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When a man has a bizarre fantasy of walking around Burger King restaurants and lecturing the employees, is it just a horrible mental delusion? Or does it point a finger at a far deeper, far darker conspiracy? And then we travel to Denver, Colorado, to take a look at a bloody crime scene that turned into a notorious haunt. Is it possible that the story of Joseph Pekora, an organ grinder who kidnapped children off the streets, even in his death, continued to torture the souls of the children?
Today on Dead Rabbit Radio. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dead Rabbit Radio. I'm your host, Jason Carpenter. I'm having a great day.
I hope you guys are having a great day too. I hope you guys had lots of fun this weekend. I didn't. I paid money.
I paid money to go see that movie, Barbarian. Ugh, I might do a review of that. Time to talk about it now. First 45 minutes, awesome.
And then the monster showed up. Sorry, spoiler alert if you didn't know there was a monster in it, but peewee, man. Anyways, someone who never stinks the place up walking into Dead Rabbit Command right now, let's give a round of applause. I know this guy's like a worker on that movie.
Give it up for our latest Patreon supporter, Jake. Woohoo, yeah! Come on in, Jake. Walk on into Dead Rabbit Command.
Shut that door before the barbarian monster gets you. Jake, you're going to be our captain, our pilot this episode. If you guys can't support the Patreon, I totally understand if you work on the movie barbarian and hate me now. I totally get it.
Just help spread the word about the podcast. That really, really, really helps out a lot. Now, Jake, let's go ahead and toss you the oars to the Dead Rabbit rowboat. We're going to leave behind Dead Rabbit Command, row us all the way out to Nevada.
Splishity splash, splishity splash. Guys, I have to get rid of this rowboat. I can't think of any good sound effects. It's only been 950 episodes at this point.
Jake is rowing us out to Nevada. Specifically, we're going to Tonopah, Nevada. In Tonopah, Nevada, we're about to meet this guy. His name is Bunhime.
His name is Bunhime. That's the name he goes by online, right? You figure, okay, that's a made-up name. Obviously, no one was named Bunhime.
Apparently, his full name is Bun. His first name is Bun, apparently. Bun Hines Butler, and he lives in Tonopah, Nevada. Now, I spent an inordinate amount of time.
I don't have a lot of time to research stuff. I spent a lot of time looking into this guy because I was like, this guy has to be a troll, right? This has to be fake. Just from the way he talks to people online and the stuff he talks about.
I'm not for sure. At first, I was like, this guy's a troll. This can't be real. This guy can't be real.
He's the moderator of a subreddit about voles, which is like this tiny varmint. It's like this tiny mouse. So that's all he just posts pictures of little mice poking their heads out of dirt, and they're like, vole, vote for the vole. Here you go.
And somehow, despite the fact of him having a pretty narrow level of interest, right? He has a paranormal podcast that obviously makes you some sort of mental case that makes you an outcast just in and of itself. Also loves voles so much that he has a whole subreddit dedicated to them. Somehow he takes the time to post on every other single subreddit possible.
He is all over the Monster Energy drink subreddit. He's constantly drinking Monster Energy drinks, which is fine, whatever. It's not fine for your heart. They're super unhealthy.
But he believes that the right energy drink, he's some sort of video game character. If you drink the right energy drink at the right time, it will give you abilities. Mostly just a bunch of energy. That's the only ability.
He tells a story. He's obsessed with drinking stuff. He's obsessed with drinking stuff. And that's where we're going to end up with this conspiracy theory.
But he tells a story. He goes, one day he was walking around the mall and he, quote, went to take a diarrhea. I've never heard it referred to as that before. I've never heard it as a singular.
I've never heard someone go, time to time to take a diarrhea. I see people who talk about that. People don't talk about that at all. That's how whenever I call in sick to work, that's the excuse I always use.
Like when I'm faking it, right? I say, oh, I couldn't come to work. I had diarrhea because no one ever lies about that, right? Except me, except me.
I would always be like, hey, I can't come to work today, dude. Diarrhea. And they're like, okay, Jason, you don't have to tell us that. And they never questioned why I was calling in.
So anyways, but I never referred to it as I was taking a diarrhea. That just sounds weird. But anyways, so he was taking a diarrhea. He's in the bathroom of this mall and a guy tries opening the stall door.
