife now what yeah i got married three times in state hospital i can't even get a text back out here i mean you can if you are willing to murder a man who stabbed his pregnant wife to death with a screwdriver and then mutilated his unborn baby they're fucking going like hotcakes apparently oh my god and there's actually you probably will recognize the photograph of him there's a photo

of him coming out of the house covered in bloody shirtless i'd actually want to pull it sir richard grease let's have a little look g-r-e-i-s-t oh yeah there he is there he is he kind of looks a little bit like Prince Andrew. That is not what I thought you were going to say. Did you think I was going to say he was hot? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. No, but that older picture of him. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true.

The chinless wonder. So obviously the folklore surrounding Greece's crimes is that he was driven mad by the asylum, by working there. Sure. So that's part of the law, right? Got it. I mean, that will really put the fucking horrible, dirty, nasty, little scary cherry on top of the terrifying cake if you have a man who does what he did. And he worked there for eight years. Anyway.

In 1982, the Department of Justice finally indicted nine Penthurst staff members for assaulting and abusing patients. In 1985, as a part of the lawsuit, researchers looked into 1,500 former patients, some of whom had been released from Penthurst and some of whom had been kept in. The ones who had been released and went on to get care other places lived at least six years longer than the patients who were left behind and not a single one of them became homeless or went to jail wow in 87 the last patient left penthouse asylum and the building was abandoned overnight it stands empty with gurneys and wheelchairs littering the halls. It wasn't long before the ghost hunters turned up.

If it's going to be anywhere, it's going to be there. My God. And absolutely not fun fact, but fact nonetheless, 5,000 people died in there. Jesus Christ. And half of them were children. Oh, I actually feel sick. And I mentioned at the top of my bit that Pennhurst Asylum was the site of the most extensive paranormal investigation in history.

I would like to clarify. That is not because of what was found. It's because it's the largest surface area that has been investigated because there's so many buildings, blah, blah, blah. So that's why it's called that. How much to go sit in one of the medical procedure rooms of Pennhurst, doors locked from the outside, and it will automatically open an hour later. And you have to do a Ouija board I feel sick just saying it can I do the spirit box instead yes how long for an hour an hour doors locked oh 50p mate do it tomorrow lights are off yeah yeah yeah oh Oh my God. No way. Fuck it.

So during this big old investigation, these ghost hunters spent two weeks in the asylum and went through every inch with their little machines. And they did report a lot of activity. They heard voices saying things like, go away, I'll kill you. Why won't you leave? Why did you come here? That sort of thing.

They also heard footsteps, doors slammed. And they also had quite a lot of vomiting coming from empty rooms children's laughter was recorded also and some people say that medical instruments moved some say they were thrown but there's one particular building ominously called the quaker building where things really kicked off. In there, rocking chairs moved without anyone being anywhere near them. Rocking chairs should be illegal. No, thanks. Investigators said they were shoved from behind and one of them even had a deep red mark on the small of their back.

And interestingly, the electrical meter readings were super super high in there but there was no electricity in any part of that nest they also reported shadows manifesting and then dissipating at will a small female child apparently showed up quite a lot with um long black hair but if it's a shadow how do you know another ghost hunter said that they quite a few times saw a figure that was hunched over with long dangling arms and another one said that they saw a full-fledged apparition of a woman in a nurse's uniform so that's the story of Pennhurst and the paranormal mark that it's left on the buildings. But whether you buy the ghost stuff or not, there is another mark that has been left.

Pennhurst obviously lives on in pop culture. If you've watched Stranger Things, you'll recognise the name because in the fourth season, all of the kids go to Pennhurst Mental Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Oh. But this is when I was talking about parameters. Uh-huh. Hit me.

