So... Alright - I Saw Dead People

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

The discovery of a dead body sends Geoff on an uncomfortable trip down memory lane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So it's been kind of a weird day and a half roundabouts. I was all set to record this episode yesterday, and I had this whole train of thought I wanted to go down about how certain songs that'll like pull you out of a funk or a depression, or maybe if you're spiraling with self-doubt, and how like kind of potent and powerful that can be. But also, I wanted to tell the story of this band you may or may not have heard of called Penny and the Quarters, which if you haven't, it's fascinating. And I'll get around to it at

some point because I'm kind of in love with them. But when I was on my bike ride yesterday, thinking that up, just kind of planning for it. I take this bike ride every day for exercise, but I'm trying to fit into a tux for this wedding. And so I go about a 24-mile route every day. It takes me about five or six miles into Town Lake in the middle of Austin. There's this place called Town Lake. And it runs east and west through downtown. Or it separates South Austin from downtown and north. And it's a huge 10.5-mile hike and bike trail. And so tons of people ride bikes and jog there every day. And I've been doing this 24 to 26-mile hike and bike trail. And so tons of people ride bikes and jog there every day. And I've been doing this 24 to 26-mile loop every day. I was down there yesterday morning from about 8 to 10.30 or so, I want to say my ride was. Maybe 8.30 to 10.30.

And while I was down there, unbeknownst to me, within about 15 minutes of a spot I rode by, they pulled a dead body out of the lake. I didn't see it. I never saw the police or ambulance or anything getting roped off. I think I passed by where the body was pulled out maybe 15 minutes before they pulled it out. So I don't know if the person maybe had a heart attack and fell in the water, or maybe they died earlier and were just found in the water. They haven't really released that information. And I had no idea. Like I said, I was, I say 15, I was maybe somewhere between like 15 and 35 minutes. I think I passed, I had to have passed before because I'm sure they would have shut it down afterwards. And it's right on the loop. It was basically right.

If you know Austin, it was right under. It was on Town Lake, right under Lamar Boulevard and Cesar Chavez. So busy section right next to the pedestrian bridge. And yeah, that whole area. Crazy. So I got home and I sat down to record the episode and saw the alert pop up. And I sat down to record the episode and saw the alert pop up. And it kind of floored me a little bit, to be honest with you, that I had ridden my bike by where a dead body was found, like maybe 30 minutes before.

It kind of took me out of the game. And so instead of recording the episode yesterday, I spent the day kind of consumed with that thought. And I don't know. It day kind of consumed with that thought. And I don't know, it's kind of fucking with me. I was put upon, I guess would be the way to say it, by two memories that just won't stay, won't get out of my head. Maybe if I talk about, I guess I can tell them here, maybe that maybe it'll be like catharsis. I don't know. They're not bad memories or any, well, that's not true. One of them's a terrible memory. But they just are like stuck in my head

like a brain worm, and I can't get them out. And it's weird. First off, let me say, it is... Sorry, I feel like I'm a little all over the map, but I'm a little befuddled by this body. And here's why. Not just that I may have ridden my bike by a dead body. I have seen dead bodies before in my life.

But because this is now the fifth... Actually, I get so annoyed with this shit according to kxan which is a local news station here this is uh at least the fifth body they've pulled out of the lake this year why say at least it's five they've been five reported bodies pulled out of the lake unless they're insinuating that there may have been bodies taken out of the lake that the police haven't told us about which seems insane It is the 10th body that's been pulled out of Town Lake since last July. So the first reported body that they pulled out of the lake was in mid-July of last year, and then there was nothing. And then it was like December, December, December, a bunch.

