STDWYTK Presents: The Tale of the University Six, Part I

In today's episode, Bill, Mark and Neil receive a strange package with no return address only to find it contains a mysterious video that may, for the first time, reveal the true fate of the infamous University Six. 

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
You're entering another world, one just a few feet beyond
the safe glow of the street light, into the dark.
One slight step off the edge of the map, into
the land of monsters. Today's tale a disturbing blend of
fiction and fact. Three intrepid podcasters stumble across a story

(00:25):
more disturbing than they ever could have imagined. In partnership,
Which Stuff they Don't Want You to Know? Presents the
tale of the University six. From UFOs to psychic powers
and government conspiracies, History is riddled with unexplained events. You

(00:47):
can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't
want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Mark, my
name is Neil. They call me Bill. Today we've got

(01:10):
a strange one, folks. It's part mystery, part possible cover up,
and just maybe part paranormal. So, as you know, we
spend a lot of time on the show making sure
anyone who wants to reach out to us can do so.
We opened a door, you could say, and over the
years we've encountered all manner of amazing, frightening allegations, but

(01:32):
this one is a little bit different. We received notice
of this story from a source that wishes to remain anonymous,
and we're making this the first of a two part series.
Let's dive in. Here are the facts, Yes, the facts,
the historical facts. The story, UM, as we can tell,
at least as near as we can tell, starts somewhere
around the dawn of the twentieth century. UM. United States

(01:55):
was quite a different place back then. This was before
the advent of the internet, why spread use of television,
before people traveled widely the the Interstates or airplanes. But
it was also in a lot of ways quite a
dangerous time throughout the eighteen hundreds. Yeah. Over the course
of the eighteen hundreds, uh, the industrial eras of Western
Europe and the US, as well as the Civil War

(02:18):
in the United States led to many disastrous things. We've
talked about the dangers of war in the past. One
thing that's not examined as often is that it led
to an increase in mental health patients. We're talking about PTSD,
even though it wasn't recognized as such as the time.
We're talking about the shock of entire populations fundamentally changing

(02:40):
their lifestyles from an agrarian to an industrial economy, huge
numbers of immigration from one country to another. This all
spelled trouble for mental health. And previously, most people with
mental health issues or with physical handicaps were taken care
of by their families or be a hodgepodge of institutions.

(03:02):
You've heard about these in the past, sometimes state sponsored,
often religious orders. But now a lot of these families
who would have previously taken care of their of their
relatives found themselves living in cramped urban environments, working very long,
demanding jobs. They had neither the time nor the space
to care for their loved ones. But there was a solution. Asylums.

(03:28):
Oh boy, just the name kind of strikes fear in
the hearts of many people. I would say, me, I
think just thinking about abandoned asylums that I've visited were seen.
I mean, it's c what a banded asylums? If you
visited mag you give me the Jews there. Well, we've
talked about it on this show before. There was one
that is now a large park in Dunwoodie, Georgia, that

(03:50):
I visited on several occasions. Oh my gosh, Okay, yeah,
forgive me for sure. But the you know, asylums were
built as a way to house people who were in
mental health crises, who had who had problems, who are
dealing with the things been and Nol just described. And
there were often facilities that housed a ton of people,

(04:13):
a lot a lot of people, and the funding wasn't
always there to keep them running, you know, in the
way they probably should. And also, guys, think about the science.
We've talked about it on our Human Experimentation episodes, the
science that was behind treatment for people in these asylums.
Science quotes, air quotes, Well there there there are a

(04:35):
couple of things here. They're really importantly. These asylums sometimes
weren't purpose built. They may have been older things like
manner estates or even castles that were repurposed, right, and
came with dark histories of their own. Uh. Mental illness
as defined back then was very very loose and quite unscientific.

