Shutdown Fullcast - Scary Stories to Tell in #Pac12AfterDark

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

The world's only college football podcast always makes the most logical choice, and that is why this episode is about SPOOKY STORIES TO TELL AROUND THE CAMPFIRE. Topics include: - Which coach’s head is secretly held on to his body by a velvet ribbon? - Ryan is not in this show because every terrible story you ever heard about New York came true at once, in his bloodstream - A great deal of time is spent in Indiana without properly taunting Indiana, and for that we apologize in advance - Also a lot of freshwater ecology talk, for some reason Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the shutdown. No, no, no, not so fast, my friend. Welcome you. Welcome to you. Oh, well, boy, thank you. Hello, stranger. Yeah. I took, what, five days off?

Where you been? I've been and took the kids to Colorado. Took him out to Legacy Pack 12 country, if you will. for a little vacay, little R&R in the wild wilderness. I got a couple of lessons to share with both of you. It was one of those lessons that the plural of moose is meas. I tried to get my kids on the plural of moose is mease, but they refuse to. They did say mooses.

No, it's mees. Yeah, I kept trying. Jason, where do you stand on the plural moose debate? I like mooses a lot. Mooses, it just makes sense to me. Right? I think that's the funniest version, too. Meese is also entertaining.

You know what isn't entertaining? Walking up to one like 20 feet away and not seeing it until you're 19 feet away. Oh, you added a moose in the wild. I did. The moose did not forcibly block me. I decided not to follow. I was walking. This was not, by the way, in an unpopulated area.

This was about two minutes walk from where I was standing. which was not exactly in the middle of the woods. It was more like glamping, right? A cabin with acceptable cable television. It's probably the best way to put it. Walking with the kids at not an unreasonable hour, not like, oh, five in the morning. No, no, no.

It was like 9 a.m. And just walking up and thought, I don't know, maybe we'll see a moose. Oh, hey, look at that. Yeah, they're six feet tall at the shoulder. This was a juvenile bull, but already on the kind of bigish side with the horns. And had to do the immediate pivot on the heel, walked about 50 feet backwards, put something big, a truck in this case between me, the kids, and the moose. Now, how hard was it to get the children to pivot?

It was easy to get one to pivot, though he was asking, neither of my children are really have survival skills of any kind, because one, One of them immediately said, like immediately, I have one who is the natural attorney. So instead of just assuming that I was doing the right thing, began to ask, why? What is the procedure? Why are we turning around making more noise for this potentially? This is the one that I don't want in a heist. Yes, the son. The heart of a snitch.

I mean, besides the fact that he has the heart of a snitch, it's like, excuse me, officer, would you mind if I parked here? Yeah. Is this weed legal? Is it the legal kind? Can you come over and look at it? This wall is stable. I can lean on it. Yeah, if I give a treat to one and like, hey, be cool.

The younger's like, yeah, dog, got it. I'm cool with it. And immediately abscondes with it. The older one says, why did you give me one and not him? You have a dog son and a cat son. Yeah, exactly. Okay. I am your friend.

So he was saying that. And the younger one insisted on getting closer to the moose, which was not going to happen. But that's where he was going. He was like, oh, let's go pat it. It's probably chill. So, yeah, wildlife, wildlife's very real. Vacation's very real. You know what?

You know what is not a part of the American wildlife experience, though? And thus, I bring it back to college football, our ostensible topic here, because we are the internet's only college football podcast. You know what doesn't really, isn't really sort of a collective skill anymore? Football. Arizona State football Depending on the state that is definitely a valid critique Running the damn ball Running the damn ball

Also a completely valid critique The drop kick The drop kick I don't know Apparently moose are real good at the drop kick Because they're just drop kicking people all over Colorado While we were there A guy got trampled up in Niederland

Because he was close to a mama and her calf Because it's calving season You don't want to get close to them if mama's got the baby around, right? Mama Moose. Yeah. And you know, they say, oh, man, inside every dog is a wolf. Well, Moose really believe that, because they see a dog and they just like, let's go, bro.

Get an agro. I also don't feel like, and I have only seen them from afar in an Alaskan jaunt many years ago, but I also feel like the general public is not super well educated on, this is going to sound basic, but I mean it, just how tall moose are. Yeah, six feet at the show. shoulder five like if you're driving you don't see their belly yeah you just see four sticks and then your car is totaled and maybe you're dead that's how moose moose sounds very basic but i truly do not feel people realize like it's like the grand canyon you see it in pictures and you're like oh that's enormous and you get there and you're like no it's the like stupidity of facts where you go a moose

is six feet tall at the shoulder and then you see it really and go oh my god it's six feet tall at the shoulder. Yeah, don't. They come correct if you're dealing with the moose. Show some respect because they will boot you into the next life. They kill more people than bears and mountain lions combined every single year. Goals. Yeah. The antlered threat.

