September 23, 2025 • 46 mins
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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!
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!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
My name is Marco, and I'm writing to you from Estonia.
We have a really weird town here called Cardla, where
a lot of weird, scary stuff happened back in the eighties,
and I think your viewers would be interested in hearing
about it. I don't expect many of your American listeners
to know where Estonia is, but that's not trying to
clown on you guys. As they say, if you put
(00:39):
a gun to my head and ask me to point
to the state of Idaho on a map, I tell
you to pull the trigger. And I'll never be convinced
that Kalama Zoo is a real place until I actually
see it for myself. Now, my point being is that
my geography of far off places isn't all that great either,
So allow me to explain where Estonia is and what
(01:00):
we're all about. And to put it very simply, Estonia
is situated in Russia's arm pit. It's not so much
the armpit part which makes that so bad, Because if
Estonia was situated in Margo Robbie's armpit, I think that
would be fantastic. But instead we're in Russia's armpit, with
little Latvia to our south. And freaky Finland to our north.
(01:23):
They're freaks and they know it. Don't worry about calling
them out on it. We are reserved, independent, to nature
loving people, and by that I mean we're a bunch
of emotionally distant loaners who love long hikes where we
drink vodka and complain about the weather. Estonians are so
terrible about talking about their feelings that if I asked
how are you and you replied I'm good, thank you,
(01:45):
I would consider that a deep heart to heart conversation,
as if you have laid out your entire soul. To me,
if Estonia sounds kind of like a weird place, then
my job is done because it is a weird place.
It's always been a weird place, because you have to
be weird if you want to survive, especially when you're
a tiny country trap between the twin Titans of Europe
(02:07):
and Asia. But from what I understand, things got even
weirder when the Communists took over. Estonia was Communists from
the nineteen forties until nineteen ninety one, and we tried
our best to resist the Russians, but there were too
many of them, and after they installed Estonian Communists as
our government. They started to ethnically cleanse us from our
(02:28):
own country. They sent out lots of people to Siberia
for a variety of crimes, some real, some imagined, whilst
importing native Russians to try and change the demographics. We
went from ninety seven percent Native Estonian to only sixty
two percent Native Estonian by nineteen eighty nine, and everyone
either worked in the factories or was enlisted into the army,
(02:52):
and we became second class citizens in our own country.
The secret police was everywhere. You couldn't even go to
the beach without permission, and if you were caught watching
anything but Russian TV, it was just like that guy
in Parks in wreck saying straight to jail. It was
a terrible time for us, a time of hatred and paranoia.
And the closer we got to independence, the more frustrated
(03:14):
and volatile people became, and none more so than in
a small coastal town known as Cardla. Cardla is the
only town on the small island of Helma, which lies
in the Baltic Sea. Most of the people there make
their money from either fishing or tourism. Because there's a
big nature reserve in the center of the island, but
(03:35):
the third of Krdla's major industries is what's referred to
in English as wrecking. Wrecking is basically when a team
of divers strips a sunken shipwreck of anything valuable, and
while it's not nearly as common as it used to
be for coastal communities around the world, the waters around
Heema were a hotspot for naval combat between Germany and
(03:56):
Russia during World War Two. There's a lot of money
to be made in bringing back military salvage, but the
practice caused a huge rift between Cardla's wreckers and its fishermen.
The fishermen all said that disturbing the drowned sailor's final
resting places would bring bad omens to Cardla, But then,
especially during communist times, people were encouraged to dismiss such
(04:18):
silly superstitions as relics of an oppressive past. The government
then paid much better wages for wrecking than fishing, which
further widened the rift between those two groups, and for
a prolonged period I'm talking many years, there was a
general feeling in town that something bad would eventually happen,
either because of the hatred between the wreckers and the
(04:40):
fishermen because of the bad luck that the latter was bringing,
or because of a third reason, the curse of the
Hehuma witches. Now, I don't believe in this kind of thing,
but it's worth mentioning because a lot of people around
Hehuma do believe in it, and as we all know,
believing can make a rec regular person do some very
(05:01):
strange things. There's a local legend which says he Huma
used to be home to a coven of witches, witches
who would cast spells, shape shift, or summon storms, especially
the sink ships, or caused bad luck to unwanted visitors.
One story claims that many hundreds of years ago, a
fisherman insulted a group of witches and they cursed his family.
(05:23):
His descendants were then plagued by misfortune for generations. And
since many of Cardless's fishing families were descended from this
very same family, the witch's curse was often alluded to
following the sudden and tragic loss of a local fishing vessel. Again,
I don't believe in witches or giants or any stuff
like that, but I do believe it's legends like that
(05:45):
which contributed to what you might call cardless psychic earthquake.
That might sound a little woo woo to some, but
I don't use the term in any kind of supernatural sense.
What I mean is all that tension in the region
was like the fault lines in an earthquake zone. It
kept building up and building up, and when it finally
got released, it was very bad. It all happened in
(06:09):
the space of just one week back in September of
nineteen eighty nine. There's another reason that compared this to
an earthquake, and that's how there was one big earthquake,
then a handful of psychic aftershocks which followed almost like
echoes of the original incident. The first incident, the earthquake,
if you will, took place when a girl named Dasha
(06:30):
Botrova blew up a Russian cafe by flooding the kitchens
with gas and then igniting it. The explosion took place
towards the end of service on the Saturday evening, so
the restaurant was packed and the kitchen staff was in
the dining area enjoying some hard earned vodka after work,
and by the time they smelled the gas, it was
too late, and when all was said and done, fourteen
(06:53):
people ended up in a hospital, some with life threatening injuries,
and five more ended up in the morgue. The authorities
were quick to blame anti Russian sentiment and were ready
to use it as an excuse to arrest dissident Estonians
who were suspected of raising support for an independence movement.
But when it was discovered that the perpetrator was none
(07:13):
other than a sixteen year old Russian cocktail waitress, everyone
in Cardla was stunned. Dasha had no history of violent
or destructive behavior. By all accounts, she was quiet, fairly popular,
and she did well in school. But what caused a
well behaved, unassuming schoolgirl to suddenly want to blow herself
(07:34):
up and take as many people as possible with her.
Police were still trying to figure out what the hell
had happened when just two days later, a Russian fishing
boat worker swerved his car into a line of school
children all waiting for the bus to school. He was
black out drunk at seven thirty in the morning, and
witnesses said it looked like he deliberately swerved in the
(07:54):
kids after putting his foot down on the accelerator. The
drunk must have knocked himself out after slamming into a wall,
because he stayed in his driver's seat until the police
shot up to drag him out of it. But when
they did, he was laughing. Everyone saw it too, the police,
the medics, all the members of the public running around
(08:15):
trying to save the kids lives. They all saw it
clear as day, because when the drunk saw what he
had done, he started laughing so hard that you'd have
thought that he was about to piss his pants. As
they dragged him to the police car, the drunk was
shouting ondine de vas tri chitaire, which is Russian numbers,
(08:38):
counting from one to four. He was counting the number
of children that he hit that weren't moving or crying
or screaming. He was counting the ones that were dead.
