You have a reason to care. You know someone. You've lost someone. You've lived it.
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Show up for CAMH and rise up for mental health. Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. When the world is a battlefield, every man is a monster.
And then we take a look at the bizarre story of a seemingly ordinary bridge. A bridge you yourself may drive across from time to time. But this bridge has a dark secret. Is it haunted by the ghost of a woman whose life was cut too short?
Or something far more evil? Today on Dead Rabbit Radio. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dead Rabbit Radio. I'm your host, Ace Carpenter.
I'm having a great day. I hope you guys are having a great day too. I hope you guys had an awesome weekend. Now a quick update here.
This will be the last week of new episodes. This will be pretty much the end of August. I'm going to be on vacation. I physically won't be here.
Won't even have a microphone. Well, it's true. I have a microphone on my phone that the CIA uses to spy on me. But I don't have an actual microphone.
I'm kind of worried about that. Honestly, with the way things have been happening so fast, I might bring a travel mic. But really, it's just for me to suppose, you know, with my family, right? I'm not supposed to be reading conspiracy theory forums every single time they're not speaking up on my phone now and start looking for the crazies website.
But someone who is always on the craziest website, probably the guy who developed them in the first place, walking into Dead Rabbit Radio Command right now, everyone get on your feet and give it up for Nick, busting. Yeah, yeah, and Helena's coming in as well. She's walking in as well. At the same time, I probably should introduce her.
Nick and Helena busting are coming into Dead Rabbit Radio Command. They recently made a long time supporters of the show, really, really cool people. And they also recently made a donation during the Sixth Anniversary Livestream Special. So guys, that's why you're going to be our captain or pilots this episode.
If you guys can't swear to show through the Patreon or through the merch store or YouTube memberships, you guys can't swear to show financially. I totally understand. I really, really do. Just helps read the word about Dead Rabbit Radio.
That helps out so much. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell everyone you know. Dead Rabbit Radio is your favorite paranormal show. That's another way you can help support the show and help the show grow.
Nick and Helena, let's go ahead and get this episode started. I'm going to toss you little captain uniforms. You got your little hat on and your nice little jacket. Everyone climb on board to the bunny battleship.
Nick and Helena are going to set sail out of Dead Rabbit Radio Command and they're taking us all the way out too. Louse. This sounds like for the battleship. Oh.
That's a red alarm where I'll run around on deck. Like everyone getting something on a boat getting a gun or start sweeping up. We're about to meet the enemy and we don't want to have a dirty boat. Sweet, sweet, sweet.
We're headed out to Louse. We're headed out there during the Laotian Civil War. This was going on between 1959 to 1975. We don't know exactly when this started to place, but sometime between those years and I argue they had really hard time keeping records.
It's probably pretty hard to have a calendar hanging up on your wall when bombs are constantly dropping in your territory. This Civil War, everyone had their fingers in the pot. You had the communist, the local communist versus the royal law government, but you also had North Vietnamese troops going in, South Vietnamese troops going in. You had a lot of USCIA operatives as well trying to stem the tide of the march of communism.
They're going to make sure it didn't happen here like it was happening in other parts of the world. And that is where the story starts off. We're going to meet this young woman. We don't have their real names, but we're going to go ahead and call her Margaret.
And she is a young woman growing up in Louse. And while she's there, she meets this young US soldier who happened to be in the area. He was in the official business. He wasn't on vacation.
He's like, Oh, man, I'm sure it's hard. I need two weeks off. Let me go into the middle of Louse. He was sent there by the US government.
We're going to call this US soldier Tommy. When they Margaret's in her village and this young soldier comes walking in and she looks at him and he looks at her. Margaret, what are you looking at? Go pick up those pails of water, take them down to the river.
Oh, sorry. Mom, sorry. She goes and she goes to get some water. And she keeps seeing Tommy around the village.
He's there to kind of talk to the leaders and strategize. And there are other US forces in the area, so he's not alone. But even if there weren't other soldiers, US soldiers there, he wouldn't have been alone for long. He started making fast friends with Margaret.
And they begin talking a lot. We can hang you know, fast friends turning into something more, maybe. And this US soldier and this young woman making a bond that probably never would have happened had this civil war not broken out. She's like, Oh, you're glad that my country's been torn asunder.
Otherwise, I never would have met you Tommy. He begins to learn a little bit of mong, the language. He learns a little bit of mong. So he can talk to her and kind of impress her, right?
He probably wasn't like super conversational, but it can be, you know, more than one language, it's kind of impressive, right? So he's like walking up turn, he's like, beer tonight? Margaret? But imagine that in mong.
