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Brown County, Indiana, May 2020. A dad and his 11-year-old daughter are turkey hunting in Yellowwood State Forest when she spots it first: about six feet tall, gray, and in his words "very, very strong looking." It crossed ground in seconds that took the two of them six minutes to walk. Back in 1952, police across south-central Indiana and military observers at Camp Atterbury watched three lights in the sky for hours, and we could not find an explanation for that night in any paper we read. Zoinks, the gang heads home to Indiana's Little Smokies. Shane walks Kim and Brent through the Brown County Bigfoot file, from a caver near Harrodsburg in 1979 to call-and-answer howls at Yellowwood Lake, the Finding Bigfoot town forum in Bloomington, and the Nashville couple running a Bigfoot research center today. Then the sky takes over: the summer of Operation Skywatch, two weekends of saucers over Washington, and the night police from Seymour to Franklin reported what one civil defense director called a dogfight over Franklin. Timeline of Events July 14, 1952: Operation Skywatch puts Ground Observer Corps volunteers on round-the-clock sky watch in 27 states. July 28, 1952: Indiana troopers and Camp Atterbury observers watch three objects over south-central Indiana from 1:07 a.m. until after 4 a.m. July 29, 1952: The Air Force holds its largest Pentagon press conference since World War II about the Washington sightings. November 1979: A caver near Harrodsburg, west of Lake Monroe, reports a six to seven foot figure covered in long dark brown hair. November 2011: Finding Bigfoot holds a town forum at the Monroe County History Center in Bloomington. August 8, 2015: Campers at Yellowwood Lake hear deep howls answered from across the water. May 9, 2020: A father and daughter report a gray figure about six feet tall in Yellowwood State Forest. What You Will Hear The 2020 Yellowwood sighting and the six-minute walk that makes it hard to shakeA rainy night on a cabin porch near Greenbriar Lake and prints that looked like fuzzy bedroom slippers What happened when Finding Bigfoot came to Bloomington The trooper logs from July 28, 1952, ending with a red, white and blue object seen from Camp Atterbury Why one military base keeps turning up in both the sky stories and the woods stories Sources Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, Brown, Monroe and Bartholomew County reports Seymour Daily Tribune and Anderson Daily Bulletin, July 28, 1952 Indiana Daily Student, November 2011 Indiana Public Media, July 3, 2026 Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Brown County State Park If you liked this: Episode 163, The Phoenix Lights. Another night when ordinary people watched lights in the sky that nobody could explain. The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker Episode 189 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Muncie, Indiana, September 2026, and Shane and Kim finally put our buddy Brent in front of a microphone. He is Shane's old college roommate and the buddy behind a lot of the travel stories told on this show. Shane brought a mystery to the table. It never made it out of his notes, and by the end of the hour you will understand why. Jinkies, it starts with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix, and the text Kim sent Shane the minute Aileen Wuornos showed up in the story. That turns into a real complaint about docudramas that never tell you how loosely they are based on a true story, Primetime included, the new Chris Hansen film starring Robert Pattinson. Then Brent and Shane start trading road stories from Hollywood, Washington State and a snowed-in Crater Lake, and Kim wants to know why she got left home. Timeline of Events August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are killed in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. June 20, 1893: A jury acquits Lizzie Borden of both murders. Summer 1999: The Blair Witch Project opens and convinces plenty of people, Shane included, that found footage is real. September 17, 2026: Netflix releases Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. September 25, 2026: Primetime, with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, opens in theaters. September 29, 2026: Shane, Kim and Brent sit down in Muncie to record this episode. What You Will Hear Why Kim texted Shane that Monster had just turned weird, and what Shane thinks the show was going for.  Shane's review of Primetime and his case for a loosely based on a true story warning on every docudrama. Shane alone at two in the morning in a Muncie movie theater, previewing found footage he believed was real. A Hollywood hotel room with a see-through shower, and a borrowed CPAP setting that nearly drowned Shane Zoinks, Brent at airport security with a backpack packed full of individually wrapped rocks Gunshots on a Washington gold-sifting trip and a snowbank that gave way at the edge of Crater Lake Sources Netflix, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (2026) A24, Primetime (2026) National Park Service, Crater Lake National Park Fall River Historical Society, Lizzie Borden collection If you liked this: Episode 183, Grandma Took Her Teeth Out. Another week where the mystery stayed in the bag and the stories took over. The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker Episode 188 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

