Trillbilly Worker's Party - Bonus: 2023 Trillbillies Halloween Special-Spectral Valley

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

Annual Halloween Special featuring Frank Hurricane, John Haywood, Caleb Hanson, Tommy Anderson, and Ken Layne. Music by Lee Bains III, production, editing and additional sound design by Matthew Carter, and artwork by Hayden Miles.

© transcript Emily Beynon අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි Good evening everybody and welcome to the annual Trillbillies Halloween special, Spectral Valley edition. annual Trillbillies Halloween special, Spectral Valley edition. I'm your host, Tom Sexton, and for the next roughly hour and a half, we'll be bringing you a nice collection of scary stories and spooky recollections from the likes of such luminaries as Frank Hurricane, John Haywood, Caleb Hansen, Tommy Anderson, and Mr. Ken Lane. You know, with all the current horrors of the corporeal world, talking about ghosts and unexplained phenomena, I can feel almost a bit quaint by comparison.

But I hope folks like this and enjoy it just the same. And without further ado, I'll shut up and turn it over to Mr. Frank Hurricane. Happy Halloween, everybody. There's a place up in Vermont called the Bennington Triangle. The first time I'd heard about this spot, the Bennington Triangle, was from this mystical dude named Aesop back in the day. And he had explained to me that this area was a strange kind of mystic vortex zone similar to the Bermuda Triangle or like Mount Shasta or something, you know, a mystical, hated-ass realm where portals and ghosts and all this stuff were at. You know, doing a little bit more mystical research about it over time, I noticed the Bennington Triangle was based around this town, Bennington, Vermont. And there's a huge

obelisk there, like some hated, a huge dong in the sky kind of thing. Enormous, enormous dong in the sky thing. And you can see it from roads even far away. And I don't know if, you know, the mystical obelisk has anything to do with the hauntedness of this mystical area, the hatedness of the psychedelic ley lines or something. But this place is off the spiritual chain. The Bennington Triangle has had disappearances throughout time. Many, many disappearances. Hikers, for sure sure but also people living there all kinds of stuff people have been disappearing without a trace since the 1800s probably since you know forever many documented disappearances tons of sasquatch sightings the big yeti tons of ufos i'm talking anything you can think of that's haunted hated or holy going down up in the bennington triangle later on after

aesop had told me about it my good friend crisscross he had told me a lot about the Bennington Triangle and he had spent some time on there. He went on to explain to me also that one of the biggest mountains, and some say this is the epicenter of the Bennington Triangle energy, is Glastonbury Mountain, which mystically is named after Glastonbury, England, which, you know, obviously is like some spiritual King Arthur mystical craziness going on. And so I, you know, had been really looking forward since I'd first heard about this to go check it out. Lo and behold, Appalachian Trail goes directly through the Bennington Triangle and like I had said earlier a lot of the disappearances in the Bennington Triangle have been hikers and we're talking

hikers some way back we're talking hikers in recent times I had hiked past the road crossing where Bennington the city comes off from and I was hiking up the smaller mountains leading up to Glastonbury Mountain I spent the night in a rainstorm and a psychedelic ancient shack with some spiritual homies and we were all really hyped about climbing up Glastonbury Mountain the next day because I explained to everybody the Bennington Triangle and all the crazy haunted insane shit that had gone down there. So wake up in the morning it was hot outside it was July you know wearing short shorts shrimponati short sleeves rolling up the mountain flying. I'd been hiking for a couple weeks at this point. I was putting in you know 20 miles a day at least in the big mountains. Now up to the

top of Glastonbury I think it was probably about I don't know five or six miles tops. So it was early in the day. Like I said it was hot. But as I'm coming up Glastonbury Mountain towards the top of it, it started to snow. And the snow was really coming down. It was a legit snowstorm turning into a blizzard in the middle of July on top of this mystical, hated mountain. As I'm going up the way, I realized there was a shelter there, like a little three-walled mystical shanty. And I said, well, I don't got pants.

I don't got long sleeves. I don't even have a thick sleeping bag. I got my thin John. I really need to post up in this shelter and see what happens. Wait out this blizzard in July. I roll in the shelter. I'm chilling. I even get in my sleeping bag because I'm freezing. One by one come all the rest of these shrimp and naughty hikers. They're coming up the way and everybody's terrified and blown away and amazed by the fact

that we're in a snowstorm in the middle of July. Everybody decides to wait out the storm and they just keep coming in, shrimping one by one. I'd say the shelter is supposed to fit about 12. I'd say by the end of the evening, there was 14, 15 people in there. Now this mystical crew was incredible. There was an old Englishman who was just off the chain. There was like a country truck driver guy. There was psychedelic fratty law students. There was hippies smoking highly concentrated tobacco out of miniature pipes. There was women who worked at the Fed,

who print the money, who make the cheese. There was a father and daughter from Burlington. And I think there was some other people. And there was me. And we're all squeezed one by one in this shelter. And we're feeling crazy vibes. I mean, like I said, 20 mile days every day turned into a six mile day and that snow ain't no sign of stopping. The next day we all wake up. The snow is coming down even more. We stuck in a blizzard at the top of a mountain in a haunted, stuck in a blizzard at the top of a mountain in a haunted, mystical, hated triangle in July snowstorm where many have disappeared and everybody's kind of freaking out. We all bundled up squashed against each other to stay warm because nobody had

any gear for anything other than peak summer. And this snow is just coming down now down the hill, a little ways where you could see from where we all were in the shelter lined up like little shrimps in a blanket. Looking down, you could see this modern privy or outhouse that they had built recently. It was a new structure. I'd say it was probably made within the last year or so. A new like outhouse privy situation that was really awesome it was fancy i actually thought about sleeping in there at one point because it sealed there was a door so

people couldn't see you crapping in there snow ain't stopping yet at this point it's the second day of all of us stuck in there and some different people came by during the day. There was a psychedelic Swedish girl who came by who I would later befriend. And we hiked together some after that. She somehow made it through this whole scenario. She just powered through the psychedelic vortex. The only other person that I saw was this guy comes up. It was in the midday. Dude looked like straight out the 80s like this dude wasn't from modern times this guy was from the 80s and he walked up and this dude looked a shoveled this was one hated hiker right here. This dude was looking twisted.