As he can imagine, the residents of Cardla were in
a state of shock. Within just three days, they had
the restaurant explosion, then the four dead school children, and
(08:58):
with many more injured, and the local medical clinic was
completely full, so many of the kids had to be
taken to the mainland for proper treatment. It was so
shocking to people that it almost felt like a ward started,
it felt like we were under attack from some unknowable
force from the outside. But after the incident with the kids,
(09:18):
people told themselves, in typical Estonian fashion, well, now things
can't get any worse, so it's all uphill from here.
But then things did get worse. There was a big
funeral and vigil held for the school kids who lost
their lives the morning that drunk decided to smash into them.
Everyone in Cardla was in attendance, at least almost everyone.
(09:41):
Because almost everyone being in the streets and walking to
the cemetery together, it made it very easy to figure
out who was and who wasn't there. And the more
people started to notice that one particular family was missing,
the more they started to ask questions, and the more
they started to become concerned. A small group of people
(10:02):
then went to check in on the absent family, only
to make a truly terrible discovery. A boy of just
eleven had convinced his little sister of around seven to
join him in murdering their mother and father. They woke
up early, then, while their parents were still in bed,
they crept downstairs to their kitchen and retrieved a pair
of very sharp kitchen knives. Then they walked back upstairs
(10:24):
into the parents bedroom, then cut both their throats while
they were still sleeping. Obviously, people don't just die if
you cut their throats, especially if you don't get all
the major blood vessels, so instead of pumping out blood
so fast that they were too weak to move or scream,
the kid's parents tried frantically to both stop the bleeding
(10:45):
and to stop their children from attacking them, but sadly
their efforts were in vain. They found the mother's corpse
in the bathroom and the dad's in the kitchen downstairs.
He passed out and died trying to reach the phone
to call zero three, which back then was the Soviet
emergency number specifically for medical emergencies. In this marked the
(11:05):
third incident of multiple murders within just a week. Then,
instead of telling each other cheer up, things can't get
any worse, people began to wonder what the next thing
would be. They went from shocked and saddened but still stoic,
to almost a fall on panic descending on their town.
People wouldn't let their kids go to school, They refused
(11:26):
to go to work or do anything remotely dangerous. It
was like people were convinced that there was some kind
of curse on the town, which there obviously wasn't, But
that didn't matter, because if people believe something, they truly
believe it, then they can act in all kinds of
ways you never expect them to. The wreckers started to
throw back some of the more valuable and precious things
(11:49):
they'd kept from the great sunken graveyards they'd made their
money from. They threw back metals, trinkets, all kinds of things.
And in the middle of the night, some men walked
out of their house us and tossed their trophies in
the Cardli's harbor and watch them sink to the bottom,
all in hopes that it would put the dead sailor's
angry spirits to rest. Some of the fishermen, on the
(12:11):
other hand, left offerings in the woods for the witches
of Huma, who they firmly believed were behind of the
horrifying goings ons. It was like the vast majority of
the people in town all fell victim to this sudden,
all consuming collective madness, one that made them lash out
at each other and act in all kinds of bizarre ways.
(12:32):
They kept waiting and waiting for the next terrible thing
to happen. But thankfully for them, the psychic storm hovering
over the town had finally abeyd. Again, I don't use
that term in the literal sense, but to me, it's
the only term that actually broaches on what happened during
that one week. Back in nineteen eighty nine, Cardla went
from years and years without so much as a common assault,
(12:54):
and then during the space of just seven days, a
dozen people all lost their lives in a series of
senselessly violent acts. It's almost enough to make a person
believe in restless spirits or ancient wicked curses. But if
you ask me, what's to blame as something that's in
our programming as biological machines, lines of code we've been
(13:16):
running since the days we lived in caves and the
shadows cast monsters on the walls during long and uncertain nights.
Without a doubt, the biggest scandal to ever hit my
(13:37):
small Arkansas town was one summer a ninth grade girl
ended up in the hospital after being attacked while walking
home from school. Whoever attacked her hadn't just beaten the
crap out of her, they'd violated her to the point
that she needed actual surgery to repair the damage. The
doctor who performed the surgery broke down into tears during
(13:58):
the press conference afterwards. It was his job to tell
everyone the good news that the surgeries had been successful
and her life had been saved, and he still broke
down into tears. Obviously. The next phase was trying to
find the guy who did it. The victim's memory of
the incident was hazy and she couldn't give a detailed
description of her attacker, and so the whole town descended
(14:21):
into this total state of paranoia, trying to figure out
who it was. State police were running the investigation, while
local cops were going door to door or making visits
to local schools to make appeals for information. And it
was a very intense time. We'd never known anything like it.
Either someone's getting a speeding ticket around here in its
(14:41):
salpeople or gossiping about for maybe weeks wondering where they'd
been speeding to or who they were speeding from. So
to go from low crime to woe crime, well that
was quite something. Everyone was praying the attacker would be
found and that they'd be found fast. And then at
the blue a local pastor walked into his seventeen year
(15:03):
old son's bedroom and shot him point blank in the head.
It was his wife, the boy's mom, who called the
sheriffs on him, and she was still there screaming bloody
murder when the deputies showed up to arrest him. The
pastor didn't resist. He just let those boys cuff him,
and then he walked with them to their cruiser and
off he went and don at the department, the guy
(15:26):
made a full confession, told them the whole chain of
events too. He and his boy had been talking and
had come to a disagreement. The pastor then walked downstairs,
took a pistol out of his gun safe, and then
walked back upstairs and shot him. He told them what
gun he used, the caliber of the bullet, everything except
why he did it. The deputies asked him over and
(15:48):
over what it was he and his boy disagreed over,
and why it was so bad. The pastor felt he
had to shoot him afterwards, But no matter how many
times they asked, no matter how many times they'd phrased
the questioner through up guesses, the pastor wouldn't say what
caused it. He simply repeated that he did it and
asked to be taken to jail. Officially speaking, no one
(16:09):
knows why the pastor killed his boy just over a
week after that ninth grader ended up in the hospital,
but off the record, we all know why, and it's
the reason the girl's attacker was never caught. The only
thing that really remains a mystery to everyone is how
the pastor found out, because outside of a straight up confession,
it's hard to imagine how a father might come to
(16:30):
learn something like that from his own flesh and blood.
There's a lot of speculation around here, some of it
good natured, a lot of it not so good natured.
But it also doesn't seem to bother people that they'll
never know how the pastor figured out his boy was
the one that attacked that little ninth grade girl, because
however it happened, some folks around here are very much
(16:53):
of the opinion that the pastor did the right thing
and putting his boy down. In late August of nineteen
ninety six, when I was just nineteen years old, I
arrived home to find my mom sitting at the kitchen table.
(17:14):
I'd been at a house party with my then girl friend.
