← Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
175. Terrifying True Urban Legends: A Toilet Stalker, a Demon Camel, and a Cursed Mansion
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This episode is brought to you by Solace Health. I have been booking lots of doctor's appointments lately and it can be such a headache. You can spend hours on hold with insurance. You can be bounced between doctors who clearly aren't talking to each other. I mean, I see it in my life now and I have a grandmother with Alzheimer's and it's hard for her to go to the doctor and advocate for herself. Having a Solace Advocate would be such a game changer. Solace connects you with dedicated healthcare advocates, registered nurses and healthcare pros averaging 16 years of experience who do the work that usually falls on you. A Solace Advocate can find the right doctors and schedule your appointments, fight denied insurance claims and get your care approved. And they can also make sure your doctors are actually in sync so nothing falls through the cracks. Studies show that 98% of patients feel more in control of their care after working with an advocate. You can go to Solish Health.com to see if you qualify. It takes about two minutes and it's covered by insurance. That's Solace Health. Insurance.com must be 18 or older. Advocates do not provide medical or legal advice.
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Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your ghost. Ooh, Kayla Moore. Today I have some urban legends for you all and the true stories behind them. You guys have sent me some legends from all over the world to look into. Actually, one of the ones today comes from a listener whose Username is False Bird. And actually, as I was just going through some of the ones that you guys have sent me, I saw an interesting suggestion from a listener, Kit, the historian. Kit writes, there's been an interesting suggestion that the trolls of Scandinavian folklore, which I grew up with in Denmark, are some sort of folk memory of the Neanderthals. It makes a lot of sense to me, honestly, considering that these beings are always described as different people rather than creatures or gods, especially in the really old legends. That's actually really interesting. Thank you for sending me that, Kit. Thanks also for giving me another rabbit hole to go down. You guys can always send me the legends and scary stories that you were raised with, and I will try to look into them more. I promise. Jinx and I will be on it. Okay. But for now, let's get into some of the legends that I have for you today. Growing up as a young girl in the US I was exposed to all sorts of spooky rituals. Light as a feather, Ouija boards. And maybe you're like me and you were always trying to get Bloody Mary started at the sleepover. But in the 90s, young girls in South Africa had their own unique. Pinky. Pinky. According to an old urban legend, you'll want to go into the school bathroom when you know you won't be interrupted. Then you'll look into the mirror and say this name three. Pinky. Pinky. Pinky. first, nothing will happen. You'll want to leave, thinking that the ritual didn't work. But then you'll see him standing behind you, red eyes with greasy, dangling hair falling around his pale, bloated face. It looks like he's been living in the plumbing, waiting for this moment. And then you'll hear his voice crying that he's all alone, begging you to come join him. You won't be able to resist. You'll walk into the stall behind you to join him. And his voice will stop crying and start laughing. Then Pinky will grab you by your throat and he'll unhinge his jaw. He'll. He'll open his mouth impossibly wide, revealing rows of massive, jagged teeth. You won't even realize it as he starts eating your insides. It'll happen so fast. And by the time the next girl comes into the bathroom, there will be no trace that you were ever there. And Pinky. Pinky will wait for the next girl to summon him. Now, Pinky. Pinky has been shared in schoolyards for decades. Girls in South Africa grew up terrified of him. But we can actually trace some of this legend. We it's believed to have started in the 90s by teachers at girls school in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was kind of a cautionary tale or urban legend that was meant to instill fear in young girls about going to the bathroom alone. Pinky Pinky was supposedly a coward and he would stay away if all the girls went to the bathroom together. And there's a few different reasons for this. Some teachers feared that actual predators were laying in wait inside of the bathrooms. I mean, there's one study I found that said 40% of women in South Africa are affected by sexual violence. So. So it makes sense that teachers were trying to protect their students. One Yale study actually suggests that a lot of the violence happened due to a lack of sanitary toilets, which leads to women being vulnerable when they have to walk long distances to find a functioning public restroom. Regardless, it seems like this was a way to keep young girls aware of their surroundings. According to different tellings of the legend, Pinky Pinky might