Then every month, February, March, April, and now another april now june a lot of them are still under investigation and uh information hasn't been released that people have been joking in austin for a few months now that there's a serial killer because a lot of the deaths are kind of near the drinking area like rainy street where a lot of you know like young people go and drink a lot of tourists go down there. People have been calling it the Brodiac Killer. There's a pretty heavy anti-California sentiment in Texas. And so a lot of people have been calling it

the Go Back to Golden State Killer. But it's been kind of a joke. I think there's actually a Facebook group that is taking it seriously, investigating it. But it's been kind of just like... I guess a joke is an insensitive way to put it. But people have been... It's been laughed at the idea that there could be a serial killer in Austin and that it's anything more than people, just coincidence and people getting too drunk

near the water and falling in. But fuck, man, 10 people in less than a year and five this year alone. It's unlike anything I've experienced since I've lived in Austin, so that's pretty wild. Got me thinking about death and about... I could have, if I'd looked left or if I'd looked up, I was lost in my head, probably thinking about this podcast. If I'd looked left, I could have potentially seen a dead body. It just got me thinking, how would I feel? What would I feel if I saw a dead body? And I kind of thought I would feel numb to it. But man, I don't know why I felt that way. I would feel that way because I have...

I was going to say, I've seen a dead body once in my life. It's not entirely true. When I was in the military in Kuwait, I did not serve during combat. I served from 1993 to 1998. And I was lucky enough, fortunate enough to be in the military during a time of peace. But I did spend a lot of time in Kuwait about two, three years right after the Gulf War. And I have to admit, I saw some pretty gross, disturbing stuff over there. But like, so gross and so over the top disturbing that it almost doesn't register, if that makes sense. It almost doesn't register, if that makes sense. But one time in Austin, I did see a dead body and it fucked me up really badly. I was driving away from the call center where Gus and I worked in Bernie when we started Rooster Teeth. And I think I was on a lunch break or something.

I was going to get lunch. And I was listening to music and just not paying attention. And I pulled up to a stop sign or a red light on this road called Ben White. And the first thing I noticed is that there was a bus. And it's been so long, I can't remember what kind of bus it was. I can't remember. It must have been a city bus, but I just can't remember. Maybe it was like a trailways bus.

But there was a bus cutting off the street across from me on the left side, so like on the other lane of traffic past the median. And I thought that was a really weird thing to see. And then I noticed that there was smoke everywhere. And it just seemed like it was coming from nowhere. It was just smoke everywhere and everywhere. And as I was kind of surveying the situation, and in my mind, this is taking a very long time.

I'm kind of taking this all in, looking, sweeping kind of like straight to left as I'm seeing this stuff. And it's slowly starting to register that I think maybe an accident just happened. And this whole thing, I said, like, it feels like a million years in my brain, but that's probably like three seconds. I took all this in. And I look immediately to my left and immediately to my left, there was a car where a car wasn't supposed to be. It was the median. I was in the left lane on Ben White and this car was in like a median and it was just parked there and there was nobody in the driver's seat except uh it was a woman except she had been i guess thrown back and from the driver's seat she had gone into the back of the car and then her head had gone through the had gone through the passenger side rearview mirror and she was kind of hanging out of it and uh just eyes glassy and uh and just staring straight ahead and i just i made eye contact with her and it realized very quickly that she was dead and then like it was like a spell broke it was like it was like the only thing in the world for a second and i was just like kind of taking in this horror and seeing how i like noticed her neck was bent in a really weird unnatural way and then uh and then like suddenly everything changed i came out of it there were

sirens everywhere there was people like uh running over in uniforms and that the next thing i knew we were being ushered off and i was driven away and uh then they started to barricade the roads and stuff and i just uh i think I went back to work. And then every night for a couple months, every time I closed my eyes, I saw that dead lady. And I couldn't sleep. And I developed some pretty horrible insomnia that I tried to drink away. That only exacerbated things.

Anyway, that was the time I saw a dead body. And I don't know why I would ever want to do that again. And I guess I don't. So I hope that there is not a serial killer in Austin. And if there isn't a serial killer in Austin, and these are just a myriad of happenstance, accidents and mistakes, please be more careful around the water in Austin. It is apparently a very dangerous place. 10 people have died in the water under a multitude of circumstances in less than a year, which is insane. on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row,

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So make every Wednesday a whopper Wednesday only at Burger King where you rule. And then the other memory that's stuck in my head that I can't get out of my head since I read this, since I found out about this yesterday, is this time when I was about 16, I don't know, I really, I get the, I literally get why I had the other memory about the dead lady. But I don't completely understand why this one stuck in my head.