The night before, and following one of my first real
experiences with alcohol, I wasn't feeling my best. I walked
through the front door into a house so quiet that
I thought my mom and sister were elsewhere. But when
I walked into the kitchen, I saw my mom just
kind of sat there, very silent, with a glass of
(17:34):
wine in front of her. It was so unexpected, and
I was so hung over that seeing her actually made
me jump a little. But then that feeling of surprise
was quickly replaced by one of dread. Mom never drank
in the daytime, and she never just sat around the
kitchen table quiet like that, and so very likely. I
(17:55):
started to suspect that I might be in for some
very bad news. She asked me to sit down, and
when I did, she told me that my dad was
gone and that he wasn't coming back. I asked if
gone she meant dead. When Mom shook her head and
told me no, he'd just left. I remember floating on
(18:16):
an island of relief for a moment before sinking back
into a sea of shock. And once I was able,
I followed up with a ton of questions, asking how
she knew where he'd gone. When he'd left and stuff
like that, and the short answer to all of them
was she didn't know. And the harder she tried to
come up with any substantial response, the more upset she got.
(18:39):
He hadn't warned her, He hadn't left a note. He
just packed a suit case, got into his car, and
then drove off to god knows where. The conversation ended
with my mom crying and me hugging her while I
told her everything was going to be okay. But as
I unfortunately came to discover, everything was not going to
be okay. For the first two or three months, no
(19:02):
one really talked about my dad leaving. There were routine
calls and visits from relatives to check in on us,
but the discussions focused on our welfare, not why Dad
had left or if he'd be back anything further than that.
Anything which rubbed up against the mystery of the whole
situation tended to upset Mom to the point that she
couldn't talk about it any more. And I'd be lying
(19:23):
if I said that I didn't feel the same way.
But then, after letting the shock fully wear off, all
the pain and grief was replaced by a burning curiosity
and one which was only made worse by my mom's
deliberate and enduring silence on the subject. She wasn't in
denial or anything, and people grieve in different ways, but
(19:44):
whenever I brought up the subject of my dad, she'd
either start crying or get super angry and start yelling
stuff like you don't talk to me about that piece
of crap. He's dead to me, and I had no
choice but the sea cancers elsewhere, And since I strongly
susp expected that Mom was hiding something from me, I
did so with great intensity. My first move was to
(20:06):
contact one of my dad's friends, his only real friend,
in fact, who I figured was the most likely to
have knowledge of his whereabouts. Dad was an only child
and both his parents died before he was thirty, but
he and his friend Carl had been close since their
college days together, which is even longer than he'd known
my mom. I thought if anyone knew where my dad was,
(20:28):
it'd be him. But when I called him, he said
that my call was the first that he'd heard of it.
He had no idea what my dad might have left,
but he did know a few places that he might
have gone, and one of those places was a small
town up in the wilds of Northern Canada named Wrigley.
(20:49):
I had managed to rule out the prospect that he'd
stayed in Portland because he wasn't going to his job
any more. I then tried his home town of Lincoln City,
but as far as I could tell, he would there either.
Then and only then did I consider traveling all the
way up to Wrigley, the furthest of the three potential locations,
because doing so would mean driving for thirty hours straight
(21:11):
through some of the most remote areas of the Canadian wilderness.
And Karl said my dad had spent a summer there
back during his college years and frequently reminisced about it.
He had also mentioned wanting to go back there one day,
so according to Karl, there was a good chance that
if he had indeed suffered some kind of sudden mid
life crisis, he traveled up to Wrigley. Wriggly, which is
(21:35):
just over four hundred and fifty miles from the nearest
big city, is a population of around a hundred, mostly
First Nation citizens. It has one gas station, one medical clinic,
and the nearest RCMP office is over two hundred miles away.
Is the very definition of a small town. But to
me that was good news because there'd be nowhere for
(21:57):
my dad to hide. I was warned again winst any
kind of winter travel, because it can reach minus sixty
up there during the winter months, and so instead I
made sure to drive up in the summertime. I arrived
at Wrigley on Wednesday, July twenty second of nineteen ninety eight,
after three days of driving up from Portland. The nearest
(22:18):
motel was over one hundred miles away, but since I
was only planning on staying in town for around forty
eight hours at the most, I figured I could just
sleep in my car, which inadvertently brings me to my
first stop in town, the gas station. Wrigley's one gas
station was staffed by a guy remembered named Winston, and
Winston was a great guy. It looked to be in
(22:39):
his late thirties or early forties, and we made small
talk at first, and he remarked about how rare it
was to get any outsiders coming through. That gave me
a golden opportunity to ask about my father, so I did,
while showing him the most recent photo that I could
get my hands on. Winston didn't recognize him from the
most recent photo, but he did recognize someone in the
(23:01):
second picture I showed him, which I fished out of
all the possessions my dad left behind. It showed a
much younger, college aged version of my dad along with
a similarly aged woman. Both were dressed in hiking gear
and were standing on either side of a large rock,
pointing at what appeared to be some kind of mineral
deposit running all the way through the center. Winston recognized
(23:24):
it as Hunter's Rock, a landmark about ten miles outside
of town and had been kind of famous back in
the eighties because some geologists had come up from Vancouver
to take a look at it, and local legend said
that it was the spear of some ancient gargantuan hunter
that had become embedded in the earth when they missed
their intended target, and this gave rise to rumors that
(23:46):
Hunter's Rock was some kind of meteorite that had indeed
buried itself deep into the earth after falling from the stars.
The geologist's arrival caused quite a stir in town, because
while many were excited to learn the truth of the
rock's origins, others believed applying such scientific rigor would be
disrespectful to the beliefs of their ancestors. The rock turned
(24:08):
out not to be any kind of meteorite, nor was
it the gigantic spear of some Titanic Hunter of yore.
But interestingly enough, the geologists estimated that it did extend
deep into the earth, potentially for almost a mile, and
unless the area was actually some kind of extinct volcano,
he had absolutely no clue how it had gotten there.
(24:28):
I say all this because I was very interested to
know why my dad had visited the place. I didn't
remember him having any kind of interest in geology, but
then again, he might have figured seeing that it was
just something to do while he was in the area.
But then, after Winston filled me in on Hunter's Rock
and I showed him the pictures one more time, he
started staring intently at the girl in the second picture.
(24:51):
He asked if I knew who she was, and when
I said no, he asked if it was okay if
he took the picture into the back while he made
a phone call. He proceeds to tell tell me that
with about eighty percent certainty, the girl in the photograph
was the same one that had gone missing back in
the early seventies out near Great Bear Lake. He said
that there were some people that I should check with
(25:12):
to be one hundred percent shore, but that her face
was remarkably similar to the one that he'd seen on
missing posters back when he was a kid. I then
asked him whom he needed to talk to in order
to be certain I mean, and he told me that
I needed to visit the local government office, which was
inside of the town's medical clinic. Since I arrived in
(25:33):
the very late afternoon, the office would be closed until
the following morning. So after Winston wished me luck in
finding my dad, I took a walk around town and
then headed back to my car. The next morning, I
walked over to the gas station to get some coffee
and breakfast and swap small talk with Winston before heading
over to the clinic. There, I met with Irwin, chief
(25:55):
of the Pedzikey First Nation, and while that sounded like
an awfully grand title, he told me he felt like
little more than a clerk at times, and that his
title was almost purely ceremonial. He was a welcoming and
generous man, and the moment I met him, I just
knew that he'd be willing to help, But unfortunately Chief
Erwin had some bad news to share with me. The chief,
(26:18):
who operated out of an office of the size of
a broom closet, was happy to welcome a rare visitor
into town, and, assuming I was some kind of tourist,
to offer to answer any and all questions I had.