take you to his lair beneath the toilets where he'll keep you prisoner with other little girls until he's ready to eat you. Or, or he might just claw out your guts or bite off your head right there in the stall. And in some tellings, teachers would even tell young girls to not wear pink because Pinky Pinky prefers that color. Now, young girls that were told the legend of Pinky Pinky grew up to understand that it was just that, a legend. There wasn't a horrifying monster actually waiting in the stalls for them to come in alone. No, they grew up to realize that the real monsters were. Or people. See, there were a few major news stories being reported on at the time the Pinky Pinky legend was being created. And those stories might have influenced the way that this legend was crafted and shared. And one of those stories, probably the most bizarre if I'm being honest, didn't actually happen in South Africa, but somewhere totally unexpected. It was the night of February 28, 1989 in the small mountain village of Miyakoji in central Japan. The sky was dark and snow was falling. The air was freezing. And 23 year old Yumi Tanaka, an elementary school teacher, was trying to get warm in her small apartment after coming home from work. Then her phone rang. Her heart sank and a pit formed in her stomach. She knew she shouldn't, but she answered the phone anyways. The voice on the other end was strange and muffled. It was a man's voice and kind of high pitched and irritated. The man went on to say horrible things about Yumi's body and how he wanted to do equally horrible things to her. Her heart started racing and she quickly hung up. This wasn't the first time this had happened. She had been getting these calls for weeks, and nothing she said on the phone ever made them stop. Her friends could see how much this was affecting her too. She was always stressed out. She was losing the light in her eyes, it seemed. So one day, one of her friends, this young man named Naoyuki Kano, came to her. He was willing to do anything he could to help, so he offered to use his contacts in the local government to try and trace these calls. This was so nice of him. He definitely didn't need to do that, but Yumi really appreciated it. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it, but it was still so nice knowing that Naoyuki really cared for her. Later that night, Yumi made sure that the door was locked and she tried to relax. She walked across the living room to her bathroom. She flipped on the light. The simple, dark room wasn't very inviting. Her toilet wasn't necessarily a nice high tech toilet like you see in Tokyo. It was a squat toilet, basically a hole in the ground that led to a septic tank outside. She was about to use the toilet when she noticed that there was something unusual in the hole. She peered over and there at the bottom of the toilet was a shoe. A man's shoe. She jumped back in, surprised. How could that have gotten there? Had someone been inside of her apartment? She looked around, almost expecting to see someone in the corner, but there was nobody there. The only other thing that made sense to her was maybe someone had thrown the shoe through the lid of the septic tank outside. But to do that, they would have had to open the lid, which would have caused more issues. So she had to go outside and see for herself. She put on a scarf and a coat and unlocked the door. It was freezing outside as she trudged through the snow around to the back of her apartment. And there she found the large pipe of the septic tank sticking out from the ground. And for the second time tonight, a pit formed in her stomach. The lid at the top of the pipe was askew. Someone had tampered with it. She almost just ran forward and closed the lid herself. But something inside of her told her to look down inside of the tank, and it was far worse than she could have imagined. The pipe went down a few feet and then off to the side where it opened back up under her toilet. It formed kind of a U shape. And this time, when she looked down, she saw more than a shoe. She saw a foot sticking out from the bottom of the pipe. Someone was stuck inside of her septic tank. This episode is brought to you by Liquid iv. Memorial Day weekend is a great summer kickoff, and that means we're going to be outside all day. If I've learned anything, it's that by hour three in the sun, I'm a different person if I haven't stayed on top of my hydration. Which is why I'm excited to talk to you about Liquid IV today. Just one stick and 16 ounces of water hydrates faster than water alone. Powered by Liv Hydroscience, an optimized ratio of electrolytes, essential vitamins, and clinically tested nutrients that turn ordinary water into extraordinary hydration. And compared to water, it retains hydration for up to 4 hours. Plus, it's non GMO with no artificial colors or sweeteners. I like to carry one on me all the time now. I have one in my purse. I keep one in my car. There's one in the diaper bag. And I'm especially excited about their sugar free lineup with flavors like White Peach Rainbow sherbet and Strawberry watermelon. Stay hydrated while you're on the go this summer with Liquid IV tear pour live more go to LiquidIV.com and get 20% off your first purchase with code HSP at checkout. That's 20% off your first purchase with Code HSP@liquidiv.com from the trusted team behind 48 Hours. Welcome to Case by Case, your weekly update on the biggest true crime stories unfolding right now.
