Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
During my junior year of high school, I thought it
would be cool to take a psychology class because it
sounded interesting to me. It's also because the psychology teacher
had a reputation as being awesome, and as I'm sure
you all agree, having a teacher that was chill and
made stuff interesting made school go way faster. But then
when all the classes and stuff were posted online, I
(00:36):
found out I wasn't getting taught by the cool psych teacher.
I was in a class with a fresh hire. Basically,
so many people applied to the psych class that the
school denied to hire a second teacher, and so a
whole bunch of the kids who partially or only chosen
psych because they thought that it was going to be
an easy ride, were super angry that they were with
(00:57):
this new teacher whose reputation they were unfamiliar with. And
I was a little disappointed. But it was actually in
it for the subject too, not just an easy pass.
But then once we actually met this dude, we realized
that he was the total opposite of the cool psych
teacher in almost every way. At first, we just thought
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he was a little harsh, but anyone would have seemed
like a buzzkill in comparison to the other psych teacher.
But then as time went on, he started to get
a little weird. I didn't hate the guy, not at first,
but like I said, things got so bad that I
even started to think that he was an a hole.
He'd snap on people for being late or talking in class,
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but then that standard for some teachers. But then he
started doing it to people over nothing at all. He
once berated a kid for getting an answer wrong and
acted like he was trying to be funny by giving
him a joke answer. But I was there and the
kid wasn't joking around. It was the wrong answer, but
that's all it was. The kid was just trying to learn,
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and our psych teacher basically went in for some verbal
ground and pound, and it was brutal. Everyone thought that
he was a jerk after that, and I heard one
or two kids actually complained about him. But then, like
instead of the Ahle style of teaching becoming his standard,
things just got worse and worse, until eventually he completely
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snapped on this one kid who had to switch classes
because of scheduling issues. The guy must have heard how
much of a jerk are psych teacher was but he
obviously didn't understand just how bad he'd actually gotten, because
the teacher was in the middle of talking when this
kid turned to his neighbor and started trying to talk
to them. I remember the kid's neighbor just completely ignoring him,
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knowing better than to become our teacher's target. But that
only made the original kid be like, why are you
ignoring me? A little louder than he'd been talking before.
Our teacher had been writing something on the whiteboard and
talking while he was doing it, but when he heard
the kids saying the thing about being ignored, he just stopped.
He didn't turn around right away, though, he just stopped.
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His hand came down from the whiteboard, and he just
stood there like seething for a second before he turned
around and asked who talked. No one said a word,
not just because they didn't want to snitch on the guy,
but because they just didn't want to become this guy's target.
Seems crazy to look back on now, how he was
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still even in a classroom. I mean, but there he was,
with all of us freaking terrified of him, just hoping
that he wouldn't target us individually. So, as I said,
he turns around and asks who talked, and we stay
totally silent. But this kid just raises his hand, albeit
kind of nervously, to say something like I was just
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asking him for and he didn't get to finish his sentence.
The teacher didn't say anything, he didn't scream or yell,
He just reeled back then sent the whiteboard duster thing
flying at this kid's head. Ever seen that old school
footage of George Bush dodging that Iraqi guy's shoe, It
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was almost exactly like that. The kids saw the teacher
whinding up to make the pitch, so he had enough
time to react and dodge the throw, but the duster
smacks into the desk of another kid behind him so
hard that girl screamed. In that Bush video, it's kind
of funny because after the shoe gets hurled at him,
he actually smiles out of surprise, or maybe he was
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impressed because it was actually a pretty good throw, But
either way, he gets rushed away by secret Service and
there's no follow up, and aside from the Iraqi dude
getting refed up on the way out, no one got hurt.
But in the case of the kid who got the duster,
hurled at him. He was tucked away into his desk
and barely had time to edge out of it before
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our teacher basically threw himself at the kid and just
started beating on him. The kid was totally helpless. He
was on the ground but throwing kicks and trying to
get away as all the kids around them jumped from
their desks. Some just kind of froze at the edges
of the room. Others ran off to get someone, really
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anyone to come break it up. Some of us in class,
myself included, tried various methods of breaking up the violence.
Some yelled, but others actually approached our teacher telling him
to stop. But whoever did got a fist thrown in
their direction or a desk shoved towards them in one case,
and one by one, everyone who approached ended up just
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backing off. This one guy actually put hands on the teacher,
who gave the kid who got attacked first a chance
to get up, but by that time he was so
mad and surging with adrenaline that he tried to knock
the teacher on his butt. This was not a good idea,
because I don't know what the hell this guy did
before he was a psych teacher, but he could legitimately
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handle himself in the street fight. I mean, I know
he was fighting high schoolers, but get this, the kid
he'd been wailing on first, jacked up with adrenaline, must
have totally abandoned the whole flight thing in favor of fight.
