Gas Station Chronicles Fear and Mystery

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Welcome to another episode of the Nighttime Scary Tales Podcast, where we explore the dark side of storytelling. Tonight, prepare for spine-chilling tales featuring original horror stories, eerie supernatural encounters, and real-life crime that reveals the darker aspects of human nature. Each story is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat long after it ends. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share your most chilling moments by leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. More haunting stories are coming, so keep your lights on and your doors locked. Sweet dreams… if you can find them!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
My name's Laura. I'm from Leeds in the north of England.
Now I heard you take submissions from viewers, so I'd
like to send mine in. I used to work morning
shifts in the petrol station when I was at Luffborough UNI.
Any day I had afternoon lectures, I'd get up at
five o'clock in the morning, work from six till twelve,
then i'd get the bus to UNI in time for

(00:36):
my one o'clock lectures. It was quite a good gig really.
After the morning rush, the last three hours or so
were usually quite quiet, and if the boss wasn't around,
I could sometimes get away with just chilling in the
office and reading a book in between serving customers. One morning,
a Tuesday, it was a man walked into the petrol

(00:56):
station who had to be in maybe his forties or fifties.
His appearance grabbed my attention right away because when I
looked up from my book, I saw that he was
the spitting image of Mark Bullen from the cover of
t Rex's album Unicorn. My Dad, God Rest his soul.
It was a big t Rex fan and I used
to flick through all of his old LP's when I

(01:17):
was a kid. I always found myself transfixed by Mark
Bollan's face. He was such a beautiful man when he
was alive, But the guy that walked into the petrol
station looked like his evil twin or something. He had
the same mop of dark curly hair, the same dark
tired looking eyes, but he had much sharper features and
looked extremely gaunt, like a skeleton that someone had paper

(01:40):
machede a thin layer of wet tissue paper on. He
was dressed that part too, with a sheepskin coat on,
a bright pink t shirt and what looked like blue
bell bottomed jeans on. It would have been a solid
outfit too, if it wasn't for the sorry state of
his clothes that they were in. Instead of them making
him look good, if it was a very vintage kind

(02:01):
of good, they just made him look weird, smelly, and creepy.
I usually didn't concern myself with people's appearance as much.
It was a petrol station, not a night club, So
even Dracula could walk in fangs all bloody, with his
cape blowing in the wind, and I wouldn't say a word.
If he just paid for his fuel and left, and

(02:21):
then under the circumstances. I think I'd rather it was
Dracula who walked in that day, as opposed to Mark
Bullen's evil twin. He grabbed a pint of milk from
the fridge section, walked up to the counter and asked
for X amount of fuel or whatever pump it was.
I took his money and gave him his change, and
then thanked him for his custom. Ninety nine times out

(02:44):
of ten, a bloke would just say cheers, love, and
then off they'd go. But Evil Bullens stayed by the counter,
looked at me and said, you're a pretty young lady,
aren't you? To say my skin crawled would have been
the understatement of the century. I'm not great at taking
compliments as it is, which I know is a big
me problem. But when the compliments come as greasy and

(03:06):
creepily spoken as Evil Bullins, it knocks me pretty sick.
And I do mean creepily spoken too. It wasn't just
some throwaway compliments. As he was walking out, he drew
out the very before pretty like you're a very pretty
young LADYY ought you? And they aren't you? Was all

(03:28):
squeaky like he was talking to a kid or something,
and I get that we had a big generation gap
between us, but I was a grown woman, not a child. Now.
Even back then, I knew better than to talk back
to a stranger like that, and it's not worth the risk.
So instead of being lippy with him, I said thank
you in a polite but very reserved way, and then

(03:49):
stepped away from the counter to make it look like
I had work to do in the stock room. It
was a trick that I'd used once or twice, a
gesture that said I'd love to stop in chat, but
duty calls. And for the most part, the man attempting
to flirt with me took the hint and made their
way back to their cars. But an evil bullin's case,
I turned my back on him and immediately asked, where

(04:12):
are you going, And with as pleasant a smile as
I could manage, I turned back and I was about
to tell him I was off into the storage room
to carry on my stock count, always a solid excuse.
When he said, now walk away from me, try to
talk to you. There was just a hint of aggression
creeping into his voice when he said it too, just

(04:32):
enough to get me thinking, uh, oh, this guy's going
to be a problem, isn't he. I started explaining that
as much as I'd like to stop and chat, I
had to work to do. My exact words were, I'm
on the clock, to which he replied, well, I'm a customer,
and then started telling me how he didn't often get
to talk to a girl as pretty as me, so

(04:53):
he wanted to make the most of it. I tried
telling him that as much as I appreciated the compliment,
i'd get into try double with my boss if I
didn't complete my assigned workload. Evil Bolin just waved away
my concerns and then told me I'll deal with your
boss if he complains. Then, just as I was about
to reply, he told me, well, I wish I was

(05:14):
as pretty as you. I know some of you might
be thinking I'm a bit full of myself dropping the
word pretty a lot, but it was verbatim what he
was saying to me. I'm not just using this whole
thing to drop a not so subtle humble brag. And
also I'm bad at handling compliments as it is, But
for a grown man to say I wish I was
as pretty as you in this slimy, letcherous way was

(05:38):
just this whole new level of cringe for me, and
in response, the only thing that came to mind for
me was to say something about how inappropriate that was
in a professional setting. And while I was sure his
intentions were pure self preservative flattery, by the way, I
didn't appreciate him commenting on my appearance. And the guy