St. Augustine, Florida, 1565. Spain planted a city on this coast forty two years before Jamestown and fifty five years before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth, and most of what happened next was fire, hurricane, siege or slaughter. Shane rode the Ghosts and Graveyards trolley through it at night, four other people on board and the sides of the bus folded open, and came back with the history and the ghost stories tangled together the way they are down there. The gang walks the oldest European city in the country, from the spring that is supposed to make old men young to the coquina fort that cannonballs could not crack. Then the graveyards. There is a boy buried where he landed, under the tree he fell out of, alone at the front of what the tour calls the oldest European burial ground in the country, and the locals will tell you he still plays out there after dark with the friends he used to talk about. Timeline of Events 1513: Juan Ponce de Leon reaches Florida. The story tying him to a spring that makes the old young again does not appear in writing until 1535, fourteen years after he died, and his landing place is disputed to this day. September 8, 1565: Pedro Menendez de Aviles founds San Agustin, named for the saint whose feast day fell when his fleet first sighted land. He holds a mass of thanksgiving and shares a meal with the local Native people, fifty six years before the Plymouth feast of 1621. September 20, 1565: Spanish troops take the French Fort Caroline, near what is now Jacksonville, while most of its defenders are away at sea. Autumn 1565: Jean Ribault's fleet is wrecked by a hurricane. Roughly three hundred French survivors are put to the knife at the inlet south of town. That inlet is still called Matanzas, which means slaughters. May 1586: Sir Francis Drake arrives with twenty three ships, takes the town and burns it. The residents rebuild. 1599: A fire and then a hurricane hit in the same year. May 1668: The pirate Robert Searle sacks the city, kills sixty residents and carries others off for ransom or for sale. Spain decides it is done building in wood. October 2, 1672: Work begins on the Castillo de San Marcos, out of coquina shellstone quarried on Anastasia Island. 1695: The first major construction phase ends. The Castillo was never taken in battle. It only ever changed hands on paper. 1780: After Charleston falls, three signers of the Declaration of Independence are held prisoner inside that fort. What You Will Hear Why coquina, a limestone made of packed seashells, swallowed cannonballs instead of shattering, and who was forced to quarry and lay it. What the Florida Historical Society actually says about Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth, and what archaeologists found under the park instead. The boy buried under the tree he fell from, and the gatekeeper's daughter said to walk the same ground. One of the earliest patented Ouija boards, a folding portable embalming table, and a wall of death masks. Why there is always a fire, and what it costs us every single time. Sources National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos National Monument Florida Historical Society on Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth legend City of St. Augustine historical record, and the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park excavations Period accounts of Drake's raid of 1586 and Searle's sack of 1668 Ghosts and Graveyards night tour, St. Augustine, ridden September 2026 If you liked this: Episode 170, Lady in Red and Tonopah's Mizpah Hotel. Another old building that never quite emptied out. The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker Episode 187 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Stafford County, Virginia, 1990. A property owner clearing brush found a human skull under a fence line beside a country road. No other bones. No cause of death. No name. It took thirty one years, a genealogy lab in Texas, and DNA from a father and a brother before anyone could say who he was. The road he was found beside is called Joshua Road. Shane went looking for cases that landed on Josh's birthday, and that is what he came back with. Kim and Shane set this one up as a surprise. Cupcakes, a handmade ring from a Florida artisan, a card printed on plantable wildflower seed paper, and nine recorded birthday messages from listeners who have talked with us for years without ever hearing each other's voices. Then Shane runs the bit he ran for Kim in episode 180: two real cases that share the date. An ocean apart, on the same day in 1990, a man in England vanished out of a parked car and a skull turned up in a Virginia field. Timeline of Events September 28, 1990: Andrew Bedford, 27, of Huntingdon, is last seen early that evening eating takeaway in a light blue Ford Cortina on Factory Bank in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire. His girlfriend expected him home by six. September 28, 1990: The same day, in Stafford County, Virginia, a property owner working a field finds a human skull under a fence line beside Joshua Road. No other remains are ever recovered. September 30, 1990: Cambridgeshire police arrest three people on suspicion of Andrew's murder. None are charged. 1990: The Smithsonian examines the Virginia skull and reports a white male, fifteen to eighteen, dead one to three years before he was found. Cause and manner of death are left undetermined. 1992: Police drain a pond on Field Road in Ramsey after information that Andrew was shot. April 10, 2015: Cambridgeshire relaunches the case as Operation Ongar and treats it as murder, naming a since demolished garage, Mongrel Cars, as the likely scene. June 2015: Pieces of bone believed to be human are recovered off Stocking Fen Road in a thirteen day search. Andrew has still never been found. 