August 25, 2026 • 60 mins
Here's the story: When Don Decker went on furlough to attend his abusive Grandfather's funeral, he experienced something extraordinary -- water fell upward from the floor of his hosts' home, he levitated, recoiled from religious symbols. Multiple witnesses and investigators, some professional, appear to agree there exists a man inxeplicably able to summon rain. In tonight's Classic episode, Ben, Matt and Noel set out to determine the truth behind this strange, disturbing tale.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realists, we are returning to you with a
classic episode. This is a weird one. We love the paranormal.
We're always trying to do more investigations on this and
a few years back we learned the story of a
guy named Don Decker.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is a crazy one. I barely remember this episode.
It's such a wild story and I can't wait to
re listen to it, and we hope you enjoy it now.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
When Don Decker went on furlough to attend his abusive
grandfather funeral, he experienced something extraordinary and you will too.
Right now.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul Mission controlled decands. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. First, this is the first episode
we are recording after we gave everybody a bit of
a surprise with our colleagues code named Doc and Dana Schwartz,
(01:31):
giving us a fantastic exploration of the terrible history between
the US and Hawaii. Thank you to everyone for tuning
into that episode. If you haven't yet check it out.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Immediately do it now and then come back. We'll be here.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
It was a great episode. I really really enjoyed it
as a listener, so yeah, huge thanks and shout out
to them.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
And today's episode. I thought an interesting way to begin
this would be to talk about one of the most
famous sci fi fantasy series in history, Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. It's the kind of whimsy that
we might need to balance out today's story. This is
(02:16):
not a spoiler for the story, and, as you know,
given the stuff they don't want you to know policy
on spoilers, this has been out long enough that a
spoiler warning need not apply anyhow, in a way that
doesn't have necessarily a huge impact on the plot. There
is a hapless character in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy named Rob McKenna. Rob McKenna is a taxi or
(02:41):
lorry driver who for his entire life has tried and
failed to get away from the rain that constantly follows him.
And he's got a little log book that proves it
has rained everywhere anytime he's been anywhere, no matter where
he goes, no matter what time a day it is.
And McKenna doesn't know that know why this happens. He
(03:05):
thinks he's just cursed. It turns out that the rain
follows him for a reason. It's a fantastic ongoing thread
in a fantastic series. And although Douglas Adams may not
have been aware of this, there may be a real
life example of a type of Rob McKenna, just as hapless,
(03:27):
if not as so sweetly Wes Anderson like wholesome. This
real life rain man, according to the story, gets his
powers not from the divine, but from the opposite of
the divine, something unclean, something infernal, a case of possession
(03:48):
or a case of abuse from beyond the grave, or
or something else. Fellow conspiracy realist, today we bring you
the strange tale of Don Decker. Here are the facts.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
In nineteen eighty three, which is I think the year
we were all born.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
No, mo, so you and me, I think.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Okay, just just you and me, pal all right, Sorry,
ben a twenty one year old man by the name
of Don Decker was having a really bad time. He
was serving four to ten months in the Monroe County
Correctional Facility of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and that was because he
(04:32):
had received stolen goods stolen property. On February twenty fourth,
about thirty eight years from this day as we sit
here and record, he was given a furlough to attend
his grandfather's funeral, a man named James Kishaw who lived
in the same town where Decker was incarcerated.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
So this was I mean, a funeral is often not
a happy event, right at least we can agree that
the majority of them are not supposed to be. This
was going to be somewhat of a personal milestone for
Decker because from a young age, and we're not too
clear on the specifics of this, but from a young age,
(05:14):
his grandfather had physically abused him. According to Decker, this
began when he was about seven years old, and in
his mind, the old man's death could lead him to
a new chapter in life, a fresh start. It could
free him from what he described as an evil that
it haunted him all his life. Like many victims, of
(05:39):
emotional or I guess social or physical abuse. He had
kept these occurrences a secret, had not told people. So
when he went to the funeral, you know, he saw
relatives and especially his parents, talking about this man who
(06:00):
had abused him in of course, the overly positive terms
that people often use for the newly dead. This funeral
was an emotionally exhausting experience for Decker. Understandably right while
these things are true, and seeing his parents talk about
his grandfather and what he felt were glowing, glorifying terms
(06:24):
made him furious. It incensed him, and so after the
funeral he said, you know, I'm gonna stay with my
friends instead of staying with my folks, I'm gonna stay
with a couple named Bob and Jeannie Keefer.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah, and like we said, he's on furlough, so the
police are aware of where he is and it's not
like he just went off. He's there staying essentially under
their custody.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Important point and I love that you brought You brought
it back to the furlough. Furlough is given for is
only allowed if you are a pretty exemplary an inmate,
right obeying the rules in jail. So that means that
we know at this point nothing unusual had happened exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
They don't consider him a flight risk, They don't consider
him a danger to anybody, especially just you know, his
friends that he's going to go and stay with. They
also don't think the Keifers have anything fishy going on
or else that would have been an issue at least
that would that would be the understanding unless there were
extenuating circumstances that we don't know about or cannot prove.
(07:32):
So the Keefers were renting a house. It was on
Ann Street there in the city, and I just really quickly.
I always like doing this and always like talking about geography,
but just so you know, where we are really is
near the Pocono Mountains. Right near where this is taking place,
there is the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau. And you've heard
(07:57):
people talk about the Pocono's before the mountain range, and
this is I'm trying to look for a nearby place.
It's basically between Scranton, Pennsylvania and Allentown, Pennsylvania kind of
but to the northeast of Allentown. So that's physically where
we are. They're in this house on Anne Street, and
(08:20):
the night of the funeral, Decker's there with his friends,
the Kiefers, and Decker is upstairs. He's in the bathroom,
at least according to the story, he's like washing his hands,
getting ready for dinner. And according to him what he
told to the Kiefers, he suddenly felt disoriented, felt very confused,
(08:40):
and then he fell down to the floor and according
to him, was given some visions, some strange visions, including
a king. You will get into.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
It, well, well if the way he says, is a
man with a crown, which kind of like a rusher
law about any one who happens to be president. But yeah, yeah,
he had these, He had these visions. He felt disoriented
and confused, and that's something that a lot of people
report when they have visions for caused by any number
(09:15):
of medical or cognitive situations. According to Decker, and you
can see video by the way of him describing this,
and we'll we'll talk a little bit about the shows
that widely publicized or popularized this story. According to him,
scratches appeared unbidden upon his wrist. He rejoins the Keyfers.
(09:38):
He seems oddly subdued. Think of Jack Nicholson as the
Overlook Hotel is slowly getting its its psychic talents into
his mind. Yeah, almost almost understated hypnosis. And he sits
down to eat. Pictureum, we're editorializing a a little bit
(10:00):
picture and moving kind of robotically, going through the motions.
You can attribute this a lot to the grief of
losing a family member, even if it's one you didn't
particularly care for the shock of going to a funeral.
His pal Keefer notices Bob Keefer, that is, notices the
blood when Decker sits down to eat, and like any
(10:23):
friend would say, he asks what happened? What happened to you?
Decker tells him about this vision, this man in a
crown reflected in a window that does not physically appear
to be in the bathroom with him. He's got these scratches,
which he attributes to Satan, you know, kind of small
(10:43):
talk you probably have at dinner, right.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, yeah, and you can imagine to some evil presence
that's what he's attributing to. But in his mind it's
that would be Satan.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Right right, And that's an important division so or differentiation.
So a few minutes later, the family, here's this loud
kind of banging noise from above, and they noticed that
water is dripping from the walls and the ceiling.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
That's fun. Something similar happened at my daughter's mom's house
the other nice She had a friend sleepover, and they
didn't realize the toilet was just constantly overflowing, and nobody
noticed until water literally started seeping through into into her
mom's closet and ruined all of her clothes. So yeah, immediately,
(11:33):
the first thing your mind would go to is, Okay,
there's a nasty, nasty plumbing problem, something catastrophic, and you're
just scrambling to like figure out where it's coming from
and stop it. Right, But this seemed to be something different.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Yeah, there's never a good time for a plumbing problem,
as anybody who's experienced one can assure you, especially homeowners
and plumbers as well. It's because burst pipe, depending on
its location, can become very expensive, very quickly. So Bob Keefer,
(12:10):
he and he and his partner are renting this structure,
so they immediately phone their landlord and this is, you know,
like this, they're not renting from some big complex or company.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
They know the guy.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
His name is really cool, actually, it's Ron Van Why why.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
That's really cool. And you know, all the homeowners that
are listening right now are going, oh, thank god they're
renting right, yeah, because it really is expensive.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
But Ron of course doesn't feel the same way. He
owns the house, so he goes over immediately. Let's get
on the case, and the two guys set off to
investigate what they naturally assumed to be leaking pipes. Of course,
plumbing problems are likely on the rise at this time. Again,
(12:59):
it's February in It's February in Pennsylvania. Here, there's been
a storm earlier, so if the pipes are old enough,
you know, they may have burst, they may have had
problems with freezing and so on. But eventually, pretty quickly
they realize something that the police will also later realize.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
All of the.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Plumbing just it goes to the kitchen, in the bathroom
and there on the other side of the house from
where this leak is occurring. Like the whole plumbing system,
the whole circulatory system of the house, it's all toward
the back of the structure. Second decker appears to have
progressed from being kind of out of it and oddly
(13:41):
calm maybe in shock to a full on trance state.
This guy is in something meditative or approaching catatonic. This
prompts Keefer to call the police and think about it
from Bob's perspective, you know, yes, this is your friend.
Your friend is technically on vacation from jail, so you
(14:04):
want to be as above board as possible. The leaks, however,
are continuing. At the same time they appear to be
increasing at a worrying pace. Where the hell is all
this water coming from?
Speaker 2 (14:17):
This is the question, right, where's the water coming from?