(05:59):
just laughed like this short chuckle and snort and then
asked me, don't you like being pretty? And for the
first time in our conversation, I couldn't think of a response,
either a professional or heartfelt. I just wanted to run
into the stock room, slammed the door, and kick the
crap out of a few cardboard boxes while pretending that
they were an evil Bullen's ball sack. But I was

(06:21):
scared that if I did, he might follow me, so instead,
I tried my best to stand my ground and repeated
that I didn't appreciate his tone or his question, and
I then told him that if he didn't leave the premises,
I'd call the police. A little bit more of that
aggression crept into his voice and he asked me, well,
you're really going to call the bloody police just because

(06:41):
someone called you pretty? Are you taking the piss. I
didn't even want to engage with him, so I just
asked him to leave and added some preemptive thanks to
make my point. There was a bit more to and
fro with him saying how he was a customer and
wasn't going to leave, and then when I pulled out
my phone as if to say, I really am about

(07:02):
to call nine ninety nine, he says this, You know,
if I look like to you, I just stay at
home all day with on a stitch of clothing on,
just staring at myself in the mirror. And to this
day that's still one of the most skin crawlingly creepy
things a man has ever said to me. And at
the time I was so angry I could have screamed,

(07:25):
but I tried my very best to keep my cool
and just asked him to leave again. Bolan's evil twins
started going off on one about how I needed to
learn to take compliments, and then said he wished he
got half the amount of tention that I did, which
was just a bizarre thing to say because he didn't
even know me. I just kept asking him to leave
on repeat, assuming it was just a matter of time

(07:47):
before he ran out of steam and did leave, but
he kept going and going and going. He started saying
something about how depressed I'd be when I got older
and lost my looks, how once they'd been taken away
from me, I'd be nothing but a pathetic, undesirable waste
of oxygen and I'd end up sticking my head in

(08:09):
an oven. The sky was off his rocker, and that
comment really pushed me closer to the edge in terms
of just snapping and screaming at him. But I just
gripped my teeth and repeated myself for the umpteenth time
that he needed to leave. And that's when he said,
if you don't want the attention, if you don't like
being pretty, then I can make you not so pretty

(08:33):
if you want. And the threat immediately silenced me, but
it didn't paralyze me. And the second after he said that,
I brought up on my phone that I had dialed
the police, and then I asked for them. The guy
did like a sort of fake, outraged laugh, but then
his voice changed almost completely. It went from a sort

(08:53):
of sneer to a very deep, guttural growl. He said,
if I had such a big effing pro em being pretty,
he could come over the counter and smash my face
in until I didn't look like a person any more.
He said, my friends and family wouldn't recognize me when
he was done, and I could forget about any kind
strangers calling me pretty because I'd be as ugly on

(09:15):
the outside as I was on the inside. And by
the time I had been connected to the police, there
was a tremor in my voice as I started telling
the operator what was happening. It was probably one of
the more stressful experiences of my entire life, to be honest,
because while I was watching Bulland's evil twin to make
sure he didn't jump over the counter, and while I
couldn't help but hear all the horrific stuff he was saying,

(09:38):
I had to concentrate on giving all the necessary info
to the police. It was like total cerebral overload. And
the more stressed I got, the more upset I got.
I remember how the bloke said something like I'd love
to cut your face off and wear it. I'd stare
at myself in the mirror and bang on wherein you?

(09:59):
I fe nick is? We'll I pretend that I'm me?
I heard that. Then the operator said police are on
their way, and then I just lost it. I started
screaming at that guy, telling him how the police are
on their way, how he was going to get nicked
if he didn't screw off while he still had the chance.
And only then did he start making his way towards

(10:21):
the door. But while he did, he had a load
of stuff about how he'd be back the next day
to teach me a lesson in manners and all this
other stuff he never followed up on. Thank god, the
police were there in minutes. I showed them the c
C t V footage and as soon as I did,
one of the officers instantly recognized the man who had
been harassing me. He said his name was Charles or Chaz,

(10:45):
but that he sometimes told people his name was Alexei Bowie,
and I said that he hadn't told me his name.
He'd just gone off on one after I didn't giggle
and curtsey when he gave me a compliment. And apparently
this was something Chaz did a lot, According to one
of the coppers, Leicestershire Police had already received several complaints

(11:05):
regarding Chaz's habit of harassing lone women, especially ones that
were working and couldn't otherwise just walk away from him.
It was like his thing, and according to one of
the officers, he was just weeks away from being arrested
and charged. They were still waiting to get the go
ahead from the CPS, but when they did, Chaz was
probably going to prison for a few months at the

(11:26):
very least. I couldn't have asked for a better outcome,
and I think they actually went through with what they said,
because I never saw that Chaz again, not around the
petrol station and not around town anywhere. I don't know
the guy's actual full names, so I've never been able
to look it up to find out how much time
he actually got. I f any but the fact that

(11:47):
I never saw him around the garage again was a
good indicator that it finally got what he deserved. Last November,
I turned off the highway into a two pump gas

(12:08):
station in the middle of nowhere at around one thirty
in the morning. I guess I was kind of zonked
from how tired it was, because as I drove my
car up to the pump, everything seemed as normal as
could be. My eyes were locked on the pump display
as I filled my car up, trying my best to
not go a penny over thirty bucks, So it was
only when I walked over to the kiosk to pay

(12:30):
that I noticed something was off. The first thing that
got my attention was how there was no one manning
this kiosk. At first, I just waited, thinking the employee
was just taking a quick bathroom break or something of
that nature. But then as I started to look around,
I realized the driver of the car at the pump
in front of me was nowhere to be seen either.