And he's burnt out. And he's like, excuse me. And we're like, what, dude? You okay? He goes, has another hiker passed through here? And we were just like, dude, no. And the guy just walked off now i'm pretty sure that was some guy who disappeared somewhere in the mystical bennington triangle like in the 80s i guess

and he came back to say what up to us during this mystical snowstorm like psychedelic blizzard portal that we were inside continuing on we realize we're all gonna have to stay here again that night because the snow ain't letting up and it's a long way to the next shelter so everyone says all all right, we're going to stay. We're staying tonight. And I'd say it's towards sunset, probably, I don't know, an hour before sunset, maybe an hour and a half before sunset. We're all just kind of playing cards and old boys puffing his concentrated tobacco out the miniature pipe. Eventually, I felt like in front of all these shrimps i could bust out the ganja weed so we were blazing down and you know just getting to know each other there was this really intense vibe like a wave comes kind of comes across a mystical wave kind of comes across

this really intense intense vibe wave and i hear a noise in the distance down kind of towards the outhouse and i look over to my right where the holy couple from burlington it was uh it was a father and daughter now the daughter was about my age and the father was older um i was probably at the time like 29 30 and she was probably like 29 30 also and i look at her and i could tell something was really going on all of a sudden with her and i said to her i said are you okay and she said i just saw a ghost and i said what she said i just saw a ghost down there it came out of the outhouse and I said

what I said have you seen something like that before and she said yes and I said oh whoa and before I could even really respond I'm looking down at the outhouse and out of this mystical outhouse comes a psychedelic woman from like the 1800s and she was wearing heavy black and white cloth clothes look like a Mennonite from the 1800s.

And she came out of the outhouse and closed the door and you could hear it slam. You could see her and she looked like she was living today. I mean, she looked real. But you knew that that woman was not wearing those clothes in this psychedelic july blizzard in real life and everyone saw her and she walked out of the outhouse into the woods now this one shrimp that was there started just flipping his lid because all of us admitted, we just saw a ghost. 1800s psychedelic Mennonite ghost. And this dude goes, I don't believe in ghosts.

Old boy goes running down past the outhouse towards where this woman had walked into the trees. And he ran for miles. He came back and obviously he said there was nothing to be seen he didn't see anything because she was a ghost and everyone saw her that was the craziest part about it was there was like 14 15 shrimps saw her so we all knew it was real and it was really insane and you know we just kind of talked about it and then we all went to sleep the next morning i woke up and i was like dude we're getting out of here it was still snowing like crazy but i threw on my my psychedelic little shirt and my little shriveled shrimp shorts.

And they were frozen solid. I mean, it was like just putting a sheet of ice against your legs and your body. But I knew it would warm up. And I threw on my pack and I ran out that spot. And I got maybe 300 yards past where the shelter was. And the weather was fine. It was warm again. We really had been trapped inside a mystical vortex.

And I don't know if that's what's happened to other people. And then they never make it out. I don't know what was going down. But it sure was off the chain. When I think about times in my life when I was scared of things, obvious things we're all scared of, fear of losing someone close to you. But being really scared, I can, you know, like genuinely scared of something. Even when I was a little kid, we had stories about the boogeyman and all that,

and the people that would come and get you. The one or two times that I remember getting really like just scared, being terrified, you know, just as a little kid. You know, I grew up in a holler. I can kind of give you the setting first, you know, in a holler. Not heavily populated, you know, I grew up in a holler. I'm going to kind of give you the setting first. You know, in a holler, not heavily populated. You know, you know everybody. So there's family history there. Also, my house, you know, we lived in a trailer sitting right in front of a coal mine, an abandoned coal mine. And when we were little kids, the mine was open. You could go back into it if you wanted to, if you got daring and explored.

If you wanted to get real brave, you'd out you know this little side passage people didn't go out that that was for air but as little kids we'd go back into the mine on the one end of my yard go back into where it was caved in and come back around you know go out squeeze out the breezeway you know and I mean squeeze out going back in there seeing this caved in coal mine and then there was another place on up the road where the there was actually an entrance under where the road went over and you could go back into it and play and explore and there was always these dark passages which where you were like you know in the rubble where you're like who would be brave enough to crawl back in there? Because it would go immediately black, dark.

You couldn't see what was going on there. And, you know, we were kids growing up in the holler there. It was just our family. We never carried flashlights or nothing. We just would imagine, you know, what was back in these caverns and stuff. You know, I'd have dreams about these places, these far-off, mountainous places where you kind of sometimes get stuck at and encounter, like, a creepy house

that had some kind of, you know, maybe what felt like a spirit attached to it. When I was a kid, and even into adulthood, I still have sort of these types of dreams where I'm way up a holler kind of places where someone doesn't live anymore. And one of these old abandoned houses where I'm way up a holler kind of places where someone doesn't live anymore and one of these old abandoned houses that we used to you know when we were kids explore and play around in and you can attribute a lot of like sort of the dreams you know and these dreams would be

like these nightmares sometime. One night me and my brother we slept in the bed together for some reason laying crossways on the bed. I wake up because it's like someone is pushing my shoulder a little bit and I look at the foot of the bed and I'm thinking it's my mom standing there and as I look at her she kind of gives me a smile and then and then she just sort of floats up into the air sort of you know goes in and just up through the ceiling and is gone and I immediately jump into the bed you know, goes in and just up through the ceiling and is gone. And I immediately jump into the bed, you know, get straightened up in the bed, throw the covers on. I was about 11 years old because I remember this. That's how old I was, that I was like not afraid of nothing

to suddenly just being terrified that there was something around any corner, you know, that there were spirits around or something weird like that. And then one other time, sort of a similar thing, I would wake up in the bed in a weird, awkward position, and I see someone sitting in my room, and all I can see is their eyes, and their face is kind of black, covered, and just like crap, you know, just so black that all I can see is this.