And I want to jump back to this concept that
all of the plumbing is on the other side of
the house. And it's simply because I'm imagining them sitting
downstairs and then hearing that bang that you demonstrated Ben,
that loud banging from above them. I'm imagining the Keefers
(14:38):
and know where the bathroom is in location to them
above them. Right, you've probably been on a second floor before,
if you're aware of it, you know where the bathrooms
kind of are in relation to you. If they believed
that that sound came from the bathroom or from the
plumbing in the bathroom, you imagine they would you know,
(14:59):
look to the pla and think about it and being
in that general area and if that occurs, and you know,
depending on where the bank came from, because we don't
I don't have an exact you know, like geolocation of
was it above them and to the right, was it
above them to the left, but then the water was
coming down from the right, I don't have We don't
have that information necessarily, but it just made it. It
(15:21):
made it more curious to me, the fact that the
plumbing is way over there in the skeletal structure of
the house. Really, what I'm wondering is where did the
bang originate and where was the plumbing and were they
definitely in two completely different places. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
It's a good question, and it's one that, uh, it's
one that isn't specifically explored even in the subsequent attempts
at a police report. The cavalry arrives first. There are
two officers on the scene, officers John Baujean and Richard Woolbert.
(15:57):
By this point, from their accounts, water just wasn't just
leaking within the house, you know, kind of streaming down
the walls or whatever. In fact, Bob Keefer and ron
Van why when the police showed up, they were at
a loss to explain what was happening. They were saying, okay,
look just come in here, just coming. You got to
(16:18):
see it for yourself. It's weird. We need help. And
the police decided to enter the premises. And what they
found inside is less like a bunch of leaks. From
everything they could tell. It was literally raining inside the house,
not necessarily a torrential downpour, but the water appeared not
(16:39):
just to be obeying the patterns of rain you would
see outside. It appeared to be there appeared to be
violations of the laws of physics inside the house. The
old rules no longer applied. This stuff was falling upward
from the floor.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Yeah, I mean it was the There were reports from
the scene that it was literally defying gravity.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
And and there was no discernible source for the leak
of a leak, existence of a leak of the of
the water appeared to just be kind of being summoned
in some weird way. It was only happening in the
living room though, So it was like this localized like
storm cloud like you see in the cartoons. And the
(17:22):
police were absolutely at a loss. I mean, this isn't
something that they're they're really equipped to deal with. So
the police left the scene because they had to figure
out how to summarize all this craziness into some semblance
of a you know, report that wouldn't get them fired.
I guess uh. And then the the Kiefers went with
(17:44):
Don Decker to a nearby restaurant. So the landlord, Ron
Van Why called his wife, Romayne's fantastic name, and she
joined him at the house. They stuck around while everyone
else left, and then all of a sudd in the
rain stopped as quickly as it had begun.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, either the it's interesting too. One detail I'm wondering
about this is whether the police the tenant's definitely the homeowner.
Surely someone immediately said let's turn off the water, right,
that's step number one, But that's not really that's not
a detail that's really reported in this story here.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Well, yeah, and that's the thing. Ron and Romain know
that house, right, They know the ins and outs of
that house, where the pipes are. They've probably had to
fix things in the past. You would imagine, like, really,
what I want is more info from those two. And
I wish we had more of that.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
There may be a reason we don't. This restaurant across
the street is a pizzeria. It's owned by a lady.
At the time, it's owned by a lady named Pam Scraffano,
and she also gives interviews on video about this Everyone
we've named so far is on video at some point
talking about this story or appearing to talk about this story.
(19:02):
The program Unsolved Mysteries, which some of some of us
in the audience today may have loved as much as
I did in younger years. Unsolved Mysteries has Scriffano on
this episode talking about how she had earlier gone to
the Keifer's house, like, clearly this pizzeria was their cheers
(19:24):
right across the street. They serve pizza, they probably have beer.
What more do you want from life? And so she
knew these folks. She had apparently already went across the
street earlier to look at this bizarre meteorological phenomenon. Micro
meteorological phenomenon, will work on it. And when she saw
(19:46):
when she saw the Kiefers and Don arrive, apparently rain
started falling in the restaurant. Two she looked at Don's
odd behavior. He was still area out of it. And
I imagine this is my speculation here, folks, but I
imagine what happened. His dinner was ruined at the Kiefer house,
(20:08):
and they decided that, regardless of the chaotic universe in
which they live, they still wanted to get something to eat,
so they had gone to a pizza restaurant with a
very weird vibe. Pam is freaking out. She goes to
the cash register where she retrieves across the symbol of Christianity,
(20:31):
and she tries to give the cross to Dawn and
he can't hold it. He claims it burns his hand. Pam,
being of a somewhat religious bent, feels like she's cracked
the case. She tells the Keifers they need to take
him to a church for the process of performing an exorcism.
(20:51):
While we do not know the specifics of the conversation
that follows, we know that instead of going to a
church immediately, they went home because a lot of churches
are closed at that time.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Well, yeah, and they just ruined a ton of pizza.
I mean, think about how bad is soggy pizza. Nobody
wants that.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Nobody wants that as a party foul. To be sure,
all of this, by the way, is delightfully recreated in
that Unsolved Mysteries episode. It's during like the golden age
of Unsolved Mystery where like Robert Stack's hair is just perfect,
and like the experts that are on this particular episode,
one of them looks like a sort of a miniature
Ringo Star. I can't remember the guy's name. He's one
(21:32):
of the investigators that we're going to get to, one
of the two, so I don't remember which one he
was exactly, but he almost looks like Andy Circus in
like Lord of the Rings, but with like a Ringo
star like go tee, perfectly quaffed and like a bun.
It's something to behold, and then you know the thing
that's about to happen next, also beautifully dramatized. Remain confronts
(21:53):
Decker as he is in this like trance like state,
like a feuw state, and then she tries to, I
don't know, settle him down or kind of talk him down.
Pots and pans start banging around the kitchen, classic possession
one on one type stuff, and then they claim and
again it's beautifully done, and then the show that Decker
(22:16):
began to levitate off the floor as the cacophonous sounds
of pots and pans clanging and banging around began to
increase to a fever pitch. Then, in a scene you
might recognize from the movie The Exorcist, these unseen you
know things start slashing at Decker's skin, and these you
know cuts or scratches start to open up all over
(22:39):
him as he's supposedly levitating there, and they form the
shape of a cross, allegedly near the inside of his
elbow or like the crook of his arm.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
There.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Officer Boujean came back where he found Genie Keefer reading
the Bible an attempt to do her own kind of
diy exorcism on Decker, Bless her Heart. In a show
called Paranormal Witnesses, Baljean said that he too truly believed
that Decker was possessed, and he decided to call him
(23:11):
the big Guns. The Chief of Police, Gary Roberts.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
So Chief of Police Gary Roberts is an important part
of this story. He is convinced by the cops to
go visit this scene in person. When he gets there,
he says, okay, yeah, moisture it's moisture is not itself
(23:40):
a supernatural nor invidious thing. I understand this might be
a weird situation for you, key, for family. We've all
had a tough day. Things are going to be fine.
There's absolutely nothing unnatural going on. And we know there's
a bit of at least a verbal reprimand to his
(24:02):
employees because he orders them to leave and not to
bother filing a report. You know what I mean, Just
another night in another episode of Law and Order, Strausburg, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
This was certainly not the end. When we return from
a quick break, we will tell you what happened the
next day.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
So the next day, some officers return. There are two
other officers who are new to this story, but they've
heard about it over the past few hours. These are
officers William Davies and Officer John Rundle. They, along with Baujean,
(24:50):
kind of defied their boss and they were like, Okay,
maybe the police chief of police is not fully grasping
the enormity or the importan into this situation, or at
least the bizarreness of this situation. So they visit the
house themselves and Davies says Decker who is still there,
recoils when he offers Decker a gold cross, just like
(25:13):
Pam at the pizzeria. Decker drops it, claiming again that
it burns his skin. There's some kind of consistency there.
And then these officers, these police officers who are trained
to accurately report what they see, say that Decker is
lifted off the ground by unseen forces. Decker is also
(25:36):
on videos saying this and that he is thrown across
the room quote as though a bus had hit him,
and additional scratches appear on his neck. I haven't read
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a number of years,
but I'm pretty sure Rob McKenna just gets rained. I
don't think he gets thrown around, So that's another difference
(25:57):
if you're keeping track. Finally, on this next night, Ron Van,
why the landlord is able to convince a preacher to
come and attempt an exorcism. This is not the first
preacher he talked to. It's definitely not his first choice.
He had talked to several other religious figures, ministers and priests,
(26:17):
and they had all turned him down because, as you've
seen in previous episodes, have done like exorcisms one oh
one and so on. Exorcisms are something that religious institutions
take very very seriously because people have been hurt in
the past, and also you have to spend a great
(26:38):
deal of time figuring out whether it could be anything
other than a case of possession. Right, so you get
a lot of you if you are a religious authority
listening to today's episode, I'm sure that you have also
received a lot of strange calls from very upset and
(27:00):
scared people, and you've had, you know, you had to
realize that maybe this isn't an exorcism, Maybe they just
need someone to help them walk back from whatever ledge
they're on. Uh so this so he finally finds a
guy who says yes. Preacher arrives unseen, he begins to
pray as his bible out, Dawn begins to convulse violently physically,
(27:25):
and then the preacher performs some sort of ceremony. It's
definitely not, you know, obviously, the Catholic right of exorcism,
but whatever it is seems to work. People who are
present describe an intangible difference in the feeling, and not
to be dismissive, but they describe a change in the
(27:47):
vibe right of change in the energy of the of
the house, of the room, and then at the end
of one of these prayers, the rain stops and it
will will never appear in the key for home again.
So maybe this bizarre incident is over and Don has
(28:11):
just had a terrible furlough, But he still has to
go back to jail. He got convicted, he has to
serve a sentence.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
That's one of the nicer furloughs I've ever heard of,
where you get multiple days off rather than you okay,
you get to attend the funeral and then you have
to immediately return. That's a that's a very nice thing
that Don got to receive.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Seems pretty unusual, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
I don't know the practices, Yeah, but still a different thing, right,
a different experience than probably a lot of people have had.
But it doesn't stop here, you're right, And just a
few days later he ends up back in the jail.
He's going to do his thing, and while he was there,
(29:01):
it appears that whatever rituals took place a few days
prior that stalked the rain at the Keefer's house didn't work.
When he returned to incarceration, because now it's raining in
the jail.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Or yeah, at the very least it's described as rain,
but at very least water is a puring in a
way that seems inexplicable. We have a quote from Don
Decker where he says, they put me in a maximum
security cell. I was in there with another inmate, and
I was thinking I should make it rain in here,
and all of a sudden, water started coming out of
(29:38):
the concrete floor, and at that point I thought I
can do stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
And then yeah, he realized he's Storm. He's like, oh man,
I'm Storm. This is awesome, or.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Like you're you know, with the black cloud following him around.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Or like Rob McKenna, who is maybe a little bit
more of an ambitious robing kind of but but yeah,
he says, maybe this is something that I can in
some way control. There's a guard who's skeptical about it,
and it's like, oh, yeah, Decker, well if you can,
(30:18):
you can control rain, and that's why we're doing so
well in life. Locked up here in jail, why don't
you make it rain in the warden's office. The warden
at the time was a guy named Dave Keenholdy.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
He just started making it rain.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Sorry, just started making it rain. Yes, no, you're so so.