(04:58):
You know, there would be people with psychological conditions, but
there might also be for instance, women who did not
want to be an arranged marriage right or uh were
speaking out for their own personal rights, and they were
treated as though they were insane. There was also a
great deal of antagonism against what we're considered to be

(05:21):
the mentally ill. They were believed to be a danger
to the greater population. Asylums then were not necessarily rehabilitative
in their in their goal. Instead, they inspired to be
um islands of quarantine, right to imprison, to house what

(05:44):
they saw is the unfit. Yeah, and I mean a
lot of these quote unquote treatments like you said, I
mean things like lobotomy ees and you know, shock therapy,
fever therapy, UM, you know, purposely induced insulin commas were
akin to like medieval torture we might think of as
ways of getting people to talk, you know, like in uh,
prisoner of war type situations. Even I mean really really

(06:06):
gnarly stuff that would have felt much more at home
like in a medieval dungeon. UM. Not to mention that,
you know, we have isolated examples of folks in charge
of some of these types of facilities using their patients
to experiment on, essentially to um you know further what
they thought of as their life's work. Yeah. And it's

(06:28):
not hyperbolic to say it was somewhat of a wild West.
These asylums quickly become overcrowded. There's not very much in
the way of substantive, rigorous oversight. And as you said, Matt,
there wasn't a lot of funding. Also, the staff didn't
really know how to deal with many many of the

(06:49):
conditions they encountered. These new mental health treatments that were
introduced were often not subject to scientific methodology, and the
families of the patients often did not have any kind
of guarantee of access to their relatives. So if you
were struggling or I loved when in your family struggling

(07:11):
with mental health issues in the early nineteen hundreds in
the United States, it would be on your family to
take care of them. But what often happened is the
family would go to a doctor and they would ask
this doctor to say, you know, whether or not a
patient should be institutionalized. And it was very common for

(07:33):
these patients to be locked up regardless of whether they want,
they gave consent, or whether they had the capability legally
to consent to something like this, And about seventy percent
of those patients were hospitalized involuntarily during this time. The
idea was that you know, you're you as a family
or making a sacrifice for a greater good. People believed

(07:57):
at this time that They believed that mental illness was heritable,
and their logic was that if you could eradicate mental
illness quarantining it the way that you would quarantine people
have suffered from a physical disease, then you would eventually
eliminate the disease altogether. And what happened to the people

(08:18):
who were the carriers of these, you know, so called diseases,
we're not saying that. We think that that's just how
medicine at the time approached it. Well, it didn't really
matter what happened to them, just keep them out of
the public square. So these patients, which could be called prisoners,
shared overcrowded rooms, absolutely no privacy, very little way in

(08:40):
the way of hygiene. If the staff is abusive to you,
there's no one you can tell about it. Uh. The
food is often inadequate, um, sometimes spoiled or rotten, and
the rooms are locked very much. Is like a prison.
If there was a fire or someone acted violently, there
wasn't any way to escape. And it isn't just the doors,

(09:01):
you know, it's the windows too. There's that there's a
facility here in Atlanta that is gosh. I want to say,
I don't know if it's c d C. I can't
remember which institution now runs the building, but it's often
rented out for filming in Atlanta right now. But it
used to be a mental institution of some sort of

(09:21):
some kind of asylum where you can see this exact
thing with the doors that are fully secured, uh, where
you'd have to have a staff member opening that door
either way, and the windows are all fully barred up,
like all up and down this this rather tall building.
It's very creepy. It kind of reminds me of I

(09:42):
think a while back, guys, we talked about the willow
Brook mental institution that was on Staten Island. There was
a there's an expose on that facility a while ago.
That's that really just showed the reality of all the
things we've been describing thus far in the episode. Yeah,
Geraldo Rivera actually cover willow Brook a while back. Yeah, uh,

(10:03):
in willow Brook fifty years later with Heeraldo Rivera. So
do check that out if you want a gripping and
in no small way disturbing exploration of what we're talking about. Yet,
some patients were given menial task and this was not
to be clear, this was not so much to engage
them in a healthy stimulation as it was to keep

(10:28):
costs down for the institutions, so they might garden vegetables,
they might do basic cleaning, maybe laundry, stuff like that.
But many of them were simply locked away and sometimes forgotten.
And this is to your earlier point. No, this is
the age of treatments that would clearly be seen as