I mean, I probably could use Google Translate to find out how you really say that. But and she'd go, Oh, Tommy, you're speaking my language now. Yeah, let's have a beer tonight. He would learn certain words and certain phrases.
Yeah, impress her so that he is, you know, going through, you know, showing that he has respect for her culture and try also, he probably has to learn for his job as well. If he's talking to all these other people, it's hard to train someone. They're like, wait, what? What's he saying?
How's he telling us how to reload this gun? I don't understand. He was now Margaret in this village, you know, her whole family's here. And then we're going to meet Margaret's niece, a young girl named Sally, a much younger girl named Sally.
She's watching all of this. She's watching her aunt fall in love with this GI. But one day Tommy doesn't come to the village. Margaret goes, Oh, you know, maybe he's busy.
He's busy liberating my people. And he doesn't come the next day, or the next day, or the day after that, and the day after that. And Margaret is holding out hope. Margaret believes, oh, he must just be on a mission.
Like something must be going on. He can't come by to see me because they've been seeing each other very regularly up until this point. But Sally, her niece begins to hear the adults talk behind Margaret's back. They haven't said this to her directly.
But the conversation of the rest of Margaret's family is he's not coming back. He's not coming back. Now, maybe he's not coming back because he met another girl. And he's in a different village.
Maybe he's not coming back because his tour of duty ended and he didn't tell Margaret and he boarded a transport plane and left the country. But the general consensus of the people in the village, specifically Margaret's family, the general consensus was he died. Not only is this a very violent conflict, he's a soldier. He's a soldier.
And that was his main reason to be here was to help trains help secure these areas a very valuable target for the other sites to take out. But Margaret still believes that he will come back. The war drags on and the war continues and he gets to the point that there are bombs raining from the sky in this particular area, which I don't know why I think we're the only one thing that bombers in the air. I could be wrong about that.
But this area was getting constantly bombed. So the people in the village, they have to leave. Margaret and Sally and their family and their friends, they had to leave because it was dangerous just to be where they were at. Because these bombs were constantly coming down, they relocated in a network of caves nearby the village.
It's going to protect them from the bombs. They can still go out to the village when they needed to. But for the most part, this is where they were going to sleep. This is where they were going to live for a while.
One night, late in the middle of the night, Margaret and Sally and the rest of their family are sleeping in one of these caves. And Sally wakes up. Her eyes are adjusting a little bit to the small amount of light that's entering this cave in the middle of the night. She can't really see anything.
But she hears something. She hears something that woke her up. She hears a voice, a familiar voice. Sally hears the voice of Tommy.
She's laying there. And she's not excited. She's not like, all right, Tommy's back. Margaret's going to be so excited.
It's going to be awesome. Something inside Sally tells her to just, just don't move. Just lay there. Lay there and listen.
It's Tommy's voice. And he's mumbling something. He's saying something over and over again, just this mumble. Sally could kind of understand what he was saying because she had heard it.
He kept repeating it over and over again. She goes, he was speaking in very broken mong. Just like Tommy did. Because he wasn't great at it.
But he kept saying the same thing over and over again. It was this mumble. There was something just wrong with the voice. Something wrong with Tommy.
Sally's just laying there. And she hears Tommy saying over and over again and broken mong in this mumble. I'm, I'm back for you. I'm back for you.
I'm back for you. I'm back for you. This is really eerie. I mean, come on, man.
Like, there's a lot of ways you can introduce yourself into a room. It's not a great one. It's a terrifying one. I dare you the next time you go to a party to just do that.
Slowly walk in the room. Sally's laying there. She's pretending she's asleep. Her eyes are closed.
She can sense Tommy coming deeper and deeper into the cave. She doesn't know if anyone else can hear it at this point. She doesn't know if anyone else is also pretending to be asleep. Sally feels something pressed down on her shoulder, kind of grab onto her shoulder and then it moved down her arm and grasped Sally's hand.
The whole time it was saying, I'm back for you. I'm back for you. And Sally's just trying not to have a reaction to this thing. One, because whatever it was, just spooking, it's gonna come in the middle of the afternoon.
What if it was scary Tommy? Two, when it touched her shoulder and kind of ran down the length of her arm, she said it was not human. She said it was like a paw, like a large animal paw pressing on her and kind of gliding across her skin. A big enough claw that she could feel it kind of grasp around her hand, but not human.
An animal paw. So she opens her eyes. She opens her eyes for the briefest of moments. She has to see what this is.
And it's so dark she can't really make out what's going on. A dark silhouette juxtaposed against the small amount of light coming through that cave entrance. Sally said it wasn't human. I don't know what it was, but I opened my eyes briefly and shut them again because I knew what I was looking at was not human.