When I turned, I think I got, I think my parents got me, helped me get a new car when I turned 17. I'd had this beater of a little pickup truck that didn't last long. And then I got this, I want to say it was get a new car when I turned 17. I'd had this beater of a little pickup truck that didn't last long. And then I got this, I want to say it was like right around the time I turned 17, I got this Datsun 200SX car that was also just an utter piece of shit, but it drove really well and it was a lot of fun.

And it looked like kind of like a spaceship. And so I got that and I got a, then I, at the same time, I saved up and I bought a Discman this is back in the time when cars well it's back in time of physical media now we have Spotify and share right but uh and and Sirius XM or whatever but back then we used to use physical media and most cars in the late 80s early 90s had tape decks and most cars that you were buying in the early 90s if you were 16 were from the late 70s early 80s and they definitely had tape decks so uh one workaround because cd players were very fucking expensive they were like 300

bucks to to get one to put in your car because you buy a little disc man like a little portable guy and then you would plug it into the like the auxiliary feed on your tape deck or sometimes you would even have this like tape you would insert and it would be connected and it would somehow send a signal and it would play your CDs. The only problem was it didn't work for shit. And I think about this dissonance all the time when we're complaining about how much technology sucks today and how it's almost convenient and how nothing works the way it's supposed to. And we kind of have this whole culture of like bagging on technology for not being perfect for us at all times. And rightly so in some cases.

But let me tell you, in the early 1990s, disk men were the worst fucking things on the planet. You would put a disk in and if it had one ounce of dust on it, it would skip. If you breathed around it, it would skip. As a matter of fact, that's how you would buy these things. There were these, they would have a little number on it. It would be like three times oversampling, no skipping. Five times, 5X oversampling, no skipping. 7X, no skipping.

And so they would say like that it would like buffer for a period of time so that it would ride out the skip if the skip happened it would play it that shit never worked that number was bullshit i would love somebody to go and do a deep dive on how meaningless go back and talk to the to the designers and the engineers about how fucking useless that feature was and how it didn't do a goddamn thing because you could get a 12X and it would skip just as bad as a 1X. And if you even so much as looked at a disc, it would, fuck dude,

if your disc skipped bad enough in a Discman, the Discman would scratch your disc. And then the Discman couldn't read the disc that it damaged. This thing sucked. But I had one and I loved it. And so I would ride around in my car at night and listen to, I had two CDs. I had Fear the Record, which did not age well. And I've heard they even went back and re-recorded to remove some of the bigotry, which I appreciate. And

The Descendants, two things at once, which now that I think about it, also didn't probably age well. But I loved those albums when I was 16 and 17 as a kid, learning about punk rock in the world. And I would drive around in my car all night long, which is another thing I don't get. This is look at me getting generational. But my daughter is 17 and her friends. And, you know, for what I've seen from from the cultural world at large kids don't seem to want to get away as much as they used to like when we turned 16 we got our licenses and we took the fuck off and I think I don't it seems like it's just not that I guess maybe because of social media because of cell phones people don't feel the need to kind of fly the coop as much but

you know it's not like I had shitty parents. I liked my parents quite a lot. But the second I got a license, I got the fuck away from home. And I would just drive around, either with friends or by myself, a lot of time by myself. This is back in an era when gas was super cheap. I was working a job. I was working in high school. I was working 25 hours a week. five hours a week. And I think I made $4 and 65 cents an hour. And gas was like 72 cents a gallon. And so I was gas rich. I could go anywhere. And I would just drive around from like 7pm until I had to go home, like probably 10 on the weeknights and midnight on weekends, and just listen to those two albums over and over again. Cause that was all the, those are all the CDs I had. And, uh, I had blown all my money, uh, on gas and the disc man, I think. Uh, I can't remember if I got given the disc man or if I bought it. The car was,