He even offered to set me up with a guide
who'd take me around the area in an off roder
so I could see all of his tribal lands from
the comfort of a passenger seat. But when I told
(26:40):
him my story, as in then I was looking for
my dad, his face softened. Then when I showed him
the second picture, the one from what I assumed were
his college days, I'll never forget how the Chief reacted.
He went from happy and smiley to having looked so
cold it almost scared me. And then he said simply said,
(27:01):
I think you and me should step into my office. Now.
It might sound morbid to some, but I was excited.
He was clearly in possession of some valuable information, the
exact thing that I'd driven more than fifteen hundred miles for.
But what he told me raised many more questions than
it answered. Chief Erwin told me that the girl in
(27:23):
the picture was named Susan Calvert and was a King's
University graduate who disappeared in the summer of nineteen seventy three.
But then he pointed to my dad and told me
that he'd been one of the potential suspects arrested by
the RCMP, and that he'd been questioned in connection with
Susan Calvert's disappearance, not once but twice. Obviously, that it
(27:46):
was all very shocking, and again this might make me
sound like a kind of psycho, but it was progress,
solid progress for the first time in literally eighteen months.
Everywhere I'd gone, every one I'd turned to, it had
all been dead ends. So even if it was bad
news that my dad had potentially been a murder suspect,
(28:06):
it was still something solid to cling to, which gave
me an idea on why he might have left us
in the first place. I mean, think about it. You're
in college, you head up to Canada for a summer
hiking vacation, You meet a girl, maybe fall in love,
but that girl ends up going missing, and you're one
of the suspects that it be just about enough to
(28:28):
screw any one up for life. I mean, provided you
weren't the cause for her disappearance. So by that point
it seemed highly probable that Dad had made a late
life pilgrimage back to Wrigley to get answers about the
girl he'd loved and lost. That last point kind of
circles back to why I was so suspicious Mom was
hiding something from me. She was so upset then so
(28:51):
angry at my dad, and it made me think that
she knew something about this girl, Susan, and that my
dad's sudden disappearance might be connected to her own. Chief
Irwin went on to tell me that Susan Colbert's remains
had never been found, so no one had ever been
charged in connection with her disappearance, but he also mentioned
that her last known location was in the jaws of
(29:13):
Great Bear Lake, out in what are known among the
tribes as the sawtou Lands, and that was where the
Mounties had found her camp site, totally abandoned but also
totally undisturbed. He took a good look at the more
recent picture of my dad before telling me that he
hadn't seen him, But the chief was also quick to
add that if Dad had been heading straight toward Hunter's Rock.
(29:35):
There was no real reason for him to stop back
in town, especially if it was a place that held
the bad memories of being arrested. If he wanted to
really look for the missing girl, or even if he
just wanted to pay his respects at the place that
she was last seen alive, it made sense that he
went straight up to the Great Bear Lake, at least
if he was up there in Canada and not some
(29:58):
place else entirely, And the only issue was getting there
from Wrigley. It was about a two hundred mile drive
to get to a place called de Leane, and if
you didn't have a decent four by four, which obviously
I didn't, then there was no point trying to make
the drive. But even if I did have one, I
(30:18):
was still looking at a thirty mile hike out into
the marsh lands through all kinds of crap and mosquitoes,
yes they still have them up there. To the police,
Susan Colvert's camp site was found, I could go through
the process of hiring a four by four driving up
to de Lean than hiking for three days through some
pretty hellish terrain, and it could end up being for nothing. Granted,
(30:42):
I considered it all a very noble pursuit. There was
literally nothing more important to me than trying to find
my dad and potentially bring him home. But like any
great effort, the spirit was willing, yet the flesh was weak,
and in my case, my bank account was even weaker.
I say, couldn't afford to extend my stay by another
(31:02):
few days, as I had already taken a whole week
off of work and had spent a ton of money
on gas, motel, rooms, and road food. It was either
throwing the towel or call mom and beg her to
transfer some money into my account. I'd then have to
call work and risk getting fired after begging for a
few extra days off, when I'd already put my manager
(31:22):
in a pretty bad bund by requesting a week off
at relatively short notice and calling it quits and then
maybe heading back at a later date seemed like the
logical course of action. Being up there in the Northwestern
territories made me feel like I was close, you know
what I mean, so close that I could practically feel
him up there with me. Somehow, Then the more I
(31:44):
thought about it, the more I realized that there was
no turning back. Not unless I wanted to live with
the regret of inaction for the rest of my goddamned life.
But the thing that really sealed it was when Chief
Erwine told me that de Leen had an RCMP office
and how that was the place they'd questioned my dad
after his friend Susan disappeared. They'd have records, written, reports, everything.
(32:06):
I needed to get more information about what had happened
to her and my dad, And with that in mind,
I called work and then I called my mom. Now
getting the time off was easy because I was just
honest with my manager and told him what I was doing.
My Dad had left, we were worried about him, so
I was off looking for him in the hopes of
bringing him home and hell, maybe even saving his life too,
(32:29):
And at that my manager said, take all the time
you need. Mom, on the other hand, was not so
easy to convince. She didn't know where I was or
what I was doing, so when I called her and
informed her of the situation, she was not happy at first.
In light of what I was doing. She refused to
wire me any money and told me to return home immediately.
I had to argue with her for about a half
(32:51):
hour straight using the phone in the Wrigley gas station's
office before she finally relented and agreed to send me
some money. I'd be lying if I said that it
didn't get a little tearful at points. And I'll be
forever grateful to Old Winston for giving me my privacy
during that phone call. It was quite possibly one of
the most intents I've ever had. I also owe Winston
(33:12):
in another way, an even bigger one, too, because it
was he who agreed to drive me all the way
up to de Lean near Great Bear Lake in exchange
for nothing but gas money. And I guess he was
pretty invested in my little story by that point, especially
once I shared what I'd learned from Chief Irwin. But
before we set off the next day, he told me
that he wouldn't be following me out into the marshes.
(33:35):
I told him that I wasn't expecting him to, and
how I wasn't one hundred percent decided on whether or
not I was headed that far anyway. But then he
said something that sticks with me to the day I die.
He asked, if your dad's out looking for the girl
and you're all looking for him, who's going to end
up looking for you you ever think about that? And
(33:57):
I remember those words, and I hadn't. I'd never even
paid one single iota of thought towards that concept. But
when I did, and the moments after Winston asked me,
it chilled me to the bone. On the drive up
to Delane the next day, Winston managed to completely talk
me out of walking thirty plus miles into the marshes.
(34:18):
If my dad was out there and he hadn't gone
completely crazy, then he would have had at least some
basic camping gear with him, whereas I didn't even have
a tent let alone enough camp food or the right
footwear to make it through thirty miles of marshy wilderness
and back. And so realistically, there was no going after
my dad in the sawtou Lance. But what I could
(34:40):
do was check in with the r c M p
up in de Lane, let them know about the situation
with my dad, and then give them my contact details
so they could get in touch if there were any
sightings of him, and maybe, just maybe some one up
there would be able to tell me more about why
my dad was arrested in connection with his friend's disappearance.