But then as he steps towards our teacher, he spins around,
just kind of eats the kid's first punch, and then
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responds by lunging forward and grabbing him by the throat.
Everything up to that point had been just startling and crazy,
but not terrifying or horrifying or anything really and truly
deep like that. But then as our teacher got hold
of this kid's neck and squeezed as hard as he could,
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there was just this immediate change of vibe in the room.
It went from like, well, we're probably going to talk
about this for a long time to holy crap, someone's
about to get murdered right here in front of the class.
And I mean it too. If it wasn't for the
school security guards showing up when they did, I actually
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think our teacher might have killed him anyways. As you
can probably guess, the aftermath of the whole thing was insane.
A bunch of people got suspended, the teacher included, and
after a lengthy court case, he ended up going to
jail for quite some time. The kid whose butt he
beat ended up testifying against him in court, and it
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was probably the most insane time I have ever had
in school. Back in Junior High, I remember we had
a Gulf War vet for a science teacher who, for
the sake of anonymity, I'll just call mister Marine. Mister
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Marine was the kind of dude who obviously had his
crap together in times of panic. In the three years
we were there, I almost never saw him do more
than crack a calm smile. Then, in ninth grade, Junior
High was seventh, eighth and ninth where I went this
girl close who showed up late to our first period
class every day and was kind of quiet. She failed
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to show up at all for some reason. Instead of
marking her absent, he called the office and had a
very quiet conversation. He looked visibly disturbed and shaken. The
Next day, the girl showed up to class just a
bit late, but with a broken nose, a black eye,
and her jaw wired shut. Even though this was twenty
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five or so years ago. I can still see the
look on mister Marine's face when he saw her. It
was pure murderous fury and even more terrifying. He pulled
her into his office and a calm conversation with her,
and sent her to the nurse. He then told the
rest of us that nobody was to say anything to
her about it, as she'd had an accident and was embarrassed,
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and most people didn't even really care. Quickly the rumors
spread though, did you see Chloe, Jesus, somebody kick the
hell out of her. I happen to be passing the
office somehow way home that night, and I saw the
principal and two police officers, mister Marine and Chloe in
there with the door shut, and she was crying. One
of the police officers noticed me looking and pulled the blinds.
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I normally walked home, so I waited. I think school
got out at around two thirty or so, and I
usually hung around with some friends to listen to music
or play basketball for thirty minutes or whatever before I
started walking. I waited outside the front of the school
until almost four p m. Finally a car pulled up,
and this dude gets out looking just angry. He's swearing
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to himself, and as I'm the only one out there,
he says, you, where's the office? And I just pointed,
but he didn't make it to the door. The two
cops came out quick, one in front and one behind,
and the one who approached the guy started telling him
to calm down. This angry dude just loses his mind, screaming,
my daughter should have been home an hour ago, and
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I had to leave work. I'm going to sue. The
cops are trying to calm him down. Then out of nowhere,
mister Marine comes out of the side door of the office,
his face lit like the fires of hell, and he
just straight up goes full horizontal, four feet in the
air and just body tackles this guy and seconds he's
on top of him, and he's probably hit the guy
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ten times, close fists and all and worse yet, he's
not saying a single thing. He's not making any noise,
just deep rhythmic breathing like you do when weightlifting. Short
breath in, long breath out. Smack, smack smack. The cops
actually kind of take their time getting them off the guy.
One casually handcuffs the guy, and the other handcuffs mister Marine,
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who is standing untouched except for some bloody knuckles and
breathing steadily, face read from exertion, eyes wide in anger
and satisfaction. He's just not saying a word. I decide
to walk home at that point, and as I'm heading
up the road, an ambulance, sirens and all flies passed
me towards the school. And the next day mister Marine
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wasn't in school and we had a substitute instead. By
the end of the day, people were telling me the
story and it was completely wrong. Of course, I heard
things like mister Marine pulled out a gun and shot
him in the gut, where mister Marine stabbed him with
that flip knife he has, or even mister Marine choked
him out and almost killed him and now he's in prison.
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None of those were true, obviously. Then the next week,
without any explanation at all, mister Marine was back. First
thing I noticed was written on the chalkboard if you
ask you go to detention. His face made it clear
that he wasn't to be tested and did not have
any sense of humor about it. Nobody saw Chloe again
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after that. I don't know what happened. And about five
or six years ago, I was telling this story to
a friend and he said, well, why don't you just
look her up on Facebook. I felt stupid that I
hadn't even thought of that. I went to my mom's
broke out my junior high yearbook and found her last
name that had completely forgotten, and I typed it into
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Facebook and I found a couple dozen options, and her
name is pretty common, and eventually I found her on LinkedIn,
of all places. She ended up going to the University
of Colorado a master's program and now works in finance
or something. Her photo looked happy, which made me happy too.