That's when Sally hears Margaret, who's laying nearby start to get up. The sound of someone rising from the ground, rising from where she's sleeping. Sally keeps her eyes closed, but she can hear Margaret get to her feet between Margaret and the Tommy. They said something to each other very briefly.
They spoke to each other and Sally could not make out what they were saying, but with her eyes closed shut, she could hear Margaret and this thing that was pretending to be Tommy or was Tommy now formerly human, but something else now. Sally with her eyes closed tight. She hears Margaret and Tommy shuffle out towards the cave entrance and walk into the night. Margaret was never seen again.
Sally's family, they talked about this. They didn't just, where's Margaret? Maybe a bomb fell on her, specifically on her and love no impact rate or other family talked about this. Other people, other members of the family must have heard this happen because they seem pretty open about it.
You know, no one, it's probably the best thing. It just pretend to be a sleep, but you have the family say that, and Sally goes, this is kind of what was the general consensus among my family. That's that Tommy did come back or something and personating Tommy came back for Margaret and they just disappeared. Who knows what happened in the end?
Did he devour her? Was it some sort of shape-shifting beast that was looking for food? Was it the fact they don't believe that it was actually Tommy himself? They go as either Tommy's wraith, his spirit coming back for her, or he had turned into some sort of monster, or it was something impersonating him.
There was none of them. He's probably fine. Everyone mumbles a little bit in the middle of the night and has a giant animal paw for hand. It happens.
No one there thought it was actually Tommy in full health walking into that cave. So I just found the story online. It was posted by someone going by the name Obie Meme Kenobi, and it's a bit of a chain for this story to get here. So Obie Meme Kenobi said my grandmother was Sally.
My grandmother was the niece of Margaret. That's how he had heard this story growing up. His grandmother was a man of my grandma's and totally awesome. And while I won't say I was never scared like walking around their spooky houses, none of them ever said hey Jason, I'm telling you about the time of monsters are real.
I mean I would have loved those stories but this guy's grandma was like yeah dude let me tell you a little story about a woman you've never met. The time she was abducted by a creature from beyond reality, he heard it from his grandmother who was Sally who moved from Laos to America at some point. So it's an interesting story as far as like what is this? What actually happened here?
Was it a ghost? Was it something else? And what's really interesting because you kind of go like maybe it was like a shapeshifter, imitating voices, shapeshifters that imitate human voices are fairly common in folklore. So we do see a lot of those stories pop up here and there.
What's interesting about this one is a lot of times that is either you're wandering through a place, you're wandering through the woods, maybe it's a place you've been before, maybe it's a place, this is your first time through the woods, and you'll hear your grandpa calling your name from the bushes. What's my grandpa doing out here? And you kind of walk into the bushes looking for grandpa. Or you know we have the mimics that we see a lot in modern stories of people in their house hearing the voices of other members of the house who aren't in the home at that time.
All but episode in the show notes is a recent one we did where a guy started experimenting with the mimic that that might actually be that actually might be a valid reason of what causes that phenomenon. But it's interesting it's like what was this? It definitely targeted Margaret. So if it was just a random shapeshifter, if it was some sort of random creature, why wouldn't it go after the youngest?
Why wouldn't it go after the youngest one or the dumbest one? It specifically went after Margaret and used her attachment, the fact that she loved Tommy to get her out of the cave. So it could have just been a traveling shapeshifting creature, but I don't think so. I think kind of what's implied in the story and probably what you were thinking of as well is that this was at some point Tommy.
I also think it's interesting because you go, so what was it? Was it Tommy? Was it actually Tommy's spirit? Was this some sort of fantasmal force that used to be Tommy but he died in this war and wanted to find his true love once more.
And he'd been wandering like a lonely ghost since he'd been killed to trying to find his way back to the village. And she finally gets to the village everyone's gone. He's like, oh great, now where do I go? Is it a love-lorn ghost who wants to spend the rest of eternity walking with his beloved?
That was a nice uplifting version of it. You also have the idea that this was either Tommy turned into a monster, some sort of cryptic as the paw, or you could also say it was a creature with very specific knowledge of Tommy who was impersonating him specifically to get Margaret for more nefarious reasons, right? Trying to trick her not to fall in love with her but to eat her or whatever. In the narrative that the poster, what we'll call the poster Peter, in the initial narrative there's really no, as far as I can remember, no explanation for it, which would make sense if a grandmother was telling a story.
She'd want to be like, and if you guys ever heard of skin walkers? Well, skin walker range is gonna, you know what I mean? Like we know more about the classifications of spirits and cryptids now than grandma would have. But when he posted this, when the person posted this and told his story, another poster jumped in going by the name po-formal and this is really interesting.
