Podcast
The Haunted Bunker: Paranormal Mysteries & the Unexplained
Hosted by Shane L. Waters, Joshua Waters, Kim Morrow · EN
Paranormal encounters. Cryptid sightings. UFO reports. Unsolved mysteries that defy explanation. Welcome to The Haunted Bunker—where mysteries hide.
Each week, brothers Shane and Josh Waters take turns presenting the unexplained to each other. One brother researches the mystery, one reacts fresh—and the gang explores alongside us.
This isn't a debate show. We don't debunk. We don't prove. We PRESERVE mysteries with wonder and respect for the witnesses who experienced them.
From Bigfoot and Mothman to haunted locations and phenomena that science can't explain—if it makes you wonder "what if?"—we're diving in.
🗓️ New episodes every Tuesday
⭐ Premium members: Early access Fridays + exclusive Unmasked episodes on Patreon and Apple Podcasts
Join the gang. The bunker door is open.
Where Mysteries Hide.
38episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The Jewel Thief | He Stole an Empress's Star
2w ago00:55:03Tap to summarizeShane handed the reins to Kim for this one. The challenge was simple: pick a documentary off a streaming service, and the gang talks the whole thing through. Kim picked The Jewel Thief on Hulu, and honestly, it is one of the most jaw-dropping true crime stories you will ever hear.The gang investigates the life of Gerald Blanchard, a Canadian thief who treated high security like a personal insult. Adopted, raised in poverty in Omaha, dyslexic and bullied, he started by forging receipts and returning stolen electronics for cash, and he never really stopped climbing. By the time he peaked, money was not even the point anymore. As one detective put it, he had a genuine compulsion to beat the system.The centerpiece is the crime that made him famous: in 1998 he walked into Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna and swapped a priceless imperial diamond star, the Sisi Star, for a replica he bought in the gift shop. Or did he parachute onto the roof from a small plane in the dark, like he claims? A parachute was found near the palace. The director spent years trying to verify the story and could not. That uncertainty is part of the fun, and Shane, Kim, and Josh dig right into it.From there the gang follows Blanchard through a bank heist so elaborate he built a full replica of the target room to rehearse, mounted handles on the drywall so he could pass through the walls, and beat the bank's high-security locks by loosening the screws that held them in place. We get into the international fraud ring run by a shadowy figure known only as The Boss, the Cairo ATM scheme his crew pulled off in disguise, and the small, almost silly mistake that finally brought the whole thing down. We talk through the eight year sentence that should have been a hundred and sixty, the deal that kept all seven of his accomplices out of prison, the priceless jewel he hid in his grandmother's basement for nine years, and where Blanchard has landed since.Along the way Shane, Kim, and Josh wrestle with the part that makes this story stick. Nobody got hurt, which is exactly why it plays like a comedy, and the detectives who caught him ended up touring the country praising how brilliant he was. Is that admiration earned, or is celebrating a thief part of the problem? And if a man can rewrite his own legend at will, does it even matter what actually happened on that palace roof?Pull up a chair in the bunker. No ghosts this week, just one of the strangest, most charming criminals of the modern era, and a conversation about why we cannot stop being fascinated by him.What you'll hear in this episode:How a bullied, dyslexic kid from Omaha became a master thiefThe Sisi Star heist, and the parachute story nobody can proveThe bank job he rehearsed in a full-scale replica roomThe eight year sentence, the bargaining chip, and where he is todayAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Michigan Dogman | The Prank That Became a Legend
3w ago00:52:01Tap to summarizeThe Michigan Dogman has claw marks, a police report, grainy film footage, and decades of eyewitness accounts. It also has a birth certificate: April 1, 1987. This week Shane brings the gang a mystery about how legends get made, and a radio prank that refused to stay a joke.Steve Cook, a DJ and production man at WTCM in Traverse City, needed an April Fools bit. So he wrote "The Legend, " a spoken-word song over a cheap keyboard, credited to a singer who did not exist named Bob Farley. Morning host Jack O'Malley slipped it into rotation with no setup and no warning. Within an hour, the phone lines lit up. Listeners were not calling to laugh. They were calling to report their own encounters, including one man who swore he had seen the creature back in 1937 while fishing the Muskegon River and had never told a soul. Cook later admitted to the Detroit Free Press that he made the whole thing up from his own imagination. It did not matter. "The Legend" became the station's most requested song within a month, and Cook eventually cataloged more than one hundred reports, selling the song on cassette and donating the money to animal shelters.The detail Shane could not shake: the song invented its