I googled her a bit out of curiosity and found
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some articles that she written for various anti bullying and
abuse awareness and management things. One of them was told
like a fictional story, almost a girl came to school
late every day, lacking in energy, and she had no
personality of note and was quiet and meek. She wore
loose fitting clothing, and she had a few friends. It
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was evident to me pretty quickly what she was talking about,
which was herself. And in the story, she writes the
girl had been physically abused for years by her stepdad
an abuse of alcoholic and it took a teacher with
no training at all to determine what had happened and
start the chain of events that ended the abuse. The
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point of the story was to teach other teachers what
signs to watch out for, what personality traits to look for.
And after that, I looked up mister Marine as well
to see how he was doing. I was worried he
was dead, after all, he was in his fifties and
sixties back then. I found a few articles about his coaching.
He had also been the baseball coach of the high school,
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and a note saying that he'd retired in two thousand
and one. Nothing after that and no obituary or anything.
I like to think that he's probably just sitting around
watching reruns of some show that he likes, drinking beer
and playing with his grandkids, who are probably about the
age Chloe and I were at the time, and that's
just what I like to imagine. Anyways, the scariest night
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in my life was November twenty second of two thousand
and eight. It was a Sunday, and my sister and
I were getting ready for bed when we heard someone
shouting from outside in our driveway. They were shouting out
our family name, something which I'm not going to share,
and as much as it scared me, I didn't understand
the significance of it at the time. I thought some
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very angry person was shouting at all of us, when
really he was shouting for my dad. It was my
sister who first peeked through the blinds to see what
all the commotion was, and it was her who first
started panicking, saying, Mommy, Mommy, he's got a gun. Mom
took us into her and our dad's room, which was
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at the back of the house, and that's where we
stayed until our dad returned and said that we were
safe to come out. Our mom kept telling us Daddy's
going to keep us safe, don't worry, Everything's going to
be just fine. But my sister and I were a
pair of emotional wrecks at that point. I was personally
convinced that this crazy idiot in our driveway was going
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to shoot my dad, so I was inconsolable until we
finally showed up again. I can't remember him telling us
anything other than it's okay. The angry man is gone.
Inasmuch as I was still shaky from the shock of
the whole thing, I took their word that everything was
going to be okay. My sister and I took a
while to calm down, but when we did, Mom and
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Dad put us to bed, tucked us in, and once
again reassured us that everything was going to be just fine.
But everything was not going to be fine. I remember
how in the weeks that followed, I noticed how Mom
and Dad seemed to be fighting an awful lot. Then
as the months went by, I noticed that Dad seemed
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to be sleeping on the couch in his office sometimes
and was staying extra late at work instead of coming
home for dinner around six every evening. This continued for
a while until one day Mom and Dad set me
and my sister down and explained that Dad wasn't going
to be living with us anymore. He was moving out
of state for his job and some place we wouldn't
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be able to visit. They told us that they still
loved each other very much and that it was only
going to be a temporary thing, but we still didn't
take it very well. We asked if we could go
with him, or if he could get a job someplace
else so he wouldn't have to move. But none of
that was possible. They said he was leaving at least
for a while, and we just had to get used
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to it. I can't remember how long it was after that,
but then came the day that Mom sat us down
all over again, with no dad this time, and told
us that they were getting a divorce. She gave us
some excuse at the time, but we didn't find out
the real reason until many many years later. And although
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I don't know one hundred percent exactly how this happened,
I imagine it went something like this. So there once
was a little girl in our town who whose dad
bought her a cell phone for her thirteenth birthday. The
little girl was attached to the phone, as you can imagine,
and was never shy about said attachment. But then one
day her dad notices that she's being a little too
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secretive with the device, and as time goes by, his
suspicion grows and he asks her who she's texting all
the time. She tells him something like just friends, daddy,
and when he asks can I see, she gets super
defensive and starts talking about privacy and boundaries and all
this other stuff a thirteen year old shouldn't be talking about.