(10:48):
tortured to any upstanding medical professional today. Lombotomies, as you mentioned,
UH seizure therapy, which is purposely inducing seizures UH. Insulin
comas also purposely induced something that I had not heard
of called fever therapy. That is where you literally give
folks malaria to induce some fever. Yeah, to try and

(11:11):
get the other bad stuff out. I guess you know
what it would be interesting to hear a doctor defend
that practice. Well. I mean again, a lot of this
stuff really has the ring of like trepid nation, like
drilling into the skull to release demons, or you know,
like leeching or blood letting, and lobotomy is in particular

(11:32):
are barbaric because when lobotomies were in their heyday, medical
professionals did not know enough about the workings of the
brain to understand what they were doing. They were just
they were just giving people brain damage. To be clear,
no one walked out of a lobotomy better than they
were in the beginning. There were also ice baths, deep

(11:54):
deep isolation, think like supermax prison level, constant physical restraints,
being hide down almost twenty three hours a day, stuff
like that. And obviously these treatments tended to do more
damage than good. Sometimes they resulted in death. And while
there are many, many examples tragically of these houses of

(12:16):
horror masquerading as halls of healing, there is one case
that is fairly obscure but notorious locally. It is the
story of Homestead State School and Hospital, which is sometimes
known as the Black Castle. But what was this exactly?
We're gonna pause for word from our sponsor and then

(12:37):
we'll be back with more and we're back. So Homestead
was built over the course of several years between nineteen
o three to nineteen oh a, just a couple of
miles outside of a place called Hazard, Pennsylvania. Seems appropriate
given where we're heading again. This is during what could

(13:00):
very rightly be called the dark days of medical science
and treatment. People struggling with mental illness, however it may
have been loosely defined, were treated not as people who
might need help, but as the criminally insane um. This
was also the age of eugenics, uh, the idea that
certain individuals did not deserve to be part of society

(13:23):
due to UH perceive traits, whether it be inherited from
their lineage that was seen as being unclean in some way,
or the color of their skin. A number of things
could have been lumped in with eugenic kind of casting
out of certain individuals, and paramount on that list was
this this idea of having mental illness. And then in

(13:48):
nineteen thirteen the Pennsylvania legislature they appointed this new thing,
it's called the Commission for the Care of the Feeble Minded,
which stated that disabled people were you know, fit for
something like citizenship, something that we recently talked about with
Baritunday actually taking part in the democratic system. They thought

(14:09):
the disabled wouldn't be able to do that, or perhaps
shouldn't be able to do that, and that they even
posed a menace to the peace, which just feels awful. Yeah,
you know, no bad person thinks they're a bad person, right,
and nobody wakes up and says I'm the villain today.
Well I do, but just today, but just today. So

(14:31):
this commission was dead set not on helping people who
are disadvantaged by a perceived condition, physical or mental. Instead,
they were dead set on preventing what they called the
intermixing of the imprisoned in the general population. Again, they
believe that by quarantining these people to whom they objected,

(14:54):
they could root out mental conditions from the population overall.
And how do we know this, It's not just our opinion.
In one of their biennial reports, Homesteads Managing Board of
Trustees literally explicitly quoted a leading eugenicist of the time,
a guy named Henry H. Goddard, who could be uh
an episode all his own. Here's what they quoted from Goddard,

(15:18):
And again this is in a government report. Quote, every
feeble minded person is a potential criminal. The general public,
although more convinced today than ever before that it is
a good thing to segregate the idiot or the distinct imbecile,
they have not yet been convinced as to the proper
treatment of the defective delinquent, which is the brighter and

(15:38):
more dangerous individual. Important to note here mental health institutions
of this era in the US and abroad were also
used to silence women, silence women's silence people who were
maybe female, identifying anybody who was seen by the current

(15:59):
status quo being difficult, and they were subjected to torture,
lobotomies in particular isolation incarceration uh and they were also
often subjected to abuse during these times. And to be clear,
this went across demographics. You can find infamous cases of