2020: Police say the leads are exhausted. Eight people were arrested over thirty years. Nobody was charged, and the prime suspect is dead. February 18, 2022: Stafford County identifies the skull as Timothy Alan Mangum, last confirmed alive between 1983 and 1984, after a Texas laboratory traced a father and a brother. How he died has never been answered. What You Will Hear Nine listener birthday messages, including one from Coventry and two men who hid a happy birthday inside a riddle about tracks, waters and a barn. The gifts: a chakra bracelet, a handmade wrap ring, and a card on seed paper you can plant in the spring. How a man eating takeaway in his own parked car leaves no trace at all. The skull on Joshua Road, the reconstructed face, and the DNA work that gave him his name back. What Josh makes of a road carrying his own name. Sources Cambridgeshire Constabulary, Operation Ongar, with reporting in The Hunts Post and Cambs Times, 1990 through 2020 Stafford County Sheriff's Office identification announcement, February 18, 2022 Othram Inc. investigative genetic genealogy case record, Timothy Alan Mangum Smithsonian Institution forensic assessment of the Stafford County remains If you liked this: Episode 180, The Buff Ledge Abduction. Kim's birthday got the same treatment, and hers came with a UFO. The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker Episode 186 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

July 2023. The show was still called Mystery Inc, and Kim was working in a corner of the studio when Shane and Josh pulled her over and put a microphone in front of her. She had edited every episode up to that point. This was the first time the gang heard her voice. We are bringing that episode back as episode 185. It is the original recording, Mystery Inc theme and all, with the Unmasked bonus that followed it, Patreon-only in 2023, included at the end. The first half is Kim's. Shane tells how he and Kim met, which starts with a Secret Santa draw, a big bottle of wine, a supervisor who pulled Shane aside, and a last-minute run to Bath and Body Works. The wooden crate from that gift still sits on the back of her toilet. Then she talks about Amber, her oldest daughter. Amber was blonde, kind, the first one to step in when anyone was being bullied, and forever asking for extra lunch money because some other kid did not have any. She got stuck on Muncie's first roundabout right after she got her license. Kim still takes an extra lap around it for her. On October 28, 2012, after a Halloween party, Amber was riding with two boys. The driver had been drinking and tried to beat a train. Amber and the driver both died. She was a junior and a cheerleader. Kim tells how she learned the news that morning, what the years since have looked like, and why she now speaks at schools and with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. As she puts it, as a parent, you do not get over it. Shane and Josh let her tell it her way, and the three of them find the laughter in it too, because that is how this friendship works. The second half is Josh's, and the trail leads to the crystal skulls. He has stood in a room with one at Spirit Fest at Camp Chesterfield, Indiana, and he describes what that felt like. From there he walks through the legend of the thirteen skulls, the Mitchell-Hedges skull and the book Danger, My Ally, the British Museum skull that surfaced in Paris in 1881 and was sold to Tiffany and Company before the museum bought it, the Sha Na Ra skull found in Mexico in 1995 by what its finders called psychic archaeology, and the skull named Einstein, whose owner says it is an ancient computer. Quartz holds no carbon, so radiocarbon dating cannot touch them. Josh lays out the case for 1800s fakes and the case for something older, and tells you which he chooses. Then the Unmasked. Shane is fresh back from Europe with stories about the postcards he mailed Kim (the one from Paris read "That's one big tower"), a tiny terracotta pot from a Walmart that got Kim to pull the car over, the man who called her three times about a silo, the stranger selling his grandmother's false teeth, a hotel plunger in Tennessee, and the crystal skull conspiracies Josh saved for the bonus, aliens included. Kim picks Velma. What you'll hear in this episode: How Shane and Kim met, and the Secret Santa gift that almost went very wrong Amber: the roundabout, the outside light and the bugs, the extra lunch money, and October 28, 2012 Why Kim speaks to students and works with Mothers Against Drunk Driving Josh in a room with a crystal skull at Camp Chesterfield The thirteen-skull legend, Mitchell-Hedges, the British Museum skull, Sha Na Ra, and Einstein Unmasked: the postcards, the little pot, the silo, the false teeth, and the plunger This one is for Kim, and for Amber. If you would like more information on the Amber Nicole Morrow Memorial Scholarship and donating information please visit https://www.randolphcountyfoundation.org Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