own history. It placed the first sighting in 1887, exactly one hundred years before it aired, with eleven lumberjacks at a Wexford County logging camp, and it set a pattern of sightings in years ending in seven. Yet no newspaper, diary, or logging camp record from before 1987 describing a Michigan dog man has ever surfaced. Not from believers, not from skeptics, not from anyone.The gang investigates what grew around the prank: Robert Fortney's black dog with blue eyes near Paris, Michigan, a story whose date drifts between 1937 and 1938 depending on the telling; the July 1987 cabin near Luther, Michigan, clawed up badly enough that DNR officers and the county sheriff investigated and Paul Harvey carried the story nationally; and the infamous Gable Film, the shaky footage that anchored MonsterQuest's series finale until a man named Mike confessed on camera, ghillie suit, coat-hanger ears, and all.So, case closed? Not quite. Josh wants to know what separates a dogman from a werewolf, and Shane plays devil's advocate: maybe a Dogman really is out there, and the timing is one strange coincidence. Black dog legends reach back through Scottish and Irish lore, and truckers still trade their own versions. Why does this one keep finding believers?Also in the bunker: a snack box from Thailand turns chaotic the moment the gang meets durian, a fruit so foul that some hotels in Thailand ban it outright. Zoinks. Kim tastes it anyway, and the bunker may never smell the same.What you'll hear in this episode:How a 1987 WTCM radio prank invented the Michigan DogmanThe Luther cabin attack that made the papers and a police reportThe Gable Film hoax and the on-camera confession that ended itA durian wafer taste test that nearly cleared the bunkerAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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CrimeCon Las Vegas: Survivors, Stings & the Sphere
4w ago01:02:52Tap to summarizeShane and Kim are back from Las Vegas, and the bunker has some catching up to do. Josh spent the week working twelve-hour shifts, so the gang skips the mystery, pulls up chairs, and settles in for a full CrimeCon debrief instead. No Unmasked this week. It all got folded into one long hangout, exactly the way these conversations want to go.The trip got off to a rocky start. Caesars Palace, home base for CrimeCon this year, hid its elevators, parked Shane and Kim a half-mile hike from the front desk, and kept the minibar fridge locked unless they paid thirty dollars a night to open it. Shane tried to outsmart the system and scored a free fridge. Jinkies, what a victory, until a maid arrived carrying a cooler barely big enough for eight cans. Then there was the TUMI store in the fancy mall next door, where Shane walked in to browse and walked out with a confession he swore he would never make, least of all into a live microphone.The CrimeCon sessions themselves were some of the most powerful the gang has ever sat through. Detectives who worked the 2017 Las Vegas shooting walked the audience through what happened inside Mandalay Bay. Epstein survivors sat down with Chris Hansen, and one of them described being warned that holding everyone in the files accountable could topple governments. Her answer: let it fall. At the Clue Awards, the survivors were honored with the Crime Fighter of the Year award. And in a backstage hallway, Shane gave directions to a friendly stranger, then walked into the survivors session the next day and realized exactly who he had been chatting with. Hansen even invited Shane to join an upcoming sting operation in Michigan, an offer he is still grinning about.Then Las Vegas itself took over. The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere came with wind effects, seats that rattled through the tornado, and drones standing in for flying monkeys. The gift shop nearly did more damage than the twister, with one shirt priced at a hundred dollars. There was Fremont Street at five in the evening, despite an Uber driver's warning that nothing gets going before eleven. And there was the gentlest driver in all of Nevada, whose calm, precise "Yes, ma'am" became the trip's unofficial catchphrase.Mix in Kim's neighbor saga, the great tipping-screen debate, and a postcard from Greenville, South Carolina, and you have a proper night in the bunker. CrimeCon heads to Orlando next year. Shane's mystery returns next week.What you'll hear in this episode:The CrimeCon sessions that stuck with the gang: the Las Vegas shooting detectives, Epstein survivors with Chris Hansen, and the Clue AwardsChris Hansen inviting Shane on a sting operation in MichiganThe Wizard of Oz at the Sphere, complete with wind, rumbling seats, and flying monkey dronesThe locked fridge standoff at Caesars Palace and the tiniest free fridge in NevadaA tipping-screen showdown and the Uber driver the gang will never forgetAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Lovelock Cave and the Si-Te-Cah