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Nick Reiner remains in custody without bail. Luigi Mangione accused of stone stalking and gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
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From high profile trials and stunning evidence to major breaks in cold cases, we'll follow it all case by case. Follow and listen to 48 Hours case by case. Wherever you get your podcasts, this episode is brought to you by Merit Beauty. Last time I talked about Merit Beauty, I said it was part of my routine. But now it's a much bigger part of that routine. Between filming calls and a baby who doesn't really care about my schedule, my window for getting ready is very small and. And merit fits inside of it. Seriously. On days where I feel like I can barely get it together, if I put on just a little bit of makeup, it can turn my entire day around. The Minimalist is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now because it's both a foundation and a concealer so I'm not layering five products on to look like I've actually slept. I also love their Flush Balm which is their best selling product. It gives that natural lit from within glow and on no makeup days. I love the great Skin Serum. It gives me a hydrated, dewy look. I've actually been using that one a lot lately. I love the way it feels on my skin and how glowy I do look afterwards. I don't really have any other skincare product like it and I am picky about what goes on my skin. Everything that they have is clean, vegan and cruelty free. Right now Merit is offering our listeners their signature makeup bag with your first order at meritbeauty.com that's M E R I T beauty.com to get your free signature makeup bag with your first order. Merit beauty.com Yuki immediately called the police who arrived on the scene a short while later. They tried reaching down into the pipe to pull on the foot, but it was way too narrow of a fit for most of the officers. Then they tried tying ropes to the foot and pulling it out that way, but that didn't work either. Whoever was down there was stuck and there were no movements or responses when they called out to the person, so they were pretty sure that whoever was down there was dead. After a short time, they managed to get some digging equipment on the scene. The police had to tear up Yumi's entire backyard as they removed the whole U shaped pipe that made up the septic tank that led from her toilet to the outside. It was really nasty work and it was pretty embarrassing for Yumi to have her toilet literally dug out of the ground by a whole squad of police officers. Once they had the pipe out on the lawn, they used the tools they had to crack it open. The pieces all fell away and Yumi screamed. Inside the pipe, covered in sewage, was a man lying flat on his back with his feet underneath one of the entrances to the pipe and his head facing upwards underneath the other pipe entrance to Yumi's toilet and just like the police guessed he was dead. The man was only wearing pants, which it didn't really make sense considering how cold it was outside. One shoe was left above ground and the other was with him in the pipe. He also had his shirt folded and clutched lightly to his chest as if he was worried about it getting dirty. The body was then transported to the local morgue. It was so covered in filth that it was impossible to tell who it was. The coroner had to slowly and methodically clean away the grime, which revealed more and more about this dead man. Wiping down the torso, the coroner didn't see any obvious wounds, so then he moved on to the legs, and there was nothing there either. So he wiped down the arms, and those were also free of any obvious signs of trauma. The coroner basically came to the conclusion that this man was not murdered and put in the pipe. And beyond that, he probably hadn't been stuffed into the pipe against his will, period. He would have had some trauma to his body if that was the case. No, from what the coroner could tell, this man had put himself in that septic tank of his own free will. The next thing he had to do was try and identify this man, so he started cleaning away the grime from his face. He wiped it down and then dropped the cloth and gasped because he recognized this man. It was a small town, and everyone was going to. It was Naoyuki Kano, Yumi's friend, the man who had supposedly been helping her trace the harassing phone calls. But now it didn't really look like he was actually trying to help her at all. It looked like he was trying to peep on her by crawling into her toilet. A few days earlier, on February 24, 1989, Naoyuki, who was 26 years old at the time, left his family home, telling his family that he would be back later that day. But he never returned. His family went on to report him missing, but a major national event delayed the investigation. The Emperor actually