(35:00):
It took us about five hours to get up to Delan,
and then when we arrived, Winston drove us straight over
to the RCMP office, which thankfully was right next to
a grocery store. He said he'd pick us up some
sodas and hot food, and then I headed into the
office alone. The office was just a small reception area
with a larger room behind it, and after looking through
(35:22):
the open doorway, I traded greetings with a younger looking
red coated Mountie, Constable Jacobs, who was around my age,
seemed only too happy to help me, but when he
realized that I had more than just a basic inquiry
in mind, he told me to sit tight while he
radioed the only other Mounte in Delane, a man named McKenzie.
(35:43):
Not his real name, and the need for the pseudonym
will shortly become clear. McKenzie, who was considerably older than
his junior co workers, seemed far more equipped to help
with inquiries of a historical nature, and he did help.
He was a little frosty with me at first, but
after I had told him the whole story about looking
for my father, he warmed up enough to talk to me.
(36:06):
Mackenzie actually remembered the incident involving Susan Calvert, and my father,
because he'd been a junior constable way back in the
seventies at the time of the investigation. He remembered my
dad stumbling back into the lean on his own. He
remembered how it was he who had reported Susan missing,
and he also remembered how, following the initial round of questioning,
(36:28):
the Mounties basically had no choice but to consider my
dad as a suspect. Mackenzie hadn't been present for either interviews,
so all he knew was that my dad had somehow
implicated himself. But that's all he knew. They had all
the files and reports on site, but Mackenzie said he
couldn't share them without the proper clearance, and that might
(36:49):
only come after a lengthy freedom of information request. If
he had showed me the files, he might actually lose
his job, and as he put it, he hadn't worked
just shy of his thirty years, only to lose his
pension after a little snaffoo like that. It was frustrating,
but also strangely cathartic. I kind of hoped that they
(37:10):
might just show me the files in the back room
or something, but I guess that was purely wishful thinking
on my part. Filing out a foyer request might take months,
but to me it was just another step on what
had already been a long journey of tracking down my dad.
I've been searching for like eighteen months by that point,
and I sure as how could have waited a little longer.
(37:31):
And even though I traveled all that way, I knew
I wasn't going home completely empty handed. Mackenzie and Constable
Jacobs both promised to keep an eye out for my
dad and even promised to call me if they had
heard or saw anything out there in the jaws of
the Bear, and by that I mean the Marshlands were
Susan Colvert when missing. And before I left, Mackenzie asked
(37:53):
what my plans were. I told him I was heading
back to Wrigley and I would probably spend another night
in my car before heading south in the morning. He
wished me luck and I thanked him, and then I
walked outside to meet Winston near his truck. He picked
us up some sandwiches, and then as we had got
on the road back to Wrigley, I gave him the
low down on what the Melnies had told me. Winston
(38:15):
said that he had been keeping me in his prayers,
hoping that I get my hands on those interview tapes
sooner rather than later. I wouldn't say that I was
a religious person, not by any stretch, but sometimes, just sometimes,
I think Winston's prayers found some one's ears, because that night,
as I was trying to get as much rest as
possible prior to my drive back south, I woke up
(38:36):
to hear some one knocking on the glass of my
car's window. Then, when I looked outside and saw a
distinctive red jacket, I realized who it was. It was Mackenzie,
the Mounte from up in de Lean. I lifted my
seat up, opened my car door, and he asked if
he could come sit in the passenger seat, and I
(38:57):
told him sure. Then, when he climbed inside, remembered that
he reached into his pocket and produced a cassette tape
with a scribbled label. I couldn't read it right away.
I had my internal lights switched off so I wouldn't
kill my car's battery and be stuck out there. But
I had a strong feeling it was something very specific,
something he definitely should not have been showing me Mackenzie
(39:20):
told me to turn on my car's tape player, and
so I did, and then after he slid the tape
into the slot, my suspicions were confirmed. It was the
tape with my dad's first interview on it, the one
from before he was arrested, since he wasn't considered a suspect.
During the first police interview, my dad was very forthcoming
with certain pieces of information, and as it turned out,
(39:43):
he and Susie as he called her, were out camping
near the marsh Lands when Susy got up in the
night to go pee outside the tent. After Susie's exit
woke him up, my Dad had simply rolled over and
attempted to go back to sleep, but just seconds later
he heard Susan Calvert scream. Dad said, hey rushed to
(40:03):
put his boots on, grabbed a flashlight and then ran
out into the night to see what had scared Susan
so badly, and that, according to him, as when he
saw them. One of the interviewing mounties asked my dad
who they are, and my Dad responds by saying that
if he tells them, they'll think he's crazy. Dad then
(40:24):
says something about how if he knew they were out there,
he and Susie wouldn't have gone anywhere near the place,
not in a million years. One of the Mounies then
asked my dad where they took Susan Calvert, and Dad
said he didn't know, but wherever it was, he knew
Susy was probably dead. She had to be, because there
(40:45):
was no way that she could survive what they were
doing to her. Again, one of the Mounties asks who
they are, and Dad explodes. He asked one of them,
how do you guys not know you live out here?
And all this other unh hinged sounding stuff like it's
no wonder The Mountes assumed that he murdered Susan Calvert
(41:06):
because he really did sound out of his goddamned mind.
The Mountes asked a few more questions, but with each answer,
my Dad kept getting more and more agitated. He didn't
know why they didn't take him too, They hadn't seen
anyone following them over the previous few days, and he
couldn't explain why there wasn't a drop of Susan's blood anywhere,
(41:26):
despite my dad's claim that they were violently attacking Susan.
And after that, the Mountes announced that they were terminating
the interview and the tape went dead. When I asked
Mackenzie if he'd brought the second tape, he shook his
head and told me it wasn't worth listening to, and
based on what my dad had said during his first interview,
(41:47):
the Mounies placed him under arrest on suspicion of Susan
Colbert's murder. Remember, my dad said that he knew for
certain that she was dead, but then put him through
a second round of questioning. But the reason it wasn't
worth worth listening to was because my dad totally stonewalled
the two Mounties asking him questions when he figured that
they might at least partially believe his story. My dad
(42:09):
was very chatty, but then once he realized that he
was a murder suspect, he did the smart thing and
didn't say another word until he was released due to
lack of evidence. Mackenzie said that after he was released,
my dad left town, but the search for Susan Calvert
continued for another ten days, and the search and rescue
(42:30):
team found the camp site that she'd shared with my dad,
but they didn't find any trace of the girl herself.
Though clothes or blood or human remains, and the search
effort was eventually called off, and many years later her
parents had her declared dead for some sort of legal
purpose and she was taken off the missing person's register
up there in Canada. But according to Mackenzie, there was
(42:54):
something in the files that caught his attention. At one
point towards the end of the search, a dog from
an RCMP's search team ran off and was never seen again,
and the dog's disappearance sparked a whole new search and
rescue operation, a kind of mini search within the larger effort.
Mounties searched high and low for this missing hound, as
(43:15):
well as Susie Calvert, but neither of them were ever recovered.