Warden Kinghold is also on video and he says the following,
I was sitting at the desk writing a report. I
was all by myself in the administration area. Nobody else
was around. It was a approximately eight in the evening
at the time. I didn't feel anything, but my shirt
(30:58):
was drooping down. And he goes on to say as
another officer entered and was going to tell him something
and was like, Warden, look at your shirt, and so
he looks down. He literally looks down at his shirt
and right around the center of his sternum, about four
inches long two inches wide, there was this huge spot
(31:18):
of water, and he says, I was startled. I was scared.
The officer was frightened. I didn't have an explanation of
why it happened. And so then the warden, OH, and
other people reported seeing this. So his cellmate saw it,
two guards saw it, janitor saw it. The warden saw
(31:41):
this stuff appear on his shirt, and the warden contacts
a guy named Reverend William Blackburn to attempt another like
another exorcism, a third exorcism for those of us keeping track,
at home.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
So then a third and final exorcism was attempted, and
this appears to perhaps have done the trick. Another reverend
by the name of William Blackburn meets Don in jail
and he sees with his own eyes this rain appear
apparently summoned by Don himself, like he said, Matt, and
(32:18):
he prayed over him, and the rain stopped. Who stopped
the rain indeed, or who will stop the rain? Apparently
it was it was William Blackburn was Creeden's clearwater revival reference.
Speaking of great references in the wake of this kind
of bizarre indoor weather thing or Ben as you nodded
to in the outline, inner weather shout out to Robert
(32:40):
Frost Don And these various witnesses still claim that they're
unable to explain where this was coming from, where this
indoor rain was coming from, And there are quite a
few people that saw it. So what's what's the deal?
What actually happened?
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Here's where it gets crazy. This is a story that,
as you said, still does not have an official explanation,
by which I mean it still does not have an
explanation that is considered one hundred percent factual by all
people involved. There are several possibilities, and not all of
(33:21):
these possibilities.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Are immediately apparent.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
So what makes this case unusual or remarkable in comparison
to other cases that have some similarities, is that there
are nine eyewitnesses, several of whom have their careers staked
on their ability to be accurate and credible, right, and
in recalling what they've encountered. Don himself, you know, we
(33:48):
could count him as an extra witness, but let's leave
him bracketed to the side. All of these nine witnesses
were willing to go on record saying that they heard, saw,
and felt unusual phenomena. But first importantly, and this is
where those shows can be a little bit misleading, not
(34:10):
all of these witnesses are saying there was something demonic
at play. The police chief right, was never convinced. Several
witnesses will. They'll go as far as saying they saw
something they can't explain. That doesn't make it necessarily supernatural.
And additionally, if you look at exorcisms overall, the claims
(34:34):
of creating rain indoors seem oddly specific and somewhat unprecedented.
It doesn't follow the exorcism tropes of the demographics and
people who tend to be possessed often children, predominantly women. Remember,
not all claims of possession or exorcisms are Christian and nature.
(34:55):
And the Decor case does include like a couple two big,
big common signs of what's considered to be possession, some
kind of levitation mysterious wounds and so on, levitation of
Don Decker himself, and then some kind of psychokinetic movement
of the pots and pans in the kitchen. But the
(35:18):
primary thing inexplicable rain wetness generated somehow by the human
mind or you know, by somehow some action or presence
of a human being that usually is attributed to stuff
like the old practice of rain makers, you know, people
(35:41):
who were paid to go out and do anything from
early science and cloud seeding to using their own allegedly
unique cognitive or spiritual abilities to bring rain to drought
stricken areas.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, it sounds to me, if it's real, more like
a superpower that is being unlocked through a highly stressful
situation or something, you know, way more so than a
possession by somebody. It sounds like he got extremely stressed
to the funeral and this abusive person in his life
(36:18):
that died. Then it went away after it feels like
being calmed down, whether or not the exorcism actually did
anything spiritually or it was just someone giving him attention
and calming him down, a lot of people being around him.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Art rate lowering endorphins.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Well, then it comes back when he gets back to
the stressful situation of being in prison. Right, so interestingly enough,
like to me, it's almost like it's being triggered through
some kind of stress or internal turmoil.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
It's a very Stephen Kingey type trope. Like it makes
me think of Carrie, you know, when she's picked on
and humiliated at the prom and then all of a
sudden she just caendo like fight or flight mode and
like burns everybody alive or Firestarter for example. You know,
a lot of these powers or latent abilities are brought
out by you know, stressful events that are triggered, and
(37:12):
then it's also usually beyond the individual's control or at
least you know to it to a large degree.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
And of course, fellow fellow comic fans, you'll call that
this is this is one of the common ways for
mutant powers to express and things like Marvel comics. It's
often tied to puberty in those sort of tropes, just
like or those sort of stories, as you'd say, not tropes,
(37:41):
just like in psyching carry as you mentioned earlier, Noel,
with this, we have to remember Don is at the
cusp of his early twenties, so his body is still
developing to that, to that theory, we don't know how much,
if any, medical research has been done on his brain, right,
(38:04):
which is another interesting question. And we also there hasn't
been a ton of research done on the house, and
we know that for sure. But let's so those are
interesting possibilities, they're interesting paths of thought. We have to
take another one, which is a little more nitty gritty,
(38:28):
and it's an unfortunate fact of the reality that Don
and these eyewitnesses were living in during the early nineties
when this case was publicized on those shows we cited earlier,
and it's an unfortunate reality of the world we live
in today. It's kind of the rise of reality television,
unscripted allegedly nonfiction programs with heavily edited interviews. Again, the
(38:53):
vast majority of people who learned about this story, especially
outside of the area between Allentown and Scranton, Pennsylvania. The
people learned about this learned about it because they were
watching stuff and I say this with love, there were
watching stuff that was meant to be entertainment, right, entertainment TV.
It is completely possible. We've explored this before. It's completely
(39:17):
possible that any of these witnesses, even down himself, may
have been manipulated or goaded in some way by the producers,
either into exaggerating their original statements or having their words
taken out of context. You know what I mean, Like,
if there's something like I bet Chief of Police Gary
Roberts was the most difficult interview for those producers. What
(39:39):
do you guys think?
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah, for sure? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Ben.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
To this end, I want to just point out exactly
what you're saying. It was nineteen eighty three when this occurred.
Then it wasn't until the nineties when it was retold
right on one of these one or more of these
scripted shows. This is something that Skeptic magazine points out.
Michael Shermer, the rights in that magazine. Why didn't anyone
(40:09):
think to snap any kind of photograph, take any kind
of evidence of this occurrence? Why doesn't that exist? We're
talking about days of this kind of thing happening, and
you know you're at the police station. You're talking about
a place where people are incarcerated, where pictures are taken
of people for mugshots. Why didn't somebody take a picture
(40:33):
of any of this stuff? It's just it feels strange.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Why did not anybody, for instance, take a sample of
the water? Right, especially because the water left will find
a physical impression. We know that there really was water,
that part is for sure. We're just now arguing over
how connected it was with down and where the water
came from. Right, be right. Memory is treacherous. Arguably one
(41:01):
of the most treacherous bodily processes is remembering something. And
then we have to look at the credibility of these shows.
As enjoyable as they are, these shows have an angle, right.
They want you to be tantalized, They want you to
be fascinated. They want you to leave with more questions
(41:24):
than you had when you started watching, and maybe one decision,
one answer, which is will I watch the next episode
of the show, And the answer is hopefully yes. Right,
that's what they're trying to get you to. They do
very well. There is an art and a craft of
this but it also means it's like telling these stories.
(41:46):
Making these narratives is like whittling a block of wood.
You have to get rid of some stuff for the
final product to have the shape you want people to see.
And that's why they don't invest a ton of time
get any possible mundane explanations that might be kind of boring.
They do have subject matter experts, you know, that's part
(42:08):
of the format of those shows, and the experts in
each of these programs are billed as paranormal investigators. Paranormal
investigators is a very large term, right. There's a lot
of stuff that fits in there, from people who believe
they are mediums to people who believe that they are
(42:29):
hardcore skeptics trying to debunk the idea of a haunted house,
you know what I mean. So the problem with describing
people as paranormal investigators wherever they fall on that spectrum,
is this, there is no widely accepted accreditation process. There's
no board or other authority that reviews you, you know,
(42:52):
like veterinarians have boards and the medical professionals have boards
to make sure that their research is up to date,
to make sure that their practices are sound and there
is no such thing as, for instance, a licensed paranormal investigator.
You can call anyone you want. There are plenty of
(43:13):
people who will issue you a certificate of some sort,
but there's not like a you can't go to the
DMV or your local courthouse, you know, like the place
you would get a gun license or a divorce or
a marriage license and say, hey, I need a judge
to sign off of me being a paranormal investigator. I tried,
(43:34):
I looked into it. It's just not a thing.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
And yet we've got priests that are like supposedly qualified
to do exorcisms. I guess maybe that's the closest thing
to having accreditation for being a paranormal investigator of some kind.
I mean, if you're a priest, you're showing up, you're
investigating a paranormal events, and then you are doing something
about it supposedly, and it's sanctioned by this very very
(43:58):
old established or organization. I just I find it fascinating.
I'm not trying to, you know, downplay anybody's beliefs or religion,
but particularly the idea of sanctioned exorcisms has always sat
a little oddly with me.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Well, it's interesting because we have to remember that the
church in a real way precedes the modern state. I
would argue religion precedes the modern state rather so in
a way. That's they're the oldest licensed paranormal investigators, even
if their license for you know, a very specific niche
(44:32):
of that sort of stuff. But that's an I think
that I agree, that's a good point. Let's pause, though,
Let's pause for a word from our sponsor. Will return,
and Will will look into the part of the story
that these programs did not like Don Decker's reign. We
(44:57):
have returned.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
Point here.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Objective scientific investigations, one in particular, do appear to have
a plausible explanation for what occurred. To your point, Matt,
these explanat this explanation occurs a number of years after
the actual events. There's a great report, series of reports
(45:21):
by the Poconot Record or pocon House that that details
the work of a researcher from New York located in
New Zealand, a medical sociologist named Robert Bartholomew. He became
interested in this case when a colleague referred it to
him and said, hey man, this is right up your alley.