And he's like, oh no, dude, I'm not done. He's like holding the stall door shut and the guy is trying to forcefully open it. And you have to wonder who this mighty man is, right? Because here we have Bun pulling on one angle.
You have this guy pulling. This is in Tonopah, Nevada. Just know if you go to the bathroom out there, someone will try to break into your stall. But see, luckily, Bun has a ace up his sleeve.
He tells us that 15 minutes before he went into the bathroom, he drank a pipeline punch, which is a random Monster Energy drink. So he says that gave him the energy to not only hold the door. It probably also gave him the diarrhea. If we want to be honest, it's probably what made him sick to himself.
But not only is he holding the door because he drank this pipeline punch 15 minutes earlier. He said, I don't know how physically this works. He says that the struggle ended with the man on the other side of the door flying through the bathroom. Like, I guess like maybe Bun let the guy open the door and he like flew around.
This guy's clearly insane. He says that this contest of might between man, muscle and pipeline punch ended with the other guy flying backwards through the bathroom, smashing into a bathroom sink and flooding into the bathroom with water to the point that Bun is complaining that his socks are wet. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and say probably none of that ever happened. I'm assuming he ate up, drank a pipeline punch, gave him diarrhea.
He went to the bathroom, someone knocked on the stall. They heard what was going on on the other side of the stall. They walked away. That's probably what happened.
But according to him, maybe he made up this whole story because he walked home and people were like, dude, why are your socks wet? And he's like, I got a story to tell you. The person's walking away because they know it's going to be completely insane. He's obsessed with drinking stuff.
He tells a story. He has a long haired cat that sits on his chest. And he was brushing it one day and the cat's like, meow, meow. And the only thing he had to put the long hair in that was coming off the cat was this cup of water next to him.
So he's brushing the cat off, taking the clump of hair, putting the water. And you're like, Jason, this story is not going to end where I think it's going to end. He's continuing to brush the hair and put more hair in this cup of water, brush more hair off, put more hair in the cup of water. And then the cat walks away.
He does not say if he did this on purpose or if it was an accident. I would like to think it was an accident. I think we all would. But apparently after brushing off the cat and the cat leaving, he forgot that he was putting the hair in the water cup and he drank the water.
He drank a bunch of cat hair water. And he goes, I could feel it in my throat. I could feel the hair in my throat. It was tickling.
So, Jason, you're clearly just talking about a troll. You're clearly talking about a guy who's making stuff up. You just want to talk. You really just want to talk about a guy who had diarrhea fighting over a bathroom stall door.
Hold on. There's more. This part is true. Now, if you're a fan of fast food restaurants, take note.
Like I said, he's obsessed with drinking. He's obsessed with sodas and stuff like that. One day, Bun went to a local Burger King. So remember, this guy's in Tonopah, Nevada, so the Burger King out there.
He walked up to the counter one day and he goes, Hey, kids, you think you're Burger It's all the afterwards. But that's true. Those machines are full of filth and disease. If they're not cleaned every single night, they are full of mold.
In fact, they have done studies on this. When they did this big study, they tested 90 different machines. I think it was on the East Coast where they did this. Virginia, yeah.
They tested 90 different soda machines, and 45 of them had mold, like had like E. Coli, had traces of fecal matter in the drinks, and the ice cubes themselves, like in that little ice maker, had more fecal matter in them than the toilet bowls in the same restaurant. And you could go, Jason, that's cool. I don't eat at Taco Bell or eat at El Pollo Loco or Cabbage Head or whatever weird fast food restaurants are on the East Coast.
They're also at Starbucks. Starbucks also has this problem. They have poop ice as well. So a true conspiracy theory, that's barely a conspiracy theory.
You just want to talk about diarrhea and drinking cat water. You're trying to turn it into some social message of cleanliness. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's true.
Maybe you just read about this lunatic online and wanted to talk about it for 20 minutes. Is that so wrong? I mean, it's true. All of this stuff with the contaminants, like doesn't that make you want to like change the world or do something good for the environment?
I don't know. I was trying to make it a little topical. But yeah, there's that. There's the gross ice thing.