yeah, who cares? What does it matter? Uh, I had a car and I had a disc man. And so I would just drive around roads and just get lost. And one night I was driving around. There's a lot of swampy rivers and marshes and shit around Mobile, Alabama, where I went to high school and where I was born. And so I was just driving around one night listening to the Descendants. And I was in this place called Dog River. There was a river named Dog River. And there was a lot of houses around it and some fancy many many not fancy and i was just driving around kind of getting lost over there because it was real swampy and kind of creepy and just had like a kind of a kind of a dark vibe and you know how like when you're when you're 16 17 you just you

can just feel everything so much more you know So I was just like embracing how like creepy and weird it felt to be driving around on these little dirt roads, uh, often around this shitty windy dog river that was just full of snakes that I would never go in for any amount of money in a million years then or now. Uh, anyway, and I, as I was driving around there, I turned down this one road and I, man, I'd pay money to be able to find this again. I turned down this one road. I looked for it again after, after this night, a couple months later, and I couldn't find it. I kind of got to the area, but you know how when you're just like winding around and you, you just kind of get lost and it, you know, you remember fragments of where places were, but if you weren't paying a ton of attention, you can lose. Well, not now because of GPS, but back then you

could lose that place in your brain forever. And I'm not suggesting that I like it. It was like supernatural and the road disappeared or like the woods closed over and I was the entrance was never there for me again or anything. I just couldn't find it. But I turned on this road one night and it was just a dirt road and it was like tree covered, you know, there was a canopy of trees all over it. And it was really kind of pretty at first. It was maybe just after dusk. So it was it was the sun had set, but it wasn't like pitch black yet. But it was a little more than like it was was kind of getting to that eerie hour. And so I'm driving through and I remember this being an incredibly, incredibly long, winding road. And I'm sure it's not as long as I remember. Age has a way of distorting memory and

making things seem more fanciful. But I just remember it being a little disturbed because the road just kept going and going and there were no like pull off areas to turn around. It was only wide enough for one car. And to I realized pretty quickly, you know, I'm 17. I don't know how to drive that well at this point. But I realized pretty quickly that like to back straight out would be a monumental undertaking. And to to turn around was not in the cards. It was just like, I had no, either it was too tight, or I knew I would get my car stuck in mud or something,

because like I said, it was kind of swampy over there. And so I just had no choice, pretty quickly, but to follow it. And one thing I do remember as clear as day is another problem with those Discman, besides besides skipping was that they would chew through batteries like they were they would just drain fucking batteries way worse than an Xbox controller now and

so on that particular night I my my batteries had died on the road so I had no music to listen to and the radio sucked back then and I didn't like it I wouldn't have liked anything on it, so I had no music to listen to. And the radio sucked back then, and I didn't like it. I wouldn't have liked anything on it. And so I just turned off the music. And also, because I was, this is like 1991, and I have a, I'm 17, 16, 17.

My car did not have air conditioning. And this is, Alabama is, people here talk about how Austin is too humid. Living on the Gulf Coast, it's like walking through a shower half the time. It was so hot and so humid that I had all my windows rolled down, and so I'm just hyper aware of all the cicadas going and the bugs and the scary bird noises as it's starting to get dark. And the road just keeps going and keeps going. And pretty far down the road there, I pull up to an area where there start to be milk cartons hanging from these trees, like big plastic jug milk cartons. And like, I don't know, dozens and dozens of them. And they're just like haphazardly hung.

And sometimes there'll be one like hung from a limb and then one hung under it and then one hung under that. And they're just kind of like banging against each other and making this really creepy noise. And then as you go further, there started to be bones hanging with the milk cartons. So it was like milk cartons and bones of, I'm assuming animals, that got weird.