A guy Josh works with was reviewing motion-triggered footage when the wind picked up and the leaves began to move. Then a large pile of them stood up off the ground, held its shape for several seconds, and dropped back down. Josh told him to go look up elementals. Then Josh went and did the reading himself, and that is this week's episode. Elementals are the beings folklore assigned to earth, water, air and fire. The trail leads back through Greek natural philosophy, medieval thought and Renaissance alchemy, and it gave us four families that still turn up everywhere. Gnomes hold the earth: mines, caves, stones, buried treasure, and that one hill nobody in the village will discuss. Undines hold the water, nymph-like spirits of rivers, springs and waterfalls, and the old book that carries their name is older than The Little Mermaid and considerably sadder. Sylphs hold the air, and get blamed for sudden inspiration, lost hats, and rumors that move faster than a horse. Salamanders hold fire, and have nothing at all to do with the amphibian. Josh's framing is the best line in the episode. Elementals are what you would get if nature had a backstage crew, moving the scenery, making the fog, and occasionally setting the curtains on fire. The folklore gets specific about consequences, and it fits the punishment to the crime. Cross the earth and you get cave-ins, spoiled foundations, and a path that stops being where you left it. Cross the water and you get floods, drowning dreams, a reflection gone missing, and a voice that knows your name a little too clearly. Cross the air and you get sudden storms, broken messages, and endless wandering. Cross fire and it skips the warning entirely. The gang also ties it back to last week. If a thing can lift a pile of leaves, it can roll a ball back across a floor. Before any of that, there is a solid hour of hangout. Shane brought Amish crack from a Fort Wayne bakery, which turns out to be a box of cinnamon sugar donut holes and a genuine hazard to everyone at the table. He picked up a twenty five dollar parking ticket in Warsaw and has decided to fight it in court on principle. He got locked in a coffee shop bathroom without his phone. He walked past a former Bachelor and learned that a town once built a fake fall festival for a TV shoot and then liked it enough to keep holding it. And a friend's five trading cards turned out to be worth a great deal more than anyone at that table guessed. Plus Josh reads everyone's element, and there is a Dollywood trip on the calendar. What you'll hear in this episode: The trail cam footage that started all of this Gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, and what each one guards What folklore says happens when you disturb the wrong threshold Amish crack, a parking ticket worth fighting, and a card shop surprise The gang is going to Dollywood in Sevierville, Tennessee, December 4 through 6. Patreons and listeners are welcome to come along. Want to send the gang something? PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992. Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The gang skipped the mystery this week and just talked, and somehow that turned into false teeth, a haunted house in Hartford City, and a box of Charleston groceries with something deeply unserious buried at the bottom. It started with Shane's trash company, which has now gone weeks without picking up his can and keeps insisting in the app that the can was never out there. Then Kim opened the listener questions, and the whole thing got away from them. Savannah asked what the most absurd thing was that their grandmothers ever did. Josh remembered dentures slipping mid-hymn on a church stage, and a grandmother who simply took them out and kept right on singing. Shane confessed to prank calling his own grandma as "John from the bank" about fraudulent charges in Nigeria and New Zealand, which ended with her cussing him out and then driving to the bank anyway, just to be sure. And then there is the story that gives this episode its name. One afternoon Grandma rose out of her chair, removed her false teeth, kicked off her slippers, and went after a houseguest who had used the F word one time too many in her house. Shane caught her mid-flight and got dragged the length of the living room for his trouble. Kim's memories run a little differently. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's while Kim was still in high school, so the one she holds onto is a camper at Cabin Creek shaking hard enough that Grandma hollered at Grandpa to knock it off. It was an earthquake. Trevor wanted to know what one snack each of them would carry into a haunted house. Josh picked Doritos, on the grounds that they burn. That set Shane off on the night he agreed to go live on Facebook from a house in Hartford City without knowing it was a haunted house, discovered the only air conditioned room was the one he then refused to leave, watched a curtain move behind him on camera, and turned down an invitation to the basement where someone had just been scratched. There was a room lined with mirrors that the owner called a portal, and a room full of dolls with a Ouija board sitting in the middle of it. He left at one in the morning for a Holiday Inn rather than sleep on an army cot. Kat asked whether Shane is married, and he answers that about as directly as you would expect from a man of mystery. MT asked whether solving a case like JonBenet Ramsey with DNA would ever quiet the arguments online or only make them louder. Nobody at this table is optimistic. There is a tender stretch in here too. It was Amber's birthday, and Kim brought her cake for everyone. Josh brought the news about Dolly Parton, and the room sat with that for a while. Then Savannah's box got opened, and the trail leads somewhere none of them saw coming. What you'll hear in this episode: The trash company saga, and why the chat support keeps insisting it is not AI Three grandmothers, two sets of false teeth, and one earthquake blamed on Grandpa Shane's night in a Hartford City haunted house, the mirror room and the doll room A care package from Charleston, a Bigfoot figurine, and an award nobody asked for Want to send the gang something? PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992. Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