Mackenzie said the dog's disappearance was eventually put down to
an operational hazard and it was mourned and then replaced,
But he thought that there was a lot more to
it than just a dog getting a little over excited
and then drowning in a marsh. Remember, they never found
Susan's body or the remains of that dog, in which case,
(43:38):
where the hell did they go? Mackenzie finished by saying that,
in his opinion, my dad and Susie Culvert had come
across some kind of gross site, either marijuana, opium, poppies,
or maybe both, and he was quick to add that
he had absolutely no proof of that theory, but very
little else explained some of the comments my dad made
(43:59):
during that first interview. After I expressed my gratitude for
bringing me the tape, Mackenzie left and left me to
an uneasy sleep. It was weird hearing my dad that young,
though he sounded a lot like me whenever I heard
my own voice on tape, But that's obviously not what
stuck with me that night. It was what he'd said
(44:20):
during that first interview, along with how he'd said it now.
Driving back, I had these strange mixed feelings of sadness
and fear. I'd never felt so close to finding my dad,
and at the same time, he'd never felt so distant
all his life. He'd probably been dealing with the aftermath
of what had happened up in the Northwest Territories. And
(44:42):
I can't speak for my mom because I still don't
know to what extent she knew all of this, But
personally I had no idea. And that was almost two
years ago, and at the time of writing now, this
is in April of two thousand. I'm still no closer
to finding out the whole truth of my dad's disappearance.
But these days I have a much better idea of
(45:05):
where to look, and now that I can hold my
own on a solo hiking trip, I think I'm just
about ready to go looking for him. I'm planning on
heading back up to Delan in the summertime, sometime possibly
in June, and I'll be sure to write up everything
I find. I don't know how many of you will
actually read this, but I don't care. This is good
for my sanity, and when I find out anything else,
(45:28):
this will be the first place I post to. I
imagine that I'll be posting another blog in a few months,
and if I don't, I either found my dad or
something else happened. I guess we'll just have to wait
and see. Hey, friends, thanks for listening. Click that notification
(45:49):
bell to be alerted of all future narrations. I release
new videos every Monday and Thursday at nine p m
e s T. And there are super fun live streams
every Sunday and Wednesday night. If you get a story,
be sure to submit them over email at Let's Read,
submissions at gmail dot com and you might even hear
your story featured on the next video. And if you
(46:10):
want to support me even more, grab early access to
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click that big join button to hear by the extra
perks from members of the channel, and check out the
Let's Read podcast where we can hear all of these
stories and big compilations located anywhere you listen to podcasts.
All links in the description below. Thanks much, friends, and
(46:32):
remember you are loved
My name is Marco, and I'm writing to you from Estonia.
We have a really weird town here called Cardla, where
a lot of weird, scary stuff happened back in the eighties,
and I think your viewers would be interested in hearing
about it. I don't expect many of your American listeners
to know where Estonia is, but that's not trying to
clown on you guys. As they say, if you put
(00:39):
a gun to my head and ask me to point
to the state of Idaho on a map, I tell
you to pull the trigger. And I'll never be convinced
that Kalama Zoo is a real place until I actually
see it for myself. Now, my point being is that
my geography of far off places isn't all that great either,
So allow me to explain where Estonia is and what
(01:00):
we're all about. And to put it very simply, Estonia
is situated in Russia's arm pit. It's not so much
the armpit part which makes that so bad, Because if
Estonia was situated in Margo Robbie's armpit, I think that
would be fantastic. But instead we're in Russia's armpit, with
little Latvia to our south. And freaky Finland to our north.
(01:23):
They're freaks and they know it. Don't worry about calling
them out on it. We are reserved, independent, to nature
loving people, and by that I mean we're a bunch
of emotionally distant loaners who love long hikes where we
drink vodka and complain about the weather. Estonians are so
terrible about talking about their feelings that if I asked
how are you and you replied I'm good, thank you,
(01:45):
I would consider that a deep heart to heart conversation,
as if you have laid out your entire soul. To me,
if Estonia sounds kind of like a weird place, then
my job is done because it is a weird place.
It's always been a weird place, because you have to
be weird if you want to survive, especially when you're
a tiny country trap between the twin Titans of Europe
(02:07):
and Asia. But from what I understand, things got even
weirder when the Communists took over. Estonia was Communists from
the nineteen forties until nineteen ninety one, and we tried
our best to resist the Russians, but there were too
many of them, and after they installed Estonian Communists as
our government. They started to ethnically cleanse us from our
(02:28):
own country. They sent out lots of people to Siberia
for a variety of crimes, some real, some imagined, whilst
importing native Russians to try and change the demographics. We
went from ninety seven percent Native Estonian to only sixty
two percent Native Estonian by nineteen eighty nine, and everyone
either worked in the factories or was enlisted into the army,
(02:52):
and we became second class citizens in our own country.
The secret police was everywhere. You couldn't even go to
the beach without permission, and if you were caught watching
anything but Russian TV, it was just like that guy
in Parks in wreck saying straight to jail. It was
a terrible time for us, a time of hatred and paranoia.
And the closer we got to independence, the more frustrated
(03:14):
and volatile people became, and none more so than in
a small coastal town known as Cardla. Cardla is the
only town on the small island of Helma, which lies
in the Baltic Sea. Most of the people there make
their money from either fishing or tourism. Because there's a
big nature reserve in the center of the island, but
(03:35):
the third of Krdla's major industries is what's referred to
in English as wrecking. Wrecking is basically when a team
of divers strips a sunken shipwreck of anything valuable, and
while it's not nearly as common as it used to
be for coastal communities around the world, the waters around
Heema were a hotspot for naval combat between Germany and
(03:56):
Russia during World War Two. There's a lot of money
to be made in bringing back military salvage, but the
practice caused a huge rift between Cardla's wreckers and its fishermen.
The fishermen all said that disturbing the drowned sailor's final
resting places would bring bad omens to Cardla, But then,
especially during communist times, people were encouraged to dismiss such
(04:18):
silly superstitions as relics of an oppressive past. The government
then paid much better wages for wrecking than fishing, which
further widened the rift between those two groups, and for
a prolonged period I'm talking many years, there was a
general feeling in town that something bad would eventually happen,
either because of the hatred between the wreckers and the
(04:40):
fishermen because of the bad luck that the latter was bringing,
or because of a third reason, the curse of the
Hehuma witches. Now, I don't believe in this kind of thing,
but it's worth mentioning because a lot of people around
Hehuma do believe in it, and as we all know,
believing can make a rec regular person do some very
(05:01):
strange things. There's a local legend which says he Huma
used to be home to a coven of witches, witches
who would cast spells, shape shift, or summon storms, especially
the sink ships, or caused bad luck to unwanted visitors.
One story claims that many hundreds of years ago, a
fisherman insulted a group of witches and they cursed his family.
(05:23):
His descendants were then plagued by misfortune for generations. And
since many of Cardless's fishing families were descended from this
very same family, the witch's curse was often alluded to
following the sudden and tragic loss of a local fishing vessel. Again,
I don't believe in witches or giants or any stuff
like that, but I do believe it's legends like that
(05:45):
which contributed to what you might call cardless psychic earthquake.
That might sound a little woo woo to some, but
I don't use the term in any kind of supernatural sense.