milk cartons and bones of, I'm assuming, animals. That got weird. And then at some point, there was a big plywood sign nailed to a tree. And just in white paint, it just said, let go and let God, which I know is like an inspirational phrase people say to like, you know, let God take control for a while. It's like a religious thing. But something about that and the way it was written and just screwed to a tree like, I don't know, half a mile down this windy road covered by trees with bugs and birds making noises and shit stomping around in the woods. And there's these bones and like milk jugs clacking together and it just kept going and going and from that point on there weren't any other signs or anything but there was the whole like like the whole i had to keep going to get to somewhere so i could turn

around and get the fuck out or maybe hit another road or whatever and the milk jugs and the bones just continued. It was like a fixture. And there were, if anything, there were more of them as I went. And then eventually it turned around a little corner and I ended up in like a clearing area with a house kind of back off in the back of it,

kind of up nestled up against the trees. And I want to say, I don't know if i'm remembering this correctly or not but i want to say the river was to my left like i could see a little bit of water bank like the house the house was like the house was on the water i guess or at least the water was near the property and um it was just kind of like a little clearing and there was all kinds of bullshit around tractors and junky cars and all the stuff you'd expect to see and in my brain once again i'm sure i'm conflating this but in my mind the house looked like a well it looked kind of like the evil dead house from evil dead 2 with maybe a hint of the original

chainsaw massacre house like just in the way that there was just like shit hanging up everywhere and everything was rusty and there was just this house and there were there was like a god i don't remember but i i feel like there was a junked up car that didn't run or something that didn't have tires off like maybe to my right with a bunch of other stuff and like an old boat and just more milk jugs and bones everywhere in the trees all around it and then this house kind of back in the middle and all the lights off on the house like all the lights are off but i could see stuff so i don't know if there's maybe like some sort of a yard lights or maybe a bug zappers or maybe it was just a a lot of moonlight that night but i definitely could see i definitely could make

everything out i do remember that uh anyway but it was just pitch black and i got so fucking scared and so terrified i just sat in my car frozen looking at this house, so scared that like a door was going to open or the lights were going to turn on. I was so, so, so far away. And so I just sat there frozen for what felt like an hour, but it was probably 15 seconds. And then I just I turned my lights off and I very quietly turned around in their yard, like amongst all their, I say it was a yard,

it was just a, you know, it's a fucking field. I just kind of turned around amongst all their junk and just slowly went down that path, and then as soon as I couldn't see the house in the rear view mirror, I turned the lights back on, and then I drove as fast as I could

down that path to get the fuck out of there because I was so scared whoever lived there was going to be coming up the path. And of course, at 16 or 17 years old, however old I was, in the middle of the woods next to some swampy ass mosquito alligator river and a bunch of weird religious iconography and bones and shit, I was convinced I was going to get eaten. And so probably the shittiest drive, scariest drive of my life was getting out of that place. And then when I drove out of there, I went, I went straight the fuck home. And anyway, I got the fuck out of there. And then, like I said, months later, I tried, I was telling my friends about it. I tried to take them to show them and I couldn't find it again. And man, I'd love to, I'd love to go back today and see it.

I mean, it's probably a subdivision now full of very nice houses that was developed. And I'm sure it was probably nothing more than a very rural, old, religious family living as close to off the grid as you can live on the Dog River. But it had a very ominous, very creepy, very morbid feel to it when I was there. And I was intensely scared.

And I don't know why that is popping into my head. But seeing the dead lady on my lunch break and then just being stuck on that road and being scared to death have both been playing in my head ever since I read about this body in the river. And I don't know. Maybe now that we talked about it, I can get it out of my head. Be safe in Austin.

If you're going to come to Austin, a lot of bachelor parties, a lot of bachelorette parties, a lot of people going on vacation here, a lot of music fans coming to the town, a lot of drinking, a lot of shenanigans. Just be careful. Be careful when you're out on the town. Austin has a great reputation for being a really chill, laid-back, fun place to come and drink, and everybody's your friend, but this city has grown a lot, and a lot faster than a lot of people realize, and the tin bodies in Town Lake, I think, are evidence of that. So just keep you know, keep your wits about you. And if you're going to go drink and don't,

don't, don't take drinks from strangers. Uh, there's, uh, some supposition that some of those people that died in the river may have been roofied. So,

uh, don't take drinks from strangers and, uh, always go with a buddy and be safe. And, uh, man, when I went for my bike ride this morning, even though I'd prefer not to see a dead

body, I couldn't take my eyes off the river. It's all I saw. Now I'm going to be watching it like a hawk with horror. Really adds a new element to the morning bike rides. All right.