(12:51):
They weren't in their car, and they weren't inside the
convenience store. So my first thought was how the driver
and the gas station attendant must have been both in
the back of the store. I guess I got this
momentary chill, thinking I might have interrupted a robbery or something,
and I was suddenly very hesitant to knock on the
glass or call for service. I remember turning to check

(13:14):
out the car parked in front of me and thinking,
if it's Honda, then I'm getting out of here. But
it looked to me like it was a two thousand
eleven three Series. Now, if you don't know cars, Hondas
are easy to steal. B M W's, on the other hand,
not so much. And while that didn't completely preclude the
possibility that there was a robbery in progress, it reassured

(13:34):
me enough that I started knocking on the glass and
asking if there was any one there. I knocked once,
and then twice, and then after the third time, I
knocked in the glass in as many minutes, and it
hit me that something highly unusual was clearly going on.
My first thought was to try the door to the
convenience store. I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be locked,

(13:55):
but when I pushed, the door swung right open for me.
I walked up to the counter, calling out hullo the
whole time, and then, thinking there might have been some
kind of medical emergency, I jumped the counter and took
a look around the back of the store. There was
a bathroom, in a storage room, in a small office,

(14:17):
but all three were unlocked and empty. Then and only
then did I realize that the entire gas station was
completely deserted. I checked around the back just to be sure,
but I figured that there'd be no one there. And then,
once I was one hundred percent shore something seriously weird
was going on, I pulled out my phone and got
ready to dial nine one one. I wasn't still one

(14:41):
hundred percent sure what to do, so I called out
HULLO again, but much louder, and when that got no response,
I called the cops. I could tell that, at first, anyway,
that the despatcher thought that I was just some jerk
customer who was angry my gas station attendant wasn't there
when I needed them. But once I'd properly explained that
there was literally no one to be found anywhere, all

(15:03):
the premises or elsewhere, she started to take my call
a little more seriously. She asked where I was, and
when I told her, she asked if it looked like
there had been a robbery. I remember asking how the
how would I know? But she explained that if there
had been a robbery recently, an employee might still be
hiding somewhere. And I felt this sort of twinge of frustration, because,

(15:24):
like I said, I'd looked probably everywhere except the dumpster
around the side of the gas station, and as I'm
walking back from checking out the highway for signs of life,
I just so happened to be passing it as the
thought to open it popped into my head. I wanted
to be able to say to the despatcher there. I
even checked the station's dumpster. There's definitely nobody here, ma'am.

(15:47):
But when I opened the dumpster, there they were. I
only caught a glimpse of what was inside before I
dropped the lid of that dumpster and backed off like
the thing was radioactive. But a glimpse was enough for me.
There were two bodies in there, all bent out of shape,
with dark stains all over their clothes, and one of
them was almost certainly wearing a gas station uniform. I

(16:10):
remember saying something like oh Jesus, oh my God, pacing
away from the dumpster in a state of total shock,
with a despatcher in my ear, Sir, Sir, tell me
what's going on, sir, And I told her there in
the dumpster, Jesus fucking Christ, learn the goddamn dumpster. The

(16:31):
cops arrived in about ten to fifteen minutes. Then by
then I'd run off near to the highway to puke
up all the contents of my stomach. And I'd remembered
that thing about preserving the integrity of crime scenes, so
in a wild panic, I'd actually puked as I was running,
then had to hoole puke in my mouth for a
few seconds before I puked even more out near the highway,

(16:53):
and after that I just walked back and forth, hitting
my vape until I saw a cop car heading towards
me down the highway, and then after talking to one
of the officers for a few minutes, he told me
I was free to leave. I looked the whole thing
up online the first chance that I got later, but
although I found a bunch of stories about a member
of the public yours truly finding some bodies at a

(17:15):
gas station, there was nothing that explained how or why
those two people had been killed. Ever since, I've always
been extra careful while driving at night, both in the
sense that I keep a very close eye on my
fuel gage and try to avoid any nocturnal pit stops,
but also if a gas station looks a little too quiet,

(17:35):
I'll avoid it altogether and just head to the next one.
I used to work nights at a gas station called
north Star Mart out near a place called Foster in
rural Virginia. I used to drive up from Gloucester, get

(17:58):
there at around ten p m. And then work all
through the night until six a m when my boss,
a dude named jud came over to relieve me. Jud
lived right next door to the gas station, in the
big old house that he claimed that he built himself.
There was no way that he built that whole thing
on his own, but he was far too nice for
me to call him out on it, so I just
let it be. He was a great boss too, I

(18:21):
mean that from the bottom of my heart. Not many
folks can say that they had a boss who had
done almost anything to keep him safe, but I can,
and it makes me feel a little guilty sometimes that
I don't head up there to visit him more. But
I don't like driving around Foster any more. I don't
like going anywhere near the place. And by the end
of this story, I think you're going to understand why.

