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.
42episodes
Episodes
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Fox Hollow Farm | The Full Story
4d ago00:56:02Tap to summarizeShane 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 outThe 2022 to 2026 identification effort and the names it has returned to their familiesWhat the new 2026 special adds: new interviews, unreleased case files, and the accomplice questionThe haunting claims at Fox Hollow Farm, reported with respect and a healthy dose of skepticismAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Should I Marry a Murderer? | The Fiancée Who Built the Case
2w ago00:47:51Tap to summarizeShane'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 proposedThe month she spent secretly building a case against her own fiancéWhy the crash itself might not be what actually killed Tony ParsonsThe seventeen year sentence, and the question of whose story this documentary really tellsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Fourth of July Mysteries | Vanished at the Lake
3w ago00:43:05Tap to summarizeThe 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 skyThe eerie same-day deaths of two founding fathers, fifty years to the dayThe unsolved 1988 San Angelo murders and the cult rumors that surround Sally and Shane's caseGot 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.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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The False Prophet | Inside Samuel Bateman's Cult
4w ago01:03:42Tap to summarizeThis 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 exploitedThe couple who infiltrated the cult and handed the FBI its caseThe trailer stop, the warehouse arrest, and the kidnapping from jailThe convictions and fifty year sentence that came after the cameras stoppedAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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The Jewel Thief | He Stole an Empress's Star
Jun 3000:55:03Tap 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
Jun 2300:52:01Tap 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
Jun 1601:02:52Tap 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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