Be familiar with it. But one thing that's not a part of the skill set and not a part of the whole American wilderness experience. So again, where I swear we'll come back and tie this in, nobody can tell a ghost story anymore. And that goes for me as well. because I failed as an elder around the campfire when it came time to you know hey let's all tell ghost stories guess you couldn't did you bring this up as a thing to do no the kids know you're supposed to say you have like an eight-year-old who's like yeah tell me a ghost story and you go

I had two things happen one I had a disappointed like five and six year olds who were like come on man can't you think of a scary story oh that's not scary at all they're the ones who's like oh scary us and then at three in the morning they're like it's 90 degrees and I want to sleep in your bed. Yeah, because I'm terrified because the one story you could think of was a weird Tibetan folk tale about a hat that turned into a monster. I like that XKCD cartoon

where they're sitting around a campfire and this little nephew or something is like, that's not scary and everyone goes, okay, scare us and he goes, I wasn't born when 9-11 happened and I'm old enough to be having this conversation with you right now and they all go a hat turned into a monster, that's what the last

Super Mario game was about. We did ask, we did ask a six-year-old what was scary. And that's, that's good because they start to say things like, so there's a robot. Yeah, the robot's real mad. Okay, it's pretty good so far. So then the robot, you just killed everyone. You're like, yeah, that's terrifying.

It's also the plot of the Terminator movies. You were now sued. Yeah, congratulations, derivative little six-year-old. Taste the wrath of James Cameron and his attorneys. now you know real fear yeah yeah do you want to know fear here's a hollywood attorney so nobody knew James Cameron himself will fuck you up I'm not sure if I'd whether hit him or a moose my car he's like tall and flinty he also has more extremely tall he also has more free time I think he'd be a good slapper right I'm not

trusting the punches but the reach on a slap from James Cameron yeah it'd be Titanic he is yeah I don't I don't get it yeah oh my Christ I there's nothing with reach to throw at you. So, we decided that in like the complete lack of, of these ghost stories, the six-year-old told their story. And then I had my 11-year-old niece, who's a bit of a reader, go, oh, hey, I looked up some scary campfire stories. This one's about a guy named John Wayne Gacy.

And I was like, stop. Wow. That's like, oh, you got scary stories to tell in the dark from your library. It turns out when you, when you have, when you Google scary stories about kids. that's not the search term you want oh the Atlanta child murders yeah let me tell you about Wayne Williams no no don't and then Jim Levitt removed the ribbon from around his neck and his head fell off there's a there's a Colorado campfire story Bill in 1986 Bill McCartney in an enchanted tree I would actually believe Bill McCartney having a head that was just filled with spiders

that's hey the promise that the promise that he kept was my head will be full of spiders. Now that we've got into the deep water here, but we thought we would ask everybody for their actual... The deep water full of scary spectral horsemen. Why don't you just tell a story about an

infamous child murderer? Okay, that's not going to help anyone here. But enough about Brian Kelly. That's our time, folks. It's been good. You know, we'll cover a podcast business later. Bye, y'all. No. Moving on.

We decided to do Camp Fire stories. A couple of these are college football related. I thought, we asked our readers for one and we'll go over them. But y'all mind if I share the one that I uncovered that actually turned out to have a real and kind of awesome story behind it? I see no way of stopping you. Jason, you mind if I do that? I mean, yeah, if it's awesome, let's do it. Okay, because I did a little bit of research for this.

I called the historian at the College Football Hall of Fame. Okay, do we actually have any college football hauntings? And there are a couple. Haints. Excuse me. They're called Haints in the SEC. Yeah, a couple. One of them seems really, really sketchy to me for a couple of obvious reasons.

George Gipp, the Notre Dame football player who died at the age of 25, which, by the way, if you want to know how Notre Dame was really good at football to start, George Gip died while playing football there at the age of 25 and didn't spend much time in the dorms and was known more for making his living playing cool in South Bend. So, ah, amateurism. It's always been amazing. George Gip allegedly haunts a couple of dorms at Notre Dame.

That's why I don't really believe it because George Gip never really graced a dorm when he was at Notre Dame. It was just kind of his job. He spent his time elsewhere. He's allegedly there. The one that is consistent and appropriate for the history of the football program, but legit tragic, Michael Plume. Michael Plume is the name of a guy whose ghost allegedly hangs from a rafter at Indiana University's Memorial Stadium.

Wait, when you say, okay, when you see a stadium rafter, I'm trying to picture this like in a concourse. Yeah, yeah, like hangs from one of the rafters. Okay. This is slightly inaccurate because one, it's a ghost. They're not real. Two, Michael Plum was a real guy, but he wasn't hanging from the rafter. Michael Plum's death was in 1960. He was found at the bottom of a scaffold with a noose around his neck on February 15th.

And he was sort of slumped at the bottom of the scaffold. His death was a promising Air Force cadet studying Russian, talked to his dad like about two or three days before, which in 1960 terms was like five minutes ago, right? Yeah, I talked to him like 60 hours ago. That's, that's, you know, basically five minutes in our terms. He's doing well. And then he was found dead at the bottom of this scaffold with a noose around his neck and the noose was tied up to a rafter, you know, about 30 feet up. Seems kind of odd, especially because there were a lot of really odd things. His shoes were completely clean, as were his clothes, despite it being a very muddy construction site where he could not get from point A to point B without

getting something on him. He didn't have a broken neck, which is typically how somebody who hangs themselves from that height would have died. So if he had jumped from a rafter. Yeah, if you'd jumped from a rafter on top of a scaffold, which was perfectly solid, which it was wobbly but solid, probably you would have broken your neck. He hadn't. And he wasn't at the kind of height where he would of asphyxiated either because he landed on the ground and did not have any visible head trauma. In addition to that, the rope had fibers which did not match the gloves that he was wearing. So another pair of gloves, no real sort of marks on the body or dirt indicating he had made the actual sort of transit across the site. A lot of weird things. Still, back in 1960,

