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- [00:00]
Julian Mokins
Did I talk too much? Can I just let it go? I wish I would stop thinking so much.
- [00:06]
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- [00:29]
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- [00:59]
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- [01:44]
Kaya Betzius
Subaru my husband, he did open the wall. He opened it up right where we thought it was and we were horrified. What we found was the burlap sack, but so much more and so much dust and dirt comes out. It was like a poof. We didn't have masks on or anything, right? And there was not a baby in that burlap sack. No baby. No baby. It was. There was something in there though, and it was a chicken carcass. It was wrapped up and shoved down into a wall in this burlap sack.
- [02:39]
Julian Mokins
Hey, I'm Julian Mokins, and you're listening to what It Was like, the show that asks people who have lived through big dramatic events what it was like. Hey friends, welcome back. I'm going to keep this one short. Maybe this will be my shortest introduction yet because I think with this story, the less you know going in, the better. But having said that, I'm going to give you the basics just so the Cold open that you just heard, you know, that thing at the start makes sense. And just so you're sufficiently curious to keep going. So this story all starts when a family moves into a house in rural Pennsylvania in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. And during renovations, they uncover something about their house which totally upends their lives. But ultimately, it reveals a fascinating piece of American history. And one. One that I knew almost nothing about before going into this conversation. To share the story with me is the woman who bought the house. Her name's Kaya Betzius. So let's just do it. We'll just get into it. So here's Kaya, and I hope you enjoy our conversation. Hey, Kaya. Welcome to the show.
- [03:59]
Kaya Betzius
Thank you.
- [04:00]
Julian Mokins
How are you doing today?
- [04:01]
Kaya Betzius
I'm doing good. I'm doing great.
- [04:03]
Julian Mokins
That's good. I'm doing well as well. I'm glad we got through that. Where does this story take place? Can you tell me about the area you live in?
- [04:14]
Kaya Betzius
Okay. So this story takes place in Pennsylvania, in the United States, in a rural county that's. It's called Schuylkill County. It's right where our location is, is right on a county line by Berks county, which becomes geographically important later on. We're in the countryside, but I'm in a town. And at this time, it was 2010, my husband and I, we were looking for a larger home to move into. We had a growing family, so we had two children already. And we had found a spot not in a town where we were from, but close by, close enough that it wouldn't be too far from our family. And it was originally built as what we call here a duplex or a double, which would be two homes that share one center wall. So the people who we bought the house from had taken the time to make this two house set up. One house, which gave us lots of bedrooms for kids and two bathrooms, which I believe is what was going to keep my marriage strong. And because we would. Had a. We had a dedicated boys room bathroom and a girls room bathroom.
- [05:45]
Julian Mokins
Ah, yeah, yeah, Right again.
- [05:48]
Kaya Betzius
We buy this house and the reason why we want this house is because it doesn't really. It's. It's in perfect condition and it doesn't need to be fixed up. We didn't want to do a lot of home improvements. We didn't have a large budget. This house was by far in the best condition for all the ones that we had looked at at the time.
- [06:11]
Julian Mokins
Okay, does it have like a old, in any way, spooky Vibe. I mean, what's. What's like the. The vibe of the house.
- [06:20]
Kaya Betzius
I didn't think it was spooky. But I will tell you, some of the kids, like my daughter, she. She didn't like the house. She didn't get to see it until after we had bought it. She had stayed at a friend's house during that time. So unfortunately, we didn't wait a long time. We made an offer on it almost right away. And it was new on the market. It hadn't sat on the market long at all. And we weren't homeowners before. This would be our first house we've ever purchased. And we close on it in October of 2010. Okay.
- [06:54]
Julian Mokins
Congratulations. Must have been an exciting time.
- [06:57]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah. So we're ready to go. We move into a house. I become pregnant with our son Barrett and give birth the following June. Haven't even had the house a year yet. We haven't done many home improvements, but we fix up the nursery for the new baby. We didn't do. We just put carpet in, repainted it, and put sticker decals on the wall. This is a low budget nursery, and we repainted one of the bathrooms, basically. And so the house has little or no insulation. When we buy it, we know this is the case, and we do plan on putting insulation in. So on the summer of 2012, I finally sent my husband up in the attic. Check out what the insulation situation is because it has some old insulation up there. This type of house was constructed in the 1920s approximately. It has something called balloon constructioning, which is basically where the framing goes from the whole, you know, floor to ceiling. There's no partition. It's just a basic, like, opening. And sometimes you can go to, like, two floors. These, they don't make them like this anymore because they're a fire hazard. This is called balloon construction. It becomes important. So we send him up there, and he comes down and he says that he can see some things are shoved down in the wall. And he's come. He comes back, you know, like, kind of like with some old bottles. And I thought, oh, these are amazing. Like, I want to keep them. They were really interesting, you know. So, you know, I asked him, can you find anything else? Can you get anything else? He goes back up and he's got our other son Joshua with him, and he digs down in the wall and he shows me some other things that he had found that were just above those old bottles. I think he just didn't really want to tell me, but they were pornographic magazines from, like, 1980. And we were giggling because our oldest son had taken off with one of the, you know, pieces of, you know, just like, I'll take care of this. And we'd run it. Run them down and say, no, we'll put this over here on top of this where you can't see it. There was. It was. It was like some.