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The guy confiscates his daughter's phone, takes a look through
the text messages, and then finds a chain of extremely
inappropriate texts with someone she's listed in her contacts under
the nickname boyfriend. The father demands to know who his
daughter is talking to, because obviously kids shouldn't be saying
such explicit things to each other, but the daughter seems
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intent on keeping that person's name a secret. The father
threatens grounding zero t V privileges, but still his daughter
won't say who her dirty pen pal is, And that's
when the father decides to just call the number. But then,
when the person on the other end picks up the call,
he doesn't hear the pubescent voice of some junior high schooler. No, Instead,
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the father hears the voice of a grown man saying
something like, oh hey, baby, I thought you'd never call
back now. I don't imagine the father was pleased about
learning that an adult was listed in his middle school
daughter's phone as boyfriend. That's the understatement of the century.
But I also don't imagine the guy was too forthcoming
with his name or home address. Once he realized who
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was actually calling him. Yet somehow the dad still extracted
the man's identity from his daughter, and in the end,
her secret dirty pen pal turned out to be none
other than my own father. He was her middle school teacher,
and although I don't care to imagine how he went
about it, he somehow got a hold of this girl's
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cell phone number and was in the process of grooming
her when her father found out about it. My dad
didn't go to work some place, he went to jail,
and to protect us from the truth, Mom went along
with this version of the truth until we were old
enough to find out for ourselves. She didn't deny it
when we confronted her with what we'd found, and honestly,
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that whole discovery process could make a pretty good story
all on its own. But we came to understand why
she chose never to bring it up. We were always
going to find out some day, but I guess it
was just a matter of time. Better to let someone
else break our hearts than do it herself. This is
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the single craziest thing I ever se saw when I
was in school, and come to think of it, I've
never seen anything that crazy since, so I guess this
tops a list for my whole life. I live in
work in Texas, but I grew up in Taiwan, with
the joke being that I'm less how to y'all and
more knee howl the y'all, which is a super funny
Mandarin language joke that only the Galaxy brings among your
(20:21):
listeners will appreciate that. Or maybe I'm just terrible at
writing jokes in my second language, and I'm sure they'll
let me know in the comments. Anyway, I grew up
in Taiwan, and since my high school campus was pretty small,
a few of the buildings were three or four stories
to accommodate all the students. One day, we're sitting in
class in total silence, busy with some physics exercise books.
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Our teacher was sat at his desk in front of us,
and suddenly he pushed back his chair in a way
that made it squeak against the floor, and it drew
many of our attentions. But what kept them is that
our teacher started to suddenly take his shoes off. It
had to be a rational explanation, right, itchy foot stone
in his shoe. There are a lot of reasons why
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he might suddenly take his shoes off. But then right
after putting his untied dressed shoes right up there on
the desk, he started taking his socks off too. By
then myself and my fellow students were all watching him
and looking at each other as if to say, what
in the world has gotten into him, because having a
teacher behave like this was nothing we'd ever seen before.
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Our teacher did the same thing with his socks as
he did with his shoes, tucking them into the shoes
on the desk in front of him, And then, with
everyone watching, our teacher walked over to one of the windows,
opened it up, and then threw himself out of it.
If you've ever heard of that by standard effect, this
was a classic example of it. No one did a
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thing until our teacher was falling three stories down. It
was like we were frozen until it was too late
to do anything about it. But then the moment he
started to fall, it was like we all came out
from under the effects of a magic spell. There were shouts, screams,
and we all ran over towards the windows to look.
I remember him lying there, not moving and thinking, oh
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my god, he's dead. Some of our class ran to
get help, but most of us stayed where we were,
looking down at our teacher's seemingly lifeless body and complete shock.
Shortly afterward, the school's staff when in full crisis mode,
calling in medics and ushering children away from the area
where our teacher was lying. It was and is a
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very traumatic memory, but there is a kind of happy
ending to all this. Our teacher survived the fall. He
was in a very bad condition, but he did survive.
But a week later we were told that our teacher
had been sick and then he needed some time off
to recover. I now understand that what he suffered from
was essentially a complete nervous breakdown, and although none of
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us knew would cause this outside of rumors, some said
his wife had left him. Others said one of his
sons had taken his own life, and he blamed himself,
but none of those were ever confirmed, and to me,
the reasons aren't really important. I heard he carried on
teaching but didn't return to our school, and although he
terrified all of us that day, I'm very glad he survived,
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and I hope he finally found some peace. I used
to go to Sunday school when I was in knee high.
I grew up in a very low income area of
coastal Louisiana, back when everything was still a mess from Katrina.
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So instead of classes being held in church or any
other kind of building for that matter, they were held
in a revival tent that had emptied out following morning service.
For the longest time, there were two teachers, man and
one woman, and I remember them being your typical church people,
nice but just kind of boring, you know. Anyway, this
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one week they introduced a third teacher. He didn't actively
participate though, he was more like a teacher's assistant or something.