his death has ruled a suicide. And one person didn't believe this. And that would be, Bill Plum, his father. Michael Plum, his son, insisted that he could not have killed himself. It just had no motive, had no reason. And never really bought into that and contested the coroner's ruling that it was a suicide. He started doing this in the 60s. One lawyer who worked on it, who's quoted in the story on it, started working the case in 1984. Good Lord. Yeah. Another one in the 1990s. Bill Plume appealed this and kept driving at it

and asked somebody to look at the case until the cause of death was officially ruled as undetermined from a suicide to undetermined in 2017. You're like, well, that's a really long time and that was his dad. How old was he? Bill Plume was 99 when this happened.

Way to finish the drill, dad. 99. And the quote from the quote from Bill Plume after he got the Monroe County coroner, Joni Shields, who agreed that this was a clear case of a potential homicide or at least an undetermined death, Bill Plume said,

I've learned one thing in 57 years. You can't fight City Hall, but you can outlive them. So if you hear about a ghost at Indiana, go, oh, there's a guy who hanged himself in the rafters. One, Vlad Evans, he didn't hang himself, Even Bill Plum said that the people who did this, yeah, they're probably long gone, which I don't know.

That's kind of a stunt, Bill. I mean, if Bill Plum is 99 years old and being like, they're long gone, I fucking hope they're long gone. Bill Bloom's going to find them. Bill Bloom's going to haunt your ass. I'm going to get you. Yeah. You know, not to, not to demean or diminish this man's tragedy. No, no.

Seriously. No, seriously. That's a dad. That's a dad to be feared. What tenacity in this man to do. drive until he was 99 years old and get what he wanted and then stun on it and be like, yeah, I outlived

you. Man, I got what I wanted after this horrible thing happened. Phil Plume, y'all. As like various generations of coroners and police chiefs and whatnot are coming and going and they're all like, how much longer can this guy possibly be around? I got to retire in three years.

Yeah, he's going to have. And then eventually he just wore him all down. Yeah. So when you hear the story of, you know, a ghosted Indiana University Stadium. That's fascinating and everything. The actual story behind it was kind of a shocking surprise in terms of, oh, God, there's, not only is there something behind this, there's another story about a guy who waited until

he was 99 years old to finally, like, win this case. If we still had digital Vikings, I would put Bill Plum in there. 99. That's metal as hell. Dear Lord. So there we go. I started with the ghost story and I ended up with, you know, a story of, you know, a story of ornery devotion by one man from Evergreen, Colorado.

Indiana football is also an urban legend. In terms of unsolved mysteries with very unpleasant and unknowable forces that work behind them, Indiana football definitely qualifies. Jason? I mean, it takes about a century before you get a victory that isn't really that much of a victory. This is all Indiana football. That's correct. Jason? So, let's see.

I had a couple to choose from here. one sort of I guess it informs at least part of my brain and I'll probably never figure out how much this was we were in Ohio my mom is from Ohio we were at her parents place I was probably around I don't know like five or six or so and I was sleeping on the floor in one of the

guest rooms and heard a older adolescent male voice say mom I broke the sentence wasn't finished I thought okay someone's right on the other side of the wall or whatever um next night i'm laying in the same place and the door is open all the grownups are either downstairs or around the corner in the kitchen or however the house is laid out and there was a discussion about one of my uncles who passed i think before i was born and what they were talking about was he broke a bicycle and he came into the house one night and he said mom i broke the and then it was time to

fix the broken bicycle i of course hear this realize i just heard someone say this sentence basically to me 24 hours prior run in the room screaming and crying and you know they think it's like oh he's upset because he heard a story about a person who has who has died and you know i never really told him why i was upset about hearing this uh i don't know if i believe in ghosts but something that that was something i don't know i'll probably never figure out what that was i would kind of prefer not to figure out what that was no that's mad specific Yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, there's no coincidence there. The other one was, y'all know about the Joplin spook light?

I don't know if I've mentioned this on here or not. No, no, no, no. I love the cadence of this, whatever it is. In southeast, Oklahoma, like, it's kind of in Missouri, kind of in Oklahoma. There's this road that's, I forget which route it's kind of adjacent to, where you go over a hill and you sit in the dark among these trees for a while and you see lights flashing above the horizon

and it's been documented back to like the 1880s which is funny because the prevailing scientific theory on this is you're seeing reflections from cars from you know from headlights a road about 10 miles I forget if that's I think that's west but it's been like the words Joplin spook light have been documented

since you know before cars existed so we went out there um and we didn't see anything so i can't have nothing to add to that particular one but if you're in the area go take a look because you know this kind of shit is all over it all over all over our country i'm assuming every other country as well and that's the type of shit of a lot of listeners sent in and this was like i don't know how many of these we're going to be able to get to from our listeners but like you know look on our Twitter and on the Reddit. There's some very fun reading on there. I have one that I would like to read because the title is the Beast of Busco. God, that's amazing. This one was sent into us by Jay Rigdon. The story starts in 1898 when a farmer named Oscar Folk, F-U-L-K, oh, we are

already doing great. Oscar Folk supposedly saw a giant turtle living in the seven-acre lake on his farm near Churibusco, where is this? I assume this is somewhere in Wisconsin. He told others about it, but eventually he decided to leave it alone. This is where the story would in. Oh, Churibusco is also in Indiana. We're keeping this Midwest.