You can see that there's something. You can see that there's skin underneath there something it terrified me to the point to where anything at night I could hear I could focus on I would focus on and imagine it being picturing to myself like this creature that's lurking in our house somewhere you know just sort of waiting on us to go to sleep to do who knows what. Weird stuff, but for some reason, you know, those incidents and also this other incident counts of myself sleepwalking, where I would wake up about almost like a half mile up the road

in someone else's yard, you know, in just my underwear, thinking like, and here's my thought. I can remember my thought process. I'm in their yard all of a sudden, you know. It's the middle of the night, and my brain just immediately kind of goes to like, oh, I'm just visiting my cousins, Scott and Shane here and Steph. I'm going to visit them and why are their lights all out? This is odd. This is kind of surreal. Their lights are out. So I'm kind of looking around

and I'm like, well, I guess you should go home. So I start making my way through the yard. All of our, you know, I lived in a place where it was all family, so you could walk home by not getting in the road. You could walk through everybody's yard and go home. So I was walking through the yards on my way home, and I stopped, and on the way to my house is my great aunt's house, and I'm like, every light in their house is off too. And then I notice my aunt's house next to hers is off. And it's like, about that time I hear my mom calling me. And I look and I see her in her nightgown

and I just break down and run to her. And then I'd do it again apparently. I would just constantly sort of break out of the house in the middle of the night. And one time my uncle, who worked in the mines and lived next to us, all of a sudden I'm standing in their yard, but I'm talking to him. You know, this is my memory of it. You know, I'm standing in their yard, I'm talking to him.

And he's like, what are you doing? And I just tell him, like, I'm coming to pick up the mail. That was what I told him, Because we all shared a mailbox. And every day it was part of just a general routine thing that I would do. Just go, you know, do that sort of stuff. And my parents, they put these high locks way up on there where I couldn't reach to keep me in the house. And my mom said I would be constantly waking her up in the middle of the night

asking her to, like, sword fight or something like that. And you could attribute that to maybe watching too much science fiction, getting too into Star Wars or something when I was a kid. One other kind of like encounter, surreal, we don't know what it was. You could ask my friend in this very day what we saw and he'd be like, I don't know what we saw. So my house had this little walkway between the house and the garage. And when you come to the house, you know, we always went in the back door.

So you had to walk through this walkway to go to the back door. We're walking through the walkway, and as we get to the backyard, we just hear, like, this crazy rumbling. It feels like it's shaking everything. You know, this is way late in the night. He immediately stops and turns around to run back to the front of the house because what it sounds like is something moving

through the sky. So we come around and we look in the sky and we see something moving in front of the stars, black out the stars, and we can see a window inside. And we can see, like, legitimately what seems like silhouettes of people floating through the sky, just going across the mountain, just like a scenic tour.

And we both, to this day, you know, we always talk about it, because it really freaked us out. What was it? Yeah, this ain't no sleepwalking thing. This is, we both saw something. I don't know if I would have been brave enough to turn around and run to the front yard to really look at it if it wasn't for him, because he did it first, and he didn't say nothing. And I don't even remember what our conversations were after that. I feel like we went in and

sat in silence. What's interesting is I've read certain other UFO encounter type things that people see in something similar to that. Like a moving object in the sky in a window and they can see what looks like folks inside. I've even read that other folks have seen something like that before. For me as an art person, when you go and you're following the art career, they tell you to sort of focus on these things. You're trying to make a thesis, but for an artist, specifically when I was a painter, they want you to look into what makes you you. How can you zero in on what makes you unique,

what makes you different from every other artist? My granny would always tell me, I was like, oh, you've got such a heavy imagination, such a good imagination, you know. So I honed in on sort of these little interesting encounters where to me as a kid, they were just stuff that scared me. So these were the stories that sort of started to influence stuff I wanted to make art about. A lot of it went, led me to more of an appreciation of my culture, so that I started doing that in my paintings too. I was using these things, you know, that just purely terrified me to, to suddenly now give me like sort of the building blocks of who I am as

an artist or whatever. And, and, and I also attribute it also to a lot of religious trauma. You know, like the fear that, you know, the ultimate fear, like what is your ultimate fear? Well, you know, any God-fearing Christian, your ultimate fear is that you're going to die one day

and your soul's going to burn in hell. That was ingrained to us growing up. Anybody who grew up in a holler around here could probably identify with maybe growing up in a who grew up in a holler around here could probably identify with maybe growing up in a real religious family. We grew up and you know my grandfather at the time when I was born was old regular Baptist and no musical instruments allowed. Just that old scary singing. It's scary singing. You know as a little kid I hear it and you cry. It scared me to death.

Especially if somebody dies like that's the stuff they start singing. My papa would go sing at these funerals all the time. We'd just imitate him as a little kid, make fun of him, you know, but all that stuff I started having to draw on as an artist. It's like it's still in my mind. Every day in my mind, I have an argument with religion. Before I had my morning coffee, I'm like, I'm just thinking, damn, these religious folk. You know, maybe it's not so, I mean, it's a million churches. You know, so much division that goes on based on this sort of stuff. I encountered that my whole life.

And then when my parents decided they'd get into the church, it was three or four days a week, sometimes all week long. Go and you'd watch these plays. People would dine and come out dressed like Gene Simmons and carry them to hell. It would be, you know, while the strobe light's playing, you know, and then at the end of it, all these people would get saved. They'd all go up there and they'd be kneeling down and praying over them all. And that stuff, to me, these ideas of God's going to burn you in the lake of fire

if you're not living right with God, it's pretty scary, and it keeps you beholden to certain things. So I've had to confront all that and confront the story, the Christian story, about what Jesus' message was at that time. It's the same as now, only it's just the different characters and the same, kind of similar story in a way. And for me, it was just one day. Once people started politicking in the church, I was over it. I was done. I think church can be a good thing, but religion is one of those things that it's very easy for someone else to use it against us. And that's scary. You know, why was Papaw a regular Baptist? Well, it turns out my

grandmother passed away, you know, years before I was even born. My aunt lived in the old home place and in her attic. Her upstairs was so scary, you know what I mean? It would be like, it was a stairway into darkness. She had one of these old landscape paintings that was there, went up, everything was so creaky. It was the house they had all grew up in, my mom and everybody grew up in. The upstairs was just tons of these old relics that was left behind, that people just hadn't fooled with in years. The cool thing was, it was a lot of photos of like my family. I remember the one photo that scared me to death

was this photo that's, I keep it in my house now, is it's my great grandmother, Mousy, because when I saw the picture, that was who visited me in my room that night. So it brought back all these stories, and here's what also we found. This was also where I encountered my first musical instruments. So there was an old auto harp up there. There was an old fiddle, which I've restored, and it sounds awesome these days.