What I mean is all that tension in the region
was like the fault lines in an earthquake zone. It
kept building up and building up, and when it finally
got released, it was very bad. It all happened in
(06:09):
the space of just one week back in September of
nineteen eighty nine. There's another reason that compared this to
an earthquake, and that's how there was one big earthquake,
then a handful of psychic aftershocks which followed almost like
echoes of the original incident. The first incident, the earthquake,
if you will, took place when a girl named Dasha
(06:30):
Botrova blew up a Russian cafe by flooding the kitchens
with gas and then igniting it. The explosion took place
towards the end of service on the Saturday evening, so
the restaurant was packed and the kitchen staff was in
the dining area enjoying some hard earned vodka after work,
and by the time they smelled the gas, it was
too late, and when all was said and done, fourteen
(06:53):
people ended up in a hospital, some with life threatening injuries,
and five more ended up in the morgue. The authorities
were quick to blame anti Russian sentiment and were ready
to use it as an excuse to arrest dissident Estonians
who were suspected of raising support for an independence movement.
But when it was discovered that the perpetrator was none
(07:13):
other than a sixteen year old Russian cocktail waitress, everyone
in Cardla was stunned. Dasha had no history of violent
or destructive behavior. By all accounts, she was quiet, fairly popular,
and she did well in school. But what caused a
well behaved, unassuming schoolgirl to suddenly want to blow herself
(07:34):
up and take as many people as possible with her.
Police were still trying to figure out what the hell
had happened when just two days later, a Russian fishing
boat worker swerved his car into a line of school
children all waiting for the bus to school. He was
black out drunk at seven thirty in the morning, and
witnesses said it looked like he deliberately swerved in the
(07:54):
kids after putting his foot down on the accelerator. The
drunk must have knocked himself out after slamming into a wall,
because he stayed in his driver's seat until the police
shot up to drag him out of it. But when
they did, he was laughing. Everyone saw it too, the police,
the medics, all the members of the public running around
(08:15):
trying to save the kids lives. They all saw it
clear as day, because when the drunk saw what he
had done, he started laughing so hard that you'd have
thought that he was about to piss his pants. As
they dragged him to the police car, the drunk was
shouting ondine de vas tri chitaire, which is Russian numbers,
(08:38):
counting from one to four. He was counting the number
of children that he hit that weren't moving or crying
or screaming. He was counting the ones that were dead.
As he can imagine, the residents of Cardla were in
a state of shock. Within just three days, they had
the restaurant explosion, then the four dead school children, and
(08:58):
with many more injured, and the local medical clinic was
completely full, so many of the kids had to be
taken to the mainland for proper treatment. It was so
shocking to people that it almost felt like a ward started,
it felt like we were under attack from some unknowable
force from the outside. But after the incident with the kids,
(09:18):
people told themselves, in typical Estonian fashion, well, now things
can't get any worse, so it's all uphill from here.
But then things did get worse. There was a big
funeral and vigil held for the school kids who lost
their lives the morning that drunk decided to smash into them.
Everyone in Cardla was in attendance, at least almost everyone.
(09:41):
Because almost everyone being in the streets and walking to
the cemetery together, it made it very easy to figure
out who was and who wasn't there. And the more
people started to notice that one particular family was missing,
the more they started to ask questions, and the more
they started to become concerned. A small group of people
(10:02):
then went to check in on the absent family, only
to make a truly terrible discovery. A boy of just
eleven had convinced his little sister of around seven to
join him in murdering their mother and father. They woke
up early, then, while their parents were still in bed,
they crept downstairs to their kitchen and retrieved a pair
of very sharp kitchen knives. Then they walked back upstairs
(10:24):
into the parents bedroom, then cut both their throats while
they were still sleeping. Obviously, people don't just die if
you cut their throats, especially if you don't get all
the major blood vessels, so instead of pumping out blood
so fast that they were too weak to move or scream,
the kid's parents tried frantically to both stop the bleeding
(10:45):
and to stop their children from attacking them, but sadly
their efforts were in vain. They found the mother's corpse
in the bathroom and the dad's in the kitchen downstairs.
He passed out and died trying to reach the phone
to call zero three, which back then was the Soviet
emergency number specifically for medical emergencies. In this marked the
(11:05):
third incident of multiple murders within just a week. Then,
instead of telling each other cheer up, things can't get
any worse, people began to wonder what the next thing
would be. They went from shocked and saddened but still stoic,
to almost a fall on panic descending on their town.
People wouldn't let their kids go to school, They refused
(11:26):
to go to work or do anything remotely dangerous. It
was like people were convinced that there was some kind
of curse on the town, which there obviously wasn't, But
that didn't matter, because if people believe something, they truly
believe it, then they can act in all kinds of
ways you never expect them to. The wreckers started to
throw back some of the more valuable and precious things
(11:49):
they'd kept from the great sunken graveyards they'd made their
money from. They threw back metals, trinkets, all kinds of things.
And in the middle of the night, some men walked
out of their house us and tossed their trophies in
the Cardli's harbor and watch them sink to the bottom,
all in hopes that it would put the dead sailor's
angry spirits to rest. Some of the fishermen, on the
(12:11):
other hand, left offerings in the woods for the witches
of Huma, who they firmly believed were behind of the
horrifying goings ons. It was like the vast majority of
the people in town all fell victim to this sudden,
all consuming collective madness, one that made them lash out
at each other and act in all kinds of bizarre ways.
(12:32):
They kept waiting and waiting for the next terrible thing
to happen. But thankfully for them, the psychic storm hovering
over the town had finally abeyd. Again, I don't use
that term in the literal sense, but to me, it's
the only term that actually broaches on what happened during
that one week. Back in nineteen eighty nine, Cardla went
from years and years without so much as a common assault,
(12:54):
and then during the space of just seven days, a
dozen people all lost their lives in a series of
senselessly violent acts. It's almost enough to make a person
believe in restless spirits or ancient wicked curses. But if
you ask me, what's to blame as something that's in
our programming as biological machines, lines of code we've been
(13:16):
running since the days we lived in caves and the
shadows cast monsters on the walls during long and uncertain nights.
Without a doubt, the biggest scandal to ever hit my
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small Arkansas town was one summer a ninth grade girl
ended up in the hospital after being attacked while walking
home from school. Whoever attacked her hadn't just beaten the
crap out of her, they'd violated her to the point
that she needed actual surgery to repair the damage. The
doctor who performed the surgery broke down into tears during
(13:58):
the press conference afterwards. It was his job to tell
everyone the good news that the surgeries had been successful
and her life had been saved, and he still broke
down into tears. Obviously. The next phase was trying to
find the guy who did it. The victim's memory of
the incident was hazy and she couldn't give a detailed
description of her attacker, and so the whole town descended
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into this total state of paranoia, trying to figure out
who it was. State police were running the investigation, while
local cops were going door to door or making visits
to local schools to make appeals for information. And it
was a very intense time. We'd never known anything like it.
Either someone's getting a speeding ticket around here in its
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salpeople or gossiping about for maybe weeks wondering where they'd
been speeding to or who they were speeding from. So
to go from low crime to woe crime, well that
was quite something. Everyone was praying the attacker would be
found and that they'd be found fast. And then at
the blue a local pastor walked into his seventeen year
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old son's bedroom and shot him point blank in the head.