- [09:43]
Julian Mokins
A lot of bush.
- [09:44]
Kaya Betzius
It was a lot of 80s bush. It was. It was funny. But there was more.
- [09:49]
Julian Mokins
How old was your son at the time?
- [09:52]
Kaya Betzius
He was about 7. He's about 7 years old.
- [09:55]
Julian Mokins
He's quite old enough for it to be okay.
- [09:58]
Kaya Betzius
It's a bit young, but he remembers this day. He remembers this day. We are blissfully unaware. So we. So, you know, we get to the point where there's still some thing down in the wall. This is a tight area. My husband's kind of a bigger gentleman, and he couldn't reach what it was, so I'm interested. And I asked him, like, what he's seeing, like, what he's describing. He's looking for something to use as a grabber. And he sees a. Like, right on top where. Like, where we couldn't. We had a Swiffer, like, taken apart. And we're just using, like, the. The aluminum end to, like, reach down. It's pretty far. We got a flashlight, and it's hard to see. And there was, like, an onion that was completely desiccated. It was perfect in shape. And then it just, poof. Whenever we, you know, touched it, it just disintegrated. And it's very dusty and dirty, and it seems to be a burlap sack. So I thought horribly. Initially, I thought that it was possibly a baby in the wall.
- [11:24]
Julian Mokins
Why? Why was that your first thought?
- [11:27]
Kaya Betzius
My first thought was that because in this town that we lived in, we were aware that, like, some babies had been found in a different house on a street, a few streets down, underneath some steps. And, you know, I just think 100 years ago, when the house was built, it was a different time. And I just couldn't think of, like, what else it would be in what. What you would wrap in a burlap sack and put down in the wall. Like, to me, it was so obvious, and I was just, like, you know, horrified, basically.
- [12:07]
Julian Mokins
I love the way that you're, like, horrified, but you're finding it simultaneously obvious. You're like, oh, this is definitely a dead baby. Like, this is.
- [12:14]
Kaya Betzius
I don't definitely. I am certain at this point.
- [12:21]
Julian Mokins
You'Ve definitely seen some horror Movies in your life.
- [12:24]
Kaya Betzius
I have, you know. I have, you know. Okay. So I look at my husband, and my husband looks at me, and he already knows what I'm gonna say. Because the wall that it's down in is in the nursery where the room that we had just fixed up, that's where the wall was. That's where we were digging at. And so I just said to him, oh, you know, I can't believe I did this. But I said. I told him to open up the wall, like, right there. I don't know. I was, like, so certain. This. I don't know why I did it, but this is what we did. This was a mistake.
- [13:05]
Julian Mokins
Oh, God.
- [13:06]
Kaya Betzius
This was a. This was a. This was a mess. My husband, he did open the wall. He opened it up right where we thought it was, and we were horrified. What we found was the burlap sack, but so much more. So first things first. We take the thing that we go after, the top thing. It's a hole in the wall. It's just like a hole you can't see, and so much dust and dirt comes out. It was like a poof. We didn't have masks on or anything.
- [13:51]
Julian Mokins
Right.
- [13:52]
Kaya Betzius
It was, like, a lot of dust. And I just remembered hanging through the air, because by this time, it's, like, afternoon and the sun is shining through it. And there was not a baby in that burlap sack. No baby. No baby. It was. There was something in there, though. So we open it up because it's, like. It's not just, like, wrapped up. It's, like, stitched in, like, this sack. And it was a chicken carcass. It was a chicken carcass. It was wrapped up and shoved down into a wall in this burlap sack. And, you know, the chicken's about the same size as a baby. I just wanna say, you know.
- [14:41]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah, big chicken, like.
- [14:45]
Kaya Betzius
So. But weird. Weird. This was really weird. Um, you know, your mind was, like. To the why Immediately. Like, why is this? What the heck? And, but, like, it wasn't just that. You could. You could hear all of these, like, the tinkling of, like, glass and things, like, shifting down the wall from when we moved the stuff. So right away, after we open this thing up, we start looking for what's underneath it and what's underneath it. And what we find is, like, a complete eclectic arrangement of things like you would never think, like. So we didn't inventory things at first, but I did take pictures, and I'm glad I did, because there's no way That I would be able to remember. So stuffed from, from the floor to the ceiling in this balloon construction, 1920s construction. Just the exterior wall. We're just talking the exterior wall where these end caps had been popped off seemingly, you know, in, in our attic. And so in between, you know, the, the beams would get. We clean out like one, right. And then we go to the next and there's more. And at this point, I'm calling my sister.
- [16:19]
Julian Mokins
Wait, before, before we get to your sister, like, what else do you find? What, what other stuff was in this wall cavity?