They said that could have been a cryptid, which it could have been right, cryptid that's imitating a human voice but they specifically named something called the crocata. It's a mimic that uses human voices to lure humans away and it has animal paws. So you go, okay, so we have those things, right? That it sounds like a human.
I wonder if you do have these mimics. I guess I don't know if we've ever talked about this before. A cryptid that can mimic a human's voice, they must have some sense of telepathy. They must know what your loved ones sound like.
If it's a mimic in your house, it's of course it's going to know what you sound like, but if you're walking through the woods and you hear your kid's sister in the bushes, but your kid's sister's not even on the strip, how does it know to imitate that? Is there some sort of telepathy going on there? But what if that was interesting, you know, because this happens, right? You put something online, people are going to try to solve it.
A crocata, I started looking into this, it is a cryptid, but it's known to be in India and Ethiopia, which at this is like an ancient cryptid. This would have been like early Greek. The people knew about it back then. It might actually be one of the original cryptids.
It was found in India and it was found in Ethiopia, which and they might have even pronounced it Ethiopia back then as well. It's just spelled with an A where I went. That really meant anything south of Egypt. Ethiopia was anything south of Egypt.
So you did have this pod, you so you did have this beast, this animal that had a paws. It was actually like a dog wolf hybrid or a lion hyena hybrid is how it was described in these early, early, like we're talking like 200 AD records of these cryptids. But what's interesting is it's not in Southeast Asia. I looked and looked and looked.
I said, okay, so it could be this thing. Like that would be crazy. That would be way creepier. If it's a spirit coming back to find his true love and I mean, he's going to turn around.
He's going to kill her, but then they get to be ghost together versus, I mean, imagine you're heartbroken. You think you're never going to see the man you never thought you're going to fall in love. He just happened to walk to your village and he fell in love with them. Then you think you're never going to see him again.
And then you hear his voice and it turns out to be a monster. He's eating your guts. You're going to feel real disappointed and honestly a little embarrassed. But this thing's only in Ethiopia.
It's nowhere in Southeast Asia. You have the scripted and we got to wrap this up. We're going too long. People are going to wear my notes.
I was like, oh, look at this stuff from Pliny the Elder. The earliest reference was 77 AD. 280 was a little too high. Can you have a cryptid in a region that the cryptid is not natural to?
It's kind of where I'm getting that. I mean, first off, it's a really cool story and it makes you wonder as a ghost looking for true love. Is it a monster using the heart to devour its prey? You don't know.
And it's really either a sweet story or or disgusting story and a woman who's screaming for her life as a monster is eating her eyeballs. We don't know which one it is. But then if you think it's a cryptid, can cryptids change areas that rapidly? You can take a frog to Australia.
I mean, that's most too right? It's illegal. You know, the Simpsons in a little episode on that. We're bringing an invasive species in.
Obviously, animals can cross boundaries. But can they? Can a owl, like a nice little winter owl in the middle of Siberia, you could pick it up and take it to Arizona. It's going to die probably, right?
You know, it takes us about made out of snow. It doesn't have a little frosting to zoom in at us. Like, don't take it off or I'll melt. You could conceivably take a cryptid from India and transport it to another country and drop it off.
I don't think it would go on its own because why would it if the hunting is good and then why leave the area? It's just interesting to think like how mobile is a cryptid is kind of where I'm getting at. I remember I've always been a big fan of the Bigfoot interdimensional hypothesis and that's the idea of that Bigfoot. He's the reason why we can never find him is because these creatures are able to shift in and out of reality.
There's a lot of bigfoot sightings around UFO sightings. So the idea has been are they somehow related to the UFO phenomenon? Is it possible that they're able to access portals? Things like that.
And then I went to a event hosted by George Norrie from coast to coast. It was so awesome and to be able to go to that. I loved it. And one of the speakers was Matt Moneymaker who I wasn't familiar with.
He's a Bigfoot expert. He did a big show on History Channel 4 a while or TLC, whatever. And someone asked the question to him. They go, what do you think of the interdimensional hypothesis?
And he said, well, he goes, I'm not going to discount it. Really? He goes, there's a lot of stuff we don't know. However, I thought this is interesting.
I never heard this before. He goes, if you look at the Bigfoot sightings, they match migration patterns. And he says, what that means is you see a lot of them in East Asia, like Mongolia has the wild man and you have them in Siberia and you start to kind of have them drop a little bit down. And so that part of Asia, like the eastern part, and then you have them in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and kind of down into the coast along a bit in Arizona and then down through the Everglades.
You know, you have like the swamp apes down there. He said it actually matches migration patterns of other animals crossing an ice bridge. He goes, you don't find Bigfoot encounters in South America. You don't find them in Africa.