(16:19):
women from very well to do families being subjected to
these operations at the behest of their own relatives. Makes
me think of the long Lost Kennedy exactly, yes, exactly,
but something went wrong at Homestead, even by the standards
of the time. Rumors began to spread, rumors of unorthodox,

(16:43):
ghoulish experiments to the staff of Homestead. This was the
forefront of medicine the greater good, the rational being that
the ends justified the means in pursuit of some imagined
greater good. To the few outsiders who were able to
learned about what was happening, the reality was much much worse.
Whispers proliferated, and in hush tones, locals would begin sharing

(17:08):
legends of something they called the laboratory. Oh man, so
these are these are some crazy rumors this this quote laboratory.
We've heard about this, by the way us on this show. Uh,
these rumors were although just rumors, right, that's all it was.
It was like tales that you would horror tales you

(17:29):
tell around a camp fire about this really genuinely creepy
place that had bad stuff going on, and you know,
arguably bad people doing bad things. It's winning combination, yeah, right,
until there was a fire. And as we talked about before,
these these buildings are so tightly controlled and sealed. When
there's a fire on the inside of one of these buildings,

(17:52):
it's gonna be horrific, especially for the people that can't
open their own doors. Any of the areas are subterranean
as well. Um, it would just be nearly impossible to escape. Absolutely,
and so the institution met a fiery end of sorts.
Throughout the nineteen sixties into the nineteen eighties, time wound

(18:14):
on and America moved on. There were a few stories
about the place, and now it was abandoned, or maybe
not all the way abandoned, but they quickly faded from
the news. Ensure there were other stories to focus on,
you know, the Vietnam War, other wars, domestic chaos. But
let's be honest, this remains part of the past that

(18:37):
American culture would rather forget. Except not everyone. You see.
Sometime in the mid nineteen nineties, a group of history
students at a local university decided to explore the abandoned
ruins of the so called Black Castle as part of
a group project. They wanted to determine once and for
all the doom they came to homestead. Hashtag no Lovecraft.

(19:02):
But that's that's the Lovecraft reference. And after a word
from our sponsor, we'll tell you what we've discovered. Here's
where it gets crazy. So you may hear whispers of
this group referred to as the University six. And as

(19:24):
we record, none of these students, these uh, these bright
young minds, have been seen since and remain officially missing today.
So what what exactly happened? Well, as we do on
this show when there's something like this going on, we
try and call primary sources. We try and call you know,
reporters and in this case, law enforcement, just to see

(19:46):
if we can get any actual details, right, because there's
not much just in the public sphere that we could find, uh,
but we didn't get anything at least out of the
local police department there or the sheriff's office. So we're
at a bit of a loss. Everything just kind of
went cold until it seems quite recently. You see, over

(20:07):
the past several weeks we've been receiving some strange materials
and artifacts that appear somehow related. Uh, it's implied that
they're related to these long forgotten disappearances. They appear for
the first time to just maybe describe the fate of
the University six and you know, Mark Neal as as

(20:29):
we all know, as we talked about off air, these
things are disturbing, but they're indistinct. We see this pretty
often whenever we get a message about a purported cryptod
or UFO. You can see maybe there's something there, but
knowing the providence of that is kind of difficult. Is
it just a floating colored blob? Is it an artifact

(20:50):
of the technology used to obtain the image? One thing
is for sure. Looking at it, it seems as though
the um, the photog aographer, whoever they might be, was
maybe in a hurry, or they're really freaked out or
they're a really bad photographer. So yeah, the still images,

(21:12):
all the problems you just described, Ben are present in
what we've seen here. But there is another thing. There
is a video where if you don't have such a
steady hand, or you are freaked out, or you're running
or something, you're still gonna create you know, hundreds, if
not thousands of still images at once. Those are a
little bit easier to go through. And we do, in

(21:32):
fact have a video. And uh, it's weird, man. It
was just a USB drive, you know, plug into your machine,
which don't do you know, generally don't do that. Okay,
even if it's sent to you from a known address,
don't put a USB drive in your machine. We put
it in a work computer. Well, let's play the clip.