But then also the fact that there's a man in Tonopah, Nevada, who drinks cat water. I just can't get over that. I don't even like having a sink. I don't mind drinking sodas that come out of a moldy faucet.
But if you put a single hair in my drink, I won't drink that. Even if it's my hair. I'll pull my own hair out of food. I think that's normal.
Like if my hair falls on my own food, I will get it out of there. I don't think I'm breaking any boundaries by doing that. But I definitely won't drink hair. That's disgusting.
If you gave me a soda and there was mold on the top of it, I'm not going to drink that. But if it's a moldy nozzle and I've already drank it, it tastes fine. Whatever. But yes, you caught me.
I just wanted to talk about this guy, this crazy guy. And he may pop back up. He may pop back up. I found some more crazy posts.
But we'll see. Maybe people are funding before I know too. Please don't tell us any more about the guy. I have some more stuff we'll see in the future.
But for now, Jake, top off this 32-ounce Coca-Cola. I've got to drink it. I've got to drink it. We're leaving behind Tonopah, Nevada.
Take us all the way out to Denver, Colorado. Jake, keep flying this carpenter copter and land us here in Denver, Colorado. And as we're walking around, everything becomes sepia-toned because we are now in the year 1875. So there's a couple of horses walking down the road.
We see like a guy standing there, like, saying, Hey, for sale. Buy all this hay. And no one's buying it. The horses are just eating it for free.
And he's too scared to fight the horses off. It's October 21st, 1875. We're on Lawrence Street. Specifically, we're at the address 2334 Lawrence Street.
And we see a house. Looks like every other house on this busy, horse-filled street. Inside this house, there is a man named Giuseppe Pecora. And he went by the name Joseph in town.
Everyone knows him as Joseph Pecora. He's a 48-year-old man who's made his business as an organ grinder. Pulling that crank, cranking it around. Music's playing.
Now, usually when you think of an organ grinder, we imagine, like, a little monkey dancing next to him with a little hat, holding it out, and a kindly old man cranking this thing, right? I don't know about the monkey thing, but apparently, people hated organ grinders back in the past. They were disgusting. I know there's an organ grinder drinking cat water.
He's like, why? Why am I doubly insulted? Organ grinders were considered hobos. They were considered bums who were performing the minimum amount of talent, the minimum amount of entertainment, so they weren't considered panhandlers.
Because it was against the law to beg for money in a lot of places back then. But you would say, I'm not begging for money. I'm getting paid because I'm an entertainer. I'm cranking this crank.
It's playing this music. You have this cylinder inside this organ. They had a bunch of songs. I didn't know that.
I thought they just had the circus song. You'd have these organ grinders. And what they would do, you're like, okay, fine. You stay on the street corner.
You play your stupid machine, and people walk by. If they want to toss you a penny, they can. But what the organ grinders would do is these things were mobile for a reason. They would follow you down the street.
They would follow you down the street, cranking that thing as fast as they could, make it super irritating until you gave them money. They're actually harassing people. Now, there were probably some purists. There was probably some people who really loved the art form of spinning brass keys against the wax cylinder or whatever it was made out of.
But for the most part, they were considered vagrants who were committing the tiniest bit of entertainment so they weren't breaking the law. But it was a racket, right? It was a racket. And like any racket, you're going to make more money if you can expand your empire.
So Joseph isn't just keen on cranking his own crank, right? He wants to start seeing. He imagines these little organs all over Denver. He's like basically the Heisenberg of wax cylinders.
I don't know if there's anybody else who's going to look that up. But anyways, he's sitting there and he's like, I'm building an empire. So he gets his son. He gets one of his kids to start cranking these boxes.
And that is Giovanni Pecori. So his son, he's 12 years old and he's out there on another part of town cranking that box and people are throwing pennies. And if they don't donate to him, if they don't give him any money, he'd walk down the street. And they're like, oh, they're all freaking out.
They had a horrible time at the circus. They're like, oh, the tickets cost too much. And my wife cost me my elephant. No.
Give me more money. Go away. Go away. And Joseph's like, dude, this is totally working out.
Like now I have two people cranking that thing. So what's better than two? I can't find anything. Literally, higher than two is better.