I play, it's my main one if I play fiddle, you know. And there was an old guitar. It probably went in there when Papaw joined the church. The fiddle, you could tell, had been played to death. It had been played to death and then someone had actually tried to do some kind of reset on the neck where they had the actual fingerboard was right on the fiddle. Like a guitar would be, it was like right on the, there was no space. The guitar was real hard to play and the auto harp was hard to tune. It was just like, oh you knew you had to, you know, you'd push these little buttons down and strum it.

These musical instruments I ended up getting. And this was also a lot of what got me into the older music, re-looking at all the old music, was this discovering of stuff that I had not paid attention to when I was young. I began making all these ties to these, seeing one of my grandmothers looking over me at night, to me, brought this desire to learn who these people were, how they lived. My mom had all of her recipes. My grandmother, Virginia, they were all passed down.

The instruments all belonged to her. The guitar, the fiddle, and the auto harp, they all belonged to her. Well, the fiddle was her first husband before my papa. Papa tells this story about when she died, that he had a dream, like a visionary type dream. I did a painting of it, where she's on the mountain, and he sees her at the top of the mountain. And in the valley ways, there's fire.

People were falling into it and dying and screaming and wanting out. On top of the mountain would be, he said, was Virginia, my grandmother, and she wanted him to follow her, come with her. And, you know, before she had passed away, she had cancer. She was saved before she passed away. And when she passed away, that was when my papa had this dream. That was when he gave up booze, joined the old regular Baptist church, which was no musical instruments. So yeah, what is my biggest fear? I guess it was growing up and throughout my whole life, even to this day, I encounter that it's this religious fear of we're all going to burn in hell for some reason, you know, eternally,

in the lake of fire, just for not doing what? You know, it depends on what church you'd ask. You know, the church I'd be in awe. He was a good person. You know, he did all the stuff to help these people he just he just never got baptized you know never he never went up there and knelt down you know and did the said the magic words so none none of his prayers count so in all this retrospect looking you know tying these little you know maybe I got a vivid imagination. I've also tied the encounter with the person who had the black on their face, you know. For me, that vision became like the coal miner, you know. So, you know, the one vision you have,

like, it's like my grandmother watching over me. My grandmother sort of saying, hey, don't forget where you come from. The other one is like the coal miner that's like my papaw. You know, my papaw, the old regular Baptist, you know, he quit school in the sixth grade to be a coal miner. That vision of my grandmother for me today as an artist, as Appalachian, you know, there's the history associated with it. You know, the old time music that's lost, the old fiddle. From the coal miner, you know, there's that work. If you're going to do something, you know, just do it, you know what I mean? Get out and work at it, get it done.

You know, I had two years ago, my papa said go to school because, well, he had quit school. He said what you learn and can acquire, you know, the knowledge, it will only help you really. Otherwise, you're just a pawn for people. They can pull shit over on you real bad. And he knew that. And I like to attribute the little encounter that me and my friend had with the UFO, which the government says, yeah, we're UFOs, only we don't call them UFOs. says, oh yeah, hey, now, yeah, there were UFOs, only we don't call them UFOs.

I like to attribute that to my, you know, that fascination growing up in the 80s with science fiction and how it might even apply to you. Like maybe, like maybe I am a little bit alien, you know, and maybe that was them that dropped me. Maybe I didn't sleepwalk, you know, maybe they just dropped me off in the yard. Maybe I was with them. And maybe they were swinging by, see if I was out. And I had a buddy, so they were like, no, man, we can't take this guy. So it's just, like I said, my granny would say I have vivid imagination, which I don't know, I kind of believe in that. I think a lot of who we are as people relies a lot on the stories that we tell ourselves of who we are and what's going on in the world and what's happening to us. Your story, how you just perceive certain things can change a lot, I think. My name is Caleb Hansen.

I used to be a raptor biologist of sorts. Raptors being birds of prey. Every raptor biologist usually ends up spending at least one fall on an annual migration count. And you sit in one place every single day, and you are essentially recording every single migratory hawk that passes through your site. It was just me and two other guys. So there were three of us and we all had our own sleeping tents. And so when the season ended, my coworkers and I, we were just like, let's put a nightcap on the season by going backpacking down in South Central Utah. One of my crew members was a very accomplished

thru-hiker, and this was my first time doing a backpack, and it was with this guy. He did an okay job of letting a couple newbies just get their feet wet into it. The day when all the shit went down, he was nowhere to be seen all day because he weighs 120 pounds and he has like an ultralight backpacking outfit

on his back so he's just gone. You know, he's the kind of guy who just wants to go at his own pace. So I'm going much slower than him. I couldn't keep up. I'm battling dehydration. I'm battling the elements. We're in the high desert. There was a dusting of

snow on the ground because it's early November and there's no one in the park. The entire hike through, I had just been noticing that it's like there's only one other set of footprints in front of me and this is Ben. So we are essentially all alone in this national park in early November. It's starting to get a little dusky, and I hear some rustling. I look uphill to my left, and there's a great Pyrenees just chilling out at the top of the hill and realizing that, oh, this dog's checking me out, making sure I'm not a threat. And eventually the dog kind of chills chills out, turns around and disappears. Goes out of my sight of view.

Probably about a half an hour after the encounter with the dog, I catch up to my other crew member, Tom, who's more like me. He's newer to backpacking. We caught up to Ben where he had made up his camp. Well, the sun had been down for probably about 45 minutes to an hour. Then in the sky, what was just like a blinking beacon of light moving through the sky that, you know, it just looked like a regular plane, satellite, whatever. Nothing really that out of the ordinary.

We weren't really paying that close attention to it at first and then it starts to emit this thin almost transparent prism of light and the prism is like turquoise teal colored it's probably anywhere from like 500 to a thousand feet tall and it's trailing it just like a plane pulling along a banner at the beach and it tapers as the object is moving through the sky we couldn't see through it and i just i distinctly remember the color just like how it looked like a really sleek metallic piece of stained glass. It continues to keep moving until the object just disappears. To this day, I do not know what that was.