He was so quiet he was almost mute too. I
think I heard him say three words in total. And
I was maybe there ten or eleven times when he
was there being that third teacher. I remember my buddy's
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mom saying how weird he was to his dad. They
didn't think I was listening, but I was. His mom
said the guy creeped her out and she didn't feel
comfortable with him being around us kids. I guess other
parents were feeling the same way, and I guess some
of them did some digging on the guy too. Because
one week the cop showed up after some kid's dad
tried to knock his teeth out. I remember the guy
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walking through the tent, the angry dad, I mean, before
he threw himself at the quiet third teacher, the main
male teacher, was a big guy. And it's a good
thing too, because if he wasn't old quiet teacher, there
would have been spread over that tent like peanut butter
and jelly. And as soon as it happened, the lady
teachers started hurting us away from the violence. So I
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remember at first hearing nothing but screaming and crying from
the other kids there, who were obviously terrified by what
was going on. But I do remember hearing the dad
screaming this one exact thing, as the teacher was dragging
him off. He was screaming something like, we know what
you are, boy, we know what you are. Next Sunday,
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my mom and dad said that we weren't going to
that Sunday school anymore, And my buddy's parents told him
the same thing. They said it was gone, moved on
or something, and they'd have to find us someplace else
to go for Sunday school. And to be honest, I
didn't really dig going to Sunday school anyways, and I
only didn't complain so much because my dad used to
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go too, and he lived way out on the other
side of the county, so there was no seeing him
outside of school. Otherwise, not going to Sunday school meant
not getting to hang out with him, but it also
meant getting to actually go home after church instead of
having to hang out in some stinky canvas tent with
a bunch of boring old church folk and a mute
weirdo and a long time after I'm hanging out with
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the buddy I used to go to Sunday school with.
We were in high school by that time, so twice
the age we were when that Sunday school thing happened,
and I barely remembered it until we randomly brought it
up that day. I thought it was kind of funny
at first, like I was laughing because it was such
a random, wild memory, a fist fight at a Sunday
school in front of all of us kids, And I'm like, oh,
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you remember that, expecting him to laugh too, but he doesn't.
He just looks at me awkwardly because it wasn't a
setup and there was no punchline. The weird quiet guy
might have seemed harmless, but he wasn't. Or actually he
might have been, but not enough. I guess that doesn't
make a lick of sense. Let me explain. A few
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years before he got the job at the Sunday School,
our quiet weirdo got caught waggling his wang in front
of an elementary school. He ended up going to jail,
but got out early after volunteering for and brace yourselves
before y'all hear this chemical castration. Now, I'm not an attorneys,
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so I'm not going to pretend to know how something
like that happens. But apparently the proof of this chemical
castration stuff, all of his paperwork, I mean, was the
only reason he got hired at the Sunday School. The
male and female teaching duo thought that that was a
sign of his true repentance, like the whole thing was
his cross to bear or something, and gave him a
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chance to do good around children and not hurt them.
I guess I can kind of attest to the fact
that he didn't make a move on any of us
kids at none that I saw. I don't think he
ever got a moment alone with us, but that was
probably down to the fact that the Sunday school knew
about this guy's past, and even with all those pills
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he was taking to take his libido away, they didn't
really trust him around kids. It doesn't excuse them hiring
the guy, though I respect all that forgive and forget
Christian stuff, but I just don't feel like that extends
to anyone caught trying to diddle children. I don't know
if they approached him or if he approached them, and honestly,
I don't know what's worse, but I feel like it
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was only a matter of time before the guy went
back to his old habits, and it's kind of scary
to think that it could have been me that he
tried it on. My name is Steve and I'm from
Fort Wayne, Indiana, And although this didn't happen to me
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or any teacher I ever had, I think it's an
incredible story and I'd like to share it with you
and your subscribers. I tend to think about it whenever
I'm stressed, to whenever a coworker jokes or sometimes doesn't
joke about being on the verge of going insane, Because
no matter how bad things get for us, they could
always be worse, and I feel the coming story is
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the best possible illustration of that. So way back in
March of nineteen hundred, a forty year old Indianapolis school
teacher named Carrie Salvage had a complete mental breakdown and
was admitted to the Indianapolis Union State Hospital. There's no
specific reason given as to why Carrie was admitted. All
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her records say things like stress or melancholy, but admitted
she was, and she was given her very own room
on the first floor at the building, which apparently had
a pretty nice view of the grounds. Then one morning,
not long after Carrie was admitted, one of the hospital's
nurses entered her room to find her standing next to
a window. She asked Carrie if everything was okay, only
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for Carrie to then ask for a glass of milk.