- [16:26]
Kaya Betzius
We find about 20 wrapped up chickens and we find all different other kind of animal skulls, feet. All of the chickens were roosters. We can tell they were roosters because they all had their spikes, their talons. Yeah, they're right, exactly. So all male chickens. And then there was carnival glass. There was metal objects, but which I didn't really notice like any significance. But there were all these different items that were like tied like in, like with knots around them. It's like tied with like string around them or cloth and like very random things. Some stuff. I don't know what the heck it was. So I come. So, I mean, I'm putting this stuff out, I'm taking pictures. It's like on my carpet. It's in my baby's nursery.
- [17:30]
Julian Mokins
Were you, can I ask, were you excited? Were you. Like, this is fun. What a weird discovery.
- [17:35]
Kaya Betzius
Oh my gosh. So after the initial relief that it wasn't a human, like human remains, it left in my house. After that, it was some sort of like grotesque fascination. And I do believe that at some pictures you can see me smiling because one thing that we pulled out of the wall, which was amazing, was like a 12 inch cast iron skillet. And it's like, how do you. How do they even get it in there? It was hard to get it out. So an eclectic array of what I think is just complete and total junk. And like. So as we are starting to grasp like the sheer magnitude of this damage, it's not fun anymore. Like, we quickly realize that this is like some horrific discovery, basically, because immediately I start saying that we were going to have to gut. Because what I didn't mention is that around our windows, since it was old, we had replacement windows. These were initially weighted windows. The weights were left in the frame of the window and there was moisture leaking around these windows. Since this is an old house, we don't have central air. We had like a window unit, air conditioner. And it. They get moist, you know, and it Was dripping a little bit in that area, but we had moisture all around those windows, and there was mold where the moisture had gotten in. Yeah, because if you can imagine, you've got, like, everything that mold needs to survive. It has, like, moisture plus, like, a food source. But we actually did end up moving from that nursery room on into the next room over then, because it's like, okay, so if it's in this room, what's to say it's not in the next room? Because we could clearly see up in the attic that end caps had been popped off all along the entire exterior wall of only one side of this duplex house. On the other side, end caps were on. No problem. Look normal. So half of the house.
- [19:57]
Julian Mokins
So as a new homeowner, that must have been kind of depressing, right?
- [20:01]
Kaya Betzius
Oh, my goodness.
- [20:01]
Julian Mokins
At that point, you were like, oh, God, what have we done?
- [20:04]
Kaya Betzius
Tears. So my husband was amazing, and he redid the whole nursery because we didn't know where it would be and where it wouldn't be. So we gutted the nursery. We had to put all, you know, new book drywall up, but we. We insulated it with, like, real insulation.
- [20:23]
Julian Mokins
Yeah. We had all of the junk and the bodies out of the wind, out of the walls.
- [20:29]
Kaya Betzius
We did. And then we moved over to the guest room, and we. But when we did. When we did the whole entire nursery, it wasn't every wall. It was only the exterior walls. There was a few odd things that were found randomly in the interior walls, but nothing that was like a dead animal. It'd be, like a metal object type of thing. But so really, this was like, just our exterior wall on one side of our house, basically. And we were looking. We were looking at it spanning, like, the whole length of the side of the house. Yes.
- [21:04]
Julian Mokins
And what was your theory at this point? You know, without. So glad you asked, but, like, what were you like, oh, my God, there was a serial killer who used to live in this house or. Cause that's where I would have lived.
- [21:14]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah. Really? That's. So I just. First of all, when we bought the house, we knew that it had gone through many owners. It had been a rental for many years. So it's like the first thing I thought Julianne was like, some renter hated their landlord and decided they were going to screw them big time by making this house unlivable. Right. That's what I thought. And I was mad. I was.
- [21:51]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:54]
Kaya Betzius
Confused and angry.
- [21:57]
Julian Mokins
I can imagine. Did you. Was. Was there any way that you would do. To do. Could you do any sort of research on who owned the house? Like, was. Did you go into, like, investigation mode? And you're like, right, who's done this to my house?
- [22:10]
Kaya Betzius
Immediately to the courthouse, looking at the church.
- [22:12]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, that's right.
- [22:14]
Kaya Betzius
We kind of knew where to look, though, because some of those chickens that were wrapped underneath the burlap sackie ones were newspapers. We had dates. So, like, the oldest one was from 1930. And I believe that the newest page paper. Newspaper that had a date was, like, 1946. So we actually had kind of an idea of like, what time frame we were looking at for this. You know, I mean, this is so much worse than just the pornomags were on top.
- [22:54]
Julian Mokins
Wow, that is such an interesting time capsule from the distant past as well. Like 1930s and 40s, you know, that was a million years ago. And you've got this little snapshot of what was going on in someone's life, but you've got no sense of who they are. Like, the. The mystery is delicious.
- [23:08]
Kaya Betzius
I love that I was angry. I was so angry.
- [23:12]
Julian Mokins
I love that you were angry. I don't own the house.