(18:44):
I worked at the North Star for nine months and
three weeks, working anything from two to five nights a week,
depending on how busy he was at school. Not a
single customer, and all the time I worked there ever
gave me a single ounce of trouble. It was one
of the best jobs I ever had in that respect.
It was always a little busier on week ends, but
during week nights I'd sometimes serve only two or three

(19:07):
customers a night and spend the rest of my time
watching movies on my iPod, back when that was like
a revolutionary thing to do. Jud was really chill like that.
He didn't give me a bunch of cleaning tasks, and
he didn't give me any busy work at all. Actually,
and he only ever had one rule. If anyone ever
showed up late at night acting weird in any way,

(19:28):
I was to call him right away. It didn't matter
if the call woke him and his wife up from
the sweetest dreams they'd ever had. If anyone was acting sketch,
Jud wanted to know about it. I figured that was
fair enough. The gas station was Jud's whole life. It
was his retirement plan, so if it went up in flames,
well you see where I'm going with this. So, even

(19:49):
though it felt slightly emasculating, as in I felt like
I could take care of the station myself, I agreed
to give Judd a call every time there was any disturbances.
First told me about his little golden roll. I'd be
lying if I said that it didn't make me a
little nervous. I guess it suggested that there were a
lot of weird people who came by the gas station

(20:10):
at night, But that couldn't have been further from the truth.
Like I said, nine whole months and not a single
instance of weird or disturbing behavior. And then one night
it happened. I was in the back office one night,
splitting my attention between security monitors and a copy of
The Dark Knight Rises, when I suddenly saw a lone

(20:31):
figure approaching the gas station. We had three cameras, one
facing the pumps, one facing the approach to the store,
and a third which allowed me to watch the inside
of the store from the back office. I can see
the guy walking towards the store, past the pumps, and
then into the view of the second camera. But then
instead of walking into the store like literally everybody else,

(20:54):
he stops dead outside the door. He's right in the
view of the second camera. So I'm looking at this
guy fairly close up, and he looked like a perfectly
regular rural Virginian dad type. He looked like he had
work boots on, some faded jeans, in the baseball cap
with some kind of hunting or fishing logo on it.
Literally the most unremarkable looking guy that could ever walk

(21:16):
through our door, but his behavior most definitely got my attention.
I guess it's not entirely true that nothing weird ever happened,
because there was one previous occasion where I called jud
in the middle of the night some crazy lady was
screaming like a demon out near the pumps. It was
a Saturday and had to be maybe four to four
thirty in the morning. But just like Judd said, I

(21:39):
gave him a call to his house. I told him
about the lady and how her screaming was freaking me out.
He asked for a description. I gave him one, and
then he tells me, oh, that's just Ronda lickered up
on Payday. She'll head home once she's tired herself out,
and then you know what she did. She eventually stopped
screaming and then just kind of walked off like she

(22:00):
was done with that night's performance. Anyway, the guy in
the sporting goods cap stopped dead and just stood there
in front of the camera, not moving a muscle. Not
nearly as freaky as screaming like a banshee, but still
weird none the less. I figured he was I don't know,
taking a moment to think or something. But then as

(22:22):
I'm watching him, his head starts slowly moving, turning his
neck until he's staring into the camera lens. I know
it was just an illusion, but it felt like he
was staring directly at me, and that was easily one
of the most unnerving sensations I've ever experienced. Once the
guy's behavior reached a concerning level of weird, I grabbed

(22:42):
the phone and called Judd. I didn't even feel emasculated
doing it either. Whatever that guy's problem was, it wasn't
meth it was something way scarier than that. Judd picked
up the phone, then once again he asked me to
describe the person acting weird. I started describing the guy
in Then the next thing, Judd slams the phone down.

(23:04):
I look back at the screen and the guy's disappeared
from view, but he's not in the store either. Something
where the hell's he gone? But at the same time,
I'm also thinking, why did Judge just slam that phone
down on me? He told me to call him if
something weird started to happen, and the first time he
sounded sleepy but pretty calm, So I was wondering what

(23:24):
was so different about that time. When I suddenly see
him on the monitors, jud was running towards the gas
station in nothing but his box or shorts and a
wife beater, and he was carrying a shotgun in his hands.
He burst into the store and asked me where he is. Then,
when I say the guy just disappeared and that I

(23:45):
think he just walked off, Jud runs past me into
the office to check the monitors. I'm freaking out too,
because what the hell's he carrying that shotgun for. But
no matter how many times I asked him what's going on,
he kept silencing me and telling me that I needed
to concentrate as he ran back to the security footage
to get a look at the guy's face. I watched

(24:06):
him rewinding the footage until he finally found what he
was looking for, and when he did, I watched Jud
turn completely pale. Whoever it was, jud was terrified of him,
so terrified that he felt the need to come running
over with a shotgun to protect me, And then that
scared the hell out of me too. Judd sent me

(24:29):
home that night after calling the cops, and the next
day he called to say that he'd understand if I
didn't want to come back to work. I asked, just
one time if he could tell me who the man was,
and Jud paused and then repeated the part about understanding
if I didn't want to come back. I thanked him
for the job, wished him luck, and then just hung up.
Like I said earlier, I still feel guilty about not

(24:51):
going up to see him more. He was a great
guy and a great boss. But without knowing who that
guy was, without knowing why Jud was so s cared
of him, I couldn't put myself in the position of
working for him anymore. I didn't want to die for
some stupid gas station job, no matter how cool my
boss was. And if there was a guy out there