And you could go with Jason this place is so human. If you had a bunch of air, you might not want to live there. You don't even find them in Britain, France, or Germany. You know, I was like, that's really interesting.
Now, you may have old stories of wild men, which is a different thing. But these hulking beasts, he goes, you don't find them everywhere. You only find them in certain places, you know, you have the Yahweh in Australia, but then you have the bombable snowman. All of that stuff is in that eastern Asia kind of Eurasia area.
I don't know how they got to Australia, but you'd have to talk to him. But it's true. That's really interesting that they do match a migration pattern. So can cryptids move from one area to the other, even the Chupacabra, which I actually don't believe exists.
That's what one cryptid I'm like 100% is real. Well, let's put on our conspiracy caps and say that it is even that matches migration. There's not Chupacabra sightings in New York, or in Canada, or Alaska, or Great Britain, or China. It's in top South America, Central America, Mexico, and along the American border.
That's it, right? So it's weird. So it's kind of sounds like a movie question. It's a creepy story.
And then they're like, Jason, that's a creepy story. I don't know why you're so stuck on migration patterns, but this is stuff I love. I love the creepy stories and I love thinking about them, seeing how they play out. So that is interesting.
The crocata, a lot of people think it was actually, because it is talk a lot in ancient history. A lot of people go, it's the hyena is what they were actually seeing because of some of the, because they eat the dead, right? They're tricking people with the voices, human voices. They said, well, hyena laughs, but I don't know.
I mean, listen, you can fit in a square peg into a round hole anytime you want. You just kind of got to force it in. There's a difference between my great grandma hiding in the bushes going, Jason, I missed you so much. Would you like some Mickey Mouse pancakes?
Are you like, yeah, sure. Yeah, grandma, I know you've been dead for 20 years, but that bush made a compelling argument versus somebody laughing in the bottom. I'd be like, oh, my grandma doesn't laugh like that. You know, it's a creepy story, can?
Cryptid, Jason, we get it. That's not the creepy part. It's not the creepy part. It's interesting, I guess.
The creepy part is a young woman, when missing, it was never seen again. Yeah, that part's cool too. Nick and Helena, let's go ahead and toss you the keys to the world. Famous governor, we are leaving behind the louse.
Why are you guys fly us all the way out to Kansas? It's on his movie last night called Hashtag Screamers. Jason, was it just nothing but jump scares? Was it just two hours of YouTube videos?
No, you know what's funny is that it started off really good. It started off with this new YouTube competitor, got a screamer video, so it's just like a woman in a graveyard and it's like, read the left tombstone. Look real close. They're all leaning into the look at the tombstone and this guy jumps up and goes, and they're like, dude, this is gold.
This is gold. We're going to put this screamer on our YouTube site and people are, everyone's going to become huge fans and it works, right? Everyone's like, oh, dude, I've never seen a screamer before the movie was made into 2022, by the way. It's not from 1997.
And from there on, they get another screamer video and they're like, dude, this is awesome. Like, we need to have exclusivity to the screamer video. Again, this would have been a much more interesting setup in 2004, but really liked the first act of it. And then it's fan footage, which I'm a huge fan of fan footage.
And then it goes to, they find out who made the screamer videos and the girl in the screamer videos had been missing for like three or four years. Like when they posted it on their website, it did go viral, but people are like, hey, isn't that like Tara Monk? Isn't that Tara Monk or whatever it was? She's been missing for two years.
So anyways, they say, well, let's find out who made these videos. Let's go, because they track it down. They do all this metadata and stuff like that. I was like, oh, dude, I'm on board.
The food was pretty dope. Like, I like the acting and the directing was really competent, good camera work, all this stuff. And then I'm watching this movie. I don't know why I didn't assume.
It didn't get great reviews. I don't think that it deserved as bad reviews as it got, but I'm watching this movie and they get to Rochester, New York, which is where the videos were being made. And it turns out they're like that name on that tombstone in the first screamer video. That's the name of like a guy who was suspected to be Jack the Ripper.
And I was like, what? Well, I know this is very timely, very timely horror movie here. The screamer or the guy who would jump up and scream at you had like this makeup on and had like some weird eyes and stuff like that. So it's like, I didn't look like Jack the Ripper wasn't described as being a hardcore and it's being the clown-faced villain who screams at you.
So they go to Rochester, New York, and the last problem I didn't see this coming, I had to keep turning it down. The last 15, maybe 20 minutes of the movie was screamers. So I was like, oh, no, that's why the movie got such bad reviews. I don't think it deserves as bad as reviews as it got.
I thought it was really well made. I thought the story was great. Mystery, right? I don't know what's going on.
The ripper shows up. You don't expect that in most order movies when I was in there watching it. And they go to this house and they're like, hello, is anyone here? Here, you take this camera.