A half century later, in July, 1948, two more Churibusco citizens, Aura Blue and Charlie Wilson. Oh, this is, we're, guys, we're doing great. We're deep, we're like neck deep. in Thomas Pension, also reported seeing a huge turtle, weighing an estimated 500 pounds while fishing on the same lake, which had come to be known as Folk Lake. A farmer named Gail Harris owned the land at the time. Harris and others also reported seeing the creature. I picked this

story just so I can read the names, in case you can't tell. People questioned the existence of the turtle. So to vindicate his good name, Harris made several attempts to catch the beast, including draining the lake by pumping the water into an area sealed off by a dam with the help of Orville Bright and Kenneth Leach, only for the dam to break when the lake had been almost entirely drained. Despite many attempts, Oscar, named after the original owner of the farm, Oscar the turtle was never captured. In March of 1949, an attempt to send a deep sea diver into the pond failed when the wrong equipment was delivered to the Harris Farm, very suspicious. And a photographer for Life magazine, Mike Shea, took 299 photos at the site, but they were deemed

unusable. I like the idea, like, my favorite thing about the ocean, which is a lot of people's least favorite things about the ocean, is how much of it we have never seen and touched and we'll never know and all the fucked up creatures that are living down by the volcano vents on the floor. I find it kind of comforting that we could, the notion that we could, the notion that we could have the same version of these same stories in freshwater. Oh, I have one.

Go on. And this is a little more ghoulish, but one thing that is... More ghoulish than Jim Levitt's head being kept on by a ribbon. Everybody knows. Almost. Almost. Okay. This would be the rumor myth, legend of what's at the bottom of Lake Tahoe.

Are either of you familiar with this? I feel like you told me the story when we were at Tahoe. Yeah. that I've already forgotten. I may have. I'm going to assume there's a golf cart down there. Probably. And if there is a golf cart down there,

then it is either very well preserved and or is in the company of really well-preserved bodies either killed by the mob or the rigors and abuses of the construction of the railroads of the west. Because the rumor is like Lake Tahoe is really deep. All right? It's a big glacial lake. It's about 1,600 feet deep at its deepest point.

Y'all, for a lake, that's real dang deep. There could be some prehistoric shit down there. Absolutely. And the rumors for a long time were that, and divers started spreading these, that you would find not one, not two, but at certain depths at the very bottom, you'd find hundreds of bodies weighted down wearing like pinstripe suits and fedoras and all the things that a gangster would be wearing when he was cap. wait how would you how do you go about trucking gangster bodies to Tahoe that's kind of out of the way it seems out of the way it seems like a real real long time it's close to Reno that is correct they're coming from Reno yeah yeah or you know okay pipe him in from Vegas if you know it's a VIP that's that's the rumor right that they would be down there and you know this was an apocryphal Cousteau quote for somebody who went down there like that Cousteau said you don't want to know what's down there nobody's ever

really sort of verified that any of the Custos actually said this after taking a, you know, jaunt around the bottom, right? But, but here's the fun, here's the fun science behind this. The fun corpse science behind this. If a body does drown in Lake Tahoe and it's way down there, guess what? It doesn't decompose. So if a body is recovered, like the body of a scuba diver was in 2011, you get you get a body that is

shockingly well preserved. So if anybody is down there and there probably it's been a while 1,600 feet deep, got a lot of people around it, it's probably somebody down there. So this is a good skincare routine, you're saying.

This is what I'm thinking. We got to haul up that water and start selling it in Sephora and shit. I think we're just dunk, dunk people in it real deep. And some formaldehyde. It is it is anaerobic. Much to the point where, like, you get sheriff saying really weird things. Who is anaerobic ass, by the way, am I?

Yeah, that's, congratulations. Go balls. Rude and hurtful. Hey, survive for years without a single bit of oxygen to keep it going or sunlight. That's Tennessee football, man. We're asking you a goddamn thing. That would be a very Jeremy Pruitt thing, by the way. It would be like, I don't like oxygen.

Oxygen. What is oxygen? I've asked you repeatedly not to bring up that man. I don't know what it is. I don't even, don't, don't bother me with that. Okay, what, what, what class of living thing is Jeremy Pruitt? Mineral? No, like, I think he's a plant, but like a real dumb one. Cactus.

Nah, people like cacti. I'm going to put him on some kind of, like a big old, like a big old mushroom. It's like a cactus who's like, I only drink water once a year. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. very good point. It was a waste time.

If you found a bird living in the side of Jeremy Pruitt's head, would you be surprised? No, no, not at all. There's certainly enough room in there. Yeah. This is, by the way, like the quote from the sheriff when they found this diver in 2011, they recovered his body was this.

His remains are in amazing physical condition where I was like, see, he's been going to the gym. It's been like lifting, looking good, eating right. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff down there is my point. And if you've got an anaerobic environment, it's all going to kind of look spectral and spooky. So are there creepy things at the bottom of Lake Tahoe?

Yeah, probably. Probably if you go far enough, which I don't think you should. It's better ways. Go ski. Go play golf. Don't take a submarine down and look at the corpses at the bottom. Yeah, just have fun. Just have a lot of fun.