Very bizarre, nonetheless. Probably the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. We're just kind of like, that was the UFO, right? I've never seen anything like that before. How do we describe what we just saw? Just baffling. So we then all go to bed. I never looked at like a clock or anything. I don't know how long it had been before I had fallen asleep, but I'm asleep in my sleeping bag in my tent. And then all of a sudden, just like that baseline noise you hear when you're in an airplane and you're just flying, you can like hear it in the back of your eardrum and you like

feel the vibration. I'm woken up by the sensation of that feeling like in the back of my ears, I am conscious, but I can't open my eyes. I can't move. I can't get up. I can't do anything. But I specifically remember that I couldn't see it like physically with my eyes, but I had a very specific vision of something pressing a probe-like object into the mesh of my tent and the tent kind of peeling around the object. It makes contact with my left arm and it's kind of, it's not pressing in that hard. You could definitely feel it and I can't move. The noise is intensifying in the back of my ear. I have no clue how long any of this really actually lasted.

Kind of seemingly from out of nowhere, there is a very specific image that I can see in my mind of that dog from earlier that evening running between me and the object that was poking me through my tent and into my sleeping bag. And then once the dog runs between me and that object poking, I can all of a sudden open my eyes. I take a sharp inhale of breath and I kind of jolt up in my sleeping bag. Essentially, the paralysis was snapped. For about a year, I was just like, that was just a really bizarre bout of sleep paralysis. I have no fucking clue what that was. When something like that happens to you, you just kind of keep a story like that to yourself for a little while. But one of the first times I told this story to like a group of people, one of the guys who ended up telling me about how he, he's a UFO enthusiast.

Just immediately after I finished telling the story, told me and he's like, oh, you were abducted. This sounds like an abduction story from the UFO that you saw earlier that night that was emitting that weird turquoise green light. And if I was abducted, I don't know what they did to me. I don't feel any stranger. I did a little bit of research into sleep paralysis, and it's, you know, sometimes sleep paralysis occurs after an extremely stressful and exhaustive day, which was that. I was very tired from a very stressful day of just hiking. But most people don't see a UFO on a day like that. You know, I hear other stories about UFOs that do insane things like shoot 15,000 feet in like half of a second.

That's not what I saw. A visually pleasant display of turquoise teal colored light in the Utah night sky with no light pollution around and then subsequently was abducted. When I was a little kid, I was fascinated by aliens. And, you know, ghosts were interesting and everything, but aliens especially were super interesting to me. And I was equally scared and fascinated, interested with extraterrestrial beings. It was probably a little bit before I hit puberty to maybe like 12 years old i was uh lying in bed and uh lived at this intersection in pike county called shelby gap it was a little community called hell you're near it j Jenkins, Dorton, and it bordered Virginia along Pine

Mountain. So there I was in bed, especially quiet night, really still. Everybody was asleep in my house. It was kind of weird for my house to be that quiet. I was having a hard time falling asleep. Then I heard a knock, like, you know, three knocks at the back door of our trailer. And I was afraid somebody was, you know, drunk or something and coming in because that had happened before. So I heard the knock, kind of startled me a little bit. Then I heard the back door open. There was another door before my room. My room was the closest one to the back door and bordered the living room. Then I heard that next door open up.

I figured somebody has to be outside of my door. Three knocks on my bedroom door. There wasn't a door handle on my door. This was, you know, this was an old trailer that we paid, you know, my mamaw paid a couple thousand dollars for. The floors were rotting out in it and stuff and we fixed it up to kind of be livable. So there was no lock on my door. The three knocks, I sat up as quick as I could in the bed and looked at the door and said, who is it? I was scared. The door opened up and standing in the doorway was this really weird being. My mind kind of makes it change a little bit,

but I remember it had goat legs. Its legs were like a goat. It didn't have any fur on it. Its skin almost kind of glowed like a pearlescent type, like it could have almost been see-through. You know, sort of what we would think of how invisible looks in a movie or something.

Shiny skin, looked almost wet the skin did these big black eyes a big head its legs that were like goat legs or deer legs and its arms were really skinny and its torso was really skinny but its but its head didn't kind of make, its body didn't make sense at all. It was really strange. I was terrified. So I slammed my fist against the wall and didn't wake anybody up in my house. You know, the wall that I banged on was where my mom and dad were sleeping in the living room. My mom was asleep on the couch. My dad was asleep on a mattress in the floor, banged my fist against the wall and just yelled out like, Hey, and this thing outside my door just, uh, sort of walked away calmly and I banged my fist on the wall a few more times and got up and turned my

light on and looked down the hall and you know you had that feeling at my back like oh shit this thing could be behind me or like I don't know what happened I know that I wasn't dreaming I kept questioning myself after you know was I dreaming or something but I know for sure I wasn't dreaming. I kept questioning myself after, you know, was I dreaming or something, but I know for sure I wasn't. I've had many instances of sleep paralysis that some of them are their own really weird story, but I got up and my parents wouldn't wake up. My brother would bear, my brother's the one that I got up and they all I don't know if they were sleepy just really really sleepy or what but nobody was really opening their eyes fully and I was trying to explain to them something came to the bedroom door and I don't know what it was and I know for sure that I wasn't dreaming and they told me you know just go back to sleep it was nothing and I went and

laid back down and somehow got to sleep and I talked to my brother about it and my parents and they're like yeah I did that you had to have been dreaming it was such an absurd notion that this could have actually happened and disturbing notion that this could have actually happened. And a disturbing notion this actually could have happened. That I convinced myself I must have just been seeing things. This couldn't have been real. I kind of didn't want it to be real. So I just stopped talking about it even though it was something that was the most disturbing and reality shaking thing that has ever happened to me in my life

without the aid of any substance flash forward let's see it's probably you know 2002 and we'll say around about whenever this happened flash forward to 2019 i'm sitting in my house up on the side of pine mountain way out in the middle of the national forest switching through more streaming app i saw the face of the creature at my door and i saw in front of it the word hellier h-e-l-l-i-e-r which is the name of a community just one mountain over from you know it's like the next zip code over it's a 12 or like a six hour documentary series about these creatures that people described as goblins that came out of the coal mines and sort of harassed these families in the Hale-Yer area. It really, it freaked me out so bad, scared me so bad. I watched the first episode and I couldn't watch it because it put such a disconcerting feeling in me. I couldn't take it.