I'll use my cell phone as a camera. And so now we have two people walking around. Hello, is anyone here? And then all of a sudden a dude would jump up out of nowhere and scream at the top of his lungs.
And then that guy dies. They just show the camera folding around. And then the dude's like, huh, what? The other guy in the house was like, Joe, was that you?
Joe, was that you screaming? Like you were a hundred-year-old serial killer, what was that? And then that guy's walking through the house and then all of a sudden, huge loud piercing scream. I'm watching it like two in the morning.
I couldn't sleep, I blame Minecraft. Why don't my movies like I normally do? And then there was a bunch of other people. There's a bunch of other people.
The B team was like back at this house. They're like, hey, we can't get ahold of Joe and Luke. Let's go find out. Let's go to the house where all the screams are coming from.
So then you get that. And then each person walks into the house and then the guy jumps up and screams as loud as they can, which is much louder when you're hearing it too in the morning. And he would be surprised how much sound can carry. And then in this one, again, they wrapped it up pretty cool.
I thought it was interesting. One of the girls of this research team, she got screamed. And then they show a new viral video and she's in it. So it's like he's trapping souls and stuff like that.
I was like, okay, you know, that was a decent year. You kind of came out in the end. You kind of worked it. I was like, I'm pulling out the earplugs, I'm pulling out cotton.
I was like, Oh, fascinating movie. Didn't that wasn't subtitled either. That was it's like, if you're going to watch it, you got to have the volume up so you can hear the screams. Anyways, there's too many things.
I just wanted to talk about the movie hashtag screamers. We're headed all the way out to Kansas. Specifically, we're going to a place called Emporia, Kansas. Nick and Helena are unloading the Jason Drawpey from the Carpenter Coctor because we're going to take a bit of a road trip.
We're headed to the Rocky Ford Bridge in Danporia, Kansas. That's the official name. But all the locals call it bird bridge. And what it is, it's just an old steel bridge that goes over this river.
Probably not something you would want to drive over. It is part of the road. You can't go home. I'm not taking that bridge or a Ford wheeling through the river.
I guess you could if your truck was big enough, but, you know, I don't like driving across bridges anyways. And if it's rusty, I mean, like they can at least make it look nice. I don't know, paint it. It's all rusty bridge.
But people still use it, I believe. I looked it up on Google Maps. All this stuff will be in the show notes. You can take a look at the photos.
The reason why they call it bird bridge is because back on July 17th, 1983, there was a car found in the river and floating in front of the car was the body of a woman. I think there were like some joggers or guys on bikes were in the area and they're like, well, dolly, Tim, I ain't never seen nothing like that. A car? It's one thing.
There's a human body floating in front of it. The guy's like, what? I didn't look over that way yet. A woman's floating on the river so they call the authorities, authorities come out and they're like, wow, this sucks.
But we can kind of figure what happened. It looks like she was driving her car and instead of driving across the bridge, she drove over this embankment. It's not high. It's maybe like a 13 foot embankment, at least from the photos I saw.
And then crashed in the river and then her body flew out of the car. Here's the thing. Some of the cops are like, oh, this is an accident. Her body must have flown out of the car and landed and to float in front of the car is an accident.
It was a horrific accident. The coroner goes, I don't know, actually. This person died. I mean, I've seen a lot of car accidents in my life.
I've seen a lot of drownings in my life. The coroner says, none of them have ever involved what appears to be getting hit in the back of the head with a lead pipe. And cops are like, what? And the coroner is like, yeah, I think she actually sustained some cranial damage before the car accident.
He goes, I don't really know what would have done it in the accident itself. But you know, you hit your head hard enough. You're coming off in embankment, maybe, right? You slam your head on the steering wheel, maybe.
And the thing was, is that Sandra Bird's husband was Tom Bird. He was a Lutheran minister in town. This was a very well loved family. So the cops are trying to figure out exactly what it was, but they also don't want to start going around and accusing people of murder.
They don't have any proof whatsoever. Well, well, eventually it does come out that not only did Tom Bird murder his wife, and they've never been able to get clarification over whether she was clubbed over the back of the head and throwing off of the bridge into the water. That was one of the hypotheses that Tom had the car pushed off the embankment and threw his body through his wife's body in the water. Like, separately, they go, did you drug her?
Did you, was she unconscious by the time you pushed the car into the river? Like, how did this happen? He's never said, how? He goes, I don't know, because I'm innocent.
I didn't do any of that stuff. Well, Tom Bird, not only did he kill his wife, he was in a love square, a love, he was in a fair relationship, right? He was in love with a church member of his, he's the minister. He falls in love with this woman, and they want to get rid of each other's significant others.