(25:11):
who scared the hell out of one of the toughest
suns of bitches I'd ever known, then what chance in
hell did I have? Back when I was in my
senior year of high school, I used to work weekends

(25:31):
at a rural gas station here in my home state
of Nebraska. I work second shift every Saturday and Sunday,
so two pm to around nine pm in early one
summer's afternoon, I set off to work with nothing but
a few wispy clouds and a clear blue sky. Now
call me sentimental, but I love driving around Nebraska. I

(25:52):
don't think there's any place quite like it. It hit
the highway from some small town and it's like the
whole world stretches out in front of you. For as
far as the I can see. There's an almost unbroken skyline,
only occasionally interrupted by a windmill, a barn, or a
cluster of trees. It can look pretty as a picture
on a sunny day, and up until that point, May

(26:14):
had brought only sunshine and showers. But as I drove
along the highway that afternoon and looked off into the distance,
I saw some really scary looking storm clouds rolling in.
The general rule is that most storm clouds look much
scarier than they actually are, especially when there's that big
wall of angry looking clouds facing you down, like something

(26:35):
straight out of the Bible. But most of the time,
you get a little rain, you get a little wind,
and nothing much else to worry about. However, on this occasion,
something told me it was going to be a bad one,
and by the time I got to the gas station,
the storm warnings were being sounded over by local radio stations.

(26:56):
My co worker and I normally did a quick hand over,
but since we got the storm warnings, we both had
a hell of a lot more work on our hands.
We had to lock all the windows, then either secure
all of our outdoor fixtures or drag them inside, and
then we had to inspect the pumps and all that
kind of stuff before shutting off the fuel completely. My

(27:17):
coworker went off to fuel up the generator just in
case we lost power, as I went off to assemble
a bunch of flashlights and batteries, and we obviously can't
use candles with it being a gas stations, so it
was a major priority. We already had our designated shelter
lined up the station's office, so after ensuring the first
aid kit was fully stopped, we kept the radio tuned

(27:40):
up in our ears, wide open for weather alerts and
other announcements. We figured people would stay home and we'd
be in for a pretty turbulent but relatively lonely shift,
but we were wrong. One by one, three cars rolled
into the front over the course of about an hour,
two driven by single people, in the other containing a

(28:00):
mom and her two young daughters wherever they'd been. The
path home led directly through the storm, so instead of
risking their lives, they came to us and begged for shelter,
and we couldn't say no to them. We weren't exactly
equipped to shelter that many people, especially not overnight, but
there was just no turning them away under these circumstances.

(28:22):
We let everybody help themselves to drinks and snacks if
they were hungry, mainly to try and calm their nerves
as the incoming storm got worse and worse, and boy,
oh boy, did it get worse. We all stayed relatively
calm until we heard the tornado sirens going off. I'm
pretty sure all the grown ups there had heard the
sound before, but it scared the hell out of the

(28:43):
younger woman's two daughters, who started screaming and crying and
begging their mom to take them home. Then, when stuff
started flying off of our roof, a piece of debris
hit one of their cars, and the sound of the
alarm made the kids cry even harder. The poor things
just didn't understand what was happening. It only took a
few more moments of stuff falling off of our roof

(29:04):
before we knew that we had to find shelter in
the station's office. There was just enough room to fit everyone,
and thankfully, with the office shielding us from the sound
of the sirens and the howling winds, the two little
girls started to calm down a little, but when something
flew across the parking lot and smashed through the big
plate glass window and made a sound like a freaking

(29:26):
bomb exploding, and the sound scared the hell out of
me and a co worker, and by that point we
were kind of expecting it, but the two little girls
nearly lost their minds. They must have thought the whole
building was coming down, and so did one of the
single drivers, because as the girls started shrieking, she had
some kind of panic attack and tried to run back
to her car. Once we realized what she was trying

(29:49):
to do, my co worker launched at her, telling her
how going outside meant absolute death, and she wouldn't listen.
She tried to fight my co worker, scream and flailing,
and it took me and the other single driver to
subdue her. The little girls were screeching so hard they
could barely breathe, watching as she struggled a little more

(30:10):
and then just burst into tears. Then and only then,
did she stop struggling as she cried and told us
over and over again that she was sorry. We rode
out the storm together for the next few hours, and
I remember how the thing that really united us and
kept us from getting too frightened was the goal of
keeping those two little girls from screaming themselves unconscious. I

(30:32):
worked so hard at keeping them calm and reassuring them
that we were all going to be just fine. But
sometimes when I think about it, I think we were
all trying to reassure ourselves too, and talking to them
little girls like we were was sort of projecting. I think. Eventually,
the sounds of the winds died down, and after about

(30:52):
an hour or so, it looked like it was safe
for everyone to make a move. We walked into the
store to find it absolutely trashed and so much stuff
had blown in that it was impossible to determine what
exactly had smashed the window and made that explosion sound. Glass, snacks, magazines,
and debris were just everywhere, and we had to tread

(31:14):
very carefully over at all to keep from falling on
the carpet of shards. The folks thanked us before they
got into their cars, especially the young mom who thanked
the other two drivers for helping keep her daughters calm
when she too was almost losing her mind. After that,
everyone except me and my coworker went their separate ways,

(31:35):
leaving me and him like, what the hell did we
just go through? On Thursday, April sixteenth of nineteen eighty seven,
four year old Marlena Childress was playing with her toys