(21:54):
Is this thing on? She's look nice? Bad? We have
to spend all weekend digging through some old junk. It's
called research. Emily, you know you have a four point
are pretty much a genius. But don't waste the better
in that thing. I am documenting our research. The look

(22:21):
at this place. It's crazy city. Here are we early
It's on the rest of the class. Okay, let's let's

(22:47):
pause here and unpack this. Um, you know, all three
of us had done i think video projects and audio
projects in college, so we know what it's like to
not work with the best of equipment. Mm hmm. Yeah.
This really does have the feel of kind of like
a college, you know, student film kind of vibe. Well,

(23:08):
let's let's talk about what we're seeing here, guys. Um,
we're clearly exterior. We've got a what appears to be
a man and a woman in the shot. Uh, they
are describing what appears to be some kind of assignment
or group project. I guess where they're going there, physically
traveling to this place that we've been describing, this black

(23:31):
castle or homestead, and they're talking about research that they're
going to be doing there. I mean, it seems pretty innocuous,
at least at first. Yeah, and we can tell a
few things if we're just being objective here. One of
the speakers is named Emily, or at least the other
speaker calls that person Emily. And this matches up with

(23:53):
what we know from the police, because there was a
person named Emily Waterhouse listed amongst the missing students. That does,
to be fair, that does not necessarily mean we're hearing
from the same, Emily, I would say it's intriguing, nonetheless,
and there are a couple of other things that stood
out to us. Another thing that does stand out that
leads a bit more credence to this perhaps being the
university six Uh. One of the male character in this

(24:17):
part of the video mentions that there are other students
that are already inside, or he thinks at least they're
already inside the facility. I'm not sure how many, like
I don't think he gives a specific number, but you know,
you can at least tell that there are multiple people
who are supposed to already be there. And I'm already
shouting at these people like don't go don't go ahead.

(24:38):
I mean, it doesn't seem like a good idea that
the shaky cam aspect of it, it already is making
me feel like something really horrible is going to happen.
Um very Blair Witch ask yes, agreed. And we also
hear the speakers talk about a three day trip, so
this gives us a rough sense of their internal timeline.

(24:58):
And to your point, mark Uh, it does appear that
they are arriving late, perhaps because they are assuming these
other folks are there. The camera does give us a
glimpse of the second speaker, not explicitly named by the
one called Emily, but this student looks to be one
Matt Kavanaugh according to police records, another one of the

(25:22):
missing students. But this is just the first part. Let's continue.
The next clip appears to jump ahead in time. At
least I thought so, because, as you said, the first
shows a daytime exterior of the site and then entering
into it. But the second clip seems to take place
either in the evening or in the dark. Here what

(25:51):
we've only been here for five minutes and your free
t already is it? You know? The first thing that
occurs to me is, um, this definitely feels like it

(26:12):
took place in the early nineties or maybe even the
late eighties, because it's like they're not able to phone
their friends ahead. They don't seem to have cell phones. Um,
the clothing is very of that period. You know, if
only they had had for cell phones, they could have
called ahead or at least known where to find their
their their friends. Um. But you know, then we wouldn't

(26:33):
have a story or fully they'd turned the radio on
for a minute so we could hear whatever the hit
you know the top forty songs were that would have
been cool, or if they had said we're recording on
month day, which would have been very helpful. And you
may be thinking, well, cameras at this time in the

(26:54):
nineties typically did have because they were running on tape, right,
they typically did have that time code time stamp. But
the quality is so bad that you can't really make
it out. Uh, And we'll get to it in a second.
But there are some serious questions about the providence of this,
of what happened to this cop this content before it

(27:15):
got to us. It reminds me of that what's that
show that was on Netflix recently that was about like
kind of like a dude who did like forensic rebuilding
of videotapes, archie archive any one. This has the feel
of something that's been like reassembled in some way after
being perhaps heavily damaged. For now, we have to brack