(45:43):
I don't know what the explanation is based on the
info I have. Bartholomew's legit. He's accredited. He teaches at
Botany Downs Secondary College, or did at the time. He
wrote in a ton of journals on things that were
allegations of the pair normal. Right. And when I say
wrote in journals, we're talking about medical and sociology journals,
(46:06):
not you know, his own personal mole schemes or something.
And he had a pretty he had a pretty solid
theory for this.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
That's right. He did make it very clear that he
did not have any connections to Stroudsburg and kind of
considered himself as as a bit of an outsider. But
he said, quote, I can be seen as an impartial
third party. My goal is to understand what happened. Uh.
And he believes, I think, kind of like what we
(46:35):
were conjecturing earlier, that through this kind of perfect combination,
perfect storm of stress, the weather, and a particular type
of ice formation, Bartholomew believes that he can reasonably explain
what happened. So for him, it all goes back to
this thing called an ice dam like the Hoover Dam.
(46:56):
Ice damming is a phenomenon that occurs when warm enters
an attic like snow melt, like melt water from like
a roof seeping in, and then if temperatures drop after
the sunsets, ice can form and it can trap the
water that had previously melted with nowhere to go and
still at a temperature, keeping it in a liquid form.
(47:19):
Because of the internal heat of the house, the water
will eventually leak outside. And you can actually see a
pretty helpful image of this if you go to University
of Minnesota Extensions website and just type in what is
an ice dam and it shows the phenomenon. It really
is little pockets in the eaves kind of of an attic,
(47:40):
so it'd be like in a corner, for example. It's
a pretty pretty helpful image, but it's sort of like
what what's described, but I don't know, not.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Quite well really what you'd be seeing here. You may
have seen this before because this is fairly common, like weeping.
You can see like your walls look like they're weeping,
like they're crying, or it's just dripping water down a
little bit. This has happened in older houses that I've
rented here in Atlanta, depending on what's going on with
(48:10):
the temperature, and accumulation. Sometimes it's it's fairly common. That's
all I wanted to say.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
So, Yeah, the reason I have a diagram there is
if you it is helpful to look at it if
you're curious. What you're seeing is a kind on the roof.
You're seeing a accommodation of water in three forms. The
isis toward the bottom, right, toward the eaves of the roof.
(48:38):
The snow is atop the damned water in the middle.
And what you know, The immediate question if you look
at this diagram or other ones like it, is how
does it get through the insulation while the insulation becomes sodden?
And that heat is going to be continual because you
(48:59):
have to keep a house warm right, ideally while you're
in snowy conditions, and so things like a snowstorm can
exacerbate that. But the big question, probably one of the
more tantalizing perps, is Okay, fine, I understand weeping, right,
I've seen leaks before.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
I know what.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Leaks are like.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Leaks do not shoot out from the bottom of the
floor like rain from a cloud.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And isn't it a pretty big coincidence that this occurred
at the house where don was then at the pizza place,
then again at the jail.
Speaker 3 (49:36):
Yeah, and it's and corroborated by various unrelated witnesses from
from these that didn't seem like they would have an agenda,
you know, I tend to I tend to believe folks
like that. It's it's hard, Yeah, it's hard to justify.
Of course not. Of course this wouldn't have And this
is a thing that happens in houses very rarely, like,
under very specific circumstances.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
Yes, So going back to what I'm building toward here,
or what I was building toward there, is that it
really the other problem with definition here is what defines rain.
A torrential downpour is rain, but a drizzle is also rain,
you know, And fog is just moisture in the air.
(50:18):
So is it possible that they were the people who
were witnessing this, We're seeing air heavy with moisture. But
was the moisture somehow being affected by the heat of
the house after it left the walls or after it
left that dam, you know what I mean? Was it
(50:38):
somehow being dispersed the way that a humidifier would or
something to the point about specificity of ice damming. Yes,
you're correct. The weather in the area, the weather on
Ann Street there does appear to be within the bounds
of what would what an ice stam need would need
to form. Daytime high were in the forties and fifties fahrenheit,
(51:02):
but then the lows drop down to the twenties and
the thirties. Also, Bartholomeles research shows that ice stamming can
be pretty common if a major snowstorm has just hit
an area where temperatures go above freezing during the day
to turn stuff into the water, and then below the
point of freezing thirty two degrees at night. This makes
(51:25):
perfect conditions for your classic ice stam and the Poconots
had been hit by a snowstorm about thirteen days before
all this stuff went down with Don Decker. So maybe
there was something unclean at play.
Speaker 3 (51:39):
But maybe it.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Wasn't a demon, or maybe it wasn't an angry ghost.
It was a dirty roof with a pile of unswept snow,
still unclean. And then also I totally get it. I've
been in snowy areas before. Why would you like just plow?
Like cleaning your driveway is enough. Who goes on their
roof all the time to clean off snow.
Speaker 2 (51:58):
I go there to clean off leaves.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Yeah, the leaves are the problem here in Georgia for sure,
although and I.
Speaker 3 (52:06):
Kind of like it.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
I think that's meditative. Also, you're not freezing, why you
do it? And then what happens to this house. Don's gone.
The keepers stay at the house for about two more years,
so they must not have been that freaked out. They
didn't see anything else super unusual. They couldn't get those
stains from the water off the walls. And we can't
(52:27):
do any on the scene testing or try to reenact
the event's unsolved mystery style because the house has been demolished.
And then the fourth point here, this one we can
maybe close with for the skeptics. You hate to see it,
and this is not victim blaming, but there's a question
(52:50):
about credibility on Don's part that becomes crucial to the
story a few years later or a few decades later.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yes, that's correct. There is a news story that we
stumbled upon from October of twenty twelve, when Don Decker
found himself back in the news. He'd been rather obscure
after these nineties television shows. He'd you know, you'd every
once in a while see an interview with him or
him talking about something over the years. But this was
the most high profile thing he was in the news
(53:19):
because he turned himself in to a federal court on
charges that he had set a blaze a business as
a restaurant in the Poconos. There was an event that
occurred in twenty eleven. This is in Wilkes bar a
(53:39):
different area there in the Poconos.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
A rival pizzeria.
Speaker 2 (53:43):
Perhaps I don't think so, but it does appear that
Don was involved because the restaurant owner, this is allegedly
the restaurant owner brought him in to do it on.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
Purpose, oh like for like an insurance money.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
Yeah. It was called Dana's Restaurant and tavern, not not
a not a pizzeri at all.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
And the owner was named Theodoros Kyriakopoulos. I think I
got that right. And this was located at five hundred
Sterling Road there in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. So he got
the arson penned on him. A grand jury charged the
pair with mail fraud, criminal conspiracy, and use of fire
to commit a federal felony. Ouch and this is mail.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
Fraud because you know, there was an insurance claim involved, right.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
That that might be an unfair assumption on.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
Our maybe, but it's why else would.
Speaker 1 (54:36):
Someone just want to see the world burn or.
Speaker 3 (54:39):
At the very least certain restaurants. But this is important,
right because other than Decker himself, uh, the events seemed unrelated.
But his involvement in this Arson scheme really calls his
entire credibility. I mean, you know, he was he was
pinched the first time for receiving stolen goods. Now he's
committing mail fraud in Arson. You know, it seems really
(55:02):
sketchy his whole kind of account of things. But again,
there are others that are that are seeing this happen.
But it does indicate a strong ability or willingness at
least to tell stories to the public.
Speaker 1 (55:17):
Right, well, I had it from my mind. It's more
that it could be taken as indicating his overall willingness
to portray a false narrative. I don't know, I don't
I don't know if it's fair to say it's strong willingness,
but it's definitely there's definitely a proven case where he
was totally fine with doing that. Maybe that's from desperation, right,
(55:40):
because people can be driven to crimes of necessity. Maybe
that's a maybe that's a completely unrelated event because people
have bad stuff happen and people make unrelated mistakes in
their lives, or or you know, maybe the devil made
him do it. So at this point, we want to
(56:03):
hear from you, what do you think, folks. Does the
proposed scientific solution for this bizarre rain well, does it
hold water wamp womp or was there something else at play?
And if so, what, Because I'll be honest, like, the
the ice standing seems a really good explanation for how
(56:28):
water could get into the house, if not through the pipes.
But from the eyewitnesses explanation, it doesn't. It sounds like
a lot of them grew up in an area where
they would have been familiar with ice stamming, right, Like
they would have known that certain types of weather can
cause certain types of leaks. And this from their descriptions,
(56:49):
at least from the way they're depicted describing these things,
it doesn't. It doesn't appear they thought that's what was
going on.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
Yeah, it looks, at least on camera in the in
the things that have been shot for those unscripted series
like it is. It is much more of a there's
much more water in these places than you would find
if there was moisture in between the walls or the
(57:16):
ceiling or something and it was just dripping out from
the drywall or you know, whatever the wall was made of.
At the time, it seems like more, but again, we
don't know. I've been I think the most convincing thing
to this entire story or the eyewitness accounts of these
police officers, simply because it you know, you listen to
(57:38):
them who they've given interviews. I believe them that they're
actually police officers, that they actually went through this stuff,
because they appear to be baffled by it. And these
are these are you know, as an occupation where you're
trying to find answers for things, especially if you're an investigator.
Maybe not necessarily to the extent that I'm thinking of,
(58:01):
if you're you know, just an officer who is on
the street or something responding to calls. But this, like,
I believe them that they saw something strange that they
could not define or explain.
Speaker 1 (58:16):
And we want to hear from you, especially if maybe
you've encountered something like this that you are at a
loss to explain. We would love to hear your story.
We try to be easy to find online. We're on Facebook,
We're on Instagram, we're on Twitter. We particularly like to
recommend our Facebook page. Here's where it gets crazy when
you could share your personal experiences, your opinions of this
(58:41):
case with the best part of the show, your fellow listeners.
But hold on, you might be saying, I do know
what happened to Don Decker, and I hate social media
because those are somehow related. I'm freestyling here, folks, But
the point is, if you don't care for social media,
you can also give us a call directly.
Speaker 3 (59:01):
We have a phone number.