(31:55):
out in her family's front yard. Marlena lived in Union City, Tennessee,
with her twenty two year old mother, Pamela Bailey, along
with her stepfather, Johnny, and her four month old half
brother Damon. Also attending the house that day was Marlena's
seven year old step brother Jerry, who was present until
he was picked up by his mother and around three

(32:16):
in the afternoon. At around three thirty p m. With
Marlena still playing in the front yard, her mother washed
dishes while watching her daughter through the large double hung
kitchen window. Pam looked down for mere moments scrubbing and
rinsing a few dishes until she heard the screech and
skidding of car tires coming from the street outside. She

(32:38):
looked up and saw a red vehicle with Kentucky license plates.
Speeding down the street and away from her home. At first,
Pam simply shook her head and returned to her work,
Yet seconds later she was hit with a terrifying realization.
She peered through the window again, then as a choking

(32:58):
panic erupted in her chest, she rushed outside into her
front yard to find that little Marlena was nowhere to
be seen. Following a frenzied search of the surrounding area,
Pamela rushed to contact the police. She strongly suspected that
her four year old daughter had just been abducted by
someone driving a red car with Kentucky license plates Pacific

(33:21):
to mc cracken County in the states far west, not
just because it was seen speeding down the street, but
because someone driving the exact same vehicle had approached her
daughter at a nearby gas station just hours before she
went missing. After surrendering to the kid's demands, Pam had
taken Marlena and her brother Jerry to a nearby gas
station to pick up some candy. After obtaining her sweet

(33:44):
treats and in her excitement to return home, little Marlena
had run out of the store following her mother's purchases
with the goal of being the first back to the car.
Pamela quickly followed her daughter out into the gas station's
parking lot, calling out to her as she went, only
to find and her staring up at a man she
didn't recognize. The man leaned forward, towering over the frightened

(34:06):
child and began talking to her, but when confronted by Pamela,
he excused himself and walked away. Pamela gently scolded little
Marlena and told her not to go rushing off like
that in public places. Then, as her tearful daughter apologized,
pam traced the strange man's path and saw him climbing
into the driver's seat of a red car with McCracken

(34:28):
County plates. Officers from the Union City Police Department rushed
to apprehend their suspect and tracked him down to his
old Kentucky home. He seemed surprised by their arrival, admitted
to having talked to the little girl at the gas
station back in Tennessee, and even consented to a brief
search of his home to confirm Marlena wasn't there. Police

(34:49):
all but ruled him out as a suspect, and after
extensive interviews with Marlena's stepfather as well as her biological father,
They too were cleared of suspicion. Mistigation continued for another
six weeks, with police becoming more and more exasperated with
the lack of progress, until one day, a deeply shocking
confession rocked the local community. On June eighth of nineteen

(35:14):
eighty seven, Pam was talking with a private investigator named
Stan Cabness. Cabnets had been hired at the beheadst of
Pam's family, who were frustrated with the tepid progress of
investigating police, and one day he and Pamela were conducting
a tape recorded interview. Pamela began talking about the day
Marlena went missing and how her misbehavior was becoming increasingly unmanageable.

(35:39):
Marlena's behavior got worse and worse, while Pam got more
and more stressed than Finally, after a bout of near
riotous misconduct, Pamela snapped, spun around, and struck her daughter
on the back of the head. She hit with such
force that little Marlena wobbled, took a tumble, then struck
her head on the corner of a nearby tape. As

(36:00):
she fell Pamela rushed to her daughter's aid, but was
horrified to discover that smashing her temple against a pointed
wooden corner had suddenly and quite definitely killed her. Pamela
continued her confession, fully aware that she was being recorded,
telling Cabnis that once she realized Marlena was dead, she

(36:23):
had hidden her body in the trunk of her car.
She then drove said vehicle to the nearby town of Martin,
where she contacted a family friend named p. L. Somers
and arranged to meet him at a bridge on Campground Road. There,
they carried the dead girl's corpse from the trunk of
Pam's car and then tossed it into Obien River. Investigator

(36:45):
Stan Cabness was stunned. He asked Pamela to confirm that
what she was saying was the truth, then, when she nodded,
he informed her of his obligation to inform the police.
On the tape, a tearful Pamela states that she understands
than Cabnets pushed a button in the recording ends. Cabness
immediately contacted the Union City Police Department, with whom he

(37:09):
had already been working closely with, and informed them of
Pamela's shocking confession. She was subsequently arrested on charges of
second degree murder, and a team of highly trained police
divers were sent to trawl the Obaion for any trace
of Marlena's remains. But this is where the case becomes
as vexing as it is chilling. Tennessee's Obaion River is

(37:32):
a relatively slow moving and meandering water course. Heavy rains
contemporarily increase its speed and water level, particularly in the
winter and spring when rainfall increases, but in its natural state,
much of the Obaion consists of slow moving waters, especially
in the lower stretches, where it flows at a much
more leisurely pace as it approaches the Great Mississippi. According

(37:55):
to Pamela, she and her friend had tossed her late
daughter's body into the water during the small hours of
April seventeenth, a time when most of the spring rains
had come and gone. This meant that by early June
a team of divers would most certainly have been able
to recover any human remains that were tossed into the
Obaion just two months prior. But strangely, despite an intense