Jun 900:57:37Tap to summarizeThe gang investigates a mystery where the legend came first and the archaeology came second.In 1883, Northern Paiute author Sarah Winnemucca published something extraordinary. In "Life Among the Piutes," she described an ancient enemy her people called the Si-Te-Cah. Red-haired. Cannibals. According to Paiute oral tradition, the tribes united against them, cornered them in a cave, and set it on fire. Winnemucca wrote that she personally possessed their hair, handed down through her family for generations.Twenty-nine years later, two guano miners cracked open a cave eighteen miles south of Lovelock, Nevada. Under six feet of bat droppings, they found thousands of artifacts, mummified human remains, and something that stopped researchers in their tracks: some of the mummies had red hair.The oral tradition was on paper before anyone touched the cave.Tonight, Shane brings this mystery to the gang. They walk through the full timeline: Winnemucca's 1883 account, the 1911 guano mining discovery, the formal excavation that recovered ten thousand artifacts from a single cave, and the 1924 discovery of eleven duck decoys now recognized as the oldest waterfowl decoys in the world. Nevada made them the official state artifact in 1995. The originals sit at the Smithsonian.Then the story takes a turn. A 1931 newspaper claimed skeletons measuring eight and ten feet tall had been found near Lovelock. The "red-haired giants" narrative exploded across fringe media, YouTube, and at least two History Channel segments. But when physical anthropologist Dr. Sheilagh Brooks examined the so-called giant bones in the 1970s, she found people about six feet tall. Some of the bones labeled "giant" turned out to be from cows.Jinkies.So the giants were debunked. The 2018 DNA analysis confirmed the Lovelock Cave people carried Native American haplogroups. The science explains the red hair as a chemical reaction: dark hair changes color in dry, alkaline cave environments over centuries.But the science does not explain everything. The Paiute described the Si-Te-Cah as people who used spear-throwers instead of bows. The archaeological record at Lovelock Cave shows a documented weapons transition from atlatls to bows in the tool layers. The legend matches a detail in the dirt.And Winnemucca said they had reddish hair before anyone pulled a mummy out of that cave.The mystery stays open. The gang explores it all.What you'll hear in this episode:The full Sarah Winnemucca quote about the Si-Te-Cah and the mourning dressHow two guano miners accidentally uncovered four thousand years of historyThe world's oldest duck decoys and why they matterWhat Dr. Sheilagh Brooks actually found when she measured the "giant" bonesThe atlatl-to-bow detail that nobody can fully explainTwo Shit Fire stories from Nevada that have to be heard to be believedAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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The Lady in Red | Tonopah's Mizpah Hotel
Jun 200:48:15Tap to summarizeThere's a five-story hotel in the Nevada desert where guests wake up to find a single pearl on their pillow. Nobody brought it. Housekeeping didn't put it there. The staff keeps a guest ghost story book at the front desk. The pearls keep filling it.The gang investigates the Lady in Red — the ghost of the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada. USA Today named it the #1 Most Haunted Hotel in America in 2018. Shane flew to Vegas early for CrimeCon, Jennifer joined them, and he brought a Lady in Red mystery worth the trip.The legend says a woman named Rose, working out of the hotel in the early 1920s, was strangled on the fifth floor by a jealous lover. Her pearl necklace broke in the attack. Pearls scattered. For years, across multiple ownership groups, guests have reported waking up to a single pearl on their pillow — same floor, same hallway outside Room 502. The Lady in Red's official room is 504, red curtains and a canopy bed. But the activity isn't in 504.Zoinks! Here's the problem. Shane went looking for Rose and couldn't find her. No contemporary newspaper coverage of a murder at the Mizpah in that period. A name attached to the legend, Evelyn Mae Johnson, born Baltimore 1879, doesn't match any of the fifty-two Baltimore birth records from that year. The hotel built its entire identity around a woman the historical record cannot confirm ever existed. And yet the Lady in Red keeps leaving pearls.When Ghost Adventures filmed at the Mizpah for Season 5, Episode 2, broadcast September 30, 2011 — about a month after the hotel reopened from a twelve-year shutdown — cameras caught elevator doors opening on their own, a shadow blocking light from under a closed door, and an EVP of a female voice saying "I'm Evil. " THB rule: we report what cameras recorded. We don't tell you what it means.Like, what if a town of eighteen hundred people, with the darkest sky in the lower forty-eight, a 117-year-old operating elevator, a cemetery next to a clown motel with six thousand clown figures, ends up haunted not because of Rose, but because the place outlived its purpose and the building didn't know how to stop?This is the special Vegas drop. Recorded the night before CrimeCon. Three voices in a hotel room with Nevada laws that sound made up, a bar that built a rooftop to watch nuclear weapons detonate at sixty-five miles, and three Mirage dolphins relocated to SeaWorld San Diego before the casino shut its doors in July 2024.What you'll hear in this episode:The pearl that keeps appearing on the pillow across multiple ownership groupsThe Lady in Red legend and the historical hole at the center of itWhat Ghost Adventures caught at the Mizpah in 2011The other Mizpah ghosts — children, miners, a soldier — none of whom get the marketingWhy Tonopah itself might be the hauntingShit Fire storie: the Yellow-billed Loon, one of the rarest mainland-breeding birds in North America, that shut down the Bellagio fountains,.Join the gang. The mystery stays open. The pearl stays on the pillow.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Le Nain Rouge | Detroit's Cursed Red Dwarf