Speaker 2 (59:02):
That's right. The number is one eight three three st
d WYTK. You can leave a message there after you
hear Ben's voice and some of that music, and we
ask that you please leave the name that you want
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(59:24):
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(59:45):
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Speaker 3 (59:58):
We are conspiracy heeartradio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realists, we are returning to you with a
classic episode. This is a weird one. We love the paranormal.
We're always trying to do more investigations on this and
a few years back we learned the story of a
guy named Don Decker.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is a crazy one. I barely remember this episode.
It's such a wild story and I can't wait to
re listen to it, and we hope you enjoy it now.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
When Don Decker went on furlough to attend his abusive
grandfather funeral, he experienced something extraordinary and you will too.
Right now.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul Mission controlled decands. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. First, this is the first episode
we are recording after we gave everybody a bit of
a surprise with our colleagues code named Doc and Dana Schwartz,
(01:31):
giving us a fantastic exploration of the terrible history between
the US and Hawaii. Thank you to everyone for tuning
into that episode. If you haven't yet check it out.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Immediately do it now and then come back. We'll be here.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
It was a great episode. I really really enjoyed it
as a listener, so yeah, huge thanks and shout out
to them.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
And today's episode. I thought an interesting way to begin
this would be to talk about one of the most
famous sci fi fantasy series in history, Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. It's the kind of whimsy that
we might need to balance out today's story. This is
(02:16):
not a spoiler for the story, and, as you know,
given the stuff they don't want you to know policy
on spoilers, this has been out long enough that a
spoiler warning need not apply anyhow, in a way that
doesn't have necessarily a huge impact on the plot. There
is a hapless character in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy named Rob McKenna. Rob McKenna is a taxi or
(02:41):
lorry driver who for his entire life has tried and
failed to get away from the rain that constantly follows him.
And he's got a little log book that proves it
has rained everywhere anytime he's been anywhere, no matter where
he goes, no matter what time a day it is.
And McKenna doesn't know that know why this happens. He
(03:05):
thinks he's just cursed. It turns out that the rain
follows him for a reason. It's a fantastic ongoing thread
in a fantastic series. And although Douglas Adams may not
have been aware of this, there may be a real
life example of a type of Rob McKenna, just as hapless,
(03:27):
if not as so sweetly Wes Anderson like wholesome. This
real life rain man, according to the story, gets his
powers not from the divine, but from the opposite of
the divine, something unclean, something infernal, a case of possession
(03:48):
or a case of abuse from beyond the grave, or
or something else. Fellow conspiracy realist, today we bring you
the strange tale of Don Decker. Here are the facts.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
In nineteen eighty three, which is I think the year
we were all born.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
No, mo, so you and me, I think.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Okay, just just you and me, pal all right, Sorry,
ben a twenty one year old man by the name
of Don Decker was having a really bad time. He
was serving four to ten months in the Monroe County
Correctional Facility of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and that was because he
(04:32):
had received stolen goods stolen property. On February twenty fourth,
about thirty eight years from this day as we sit
here and record, he was given a furlough to attend
his grandfather's funeral, a man named James Kishaw who lived
in the same town where Decker was incarcerated.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
So this was I mean, a funeral is often not
a happy event, right at least we can agree that
the majority of them are not supposed to be. This
was going to be somewhat of a personal milestone for
Decker because from a young age, and we're not too
clear on the specifics of this, but from a young age,
(05:14):
his grandfather had physically abused him. According to Decker, this
began when he was about seven years old, and in
his mind, the old man's death could lead him to
a new chapter in life, a fresh start. It could
free him from what he described as an evil that
it haunted him all his life. Like many victims, of
(05:39):
emotional or I guess social or physical abuse. He had
kept these occurrences a secret, had not told people. So
when he went to the funeral, you know, he saw
relatives and especially his parents, talking about this man who
(06:00):
had abused him in of course, the overly positive terms
that people often use for the newly dead. This funeral
was an emotionally exhausting experience for Decker. Understandably right while
these things are true, and seeing his parents talk about
his grandfather and what he felt were glowing, glorifying terms
(06:24):
made him furious. It incensed him, and so after the
funeral he said, you know, I'm gonna stay with my
friends instead of staying with my folks, I'm gonna stay
with a couple named Bob and Jeannie Keefer.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Yeah, and like we said, he's on furlough, so the
police are aware of where he is and it's not
like he just went off. He's there staying essentially under
their custody.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Important point and I love that you brought You brought
it back to the furlough. Furlough is given for is
only allowed if you are a pretty exemplary an inmate,
right obeying the rules in jail. So that means that
we know at this point nothing unusual had happened exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
They don't consider him a flight risk, They don't consider
him a danger to anybody, especially just you know, his
friends that he's going to go and stay with. They
also don't think the Keifers have anything fishy going on
or else that would have been an issue at least
that would that would be the understanding unless there were
extenuating circumstances that we don't know about or cannot prove.
(07:32):
So the Keefers were renting a house. It was on
Ann Street there in the city, and I just really quickly.
I always like doing this and always like talking about geography,
but just so you know, where we are really is
near the Pocono Mountains. Right near where this is taking place,
there is the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau. And you've heard
(07:57):
people talk about the Pocono's before the mountain range, and
this is I'm trying to look for a nearby place.
It's basically between Scranton, Pennsylvania and Allentown, Pennsylvania kind of
but to the northeast of Allentown. So that's physically where
we are. They're in this house on Anne Street, and
(08:20):
the night of the funeral, Decker's there with his friends,
the Kiefers, and Decker is upstairs. He's in the bathroom,
at least according to the story, he's like washing his hands,
getting ready for dinner. And according to him what he
told to the Kiefers, he suddenly felt disoriented, felt very confused,
(08:40):
and then he fell down to the floor and according
to him, was given some visions, some strange visions, including
a king. You will get into.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
It, well, well if the way he says, is a
man with a crown, which kind of like a rusher
law about any one who happens to be president. But yeah, yeah,
he had these, He had these visions. He felt disoriented
and confused, and that's something that a lot of people
report when they have visions for caused by any number
(09:15):
of medical or cognitive situations. According to Decker, and you
can see video by the way of him describing this,
and we'll we'll talk a little bit about the shows
that widely publicized or popularized this story. According to him,
scratches appeared unbidden upon his wrist. He rejoins the Keyfers.
(09:38):
He seems oddly subdued. Think of Jack Nicholson as the
Overlook Hotel is slowly getting its its psychic talents into
his mind. Yeah, almost almost understated hypnosis. And he sits
down to eat. Pictureum, we're editorializing a a little bit
(10:00):
picture and moving kind of robotically, going through the motions.
You can attribute this a lot to the grief of
losing a family member, even if it's one you didn't
particularly care for the shock of going to a funeral.
His pal Keefer notices Bob Keefer, that is, notices the
blood when Decker sits down to eat, and like any
(10:23):
friend would say, he asks what happened? What happened to you?
Decker tells him about this vision, this man in a
crown reflected in a window that does not physically appear
to be in the bathroom with him. He's got these scratches,
which he attributes to Satan, you know, kind of small
(10:43):
talk you probably have at dinner, right.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, yeah, and you can imagine to some evil presence
that's what he's attributing to. But in his mind it's
that would be Satan.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Right right, And that's an important division so or differentiation.
So a few minutes later, the family, here's this loud
kind of banging noise from above, and they noticed that
water is dripping from the walls and the ceiling.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
That's fun. Something similar happened at my daughter's mom's house
the other nice She had a friend sleepover, and they
didn't realize the toilet was just constantly overflowing, and nobody
noticed until water literally started seeping through into into her
mom's closet and ruined all of her clothes. So yeah, immediately,
(11:33):
the first thing your mind would go to is, Okay,
there's a nasty, nasty plumbing problem, something catastrophic, and you're
just scrambling to like figure out where it's coming from
and stop it. Right, But this seemed to be something different.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Yeah, there's never a good time for a plumbing problem,
as anybody who's experienced one can assure you, especially homeowners
and plumbers as well. It's because burst pipe, depending on
its location, can become very expensive, very quickly. So Bob Keefer,
(12:10):
he and he and his partner are renting this structure,
so they immediately phone their landlord and this is, you know,
like this, they're not renting from some big complex or company.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
They know the guy.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
His name is really cool, actually, it's Ron Van Why why.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
That's really cool. And you know, all the homeowners that
are listening right now are going, oh, thank god they're
renting right, yeah, because it really is expensive.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
But Ron of course doesn't feel the same way. He
owns the house, so he goes over immediately. Let's get
on the case, and the two guys set off to
investigate what they naturally assumed to be leaking pipes. Of course,
plumbing problems are likely on the rise at this time. Again,
(12:59):
it's February in It's February in Pennsylvania. Here, there's been
a storm earlier, so if the pipes are old enough,
you know, they may have burst, they may have had
problems with freezing and so on. But eventually, pretty quickly
they realize something that the police will also later realize.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
All of the.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Plumbing just it goes to the kitchen, in the bathroom
and there on the other side of the house from
where this leak is occurring. Like the whole plumbing system,
the whole circulatory system of the house, it's all toward
the back of the structure. Second decker appears to have
progressed from being kind of out of it and oddly
(13:41):
calm maybe in shock to a full on trance state.
This guy is in something meditative or approaching catatonic. This
prompts Keefer to call the police and think about it
from Bob's perspective, you know, yes, this is your friend.
Your friend is technically on vacation from jail, so you
(14:04):
want to be as above board as possible. The leaks, however,
are continuing. At the same time they appear to be
increasing at a worrying pace. Where the hell is all
this water coming from?
Speaker 2 (14:17):
This is the question, right, where's the water coming from?
And I want to jump back to this concept that
all of the plumbing is on the other side of
the house. And it's simply because I'm imagining them sitting
downstairs and then hearing that bang that you demonstrated Ben,
that loud banging from above them. I'm imagining the Keefers
(14:38):
and know where the bathroom is in location to them
above them. Right, you've probably been on a second floor before,
if you're aware of it, you know where the bathrooms
kind of are in relation to you. If they believed
that that sound came from the bathroom or from the
plumbing in the bathroom, you imagine they would you know,
(14:59):
look to the pla and think about it and being
in that general area and if that occurs, and you know,
depending on where the bank came from, because we don't
I don't have an exact you know, like geolocation of
was it above them and to the right, was it
above them to the left, but then the water was
coming down from the right, I don't have We don't
have that information necessarily, but it just made it. It
(15:21):
made it more curious to me, the fact that the
plumbing is way over there in the skeletal structure of
the house. Really, what I'm wondering is where did the
bang originate and where was the plumbing and were they
definitely in two completely different places. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
It's a good question, and it's one that, uh, it's
one that isn't specifically explored even in the subsequent attempts
at a police report. The cavalry arrives first. There are
two officers on the scene, officers John Baujean and Richard Woolbert.