He ends up, though, kidnapping two other kids. He kidnaps two other kids and makes them be organ grinders. So I don't know how you kidnap somebody and then give them a box and say, go get money for me and you got to come back here. I mean, I guess that's what pimps do, right?
But like if you kidnap someone from their family, you kidnap a kid from their family and say, you're gonna go into the city, you're gonna crank this box. You're going to get enough money for a bus ticket or enough money for anything. And then you've got to come back to me and give me that money and I'm going to send you back out the next day. Like I would be like, that is a terrible plan.
Oh, I would tell him that. I'd be like, gee willikers. And then he would take me down there and I would crank the box and get a bunch of money. I'm like, become a star.
I'm on Broadway cranking it. They're like, oh, he's so amazing at it. I'd get money and then I'd just go back home. I guess I didn't have bus tickets, but I'd get money and, like, throw, you know, get a horse, ride a horse home or something like that.
Anyways, he did gives my fantasy would work. Whether or not my dream of being the first Broadway organ grinder would work. His plan works. He did kidnap children and make them be organ grinders.
So he now has these four people working around town cranking that box. Well, what happens is, you know, the organ grinder community was actually considered, like, if they weren't outright criminals themselves, they were criminal adjacent. They actually at one point banned all organ grinders in New York. And they say, actually, like originally, that was one of the only ways that music was recorded was on those cylinders.
So we, as like a society, we lost a lot of early recordings of music because in New York they were just smashing the boxes. They're like, go away, box, you're done. The guy standing next to it, he's like, I'm just being another type of beggar now, pulls a switchblade and mungs the cops. But they did.
They shut it down in New York. There's certain places that you can have these because they were, if not outright criminal, criminal adjacent. So Joseph Pecora ran, most likely ran with some seedy people. So October 21st, 1875 is when we're standing outside this house.
And that's the same night that three acquaintances of Joseph broke into his house. They had heard that he had money in there and they were going to get that money. Basically, this was a home invasion, a robbery. So they break into the house and they robbed him.
But when they break into the Looking up these people. Giuseppe Pecora was his name. I'm looking up the address. What we know is true.
This is so interesting. What we know for a fact is true because I found this on genealogy websites, is there was a man named Giuseppe Pecora, and it says, this is from this website, this website called SarlyJournal.blogspot.com, which is a collection of this one guy's, Rocco Vincenzo Sarly's ancestors, and it says this, according to Denver court documents, quote, it is undisputed that Giuseppe Pecora was killed on October 21st, 1875, in the ramshackle house on Lawrence Street in Denver by mostly Italian perpetrators. The other three victims were youths. So that's a, so we know that that actually did happen.
This website talks nothing about ghosts, doesn't mention anything else, but it does give the names. The original story says he kidnapped three kids to run this operation, but looking at the other three victims in the house, one of the names was Giovanni Pecora, which was his son. The other two were older. Domenico Finelli was 19, and then Domenico D'Onofrio was 18.
So youths, they weren't these little kids, kind of how the ghost story had it out, but those were the three people who were killed in the house plus Giuseppe. And then, yeah, sure enough, I continue to look up, I found another genealogy website, and it does have Giuseppe, quote unquote, Joseph Pecora. His date of death is listed as October 1875. It also states that two of his sons died that year as well in Denver, Colorado, him and two other sons, Giuseppe and Giovanni.
So Giovanni now, and he's 12 in both of those. So there's a Giuseppe who died that same year who may have also died in the house. Absolutely. You know, again, when you read these stories, it's so old.
You think, is this some sort of urban legend? The house burned down. There's no proof of anything. And yet when you're able to find genealogy records, right, where they're mentioning Denver court documents, the murders took place.
That's a fact. So the family was there. That's huge. Even when you're just researching ghosts, though, a lot of times you can't reference anything.
What's, I'm fascinated about the story, right? Like that right there, that we know that the true crime element is 100% true. And this ghost story is really only two other places. That first book, Ghosts and Hauntings, and then my favorite book, Haunted Places, a National Directory.
What's interesting is you can look up 2-30-34 Lawrence Avenue, and it's in the heart of Denver. Like Denver is a major city right now. There's no horses, there's no hay. It is streets and posh bookstores and coffee shops and things like that.