passed away that very same day, and almost everyone took the 24th through the 27th off to mourn him and attend his funeral or watch it on tv. So no one really thought to look for Naoyuki. As far as the coroner could tell, he probably died on the 26th and then had been in the septic tank until Yumi found him after returning to work on the 28th. But police were completely stumped as to how he found himself in there. It was almost physically impossible to get into this tank. It was only 36 cm across, and the average Japanese male had a torso width of 40cm. But Naoyuki had clearly chosen to go into the septic tank. His car was even found nearby with the keys still inside. Once he was at the tank, he must have figured out a way to wiggle his way in. And then he must have figured out how to navigate the sharp 90 degree turn to where the pipe turned towards the apartment. According to the coroner, he must have gotten stuck there and froze to death. It was officially ruled death by misadventure. Naoyuki was a well respected member of the community, known for organizing youth sports and giving political speeches. He had a good job at the local nuclear power plant. And as I mentioned, he was seemingly friends with Yumi. So why would he do this to her? Well, his father refused to believe the police's explanation and he started a petition to reopen the case as a murder. And he got 4300 signatures from local townspeople who also could not believe that Naoyuki would do something like this. But the police had no other evidence that it was a murder. And again, there were no signs of trauma on Naoyuki's body. They had no reason to reopen this case. And the really bizarre nature of the case led to it spreading throughout Japan. And a lot of people started forming their own conspiracy theories to explain how some nice young man could have ended up inside of a woman's toilet. Now, personally, I think he was probably a weirdo. I don't think there's much more to it. In fact, the whole story does start to feel like an urban legend. However, it's not. We found a pretty detailed Namuwiki article which is a Korean pop culture Wikipedia. It links to first hand sources and goes through a ton of detail on this case. Some of it is hard to parse through as the English translation is pretty rough, but it does appear that this actually happened. And this is just a weird dark rabbit hole I went down that I figured I'd share with you guys. But that same Namuwiki article also brings up a meme that roughly translates to the 4 great perverts of Japan. These are similar cases describing incidents from the 2000s where Japanese men did very, very gross things just to creep on women. One of these men broke into a girl's school's swimming pool and tried on a bunch of the girls swimsuits. Another man broke into a bunch of different girls schools and stole shoes just to smell them. The third man collected saliva samples from over 500 different girls over the course of years. I have no idea why he would have done that. But the most recent of These was a 28 year old man who was arrested in 2015 for hiding in storm drains to take pictures up women's skirts. He was a very, very bizarre and disturbed human being. And he went on record saying that he wanted to be reborn in a second life as a road. But what's most disturbing about this is he was otherwise a very successful office worker who lived in a nice apartment. And no one saw that coming. And that kind of has some parallels to Naoyuki's story in that Naoyuki was also successful, and no one really expected that he would do something so gross. It goes to show that some people are harboring significant issues that they are very good at hiding from the world. But despite all of this, maybe the strongest piece of evidence against Naoyuki is what happened after he died. Remember those harassing phone calls Yumi was receiving that I told you about? The ones that Naoyuki was supposedly trying to help trace? Well, after he died, those calls stopped, and Yumi was never bothered again. It's always interesting to me how these stories can travel around the world and change from culture to culture. Humans have this way of combining fact and fiction to create even darker legends that tend to take on a life of their own. And that's never been more true than in this next urban legend. I have for you a place in Wisconsin called Summerwind Mansion. It's a haunted house where it's rumored that anyone who lives there goes mad. Summerwind Mansion sits on the West Bay Lake in northern Wisconsin. It's an old place where early British explorers first came into contact with members of the Dakota tribe. Dark green trees loom over the black water. The house itself sticks out from the trees, kind of like a giant human skull. Its many gabled roof and upper story windows give the impression of of empty eye sockets looking out over the lake. Add in the chipped gray wood siding, and summer wind is a little reminiscent of Amityville. The local children would tell stories of the previous owners of this place. Legend says that the house drove anyone who tried to own it mad. One after another, these families would break down and flee or would have to be committed. And