(38:18):
search that spanned multiple days, not a single trace of
Marlena's body could be found. Curious regarding the inconsistency in
her story, homicide detectives visited Pamela whilst in custody and
asked her to confirm the location of the dumping site.
It was here that Pamela once again shocked investigators by

(38:38):
recanting her entire confession. Pamela explained that just days prior
to the tape confession with Stan Cabness, she'd been released
from a psychiatric hospital. The stress of losing her daughter
had been too much to bear, so after a brief
stay under the care of medical professionals, she was released,
having been prescribed a cocktail of antidepressants. Pam then claimed

(39:02):
that not only had she been high as a kite
during the tape conversation with Cabnus, but he'd heavily intimidated
her prior to its recording, having used the threat of
the electric chair to coerce a confession. Police the master
what involvement, if any, her friend p. L. Somers had
in her daughter's disappearance, and pam made yet another astonishing claim.

(39:23):
Somers wasn't her friend, He'd been her life long abuser,
and it was he that had abducted and murdered little Marlena.
According to Pamela, Summer's interest in her would wax and wane.
Sometimes he'd be a constant menace, demanding satisfaction whenever the
mood took him. Other Times he'd leave her in peace

(39:45):
for months on end, but he always came back for more.
Then one day, after Somers called to arrange a date,
she decided that enough was enough. Summers stopped by, but
instead of giving in to him, Pamela fought off his
advance answers and then threaten to call the police. Summer's
response was to threaten Marlena's life, and then a few

(40:06):
weeks later, there's a screech of tires while she's washing
dishes in her little girl was gone. A decidedly puzzled
pair of homicide detectives then paid a visit to p. L.
Somers at his home. There, they informed him of the accusations,
and his reaction was incredulous. Summrs categorically denied Pamela's shocking

(40:28):
claim and retorted by painting her as a liar of
pathological proportions. He stated he and Pamela had shared a
brief dalliance many years ago, and that he didn't even
know that she had a daughter, let alone kidnapped and
murdered her. Police then asked Summers if he had an
alibi for the day of Marlena's abduction. He responded by

(40:49):
listing several all of which proved credible when cross reference
by detectives. Police had no choice but to rule Summers
out as a potential suspect. But here's where the story
takes another unexpected turn. Just months later, P. L. Somers
was arrested on charges of molesting a nine year old boy.

(41:11):
An article from the Kentucky based Paduca's Son dated September
thirtieth of nineteen eighty seven states that a sixty five
year old named P. L. Somers was arrested the previous
afternoon on charges of aggravated battery. And what's more, Somers
was arrested after a traumatized child approached their parents. He
wasn't caught at the scene. It wasn't some kind of sting.

(41:34):
Somers was visited at his home in around four hours
after the attack. Unless the nine year old he was
accused of molesting had a photographic memory and a talent
for articulating the finer details of a person's appearance, it's
safe to say that the police considered him a suspect
due to his history of child abuse. As it turns out,

(41:54):
there was some degree of truth to Pamela's frightful claims,
but the fate of her daughter remained a deeply troubling mystery.
Many police officers doubted Pam's story, and others doubted her sanity,
but all agreed that without a body or any other
kind of solid evidence, the chance of getting a conviction
was highly improbable. Free to move on with their life,

(42:16):
Pamela Bailey found that she couldn't continue living in Union
City and relocated to Mayfield, Kentucky, around forty miles northeast
of her childhood home. Two years later, sometime in early
nineteen ninety, Pamela gave birth to a son that she
named Casey, and for twelve long years they lived in
peace and harmony. Then, on April twenty second of two

(42:39):
thousand two, just a few months after Casey's twelfth birthday,
Pamela told her young son that she had a surprise
for him and asked him to put on a blindfold.
Casey did as she was told before his mother led
him out to the car and helped her son into
the passenger seat. Six days prior marked the fifteenth anniversary
of Marlena's disappearance. She would have been nineteen years old

(43:03):
had she been alive. Pamela drove her son all the
way to the mystery destination she picked out, then carefully
helped him from the passenger seat and led him off
into the unknown. Casey kept asking if he could take
off the blindfold, yet his mother told him no, that
he had to wait until the right moment. He felt
grass soft and spongy under the souls of his sneakers,

(43:27):
and then suddenly, his mother brought him to an abrupt
halt and told him to take off his blindfold. When
Casey did so, his first reaction was utter confusion. He
believed his mother was taking him somewhere exciting or fun,
potentially as a belated birthday present. Instead, she'd taken him

(43:47):
to a cemetery. Casey looked around, wondering what in the
world his mother was thinking, when he suddenly spotted a
clue to the purpose of their visit. Before him, a
single word was et into a small child sized gravestone.
Son it said, Casey turned to see his mother brandishing

(44:08):
a knife. He tried to run, but she grabbed his shirt,
stabbing him once in the back of the neck and
twice through the flesh atop his shoulder. Thankfully, Casey's quick
thinking and decisive action saved his life. His dynamic movement
meant the stab wounds inflicted by his own mother were
only relatively minor. He escaped, sought help, and then fully

(44:32):
recovered following a brief stay in a hospital. Pamela was
once again arrested on charges of harming one of her
own children, but when questioned, claimed that she had no
memory of the event and must have blacked out for
the duration. She was subsequently charged with attempted murder, but
after a period of legal wrangling, ended up pleading no