Inside Pennhurst Asylum. Currently, right now I'm sure because it is October. Uh-huh. There is a haunted house attraction. Uh-huh. You can pay $70 to walk through Pennhurst as actors in straight jackets lurch at you. And apparently hauntworld.com calls it

the top haunted house in the US. Don't love that. No, there's a lot of campaigns to try and get it shut down. And yeah, a lot of people are really not very happy about it. It's so recent. It's so recent and it's so gross. Like, I think it's different to the straitjackets so gross yes that's the thing and like the the actors will like give you sugar

pills to like swallow and like awful so this is what i mean if it was like just a like solid ghost hunt sure 100 i would go yeah yeah i'm not doing this shit. No. That's disgusting. And I went, I did your favorite thing and I looked at TripAdvisor. Yes. And quite a lot of the reviews are like, you have to queue for ages and then it's not even scary. And you can tell that they're not ghosts and they're just actors. I'm like, okay, Janice. Oh my God. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's not. No no let's not go i would i would go and like be there i have no interest in putting any money or time or energy towards these people who are running this thing no absolutely not i totally agree because you,000 people over 80 years. Fuck that. Yeah. No, let's not go. I think next year I would quite like us to go to Clophill. Yes, I agree. Stay tuned for that. I'm not going to explain what it is right now, but it will be scary.

Because I think because it won't be like an organized thing, I think it'll be even scarier. Oh, totally. I totally agree. We'll just take the spirit box up there. Someone will probably call the police, though. Because the people who live around there are fucking sick of people going up there. So they totally. I totally agree. We'll just take the spirit box up there. Someone will probably call the police, though. Because the people who live around there are fucking sick of people going up there. So they'll probably call the police.

We just have to not scream that loud. Okay, okay. Deal. We'll have to get silencers for our faces. But I can't wait. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul. The man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry.

The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Combs. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom. But I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry.

Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is The Rise and Fall of Diddy. Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery+. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus.

In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me

and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. All right. Excellent work, Hannah. Everybody feels grossed out, sick, horrified by humanity.

I'm going to take us a little bit more insular, a little bit smaller scale. Okay. One family, to be precise. So let's go. Okay. The 25th of September, 2018, began as an ordinary autumn day in the picturesque market town of Helmsley, North Yorkshire, here in the UK. You can all imagine it in your minds if you conjure up some sort of chocolate box little village. It's very charming, brings to mind old-fashioned village life where everybody knows and trusts everyone else. Emmerdale, got it.

Tick. But in 2018, it was becoming increasingly clear that something weird was in the air. Staff at the local pharmacy had noticed a strange man and woman coming in regularly over the past few weeks, buying large quantities of surgical spirit, also known as robbing alcohol. Knowing that this substance is usually just used to, like, treat wounds and sores, the pharmacy staff were concerned about the amount that these two were buying. But it wasn't the only thing they were worried about,

because according to the staff at the pharmacy, the pair also smelled of what could only be described as death. So, the next time they returned to make their now habitual order of surgical spirit, the staff at the pharmacy felt like they should probably confront them about it. Noticing a name, Inayashitake, scrawled on a pink folder in the middle-aged man's arms. The pharmacy staff, tentatively looking for a way to broach the subject, asked if the surgical spirit was for her. And like a deer in headlights, the woman blurted

out a surprising admission. Our sister isn't unconscious. Oh my God. Yeah. With alarm bells now ringing, staff tipped off the authorities, who immediately sent paramedics to this suspicious family's address at 41 Bondgate in Helmsley. There they found 49-year-old Rina lying on a mattress on the floor of an upstairs bedroom. The blankets were pulled up around her neck and she wasn't moving. Rina's siblings and their elderly mother indicated that they had been caring for her through a period of illness and that they hoped she would wake up soon. But Rina wouldn't be waking up now or ever

because she had been dead for at least six weeks. And her body was beginning to mummify itself. My God. Like that poor girl, is it Lacey something, who like melted into the sofa? Oh. It's like a child neglect case in the States. Oh God. It sounds familiar.

And yeah, I just want to write, like, this happened in 2018. This case. Now, as word spread about the body found on Bondgate, an eerie picture emerged of a complicated and isolated family. The cottage was home to matriarch Michiko, then 75, and her three adult children, Yoshika, 51, Takehiro, 46, and of course Rina, 49. Michiko was originally from Japan, but had moved to England almost 40 years earlier, when she had met and married a British illustrator named Peter Calladine.

Despite the marriage ending years later, Michiko and her children remained in North Yorkshire, moving from the nearby village of Nunnington to Helmsley in the late 90s. Now, the grown-up siblings were privately educated in the UK and were said to have excelled in various academic and creative pursuits in their younger years. But, rather than going out into the world and making a name for themselves as everyone had expected they would, instead, the trio had holed up with their mother at 41 Bondgate for the past two decades. That's extraordinarily Japanese of them. Uh-huh. The house also had no modern devices. They didn't have a TV, they didn't have any computers, they didn't even have a radio.