according to this legend, if you were to step foot inside, you too might feel your mind start to warp. Now, maybe this was just a way for the neighborhood kids to dare each other to go in. They would tell each other these stories while sitting in the abandoned house's basement, surrounded by the decaying furniture and the drug and alcohol paraphernalia from the partying teens that would go there. But most of them were ignorant of the house's real history. These legends might have been a lot more accurate than they could have ever guessed. The previous owners were strange, but kind of in ways that the kids could not have imagined. Before this house was known as Summerwind. It was just a fishing lodge. It was purchased in 1916 by a wealthy businessman named Robert Lamont, who would go on to be the Secretary of Commerce to President Herbert Hoover. From 1929 to 1932, he spent $125,000 on renovations, which today would be about $4 million. As he transformed the house from a lodge to a mansion, the contractors that were working for him immediately began to notice that there was something odd about this place. Something that was making it really hard for them to complete their work. They would measure out part of one room, but when they came back to remeasure it, it would be a different length. It was like the house was changing dimensions on them. But the mansion still ended up being finished in 1918, allowing Robert and his family to move in. And together they called it Lilac Hills. Locals, though, called it the Lamont Mansion. One night in the early 1930s, Robert and his wife were having dinner in the dining room. Their servants had been sent away for the night, and as they ate their food, lit by dim electric lamps of the time, they heard a loud banging noise in the kitchen. Robert and his wife looked at each other in shock, and he ran to another room where he retrieved a pistol. Fearing that they had an intruder on their hands. He walked into the kitchen, his gun raised. Everything was still and quiet before another loud bang made Robert jump. He pointed his gun at the basement door, which was glowing in the dim light of the kitchen bulbs, and the door started shaking. Something was clearly behind it, wanting to get out. But Robert couldn't think of any natural reason why someone would be down in the basement. The servants were gone. His children were grown and living on their own. So he kept his gun raised just in time for the lock to give and for the door to come crashing open. The room filled with bright blue light as a strange, translucent being floated into the kitchen from the basement. Robert couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, but he didn't care. He fired two shots at it. The figure disappeared in an instant, and the blue glow went with it, returning the kitchen back to normal. Robert stared ahead, trying to process what it was he saw. The figure was gone, but there, embedded in the basement door, were his two bullets. Had he just shot at a ghost? The lamottes didn't stick around much longer to find out. They moved out of the house and left it empty until Robert's death in 1948. The house was then purchased by a man known only as Mr. Kiefer and his wife Lillian. But reports say that the house was even more unkind to them. Mr. Kiefer died of a sudden heart attack only a few months into staying there. No one knows why, but after that Lillian became so frightened that she left the house in a hurry, saying that her neighbors could have all of her things. Her parting words were that she didn't want to be responsible if anything happened to anyone while they were in the house. Next, Arnold and Ginger Hinshaw moved in with their six children and their pet raccoon in the early 1970s. Yes, had a pet raccoon. They hoped that they could renovate the old place and make a life there. But they should have done a little bit more research, it seems, because the house would go on to torture them more than either of the previous couples. It seems like they both began to change. Ginger became obsessed with the color of the walls, and she would constantly paint and repaint them. And Arnold would stay up all hours of the night playing strange music on an organization. And he claimed that spirits were telling him what to play. When they tried to get people to come help them repair the house, most refused. So the couple became desperate, and things like the water pump and the heater started breaking down. When they finally did get a repairman to come, both of those things mysteriously repaired themselves. After that, Arnold was at the end of his rope. He felt like there was something wrong with the house, like there was an unusual force about it. He wanted to figure out where it was coming from. So he searched up and down until he got to the closet in the guest bedroom. Inside, there was an old chest of drawers, which he pushed to the side. And there, hidden, was a small entrance to a crawl space. He swung the little door open and peered inside, but it was so dark, he couldn't see how big the space actually was. Then he had an idea. He called one of his children and told them to go look around inside. The child was inside for only