No mystery again this week. Just Shane, Josh, and Kim around the table, and a conversation that gets away fromall three of them inside of ten minutes. It starts with a word. Shane had lunch with a friend who mentioned that growing up she was not allowed to say the F word or, of all things, crevice. Crevice. That sets off an hour of collateral damage, plus a real conversation about the words that were banned in their own houses. Sucks. Shut up. Hell. Anything that even rhymed with a cuss word. Josh confesses to crawling under the bunk beds to practice swearing where Jesus was the only witness, and Shane remembers the one night in the back of Grandma's Buick when he was handed actual permission to repeat every word their aunt had said, and used it. Which is the on-ramp to a full Grandma episode. Her purse was stocked like a pharmacy, which is how Shane once got handed two blood pressure pills in the middle of a sermon instead of Tylenol. When he asked if he was going to be okay, she said, "We'll find out." She kept the good candy bars in her panty drawer, right next to a cow taser. And years after she quit smoking, their uncle found a pile of cigarette butts in the grass under her bedroom window, told her a stranger must have been standing out there watching her sleep, and got to watch her stare at the ceiling and say, "Huh. That's weird." The rest of the evidence turned up much later, inside a heavy stone turtle that came apart in his hands. Zoinks. Shane also finally tells the Eagles Theater story. He accepted a calendar invite with no description, showed up for what he assumed was a normal evening downtown, and looked up to see his own name on the screen between two doctorates. Two hundred people. Doors closing. A panel on community food needs that nobody had mentioned he was speaking on. What he said up there came out of nowhere and turned out to be the most honest thing in the episode: go to the people who are barely making it, because they are the ones who know what next week feels like. That opens into food bank boxes full of things they could not cook with the gas shut off, and a carton of peanut butter milk nobody in this family has recovered from. Everything else lands where it lands. Josh's tarantula molted and then earned its keep by clearing a man out of his living room. The hissing cockroach Shane's college roommate kept spent a weekend in the freezer and survived it. Death cap mushrooms after the floods. Stop signs in this state you cannot see around until you are already in the intersection. A nine person salt water hot tub that dropped six thousand dollars because somebody drilled one light two inches too low. Josh talking honestly about labels and where he actually lands on them. And Kim stating for the record, more than once, that she is never calling Shane Dr. Waters. The postcard wall has room on it. PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992. Pull up a chair in the bunker. The only thing getting unmasked this week is Grandma. What you'll hear in this episode: The words they were not allowed to say as kids, and the one night in Grandma's Buick when Shane got permission to say all of them Grandma's purse pharmacy, the good candy bars stored next to a cow taser, and the hollow stone turtle where the cigarette butts went The Eagles Theater panel Shane got ambushed onto, and the food bank answer he came up with on the spot A tarantula that molted and then cleared a man out of Josh's living room, plus the hissing cockroach that survived a weekend in a freezer A nine person salt water hot tub discounted six thousand dollars over one crooked light Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's a Josh mystery week in the bunker, and this one comes with a warning: Josh's reading habits are involved. Deep in the Amazon lives a freshwater dolphin that starts life gray and turns pink as it ages. By day, the boto swims the tannin-dark river hunting fish. But in stories told up and down the Amazon for generations, some nights one of those pink dolphins rises out of the black water as something else entirely: a handsome stranger dressed all in white, charming, magnetic, and always wearing a hat. The hat is not a fashion choice. It hides the blowhole he cannot quite leave behind. He is the Boto Encantado, the enchanted dolphin, and in the legend he appears at riverside festivals as the literal life of the party. He drinks, he dances, he sings, and by dawn he is gone, slipped back beneath the river as if he was never there. The villagers are left with a vague memory of the man in white. That is, until some of the women he charmed begin to show up pregnant. In communities that believed in the boto, naming a river spirit as the father carried more honor than admitting a stranger passed through, and a boto child was a blessed child. Josh has thoughts about this arrangement, and about Mr. Boto's parenting record. Other branches of the tale go darker. The boto can take people under the river entirely, not to drown them but to carry them down to Encante, a shimmering sunken city beneath the Amazon, the river's own Atlantis. For centuries, that one legend quietly explained the river's drownings, its disappearances, and its surprise pregnancies all at once, in a jungle where jaguars, anacondas, and fast black water gave it plenty to explain. Josh walks Shane and Kim through where the legend came from, why water spirits in folklore are almost always women (nymphs, sirens, mermaids, even Nessie) and what it means that this one is a man, and how the myth still protects the real animal today. Along much of the Amazon the pink dolphins are treated as sacred, and fishermen work around them rather than against them, a striking contrast with their propeller-scarred saltwater cousins. The species is genuinely endangered, which makes the old story one of its stranger guardians. Also in the bunker this week: Kim's birthday celebration rolls on with cake and gifts, Shane's grandma's full-sheet-cake miscommunication gets told at last, the robot mower fails to make it home two nights running and has to be rescued from a flower bed, and Josh lands the "multiple porpoises" pun he is far too proud of. Plus a tease for next week: the gang takes on the Idaho student murders and Netflix's College Nightmare. **What you'll hear in this episode:** - The real pink river dolphins of the Amazon, and why they turn pink - The man in white with a hat over his blowhole - Unexplained pregnancies, blessed children, and folklore as social cover - Encante, the glowing city beneath the river - Why the legend still protects an endangered species today - A sheet-cake miscommunication, a runaway robot mower, and birthday week in the bunker Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