- [23:16]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah, right. This was very angry. This is difficult to deal with on a number of levels. Opening up from the inside was a bad idea. We didn't have the proper PPE on. We didn't have gloves on at first. We didn't have mass on at first. So we did. We got. Ended up just my husband and I, just from being in that. Just from breathing it in, ended up getting pretty sick. We got fevers. Acutely sick. Like, we, you know, we inhaled something and it made us sick basically for like, I think it was like three or four days. I remember the fever, though, that like, no Tylenol or no fever reducer would. Was helping me at that time. I knew. I was like. I knew I had made a mistake at that point.
- [24:04]
Julian Mokins
Whoa. And my husband was some freaky rooster flu from the 40s.
- [24:10]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah, it is. You know, they've got some really nasty bacteria in their guts, and it was, like, basically mummified in the areas that hadn't gotten any moisture, you know, and so then just aerosolized when we open the walls from the inside. We didn't know it then, but we had made a really big mistake by doing that.
- [24:30]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. This is your kid's nursery as well, you know, that's not what you.
- [24:34]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah, not anymore.
- [24:35]
Julian Mokins
What a mom needs.
- [24:37]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah. We had to move them into our bedroom while it was under construction. I mean, it was just. And you know, on a side note, prior to that, our kid who had been sleeping in there had ear infections all the time and upper respiratory infections. And I was certain that because of this old window unit, I mean, it wasn't like that, but it was, you know, jig. It vibrates. It's kind of got moisture, it's jiggling mold and, and, and feeding mold that's coming into the room that I can't even see. And I'm putting him. And boy, he did, he had a lot of upper respiratory infections and ear infections. And I just, I just knew after we found it that it was, it wasn't going to be a problem anymore because we were moving him out of the room because he wasn't going to be in it. And it did, it cleared up. It really did. But, you know, you just never know. Like, we just thought our kid just had ear problems, like just bad genetics or something. Making him sick, you know, putting him to sleep in his room, you know.
- [25:42]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Little did you know it was this kind of like ancient chicken burial site.
- [25:48]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah. The other kids were safe on the, on the other side of the house and the other affected bedroom was a guest room. So it was just our one son, Barrett, who was being affected by it acutely at that point.
- [26:02]
Julian Mokins
Hey, it's time for a quick ad break here, but please don't go anywhere. Stick around because we'll be right back.
- [26:16]
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- [26:24]
Kaya Betzius
Yep.
- [26:24]
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- [26:45]
Julian Mokins
Did I talk too much? Can't I just let it go?
- [26:49]
Kaya Betzius
Thank you so much.
- [26:51]
BetterHelp Advertiser
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- [27:14]
Julian Mokins
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- [27:17]
Kaya Betzius
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- [27:24]
Julian Mokins
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- [27:33]
Kaya Betzius
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- [27:38]
Julian Mokins
Visit botoxcosmetic.com that's botoxcosmetic.com hey, listeners, meet Russell.
- [27:46]
Kaya Betzius
Hey.
- [27:46]
Julian Mokins
Russell just launched a fitness app, and he needed to get the word out to busy professionals looking to stay fit. So I turned to acast. I used their Smart recommendations feature to easily find shows that talk about health and fitness. Booking sponsorships through their platform was a breeze. And just like that, my app was in their ears during their morning run. Sounds like a smart move, Russell. How's business looking now? Sweat is pouring and so are the installs. Spread the word about your business with podcast ads on Acast. Start today at go.acast.com advertise okay, so you cleaned up his room. I'm guessing you replaced all the walls.
- [28:32]
Kaya Betzius
In this room, everyone? Yeah, we stripped down all four walls to figure out what's going on, assess the situation. My husband had it all back up again within like a week or two. He was so fast. He was just like, I'm gonna fix this baby. Okay, so, well, the nursery's fixed up and we're working on the guest room. And I think it's like a week or two later. Cause we work full time, we're doing this in our free time, and we don't know what we're doing at this point. We've not consulted anybody professionally. We just want to clean this stuff out. And I give my sister a call now. I was already crying to her on day one about this because we were close, right? But you know, it was going to take. I was going to definitely need help to fix it. And, you know, just tearful, just anguished. Why is all over the place, right? But don't worry, she's got an answer.
- [29:37]
Julian Mokins
Why does she have an answer?
- [29:41]
Kaya Betzius
You know, she's like, her profession happened to be that she is an archaeologist. So she's just like, looking at this from a completely different angle. A different state of fascination. I had loaded everything that we were finding. Oh, I remember exactly. It had not even been one week because the garbage hadn't come yet. It was days before the garbage was supposed to come. Like maybe three days. When we get to really talking about this, by this time, we've realized that we need to wear ppe, we need to wear gloves, that it's really nasty. It's gonna make us sick. Cause we had Already been going through it. I remember when my husband redid the nursery. He had a raging fever and it was his birthday.
- [30:29]
Julian Mokins
Oh, yuck.
- [30:31]
Kaya Betzius
You know, my sister's just. She got. She gets on the phone, she's an archeologist. She's got archeologist friends that know stuff. Telling you. She comes back to me, she's like, don't throw that stuff away. And it was like, oh, why? Like. And she said, honestly, I have, you know, I know of someone who studies like, wall caches, like, wall dumping. Like, when people put, like, shoes in their walls. So for whatever reason, good luck wore off. Bad luck, superstitious reasons. And I'm saying, oh, this is garbage. This is garbage. This is someone trying to sabotage me. They didn't know it was going to be me, but it was going to be whoever bought this house someday.