Oh, I haven't told my personal story yet. Oh, go ahead. Which I thought that I had told on this program before, which I feel like I've been saying a lot lately, but that's how long this program has been going on. Spencer, I know that you are certainly aware because you've met my family that there are members of my mother's side who believe that we are bloodline descendants of the moth man. Can you backtrack and just explain the moth man to everybody who might not? The mothman is a West Virginia spectral haint type situation that typically appears people as an enormous red-eyed critter with wings. It's thought to be it's more of, it's thought to be more of like an earthbound silver.

surfer type situation like not not the cause of bad things but the harbinger of bad things like the famous one that you'll point to is is the the collapse of the point of the silver bridge in point pleasant west virginia um we got a lot of reader responses involving the mothman because we have a lot of west virginians involved the show go ears but i need to tell you that my mother's people believe that one person in every generation in our family inherits Mothman powers. Okay. And in this current generation,

it is my mother's older sister who has been stuck with this, who has been stuck with this meme for so long that we have referred to her as Aunt Mothman since childhood. This is the degree to which this is just accepted. The great news is she has no kids, so guess who gets it next?

is it you what's up that's terrified i'm extremely excited to come into my birthright but anyway she was in point pleasant uh the day the silver bridge collapsed she didn't live there she was visiting a student at the time she has done my favorite this is just stuff like you know elevators will fail with her in them planes will make she's been in more emergency landings on airplanes uh than any three people i know but my favorite is, and I swear I've told this story before, but she's at a Sonic. She's at a Sonic in, oh, this is the auntie who lived in Denver and was raising Alaskan Huskies on a friend of hers farm.

And the black helicopter cult came and slaughtered a bunch of their cows for a satanic ritual. This is going places. Yeah, yeah. Wasn't she also a champion, like, kite surfer? She was a semi-professional windsurfer. Okay. yeah she's had a life um

terrified woman but she was parked this is my favorite one of these because it's the most recent was when she was parked at a sonic that was next to I guess an overpass and on the other side of her there was like a Walmart or something where there was like a classic car club like a bunch of just old dudes

like not like Fast and Furious but a bunch of old dudes with their Camaros and stuff you know with the hoods up and a car as she's in the she's not in a pull-up stall she's the drive-thru window yeah and as she's pulling away a car sales mid-air through her vision uh had burst through the guardrail next to her flown mid-air right in front of her as she was pulling out of the drive-thru and landed and rolled

a top three or four classic cars like monster truck style uh-huh and i was like what did you do and she's like well i got my milkshake and left like yeah that's that's a fair reaction Mothman needs a milkshake That's a fair reaction Anyway, I'm super excited To come into my haintly powers Jason if I Just you know

You can just drive down here And come get me right now How are we planning on using these? Yeah, that's the thing How do we monetize this? I will I will destroy this bridge On a go fund me

Welcome to Infrastructure Week fuckers I'm telling you One Man Demolition Crew Madam Secretary Mothman We've sent our finest agent Mothman So the power is being near things that collapse The power is allegedly like bad things happen around you

Like wherever you go like weird And weird and bad slash bad things Happen when you are near And we're trying to steer this away from Tennessee football too Oh no no I just assumed that that's been inborn I meant as a like it feels like every metaphor here. I guess my real question is how would we tell the difference? Yeah, yeah. I guess it just feels like every story we're telling is like, wow, this, boy, this, again, this also sounds like the

Vols. Yeah, it might turn out that the real Mothman was inside me all along. I would put you in Athens, but they collapse on their own well enough. Woo-hoo! Jason. Let's see here. I have not read this content. So I'm just going to read this. Oh, I got another one I can read. I'm just going to read this one live. It's the next. So Ryan Nanny, who is with us. We all found several paths to this topic. Spencer was out in the, out in the hills. Ryan was struck dumb because he saw a ghost. He's on here right now. He can't speak. Ryan's sitting in for Brian Floyd this week. Floyd, who also saw ghosts. They were both, they were both dressed as ghosts. It was tragic. This comes to us from

listener Stuart P. As assembled by Ryan, God rest his speech. Back more than a century ago, horse racing, cockfighting, and gambling were all common pastimes in North Carolina. Fremont being right on the newly built railroad line and halfway between Wilson and Goldsboro

would throw festivities every summer. Tourists would take day trips from the cities to the little town to take part in the excitement and to enjoy the whiskey that flowed freely all day. In Fremont, which might be Fremont, I don't know, towns in the Carolinas, We get yelled at every time we pronounce one of your cities. I'm just going to, I'm just going to say that.

Look, I just dove face first into Indiana pronunciations. I think it's from all. And from all, one of the regulars at the events was the local man by the name of Bolton. It's actually pronounced Fred. Fremant. Bolton was a giant of a man massively built a hulk of muscle and bone. He had big bones. Well, I hope so.

He was also a very, very heavy drinker. Whenever there was racing and gambling going on, Bolton would work the crowd performing feats of strength in exchange for a drink. The signature trick was smashing a whiskey barrel to pieces using his giant head. Same. Same. He would celebrate his triumph by gulping down the whiskey that the appreciative onlookers passed his way. On one of these festival days in from all, the weather was good.