You know, it was like, I can't let this be real. This cannot be real. So I start talking about it more. I bring it up to my brother. Do you remember when that happened? There's a documentary about Hellier, right? And this is Shelby Gap where I was from, the population is 400. It's not like some popular place,

but apparently this weird thing has happened here. And it just, you know, it shook me. It was, it was weird. The more I start talking about it, I start these weird little synchronicity type things happen. You know, just like you say a word while you see it on a screen or somebody on a show says a word that you just said or says a thing that you're thinking where peculiar, surreal things. And also these weird synchronicities that you think mean something, you know, they're like, oh, well, you really want to follow it more and figure out why are these weird coincidences or synchronicities that you think mean something you know they're like oh well you you really want to follow it more and figure out why are these weird coincidences or synchronicities happening i was finally able by the time that the second season of this documentary series so now it's 12 hours of content about these people pursuing these goblins. So first out starts out, they're goblins is the idea.

Six hours of this. They put out another season called Hell Year Season 2. And they're still talking about off of this thing that they saw. They've gone all the way to the point of, in occultism, that they're looking at the the deity pan but before that you know they found connections to the mammoth caves there was a um there was a ufo crash out in central kentucky near mammoth caves and there are theories that you know whatever beings those were retreated into the caves those cave systems connect to caves in eastern kentucky

where where i where i live and i had this experience and they tie it into uh the occult and then the the trickster god pan pan is a satyr which has goat legs this thing had goat legs. This thing had goat legs. Weird thing about Pan is Pan was the only god in that pantheon, the Greek pantheon, I believe, that was the only god that died. And it's a really weird coincidence here that the person that announced the death of Pan was a sailor named Famas, T-H-A-M-A-S. One letter away from my given name at birth and also the famous of the fairies, which are themselves extra dimensional beings. Always was fascinated with fairies, believed in fairies as a kid, even as an adult, I still believe there is, you know, some sort of a Feywild or something where I believe everything's possible. so they also talked about in this

documentary the the possibility of this of these extra dimensional creatures when i'm finally able by the second season of this documentary i'm you know able to watching a few episodes with my friends i'm finally able to you know finish this documentary it took some some like drinking to get through it some you know getting drunk and uh and just watching it and having something to help me go to sleep as I watched it. And I started, you know, going down this rabbit hole of what is what is this? And the synchronicity started happening. The synchronicities were happening to the people in this documentary as they pursued this deeper and deeper. They were finding themselves

caught in all these um synchronicities and i put together to get this connection it's you know pan is a trickster deity pan would lead people down paths in the woods to nowhere and i felt like this is what's happening to me i'm being led on like a wild goose chase for the entertainment of this deity. This second season of this documentary, I finished right before the pandemic. Another weird synchronicity, a pan-demic. Here I was freaking out about this deity called Pan. We ended up to a pandemic and I was so caught up in it i had to stop thinking about it because it was making me feel like i was losing my mind as a young person really early age for around that age that this happened to me i was you know reading things like the demonomicon

the necronomicon uh the you know en of Demons, and looking at all these sigils. And I was kind of like, you know what? I maybe made this happen to me by pouring some of my attention and energy into this occult stuff. The people in this Hellier documentary were talking about this mass ritual that was supposedly happening in that was all throughout society somehow that was attempting to resurrect the dead god pan and when i got to that point i was like i'm not gonna go down the forest path anymore. I reasoned, you know, this is just making me feel not mentally okay. So I just told myself, stop, stop thinking about it.

Stop worrying about it. Has nothing. There's nothing there. You're just going to keep following these synchronicities into, you know, into or on the border of oblivion. There is one weird thing that happened that I've, I mean, in between that time and now, I've had countless experiences with sleep paralysis. There's one that coincided with real world events in a very scary way. This was during the time when I was going to Catholic church a lot. I just really enjoyed the services. I was trying to stay sober and stuff. I was volunteering a lot and foster care system, mentoring kids, teaching.

And I was asleep one night on my couch. It was dark. The front porch light was actually on. And I got sleep paralysis. I woke up into sleep paralysis. It's an awful feeling it's terrible feeling and my front door swung open and slammed against the wall violently and this shadowy creature that i had experienced as a kid was sort of like this nightmarish type thing just manifestation of everything I'd think was scary was shadowy big scary mouth but it was just like the mouth was just see-through and it came into the living room and was like getting close to me and trying to intimidate me and I just started saying uh the Lord's Prayer over and over, Hail Mary, every prayer that I knew, I just started reciting it over and over. And I was actually really the

calmest I had ever been in one of these really scary sleep paralysis situations. And it left out the door, like felt like it got sucked like a vacuum out the door. Thank God I have these prayers to recite, you know, it really helped me out in that situation. The next day, I found out that my 17 year old neighbor took his own life. neighbor took his own life you know it was just some sort of a projection of that event or the feelings maybe being released of how he might have felt inside or something that it was just this really scary feeling and I remember getting the news the next day and thinking either a wild coincidence and then this happened or you know that must have been some sort of either indicator or projection of of that happening and you know it's it's weird because that you know that kid had been at my house playing drums and you know sitting around playing video games and stuff before and uh he seemed like a really happy kid.

And I don't know how that happened. I really don't. I really don't worry about seeing anything like I saw whenever I was younger and the thing came to my door. You know, age 12 with this being was not a dream and it was not sleep paralysis. I was fully aware, fully awake, fully mobile. Senses all alert.

When this happened to me, there was no sort of a sleep paralysis, no sort of grogginess, no waking up, nothing. I know that it actually happened. And that's, you know, I can sort of differentiate between, I know exactly what sleep paralysis is and, you know, weird dreams. And this was unlike anything. Some of the theories that I had are that there are extra dimensional beings that have created some sort of a biological avatar to move throughout the world in a physical way or a corporeal way. They might be incorporeal beings, maybe with cloven hooves to conceal their travel through the forests. The other theory is that part of their avatar maybe is that these big heads with gigantic brains maybe they have some sort of a psychic ability and maybe they're right here right now with us watching us but they have some sort of a psychic ability that

scrambles our senses and causes us not to be able to conceive or notice their presence. Maybe they're the orchestrators of, you know, pieces of this reality. I don't know. And I try not to think about it too much, even though it fascinates me and I love to talk about it, but for everyday conversations with my friends, it became, uh, it became something that was, people were just giving me blank looks like, okay, all right. So I just had to kind of put it away, at least until something else tells me to start giving it attention again. Thank you. This is a story about when I was a young newspaper reporter out in the avocado hills of Fallbrook, California, which was then, it's more suburban than anything now,

still very pretty but there's a country town is tucked under camp pendleton the marine base north of san diego uh is in the santa margarita mountains as part of the pacific coast ranges you know they run from the yukon to the sierra madre that whole coast is one chain of mountains. Fallbrook, even now, I was there not long ago, but in the 80s, 90s especially, it felt a long ways from anywhere. It was like 25 minutes through farms and Chaparral and whatever past the Mission, the San Luis Rey River from Oceanside. So I worked at this daily newspaper, and I could make it from Fallbrook to Oceanside

in like 15 minutes late at night when the road was empty because you had to go type your story in at the paper. We had this ancient newspaper computer system that we called Mother, and everybody called it Mother, you know, sometimes with reverence, sometimes like in agony as you see your text just disappearing. It's like, ah! And sometimes it's part of the popular two-word phrase

that starts with Mother. And I'd race back and type my stories. You know, I covered the planning division meetings. I covered the Avocado Festival, the Farm Bureau, and we had the White Aryan Resistance out there too. We had Tom Metzger, who had war, the White Aryan Resistance, he lived there, riling up the skinheads, you know. I'd go interview him sometimes because he was always in the news. He got beat up on Geraldo Rivera's show, like it was a talk show, you know, and the

skinheads start fighting and banging chairs on each other's heads. Tom Mesker was this clown, and he got shut down by Southern Poverty Law Center. They kind of sued him out of business because these skinheads up in Portland, Oregon killed this guy. Southern Poverty Law Center did a civil case, RICO murder encouragement or something. There was some news out there but it was also the sticks. Meanwhile back in Oceanside, which is a sleazy Marine Corps town, you know, they got a waste disposal mafia. They got fights in the streets, hookers everywhere, drug dens.

It was just a great news town. But there was a little quiet neighborhood kind of outside the main part of the town. And there was this cute little girl named Leticia Hernandez. And she was playing outside in her parents' very tiny fence front yard in this neighborhood of little stucco houses. And her mother and I believe her grandmother were both about six feet away. The front doors open, the windows are open, the front doors open the windows are open friends and relatives lived on either side you know there's lots of grandmas on front porches this was the old working class mexican neighborhood of oceanside

and leticia hernandez she's seven years old she just disappears she's there one minute she's playing with her dolls right outside the front door. I've been to the house. The front yard is like a little garden-sized thing with flower beds and a mailbox and a fence and a little walkway to the door. And she vanished. And we did not have a lot of those stories in those days. So the whole town is covered in flyers with her first grade school picture. And all the police reporters were on the story. And it's a big deal. It makes the LA news. It makes the big TV news shows and the LA papers. We were about 90 minutes south of Los Angeles. All these front page stories, all the flyers and the searches,

they add up to nothing. The girl is gone. After it calms down a little bit, Art Bell, the late night radio host, who was out of Las Vegas at the time, you know, this is end of 1989, beginning of 1990, and it's a clear channel in the time. You know, this is 19, end of 1989, beginning of 1990. And he's, and it's a clear channel in the West. So you pick it up at night everywhere. Everybody, if he had your radio on, he listened to Art Bell. And he's got a psychic on the line, a guy named John Monty.

I want to read you a couple lines from this United Press International Wire story I dug up. This is from April 3rd, 1981, a decade earlier. Dateline, Quincy, Massachusetts. A self-employed house painter who claims to have psychic powers predicted on a taped radio show on March 4 that President Ronald Reagan would be shot sometime toward the end of March, but would survive. Psychic John Monty, 30, of Quincy, told the Brockton Enterprise that on March 3, he had a premonition about the president, which he wrote down.

Monty announced it on a telephone hookup with a New Hampshire radio station the next day. The prediction was confirmed by the station WKBR of Manchester, New Hampshire. This is what he wrote. There is sadness around President Reagan. I feel he will be shot in the left side of his body after a speech in Washington. I feel it will happen by the end of March, but the president will live. So he read it the next night on WKBR,

which featured him on a two-hour talk show hosted by Rudy Nelson. In confirming that Monty made the prediction on his 6 to 8 p.m. talk show March 4, Nelson said, quote, we consider him our resident psychic. The phones go bananas when he's on. Monty gives his predictions from his Quincy apartment by telephone. So Reagan was shot on March 30th and survived after being shot on his left side in the chest.

And the guy who shot him is a popular liberal on Twitter now. So it goes. So other people claim to have the premonition as well, but Monty's was confirmed. And he had a pretty good track record before that, although later in life, as he got better known, after the incident I'm going to tell you about, you'd see his predictions in a national inquire, whatever they pay you, when you've gotten a little notoriety as a psychic.

And those were all no good. But Johnny Monty had helped out a number of New England cold cases. He would touch things belonging to missing people. The victim, whoever it was. And he'd get these impressions. And he was pretty well known in New England from the crime section of the newspaper when Stephen King wrote The Dead Zone about a mild-mannered psychic named Johnny Smith. Johnny Monty, he'd found a three-year-old boy in Maine who'd been kidnapped from Northern California and survived. Monty led the police to him.