a minute before they started screaming and ran out. Arnold grabbed them and asked what they saw, and they said that there was a skeleton with dark hair clinging to its skull deep inside the crawl space. He then sent all of his other kids just to be sure, and they all claimed that they saw the same thing. That night. The family huddled together in the living room, too afraid to be alone. And suddenly, blue light flooded in from the direction of the dining room. They looked to see an ethereal woman dancing in the air above their table. And that seemed to be the thing that sent Arnold over the edge. The next morning, when Ginger found him, he was chasing after the family's pet raccoon with a large butcher knife. Ginger said she had no choice but to have him committed. It was him or the raccoon. And I guess she picked the raccoon. After that, she divorced Arnold and moved herself and her children in with her parents, and she put the Lamont Mansion behind her. But that was hardly the end of the story for the Lamont Mansion. Ginger's father, Raymond Boeber, was fascinated by what happened to her, and he himself moved onto the property, staying in a trailer. He apparently hoped to witness some of the same supernatural things that his daughter had seen. And according to him, he didn't have to wait very long. He claimed to have been visited in a dream by the ghost of Jonathan Carver, a British explorer who was one of the first Europeans to scout the area. He told Raymond that the house was actually called Summer Wind and that a deed to much of the land of northern Wisconsin was buried there. Raymond never found the deed. He looked for it, but he promptly wrote a book about the house called the Carver Effect and started making money off its sales. And here's some context that even a lot of modern locals have forgotten. But most of the legends we've discussed up until this point come from that book. Before this, the house was not called Summer Wind, and there weren't any written stories of its hauntings. The explorer whose ghost Raymond claimed to see, Jonathan Carver, was a bit of a shady character from the early 1800s who abandoned his family in Wisconsin to start a new one in London. He died there 125 years before the mansion was even built. His descendants were left high and dry. But they created a story about how the Dakota tribe had supposedly left their family a huge part of northern Wisconsin. They said that they had the paperwork to prove it, and they called this document the Carver deed. And they said that whoever held it would supposedly own all the land. Judges recognized it as a con then, and the Carver deed became its own kind of urban legend. And some people have suggested that Raymond Boeber was just dredging it up years later for his book. In order to better sell the legend, he colored it with new, maybe made up details about the newer inhabitants of the land. Raymond published this book first in 1979, two years after the Amityville horror book was published and had become a huge sensation. So, you know, maybe he was chasing his own version of that story. And so that would seem to be a conclusive source for this urban legend. However, there is one strange thing about the house that is hard to explain. So the house sat empty for years after the Hinshaws lived there, becoming a popular hangout spot for neighborhood kids. Like I mentioned before, it was mostly intact until one day in 1988, when dark storm clouds appeared over the lake, a heavy thunderstorm pelted the area with wind, rain, and lightning. And out of those dark storm clouds, a lightning bolt struck Summerwind, lighting it on fire. The flames grew and grew until they engulfed the entire house. By morning, all that was left was the basement and two chimneys, and firefighters thought this was strange because the house's lightning rods were still intact at the time of the fire. And since then, any investor that has tried to do something with the property has been scared away by local legends or met with misfortune. So even if Summerwind isn't haunted by it sure seems like it wants to be left alone. This episode is brought to you by Alma May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I think most of us are past the point of wondering whether therapy helps. We know that it does, but the hard part is usually the finding. First you have to search up new therapists. Then you have to contact them. You have to see if they're accepting new patients. Then you go through the scheduling and insurance process. This is all time that you could be spending getting the help you need, and instead it's just adding more stress to your plate. Well, Alma gets that, which is why they've made it genuinely simple. They have a network of over 26,000 therapists nationwide, and you can browse the directory without even making an account filter. By insurance, specialty, background, whatever matters to you. 98% of Alma therapists accept insurance, and clients with insurance pay $20 on average. Most people find their match on the first try, and over 80% report feeling better within six months. If you've been putting it off because the search felt like its own barrier, Alma took that barrier down. Get started now at hello Alma.com heart starts. That's hello Alma.com h e a R T S T A R T S this episode is brought to you by Kachava. If you've listened to the show for any amount of time, you know that Kachava is now a staple for me. I literally have a subscription that I pay for with my own money. That's how much I rely on this for the vanilla flavor. But here's the thing. The bags live on my kitchen counter and the second I'm out the door or away for the day or traveling, I my routine tends to fall apart. Which is why I'm so excited about Cachava's new travel packs. 