The nurse go to get her one, making sure to
lock the door behind her, but when she comes back,
Carrie was gone. The walk down to the kitchens took
less than five minutes there and back, and Carrie was
wearing a thin gown and slippers at the time, so
it was only logical that she couldn't have gotten far
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The hospital's staff then went about looking for her, covering
the entirety of the hospital's grounds in the process, but
found no trace of her anywhere. This sparked off a
big panic among the staff at the time, not just
because Carrie was missing, but because her brother was due
to pay her a visit that very same day. They
looked all over the place again but couldn't find Carrie,
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and when her brother showed up, they were forced to
tell him the truth, and, needless to say, he was pissed.
Carrie's family were informed to in turn enlisted the help
of law enforcement and dozens of volunteers to help find her.
They spent days searching for her, going over the hospital's
grounds again, then expanding their searched nearby fields and forests.
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They walked rivers, dragged creeks and lakes, all on the
off chants that she'd fallen in and drowned, but again,
no trace of her was ever found. In the end,
the cops were basically forced to abandon the search and
left only one detective on the case. That meant if
Carrie's friends and family wanted to carry on looking for her,
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they'd have to do it themselves. Years go by and
even with the offer of a sizeable reward, no one
comes forward with any useful information. There were rumors that
she had been spotted boarding a train to Ohio, which
am pretty sure was her home state, but none of
those rumors could be substantiated, so the search continued. Cut
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to two years later, in nineteen o two, and at
some medical school, a doctor is performing a corpse dissection
in front of a group of medical students. He pulls
out the human body, then pulls back the sheet, revealing
the subject's face. When one of the students remarks how
she looked an awful lot like a missing person from
over in Indiana, a bunch of other students agreed that, yes,
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it does look like that missing school teacher who went
missing from the Union State Hospital. The lecture was stopped,
a dentist was summoned, and after checking out the corpse's teeth,
they were shocked to discover that it was indeed the
missing Carey Salvage. Obviously, the cops were very interested to
learn how the medical school had got in their hands
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on the corpse of a missing mental patient, and when asked,
the school told them that they bought the body from
a guy called Rufus Cantrell. This rufous dude was then arrested,
and once in custody, he confessed to being one of
the most active professional grave robbers in American history. I
figured it was probably in exchange or immunity, or like
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a lesser sentence or something. But the story goes that
Rufus told them everything. He gave up people he worked with,
snitched on the surgeon who bought the bodies, and even
told the cops exactly how he went about making money
from selling bodies, either whole or in bits and pieces.
I'm sure the cops wrote down everything he said, but
when push came to shove, they were only interested in
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one thing. Just how in the hell did he get
his hands on the corpse of Carrie Salviach. Supposedly on
the same night Carrie went missing March eleventh of nineteen hundred,
Rufus and his grave robber buddies were hanging out in
the cemetery near the Union Hospital when they spotted a
woman wearing a gown and slippers. They tried to hide,
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but the woman saw them. Then, fearing that she'd go
straight to the cops, they kidnapped her. Then took her
to the basement of a nearby farmhouse. I think they
figured that it would be a pretty simple process of
convincing her that she hadn't seen anything and then letting
her go. Because Rufus said that they didn't try to
hurt or kill her, and even tried to feed her
when she was getting hungry. But as you remember, Carrie
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was not a well She refused all offers of food
and water, maybe figuring it was poisoned or something. Than
after two to three days of slowly starving, she passed,
and that's how Rufus and his buddies ended up with
a fresh corpse on their hands for a change, instead
of one that's already decomposing. Rufus claimed he was innocent
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and that his buddies were to blame for Carrie's death,
but he still got ten years in prison for his
part in it. And this was a time when print
media had really taken off too, so within just a
few days of Rufus's trial, the whole of the Midwest
was up in arms about it, saying he hadn't gotten
long enough in prison, that he should hang for what
he did. Stuff like that. Officials responded by establishing the
(34:44):
State Anatomical Board, which put some of the first laws
into effect, requiring medical schools to obtain a cadaver legally,
as well as more severe punishments for grave robbers. Carrie
was eventually laid to rest in a graveyard of her
family's choosing, and the hospital she vanished from was closed down.
For a short time. It was turned into a boarding house,
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but that too soon closed its doors, and the place
remained vacant for many years. The end or not the end,
as I came to learn while going down the research
rabbit hole, what I just told you is almost like
the official version. The authorities were content to make out
like Carrie had been the victim of some evil grave
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robbing ghoul who they so valiantly apprehended before throwing him
in prison. But then Rufus had never really claimed he
was entirely innocent. He basically admitted to starving a woman
to death, but he made repeated claims that it couldn't
have been Carrie because it looked nothing like her at
the time that she was alive. It seems the jury
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didn't believe him, which is why they gave him that
guilty verdict, And I don't think the judge did either.