(15:57):
By this point, from their accounts, water just wasn't just
leaking within the house, you know, kind of streaming down
the walls or whatever. In fact, Bob Keefer and ron
Van why when the police showed up, they were at
a loss to explain what was happening. They were saying, okay,
look just come in here, just coming. You got to
(16:18):
see it for yourself. It's weird. We need help. And
the police decided to enter the premises. And what they
found inside is less like a bunch of leaks. From
everything they could tell. It was literally raining inside the house,
not necessarily a torrential downpour, but the water appeared not
(16:39):
just to be obeying the patterns of rain you would
see outside. It appeared to be there appeared to be
violations of the laws of physics inside the house. The
old rules no longer applied. This stuff was falling upward
from the floor.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Yeah, I mean it was the There were reports from
the scene that it was literally defying gravity.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
And and there was no discernible source for the leak
of a leak, existence of a leak of the of
the water appeared to just be kind of being summoned
in some weird way. It was only happening in the
living room though, So it was like this localized like
storm cloud like you see in the cartoons. And the
(17:22):
police were absolutely at a loss. I mean, this isn't
something that they're they're really equipped to deal with. So
the police left the scene because they had to figure
out how to summarize all this craziness into some semblance
of a you know, report that wouldn't get them fired.
I guess uh. And then the the Kiefers went with
(17:44):
Don Decker to a nearby restaurant. So the landlord, Ron
Van Why called his wife, Romayne's fantastic name, and she
joined him at the house. They stuck around while everyone
else left, and then all of a sudd in the
rain stopped as quickly as it had begun.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, either the it's interesting too. One detail I'm wondering
about this is whether the police the tenant's definitely the homeowner.
Surely someone immediately said let's turn off the water, right,
that's step number one, But that's not really that's not
a detail that's really reported in this story here.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Well, yeah, and that's the thing. Ron and Romain know
that house, right, They know the ins and outs of
that house, where the pipes are. They've probably had to
fix things in the past. You would imagine, like, really,
what I want is more info from those two. And
I wish we had more of that.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
There may be a reason we don't. This restaurant across
the street is a pizzeria. It's owned by a lady.
At the time, it's owned by a lady named Pam Scraffano,
and she also gives interviews on video about this Everyone
we've named so far is on video at some point
talking about this story or appearing to talk about this story.
(19:02):
The program Unsolved Mysteries, which some of some of us
in the audience today may have loved as much as
I did in younger years. Unsolved Mysteries has Scriffano on
this episode talking about how she had earlier gone to
the Keifer's house, like, clearly this pizzeria was their cheers
(19:24):
right across the street. They serve pizza, they probably have beer.
What more do you want from life? And so she
knew these folks. She had apparently already went across the
street earlier to look at this bizarre meteorological phenomenon. Micro
meteorological phenomenon, will work on it. And when she saw
(19:46):
when she saw the Kiefers and Don arrive, apparently rain
started falling in the restaurant. Two she looked at Don's
odd behavior. He was still area out of it. And
I imagine this is my speculation here, folks, but I
imagine what happened. His dinner was ruined at the Kiefer house,
(20:08):
and they decided that, regardless of the chaotic universe in
which they live, they still wanted to get something to eat,
so they had gone to a pizza restaurant with a
very weird vibe. Pam is freaking out. She goes to
the cash register where she retrieves across the symbol of Christianity,
(20:31):
and she tries to give the cross to Dawn and
he can't hold it. He claims it burns his hand. Pam,
being of a somewhat religious bent, feels like she's cracked
the case. She tells the Keifers they need to take
him to a church for the process of performing an exorcism.
(20:51):
While we do not know the specifics of the conversation
that follows, we know that instead of going to a
church immediately, they went home because a lot of churches
are closed at that time.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Well, yeah, and they just ruined a ton of pizza.
I mean, think about how bad is soggy pizza. Nobody
wants that.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Nobody wants that as a party foul. To be sure,
all of this, by the way, is delightfully recreated in
that Unsolved Mysteries episode. It's during like the golden age
of Unsolved Mystery where like Robert Stack's hair is just perfect,
and like the experts that are on this particular episode,
one of them looks like a sort of a miniature
Ringo Star. I can't remember the guy's name. He's one
(21:32):
of the investigators that we're going to get to, one
of the two, so I don't remember which one he
was exactly, but he almost looks like Andy Circus in
like Lord of the Rings, but with like a Ringo
star like go tee, perfectly quaffed and like a bun.
It's something to behold, and then you know the thing
that's about to happen next, also beautifully dramatized. Remain confronts
(21:53):
Decker as he is in this like trance like state,
like a feuw state, and then she tries to, I
don't know, settle him down or kind of talk him down.
Pots and pans start banging around the kitchen, classic possession
one on one type stuff, and then they claim and
again it's beautifully done, and then the show that Decker
(22:16):
began to levitate off the floor as the cacophonous sounds
of pots and pans clanging and banging around began to
increase to a fever pitch. Then, in a scene you
might recognize from the movie The Exorcist, these unseen you
know things start slashing at Decker's skin, and these you
know cuts or scratches start to open up all over
(22:39):
him as he's supposedly levitating there, and they form the
shape of a cross, allegedly near the inside of his
elbow or like the crook of his arm.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
There.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Officer Boujean came back where he found Genie Keefer reading
the Bible an attempt to do her own kind of
diy exorcism on Decker, Bless her Heart. In a show
called Paranormal Witnesses, Baljean said that he too truly believed
that Decker was possessed, and he decided to call him
(23:11):
the big Guns. The Chief of Police, Gary Roberts.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
So Chief of Police Gary Roberts is an important part
of this story. He is convinced by the cops to
go visit this scene in person. When he gets there,
he says, okay, yeah, moisture it's moisture is not itself
(23:40):
a supernatural nor invidious thing. I understand this might be
a weird situation for you, key, for family. We've all
had a tough day. Things are going to be fine.
There's absolutely nothing unnatural going on. And we know there's
a bit of at least a verbal reprimand to his
(24:02):
employees because he orders them to leave and not to
bother filing a report. You know what I mean, Just
another night in another episode of Law and Order, Strausburg, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
This was certainly not the end. When we return from
a quick break, we will tell you what happened the
next day.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
So the next day, some officers return. There are two
other officers who are new to this story, but they've
heard about it over the past few hours. These are
officers William Davies and Officer John Rundle. They, along with Baujean,
(24:50):
kind of defied their boss and they were like, Okay,
maybe the police chief of police is not fully grasping
the enormity or the importan into this situation, or at
least the bizarreness of this situation. So they visit the
house themselves and Davies says Decker who is still there,
recoils when he offers Decker a gold cross, just like
(25:13):
Pam at the pizzeria. Decker drops it, claiming again that
it burns his skin. There's some kind of consistency there.
And then these officers, these police officers who are trained
to accurately report what they see, say that Decker is
lifted off the ground by unseen forces. Decker is also
(25:36):
on videos saying this and that he is thrown across
the room quote as though a bus had hit him,
and additional scratches appear on his neck. I haven't read
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a number of years,
but I'm pretty sure Rob McKenna just gets rained. I
don't think he gets thrown around, So that's another difference
(25:57):
if you're keeping track. Finally, on this next night, Ron Van,
why the landlord is able to convince a preacher to
come and attempt an exorcism. This is not the first
preacher he talked to. It's definitely not his first choice.
He had talked to several other religious figures, ministers and priests,
(26:17):
and they had all turned him down because, as you've
seen in previous episodes, have done like exorcisms one oh
one and so on. Exorcisms are something that religious institutions
take very very seriously because people have been hurt in
the past, and also you have to spend a great
(26:38):
deal of time figuring out whether it could be anything
other than a case of possession. Right, so you get
a lot of you if you are a religious authority
listening to today's episode, I'm sure that you have also
received a lot of strange calls from very upset and
(27:00):
scared people, and you've had, you know, you had to
realize that maybe this isn't an exorcism, Maybe they just
need someone to help them walk back from whatever ledge
they're on. Uh so this so he finally finds a
guy who says yes. Preacher arrives unseen, he begins to
pray as his bible out, Dawn begins to convulse violently physically,
(27:25):
and then the preacher performs some sort of ceremony. It's
definitely not, you know, obviously, the Catholic right of exorcism,
but whatever it is seems to work. People who are
present describe an intangible difference in the feeling, and not
to be dismissive, but they describe a change in the
(27:47):
vibe right of change in the energy of the of
the house, of the room, and then at the end
of one of these prayers, the rain stops and it
will will never appear in the key for home again.
So maybe this bizarre incident is over and Don has
(28:11):
just had a terrible furlough, But he still has to
go back to jail. He got convicted, he has to
serve a sentence.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
That's one of the nicer furloughs I've ever heard of,
where you get multiple days off rather than you okay,
you get to attend the funeral and then you have
to immediately return. That's a that's a very nice thing
that Don got to receive.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Seems pretty unusual, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
I don't know the practices, Yeah, but still a different thing, right,
a different experience than probably a lot of people have had.
But it doesn't stop here, you're right, And just a
few days later he ends up back in the jail.
He's going to do his thing, and while he was there,
(29:01):
it appears that whatever rituals took place a few days
prior that stalked the rain at the Keefer's house didn't work.
When he returned to incarceration, because now it's raining in
the jail.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Or yeah, at the very least it's described as rain,
but at very least water is a puring in a
way that seems inexplicable. We have a quote from Don
Decker where he says, they put me in a maximum
security cell. I was in there with another inmate, and
I was thinking I should make it rain in here,
and all of a sudden, water started coming out of
(29:38):
the concrete floor, and at that point I thought I
can do stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
And then yeah, he realized he's Storm. He's like, oh man,
I'm Storm. This is awesome, or.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Like you're you know, with the black cloud following him around.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Or like Rob McKenna, who is maybe a little bit
more of an ambitious robing kind of but but yeah,
he says, maybe this is something that I can in
some way control. There's a guard who's skeptical about it,
and it's like, oh, yeah, Decker, well if you can,
(30:18):
you can control rain, and that's why we're doing so
well in life. Locked up here in jail, why don't
you make it rain in the warden's office. The warden
at the time was a guy named Dave Keenholdy.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
He just started making it rain.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Sorry, just started making it rain. Yes, no, you're so so.