- [31:25]
Julian Mokins
Yeah.
- [31:27]
Kaya Betzius
And she says, I think it's. I think it's an archeological find. I think that it is something that you don't know about, Kaya. And I want to get you in touch with the right people, but you gotta save this stuff. You've gotta. You've gotta document what you're finding, where you're finding it in the walls, you know, while it's fresh in your mind before you forget. Because there's an over. Just so much overwhelming thing, like, just happening, like, one after another, basically, as we're making these discoveries. I mean, there's. Let me tell you, there's like women's pantyhose there. There's like, things that look like maybe from like a sewing kit. There's like needles that have, like, wood. Like. Like bent wood that's like wrapped in C with like, thread tied around it. And just. There was like an aluminum curtain rod that was definitely, like, from like the 40s. It was like, pink. It was like a cheap. I don't. I. In my mind when I saw it, I thought somebody was trying to dig down in there and lost their diggy stick. Just like we had our Swiffer down in there. I was like, see, they were trying to push it down in or something and they lost their picky diggy stick thing.
- [32:39]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [32:44]
Kaya Betzius
And she does. My sister does. She gets milk. She finds someone in who studies the Pennsylvania Dutch practices, which is right smack dab where we are living. And I'm not from the area and my husband's not from the area, so we're not really familiar with these practices. Like, she's talking about something called powwowing. And where I grew up, powwowing would be, like, literally something that people do for, like, American Indian, like, to pay tribute to or to. To keep the traditions alive. They would do like a. What's called a powwow, and it's a gathering. This is not what she was talking about. And there really wasn't anything on Google at that time in 2012 about it. You couldn't find anything really online about it, so you just couldn't look that up. And it seemed like no one. It seemed like, as I'm asking around, like, my work friends who are from the area, like, what do you guys think? You know, do you think that it's a powwow, Like a pow wowing thing? Is it a. They're calling it Dutch magic or white magic, and it was done for healing purposes, and it was not spoken about or. Or it was not. It wasn't considered necessarily quite Christian. So the tradition kind of fizzled out because there weren't written recordings of these types of things. It was like a.
- [34:25]
Julian Mokins
Okay, and what's the Dutch part of that in Pennsylvania? Why Dutch magic?
- [34:32]
Kaya Betzius
Okay, so in Pennsylvania, this is kind of a weird thing to know about Pennsylvania, but we have the Pennsylvania Dutch. And that's because when they settled in the area, there was a Sprachenie Deutsch. And so people who are already living in Pennsylvania said, oh, they're Dutch, but they were German. They were not. Yeah, they stuck in Deutsch. Do you speak German?
- [34:57]
Julian Mokins
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so these were. These were German migrants who first moved to Pennsylvania.
- [35:03]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah, they did. And they brought their customs with them. And, you know, some of them had to do with, I don't want to say spells or just, like, sayings that you would do or things that you would say say. It's like as almost like as a healing spell. It's not really as a healing ritual. I think is more. More what you would call it. The people who ran the historical society in. In our town kind of wanted to know more about it and started to scratch a little deeper and started to come back to me with information about the. The people who are in the house around the time that those newspapers were dated.
- [35:51]
Julian Mokins
Okay, and what did you learn?
- [35:53]
Kaya Betzius
We learned that there was a powwower that lived in our house. He was a renter, not a homeowner. I was right. A homeowner would never do this to their own home. Only a renter would do this. I was 100% sure on that. And this is like, over weeks now, by this point, I'm starting to Learn a little bit about this archeological stuff. But I've only gotten through two of the bedrooms, basically. And my husband's swearing up and down that they are gone. Two bedrooms cleared out.
- [36:39]
Julian Mokins
Two bedrooms worth of pow wowing.
- [36:42]
Kaya Betzius
Pow wow stuff.
- [36:43]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah.
- [36:45]
Kaya Betzius
And lo and behold, I get a hold of someone through Facebook, which my sister helps me. And his name is Patrick Donmoyer, and he collects. He was working at the Historical Society in Kutztown because they do a lot of this documentation. He was working at a museum there, and he was really interested in the contents. Okay. And at this point, I mean, before he's come, I'm wanting to throw it away. I'm told, don't throw it away. So I have my husband, poor husband, drag it down to the garage so the garbage guys don't come and get it till he can come. And he. And he does. And he comes down and he takes a look, takes a look at what I'm talking about in the house. Goes around. He looks all over the house and he seems to concur that this does seem to. Because of the way that things have knots around them. It almost looks like ritualistic. He knows a lot more about these things than my sister. So he was explaining it to us in a way that made sense after so much did not make sense. Like, so many questions. But finally this explanation does seem to go because of the way that everything was. Like, for instance, the chickens weren't like. They weren't like just wrapped up, like balled up and like, shoved down in there. They were like whip. Stitched together, like stitched inside of the pillowcase or the sack, you know, whatever it was. So the ones on top were like more meticulously, more ceremoniously, like, done. The ones on the bottom were like the newspaper ones. They weren't like sealed up inside of another item. They were kind of just like wrapped in newspaper. It seemed like it was morphing. It seemed like whoever was doing this was doing this over years and years and just building up layers. And then he is sharpening his technique and, you know, whatever it is. And because there's definitely a gradient change that seems to be more sophisticated as time goes on. And it was kind of cool. You could date it with the newspapers.