Despite living in the UK for most of their lives and having formerly been fluent in English, the family now only spoke Japanese to one another. And according to interpreters later involved in the case, they also had a peculiar dialect that they developed within their family unit that was, quote, quite unique from standard Japanese. So it's very, very, very insular. Communicating in their own secret code with few links to the outside world, the Asatakis were as detached from reality as it's possible to be. But how did things get so bad? Well, Rina's siblings, Yoshika and Takahiro, then aged 46 and 51, were an occasional sight for the residents of Helmsley. They were described by the neighbours as a quote odd pair to say the least.

They would walk hand in hand, leading many in the village to wrongly assume that they were a couple, and they'd always walk with their heads bowed low, avoiding all eye contact. Their only interaction with outsiders was to collect the family's weekly shopping from the local supermarket, which they ordered through a hand-written list. Oh my god. In all honesty, it seems like the whole village was creeped out by them. Yeah, I would be. And though they'd lived in the area for over 20 years,

nobody seemed to really know anything about this mysterious family. The clan's matriarch, Michiko, was sometimes spotted letting Yoshiko and Takehiro into the house. But she didn't appear to ever leave herself. And as for middle child, 49-year-old Reena, well, when the news came out that her remains had been found, shockingly her neighbours didn't even recognise the photo that was published in the papers. They had no idea that there was another person living at that cottage. Rumours had swirled of worried residents

reporting the sightings of a small child through the window to the police a few years prior. Welfare checks were actually carried out, but it was confirmed that no child was present. But I think what happened is that Rina, who stood at just 4 foot 11 and who was incredibly petite, was probably the one looking through the window. And people had mistaken this woman who was nearly 50 for a child.

There's something really haunting about that. Yeah. And so apart from these eerie sightings, Reena had remained hidden from sight for decades. To the people of Helmsley, Reina Yashitake didn't exist. But Reina hadn't always been invisible. In fact, she was once considered something of a rising star. The whole family were known for being overachievers. Yoshika was a talented pianist who studied at the Royal College of Music, while Takehiro was described

as a writer. Rina was similarly gifted, if not more so than her siblings. In the 80s, she'd attended the prestigious Queen Mary's boarding school between Thirst and Ripon. According to an old dorm mate, Rina was, quote, not your average kind of girl. In fact, she was kind of a genius. She achieved top marks in her A-levels, including English, quote, not your average kind of girl. In fact, she was kind of a genius. She achieved top marks in her A-levels, including English, Greek, Latin, and History, and she even won a scholarship to attend Cambridge University. At Cambridge, Rina attained a first-class degree in Classics and Linguistics. While Rina was known for being exceptionally studious, she also made friends at school and took part in all areas of school life. She was described as a lovely girl with a good sense of humour,

who used our artistic talents to make beautiful handmade Christmas cards for her friends. And her artwork was of such a high standard that she even managed to sell some pieces for hefty sums while she was still at university. In short, Rina was a prodigy. But something happened after she graduated from Cambridge. Right as she seemed poised to bloom, Rina returned to the family home in North Yorkshire and never left. She didn't find a job or socialise or even venture outside. She became a recluse, never seen or heard from again by anyone outside of her tight family unit.

This once budding talent turned into a wallflower, left to wither and die within the dark walls of a pretty sandstone cottage in the Yorkshire countryside. Now it's unclear what exactly happened to Rena, but it's generally believed that she suffered some kind of mental health breakdown.

Some psychological conditions, including schizophrenia for example, are known to usually manifest when a person reaches their 20s. We do know that Rina was taken by her family to a local GP in 2013 for reported aggressive episodes, with her siblings allegedly concerned that she could hurt their ageing mother. But when inpatient treatment was suggested, the family got spooked. Expressing fears that something may happen to Rina in hospital, they took her home

and did not seek support from healthcare services again. Five years later, in 2018, Rena was dead. So what the hell happened? At the autopsy of Rena's partial mummified remains, decomposition was so advanced that it was impossible for the coroner to ascertain a cause of death. Based on the state of the body, the coroner believed that she'd been dead for at least six weeks by the time she was discovered

on the 25th of September. A further clue came in the form of a handwritten diary found at the cottage. Written in Japanese, the unknown author indicated that Rina had suddenly stopped eating back in August, sometime after news arrived that their biological father had passed away in Japan.