The crowd was large and generous, and Bolton had drunk more than even his usual share. He began to boast saying he could smash anything with his head. Okay. He was soon breaking bottles and two by fours on his head without seeming to feel any pain. as it became more and more drunk Boultoons boasting grew until he declared he could stop a train with his head. Naturally.

That's just the progression. Where's this going? By this time the crowd was nearly as drunk as bold tone and they cheered him on as he swaggered down to the railroad tracks and stood right in the middle of the line, sticking his big ass head out in the direction of the next arrival. This type of shit when like

the new millennial trend is taking photos next to trains. Why are millennials stopping more trains? Y'all weren't no smarter than us, so shut the fuck up. The tale of boultoned tells you nobody knows how to handle a fucking train. In those days, trains ran on time. Okay, millennial trains no longer run on time. You know who else ran trains on time?

I never get to use that literally. Wow. Before too long, the crowd heard the whistle and the rumble of the express rolling down the tracks. Now, the sound of an oncoming train was enough to sober up a few of the crowd who tried to pull bull-tone off the tracks, but he refused, and as a train drew ever closer, he loudly proclaimed that he was tougher than any train. The train soon proved him to be very wrong about that.

It's how he would have wanted to go. The crowd gathered around what remained of B. Olton and carried him down to the graveyard. They found the local preacher and poured enough coffee into him so that he was sober enough to say a few words. Oh, and the preacher, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait a second.

But wait, the pronouns get even better. After they buried him, after they buried the preacher and... Thanks, guys! Blulton. The drinking and carousing continued, but became awake for Blalton. Folks figured he would have wanted it that way. I think that's correct. Ever since that night, that mysterious light has been seen rising out of the graveyard

and traveling to the spot on the railroad tracks where Bluton met his end. Folks who have gotten close enough to the light to get a good look say that inside that airy green glow seems to be the shape of of a particularly large human skull. Spencer, it's your kid. No, hey, bro. Coming toward us. The phantom gourd. Holy shit, that thing's an eight and three quarters

sailing right at us. And a few have even said they've heard a spectral voice coming from the glow. The voice is indistinct as coming from another world, but it seems to be asking a question. It wants to know if they can spare any whiskey. that's beautiful man that's a story of the story of bolton and his big ass head that's an amazing story that's the appalachian shit i think it would suck if that was your ghost but the only thing they saw

was like the most unflattering part of you right if it was like yeah here comes old here comes old tiny penis wilson just rising there it is there comes weird dick maggie does it yeah look through the ether it's like a look at it it's like a neon chito just walking through the air dick and all it can be heard saying is I wasn't green in real life it was cold when I died course he died of sun poisoning so that's a lie that's that's that's a day hey you know it can be sunny when it's when it's cold out of course he died because he burned his house down I like that we have like ghost or ghosts always have rebuttals I would like to rebut this statement yeah you don't really have time to argue with them they just say one thing over and over

from the grave so you got you gotta be sure you program the right statement because like imagine if you record your one ghost line and it's like hang on let me try that again sorry that's locked in that's all you get to say forever

you're to try again ghost the other this is another by the way like odd thing that that most of the ghost stories that you know we get in our particular Ballywick

they're not real good good you know like if you tell me though like like if certain places were haunted i would just accept that like if you told me ohio stadium was haunted i would just believe you because if you've been to ohio stadium where the barker's play uh it is uh it's big it's kind of scary it's got some like got some like it's got some print and some like the original font they use for everything is like you know gothic font which originally looked a little spooky and now just looks like Ohio State fans tattoos, right? Like, that's, you know, if they could have written Monster Energy in that font, they probably

would. Somebody out there who's an Ohio State fan probably has that tattoo. And if so, sir, or madam, you are at Max Brand. Please stop. I mean, monsters are scary, so. And they have energy. Yeah. Famously so.

But if you tell me Ohio Stadium was haunted, I would 100% believe you for, no reason whatsoever other than it's just kind of big and creepy looking however if you told me like the rose bowl was haunted i don't know i don't think anything is haunted by angels yeah that's a ghost a ghost in the rose bowl's got it pretty good they're like i don't know it's not bad no it's true what they say about the san gabriel's it does like it's just a genial uh white sweatered golfer type ghost right who's like had a good round today got in 36 like oh God, that's his unearthly shroud. No, that's a, that's a fetching cardigan.

He's tied around the shoulders there. The Rose Bowl is a fairy garden where you go to get, like, another power up or something. Yeah, yeah, no, that's, yeah, exactly. It's, it's someplace that, you know, when you find it in Zelda, they're like, the spirits here are good, and they'll help you get, you know, they'll help you get good gear. They'll help you level up. It's fine. If you told me Florida was haunted, I might believe you, because there was always a rumor that

somebody had jumped from the side of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. However, I also refused to believe that a ghost would hang around. Which is a stadium that almost definitely has people buried under it? Well, the rumor was that the Meadowlands, the old Meadowlands had

Jimmy Hoffa. Right? There's a college stadium with a rumor. That people were buried under it? Yeah. Well, I know that, I mean, if you want bodies, Camp Randall, Camp Randall was an actual like

military training camp and you know before the age of antibiotics inevitably somebody probably died from you know super diarrhea aka dysentery so there's some there's somebody had probably buried around in or around camp randall is my guess because that was that was pioneer days so that would be my leading candidate for it let's see here uh unfortunately it is once Do we count Uggas, Matt? Do we count all the Uggas? No. That doesn't be, man, that's a lady.