- [38:57]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, that's amazing. And so just so I've got this right in my head. This is like a medieval, probably like pagan Central European tradition that's arrived in America from these migrants, I guess, in the 1800s, 1700s.
- [39:14]
Kaya Betzius
I don't think you're ever supposed to Put this stuff in your walls, like he was doing. But I feel like he was under the pretense of, like, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Because eventually, talking to people who were from the Berks county area, they were like, yeah, you know, I. I mean, I had one nurse tell me that she did find chicken feet, rooster feet tied together same way in her kitchen walls, but it was, like, only, like, a half a dozen, and it was just the chicken legs. And honestly, she said she wasn't even worried about it because she said her barn was haunted from a guy that hung himself when his son died in the Civil War.
- [39:51]
Julian Mokins
So I was like, sorry, never mind the chicken fate.
- [39:56]
Kaya Betzius
Like, my house is fine. Sorry. Didn't mean to complain.
- [40:03]
Julian Mokins
Wow.
- [40:03]
Kaya Betzius
Right? I don't think it was ever supposed to be like this, but this guy took it to the extreme.
- [40:09]
Julian Mokins
Okay. And it was supposed to bring good luck or, like, what was the point?
- [40:13]
Kaya Betzius
For yelling purposes. And as this individual who worked for the Historical Society in our town started interviewing these townspeople, it turns out that this individual, he has relatives that still live in the town. And there are others even still, who remember specifically being treated by this powwower. So the one story that was brought up to me in specifics, the gentleman was in his 90s, and he spoke directly to the interviewer. Who was. Who. His name was Todd. He worked for the community or the. Sorry. He worked for the Historical Society. And he. He interviewed this person, and he said, what do you remember about being treated by this individual, this powwow? He said that he had pertussis, which is whooping cough. So you cough and cough and cough when you have this until you basically run out of breath. And so he wasn't getting better over the course of whatever treatment he was getting from his regular doctor. So his mother was worried and called upon this person to do one of his powwow rituals over him. And he said he was nine years old. Men came down, he blew smoke over him, blew the smoke in his face, said a couple prayers from a book that doesn't ring any bells for me. I can't. It was like the seventh book of Moses or something like that. And he said he coughed like crazy, Said it didn't make his pertussis any better. But, you know, eventually he did get better from, you know, the sickness. But this was his experience. And the only reason I won't say his name, the person who lived in the house who did this, is only because he still has relatives that live in the town. And people got a little Weird when this happened because they weren't really sure what we were going to say because it's such a weird story and we're not really from the town, you know.
- [42:27]
Julian Mokins
Okay. Yeah, right. So you guys, you sort of come in as just. Just Johnny come lately. And they're like, don't you criticize our local black magic man. Like he. He solved a lot of problems for us.
- [42:39]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah. Just like, I don't know. People had so many questions. They didn't think that maybe that this was a credible, you know, story, but it was. We actually called the insurance adjuster because we made an insurance claim because we. Because what happened? About a year later, my husband has promised all of these chickens, they're gone and there's no more chickens in the wall. I'm traumatized, but I believe him. We decide to have our last kid. I get pregnant. We still have moisture problems around some of these windows. And I start to be able to smell them because I could have. I had really great sense of smell when I was pregnant. Still do.
- [43:28]
Julian Mokins
But yeah, estrogen powered turbo smell.
- [43:32]
Kaya Betzius
Right. And it was making me crazy. I mean, it was driving me. And it was just. It was. And I was saying to my husband that they are. You didn't get them all. You need to check the bathroom wall, which is an extension of that exterior wall. So it was like two bedrooms and then this bathroom wall. But the house pitch comes down to such an angle that my large husband could not get in to like shine a flashlight. And he was like telling me, don't worry, like, nobody could fit in there. There's. But I'm like, I can smell it. I know it is.
- [44:04]
Julian Mokins
What did it smell like?
- [44:06]
Kaya Betzius
It just smelled like death. Like, like if you ever have a mouse die in your wall and then like your house kind of stinks for a month until it dries out. So it is smell. It was not a good smell. It was not. And it wouldn't go away.
- [44:24]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah.
- [44:25]
Kaya Betzius
My husband. My husband could not smell it. The kids could not smell. I think maybe my daughter Sarah could smell it. But, you know, I was taking a lot of heat for this because we just gutted the two rooms. We didn't want to got the bathroom either. Right. But this is where we are. So I was extreme, Julian. I told my husband one day, I said to him that if he didn't find them because I could smell them, that I would take a hammer and I would put a hole through every wall until I did find them because I could smell them. And it was just A matter of time. He came home from work that day and he found them and they were in the, you know, in the exterior wall there in the boys bathroom.