And you're driving through Google Earth. You're looking through all this stuff and you see, like, just buildings, right? Just buildings with retail stores, Gap or whatever, and their local businesses and all that stuff. 2-30-34 Lawrence Street, because I was driving down Lawrence Street on Google Earth.
Everything else is a building. Everything else is some sort of, so interesting. Everything else is some sort of residence. 2-30-34 Lawrence Street doesn't exist.
Like you see 2-30-35 and over here is 2-30-32, and you're looking at all this stuff. So you kind of got to figure out where it would have been. Where 2-33-34 Lawrence Street used to be now stands a community park. So that makes sense, right?
Even when they were rebuilding the city, they never built another building here. Because the people, there was a neighborhood there of houses, of suburbs. People started moving out. This house got burned down.
People I'm assuming moved back into the other houses, but they would not build a new house on this location because of its curse. And then as the city of Denver grew and the residential district got pushed further out from the heart of the city, even then, when they're thinking, well, what can we do? Look, we have this huge piece of property. You would still have people who would remember this story.
You don't want to put anything there. First, you had people who experienced the stories of the murders. Then you had people who experienced the demons inside the house. And then eventually you started having urban legends kind of wash over it, right?
You had children and their children and their children. You started to hear just tales of this, but people still didn't dare to build anything on that. But eventually, even the urban legends got lost, which means the truth got lost. Where you could probably walk through that area of Denver, Colorado.
You could walk into any of those businesses on Lawrence Street and ask them if they've ever heard the story about Joseph Pecora and the terrible murders that took place just a few yards away. I would be shocked if any of them knew it because the only place that you can find it is in two books. It's not something you're finding on the shadow lands. It's not something you're finding on hauntedplaces.org.
And it's creepy to think that you have this little community park here that even after all these years, it's been 150 years at this point, no one's ever built another building on there. It's a little community park. It's not in memory to Joseph Pecora. It's just a little park.
People drive by it all the time. People probably sit in this park and enjoy the flowers, enjoy the beauty. And I would be shocked if any of them knew this story. Knew that where they are sitting on that bench, four people were brutally slaughtered there and not even their spirits found rest.
Even in death, they were being tortured. And it makes me think how many other, how many other horrific events have happened in these just seemingly mundane, if not peaceful locations? And there was a time where everyone knew the story. And then a time where just some people remembered it.
And then a time where only some people continued to tell it to a point where the story was a memory. It wasn't even a memory. It was lost to time. And now it's just a little parcel of land.
If you sit down on when your feet get kind of tired when you're walking between your job and head at home, listen into the birds chirp. How many other places has this happened where the story's got completely erased? There's just enough things online that still point to a truth, whether these genealogy websites, they just confirmed that these people lived and died in those locations on that date. I mean, it's really accurate stuff when you can compare it to this ghost story.
So the next time you're enjoying your place of beauty, your place of zen, the location you go to to help balance yourself, or maybe just enjoy a nice morning breeze on your face as you sit on a bench contemplating your life. While you're just eating mac and cheese, it doesn't have to be that deep. I think it's good to remember that the place where you find pleasure is a place where someone else may have found pain. Who knows what blood has been spilled on that land that you enjoy so much?
Who knows how many children were killed on your favorite bike trail? So the next time you're at that location and you think you're finding peace, just remember, someone else may have been brutally murdered there. I've ruined soft drinks for you, and now I'm ruining everything that you like to do. Just remember, though.
Just remember, just because you can't, like, look it up online, you can't find any proof that a child wasn't murdered there. Who knows? Check the genealogy website. You just don't know.
The point is, is that beauty can hide brutality, even in the most perfect of places. Blood may have been spilled. And just because the dark spirits seem to be gone doesn't mean they've left. They could just be waiting, waiting to gather new souls to join them in their eternal symphony of pain.
DeadRabbitRadio at gmail.com is going to be our email address. You can also find us up on Facebook.com slash DeadRabbitRadio. TikTok is at DeadRabbitRadio. DeadRabbitRadio is the daily paranormal, conspiracy, and true crime podcast.
You don't have to listen to it every day, but I'm glad you listened to it today. I'm Rabbit.