It was this woman named Lorna Anderson. So Tom goes, Hey, Lorna, I got a plan. How about I kill my wife, and then I kill your husband, and then we compete together and no one will ever know, no one will ever find it totally suspicious. He somehow killed his wife.
We don't exactly know how. And then a couple months later, he jumped out of the bushes. I guess this was pretty ranged Lorna with the kids in the car and her husband, they were driving on the road and she's like, Oh, no, the car broke down. Honey, can you get out and see what's wrong with the car?
And when he got out, Tom jumped out of the bushes, wearing a ski mask and shot Martin in front of his own kids, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And then took off into the night. So the cops are like, oh, the cops are like two murders in one church. Yeah, let's look a little bit deeper into this.
They were eventually arrested, found guilty. What's interesting is that when did I say the story started? It took place in 1983. They're both out now.
They are both out. Lorna and Tom have served their sentences. They were like 20, 25 year sentences and now they're free. They're not even on parole or probation.
He still goes, I didn't kill anybody. You know, he killed his wife and he jumped out of this and killed this other guy. Yeah, they're both out. They're both free.
They're both walking around. Maybe you know these guys, maybe you are one of these guys. But all of that being said, I think it's very interesting from a true crime standpoint, Bird Bridge is considered haunted. The question is by what?
They say that when you go to this area, you can hear the sound of a woman screaming underneath the bridge. People say they've been out there at night and you can look and you can see the ghostly apparition of something or someone walking underneath the bridge along the shoreline. Kind of the idea is that that is Sandra Bird, that her ghost is still lingering in the area. And you do get a lot of people checking out these places.
Obviously a lot of locals will go out there. It's kind of, I won't say it's in the middle of nowhere, but it's creepy and it's something that you can tell other people about, hey, guys, let's go down down to the ghost bridge, Bird Bridge or whatever, we'll go hang out. You know, it's just kind of like a fun spot for teens to drive around and spook each other out. So a lot of people have been out there.
It's kind of a local thing. There was one account by a woman named Ashley Gillitt. She said that when she was there, her car kept locking and unlocking by itself. She wasn't doing anything.
It was locking and unlocking by itself. She said it happened in such a weird pattern that she believed it was Sandy trying to communicate with her via Morse code, which while the walking and unlocking might have happened, that's kind of weird. And then I thought, well, I wonder how much you ghost know. And if you don't know Morse code as a human, when you die, do you get extra knowledge?
You're like, oh, awesome. I can speak Bulgarian now. And then you look, I'm in the middle of the Death Valley. You've died.
You're from Texas taking a walk and you just died in the heat. You're like, well, I don't know how Bulgarian's going to hold me out. Maybe Sandra knew Morse code. Maybe it wasn't Morse code.
Maybe it was just click, click, click, click. Maybe she needs to take her car to the mechanic. I don't know. But it's interesting because you have a lot of reports of this stuff.
Now, there is a group we've covered at least twice on this show. They are a Kansas paranormal group called Anam Paranormal. Anam Paranormal. We covered them.
I'll put those episodes in the show notes. They do on the ground research. They go out to these places and they take photos and they take readings and all of that. And this is where the story's really going to take a little choice and then we'll wrap it up.
Anam Paranormal, they've done over 40 on the ground investigations going out to different locations. They went to this area. They went out to Bird Bridge. And so they go out there.
This is general how ghost hunting teams work or paranormal research teams work. You'll have a lot of tech and then you'll try to bring a psychic or someone who's sensitive to the things in the area. So you can kind of try to get both sides of it. The technical side and the metaphysical side.
When I was reading this report by Anam Paranormal, they go, you know what? When you go out there, there is a feeling of dread in the area. And let's say if a ghost hunter is worried about it. It might be a little bit higher up on the level rather than just a spooky skeleton hiding in the graveyard.
We said they're feeling a dread. They go, we didn't hear any screaming at all. We didn't hear any of that. All of our temperature readers, all of our gauges, as far as trying to detect cold spots and none of those detected any anomalies whatsoever.
They said that they had an EVP. They took a recorder and left it in the car. And the I couldn't hear it. I mean, I could not understand it.
Maybe I'll put it in the show notes. I listened to it. I couldn't understand it. I didn't hear anything to be honest.
Not like I didn't understand what the voice was saying. I didn't hear a voice at all. It just sounded like nothing but nothing. Like if you just left a tape recorder in the car, they said it sounded like it said, add more to pin dragon.
One of the investigators that they work with is a woman named the Dre up in dragon and add more to means to death. So anyways, you kind of a bust, right? As far as that goes, it's a feeling of dread, but you'll get these at a lot of places. You go to a lot of sites that are haunted.