May 2601:25:28Tap to summarizeLe Nain Rouge has cursed Detroit for three hundred years. Antoine Laumet made up the name "Cadillac, " stole a coat of arms off a gate in France, and founded the city under a lie. Three weeks after he arrived, something small and red stepped out of the riverbank fog, and he swung his cane at it.The fortune teller in Quebec had warned him. His wife recognized it. He hit it anyway.Tonight is a special. Our friend Jennifer brought this one from Detroit. She's sharing the mystery of Le Nain Rouge — the Red Dwarf — while Shane and Kim get to listen.The gang investigates a creature reported in Detroit for over three hundred years. Every time the city has fallen, somebody reported seeing the little red man again. The 1763 Battle of Bloody Run. The Great Fire of June 11, 1805, the one that gave Detroit its motto, Speramus Meliora — we hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes. The 1812 surrender, when General Hull gave up the city without firing a shot. The 1872 sighting by Jane Dacy in the Detroit Free Press. The 1884 newspaper account of a woman attacked by something she called "a baboon with a horned head, brilliant restless eyes, and a devilish leer. " The 1967 Riots. The 1976 ice storm.Like, what if Detroit's whole identity, from its founding to its bankruptcy to its rebirth, is wrapped around a creature it can't actually find?Jinkies! Here's where it gets stranger. The first written record of the Nain Rouge doesn't appear until 1884, one hundred and eighty-three years after Cadillac's encounter. Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin, a descendant of Detroit's earliest French families, gathered the oral tradition into Legends of le Détroit that same year. Either Hamlin influenced the sightings, or the sightings influenced Hamlin, or both responded to the same Detroit anxiety.Plus: the Marche du Nain Rouge, founded 2010 by Wayne State law students Francis Grunow and Joe Uhl, modeled after New Orleans' post-Katrina Mardi Gras revival. The annual parade banishes Le Nain Rouge in effigy on the steps of the Masonic Temple at 500 Temple Street. Indigenous scholars have argued since the parade began that the Nain Rouge has roots in Anishinaabe protector-spirit traditions, and a mostly-non-Indigenous parade banishing it enacts colonial logic. That debate hasn't gone away. Neither has the curse.What you'll hear in this episode:The con man who founded Detroit — Antoine Laumet and the noble identity he inventedMarie-Thérèse Guyon, Cadillac's wife, called the "First Lady of Detroit" by the Detroit Historical SocietyThe fortune teller's warning Cadillac ignoredEvery documented sighting from 1701 to 1976, including the 1872 and 1884 Detroit Free Press accountsFather Gabriel Richard — the priest who gave Detroit its motto, then died September 13, 1832, treating cholera patientsThree competing theories: French lutin vs. Anishinaabe spirit vs. literary creationThe Marche du Nain Rouge, the Masonic Temple, and the Indigenous protestTwo Shit Fire stories: Officer Matthew Jackson at Zoom court without pants, and a Michigan bear who wore a plastic drum lid for two yearsJoin the gang. The cane stays raised.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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The Axeman of New Orleans | Jazz or Die, 1919
May 1901:01:56Tap to summarizeDave brings this mystery to the bunker with Kim and Josh this week, and the gang explores a case where an entire city's survival may have depended on keeping the music playing. The Axeman was never identified, never caught, and left behind only questions.Some researchers believe the letter wasn't written by the killer at all, but by a musician hoping to sell copies of a song called "Don't Scare Me Papa, " inspired by the events. The Axeman's attacks resumed briefly afterward, with possible additional murders as late as 1920, before the killer simply vanished from history. Theories about his identity range from a lone drunk who turned violent to mafia enforcers targeting grocers who may have been laundering money or refusing to cooperate. That Tuesday happened to be St. Joseph's Day. The city erupted in music. Jazz poured from every window, every open door, every club. Those without instruments or records rushed to any establishment playing music. The streets were alive with sound. And nobody was killed that night.Then came the letter. On March 13, 1919, the Times-Picayune newspaper published a letter from someone claiming to be the Axeman himself. Written with theatrical flair, the author declared himself "a spirit and a