Whilst her mother and siblings had tried to convince Rina to accept food and drink, she adamantly refused. And ultimately, they decided to leave her to it. It's assumed that Rina passed away from subsequent starvation and malnutrition of her own choosing, without third-party involvement. But what is stranger than Rina's death in this case is her family's behaviour. When paramedics first made the grisly discovery of her mummified body,

they weren't met with a grieving family. Instead, the family were insisting that Rina was still alive. At a later inquest, Rina's older sister, Yoshika, bizarrely explained that Rina, quote, looked like she was nourished by eating her soul. Even though she was not eating, she was nourished with spiritual food and was fulfilled. What? Oh yes. It seemed impossible to investigators that an entire well-educated family could truly believe that their sister, whose remains had been releasing a stench of death

so potent that it clung to her siblings' clothes and it was noticed in the community, had survived without eating or drinking for months. But Yoshika insisted. Rina was simply comatose, with her and Takahiro applying surgical spirit to cleanse her body while she couldn't move or bathe herself. And it's the application of these chemicals that had led to a whirlwind of speculation that perhaps the family were up to something darker. That perhaps

they were intentionally turning their sister into a mummy. And this brings us to the fascinating but eerie world of Sokushin Butsu. I don't want to go to there. We have to. Because I have wanted to go into there for a very, very long time. I actually wanted to do a whole shorthand on this, but we're going to talk about it here. Sokushin Butsu translates loosely to a Buddha in his very body. And this refers to the practice of self-mummification undertaken by certain Japanese Buddhist monks. Yeah, I've seen these guys. So these monks basically gradually starve and dehydrate themselves over the course of several years to achieve mummification while they are still alive. This practice was officially outlawed in Japan in the late 19th century

and has since mainly only existed in scary stories, but I'm not going to say it doesn't still happen. But surely it couldn't have taken place in the 21st century, much less in an ordinary rural street in the UK. But there's something about the Ashiteke family that makes this spooky possibility not seem quite so implausible. After all, they were known to practice Japanese Buddhism, and according to Rina's old friend from boarding school,

she would even get up at 5am every day to do Buddhist prayers in the library. Some online sleuths who have looked into this case have suggested that perhaps Rina, in the throes of a mental health episode, had delusions of being one of the enlightened souls who became a living Buddha. Could she have instructed her siblings to apply the surgical spirit to her body as she inched closer to death? We can't possibly say for certain if Rina's family members were thinking of Sokushin Butsu as they tended to her fading body and much less whether Rina was conscious of what was happening before her death. We just don't have the information about what went

on inside that house in the years and months and weeks before Rina's body was found. But the mummification of her body and Yoshika's comments that Rina was being spiritually fed by eating her salt mean that it's almost impossible for us not to speculate. As incredible as it seems, Rina's story has some disturbing parallels with another case that took place in Japan in 2010. Sogen Kato was thought to be the nation's

oldest living man at 110 years old. But when authorities visited the house to arrange a celebration for his 111th birthday, they were met by shifty relatives who were trying to usher them away. And the mummified corpse of Sogan

himself, who had in fact passed away back in 1978 at the age of 79, was discovered. Which is kind of awkward and horrible. Sogan had lain in his bedroom for over 30 years in this house, with his family never reporting his death. Relatives told police that he had, quote, confined himself in his room for more than 30 years and that he became a living Buddha. But in the meantime, they had collected the equivalent of over £70,000 in pension payments for him. Convenient.

Yeah. So did the Cato family genuinely believe that Sogan had become a living mummy? Or were they just scamming the government? And if so, could Rina's relatives also have been trying to cover their tracks? My question was that. You don't have to keep the dead body in your house to collect pension checks.