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It's all the candid stuff. Those are the moments that I don't want just stuck in my camera roll where I'm never gonna see them. And that is why I love Aura Frames. I have an Aura Frames right now and I love uploading photos to it. I honestly watch it like a tv. You can preload the photos before the frame even ships. You can add a personal message and keep adding more from anywhere anytime. The storage is free and unlimited. You can even text photos straight to the frame from your phone, which honestly is the only way it would actually happen in my house right now. Make Mother's Day special with Aura Frames named number one by Wirecutter. You can save on gifts mom loves by visiting auraframes.com and for a limited time, listeners can get 25 off their best selling Carver mat frame with code HSP. That's a U R A frames.com promo code HSP and support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Time can be a funny thing. Communities can forget their own history and come to prefer the legends that they tell one another. Just like how Pinky Pinky is in some ways a more palatable monster than the real horror of sexual assault in South Africa. Summerwind is a more interesting legend than the con artistry at the Lamont Mansion. But sometimes the reverse can actually be true. Sometimes history can be stranger than fiction. And we come to believe the legend just because we can't fathom that reality is just as weird. Our final urban legend is from The American West. And it proves this in more ways than one. The story of the Red Ghost begins in the dry desert hills of Eagle Creek, Arizona, in 1883. One night, a family of American sheep farmers was eating dinner when they heard horrible sounds coming from the pasture where they kept their sheep. It was too dark to see outside, but they knew that this must be an attack from the nearby Apache tribe. There was nothing the family could do though, because they would be killed immediately if they went outside to stop the attack. So instead, they sat around their table and listened to the sound of their sheep being massacred. First thing in the morning, the two oldest brothers peeked their heads outside to find that the Apaches were gone. They went up into the hills surrounding the ranch house with their father to try to find what was left of their livestock. Their mother didn't love the idea of being left alone with the other children, but she had no choice. She planned to stay inside as much as she could to wait for the men to return. But soon she realized that the family needed fresh water from the outdoor pump. And that meant walking around as an open target. As she walked across the field, she could see the horse hoofprints in the grass, all of their carefully stacked firewood, their tools, their fence, it was all destroyed and laying in bits and pieces around the yard. She could also see streaks of blood where her sheep had been carried away. And some of the streaks looked like they had this red hair in them. The woman tried to not think about it as she made her way to the pump. But as she got closer, the sudden snort of a large animal caused her to stop in her tracks. She looked up to see something horrible hovering over her. Back in the house, one of the daughters heard a scream. She ran to the window and looked outside, expecting to see more Apache warriors. But instead she saw something she almost couldn't believe. Across the yard near the water pump was a giant red buffalo. And seated atop its back was what looked like a dark eyed, sharp toothed demon straight from hell. The men soon returned and the young girl told them exactly what she saw. So they quickly went out to investigate the water pump. And there, at the foot of that very pump was the broken body of their mother. Every bone in her body was shattered. Thousands of bits of bones stuck out from her skin. And blood soaked her dress. Her hair was tangled and matted with blood. It was like something massive had landed right on top of her. And strangely, the area around her body was covered in the same bits of red hair that was in the sheep's blood. An official inquiry was opened into the death, with law enforcement believing that the family might have just killed her themselves. But a jury found no reason to bring charges. When the cause of death was so strange and there was no real motive, they ruled it death in a manner unknown. But soon whispers of this creature that the family saw started spreading, and they started calling it the red ghost. A local newspaper, the Mojave county miner, became obsessed with