demon from the hottest hell" and made a demand: at 12:15 AM on the following Tuesday, every home must have a jazz band playing in full swing. Anyone without jazz would "get the ax."The first known attack claimed the lives of Joseph and Catherine Maggio in May 1918. Joseph's brothers discovered them after hearing strange groaning through the walls. Catherine was nearly decapitated. A straight razor had been used alongside the axe. The back door panel had been knocked out. And in the months that followed, the same pattern repeated across the city. Italian grocers, doors chiseled open, the household axe turned against its owners, nothing taken.Between 1918 and 1919, a mysterious figure terrorized the Italian grocers of New Orleans. The attacker's method was consistent and chilling: chisel through a panel in the back door, enter the home behind the grocery store, pick up the family's own axe, and attack. Nothing was ever stolen. The victims, who somehow survived more often than not, could never remember what happened. And the city had no idea who was responsible.Jinkies! The gang travels to early 1900s New Orleans for a mystery that demanded an entire city play jazz music or face the consequences.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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The Perfect Disappearance
May 1200:54:57Tap to summarizeZoinks! The trail leads from a Cleveland bank vault to a quiet Massachusetts life, and the only person who ever knew the full truth took most of it to his grave.Josh brings this mystery to the bunker this week while Kim and buddy Dave join him, asking the questions that remain: How did a man who supposedly couldn't find his own socks maintain a double identity for five decades? How did he explain away his missing family, his absent past? And perhaps most intriguing of all, did he really do it just because of a movie?The case remained open for over half a century. Tragically, the original detective who worked the case died just two years before its resolution. In 2021, on his deathbed, Thomas Randall finally confessed to his wife and adult daughters that he was really Theodore Conrad, the bank teller who vanished with nearly $1.9 million in today's money.From Cleveland, Conrad fled to Washington D.C., then Los Angeles, before finally settling in a small Massachusetts town where he reinvented himself as Thomas Randall. He worked as a golf pro at a country club and sold high-end cars. He married in 1982, raised two daughters, and became well-liked by his neighbors and local police. For fifty-two years, he lived an entirely fabricated life while his case appeared on both America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries.What makes Conrad's story so captivating isn't just the robbery itself. It's everything that came after. The all-American boy, popular student council member with a high IQ, simply evaporated. He left behind a note to his girlfriend confessing what he'd done, and his buddies told police he'd been obsessed with the 1967 film The Thomas Crown Affair, often joking about how easy it would be to steal from the bank. They never took him seriously. Why would they?On July 11, 1969, twenty-year-old Theodore Conrad walked into the vault at Society National Bank's Cleveland headquarters, stuffed $215,000 in cash into a brown paper bag, and walked right out the front door. Nobody stopped him. Nobody questioned the bag. And because he left on a Friday evening, the theft wasn't discovered until Monday, giving him a two-and-a-half-day head start that turned into a lifetime.The gang investigates one of the most audacious bank heists in American history, and the five decades of silence thatfollowed.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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The Gay Bomb
May 500:33:52Tap to summarizeZoinks! What do pheromones, the Pentagon, and an elite ancient Greek army have in common? More than you would ever guess, and Josh is here to connect the dots in one of the wildest episodes the gang has tackled yet.It started with cologne. Josh has been on a lifelong quest for the perfect scent, one powerful enough to, as he puts it, land a big hairy silver fox. While researching pheromone-based fragrances, he stumbled onto something the United States government would probably rather forget: the Gay Bomb. Yes, that was the actual name. In the late 1990s, the Pentagon explored the idea of a non-lethal weapon that would release pheromones into the air and make enemy soldiers so attracted to each other that they would stop fighting. The theory was that an explosion of airborne hormones would trigger a mass battlefield romance, effectively ending combat without a single bullet fired.The proposal made it far enough to appear in official Pentagon records as part of a broader study into non-lethal chemical weapons. It was never built, and for good reason. No scientific evidence has ever demonstrated that any scent or pheromone can alter a person's sexual orientation. Companies have been making that claim since the 1970s with musky colognes and supposed attraction sprays, and the science has never backed it up.But the trail leads somewhere unexpected. Josh discovered that an