Warden Kinghold is also on video and he says the following,
I was sitting at the desk writing a report. I
was all by myself in the administration area. Nobody else
was around. It was a approximately eight in the evening
at the time. I didn't feel anything, but my shirt
(30:58):
was drooping down. And he goes on to say as
another officer entered and was going to tell him something
and was like, Warden, look at your shirt, and so
he looks down. He literally looks down at his shirt
and right around the center of his sternum, about four
inches long two inches wide, there was this huge spot
(31:18):
of water, and he says, I was startled. I was scared.
The officer was frightened. I didn't have an explanation of
why it happened. And so then the warden, OH, and
other people reported seeing this. So his cellmate saw it,
two guards saw it, janitor saw it. The warden saw
(31:41):
this stuff appear on his shirt, and the warden contacts
a guy named Reverend William Blackburn to attempt another like
another exorcism, a third exorcism for those of us keeping track,
at home.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
So then a third and final exorcism was attempted, and
this appears to perhaps have done the trick. Another reverend
by the name of William Blackburn meets Don in jail
and he sees with his own eyes this rain appear
apparently summoned by Don himself, like he said, Matt, and
(32:18):
he prayed over him, and the rain stopped. Who stopped
the rain indeed, or who will stop the rain? Apparently
it was it was William Blackburn was Creeden's clearwater revival reference.
Speaking of great references in the wake of this kind
of bizarre indoor weather thing or Ben as you nodded
to in the outline, inner weather shout out to Robert
(32:40):
Frost Don And these various witnesses still claim that they're
unable to explain where this was coming from, where this
indoor rain was coming from, And there are quite a
few people that saw it. So what's what's the deal?
What actually happened?
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Here's where it gets crazy. This is a story that,
as you said, still does not have an official explanation,
by which I mean it still does not have an
explanation that is considered one hundred percent factual by all
people involved. There are several possibilities, and not all of
(33:21):
these possibilities.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Are immediately apparent.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
So what makes this case unusual or remarkable in comparison
to other cases that have some similarities, is that there
are nine eyewitnesses, several of whom have their careers staked
on their ability to be accurate and credible, right, and
in recalling what they've encountered. Don himself, you know, we
(33:48):
could count him as an extra witness, but let's leave
him bracketed to the side. All of these nine witnesses
were willing to go on record saying that they heard, saw,
and felt unusual phenomena. But first importantly, and this is
where those shows can be a little bit misleading, not
(34:10):
all of these witnesses are saying there was something demonic
at play. The police chief right, was never convinced. Several
witnesses will. They'll go as far as saying they saw
something they can't explain. That doesn't make it necessarily supernatural.
And additionally, if you look at exorcisms overall, the claims
(34:34):
of creating rain indoors seem oddly specific and somewhat unprecedented.
It doesn't follow the exorcism tropes of the demographics and
people who tend to be possessed often children, predominantly women. Remember,
not all claims of possession or exorcisms are Christian and nature.
(34:55):
And the Decor case does include like a couple two big,
big common signs of what's considered to be possession, some
kind of levitation mysterious wounds and so on, levitation of
Don Decker himself, and then some kind of psychokinetic movement
of the pots and pans in the kitchen. But the
(35:18):
primary thing inexplicable rain wetness generated somehow by the human
mind or you know, by somehow some action or presence
of a human being that usually is attributed to stuff
like the old practice of rain makers, you know, people
(35:41):
who were paid to go out and do anything from
early science and cloud seeding to using their own allegedly
unique cognitive or spiritual abilities to bring rain to drought
stricken areas.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, it sounds to me, if it's real, more like
a superpower that is being unlocked through a highly stressful
situation or something, you know, way more so than a
possession by somebody. It sounds like he got extremely stressed
to the funeral and this abusive person in his life
(36:18):
that died. Then it went away after it feels like
being calmed down, whether or not the exorcism actually did
anything spiritually or it was just someone giving him attention
and calming him down, a lot of people being around him.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Art rate lowering endorphins.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Well, then it comes back when he gets back to
the stressful situation of being in prison. Right, so interestingly enough,
like to me, it's almost like it's being triggered through
some kind of stress or internal turmoil.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
It's a very Stephen Kingey type trope. Like it makes
me think of Carrie, you know, when she's picked on
and humiliated at the prom and then all of a
sudden she just caendo like fight or flight mode and
like burns everybody alive or Firestarter for example. You know,
a lot of these powers or latent abilities are brought
out by you know, stressful events that are triggered, and
(37:12):
then it's also usually beyond the individual's control or at
least you know to it to a large degree.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
And of course, fellow fellow comic fans, you'll call that
this is this is one of the common ways for
mutant powers to express and things like Marvel comics. It's
often tied to puberty in those sort of tropes, just
like or those sort of stories, as you'd say, not tropes,
(37:41):
just like in psyching carry as you mentioned earlier, Noel,
with this, we have to remember Don is at the
cusp of his early twenties, so his body is still
developing to that, to that theory, we don't know how much,
if any, medical research has been done on his brain, right,
(38:04):
which is another interesting question. And we also there hasn't
been a ton of research done on the house, and
we know that for sure. But let's so those are
interesting possibilities, they're interesting paths of thought. We have to
take another one, which is a little more nitty gritty,
(38:28):
and it's an unfortunate fact of the reality that Don
and these eyewitnesses were living in during the early nineties
when this case was publicized on those shows we cited earlier,
and it's an unfortunate reality of the world we live
in today. It's kind of the rise of reality television,
unscripted allegedly nonfiction programs with heavily edited interviews. Again, the
(38:53):
vast majority of people who learned about this story, especially
outside of the area between Allentown and Scranton, Pennsylvania. The
people learned about this learned about it because they were
watching stuff and I say this with love, there were
watching stuff that was meant to be entertainment, right, entertainment TV.
It is completely possible. We've explored this before. It's completely
(39:17):
possible that any of these witnesses, even down himself, may
have been manipulated or goaded in some way by the producers,
either into exaggerating their original statements or having their words
taken out of context. You know what I mean, Like,
if there's something like I bet Chief of Police Gary
Roberts was the most difficult interview for those producers. What
(39:39):
do you guys think?
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah, for sure? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Ben.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
To this end, I want to just point out exactly
what you're saying. It was nineteen eighty three when this occurred.
Then it wasn't until the nineties when it was retold
right on one of these one or more of these
scripted shows. This is something that Skeptic magazine points out.
Michael Shermer, the rights in that magazine. Why didn't anyone
(40:09):
think to snap any kind of photograph, take any kind
of evidence of this occurrence? Why doesn't that exist? We're
talking about days of this kind of thing happening, and
you know you're at the police station. You're talking about
a place where people are incarcerated, where pictures are taken
of people for mugshots. Why didn't somebody take a picture
(40:33):
of any of this stuff? It's just it feels strange.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Why did not anybody, for instance, take a sample of
the water? Right, especially because the water left will find
a physical impression. We know that there really was water,
that part is for sure. We're just now arguing over
how connected it was with down and where the water
came from. Right, be right. Memory is treacherous. Arguably one
(41:01):
of the most treacherous bodily processes is remembering something. And
then we have to look at the credibility of these shows.
As enjoyable as they are, these shows have an angle, right.
They want you to be tantalized, They want you to
be fascinated. They want you to leave with more questions
(41:24):
than you had when you started watching, and maybe one decision,
one answer, which is will I watch the next episode
of the show, And the answer is hopefully yes. Right,
that's what they're trying to get you to. They do
very well. There is an art and a craft of
this but it also means it's like telling these stories.
(41:46):
Making these narratives is like whittling a block of wood.
You have to get rid of some stuff for the
final product to have the shape you want people to see.
And that's why they don't invest a ton of time
get any possible mundane explanations that might be kind of boring.
They do have subject matter experts, you know, that's part
(42:08):
of the format of those shows, and the experts in
each of these programs are billed as paranormal investigators. Paranormal
investigators is a very large term, right. There's a lot
of stuff that fits in there, from people who believe
they are mediums to people who believe that they are
(42:29):
hardcore skeptics trying to debunk the idea of a haunted house,
you know what I mean. So the problem with describing
people as paranormal investigators wherever they fall on that spectrum,
is this, there is no widely accepted accreditation process. There's
no board or other authority that reviews you, you know,
(42:52):
like veterinarians have boards and the medical professionals have boards
to make sure that their research is up to date,
to make sure that their practices are sound and there
is no such thing as, for instance, a licensed paranormal investigator.
You can call anyone you want. There are plenty of
(43:13):
people who will issue you a certificate of some sort,
but there's not like a you can't go to the
DMV or your local courthouse, you know, like the place
you would get a gun license or a divorce or
a marriage license and say, hey, I need a judge
to sign off of me being a paranormal investigator. I tried,
(43:34):
I looked into it. It's just not a thing.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
And yet we've got priests that are like supposedly qualified
to do exorcisms. I guess maybe that's the closest thing
to having accreditation for being a paranormal investigator of some kind.
I mean, if you're a priest, you're showing up, you're
investigating a paranormal events, and then you are doing something
about it supposedly, and it's sanctioned by this very very
(43:58):
old established or organization. I just I find it fascinating.
I'm not trying to, you know, downplay anybody's beliefs or religion,
but particularly the idea of sanctioned exorcisms has always sat
a little oddly with me.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Well, it's interesting because we have to remember that the
church in a real way precedes the modern state. I
would argue religion precedes the modern state rather so in
a way. That's they're the oldest licensed paranormal investigators, even
if their license for you know, a very specific niche
(44:32):
of that sort of stuff. But that's an I think
that I agree, that's a good point. Let's pause, though,
Let's pause for a word from our sponsor. Will return,
and Will will look into the part of the story
that these programs did not like Don Decker's reign. We
(44:57):
have returned.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
Point here.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Objective scientific investigations, one in particular, do appear to have
a plausible explanation for what occurred. To your point, Matt,
these explanat this explanation occurs a number of years after
the actual events. There's a great report, series of reports
(45:21):
by the Poconot Record or pocon House that that details
the work of a researcher from New York located in
New Zealand, a medical sociologist named Robert Bartholomew. He became
interested in this case when a colleague referred it to
him and said, hey man, this is right up your alley.