(27:36):
at the idea of something moving in the background there
because there's just not enough information to clearly distinguish who
it could have been. Um, just you know, looking at
the footage, guys, I, like you said, Bill, I can't
conclusively say there was a thing there, but it looks
like something, like you said, a humanoid figure of some

(27:58):
kind that's of a shape in the Yeah. Well, in um,
let's the other thing. One of the other people in
the in the footage here mentions being cold and like
hitting a cold spot, which is a very common thing
that we've heard from you know, from you from listeners
as well as from our research, that coincides with some
kind of let's say, interaction with something from the other side,

(28:23):
if it exists, and if there is some kind of
interaction truly happening, a cold spot or coldness is often
associated with it, right, And to be fair, it doesn't
look like they have equipment to measure that temperature, right,
so it's working off their personal sensations at this point. Also,
we haven't actually heard or seen the other four students, right,

(28:47):
or whatever group they're supposed to be meeting up with.
But of course this is not the entirety of the
footage we've received. And let's talk a little bit about
the footage, because you can tell we have some serious
issues with it. We spent some time looking over the
video files themselves in depth, running them through a couple
of different filters, and not to get to in the
weeds about it. But one of the important things you

(29:09):
want to do when you're doing any kind of forensic
research in the footage like this is you want to
search the meta data. Meta data would plausibly tell us
when something was actually created, right as long as the
meta data isn't messed with. But when this was sent

(29:31):
to us, it appears that someone had intervened somewhere in
the chain of custody between this was when this was
originally filmed and when we got it. It does seem
like when it was digitized, maybe there was some tampering
that occurred, or maybe just error, or maybe just a
piece of software that automatically altered it. But who we

(29:52):
don't know. We can't confirm. It's just different, so we
you know, full disclosure, folks. We went back on fourth
on whether to air this footage because we thought it
could be possibly a prank. You know, we're fans of pranks.
We said, well, what if it's genuine. Due to the
quality of this footage as well as our confirmation that

(30:14):
somebody probably did mess with the source data, it is
honestly hard to tell. But if it is genuine, then
the last thing we want to do is put anyone
in danger for sure. So once again we contact with
local authorities and we sent copies of the files, and
after a few days, we actually gave them a call. Uh.
And while they did acknowledge they received our package, they

(30:36):
had absolutely nothing to say about what we had sent them,
at least not yet, right. We just to be fair,
we only did that as a cautionary measure, right in
case this is real, maybe it's not, Maybe it is,
we figured at least give it to them in case.
And since they did not explicitly forbid us from airing this,

(30:58):
we made the decision to put it on now. And
that's where we're gonna leave the story for today. We
will continue uh stuff they don't want you to know
as normal, but as we learn more, we will record
a second update here and the investigation will continue. And
so that is our show. Thank you so much. As always,

(31:18):
tune in for our upcoming episodes on the way too soon. Okay, well, uh,
we're we're wrapped. How was it, doozy? That was a
nutty one, that's for sure. Yeah. To be honest, I'm
a little weirded out. We kind of even put this
out guys, because I maybe they really did see something

(31:42):
when they were down there in that in that place.
I don't know. Yeah, Mark, you're the video expert, but
just between us, it kind of looked like a clown.
Well like I didn't want to say that, right, it
was clown like uh in shape and form, that's for sure.

(32:02):
Ye have big weird nose too, very like snazzy bulbous. Yeah.
I'm just kind of upset that the cops didn't like,
immediately get back to us and at least say, oh, yeah, okay, whatever,
this is nothing, or thank you or something. It's very odd, right, Yeah,
I mean the public information officers are doing their best,

(32:22):
but their hands are tied. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. Um,
it's a weird one. Hang on out, someone's at my door.
Oh shoot, okay, bill, Um, do we know what we're
covering next Tuesday? What? It's another package? What? It's another package?

(32:44):
And it looks just like the one we got with
all the photos and the thumb drive. Is there a
return address? No? Okay, let's meet up,