So apparently the urban legend is, once again, that it is Tennessee. No, no, no, no. The urban legend is that he's not going to ever coach again. The, uh, let's see. The FBI. No, no, wait. The urban legend is that he didn't know Zach Smith is a piece of shit. Yeah, no.

Ninety-2. Ninety-two, uh, Tennessee's forensic, forensic anthropology center allegedly buried the, I forgot about this. Yeah, allegedly buried the bones under the stadium. So, yeah, again, we're talking about the Vols. I'd explain some shit. Tennessee was one of those stadiums that had dorms built into it as part of a swindle by the government to get it built.

My dad used to live in one of them. And I think LSU did the same thing, didn't they? Yeah, they did. How come we don't get more ghost stories out of LSU? Is it because they don't consider them scary or remarkable? Like, oh, hell, that's just Kevin. I don't know why the ghost is named Kevin. It's not a very LSUVN name.

It's named after Kevin Fault. Ah, there we go. That's the Camp Randall, by the way, does have, it has some potential because it was a Confederate prison. So, SEC starts like, oh, and many. Damn, they were shipping those motherfuckers on some road games. No, seriously. They got all the way up there? As last time the SEC traveled that far.

I'll tell you what. Why don't the SEC go to Wisconsin? Johnson, there you go. That's it. They didn't go to Canada. Yeah, LSU and that's it. Only LSU is that brave. LSU and the Confederacy.

That's the imprisoned, beaten Confederacy. Those are the two who actually went north to play a road game. They both lost, right? Yes, they both lost. Many people are saying. I mean, a lot of people are buried, and a lot of people have been. A lot of people are buried. Thank you.

Thank you. A lot of people have been cremated. Also true. their ashes taken to you're on a roll buddy i know i'm good a lot of people are dead is what i'm saying the shutdown full three for three man i'm dropping he's on fire i've been telling scary stories with a six-year-old and a nine-year-old for a week that's all i have left in my brain there have been many deaths yeah the death webster's dictionary defines death as so remember though like people in the middle of the

Iron Bowl will dump their relatives on the field, either at Jurgen-Hare. They had to stop asking people to do that. They'll do it at Sanford, too, in the hedges. Yeah. Just like, imagine, like, sneezing near the hedges, and you got somebody's uncle just in your nostrils. That's... I don't love it.

The best... I don't love it, y'all. The best story from this, of course, is from America's finest news organization, AL.com, where during the 2014 game, Taylor Tannenbaum, was on the sidelines filming and a guy made eye contact with her from the story these are my grandfather's ashes and i'm going to dump them on the field the man said grasping a ziplock bag the sports anchor was momentarily stunned uh this next part i find rhetorically funny was this guy really going to dump his grandfather's final remains during

the middle of the 2014 iron bolt yeah yeah no what else was going on at the time yeah that wasn't what was going to happen at all. The best part was that at that point, Auburn was leading the game by a touchdown. The reporter pointed out it could be bad luck to dump a Bama fan's ashes when the tide was losing. It didn't work, quote, I have to do it now, he said. I have to do it.

It sounds like the tide needed all the help they could get. Yeah, Tannenbaum said, it was on my mind the entire time I was shooting. I didn't want to be the one. who stepped on it. I mean. Also, Bama won, so they did need the help. Yeah, come on. Grandpa, grandpa, turn the tide, so to speak.

I don't get it. The tide, I said. Did we also have Bigfoot content to discuss? Oh, we do. Spencer, this was you. Oh, yeah, the FBI Bigfoot vaults. The FBI Bigfoot vaults. I like how I'm the default person for Bigfoot.

You were the one who told me about. about this. Well, no, it's true. But they're like, hey, you have a beard. Okay. While you get your shit together, I'm going to read another reader contribution from our longtime friend and colleague, Braves and Birds. Thank you. Oh, this has a cold open. This doesn't say what the story is about. It just starts. The aircraft, a B-52G, was based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro. This is North Carolina. Around midnight on January 23rd, 24th, 1961, the bomber had a rendezvous with a tango for aerial refueling. During the hookup, the tanker crew advised the B-52 aircraft commander,

Major Walter Scott Tulloch, that his aircraft had a fuel leak in the right wing. I didn't know that aircraft could just squirt fuels out of their wings. We're learning all kinds of shit today. The refueling was aborted. All I know about aircraft refueling was what I learned playing the 8-bit top gun game on the Nintendo console. I know it's very difficult. Ground control was notified of the problem. The aircraft was directed to to assume a holding pattern off the coast until the majority of fuel was consumed. Just go spray that fuel into the ocean, Walter, until it's almost out. It'll be fine. It's the ocean.

However, when the B-52 reached its assigned position, the pilot reported that the leak had worsened. Well, who saw that coming? And that 37,000 pounds of, okay, you know that Braves and Birds is a Michigan man, because 37,000 pounds, he includes the metric 17,000 kilograms. I think this was added by Ryan. Oh, wait. Was he pasting in from Wiki? Because I legit thought this was our B&B, palp, putting in the kilograms just so we could understand.