(45:43):
I don't know what the explanation is based on the
info I have. Bartholomew's legit. He's accredited. He teaches at
Botany Downs Secondary College, or did at the time. He
wrote in a ton of journals on things that were
allegations of the pair normal. Right. And when I say
wrote in journals, we're talking about medical and sociology journals,
(46:06):
not you know, his own personal mole schemes or something.
And he had a pretty he had a pretty solid
theory for this.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
That's right. He did make it very clear that he
did not have any connections to Stroudsburg and kind of
considered himself as as a bit of an outsider. But
he said, quote, I can be seen as an impartial
third party. My goal is to understand what happened. Uh.
And he believes, I think, kind of like what we
(46:35):
were conjecturing earlier, that through this kind of perfect combination,
perfect storm of stress, the weather, and a particular type
of ice formation, Bartholomew believes that he can reasonably explain
what happened. So for him, it all goes back to
this thing called an ice dam like the Hoover Dam.
(46:56):
Ice damming is a phenomenon that occurs when warm enters
an attic like snow melt, like melt water from like
a roof seeping in, and then if temperatures drop after
the sunsets, ice can form and it can trap the
water that had previously melted with nowhere to go and
still at a temperature, keeping it in a liquid form.
(47:19):
Because of the internal heat of the house, the water
will eventually leak outside. And you can actually see a
pretty helpful image of this if you go to University
of Minnesota Extensions website and just type in what is
an ice dam and it shows the phenomenon. It really
is little pockets in the eaves kind of of an attic,
(47:40):
so it'd be like in a corner, for example. It's
a pretty pretty helpful image, but it's sort of like
what what's described, but I don't know, not.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
Quite well really what you'd be seeing here. You may
have seen this before because this is fairly common, like weeping.
You can see like your walls look like they're weeping,
like they're crying, or it's just dripping water down a
little bit. This has happened in older houses that I've
rented here in Atlanta, depending on what's going on with
(48:10):
the temperature, and accumulation. Sometimes it's it's fairly common. That's
all I wanted to say.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
So, Yeah, the reason I have a diagram there is
if you it is helpful to look at it if
you're curious. What you're seeing is a kind on the roof.
You're seeing a accommodation of water in three forms. The
isis toward the bottom, right, toward the eaves of the roof.
(48:38):
The snow is atop the damned water in the middle.
And what you know, The immediate question if you look
at this diagram or other ones like it, is how
does it get through the insulation while the insulation becomes sodden?
And that heat is going to be continual because you
(48:59):
have to keep a house warm right, ideally while you're
in snowy conditions, and so things like a snowstorm can
exacerbate that. But the big question, probably one of the
more tantalizing perps, is Okay, fine, I understand weeping, right,
I've seen leaks before.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
I know what.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Leaks are like.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Leaks do not shoot out from the bottom of the
floor like rain from a cloud.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And isn't it a pretty big coincidence that this occurred
at the house where don was then at the pizza place,
then again at the jail.
Speaker 3 (49:36):
Yeah, and it's and corroborated by various unrelated witnesses from
from these that didn't seem like they would have an agenda,
you know, I tend to I tend to believe folks
like that. It's it's hard, Yeah, it's hard to justify.
Of course not. Of course this wouldn't have And this
is a thing that happens in houses very rarely, like,
under very specific circumstances.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
Yes, So going back to what I'm building toward here,
or what I was building toward there, is that it
really the other problem with definition here is what defines rain.
A torrential downpour is rain, but a drizzle is also rain,
you know, And fog is just moisture in the air.
(50:18):
So is it possible that they were the people who
were witnessing this, We're seeing air heavy with moisture. But
was the moisture somehow being affected by the heat of
the house after it left the walls or after it
left that dam, you know what I mean? Was it
(50:38):
somehow being dispersed the way that a humidifier would or
something to the point about specificity of ice damming. Yes,
you're correct. The weather in the area, the weather on
Ann Street there does appear to be within the bounds
of what would what an ice stam need would need
to form. Daytime high were in the forties and fifties fahrenheit,
(51:02):
but then the lows drop down to the twenties and
the thirties. Also, Bartholomeles research shows that ice stamming can
be pretty common if a major snowstorm has just hit
an area where temperatures go above freezing during the day
to turn stuff into the water, and then below the
point of freezing thirty two degrees at night. This makes
(51:25):
perfect conditions for your classic ice stam and the Poconots
had been hit by a snowstorm about thirteen days before
all this stuff went down with Don Decker. So maybe
there was something unclean at play.
Speaker 3 (51:39):
But maybe it.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Wasn't a demon, or maybe it wasn't an angry ghost.
It was a dirty roof with a pile of unswept snow,
still unclean. And then also I totally get it. I've
been in snowy areas before. Why would you like just plow?
Like cleaning your driveway is enough. Who goes on their
roof all the time to clean off snow.
Speaker 2 (51:58):
I go there to clean off leaves.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Yeah, the leaves are the problem here in Georgia for sure,
although and I.
Speaker 3 (52:06):
Kind of like it.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
I think that's meditative. Also, you're not freezing, why you
do it? And then what happens to this house. Don's gone.
The keepers stay at the house for about two more years,
so they must not have been that freaked out. They
didn't see anything else super unusual. They couldn't get those
stains from the water off the walls. And we can't
(52:27):
do any on the scene testing or try to reenact
the event's unsolved mystery style because the house has been demolished.
And then the fourth point here, this one we can
maybe close with for the skeptics. You hate to see it,
and this is not victim blaming, but there's a question
(52:50):
about credibility on Don's part that becomes crucial to the
story a few years later or a few decades later.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yes, that's correct. There is a news story that we
stumbled upon from October of twenty twelve, when Don Decker
found himself back in the news. He'd been rather obscure
after these nineties television shows. He'd you know, you'd every
once in a while see an interview with him or
him talking about something over the years. But this was
the most high profile thing he was in the news
(53:19):
because he turned himself in to a federal court on
charges that he had set a blaze a business as
a restaurant in the Poconos. There was an event that
occurred in twenty eleven. This is in Wilkes bar a
(53:39):
different area there in the Poconos.
Speaker 3 (53:41):
A rival pizzeria.
Speaker 2 (53:43):
Perhaps I don't think so, but it does appear that
Don was involved because the restaurant owner, this is allegedly
the restaurant owner brought him in to do it on.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
Purpose, oh like for like an insurance money.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
Yeah. It was called Dana's Restaurant and tavern, not not
a not a pizzeri at all.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
And the owner was named Theodoros Kyriakopoulos. I think I
got that right. And this was located at five hundred
Sterling Road there in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. So he got
the arson penned on him. A grand jury charged the
pair with mail fraud, criminal conspiracy, and use of fire
to commit a federal felony. Ouch and this is mail.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
Fraud because you know, there was an insurance claim involved, right.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
That that might be an unfair assumption on.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
Our maybe, but it's why else would.
Speaker 1 (54:36):
Someone just want to see the world burn or.
Speaker 3 (54:39):
At the very least certain restaurants. But this is important,
right because other than Decker himself, uh, the events seemed unrelated.
But his involvement in this Arson scheme really calls his
entire credibility. I mean, you know, he was he was
pinched the first time for receiving stolen goods. Now he's
committing mail fraud in Arson. You know, it seems really
(55:02):
sketchy his whole kind of account of things. But again,
there are others that are that are seeing this happen.
But it does indicate a strong ability or willingness at
least to tell stories to the public.
Speaker 1 (55:17):
Right, well, I had it from my mind. It's more
that it could be taken as indicating his overall willingness
to portray a false narrative. I don't know, I don't
I don't know if it's fair to say it's strong willingness,
but it's definitely there's definitely a proven case where he
was totally fine with doing that. Maybe that's from desperation, right,
(55:40):
because people can be driven to crimes of necessity. Maybe
that's a maybe that's a completely unrelated event because people
have bad stuff happen and people make unrelated mistakes in
their lives, or or you know, maybe the devil made
him do it. So at this point, we want to
(56:03):
hear from you, what do you think, folks. Does the
proposed scientific solution for this bizarre rain well, does it
hold water wamp womp or was there something else at play?
And if so, what, Because I'll be honest, like, the
the ice standing seems a really good explanation for how
(56:28):
water could get into the house, if not through the pipes.
But from the eyewitnesses explanation, it doesn't. It sounds like
a lot of them grew up in an area where
they would have been familiar with ice stamming, right, Like
they would have known that certain types of weather can
cause certain types of leaks. And this from their descriptions,
(56:49):
at least from the way they're depicted describing these things,
it doesn't. It doesn't appear they thought that's what was
going on.
Speaker 2 (56:56):
Yeah, it looks, at least on camera in the in
the things that have been shot for those unscripted series
like it is. It is much more of a there's
much more water in these places than you would find
if there was moisture in between the walls or the
(57:16):
ceiling or something and it was just dripping out from
the drywall or you know, whatever the wall was made of.
At the time, it seems like more, but again, we
don't know. I've been I think the most convincing thing
to this entire story or the eyewitness accounts of these
police officers, simply because it you know, you listen to
(57:38):
them who they've given interviews. I believe them that they're
actually police officers, that they actually went through this stuff,
because they appear to be baffled by it. And these
are these are you know, as an occupation where you're
trying to find answers for things, especially if you're an investigator.
Maybe not necessarily to the extent that I'm thinking of,
(58:01):
if you're you know, just an officer who is on
the street or something responding to calls. But this, like,
I believe them that they saw something strange that they
could not define or explain.
Speaker 1 (58:16):
And we want to hear from you, especially if maybe
you've encountered something like this that you are at a
loss to explain. We would love to hear your story.
We try to be easy to find online. We're on Facebook,
We're on Instagram, we're on Twitter. We particularly like to
recommend our Facebook page. Here's where it gets crazy when
you could share your personal experiences, your opinions of this
(58:41):
case with the best part of the show, your fellow listeners.
But hold on, you might be saying, I do know
what happened to Don Decker, and I hate social media
because those are somehow related. I'm freestyling here, folks, But
the point is, if you don't care for social media,
you can also give us a call directly.
Speaker 3 (59:01):
We have a phone number.
Speaker 2 (59:02):
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(59:45):
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Speaker 3 (59:58):
We are conspiracy heeartradio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
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