all-gay military unit actually existed, and it was one of the most feared fighting forces in the ancient world. The Sacred Band of Thebes consisted of 150 male couples, 300 soldiers total, who fought side by side as lovers. The idea was simple and effective: a soldier fights harder when the person he loves is standing next to him on the battlefield. The unit was active from 378 BC and remained undefeated for decades until Alexander the Great finally overcame them in 338 BC.The gang investigates how ancient Greek culture viewed homosexuality in the military, including passages from Plato's Symposium that praised the bond between male soldiers as a source of extraordinary courage. As Plato wrote, no man is such a coward that love cannot inspire him with bravery equal to the bravest born. In ancient Greece, these relationships were not hidden or merely tolerated. They were celebrated as a military advantage.From a Pentagon proposal that treated attraction as a weapon to an ancient army that proved love actually could win wars, this episode covers ground that history books tend to skip. Josh brings his signature humor and genuine curiosity to a story that is equal parts absurd, fascinating, and surprisingly moving.What you'll hear in this episode:The real Pentagon proposal to weaponize pheromones and why it never left the drawing boardThe Sacred Band of Thebes, 300 elite gay soldiers who were undefeated for 40 yearsPlato's take on why love makes better warriors than fearJosh's personal quest for the perfect cologne and how it led to a classified government documentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Skinwalker Ranch | Utah's Most Haunted Property
Apr 2800:39:00Tap to summarizeJinkies! What happens when a family moves into a 512-acre cattle ranch in northeastern Utah and discovers every door, window, and cabinet bolted shut from the inside? For the Sherman family, the locks were just the beginning.In 1994, Terry and Gwen Sherman purchased a remote ranch in the Uintah Basin, lured by cheap land and wide-open skies. Within weeks, they understood why the previous owners had fortified every inch of the house. Cattle started turning up dead with surgical wounds, organs removed, and not a drop of blood anywhere. One cow had an 18-inch hole cored straight through its body cavity. No predator leaves a scene like that.Then came the wolf. A massive animal, three times the normal size, appeared in the fields and attacked a calf. Sherman fired four rounds from a .357 Magnum at close range, then grabbed a rifle and fired again. A chunk of flesh tore free, but the wolf just looked at him and walked away. No blood. Its tracks ended the next morning in the middle of a field and simply stopped.The lights followed. Blue orbs with orange centers drifted across the property, floating through walls and hovering above the fields. One night, three of the family's dogs chased an orb into thick brush. Three yelps. The next morning, all that remained were three greasy spots on scorched earth where the dogs had been. Four bulls vanished from a corral and were found crammed inside a sealed metal trailer, cobwebs still undisturbed across the door, waking from what looked like a trance.The gang investigates one of the most documented paranormal properties in American history. After the Shermans sold the ranch in 1996, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow deployed a full scientific team through his National Institute for Discovery Science. They documented close to 100 incidents, but the phenomenon seemed aware it was being watched. Activity spiked when observers were present but died the instant instruments were aimed at it. Cameras were vandalized. Sensors failed at exactly the wrong moments.The story took a classified turn when a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst visited the ranch in 2007 and reported seeing a floating yellow object in the kitchen. Senators Harry Reid, Ted Stevens, and Daniel Inouye secured $22 million in classified funding for a government study through Bigelow's company, BAASS. Over 100 technical papers and 38 classified defense documents were produced before the program ended in 2012. The New York Times revealed its existence to the public in December 2017.But the most unsettling finding was what researchers called the Hitchhiker Effect. The phenomena did not stay at the ranch. It followed investigators home. Blue orbs appeared at researchers' houses in Las Vegas. Military personnel reported strange activity at their own homes after visiting the property. Every one of five service members deployed to the ranch experienced something unexplained.Today the ranch is owned by Brandon Fugal and featured on the History Channel. The questions remain open, the cameras keep rolling, and whatever lives on that land keeps watching back.What youll hear in this episode:The Sherman family's harrowing 18 months on the ranch, from mutilated cattle to a bulletproof wolfA $22 million classified government investigation that produced more questions than answersThe Hitchhiker Effect and why what happens at the ranch does not stay at the ranchAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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