reporting on any further sightings of this creature. And over the next several years, they shared accounts from other locals who had run ins with this thing. And there were a lot. One day, two local miners were camped next to a river where they were searching for gold. They were sound asleep in their tent when some sort of animal hoof came crashing down between them. It continued to trample the tent with hooves stamping all around them over and over, and they were lucky to not be trampled themselves. And when they climbed out of the tent, they saw a massive red creature thundering into the dark desert. The Mojave county miner next reported that a group of miners caught the sight of the red ghost and cornered it, firing at it with their rifles. It escaped up a hill, but not before one of the miners landed a shot on it. The bullet didn't hit flesh, though. It hit something on the creature's back and knocked it off. And when they went to go investigate, they found something white and round in the dirt. It was a human skull. It wasn't until February 1893, which was 10 years after the first red ghost sighting, that the legend finally came to an end. An Eagle Creek farmer named Mizzou Hastings woke up one morning to find something large and red in the back of his garden. It was the red ghost. He grabbed his gun and he fired a shot at it. And this time, he hit it right in the eye. It fell down dead. When he got close, what he saw was almost more confusing than scary. The red ghost wasn't a buffalo after all, but a camel, like the ones that are found in Africa. And it had old leather straps on its torso as if some saddle had been on it for years. I mean, the whole thing sounds like a legend that an African camel had been terrorizing a small community in Arizona. But the wild part in all of this is there actually were camels in Arizona the 1800s. So in 1857, adventurer Edward Beale led an expedition from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Los Angeles. This was one of the first American surveys of the southwest. But he didn't use horses in this expedition. He used camels imported by the US army for this purpose. They had thought that camels would be better travel companions because they could go for three days without water and they made really good time across the desert. But the reality was much less ideal. Camels are actually kind of jerks. If one of the explorers tried to put one more pound of cargo on a camel than the camel was comfortable with, that camel would spit directly in their eye. And if they tried to lasso a camel, the camel would charge them and trample them. That's all to say, camels are partners, not servants, and they demand to be treated like it. The camels were used by both the Union and the Confederates during the Civil War, but they were all sold and spread out across the desert in a variety of jobs. The camels were used by both the Union and the Confederates during the Civil War, but afterwards they were all sold and they spread out throughout the desert in a variety of jobs. Some were involved in skirmishes with the Native American tribes. In the case of the Red Devil, it's possible that an unlucky soldier had taken an arrow or a bullet to the head, but stayed tied to the saddle. And as this camel wandered, maybe for decades, it's possible that his body stayed in the saddle and just decomposed until his skeleton became confused with some sort of devil creature, and thus the legend was born. Now, urban legends are deeply psychological. We can use them to avoid facing our real fears head on or to build up something in our head that actually isn't that scary. In real life, it's avoidance or catastrophizing that can snowball over the years until a lot of people accept legends as fact. And sometimes they're just born out of ignorance. These poor Arizona settlers truly had no context for why a giant Mediterranean camel with a dead man on his back would be attacking them. And I love being able to bring some of that context to you all. Now, these stories are still kind of spooky, even without the supernatural elements. But now I turn it over to you guys. What were some urban legends that you were all raised with? You can let me know wherever you listen to this podcast and you can join me over on the high council tier on Patreon, where I'm going to go through a little bit more of the research that didn't make it into the episode, including kind of a rabbit hole. I went down on camel attacks because they're very serious and they happen quite often. So if you want to know more about that, you can join me on the high council tier on Patreon I will be back next week with another episode for you all. And until then, Pinky Pinky Pinky. Heartstrings Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heartstarts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our Associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Additional research and writing by Greg Castro Sound design and mix by Redroam Creative Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan and the team at wme. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Go to heartstarts pounding.
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