Let's see if Ryan committed plagiarism. I would believe a Michigan man. Yes, this is from the Wiki. I'll leave it to a Florida man to just not do the reading. Ryan has pasted Wiki. Okay. Anyway, so I'm going to start paraphrasing now. I do think it would be very Michiganly, though, of you to put the kilogram measure in. So the aircraft was immediately directed to return and land. But as it descended, the pilots lost control of the plane. They ejected. Five men landed safely after ejecting or bailing out through a hatch. One did not survive his parachute landing and two died in the crash. The third pilot of the bomb, atomatics is the only person known to have successfully bailed out of the top hat to the B-52 without an ejection seat. Baller.

Oh, wait. Now we get to the buried lead. The two nuclear bombs, the plane was carrying separated from the aircraft as it broke up between 1,000 and 2,000 feet. Okay, I have heard this story. This is the time we almost bombed North Carolina. The first bomb that descended by parachute, that's sweet they gave parachutes to the bombs, was found intact and standing upright as a result of its parachute being caught in a tree. Take that, Elon Musk.

Hey, guys. In 2013, a FOIA release confirmed that one single switch out of four prevented detonation. We're doing great. The second bomb plunged into a muddy field at around 700 miles per hour and disintegrated without detonation. And an unclosed, high-volted switch had prevented. did that from fully arming. In 2013, they interviewed one of these guys

who recalled the exact moment the second bomb switch was found. He said, until my death, I will never forget hearing my sergeant say, Lieutenant, we found the arm safe switch. And I said, great. He said, not great. It's on arm. In that, excavation

of the second bomb was abandoned as a result of uncontrollable ground water flooding, most of the thermonuclear stage containing uranium and plutonium, and this is all the interesting to me, was left in place, but the core of the bomb was removed. The United States Army Corps of Engineers, as it does with most things, purchased a 400-foot easement over the buried component. That's just solid real estate play, right there? Is that like a little, is that like a little bitty Air Force base, like the size of my office now?

I'm going to call it that, yeah. that's uh that's that's so nuclear weapons being in the groundwater that's fine right oh yeah this was back in the 60s yeah that's fine radio the entire water table is full of mayonnaise and plutonium radiation wasn't bad for you back then that's fine um i have one more now just to to keep you updated on my favorite thing which was the uh the the bigfoot files kind of a disappointment they're like, oh, man, the FBI's got a file on them. Yeah, kind of. They analyzed a sample of hair.

Like, the FBI typically only does work for criminal investigations. However, in the interest of what they would call science and inquiry, sometimes they do additional work disqualified, a sample of hair that was allegedly Bigfoot's, yeah, it was a deer hair. It was just, just deer hair. That's it. That's all you got out of like the Bigfoot file. they didn't oh shit you know what that means though that means they're lying that means there's

way more see you got you got you got to use your third eye because they have a file that means there's a there's a lot more shit in it think about it did they eavesdrop on like bigfoot sexual activity and encourage him to kill himself is that that is a thing the fbi has done yeah oh okay weird they didn't do that for bigfoot though not that we know about yet we could just say they should just drop stuff like, yeah, we got some other files and we're just going to see them until 2080 because I don't know, it'll keep you interested.

Yeah, like the time the president was murdered on TV in the 60s and they said like, yeah, we'll drop all our stuff you know, once we're all clear of this and then they say, I would just open so many things on an unprotected public drive, right, that were files

that were like locked until 2080, all the information about the spot in Ohio State Michigan. We did a little inquiry just looked into it you guys can't find out about it for another 50 years it's fine i like the kicking the can down the road nature of sealed file until just like the NCAA yeah yeah i'm not joking we've never told a joke on this show not one not one i have one disappearance here that is is kind of like a real case and i'm sure this dude's totally dead but it is it is prime australia to me that It's the disappearance of Harold Holt.

If you don't know who Harold Holt is, and it's funny and weird and sad and very Australian. Harold Holt was the Prime Minister of Australia. And in December, 1967, he went for a swim. By the way, Australians are just different than you and me because, you know what the last thing I'm doing in Australia is? Going for a swim. It's not just because they have great whites.

They have like octopus that are the size of a thumbtack that can leave you in the hospital. They got like spider sharks and shit. Yeah, you know, I don't want that. I don't want any of that. They got jellyfish out there that, you know, are microscopic and the minute they touch you, you turn into a pile of fingernails. That's all real bad. But Harold Holt, he's different.

He's Australian. He's out there swimming, as he did frequently. And Harold Holt, Harold Holt never came back. nothing just disappeared he didn't do this at like you know the dead of night he didn't do this you know in the morning no it was around noon man just thought he'd go for a swim and uh he's he's out there he's out there somewhere just just floating around probably dead although there was a conspiracy theory that he was picked up by a chinese submarine i like that one too because it sort of implies that maybe Harold took the submarine over.

He and the Chinese sailors were like, we can have a better life, man, just cruising and rocking out here. Let's do it. How do you replace the prime minister when he just leaves? Well, one, you replace him with somebody who doesn't like spear fishing. Because that's, that didn't go well the last time, right? Two, two, I think you just find the guy who at the bar who's still, standing right you you that's it next yeah next that's remember that was the inspiration for beer

fest was drinking with australians how's that going to go oh you think that competitively they'd be the best in the world that was the conclusion that led all the guys in broken lizard to write beer fest so you probably pick the guys standing at the end of the night which is also by the way how you pick a good punter evidently since all great punters are australians