You could have got rid of him. Yeah. So yes, was this what Rina's family were up to? Possibly, but it seems unlikely. The surviving family were initially charged with preventing a decent and lawful burial for Rina, but as the investigation went on, medical professionals concluded that the family members genuinely believed that Rina was still alive. They couldn't be convicted of abuse or neglect of a corpse because in their eyes, Rina wasn't a. They couldn't be convicted of abuse or neglect of a corpse

because in their eyes, Rina wasn't a corpse. She was their living, breathing sister and daughter. According to DI Nicola Holden, the family held on to their shared delusion that Rina was alive for several months after she was discovered, requiring extensive counselling to help them accept her death. Ultimately, legal proceedings were dropped entirely as it was felt that it wasn't really in the public interest to convict the family.

So they were free to return to the cottage where Rina had lived and died. And that is where they still reside to this day. And the little girl... Oh no. ...is still standing in the window. No. Imagine if you live fucking next door. No, thank you.

I wonder whether, I mean, it's sort of like madness genius thing, isn't it? Like, you do see, you know, people who are extraordinarily intelligent can find living in the world really hard. Yeah. So I wonder whether, you know, if she's the prodigy, whether she ran that house. Quite possibly. Oh, so I'm never leaving. No. God, that is absolutely haunting.

And I'm not done. No! With the dust settling on Rina's case, what remains is a haunting story of an isolated family gripped by a terrible delusion. There was an inquest into this case, and they concluded that the family members had a, quote, extreme and rare mental affliction, which negated any criminal responsibility. So while no specific details were shared with the public, it seems possible that they were affected by shared psychotic disorder. This rare phenomenon, coined by French psychiatrist Jules Balingerie, which I probably butchered, in 1860,

has been variously called psychosis of association, shared paranoid disorder, communicated insanity, contagious insanity, or a folio duo. In this case, it would probably be called a folio family or family madness. It relates to the transfer of delusional ideas and or abnormal behaviors from one person to another or several others who would have been in close association with the primary affected person. Recorded cases of SPD tend to involve parties with unusually close relationships who are isolated from others by language, culture or geography. The literature into SPD tends to describe a dominant personality whose delusions are then taken on by the others around them. And that's exactly it, Anna. Was it Rina

who was the dominant personality? And was it her mental illness that quote-unquote rubbed off on the family members, whose lives had all come to revolve around caring for her, even after she was clearly dead? Or perhaps the circumstances surrounding Rina's strange death were just the culmination of a perfect storm that had been rising for years. Over two decades of caring for a mentally ill family member without support, because remember they were like no thank you to any like external people getting involved, perhaps that just took its toll on the family. Rina's aggressive behavior was evidently severe enough for even the most insanely

private of families to seek help from their GP in 2013. How long had they been struggling to manage Rina's mental illness and how far did things escalate after they didn't get her help? So sacrificing their own talents and ambitions, it's not impossible or improbable to imagine that Machiko, Takehiro and Yoshika's world shrunk down to just four walls, with Rina, whose mental health had been disintegrating for years, at the centre. And when she passed away, perhaps they just couldn't accept her death.

Maybe they were scared of her still, to an extent, and what she might do if they didn't continue to follow her orders and cover her body in surgical spirit. We just don't know. And so perhaps instead of facing up to reality they retreated into a fantasy world where she was still with them. Either way what we're left with is a desperately sad and creepy story of a promising young woman whose future was curtailed by mental illness and the family who were left behind. This story brings to mind distressing cases like Joy Vincent, the London woman who laid dead in her flat for three whole years

before being discovered in 2003. And I think the hard thing for people to wrap their head around, especially it's how I feel, is that it feels impossible in like today's day and age that somebody would die and you just wouldn't know about it. They act as a grim reminder that we don't always know what's happening behind closed doors and Helmsley is the sort of town that prides itself on a sense of community but at the end of the day nobody knew that Rina even existed let alone that she had died and that

her body lay rotting for months before she was found could there be a mummy next door that you don't know about who knows bad stuff yeah yeah it's just sad it's sad and it's creepy and i think it's just that idea of like them going to the pharmacy like every day to buy surgical spirit to pour on her. And holding hands because they're so scared to be outside. Oh, 100%. And this is why it's important to go for a walk, my friends. It is. A lot can be gained from it. Horrible.

So yeah, with that, we will see you next week. Bye. Goodbye. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts.

But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Start your free trial today. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along

with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness. And inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.