August 7, 1968. The number one song in America is "Hello, I Love You" by The Doors, Richard Nixon is being nominated in Miami Beach, and Congress has just spent a day asking scientists whether UFOs are real. It's also the day Kim was born. So for her birthday, the gang investigates the strangest thing that happened on her actual birth date: the Buff Ledge abduction, one of the best-documented UFO cases in American history, which played out on a quiet Vermont lake the very day she arrived. Buff Ledge Camp sat on the shore of Lake Champlain, just north of Burlington. That Wednesday evening the camp was nearly empty, the swim team away at a meet. Two teenage staffers, sixteen-year-old Michael Lapp and nineteen-year-old Janet Cornell, were on the boat dock watching the sun go down when a bright light appeared in the darkening sky. It descended, flattened into a disc, and released three smaller craft that looped and fell like leaves over the water. One of them plunged into the lake, resurfaced, and glided straight toward the dock. What Michael described next has kept this case alive for more than five decades: a transparent dome, two childlike beings inside, a strange feeling of mental contact, and then a beam of light so intense he said he could see the bones in his own hand. His last clear memory of that stretch of evening is screaming "We don't want to go!" When the world snapped back, the sky was fully dark, time was missing, and Janet was groggy beside him. Then came the silence. The two never reported it, went their separate ways after camp, and said nothing for about ten years, until recurring nightmares drove Michael to the Center for UFO Studies. Investigator Walter Webb spent roughly five years on the case, regressing both witnesses under hypnosis, separately, after a decade with no contact between them. Their recovered accounts matched on the small, strange details, and Webb tracked down other former camp staff who remembered unexplained lights over the lake that same night. He published the full investigation in 1994. Jinkies, and that's only half the episode. This one is also a time capsule of the world Kim was born into: the Doors on the radio, Cream taking over the album chart, Rosemary's Baby and 2001: A Space Odyssey in theaters, six-cent stamps, and a country that spent the summer of 1968 staring at the sky. What you'll hear in this episode: The world on August 7, 1968, from the number one song to the news that night Two teenagers, an empty camp, and a light that fell like a leaf onto Lake Champlain The beam, the missing time, and ten years of silence Walter Webb's five-year investigation and the separate hypnosis sessions that matched Where the case stands today, and what the skeptics say Happy birthday, Kim. The universe apparently threw you quite a party. Join the gang for the case, the time capsule, and the question nobody has answered in fifty-eight years. Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

No mystery this week, just the gang around the table with snacks, big travel plans, and way too many cemetery stories. Shane, Josh, and Kim start with a follow-up on the Herb Baumeister case after watching more of the Fox Hollow Farm documentary on Hulu, including the detail about the original detective that Kim could not stop thinking about. Then some very cool news: one of the show's Patreon members is going to be in Indianapolis on Monday, and she has offered to take Shane and Kim to see the Fox Hollow memorial in Westfield honoring the victims. Full report next week. From there it turns into a tour of every famous grave the crew has ever hunted down. Muhammad Ali and Colonel Sanders in Louisville. President James Garfield in Cleveland, plus a certain sun-baked death angel statue that people still leave offerings for. John Dillinger at Crown Hill in Indianapolis, unmarked on the map, with concrete poured over the grave so nobody could dig him up. The Wright brothers. Tammy Wynette's mausoleum in Nashville, which you can only reach by walking through a working funeral home. And the little memorial pond where families scatter ashes, which instantly gets named ghost soup. Zoinks. There is also a genuinely useful travel tip in here: if you are ever trying to find a famous grave in a huge cemetery with no map, open Pokemon Go. The notable stones are almost always PokeStops. The rest of the night wanders exactly where you would expect. A robot lawn mower gets christened Muhammad Ali. Banana chips and Fiber One bars get reviewed, along with a cautionary tale about half a gallon of unpast- eurized apple cider. Josh mixes up Death on the Nile with Death on the Lanai, a Golden Girls cozy mystery, and somehow both end up on the watch list. Alton Brown is coming to the Honeywell Center. And Kim reports back from her guest spot on the Thriving Wabash County podcast, where she accidentally