You're already kind of amped up to feel something negative. So you're probably going to feel negative. If you are walking into a Krispy Kreme donuts and you feel a feeling of dread, that's a little more alarming. Probably means you're having an architect feeling dread.
Your chest is being crushed. Anyways, one of the psychic members of the team, when they were out there, they said somewhere near the area, they didn't really say that they even since the ghost of Sandra Verde, the psychic if I remember correctly didn't say that they sensed her at all. But the psychic in this group in Ampere Normal said nearby, very nearby to the bridge, just a little bit down the road, there's the ghost of a Native American man. And a bit further down from that, but not far, still all in this general area, is a negative spirit.
That's how it was described. And this entity lives in this area for one reason. It is there to feed off of all of the negative energy, all of the fear of the people who come to visit Sandra Verde. There is no ghost of Sandra Verde in the area is what we're really being told.
But there is a creature there. There is some sort of spirit, some sort of malignant force that feeds off the negative energy from the people coming to see Sandra Verde's ghost. So with this negative energy in the area, this negative entity demon, who knows what this is, we can look at it a couple different ways. We'll wrap it up.
We'll wrap it up real quick here. One, it's possible that because of the murder of Sandra Verde and the local folklore saying that her ghost was sighted there and you would hear these screams, it was drawing people out to this area to see if it's haunted. And there was an entity that may have been in the area initially, but has begun to gain power over the decades because of the belief in the ghost of Sandra Verde. Even though her ghost isn't there, something was always there and it's beginning stronger and stronger because it's feeding off his negative energy.
That's theory one. The other one I think this is interesting is to think that there was no entity there at first. Sandra Verde was murdered, which is horrific. People are coming out to try to experience her ghost and that combination of stuff attracted an entity, a demon, to that area because of that.
So there wasn't anything there previously, but something was drawn to that area because it knew it could feed off of this constant parade, this constant procession of curiosity seekers and ghost hunters, something decided to stop there and stay and feed off of the energy. Now again, even like having your door locked, locking kind of weird or just because, and on paranormal didn't experience the scream, other groups may have. And I think at this point we're saying it's not the screaming of Sandra Verde, it's this demon heightening the effect it's trying to make the area as scary as possible to feast off of. The last theory I have and it's probably the most troubling one and something we actually talked about early on in this show is that the darkness was always there and it was always powerful.
Long before Sandra Verde died was murdered there. People may have not have liked driving through this area. They felt it was kind of creepy even before the death. What if people coming through the area did have a sense of dread when they were out there that long before the woman was ever murdered, the area was steeped in dark energy.
And that kind of makes sense because we also have the trapped soul of his Native American spirit, which is separate from the evil presence that they located. If that's the case of the area was already soaked in this demonic energy, that may have been why Tom chose that location subconsciously, but out of all the ways he could possibly kill his wife when he was traveling through this area, he may have gotten that same sense of dread, the same sense of unease of creepiness, but unlike the members of the enamperinormal group who go, wow, this is not the place we want to hang out, it attracted Tom. It called to him. And out of all the ways and all the places he could have murdered his wife, this was the one that he chose because this area spoke to that darkness in his soul.
Because I've often wondered and we talked about this again early on in the podcast, there were beautiful places that attract beautiful souls, whether that be a church or a grove or a riverbank. There are these places that throughout time different religions have placed their temples at because the area is steeped in a positive energy, a beautiful feeling. But if that's the case, there should be the inverse, there should be places that are steeped in negative energy that attract negative people because they're going to feel more at home there than they will in a cathedral that's built on land that the druids once used to worship their pagan gods. Now the Catholic Church has built a cathedral there because it's still harvesting off of that same positive feeling you got in the area.
The inverse should be true, there should be negative places out there that attract negative people. And that may be the case here, this darkness, this demon may have existed long before even the first Native American crossed the Ice Land Bridge, crossed over from Alaska. It could be that old, the area could be seeped in that much evil. And most people just pass them through going, I don't really like taking that route.
I don't know, I don't like going that way. Let's go a long way. Some people though, they just drive through and they're like, yeah, it's a little creepy or maybe they don't even register that it's creepy because their minds are too busy. They've got worries about the day rather than the physical energies that are flowing through the multiverse.
But to evil people like Tom who murdered two people, this place may have called to him. The darkness may have made him feel at home. And it may have even corrupted him enough that the first murder he ever committed, the murder of his own wife, he didn't choose this bridge because he thought it would look like an accident. He didn't choose this area because it was remote enough that he figured there'd be no witnesses, no.
He chose this area because the darkness inside him matched the darkness of the land, of the river, of the bridge. It called out to him. And he answered that call in the most brutal way possible.