But you know who did believe Rufus Cantrell when he
said that he knew for a fact the woman was Carrie.
Carrie's own brother, Joseph. Joseph was close with Carrie, if
you remember, he was the one scheduled to visit her
(36:09):
the same day that she went missing, and it was
him that was summoned to id her body once she
was supposedly found on that medical table. There are records
of him agreeing that the corpse's teeth had dental work
that was similar to Carrie's, but there are also records
of him saying that he wasn't entirely sure that the
body was really her. I don't know how he didn't
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make more of an issue about this at the time,
because the body getting dissected couldn't have been all that
badly decomposed. Maybe he did and the authorities just ignored him.
But either way, I know for a fact that he
was never one hundred percent sure that it was Carrie,
and that leads me into my next point. Twenty years
after the Union State Hospital shuts down, some big engineering
(36:53):
company comes along which decides that they're going to turn
the place into a machine shop. A construction crew shows
up then starts removing whole sections of the building's inner structure,
which included a section of this big, old, compartmented attic.
From what I read, some iron worker was told to
remove a small cubbyhole above the attic, something they called
(37:15):
a cupola, which from the outside of a building, appeared
to be nothing more than an ornamental piece in the
shape of a dome or box. On a building, the
space was too small for the iron worker to fit through,
so he decided to enlarge the entrance, but after doing so,
he peered inside to find himself face to face with
(37:35):
the human skeleton wearing a blue nightgown and slippers. Police
were immediately informed of the morbid finding, and then I
guess after putting two and two together, the cops contacted
Carrie's family with some very shocking news. When the skeleton
was taken off to be examined, the coroner said that
he couldn't determine the cause of death, but said it
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was very possible that it belonged to the carry and
that she'd fallen victim to cold or thirst after getting
lost and trapped in the attic. I don't think Joseph
quite believed this either, because he didn't seem to change
his tune regarding the possibility of his sister being murdered.
I think he was well and truly convinced that someone
at the hospital killed her stashed her body in the attic.
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He said Carrie was suffering from arthritis at the time
she disappeared, meaning there's no way she could have climbed
all the way up into the attic on her own.
I don't know how true the arthritis thing is, but
I do know that murder or not, the body's discovery
makes for one hell of a creepy twist in the tail.
The second body, which I think was more assumed to
(38:43):
be Carrie's than the first, was laid to rest in
the grave dug for the first. The first body found
was then taken off and declared a Jane Doe as
they called them. And the whole body switching thing is
just awful too, Like imagine never knowing which corpse was
your dead sister, the one in the grave that's been
dug for her, or the one that's off on some
(39:05):
cooling board somewhere with no name or identity at all.
In September of nineteen fifty eight, seventy year old Leona
Diieseldorf was living at one thousand South Brady Streets in Attica, Indiana.
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The former teacher, who'd retired almost twenty five years earlier,
was mostly reliant on her social Security checks to put
food on the table, and would often wait on her
porch to meet the mailman who delivered them. But one day,
the mailman arrived to discover that Leona wasn't waiting for him,
and he immediately became concerned. When the man inspected Leona's
(39:49):
mailbox and discovered that the previous day's letters hadn't been
opened either, he knocked on her door and called out
her name. When he got no response, he in formed
herighbors of the situation and asked them to call the police. Then,
when the police arrived, they forced their way into the
property and began searching for Leona. Upon gaining entry to
(40:11):
the property, the officers observed the mess of upturned furniture
and animal feces. Leona's collection of cats had made quite
a mess of her kitchen in an attempt to find food,
a detail which the officers misread with grim foreboding. They
assumed that since her beloved kitties were being neglected, that
Leona's corpse would be awaiting them in an upstairs bedroom.
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But when they climbed the stairs and inspected the second
floor of the home, they discovered no sign of Leona anywhere.
There was no sign of any struggle, and the only
things that were missing were Leona's purse and a small
lapel watch that she was known to wear. This led
police to believe that she departed the home voluntarily, but
her continued absence was the true cause for concern. Despite
(40:58):
her advanced age, Leona was a very fit and active
lady and was known to head off on long walks
that covered up to eight miles at a time. However,
on occasion, Leona was also known to hitchhike, accepting rides
from locals and strangers alike. Police conceived of two possibilities
(41:19):
that Leona had gotten hurt on one of her fitness walks,
or had gotten into the car of someone with concealed
but sinister intentions. Along with local volunteers, law enforcement search
and rescue teams scoured her regular routes, including a rural
farming property that Leona owned near Stone Bluff, Leona's sister,
(41:39):
who had passed away a few years prior, had left
Leona the eighty acre piece of farming property, and Leona
would sometimes visit the property whenever she wanted to feel
closer to the departed, But despite an extensive search of
the property, police found no sign of the missing Leona.