roasted the nicest member of the panel. Pull up a chair in the bunker. The only mystery this week is what that smell was. What you'll hear in this episode: A Fox Hollow Farm documentary follow-up and the plan to visit the victims' memorial in Westfield Famous grave road trips: Muhammad Ali, Dillinger, Garfield, the Wright brothers, Tammy Wynette, and the Cleveland death angel Ghost soup, the Pokemon Go grave-finding trick, snack reviews, and a Golden Girls cozy mystery mix-up Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Shane took the documentary pick this week, and he brought the bunker home to Indiana. Both Fox Hollow documentaries on Hulu, the Emmy nominated 2025 series The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer and the brand new July 2026 follow-up Return to Fox Hollow: New Victims, Darker Secrets, plus the parts of the story neither film had room to tell. A heads up before you press play. This is a heavy one. It involves the murders of at least 25 men, most of them gay men taken from Indianapolis bars in the early 1990s, and their families are receiving answers right now, in 2026. We handle the victims with care, we attribute every theory to its source, and we keep the focus where it belongs: on the men who were lost and the people still working to bring them home. The story: Herb Baumeister was a married Westfield thrift store owner with a Tudor house, an indoor pool, and 18 wooded acres called Fox Hollow Farm, about 90 minutes from where we record. In 1996, after a witness's tip and a two year investigation that could not get past his front gate, his wife consented to a search while he was away. Investigators recovered roughly 10,000 charred bones and bone fragments from the woods. Baumeister fled to Canada and died by suicide before he could be arrested. Eight men were identified in the 1990s. Then the county closed the case, and the remaining bones sat in boxes for 26 years. That is where the documentaries begin. Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison reopened the identification effort in 2022 after one message from a victim's cousin, and Fox Hollow started giving up its answers: Allen Livingston in 2023, Daniel Halloran in 2025, a memorial in Westfield with room left for more names. The 2025 series brought the case 500 new tips and the first on-camera interview with the witness whose story started everything, and then changed. The 2026 special picks up the hardest question of all: could one man really have done this alone? Shane, Kim, and Josh walk the whole timeline, sit with the identification effort that is still running at this hour, and then step onto the show's home ground: the haunting claims at Fox Hollow Farm, the red shirted figure, the pool, the recordings, and the honest question of what it means to tell ghost stories at a place where the victims are still being named. If you have information about the Fox Hollow victims, the Hamilton County Coroner's tip line is (317) 770-4415. What you'll hear in this episode: The full Fox Hollow case, start to finish, including what both documentaries leave out The 2022 to 2026 identification effort and the names it has returned to their families What the new 2026 special adds: new interviews, unreleased case files, and the accomplice question The haunting claims at Fox Hollow Farm, reported with respect and a healthy dose of skepticism Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Shane's pick this time. The challenge is always the same: grab a documentary off a streaming service and let the gang talk the whole thing through. Shane went with Should I Marry a Murderer? on Netflix, and it might be the most unsettling one yet, because the story is not really about the killer. It is about the woman who got engaged to him first. The gang follows Caroline Muirhead, a Glasgow pathologist who matched with Highland gamekeeper Sandy McKellar on Tinder in October 2020. He proposed within months. Then, during a visit to the estate where he worked, he told her something that changed everything: three years earlier, he and his twin brother Robert had struck and killed a cyclist named Tony Parsons on a remote Highland road, and buried him on the property rather than call for help. What Caroline did next is the whole show. She did not go straight to police. She stayed engaged to a man who had just confessed to burying a body, secretly recorded him for more detail, and left a marker near the burial sitefor investigators, all before formally reporting him about a month later. Shane, Kim, and Josh dig into whether that is bravery, self-preservation, or some tangle of both, and what nearly four years of not knowing did to Tony Parsons's own family while his killers kept working a few miles down the road. They also get into the detail that might be the hardest part of the whole case: by the best-corroborated accounts, Parsons was still alive after the crash. The brothers left, came back in a different vehicle, and still never called for help. A charge that started as murder ended as culpable homicide, and the two men who did this got a combined seventeen years. Along the way the gang wrestles with the bigger, uncomfortable question the documentary itself raises. It is billed as the first version of this story told from Caroline's point of view, and some UK critics have already said that framing buries Tony Parsons a second time. Shane, Kim, and Josh do not let him disappear from this conversation the way he nearly disappears from the film. Pull up a chair in the bunker. No ghosts this week, just a fiancée who became the whole case against the man she almost married, and a conversation about who these stories are actually supposed to be for. What you'll hear in