- [45:13]
Julian Mokins
Hey, this bit of music means it's time for an ad break. But please don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.
- [45:25]
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- [45:33]
Kaya Betzius
Yep.
- [45:34]
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- [45:55]
Julian Mokins
Did I talk too much? Can't I just let it go?
- [45:58]
Kaya Betzius
Thank you so much.
- [46:04]
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- [46:32]
Julian Mokins
So how did this affect you financially?
- [46:35]
Kaya Betzius
So it, it did affect us financially too because with the mold problem and we had some really great advice through everything at the end of there, we had a friend say to us, why don't you start a GoFundMe? And we, and we made a little GoFundMe and the GoFundMe raised, I was so proud of it. It raised like about $3,400. But that was really great because that helped us put stuff together. So I documented like every single receipt, you know, because this ends up changing the whole way that Brian and I see the world then because we were so unbelievably touched. Not just people that gave money, but people who gave us really sound advice that we needed that we couldn't afford to pay for. Right. And they said like, I remember like some of the best advice we got was like, look like mold needs food and water. And if you take away those things, you don't have problems. So if you seal up your windows and your roof so that you're not having water leaking, even if there are chickens that you don't know are there, that will make you sick as long as you're mitigating the moisture problem. So that really helped me sleep at night because like this was a 5,000 square foot house and That's a lot of walls. And I didn't know, like, I just wanted to tear the whole. I wanted to get the whole house while we were living in it and working two full time jobs. Like, it was just not realistic or doable ever. So like, I mean it was like so we were, people just were so unbelievably kind. We did have some critics most of the time. If we could answer people's questions, they, they calmed down. I think a lot of people just thought we were making it up. It's like, you can't make this shit up. And so like after we get, after we get those donations, Brian and I end up becoming the kind of people who always donate anytime anyone asks because.
- [48:46]
Julian Mokins
Oh, that's nice.
- [48:47]
Kaya Betzius
It was so touching. It was a game changer for us though before, you know, we had a growing family and we didn't have a lot of extra money. We didn't donate a lot.
- [48:56]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I understand this story. I mean, I found you via a local news piece and this story got out and like, how was that, what was that ride?
- [49:06]
Kaya Betzius
Like, that was horrible because I didn't mind it so much. It was a little bit embarrassing. But like my poor kids got bullied at school because we were still living in the house. And for some reason kids, you know, they would be like, kind of like, ew, you had chickens in your walls. I remember my kids being like, but it's not our fault, Seriously, kids are so ridiculous.
- [49:32]
Julian Mokins
I'd be like, wow, you've got black magic in your walls. Let's, I'm impressed, let's hang out.
- [49:37]
Kaya Betzius
But I'm so glad you called it that because it's not black magic. It's what they call white magic. And here was the kicker for me. Once I understood, it took me a little while that these were things that were said or spells that were done to heal people. I'm a nurse, so I'm like, okay, I get healing people. I even get being so scared, you know, that your kid's sick and that you will try whatever, even if it's a non traditional type of medicine. You know, like you would try something that's just maybe not proven, you know, just. I get that. So then finally that's where that was my come to Jesus moment, basically was just realizing that it wasn't black magic. Although some people did get online and tell us that we needed to put them back in the walls. And I was just like, oh no, never gonna happen.
- [50:29]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah, brutal, brutal back and have a session.
- [50:32]
Kaya Betzius
They're like, you've disturbed these things, and you're like, this horribleness is gonna continue to befall you. And it's like, I'm sorry, but I'm just. I had not put that stuff back in. There it is. First of all, we donated to that museum. Now, the last I heard, it's not, like, out on display because it's biohazardous. The guy that we donated to has it in a storage unit because it's hard to get friends that will agree to help inventory the stuff and get the stuff out of these bags. It's like, basically, you could get really sick because what's in a chicken's gut are bacteria, like Campylobacter, that can really make you sick, give you high fevers and make you vomit and give you diarrhea and so forth. Like, GI Bug. So, yeah, it just sits in a storage bin somewhere, but maybe someday it'll be an exhibit. We donated it. That guy wanted it.
- [51:25]
Julian Mokins
Sure. Good luck to him.
- [51:29]
Kaya Betzius
Good luck to him. Yeah. Yeah.
- [51:32]
Julian Mokins
Okay. How long did it take you to clean out all of your house and just get back to get your life back?
- [51:37]
Kaya Betzius
If we would have found it all at the same time, it wouldn't have taken so long. It took a while to, like. We removed all the biohazardous stuff right away, but then to, like, make it look pretty again, like, your room looked nice again. We didn't do. We didn't get all that done, like, right away. So it was years.
- [51:57]
Julian Mokins
Yeah.
- [51:58]
Kaya Betzius
But we now know not to open those things up from the inside. So if we were to find more, we would go and open up the wall from the outside so that it wouldn't. So that all that, you know, nasty, particulate, desiccated, mummified matter doesn't release inside the house. That was, like, one of the biggest mistakes, I think, that we made.
- [52:25]
Julian Mokins
Yeah. Okay.