Just less than two months following Leona's initial disappearance, its
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two rabbit hunters from Covington, Indiana, stopped to take a
break atop an old well covered in wooden planks when
they noticed a foul smell coming from within. Despite its
lack of use, the well still stands today and lies
eleven miles southwest of Attica, Indiana, on the property of
a woman named Mary Hickman, but back in fifty eight
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the property was farmed and cared by by her brother
in law, Guy Grady. Moments after the two rabbit hunters
arrived at the well, Guy and his son Jean, who
had been farming the property all day, arrived at the
well to get water for the radiator in his tractor.
When they too noticed the pungent odor. Guy helped Bill
(42:43):
and Don remove the wooden planks covering the well, and
after Peering forty feet down into the dark below, the
men noticed the water appeared to be oily in a
strange bluish color. Floating on the water's surface, They assumed
that an animal must have gotten in somehow and was
decomposing in the water below. In an attempt to retrieve
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the dead animal, the men lowered a length of barbed
wire down into the dark well. However, when they pulled
the wire up, it was covered in hair that was
eagerly human in appearance. Then, following a second glance down
the well, the men saw what appeared to be a
human corpse in the ten feet of water, and immediately
(43:26):
summoned the sheriff. In the hours that followed, the badly
decomposed body of Leonna Dieseldorff would be dragged from the
well's cold, murky waters and driven down to the county
coroner's office. She was first identified by her cousin, who
recognized a pair of shoes that had been pulled from
the well. This cousin claimed that she was ninety nine
(43:49):
percent sure that the shoes belonged to Leona, but it
was her dental records that confirmed the tragic find. During
his examination, the coroner observed that Leone and his feet
and wrists were bound with white plastic clothes line, and
that her arms were tied around her neck. Leona was
found fully clothed except for a red sweater that she
(44:10):
was said to wear on an almost daily basis. Her
purse and watch were also missing and could well have
been taken as trophies by her mysterious killer. Electrical wiring
was found wrapped around her waist, with someone having carefully
attached bricks from the local Attica brickyard to it. To
weigh her body down, A white towel was found tied
(44:31):
around Leona's throat and two square knots, while a cloth
rag was found jammed into her mouth. Due to the
advanced state of decomposition, the coroner could not determine an
accurate cause of death. However, it's believed that Leona was
still alive when she was tossed down that well. When
the police first attempted to retrieve her body, they discovered
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her hand was still clenched around the small pipe inside,
meaning that in all likelihood she was conscious or had
re gain consciousness by the time she hit the water.
Leona was reportedly last seen on the day before her
disappearance by a former student who saw Leona getting into
the back seat of a car near Highway forty one.
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The student's recollection of the vehicle was unclear, but they
appeared quite certain Leona had been wearing her signature red sweater,
as it was the detail which drew their attention in
the first place. Police believed that robbery may have been
the motive for Leona's murders, since her purse and watch
were never found. During the investigation, they heard rumors that
(45:35):
Leona may have hidden a large sum of money at
the small farm property her sister had left her, and
theorized that the money was her killer's intended target. However,
after an extensive search of the farm, no such stash
of money was ever found. Another theory involves Leona's ex husband,
a man named Edgar Emmons. During their marriage, Edgar had
(45:58):
had Leona involuntarily admitted to a state mental hospital under
claims she was incapable of managing her financial affairs. Leon
encountered by claiming Edgar was abusive, and the two divorced
in nineteen thirty one. Almost a decade later, in nineteen
forty three, Edgar helped a woman kidnap her own daughter,
(46:18):
whom she had lost custody of during the divorce proceeding,
similar to his own. He shot a policeman in the
process and was jailed for attempted murder and died a
few years later while still incarcerated. This obviously meant that
Edgar could not have been his ex wife's killer, but
is it possible that his former companion was involved. After all,
(46:41):
Edgar had shown such devotion to her that he'd almost
killed a police officer, and he no doubt talked of
his divorce from Leona during his time with his new
female companion. Perhaps as a way of granting her lover
a sick form of retribution from beyond the grave, Edgar's
Bell tracked down his ex wife and murdered her. The
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fact remains that the truth behind Leona Dieseldorf's murder remains
a terrifying mystery, but behind it lurks some deeply sinister implications,
and in all probability, the monster that took her life
is still free to walk among us. Hey, friends, thanks
(47:23):
for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted of
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the spiders are co ordinating an attack.