this episode: How Caroline Muirhead and Sandy McKellar met, and how fast he proposed The month she spent secretly building a case against her own fiancé Why the crash itself might not be what actually killed Tony Parsons The seventeen year sentence, and the question of whose story this documentary really tells Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The gang investigates three mysteries stitched together by one date on the calendar: the Fourth of July. This week Josh brings the holiday and everything strange hiding inside it. What starts as hot dogs and bottle rockets turns into a night sky that changed forever, a coincidence that still makes historians shiver, and a cold case that has gone unanswered for more than three decades. First, look up. On July 4th in the year 1054, Chinese and Japanese sky watchers recorded a brilliant "guest star" that flared in the constellation Taurus. It burned so bright it was visible in broad daylight for weeks, then faded into the glowing cloud we now call the Crab Nebula. Josh brings word of its modern echo too, a recurrent nova called T Coronae Borealis that astronomers keep predicting could blaze into view any night now. Like, what if the greatest Fourth of July fireworks show comes from deep space? Then, a coincidence that reads like fiction. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, rivals, founders, the second and third presidents, both signed the Declaration of Independence and then both died on the very same day, July 4th, 1826, exactly fifty years later, within hours of each other. Adams reportedly slipped away believing his old rival had outlived him. Jefferson had already been gone since that morning. And then the mystery that still has no ending. On the Fourth of July in 1988, two teenagers, Sally McNelly and Shane Stewart, drove out to Lake Nasworthy in San Angelo, Texas, to watch the fireworks. They were seen on the shoreline late that night, and then they were simply gone. Months later their remains were found miles away near the Twin Buttes Reservoir. The trail leads into the strange heart of 1980s Satanic panic, through rumors of a cult the two had been trying to escape and a person of interest named decades after the fact, and it stops cold. The San Angelo murders remain unsolved to this day. Three mysteries, one holiday, and the hosts pulling every thread they can find while keeping things gloriously off the rails in between. Grab a cold drink, settle in, and stay a little bit spooked. What you'll hear in this episode: The Fourth of July "guest star" of 1054 and the supernova that could still light up our sky The eerie same-day deaths of two founding fathers, fifty years to the day The unsolved 1988 San Angelo murders and the cult rumors that surround Sally and Shane's case Got a theory, a mystery of your own, or just want to send the gang some snacks? Find us and join the conversation, and come back next week when the bunker door opens again. Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

This week Shane handed the pick to Josh, with one rule: choose a documentary worth talking through start to finish. Josh chose Trust Me: The False Prophet on Netflix, and it turned into one of the heaviest, most gripping conversations the bunker has had. A heads up before you press play. This episode deals with a polygamous sect and the abuse of children. We handle it with care, we keep the focus on the survivors, and we do not sensationalize what happened to them. Everyone named as a perpetrator here has been convicted. The story centers on Samuel Bateman, a man who grew up a minor figure inside the FLDS community of Short Creek on the Arizona and Utah border. When the imprisoned prophet Warren Jeffs banned his followers from marrying or having children, Bateman saw an opening. He told the community Jeffs had died, declared himself the chosen successor, and started granting the one thing his followers had been denied. Within a few years he had built a small faction and accumulated more than twenty wives, many of them children. What makes this documentary different is how it was made. A cult expert named Christine Marie and her husband, a videographer, moved into the community, earned Bateman's trust, and recorded him from the inside while feeding everything to the FBI. The camera was the weapon. Shane, Kim, and Josh walk through the whole timeline: the undercover footage, the moment a stranger spotted small fingers poking through the slats of a trailer on a Flagstaff street, the federal arrest staged inside a warehouse, and the kidnapping Bateman ordered from jail that sent eight girls across state lines before police recovered them. We also cover what the series could not, because it happened after filming wrapped. Bateman is now serving fifty years. Eleven of his adult followers have been convicted, one of them sentenced to life for handing over his own daughters. And we sit with the hardest questions the story raises. Why did the children who were removed break free while many of the adults stayed loyal? What do we make of a couple who deceived a man for a year to stop him? And what does it mean that he still calls his followers every day from prison? This one is sobering, but it is also a story about ordinary people who refused to look away. Come sit with us in the bunker for a serious one. What you'll hear in this episode: How Warren Jeffs's prison decree created the opening Bateman exploited The couple who infiltrated the cult and handed the FBI its case The trailer stop, the warehouse arrest, and the kidnapping from jail The convictions and fifty year sentence that came after the cameras stopped Our Sponsors: * Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy