March 17, 2021 • 59 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to
(00:25):
the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul mission controlled decads. 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 after we gave everybody a
(00:46):
bit of a surprise with our colleagues code named Doc
and Danish Schwartz giving us a fantastic exploration of the
terrible history between the US and why. Thank you to
everyone for tuning into that episode. If you haven't yet
check it out, immediately do it now and then come back.
(01:07):
We'll be here. It was a great episode. I really
really enjoyed it as a listener. So so yeah, huge
things and shout out to them and uh today's episode.
I thought an interesting way to begin this would be
to talk about UM, one of one of the most
famous sci fi fantasy series in history. Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's
(01:30):
Guide to the Galaxy. It's it's the kind of whimsy
that we might need to balance out today's story. Uh,
this is 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.
(01:55):
There's a hapless character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
named Rob McKenna. Rob McKenna is a taxi or 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
(02:16):
has rained everywhere anytime he's been anywhere, no matter where
he goes, no matter what time of day it is.
And McKenna doesn't know that I know why this happens.
He thinks he's just cursed. It turns out that the
rain follows him for a reason. It's fantastic ongoing thread
in a fantastic series. And although Douglas Adams may not
(02:40):
have been aware of this, there may be a real
life example of a type of uh Rob McKenna, just
as hapless, if not as um so sweetly Wes Anderson
like wholesome. This real life rain Man, according to the story,
gets his path hours not from the divine, but from
(03:03):
the opposite of the divine, something unclean, something infernal, a
case of possession or a case of abuse from beyond
the grave, or or something else. Fellow conspiracy realist, today
we bring you the strange tale of Dawn Decker. Here
(03:25):
are the facts. In nineteen eighty three, which is I
think the year we were all born. No, okay, just
just hearing me, alright, sorry, man, a twenty one year
old man by the name of Don Decker was having
a really bad time. Uh. He was serving four to
(03:45):
ten months in the Monroe County Correctional Facility of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania,
And that was because he had received stolen goods stolen property.
On February thirty eight years from this day, as we
sit here and record, he was given a furlough to
(04:07):
attend his grandfather's funeral, a man named James Kishaw who
lived in the same town where Decker was incarcerated. So
this was I mean, a funeral is often not a
happy event, right, at least we can agree the majority
of them are not supposed to be. This was going
to be somewhat of a personal milestone for Decker because
(04:31):
from a young age, and we're not too clear on
the specifics of this, but from a young age, 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
(04:54):
from what he described as an evil that it haunted
him all his life. Like many victims of emotional or
I guess social or physical abuse, he had kept these
occurrences a secret, had not told people. So when he
(05:14):
went to the funeral, you know, he saw relatives and
especially his parents, talking about this man who 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,
(05:38):
and seeing his parents talk about his grandfather and what
he felt were glowing, glorifying terms made him furious. It
had sensed 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 f Yeah, And like we said,
(06:02):
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. Important point, uh,
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 uh inmate right or
(06:26):
obeying the rules in jail. So that means that we
know at this point nothing unusual had happened exactly. 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 Keefers have anything fishy going on or
else that would have been an issue at least that
(06:47):
that would that would be the understanding unless there were
extenuating circumstances that we don't know about or cannot prove.
So the Keefers were renting a house. It was on
Ann Street there in the city and Uh, I just
really quickly. I always liked doing this and always like
talking about geography. But just so you know, where we
(07:08):
are really is near the Pocono Mountains. Right near where
this is taking place, there's the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau.
And you've heard people talk about the Poconos before the
Mountain Range, and this is I'm trying to look for
a nearby place. It's basically between Scranton, Pennsylvania and Allentown,
(07:32):
Pennsylvania kind of but to the northeast of Allentown. So
that's physically where we are there in this house on
Ann Street, and the night of the funeral, Deckers there
with his friends, the Keefers, 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
(07:55):
to him what he told to the keepers, uh, he
suddenly felt disoriented, felt very confused, 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 it well, well if the way he says,
(08:17):
is a man with a crown, which kind of like
a Russian law about anyone who happens to the president.
But yeah, he had these He had these visions. Uh,
he felt disoriented and confused. And that's something that a
lot of people report when they have visions for caused
by any number of medical or cognitive situations. According to Decker,
(08:43):
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 rejoined
the keepers. He seems oddly subdued. Think of Jack Nicholson
(09:06):
as the Overlook Hotel is slowly getting it's its um
psychic talents into his mind. Yeah, almost almost understated hypnosis.
And he sits down to eat. Picture him. We're editorializing
a little bit picture moving kind of robotically, going through
the motions. You can attribute this a lot to the
(09:29):
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 Keeper notices Bob Keeper, that is,
notices the blood when Decker sits down to eat, and
like any friend would say, he asked what happened? What
happened to you. H Decker tells him about this vision,
(09:53):
this man in a crown reflected in a window that
does not physically appear to be in the bathroom with him. Uh,
he's got the scratches, which he attributes to Satan, you know,
kind of small talk. I could probably have a dinner,
right yeah, yeah, but and you can imagine to some
evil presence. That's what he's attributing to. But in his
(10:13):
mind it's that would be Satan, 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
(10:33):
and the ceiling. That's fun. Something similar happened, uh 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, uh,
into into her mom's closet and roomined all of her clothes.
(10:54):
So yeah, Immediately, the first thing your mind would go
to is, Okay, there's a nasty, nasty plumbing problem, something catastrophic,
and you're scrambling to like figure out where it's coming
from and and stop it. Right, but this seems to
be something different. Yeah, there's never a good time for
plumbing problem, as anybody who's experienced one can assure you,
(11:17):
especially homeowners uh and plumbers as well. It's because a
burst pipe, depending on its location, can become very expensive,
very quickly. So Bob Key for uh, he and he
and his partner are renting this structure, so they immediately
phone their landlord. And this is you know, like this,
(11:40):
they're not renting from some big complex or company. They
know the guy. His name is really cool. Actually it's
Ron van Y w h y. That's really cool. And
you know, all the homeowners that are listening right now
are going, oh, thank god they're renting, right, because it
really is expensive. But Ron of course doesn't feel the
(12:02):
same way because he owns the house. So 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. Uh. Of course, plumbing problems are
are likely on the rise at this time. Again, it's February.
(12:23):
In it's February, and Pennsylvania here. There has 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. All of
the plumbing just it goes to the kitchen in the bathroom,
(12:45):
and they're 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 towards
the back of the structure. The second decker appears to
have progressed from being kind of out of it an
oddly calm maybe in shock, to a full on trance state.
(13:08):
This guy is in something meditative or approaching catattic. This
prompts Keeper 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
want to be as above board as possible. Uh. The leaks, however,
(13:32):
are continuing. At the same time they appear to be
increasing at a worrying pace. Where the hell is all
this water coming from? This is the question, right, where
is 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 I'm imagining them sitting downstairs and then hearing
(13:53):
that bang that that you demonstrated, Ben, that that loud
banging from above them. I'm a iagining the Keefers 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
(14:15):
sound came from the bathroom or from the plumbing in
the bathroom, you imagine they would, you know, look to
the place and and think about it in 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
(14:36):
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
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 where they
definitely into completely different places. I don't know. It's a question,
(15:00):
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 bow Jean and Richard Woolbert. By this point,
(15:20):
from their accounts, water just wasn't just leaking within the house,
you know, kind of streaming down the walls or whatever. Uh.
In fact, Bob Kiefer and Ron Van why when the
police showed up, they got they were at a loss
to explain what was happening. They were saying, okay, look
just come in here, just coming you gotta see it
(15:41):
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. No,
not necessarily a torrential downpour, but the water appeared not
just to be obeying the patterns of rain you would
(16:04):
see outside. It appeared to be uh. 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. Yeah, I mean it was the
There were reports from the scene that it was literally
defying gravity. Uh. And and there was no uh discernible
(16:26):
source for the leak, for the of a leak, in
the 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. Um. And the police were
absolutely at a loss, as I mean, this isn't something
(16:48):
that they're they're really equipped to deal with to the
police left the scene because they had to figure out
how to summarize all this craziness and some semblance of
you know, UM report that wouldn't get them fired, I guess. Uh.
And then the keepers went with Don Decker to a
(17:08):
nearby restaurant. So the landlord Ron than Why called his
wife Romaine fantastic name, um, and she joined him at
the house and they stuck around while everyone else left,
and then all of a sudden, the rain stopped as
quickly as it had begun. Yeah. Either the It's interesting
(17:29):
to one detail I'm wondering about this is whether the police,
the tenants 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. Well, yeah, and that's the thing.
Ron and Romayne know that house, right, They know the
(17:50):
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.
There may be a reason we don't. Uh. This restaurant
across the street is a pizzeria. It's owned by a lady.
At the time, it's home by lady named Pam Scrafano,
(18:12):
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.
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 Scrafano on
(18:36):
the on this episode talking about how she earlier gone
to the Keefer's house, Like, clearly this pizzaio was their cheers.
It's right across the street. They serve pizza, they probably
have beer. What more do you want from life? And
uh so she knew these folks. She had apparently already
went across the street earlier to look at this bizarre
(19:00):
meteorological phenomenon. Micro meteorological phenomenon, will work on it. Uh
And when she saw when she saw the Keepers and
Don arrive, apparently rain started falling in the restaurant too.
She looked at Don's odd behavior. He was still very
(19:22):
out of it. And I imagine this is my speculation here, folks,
but I imagine what happened. His dinner was ruined at
the keeper house. And they decided that regardless of the
chaotic universe in which they live, they still wanted to
get something to eat. Uh So, so they had gone
to a pizza restaurant with a very weird vibe. Pam
(19:44):
is freaking out. She goes to the cash register, where
she retrieves across the symbol of Christianity, and she tries
to give the cross to down 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
(20:07):
tells the keepers they need to take him to a
church for the process of performing an exorcism. While we
do not know the specifics of the conversation that followed,
we know that instead of going to a church immediately,
they went home, probably because a lot of churches are
closed at that time. Right. Well, yeah, and they just
ruined a ton of pizza. Let me think about how
(20:29):
bad is soggy pizza. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to
that as a party foul. To be sure, all of this,
by the way, is 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.
(20:53):
I can't remember the guy's name, he's he's one 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 um Andy Circus in like
Lord of the Rings, but with like a ringo star
like goatee, perfectly quafft and like a bun. It's it's
something to behold. And then you know the thing that's
about to happen next, also beautifully dramatized. Remain Uh confronts
(21:16):
Decker as he is in this like trance like state,
like a fugue state. Uh. And then she tries to,
I don't know, settle him down or kind of talk
him down. Pots and pants 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
(21:37):
that Decker 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 and and
seeing you might recognize from the movie The Exorcist, Uh,
these unseen you know things start slashing at Decker's skin,
and these you know, cuts or or scrap to start
(22:00):
to open up all over him as he's supposedly levitating
there and they form the shape of a cross allegedly
uh near the inside of his elbow or like the
crook of his arm. There. Officer bow Jean came back
where he found Genie Keefer reading the Bible an attempt
to do her own kind of d i y exorcism
(22:22):
on Decker bless her Heart. Uh. In a show called
Paranormal Witnesses, bou Jean said that he too, truly believed
that Decker was possessed, and he decided to call in
the big guns. The chief of Police, Gary Roberts. So
Chief of Police Gary Roberts is an important part of
(22:43):
this story. He is convinced by by the cops to
go visit this scene in person. When he gets there,
he says, Okay, yeah, moisture, it's it's moisture, is not
itself a supernatural, norm invidious thing. I understand this might
(23:10):
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
employees because he orders them to leave and not to
bother filing a report, you know what I mean, just
(23:32):
another night in another episode of Law and Order, Straulsburg, Pennsylvania.
This was certainly not the end. When we returned from
a quick break, we will tell you what happened the
next day. So the next day some officers returned there,
(23:56):
and there are two other officers who are you to
the story, but they've heard about it over over the
past few hours. These are officers William Davies and officer
John Rundle. They along with bou Jean, kind of defied
their boss and they they were like, Okay, maybe the
(24:17):
police chief of police is not fully grasping the enormity
or the importance of 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 Pam at
the pizzeria. Decker drops it, claiming again that it burns
(24:40):
his skin. There's some kind of consistency there, uh. 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 on
video saying this uh and that he's thrown across the
(25:02):
room quote as though a bus had hit him. Uh,
And additional scratches appear on his neck. I haven't read
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 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 that's another
difference if you're keeping tracked. So finally, on this next night,
(25:24):
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, and they had all turned him down. Because,
as you've seen in previous episodes, we've done like exorcisms
(25:47):
one oh one and so on. Uh. 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 deal of time figuring out whether it
could be anything other than a case of possession. Right,
(26:08):
So you get a lot of you you know, if
you are. 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 scared people,
and you've had, you know, you had to realize that
maybe this isn't an exorcism, Maybe they just need someone
(26:29):
to help a walk back from whatever ledge they're on.
So this so he finally finds a guy who says yes.
Preacher arrives unseen, he begins to pray as his bible out.
Don begins to convulse violently physically, and then the preacher
(26:50):
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 vibe, right of change in
(27:11):
the energy of of the of the house, of the room.
And then at the end of one of these prayers,
the rain stops and it will never appear in the
key for home again. So maybe this bizarre incident is
over and Don has just had a terrible furlough, but
(27:37):
he still has to go back to jail. He got convicted,
he has to serve his sentence. 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 it's a very nice thing that Don got to
to receive. He was pretty unusual then, m I don't
(28:02):
know the practices, but but still a different thing, right,
a different experience than probably a lot of people have
had um. But it 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, it appears that whatever rituals took
(28:26):
place a few days prior that stopped the rain at
the Keefer's house didn't work when he returned to incarceration,
because now it's raining in the jail. Or yeah, at
the very least it's described as rain, but very least,
uh water is a puri in a way that seems inexplicable.
(28:47):
We have a 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 mean out of the concrete floor,
and at that point I thought I can do stuff.
And then uh yeah, he realized he's Storm. He's like,
(29:10):
oh man, I'm Storm. This is awesome. Or like your
you know, with the black cloud following him around, or
like Rob McKenna, who is maybe a little bit more
of an ambitious robin kind of but but yeah, he says,
maybe this is something that I can U in some
(29:33):
way control. There's a guard who's skeptical about it, and
it's like, oh yeah, Decker, well if you can, you
can control rain, and that's why you'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 keen Holt. He
(29:54):
just started making it rain. Sorry, just started making it rain. Yes, no,
you're so so. Warden. Keene Hold 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 approximately
(30:16):
eight in the evening at the time, I didn't feel anything,
but my shirt was drooping down. And he goes on
to say, uh, 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
(30:36):
a stern um about four inches long two inches wide,
there was this huge spot of water, and he says,
I was uh. 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
(30:59):
guards saw, janitor saw it. The warden saw 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.
So then a third and final exorcism was attempted, and
(31:24):
this appears to perhaps have done the trick. Another reverend
by the name of William Blackburn meets Don in jail
um and he sees with his own eyes this rain appear,
apparently summoned by Don himself, like he said, matt Um,
and he prayed over him, and the rain stopped. Who
(31:46):
stopped the rain? Indeed? Uh? Or who will stop the rain?
Apparently it was it was William Blackburn as a credence
clearwater revival reference um speaking of great references. Uh. In
the wake of this kind of bizarre indoor weather the
thing or ben as you not to in the outline
inner weather, shout out to Robert Frost um Don and
these various witnesses still claim that they're unable to explain
(32:12):
where this was coming from, where this indoor rain was
coming from? Um. And and there are quite a few
people that that saw it. So what's what's the deal?
What actually happened? Here's where it gets crazy. This is
a story that, as you said, Noell still does not
have an official explanation, by which I mean it still
(32:33):
does not have explanation as considered a hundred percent factual
by all people involved. Uh. There are several possibilities, and
not all of these possibilities are immediately apparent. So what
makes this case unusual or remarkable in comparison to other
(32:54):
cases that have some similarities is that there are nine
eye witnesses, several of whom have their careers stated on
their ability to be accurate and credible, right, and in
recalling what they've encountered. Uh Don himself. You know, we
could count him as as an extra witness, but let's
let's leave him bracketed to the side. All of these
(33:18):
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 all of these witnesses are saying there
was something demonic at play. The police chief right, was
(33:39):
never convinced. Several witnesses will still they'll 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 of creating rain indoors seem
oddly specific and somewhat unprecedented. It doesn't follow the exorcism
(34:05):
tropes of Uh. The demographics of people who tend to
be possessed often children, predominantly women. Remember, not all claims
of possession or exorcisms are Christian and nature and the
Decker case does include like a couple two big, big
common signs of what's considered to be possession, some kind
(34:28):
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 primary
thing inexplicable rain uh, wetness generated somehow by the human
(34:51):
mind or by you know, by somehow some action or
presence of a human being that usually is attributed to
stuff like the old practice of rainmakers, you know, people
who were paid to go out and do anything from
early signs of cloud seating to using their own allegedly
(35:13):
unique cognitive or spiritual abilities to bring rain to drought
stricken areas. 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, more way more
so than a possession by somebody. It sounds like he
(35:37):
got extremely stressed to do the funeral and this abusive
person in his life 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, heart rate, lowering endorphins. Well, then
(36:00):
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 it's almost like it's being triggered
through some kind of stress or internal turmoil. It's a
very Stephen Kingy type trope. Like it makes me think
of Carrie, you know, when she's picked on and uh
and humiliated at the prom and then all of a
(36:21):
sudden she just kicks into like fight or flight mode
and like burns everybody alive or or firestarter for example.
You know, a lot of these powers or latent abilities
are brought out by you know, stressful events and that
are triggered. And then it is also usually beyond the
individual's control or at least you know, to or to
a large degree. And of course, um, fellow fellow comic fans,
(36:47):
you we're called that this is this is one of
the common ways for mutant powers to express and things
like Marvel comics. Uh, it's often tied to puberty in
those or tropes just like or those sort of stories,
I should say, not tropes, just like in Um Sinking Carrey.
As you mentioned earlier, noal with this. We have to
(37:10):
remember Don is at the cusp of his early twenties,
so his body is still developing to that to that theory, Uh,
we don't know how much, if any, medical research has
been done on his brain, right, which is another interesting question.
And we also there hasn't been a ton of research
(37:33):
done on the house, and we know that for sure.
But let's let's so those are interesting possibilities, they're interesting
um paths of thoughts. We have to take another one,
which is a little more nitty gritty, And it's an
unfortunate fact of the reality that Don and these eyewitnesses
(37:55):
were living in during the early nineties when this case
was publicized on those shows we cited earlier. Uh, And
it's a it's an unfortunate reality of the world we
live in today. That's kind of the rise of reality television,
unscripted allegedly nonfiction programs with heavily edited interviews. Again, the
(38:16):
vast majority of people who learned about this story, especially
outside of UH the area between Allantown in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The people learned about this learned about it because they
were watching stuff, and I say this with love, they
were watching stuff that was meant to be entertainment, right,
entertainment TV. It is completely possible. We've explored this before.
(38:39):
It's completely possible that any of these witnesses, even Don 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
(39:02):
do you guys think? Yeah, yeah, for sure, Yeah, been
to to this end. I want to just point out
exactly what you're saying. It was 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. Um,
(39:22):
this is something that Skeptic Magazine points out. Michael Shermer
that writes in in that magazine, Uh, why didn't anyone
think to snap any kind of photograph, take any kind
of um evidence of this occurrence? Why doesn't that exist?
We're talking about days of this kind of thing happening,
(39:45):
and you're 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 mug shots. Why didn't somebody
take a picture of any of this stuff? It's just
it feels strange. Why didn't anybody, for instance, take a
sample of the water? Right, especially because the water left
(40:07):
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 Don and where
the water came from. Right, be right? Memory is treacherous,
arguably one of the most treacherous bodily processes, uh is
remembering something. And then we have to look at the
(40:31):
credibility of of these shows. As enjoyable as they are, Um,
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 than you had when
you started watching, and maybe one decision, one answer, which
(40:54):
is will I watch the next episode of the show?
And the answer is hopefully yes. Right, what they're trying
to get you to, um, they they do very well.
There is an art and a craft of this, But
it also means it's like telling these stories, making these
narratives is like whittling a block of wood. You have
to get rid of some stuff for the final product
(41:16):
to have the shape you want people to see. And
that's why they don't invest a ton of time looking
at any possible mundane explanations that might be kind of boring. Uh.
They do have subject matter experts, you know, that's part
of the format of those shows, and the experts in
the in each of these programs are billed as paranormal investigators.
(41:39):
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 hardcore skeptics trying to debunk the idea of a
haunted house, you know what I mean. So the problem
(42:00):
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,
like veterinarians have boards and um the medical professionals have
boards to make sure that their researches up to date,
(42:23):
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
people who will issue you a certificate of some sort,
but there's not like a you can't go to the
d m V or your local courthouse, you know, like
(42:46):
the place you would get a gun license or divorce
or marriage license and say, hey, I need a judge
to sign off of me being a paranormal investigator. I tried,
I looked into it. It's just not a thing. 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 for being a paranormal investigator of some kind.
(43:10):
I mean not kind of. You're if you're a priest,
you're showing up, you're investigating a paranormal event, and then
you are doing something about it, supposedly, and it's sanctioned
by this very very old, established 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
(43:32):
exorcisms has always sat a little oddly with me. Well,
it's interesting because we have to remember that the church
in in a real way, uh, proceeds 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 they're licensed for you know, a very specific
(43:54):
niche of that sort of stuff. But that's why 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 John Decker's reign. We
(44:20):
have returned. Uh. Third point here, objective scientific investigations, one
in particular, do appear to have a plausible explanation for
what occurred. To your point, Matt, these explanation, this explanation
occurs um a number of years after the actual events.
(44:42):
There's a great report, series of reports by the Pocono
Record or poken 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,
(45:03):
this is right up your alley. I don't know what
the explanation is based on the info I have. Bartholomew's legit,
he's accredited. He teaches at Botany Down Secondary College, or
did at the time. He wrote in a ton of
journals on on things that were allegations of paranormal right.
(45:23):
And when I say wrote in journals, we're talking about
medical and sociology journals, not you know, his own personal
mole schemes or something. Uh. And and he had a
pretty he had a pretty solid theory for this, that's right. Um.
He he did make it very clear that he did
not have any connections to Stroudsburg UM and kind of
(45:43):
considered himself as as a bit of an outsider. Um.
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
were conjecturing earlier, that through this kind of perfect combination,
perfect storm of stress, uh, the weather and a particular
(46:07):
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.
Ice damning is a phenomenon that occurs when warm air
enters an attic uh like snow melt like melt water
from like a roof seeping in um and then if
(46:30):
temperatures drop after the sun sets, 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. Because of the internal heat of
the house. The water will eventually leak outside. And you
can actually see a pretty helpful um image of this
(46:51):
if you go to University of Minnesota Extensions website, UH
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, so it would
be like in a corner for example. Uh. It's a
it's a pretty pretty helpful image, but it's sort of
like what what's described, but I don't know, not quite
(47:12):
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 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
(47:32):
with the temperature and accumulation. Sometimes, uh, it's it's it's
fairly common. That's all I wanted to say. So the yeah,
the reason I have that diagram there is if you
it is helpful look at it if you're curious. Um,
what what you're seeing is a kind on the roof.
You're seeing a a combination of of water in three forms.
(47:56):
The ice is towards the bottom, right toward the eaves
of the roof. The snow is the top, 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
(48:20):
to be continual because you 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. I know what
(48:41):
leaks are like. Leaks do not shoot out from the
bottom of the floor like rain from a cloud. And
isn't it pretty big coincidence that this occurred at the
house where Don was, then at the pizza place, then
again at the jail. Yeah, and and corroborated by various
unrelated witnesses from from these Uh, well, it didn't seem
(49:05):
like they would have an agenda, you know, I tend
to I tend to believe folks like that. Uh, it's
it's it's hard. Yeah, it's hard to justify. Of course not.
Of course this wouldn't have And this is the thing
that happens in houses very rarely, like under very specific circumstances. Yes,
So going back to um, what I'm building toward here,
or what it was building towards there, is that it
(49:28):
Really The other problem with definition here is what defines rain.
Torrential downpour is rain, but a drizzle is also rain,
you know, And and fog is just moisture in the air.
So is it possible that they were, um, the people
who are witnessing this, we're seeing air heavy with with moisture.
(49:50):
But was the 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 somehow um being dispersed the way that a
humidifier would or something. Uh. To the point about specificity
of ice stamming, Yes, you're correct. The weather in the area,
(50:13):
the weather on Ant Street there does appear to be
within the bounds of what would what an ice stam
need would need to form. Uh. Daytime highs were in
the forties and fifties fahrenheit, but then the lows dropped
down to the twenties and the thirties. UH. Also, Bartholomells
research shows that ice stamming can be pretty common if
(50:35):
a major snowstorm has just hit an area where temperatures
go above freezing during the day to turn stuff in
the water, and then below the point of freezing thirty
two degrees at night. UH. This makes perfect conditions for
your classic ice stam and the Poconos have been hit
by a snowstorm about thirteen days before all this stuff
(50:56):
went down with Don Decker. So maybe there was something
unclean at play. But maybe it 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 snow
areas before. Why would you like just plow? Like cleaning
your driveway is enough. Who goes on their roof all
(51:19):
the time to clean off snow? I go there to
clean off leaves. Yeah, the leaves are the problem here
in Georgia for sure. Uh, although the and I kind
of like it. I think that's meditative. Also, you're not freezing,
why to it? Uh? 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
(51:40):
freaked out, and they didn't see anything else super unusual. Uh.
They couldn't get those stains from the water off the walls.
And we can't do any on the scene testing or
try to reenact the events unsolved mystery style because the
house has been demolished. And the fourth the fourth point here,
(52:03):
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 about credibility on Don's part that
becomes crucial to the story. A few years later, or
a few decades later. Yes, that's correct. There is a
news story that we stumbled upon from October of two
thousand twelve, when Don Decker found himself back in the news.
(52:27):
He'd been rather obscure after these nineties television shows. He'd
you know, you'd every once in a while seeing an
interview with him or him talking about something over the years.
But this was the most high profile thing. Uh. He
was in the news because he turned himself in to
a federal court on charges that that he had set
(52:50):
ablaze a business as a restaurant in the Poconos. Is
an event that occurred in two thousand eleven. This is
in will Bar, a different area there in the Poconos,
a rival pizzeria. Perhaps I don't I don't think so,
but but it does appear that Dawn was involved because
(53:13):
the restaurant owner, this is allegedly the restaurant owner brought
him in to do it on purpose. Oh like for
like an insurance money. Uh yeah, yeah. It was called
Dana's Restaurant and tavern, not not a not a pizzeria
at all. Uh. And the owner was named Theodoro's Kiriakopolos.
I think I got that right. Um. And this was
located at five hundred Sterling Road there in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
(53:37):
So he got the arson pinned on him. A grand
jury charged the pair with mail fraud, criminal conspiracy, and
used to fire to commit a federal felony ouch um.
And this is because you know there's an insurance claim involved, right,
oh a million. That might be an unfair assumption on
our maybe, but it's some just want to see the
(54:00):
world burn or the very least certain restaurants. Um. 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. Mean, you know, he
he was he was pinched the first time for receiving
stolen goods. Now he's committing mail fraud and arson. You know,
(54:24):
it seems really 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. Right, well,
I had from my mind, it's more that it could
(54:44):
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 see it's strong willingness, but it's
definitely there's definitely a proven case where he was totally
fine with doing that. Maybe maybe that's from desperation, right, um,
because people can be driven to crimes of necessity. Maybe
(55:06):
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
hear from you, what do you think, folks? Does the
(55:29):
proposed scientific solution for this bizarre rain well, does it
hold water wamp wamp 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
(55:51):
water could get into the house, if not through the pipes,
But from the eyewitnesses explanation, it doesn't. It sounds like
a out of them grew up in an area where
they would have been familiar with ice stamming, right, Like
they would have known that uh certain types of weather
it can cause certain types of leaks. And this from
(56:11):
their descriptions, at least from the way they're depicted describing
these things, it doesn't it doesn't appear the thought that's
what was going on. 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
(56:34):
than you would find if there was moisture in between
the walls or the ceiling or something. Uh, 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,
(56:59):
you know, you listen to 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 as an
occupation where you're trying to find answers for things, especially
if you're an investigator. Maybe not necessarily to the extent
(57:23):
that I'm thinking of, if you're you know, just in
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,
and we want to hear We wouldn't hear from you,
especially if maybe you've encountered something like this that you
(57:45):
are at a loss to explain. We would love to
hear your story. We try to be easy to find
online where 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 can share, uh, your personal experiences,
your opinions of this case with the best part of
the show, your fellow listeners. But hold on, you might
(58:07):
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. We have a phone number, that's right.
The number is one eight three three s T D
(58:28):
W y t K. You can leave a message there
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Whatever you're comfortable with us calling you on air, let
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(58:49):
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(59:11):
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(59:43):
want you to know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to
(00:25):
the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul mission controlled decads. 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 after we gave everybody a
(00:46):
bit of a surprise with our colleagues code named Doc
and Danish Schwartz giving us a fantastic exploration of the
terrible history between the US and why. Thank you to
everyone for tuning into that episode. If you haven't yet
check it out, immediately do it now and then come back.
(01:07):
We'll be here. It was a great episode. I really
really enjoyed it as a listener. So so yeah, huge
things and shout out to them and uh today's episode.
I thought an interesting way to begin this would be
to talk about UM, one of one of the most
famous sci fi fantasy series in history. Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's
(01:30):
Guide to the Galaxy. It's it's the kind of whimsy
that we might need to balance out today's story. Uh,
this is 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.
(01:55):
There's a hapless character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
named Rob McKenna. Rob McKenna is a taxi or 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
(02:16):
has rained everywhere anytime he's been anywhere, no matter where
he goes, no matter what time of day it is.
And McKenna doesn't know that I know why this happens.
He thinks he's just cursed. It turns out that the
rain follows him for a reason. It's fantastic ongoing thread
in a fantastic series. And although Douglas Adams may not
(02:40):
have been aware of this, there may be a real
life example of a type of uh Rob McKenna, just
as hapless, if not as um so sweetly Wes Anderson
like wholesome. This real life rain Man, according to the story,
gets his path hours not from the divine, but from
(03:03):
the opposite of the divine, something unclean, something infernal, a
case of possession or a case of abuse from beyond
the grave, or or something else. Fellow conspiracy realist, today
we bring you the strange tale of Dawn Decker. Here
(03:25):
are the facts. In nineteen eighty three, which is I
think the year we were all born. No, okay, just
just hearing me, alright, sorry, man, a twenty one year
old man by the name of Don Decker was having
a really bad time. Uh. He was serving four to
(03:45):
ten months in the Monroe County Correctional Facility of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania,
And that was because he had received stolen goods stolen property.
On February thirty eight years from this day, as we
sit here and record, he was given a furlough to
(04:07):
attend his grandfather's funeral, a man named James Kishaw who
lived in the same town where Decker was incarcerated. So
this was I mean, a funeral is often not a
happy event, right, at least we can agree the majority
of them are not supposed to be. This was going
to be somewhat of a personal milestone for Decker because
(04:31):
from a young age, and we're not too clear on
the specifics of this, but from a young age, 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
(04:54):
from what he described as an evil that it haunted
him all his life. Like many victims of emotional or
I guess social or physical abuse, he had kept these
occurrences a secret, had not told people. So when he
(05:14):
went to the funeral, you know, he saw relatives and
especially his parents, talking about this man who 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,
(05:38):
and seeing his parents talk about his grandfather and what
he felt were glowing, glorifying terms made him furious. It
had sensed 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 f Yeah, And like we said,
(06:02):
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. Important point, uh,
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 uh inmate right or
(06:26):
obeying the rules in jail. So that means that we
know at this point nothing unusual had happened exactly. 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 Keefers have anything fishy going on or
else that would have been an issue at least that
(06:47):
that would that would be the understanding unless there were
extenuating circumstances that we don't know about or cannot prove.
So the Keefers were renting a house. It was on
Ann Street there in the city and Uh, I just
really quickly. I always liked doing this and always like
talking about geography. But just so you know, where we
(07:08):
are really is near the Pocono Mountains. Right near where
this is taking place, there's the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau.
And you've heard people talk about the Poconos before the
Mountain Range, and this is I'm trying to look for
a nearby place. It's basically between Scranton, Pennsylvania and Allentown,
(07:32):
Pennsylvania kind of but to the northeast of Allentown. So
that's physically where we are there in this house on
Ann Street, and the night of the funeral, Deckers there
with his friends, the Keefers, 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
(07:55):
to him what he told to the keepers, uh, he
suddenly felt disoriented, felt very confused, 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 it well, well if the way he says,
(08:17):
is a man with a crown, which kind of like
a Russian law about anyone who happens to the president.
But yeah, he had these He had these visions. Uh,
he felt disoriented and confused. And that's something that a
lot of people report when they have visions for caused
by any number of medical or cognitive situations. According to Decker,
(08:43):
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 rejoined
the keepers. He seems oddly subdued. Think of Jack Nicholson
(09:06):
as the Overlook Hotel is slowly getting it's its um
psychic talents into his mind. Yeah, almost almost understated hypnosis.
And he sits down to eat. Picture him. We're editorializing
a little bit picture moving kind of robotically, going through
the motions. You can attribute this a lot to the
(09:29):
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 Keeper notices Bob Keeper, that is,
notices the blood when Decker sits down to eat, and
like any friend would say, he asked what happened? What
happened to you. H Decker tells him about this vision,
(09:53):
this man in a crown reflected in a window that
does not physically appear to be in the bathroom with him. Uh,
he's got the scratches, which he attributes to Satan, you know,
kind of small talk. I could probably have a dinner,
right yeah, yeah, but and you can imagine to some
evil presence. That's what he's attributing to. But in his
(10:13):
mind it's that would be Satan, 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
(10:33):
and the ceiling. That's fun. Something similar happened, uh 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, uh,
into into her mom's closet and roomined all of her clothes.
(10:54):
So yeah, Immediately, the first thing your mind would go
to is, Okay, there's a nasty, nasty plumbing problem, something catastrophic,
and you're scrambling to like figure out where it's coming
from and and stop it. Right, but this seems to
be something different. Yeah, there's never a good time for
plumbing problem, as anybody who's experienced one can assure you,
(11:17):
especially homeowners uh and plumbers as well. It's because a
burst pipe, depending on its location, can become very expensive,
very quickly. So Bob Key for uh, he and he
and his partner are renting this structure, so they immediately
phone their landlord. And this is you know, like this,
(11:40):
they're not renting from some big complex or company. They
know the guy. His name is really cool. Actually it's
Ron van Y w h y. That's really cool. And
you know, all the homeowners that are listening right now
are going, oh, thank god they're renting, right, because it
really is expensive. But Ron of course doesn't feel the
(12:02):
same way because he owns the house. So 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. Uh. Of course, plumbing problems are
are likely on the rise at this time. Again, it's February.
(12:23):
In it's February, and Pennsylvania here. There has 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. All of
the plumbing just it goes to the kitchen in the bathroom,
(12:45):
and they're 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 towards
the back of the structure. The second decker appears to
have progressed from being kind of out of it an
oddly calm maybe in shock, to a full on trance state.
(13:08):
This guy is in something meditative or approaching catattic. This
prompts Keeper 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
want to be as above board as possible. Uh. The leaks, however,
(13:32):
are continuing. At the same time they appear to be
increasing at a worrying pace. Where the hell is all
this water coming from? This is the question, right, where
is 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 I'm imagining them sitting downstairs and then hearing
(13:53):
that bang that that you demonstrated, Ben, that that loud
banging from above them. I'm a iagining the Keefers 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
(14:15):
sound came from the bathroom or from the plumbing in
the bathroom, you imagine they would, you know, look to
the place and and think about it in 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
(14:36):
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
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 where they
definitely into completely different places. I don't know. It's a question,
(15:00):
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 bow Jean and Richard Woolbert. By this point,
(15:20):
from their accounts, water just wasn't just leaking within the house,
you know, kind of streaming down the walls or whatever. Uh.
In fact, Bob Kiefer and Ron Van why when the
police showed up, they got they were at a loss
to explain what was happening. They were saying, okay, look
just come in here, just coming you gotta see it
(15:41):
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. No,
not necessarily a torrential downpour, but the water appeared not
just to be obeying the patterns of rain you would
(16:04):
see outside. It appeared to be uh. 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. Yeah, I mean it was the
There were reports from the scene that it was literally
defying gravity. Uh. And and there was no uh discernible
(16:26):
source for the leak, for the of a leak, in
the 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. Um. And the police were
absolutely at a loss, as I mean, this isn't something
(16:48):
that they're they're really equipped to deal with to the
police left the scene because they had to figure out
how to summarize all this craziness and some semblance of
you know, UM report that wouldn't get them fired, I guess. Uh.
And then the keepers went with Don Decker to a
(17:08):
nearby restaurant. So the landlord Ron than Why called his
wife Romaine fantastic name, um, and she joined him at
the house and they stuck around while everyone else left,
and then all of a sudden, the rain stopped as
quickly as it had begun. Yeah. Either the It's interesting
(17:29):
to one detail I'm wondering about this is whether the police,
the tenants 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. Well, yeah, and that's the thing.
Ron and Romayne know that house, right, They know the
(17:50):
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.
There may be a reason we don't. Uh. This restaurant
across the street is a pizzeria. It's owned by a lady.
At the time, it's home by lady named Pam Scrafano,
(18:12):
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.
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 Scrafano on
(18:36):
the on this episode talking about how she earlier gone
to the Keefer's house, Like, clearly this pizzaio was their cheers.
It's right across the street. They serve pizza, they probably
have beer. What more do you want from life? And
uh so she knew these folks. She had apparently already
went across the street earlier to look at this bizarre
(19:00):
meteorological phenomenon. Micro meteorological phenomenon, will work on it. Uh
And when she saw when she saw the Keepers and
Don arrive, apparently rain started falling in the restaurant too.
She looked at Don's odd behavior. He was still very
(19:22):
out of it. And I imagine this is my speculation here, folks,
but I imagine what happened. His dinner was ruined at
the keeper house. And they decided that regardless of the
chaotic universe in which they live, they still wanted to
get something to eat. Uh So, so they had gone
to a pizza restaurant with a very weird vibe. Pam
(19:44):
is freaking out. She goes to the cash register, where
she retrieves across the symbol of Christianity, and she tries
to give the cross to down 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
(20:07):
tells the keepers they need to take him to a
church for the process of performing an exorcism. While we
do not know the specifics of the conversation that followed,
we know that instead of going to a church immediately,
they went home, probably because a lot of churches are
closed at that time. Right. Well, yeah, and they just
ruined a ton of pizza. Let me think about how
(20:29):
bad is soggy pizza. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to
that as a party foul. To be sure, all of this,
by the way, is 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.
(20:53):
I can't remember the guy's name, he's he's one 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 um Andy Circus in like
Lord of the Rings, but with like a ringo star
like goatee, perfectly quafft and like a bun. It's it's
something to behold. And then you know the thing that's
about to happen next, also beautifully dramatized. Remain Uh confronts
(21:16):
Decker as he is in this like trance like state,
like a fugue state. Uh. And then she tries to,
I don't know, settle him down or kind of talk
him down. Pots and pants 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
(21:37):
that Decker 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 and and
seeing you might recognize from the movie The Exorcist, Uh,
these unseen you know things start slashing at Decker's skin,
and these you know, cuts or or scrap to start
(22:00):
to open up all over him as he's supposedly levitating
there and they form the shape of a cross allegedly
uh near the inside of his elbow or like the
crook of his arm. There. Officer bow Jean came back
where he found Genie Keefer reading the Bible an attempt
to do her own kind of d i y exorcism
(22:22):
on Decker bless her Heart. Uh. In a show called
Paranormal Witnesses, bou Jean said that he too, truly believed
that Decker was possessed, and he decided to call in
the big guns. The chief of Police, Gary Roberts. So
Chief of Police Gary Roberts is an important part of
(22:43):
this story. He is convinced by by the cops to
go visit this scene in person. When he gets there,
he says, Okay, yeah, moisture, it's it's moisture, is not
itself a supernatural, norm invidious thing. I understand this might
(23:10):
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
employees because he orders them to leave and not to
bother filing a report, you know what I mean, just
(23:32):
another night in another episode of Law and Order, Straulsburg, Pennsylvania.
This was certainly not the end. When we returned from
a quick break, we will tell you what happened the
next day. So the next day some officers returned there,
(23:56):
and there are two other officers who are you to
the story, but they've heard about it over over the
past few hours. These are officers William Davies and officer
John Rundle. They along with bou Jean, kind of defied
their boss and they they were like, Okay, maybe the
(24:17):
police chief of police is not fully grasping the enormity
or the importance of 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 Pam at
the pizzeria. Decker drops it, claiming again that it burns
(24:40):
his skin. There's some kind of consistency there, uh. 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 on
video saying this uh and that he's thrown across the
(25:02):
room quote as though a bus had hit him. Uh,
And additional scratches appear on his neck. I haven't read
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 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 that's another
difference if you're keeping tracked. So finally, on this next night,
(25:24):
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, and they had all turned him down. Because,
as you've seen in previous episodes, we've done like exorcisms
(25:47):
one oh one and so on. Uh. 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 deal of time figuring out whether it
could be anything other than a case of possession. Right,
(26:08):
So you get a lot of you you know, if
you are. 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 scared people,
and you've had, you know, you had to realize that
maybe this isn't an exorcism, Maybe they just need someone
(26:29):
to help a walk back from whatever ledge they're on.
So this so he finally finds a guy who says yes.
Preacher arrives unseen, he begins to pray as his bible out.
Don begins to convulse violently physically, and then the preacher
(26:50):
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 vibe, right of change in
(27:11):
the energy of of the of the house, of the room.
And then at the end of one of these prayers,
the rain stops and it will never appear in the
key for home again. So maybe this bizarre incident is
over and Don has just had a terrible furlough, but
(27:37):
he still has to go back to jail. He got convicted,
he has to serve his sentence. 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 it's a very nice thing that Don got to
to receive. He was pretty unusual then, m I don't
(28:02):
know the practices, but but still a different thing, right,
a different experience than probably a lot of people have
had um. But it 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, it appears that whatever rituals took
(28:26):
place a few days prior that stopped the rain at
the Keefer's house didn't work when he returned to incarceration,
because now it's raining in the jail. Or yeah, at
the very least it's described as rain, but very least,
uh water is a puri in a way that seems inexplicable.
(28:47):
We have a 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 mean out of the concrete floor,
and at that point I thought I can do stuff.
And then uh yeah, he realized he's Storm. He's like,
(29:10):
oh man, I'm Storm. This is awesome. Or like your
you know, with the black cloud following him around, or
like Rob McKenna, who is maybe a little bit more
of an ambitious robin kind of but but yeah, he says,
maybe this is something that I can U in some
(29:33):
way control. There's a guard who's skeptical about it, and
it's like, oh yeah, Decker, well if you can, you
can control rain, and that's why you'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 keen Holt. He
(29:54):
just started making it rain. Sorry, just started making it rain. Yes, no,
you're so so. Warden. Keene Hold 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 approximately
(30:16):
eight in the evening at the time, I didn't feel anything,
but my shirt was drooping down. And he goes on
to say, uh, 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
(30:36):
a stern um about four inches long two inches wide,
there was this huge spot of water, and he says,
I was uh. 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
(30:59):
guards saw, janitor saw it. The warden saw 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.
So then a third and final exorcism was attempted, and
(31:24):
this appears to perhaps have done the trick. Another reverend
by the name of William Blackburn meets Don in jail
um and he sees with his own eyes this rain appear,
apparently summoned by Don himself, like he said, matt Um,
and he prayed over him, and the rain stopped. Who
(31:46):
stopped the rain? Indeed? Uh? Or who will stop the rain?
Apparently it was it was William Blackburn as a credence
clearwater revival reference um speaking of great references. Uh. In
the wake of this kind of bizarre indoor weather the
thing or ben as you not to in the outline
inner weather, shout out to Robert Frost um Don and
these various witnesses still claim that they're unable to explain
(32:12):
where this was coming from, where this indoor rain was
coming from? Um. And and there are quite a few
people that that saw it. So what's what's the deal?
What actually happened? Here's where it gets crazy. This is
a story that, as you said, Noell still does not
have an official explanation, by which I mean it still
(32:33):
does not have explanation as considered a hundred percent factual
by all people involved. Uh. There are several possibilities, and
not all of these possibilities are immediately apparent. So what
makes this case unusual or remarkable in comparison to other
(32:54):
cases that have some similarities is that there are nine
eye witnesses, several of whom have their careers stated on
their ability to be accurate and credible, right, and in
recalling what they've encountered. Uh Don himself. You know, we
could count him as as an extra witness, but let's
let's leave him bracketed to the side. All of these
(33:18):
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 all of these witnesses are saying there
was something demonic at play. The police chief right, was
(33:39):
never convinced. Several witnesses will still they'll 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 of creating rain indoors seem
oddly specific and somewhat unprecedented. It doesn't follow the exorcism
(34:05):
tropes of Uh. The demographics of people who tend to
be possessed often children, predominantly women. Remember, not all claims
of possession or exorcisms are Christian and nature and the
Decker case does include like a couple two big, big
common signs of what's considered to be possession, some kind
(34:28):
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 primary
thing inexplicable rain uh, wetness generated somehow by the human
(34:51):
mind or by you know, by somehow some action or
presence of a human being that usually is attributed to
stuff like the old practice of rainmakers, you know, people
who were paid to go out and do anything from
early signs of cloud seating to using their own allegedly
(35:13):
unique cognitive or spiritual abilities to bring rain to drought
stricken areas. 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, more way more
so than a possession by somebody. It sounds like he
(35:37):
got extremely stressed to do the funeral and this abusive
person in his life 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, heart rate, lowering endorphins. Well, then
(36:00):
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 it's almost like it's being triggered
through some kind of stress or internal turmoil. It's a
very Stephen Kingy type trope. Like it makes me think
of Carrie, you know, when she's picked on and uh
and humiliated at the prom and then all of a
(36:21):
sudden she just kicks into like fight or flight mode
and like burns everybody alive or or firestarter for example.
You know, a lot of these powers or latent abilities
are brought out by you know, stressful events and that
are triggered. And then it is also usually beyond the
individual's control or at least you know, to or to
a large degree. And of course, um, fellow fellow comic fans,
(36:47):
you we're called that this is this is one of
the common ways for mutant powers to express and things
like Marvel comics. Uh, it's often tied to puberty in
those or tropes just like or those sort of stories,
I should say, not tropes, just like in Um Sinking Carrey.
As you mentioned earlier, noal with this. We have to
(37:10):
remember Don is at the cusp of his early twenties,
so his body is still developing to that to that theory, Uh,
we don't know how much, if any, medical research has
been done on his brain, right, which is another interesting question.
And we also there hasn't been a ton of research
(37:33):
done on the house, and we know that for sure.
But let's let's so those are interesting possibilities, they're interesting
um paths of thoughts. We have to take another one,
which is a little more nitty gritty, And it's an
unfortunate fact of the reality that Don and these eyewitnesses
(37:55):
were living in during the early nineties when this case
was publicized on those shows we cited earlier. Uh, And
it's a it's an unfortunate reality of the world we
live in today. That's kind of the rise of reality television,
unscripted allegedly nonfiction programs with heavily edited interviews. Again, the
(38:16):
vast majority of people who learned about this story, especially
outside of UH the area between Allantown in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The people learned about this learned about it because they
were watching stuff, and I say this with love, they
were watching stuff that was meant to be entertainment, right,
entertainment TV. It is completely possible. We've explored this before.
(38:39):
It's completely possible that any of these witnesses, even Don 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
(39:02):
do you guys think? Yeah, yeah, for sure, Yeah, been
to to this end. I want to just point out
exactly what you're saying. It was 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. Um,
(39:22):
this is something that Skeptic Magazine points out. Michael Shermer
that writes in in that magazine, Uh, why didn't anyone
think to snap any kind of photograph, take any kind
of um evidence of this occurrence? Why doesn't that exist?
We're talking about days of this kind of thing happening,
(39:45):
and you're 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 mug shots. Why didn't somebody
take a picture of any of this stuff? It's just
it feels strange. Why didn't anybody, for instance, take a
sample of the water? Right, especially because the water left
(40:07):
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 Don and where
the water came from. Right, be right? Memory is treacherous,
arguably one of the most treacherous bodily processes, uh is
remembering something. And then we have to look at the
(40:31):
credibility of of these shows. As enjoyable as they are, Um,
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 than you had when
you started watching, and maybe one decision, one answer, which
(40:54):
is will I watch the next episode of the show?
And the answer is hopefully yes. Right, what they're trying
to get you to, um, they they do very well.
There is an art and a craft of this, But
it also means it's like telling these stories, making these
narratives is like whittling a block of wood. You have
to get rid of some stuff for the final product
(41:16):
to have the shape you want people to see. And
that's why they don't invest a ton of time looking
at any possible mundane explanations that might be kind of boring. Uh.
They do have subject matter experts, you know, that's part
of the format of those shows, and the experts in
the in each of these programs are billed as paranormal investigators.
(41:39):
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 hardcore skeptics trying to debunk the idea of a
haunted house, you know what I mean. So the problem
(42:00):
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,
like veterinarians have boards and um the medical professionals have
boards to make sure that their researches up to date,
(42:23):
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
people who will issue you a certificate of some sort,
but there's not like a you can't go to the
d m V or your local courthouse, you know, like
(42:46):
the place you would get a gun license or divorce
or marriage license and say, hey, I need a judge
to sign off of me being a paranormal investigator. I tried,
I looked into it. It's just not a thing. 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 for being a paranormal investigator of some kind.
(43:10):
I mean not kind of. You're if you're a priest,
you're showing up, you're investigating a paranormal event, and then
you are doing something about it, supposedly, and it's sanctioned
by this very very old, established 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
(43:32):
exorcisms has always sat a little oddly with me. Well,
it's interesting because we have to remember that the church
in in a real way, uh, proceeds 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 they're licensed for you know, a very specific
(43:54):
niche of that sort of stuff. But that's why 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 John Decker's reign. We
(44:20):
have returned. Uh. Third point here, objective scientific investigations, one
in particular, do appear to have a plausible explanation for
what occurred. To your point, Matt, these explanation, this explanation
occurs um a number of years after the actual events.
(44:42):
There's a great report, series of reports by the Pocono
Record or poken 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,
(45:03):
this is right up your alley. I don't know what
the explanation is based on the info I have. Bartholomew's legit,
he's accredited. He teaches at Botany Down Secondary College, or
did at the time. He wrote in a ton of
journals on on things that were allegations of paranormal right.
(45:23):
And when I say wrote in journals, we're talking about
medical and sociology journals, not you know, his own personal
mole schemes or something. Uh. And and he had a
pretty he had a pretty solid theory for this, that's right. Um.
He he did make it very clear that he did
not have any connections to Stroudsburg UM and kind of
(45:43):
considered himself as as a bit of an outsider. Um.
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
were conjecturing earlier, that through this kind of perfect combination,
perfect storm of stress, uh, the weather and a particular
(46:07):
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.
Ice damning is a phenomenon that occurs when warm air
enters an attic uh like snow melt like melt water
from like a roof seeping in um and then if
(46:30):
temperatures drop after the sun sets, 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. Because of the internal heat of
the house. The water will eventually leak outside. And you
can actually see a pretty helpful um image of this
(46:51):
if you go to University of Minnesota Extensions website, UH
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, so it would
be like in a corner for example. Uh. It's a
it's a pretty pretty helpful image, but it's sort of
like what what's described, but I don't know, not quite
(47:12):
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 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
(47:32):
with the temperature and accumulation. Sometimes, uh, it's it's it's
fairly common. That's all I wanted to say. So the yeah,
the reason I have that diagram there is if you
it is helpful look at it if you're curious. Um,
what what you're seeing is a kind on the roof.
You're seeing a a combination of of water in three forms.
(47:56):
The ice is towards the bottom, right toward the eaves
of the roof. The snow is the top, 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
(48:20):
to be continual because you 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. I know what
(48:41):
leaks are like. Leaks do not shoot out from the
bottom of the floor like rain from a cloud. And
isn't it pretty big coincidence that this occurred at the
house where Don was, then at the pizza place, then
again at the jail. Yeah, and and corroborated by various
unrelated witnesses from from these Uh, well, it didn't seem
(49:05):
like they would have an agenda, you know, I tend
to I tend to believe folks like that. Uh, it's
it's it's hard. Yeah, it's hard to justify. Of course not.
Of course this wouldn't have And this is the thing
that happens in houses very rarely, like under very specific circumstances. Yes,
So going back to um, what I'm building toward here,
or what it was building towards there, is that it
(49:28):
Really The other problem with definition here is what defines rain.
Torrential downpour is rain, but a drizzle is also rain,
you know, And and fog is just moisture in the air.
So is it possible that they were, um, the people
who are witnessing this, we're seeing air heavy with with moisture.
(49:50):
But was the 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 somehow um being dispersed the way that a
humidifier would or something. Uh. To the point about specificity
of ice stamming, Yes, you're correct. The weather in the area,
(50:13):
the weather on Ant Street there does appear to be
within the bounds of what would what an ice stam
need would need to form. Uh. Daytime highs were in
the forties and fifties fahrenheit, but then the lows dropped
down to the twenties and the thirties. UH. Also, Bartholomells
research shows that ice stamming can be pretty common if
(50:35):
a major snowstorm has just hit an area where temperatures
go above freezing during the day to turn stuff in
the water, and then below the point of freezing thirty
two degrees at night. UH. This makes perfect conditions for
your classic ice stam and the Poconos have been hit
by a snowstorm about thirteen days before all this stuff
(50:56):
went down with Don Decker. So maybe there was something
unclean at play. But maybe it 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 snow
areas before. Why would you like just plow? Like cleaning
your driveway is enough. Who goes on their roof all
(51:19):
the time to clean off snow? I go there to
clean off leaves. Yeah, the leaves are the problem here
in Georgia for sure. Uh, although the and I kind
of like it. I think that's meditative. Also, you're not freezing,
why to it? Uh? 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
(51:40):
freaked out, and they didn't see anything else super unusual. Uh.
They couldn't get those stains from the water off the walls.
And we can't do any on the scene testing or
try to reenact the events unsolved mystery style because the
house has been demolished. And the fourth the fourth point here,
(52:03):
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 about credibility on Don's part that
becomes crucial to the story. A few years later, or
a few decades later. Yes, that's correct. There is a
news story that we stumbled upon from October of two
thousand twelve, when Don Decker found himself back in the news.
(52:27):
He'd been rather obscure after these nineties television shows. He'd
you know, you'd every once in a while seeing an
interview with him or him talking about something over the years.
But this was the most high profile thing. Uh. He
was in the news because he turned himself in to
a federal court on charges that that he had set
(52:50):
ablaze a business as a restaurant in the Poconos. Is
an event that occurred in two thousand eleven. This is
in will Bar, a different area there in the Poconos,
a rival pizzeria. Perhaps I don't I don't think so,
but but it does appear that Dawn was involved because
(53:13):
the restaurant owner, this is allegedly the restaurant owner brought
him in to do it on purpose. Oh like for
like an insurance money. Uh yeah, yeah. It was called
Dana's Restaurant and tavern, not not a not a pizzeria
at all. Uh. And the owner was named Theodoro's Kiriakopolos.
I think I got that right. Um. And this was
located at five hundred Sterling Road there in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
(53:37):
So he got the arson pinned on him. A grand
jury charged the pair with mail fraud, criminal conspiracy, and
used to fire to commit a federal felony ouch um.
And this is because you know there's an insurance claim involved, right,
oh a million. That might be an unfair assumption on
our maybe, but it's some just want to see the
(54:00):
world burn or the very least certain restaurants. Um. 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. Mean, you know, he
he was he was pinched the first time for receiving
stolen goods. Now he's committing mail fraud and arson. You know,
(54:24):
it seems really 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. Right, well,
I had from my mind, it's more that it could
(54:44):
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 see it's strong willingness, but it's
definitely there's definitely a proven case where he was totally
fine with doing that. Maybe maybe that's from desperation, right, um,
because people can be driven to crimes of necessity. Maybe
(55:06):
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
hear from you, what do you think, folks? Does the
(55:29):
proposed scientific solution for this bizarre rain well, does it
hold water wamp wamp 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
(55:51):
water could get into the house, if not through the pipes,
But from the eyewitnesses explanation, it doesn't. It sounds like
a out of them grew up in an area where
they would have been familiar with ice stamming, right, Like
they would have known that uh certain types of weather
it can cause certain types of leaks. And this from
(56:11):
their descriptions, at least from the way they're depicted describing
these things, it doesn't it doesn't appear the thought that's
what was going on. 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
(56:34):
than you would find if there was moisture in between
the walls or the ceiling or something. Uh, 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,
(56:59):
you know, you listen to 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 as an
occupation where you're trying to find answers for things, especially
if you're an investigator. Maybe not necessarily to the extent
(57:23):
that I'm thinking of, if you're you know, just in
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,
and we want to hear We wouldn't hear from you,
especially if maybe you've encountered something like this that you
(57:45):
are at a loss to explain. We would love to
hear your story. We try to be easy to find
online where 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 can share, uh, your personal experiences,
your opinions of this case with the best part of
the show, your fellow listeners. But hold on, you might
(58:07):
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
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(58:28):
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(58:49):
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(59:11):
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