- [52:26]
Kaya Betzius
Okay. It was traumatic. And my husband, too. Like, even at his work, I remember, like, his friends would not. Like, his coworkers would be like, you're bullshitting us. Like, you're shitting me. And he didn't like it. It was not good attention. It was. And then, like, anybody that we would ever tell the story to, it would be. They would be so unbelievably horrified. And then it's, like, kind of hard to get out of that funk. It's kind of like. It's like a real. It's scary. It's. It's scary with what people? I. We should have probably bought new construction. I will never probably. I'LL probably. If I ever buy another house, it'll be new construction. I'm trump. Us.
- [53:06]
Julian Mokins
Oh, no, I. I think. I mean, but it's. This is just such a singular experience as well, like, this just never happens. I've never. I've never heard of this happening to anyone. So it's not like you're the member of some subculture. You kind of, like, you and your husband are just out there on the fringes with this experience that no one has heard of before.
- [53:24]
Kaya Betzius
When we were able to locate who the person was, we were. We were able to kind of reach out to this gentleman's children who were still alive. They weren't in the town, but we found, I think, a daughter, I believe, and she was in Arizona, and she had no idea what I was talking about. She. She. She. She doesn't remember her dad doing anything like that. And she would have been around, like, age, like 8, 9, 10 type of age. So, I mean, yes, it is. It's unique. All right. Although we continued to get information about, like, the. The. The town kind of, and like, the powwow and, like, has a history, and there was another powwower that lived across the street who was a female, and that house is still across our street. And I always look at that house, like, and that house is a rental. Like, has anybody looked in the walls? Maybe you shouldn't. But.
- [54:27]
Julian Mokins
That can of worms open it.
- [54:29]
Kaya Betzius
From the outside, not from the inside. Oh, my God. Yeah.
- [54:33]
Julian Mokins
Yeah. Do you feel like it's now comfortably behind you far enough that you can smile about it and not get mad?
- [54:43]
Kaya Betzius
Yes.
- [54:44]
Julian Mokins
Yeah.
- [54:44]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah. But you better believe anytime we do any kind of construction and we're opening up an area that we've never looked in, I am, like, jumping over that person to look down because I'm like, you never know. Our house is like an archaeological dig, and you never know what you're gonna find. And I found, like, just all kinds of. Just interesting stuff that they stuffed down. I'm like, I'm still glad it wasn't a baby. No wall. Yeah.
- [55:06]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, that's right. Silver lining, at least. Silver lining.
- [55:10]
Kaya Betzius
We found no babies the entire time.
- [55:14]
Julian Mokins
This is freaky house, but it's baby free, baby.
- [55:18]
Kaya Betzius
Yes, exactly. Exactly. It could have been worse. Yeah, Very good point.
- [55:22]
Julian Mokins
So. So what? Let's just finish with something broad. You know, when you look back, it feels like you've moved on with your life. What did you learn from this experience?
- [55:33]
Kaya Betzius
Well, I definitely learned that they are different and exciting ways to practice medicine that I did not know about. I think that's interesting. And then learned a lot about moisture and mold mitigation. And I'm not even trying to be sarcastic, but if you do have a house that's 1 years old or older, you're going to need to know that anyway. And, and, and it's just an amazing story and I get a lot of questions about it. So from. I mean, it's fun at parties. You get a lot of people, you know, crowded around, but not, not my kids and not my husband. They leave. They want to hear it.
- [56:22]
Julian Mokins
Thanks so much for talking about it one last time.
- [56:25]
Kaya Betzius
Yeah, no problem.
- [56:26]
Julian Mokins
It's fascinating and like the, you know, the way it starts so small, you're just like, oh, we opened a wall and then this happened, and then this happened. And then it turned out to be this fascinating piece of obscure history that relates to the sort of like, founding of modern America.
- [56:40]
Kaya Betzius
Like, it was like going down a rabbit hole.
- [56:44]
Julian Mokins
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Except this is like a wall cavity.
- [56:48]
Kaya Betzius
A hole in the wall.
- [56:50]
Julian Mokins
Yeah. Okay. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
- [56:53]
Kaya Betzius
Thanks for having me.
- [56:57]
Julian Mokins
Hey, thanks for joining me today. If you really enjoyed this, you know, if you were like, wow, that's, that's interesting. But geez, I'd love to know more about this Dutch magic thing. Pow wowing as. As Kaya kept calling it. You should subscribe and you should listen to this week's bonus episode because I'm talking to an expert on German migration to America and how they brought their superstitious beliefs with them. You might remember that actually the Grimm's fairy tales, you know, like Hansel and Gretel and all those ones, they're all like folktales that originated in Germany. So this belief system was all about potions and castles and witches and damsels. And it's actually a world that I think feels very familiar to us in a lot of ways. So how did it survive in frontier America into the 1930s and 40s? Well, subscribe and tune into this week's bonus episode to find out.
- [58:07]
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- [58:36]
Julian Mokins
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Kaya Betzius
Just, dang, these are some tasty sandwiches.
- [59:01]
Julian Mokins
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