(44:52):
contest to charges of second degree assault. She received a
ten year prison sentence, but was really least after serving
just two thirds of her time. And while she was
in prison, police took the opportunity to reopen the investigation
into the disappearance of Marlena Childress, but despite their best efforts,

(45:13):
they were unable to make any solid progress in their investigation.
Some detectives remained firm in their position that Pam, who
had already admitted to harming one of her children, was
responsible for Marlena's death. Others weren't so sure. According to
one former homicide detective, there was a potentially credible sighting

(45:34):
Marlena had a Memphis hair salon just six days after
she went missing. Two hairstylists claimed that a girl with
a strong resemblance to Marlena was brought into their salon
by two grown women who also appeared to be the
guardian of a similarly aged boy. The women asked for
the little girl's hair to be styled, but during the cut,

(45:54):
the little girl kept sobbing and saying that she wanted
her mother. The stylists claimed the women referred to the
girl as Marlena, but thought very little of the encounter
until they saw the girl's picture in a local newspaper,
at which point they seemed convinced that little Marlena and
the sobbing child were one and the same. Following the
reported sighting, Marlena's maternal grandfather drove all the way to

(46:17):
Memphis to personally verify the story. Lawage Strickland tracked down
one of the women that had reportedly brought Marlena for
a hair cut, but after she was questioned by police,
who was determined the little girl had not been his
missing granddaughter. Yet, in their haste to pursue more recent leads,
investigators appear to have neglected what is arguably their strongest

(46:40):
avenue of investigation, the man in the red car. Despite
having his name stricken from the list of potential suspects,
the involvement of the mysterious driver with mc cracken County
plates has never been fully explored. Not only was his
vehicles spotted speeding away from the scene of Marlena's abduction,

(47:00):
but they just so happened to bump into one another
in a gas station parking lot just hours before. Police
seemed to have assumed that since Marlena was sitting on
the man's couch or at his kitchen table, she couldn't
possibly have been present in the home, Yet their search
appears to have been skinned deep. The driver could have
drug Marlena to keep her quiet before secreting her away

(47:23):
in a very discreet hiding place. Alternatively, he could have
handed Marlena off to an accomplice in the hours between
speeding away from her home and arriving back in mc
cracken County on the other side of the Kentucky Tennessee
state line. It's entirely possible that Pamela was in cahoots
with this mystery driver and made a calculated decision to
confuse and frustrate any subsequent investigation by claiming that she

(47:48):
had been her daughter's killer. But if that was the case,
why arrange for her daughter to be abducted in the
first place. If twenty two year old Pam believed that
she was too young to be a full time mother,
she could have easily placed her daughter into adoptive care,
but that would have come with a degree of stigma,
a sense that she'd given up. However, arranged for Marlena

(48:09):
to go missing, especially if it happened during a brief
lapse in her otherwise attentive care, that would leave Pam blameless.
But what if Pam had a little more to gain
than just her freedom. What if she lied about her
daughter's fate in order to mask an immense personal gain.
What if Pamela Bailey sold her child. Between nineteen twenty

(48:30):
four and nineteen sixty, a woman from Memphis named Georgia
Tan stole and sold up to five thousand different children.
Operating under the cover of her position at the Tennessee
Children's Home Society, Tan arranged for the children to be
adopted in exchanged for vast sums of cash. She performed
no background checks on the people she sold children to,

(48:52):
meaning there's a good chance that she deliberately sold children
to people who would exploit their labor or exploit their innocence.
Tan charged anywhere from seven hundred to ten thousand dollars,
and during a speech in nineteen forty four, had the
audacity to accuse other adoption agencies of trafficking vulnerable children
for profit. Incredibly, one child stolen and sold by Georgia

(49:18):
Tan grew up to be a household name. Born as
Fred Phillips, the infant Boy was sold to Kathleen and
Richard Fleer sometime in early nineteen forty nine or nineteen fifty,
who went on to settle in the state of Minnesota
before renaming the boy Richard. The Boy grew up an athlete,
and by the early nineteen seventies was well on his

(49:40):
way to becoming the styling profiling limousine riding jet, flying
kiss stealing Wheeling and dealing Son of a gun Rick,
the nature Boy Flare. The point is that even some
of America's most beloved public figures were once bought and
sold as children. Sadly, Georgia Tan died of uterine cancer

(50:02):
three days before the state filed charges against her, and
thus escaped justice, but there's no evidence that the network
she operated was effectively dismantled. It's estimated that Georgia Tan
had made somewhere in the region of one hundred and
twenty thousand dollars from the sale of orphaned children, which
in today's money is almost one point two million dollars.

(50:25):
An industry that profitable doesn't just disappear overnight, and it
seems far too much of a coincidence that Tan's trafficking
operation and Marlena's mysterious disappearance occurred in the exact same state.
It makes very little sense that Pam Bailey would be
working in cahoots with the driver of the red car,
only to then swiftly report him to the police. But

(50:47):
what if the driver was a well placed decoy employed
as part of a vast, historic human trafficking network that's
existed for a hundred years what if she felt so
guilty and was so acutely aware of the evil that
lurks in the shadows of our society that her ultimate
gift to her twelve year old son was eternal dreamless sleep. Hey, friends,

(51:13):
thanks for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted
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at my email Let's read submissions at gmail dot com

(51:34):
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(51:55):
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so much, friends, and remember, Lady fingers don't have fingerprints.