He did not make any claims that he was never wrong or anything, but sometimes he got these impressions. So that's why he's on Art Bell. And this is in the weeks after the disappearance of Leticia Hernandez. A radio listener in Oceanside or somewhere in North San Diego County, heard him on the show, calls in on the West of the Rockies line and asked John Monty if he got any impression from hearing about this little seven-year-old girl, Leticia Hernandez. And he must have said something like, yeah, I'd need to be there, stand in the place where she vanished, et cetera. So my newspaper publisher, this old boy from Virginia, Tom Missett, this big tall guy with like a handlebar mustache and a suit and suspenders and everything,

he hears about the radio show and he hires John Monty to fly out to California and find Leticia Hernandez. So they put a couple of cops reporters on the story, along with our one reporter who was bilingual, who spoke Spanish, Dan Trotta. You know, all I could do was watch from afar because I'm out covering the Farm Bureau. But it was fascinating. And I did see him, though. I'd see him in the newsroomroom and he was this kind of scatterbrained character. He seemed kind of lost in the world. He's always eating candy bars. He was like a little boy lost, you know? He seemed sincere. Everybody liked him and sort of watched out for him. He'd never been to the West Coast. And Oceanside was just a wild town. Like, don't, don't lose, you know, don't let

him go out there. The hookers will get him he takes all these notes and he filled these yellow legal pads with impressions and thoughts and little drawings and single words whatever and after a week he went home and his yellow legal pads went in a file cabinet in the newspaper's morgue. That's what newspapers called libraries, the morgue. That's where all the back issues were, the microfiche, you know, whatever. Stuff from big stories, investigations. So a year and three months passes from the time she disappeared. passes from the time she disappeared and then Leticia Hernandez's skull is discovered by a caretaker on a rural Indian reservation property on the side

of a country two-lane about 25 miles east of Oceanside going up into the mountains and by then I was on the police beat. It was a year or so later. You know, they move you around different beats, and I wanted to be on the police beat. So I got put on the story, along with, once again,

our bilingual reporter, Dan Trotta, who was still there. And I spent a couple of days and really sleepless nights going through all the backstories, and especially his yellow legal pads, which I'd take home every night and just sit there with a cup of coffee, going through them, going through them,

trying to, you know, a lot of them were notes, like names of streets he was on, people he met, you know, writing down dates, just like notes for himself, but then there were things that just didn't make much sense, kind of sketches, drawings, or whatever. I start talking to John on the phone, long distance, he's back east again, John on the phone long distance. He's back east again. I've been trying to make some sense of these notes he left. And he told me, he said, she was dead by the time I was there. But I couldn't say that, you know. I was there with her parents and everything. They were so hopeful. They like, her Christmas presents were still under the tree, you know, the second Christmas after she was gone. But he said, when I was there, she had been killed. I felt that very strongly.

So then the coroner's report comes out and it confirms it. So she likely died about three months after her abduction. So Dan Trotta and I decided we're going to go up and check out the property a couple days after the news. I spoke to John Monty on the phone again the morning before. There's no suspects. It's just a skull. The rest of her wasn't there. So I called John again. I said, look, Dan, he knew Dan Trotta. I said, Dan and I are going to drive out there to where she was found. Do you have any impressions, any thoughts, anything? And he didn't really. But before I say I got to go, he says, oh, take care of yourself out there. It's not going to be a very friendly day out there. day out there. Somebody's going to pull a gun on you. And then he pauses. And he says, but no one's going to shoot. Just be careful. Be polite. I said, oh yeah, I'll be real polite if anybody pulls a gun on me, you know. And he pauses again. And then he says, actually, two people are going to pull guns on you and Dan. A rifle and a handgun. But no one's getting hurt, no gunfire, just be careful.

So I tell Dan that as we're driving out on the little two lane, and he starts shaking his head. He's like, are you sure you want to go out there? Like, well, we're just going to look at the place and see if there's anything because all it was was side of the road. What is it? You know, there's not a lot of closure in that. So we go off, we pull off on the side of the road. We park. We were in my pickup and we get out and we're walking around and Dan says, oh, look, there's some police tape. So we walk over where the police tape is, and there's some old oak trees,

you know, California live oaks, and just rural hills. We're looking around, there's really nothing to see, and all of a sudden this guy says, hey! And we look over, and there's this Indian dude across from us in the trees, and he's got like a rifle or a shotgun pointed right at us and I kind of raised my eyebrows over to Dan and he just nods

and I say hi we're just from the newspaper in Oceanside this is private land I'm the caretaker here you know know, you're not allowed. I said, look, I didn't see any no trespassing signs. We're 10 feet off the road. You know, we're not doing anything. And he's's going on, stops, that guy runs out and draws his service revolver or whatever he's got, and there we go, two guns hold on us within two minutes or something. So now the caretaker guy lowers his, and he says, I'm the caretaker here, it's legal for me to da da da. And he's like okay buddy just you know put it down. He's like what are you guys doing? We've got on tie

you know we look like reporters. We've got on like button downs and ties and we're holding notepads. We're from the newspaper. This is where the girl's skull was discovered. And so everybody calms down and it's resolved.

Thank God, you know. Although that would have been a dramatic end. Because the cop would have killed everybody, you know. Two reporters and an Indian Reservation caretaker were shot dead by a CHP. So it works out. Then we drive back. And as we drive back and we see the little green sign on the side of the road that says leaving the Indian Reservation,

you know, I think this is just bad vibes all around. Everything feels haunted here. In fact, over the years to come, In fact, over the years to come, there would be four or five bodies or parts of bodies of abducted girls and women that were found within about 100, 200 feet of there, thrown off the road into the woods right there. Another one came up about 10 years later. And I remember that one because they referenced Leticia Hernandez from 1991, beginning of 1991, in that story in the San Diego paper. So I get back to the newsroom

and I go through those legal pads again and I notice something I missed before. every couple of pages in increasingly large kind of frantic scratch ballpoint handwriting John had written the name Paula P-A-U-L-A Paula underlined or circled or whatever the skull of Leticia Hernandez was found on the Paula Indian Reservation.

E-A-L-A. 25 miles east of Oceanside. It had been dumped there, the detective said, fairly recently before it was found. John Monty knew this a year before it happened and where it happened, but he did not know what it meant. He wasn't from around there. He had no idea there was a small rural Indian reservation

with that same name but different spelling. So we all missed it. And we couldn't have done anything about it anyway, because it had not happened yet. And that's the end of the sad story of Leticia Hernandez. thanks kim and thanks everybody once again for going on this ride with us i know we always have fun with it this time of year and wouldn't have been possible without some very special people who i want to take a moment to recognize here real quick. Our music and sound design was brought to you by Mr. Lee Baines III this year with additional music, sound design, editing,

and producing by Mr. Matthew Carter. And lastly, the cover art is by the wonderful Mr. Hayden Miles. Thanks again, everybody, and we'll see you again real, real soon. Happy Halloween. Thank you.