It was his wife, the boy's mom, who called the
sheriffs on him, and she was still there screaming bloody
murder when the deputies showed up to arrest him. The
pastor didn't resist. He just let those boys cuff him,
and then he walked with them to their cruiser and
off he went and don at the department, the guy
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made a full confession, told them the whole chain of
events too. He and his boy had been talking and
had come to a disagreement. The pastor then walked downstairs,
took a pistol out of his gun safe, and then
walked back upstairs and shot him. He told them what
gun he used, the caliber of the bullet, everything except
why he did it. The deputies asked him over and
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over what it was he and his boy disagreed over,
and why it was so bad. The pastor felt he
had to shoot him afterwards, But no matter how many
times they asked, no matter how many times they'd phrased
the questioner through up guesses, the pastor wouldn't say what
caused it. He simply repeated that he did it and
asked to be taken to jail. Officially speaking, no one
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knows why the pastor killed his boy just over a
week after that ninth grader ended up in the hospital,
but off the record, we all know why, and it's
the reason the girl's attacker was never caught. The only
thing that really remains a mystery to everyone is how
the pastor found out, because outside of a straight up confession,
it's hard to imagine how a father might come to
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learn something like that from his own flesh and blood.
There's a lot of speculation around here, some of it
good natured, a lot of it not so good natured.
But it also doesn't seem to bother people that they'll
never know how the pastor figured out his boy was
the one that attacked that little ninth grade girl, because
however it happened, some folks around here are very much
(16:53):
of the opinion that the pastor did the right thing
and putting his boy down. In late August of nineteen
ninety six, when I was just nineteen years old, I
arrived home to find my mom sitting at the kitchen table.
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I'd been at a house party with my then girl friend.
The night before, and following one of my first real
experiences with alcohol, I wasn't feeling my best. I walked
through the front door into a house so quiet that
I thought my mom and sister were elsewhere. But when
I walked into the kitchen, I saw my mom just
kind of sat there, very silent, with a glass of
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wine in front of her. It was so unexpected, and
I was so hung over that seeing her actually made
me jump a little. But then that feeling of surprise
was quickly replaced by one of dread. Mom never drank
in the daytime, and she never just sat around the
kitchen table quiet like that, and so very likely. I
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started to suspect that I might be in for some
very bad news. She asked me to sit down, and
when I did, she told me that my dad was
gone and that he wasn't coming back. I asked if
gone she meant dead. When Mom shook her head and
told me no, he'd just left. I remember floating on
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an island of relief for a moment before sinking back
into a sea of shock. And once I was able,
I followed up with a ton of questions, asking how
she knew where he'd gone. When he'd left and stuff
like that, and the short answer to all of them
was she didn't know. And the harder she tried to
come up with any substantial response, the more upset she got.
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He hadn't warned her, He hadn't left a note. He
just packed a suit case, got into his car, and
then drove off to god knows where. The conversation ended
with my mom crying and me hugging her while I
told her everything was going to be okay. But as
I unfortunately came to discover, everything was not going to
be okay. For the first two or three months, no
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one really talked about my dad leaving. There were routine
calls and visits from relatives to check in on us,
but the discussions focused on our welfare, not why Dad
had left or if he'd be back anything further than that.
Anything which rubbed up against the mystery of the whole
situation tended to upset Mom to the point that she
couldn't talk about it any more. And I'd be lying
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if I said that I didn't feel the same way.
But then, after letting the shock fully wear off, all
the pain and grief was replaced by a burning curiosity
and one which was only made worse by my mom's
deliberate and enduring silence on the subject. She wasn't in
denial or anything, and people grieve in different ways, but
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whenever I brought up the subject of my dad, she'd
either start crying or get super angry and start yelling
stuff like you don't talk to me about that piece
of crap. He's dead to me, and I had no
choice but the sea cancers elsewhere, And since I strongly
susp expected that Mom was hiding something from me, I
did so with great intensity. My first move was to
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contact one of my dad's friends, his only real friend,
in fact, who I figured was the most likely to
have knowledge of his whereabouts. Dad was an only child
and both his parents died before he was thirty, but
he and his friend Carl had been close since their
college days together, which is even longer than he'd known
my mom. I thought if anyone knew where my dad was,
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it'd be him. But when I called him, he said
that my call was the first that he'd heard of it.
He had no idea what my dad might have left,
but he did know a few places that he might
have gone, and one of those places was a small
town up in the wilds of Northern Canada named Wrigley.
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I had managed to rule out the prospect that he'd
stayed in Portland because he wasn't going to his job
any more. I then tried his home town of Lincoln City,
but as far as I could tell, he would there either.
Then and only then did I consider traveling all the
way up to Wrigley, the furthest of the three potential locations,
because doing so would mean driving for thirty hours straight
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through some of the most remote areas of the Canadian wilderness.
And Karl said my dad had spent a summer there
back during his college years and frequently reminisced about it.
He had also mentioned wanting to go back there one day,
so according to Karl, there was a good chance that
if he had indeed suffered some kind of sudden mid
life crisis, he traveled up to Wrigley. Wriggly, which is
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just over four hundred and fifty miles from the nearest
big city, is a population of around a hundred, mostly
First Nation citizens. It has one gas station, one medical clinic,
and the nearest RCMP office is over two hundred miles away.
Is the very definition of a small town. But to
me that was good news because there'd be nowhere for
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my dad to hide. I was warned again winst any
kind of winter travel, because it can reach minus sixty
up there during the winter months, and so instead I
made sure to drive up in the summertime. I arrived
at Wrigley on Wednesday, July twenty second of nineteen ninety eight,
after three days of driving up from Portland. The nearest
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motel was over one hundred miles away, but since I
was only planning on staying in town for around forty
eight hours at the most, I figured I could just
sleep in my car, which inadvertently brings me to my
first stop in town, the gas station. Wrigley's one gas
station was staffed by a guy remembered named Winston, and
Winston was a great guy. It looked to be in
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his late thirties or early forties, and we made small
talk at first, and he remarked about how rare it
was to get any outsiders coming through. That gave me
a golden opportunity to ask about my father, so I did,
while showing him the most recent photo that I could
get my hands on. Winston didn't recognize him from the
most recent photo, but he did recognize someone in the
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second picture I showed him, which I fished out of
all the possessions my dad left behind. It showed a
much younger, college aged version of my dad along with
a similarly aged woman. Both were dressed in hiking gear
and were standing on either side of a large rock,
pointing at what appeared to be some kind of mineral
deposit running all the way through the center. Winston recognized
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it as Hunter's Rock, a landmark about ten miles outside
of town and had been kind of famous back in
the eighties because some geologists had come up from Vancouver
to take a look at it, and local legend said
that it was the spear of some ancient gargantuan hunter
that had become embedded in the earth when they missed
their intended target, and this gave rise to rumors that
(23:46):
Hunter's Rock was some kind of meteorite that had indeed
buried itself deep into the earth after falling from the stars.
The geologist's arrival caused quite a stir in town, because
while many were excited to learn the truth of the
rock's origins, others believed applying such scientific rigor would be
disrespectful to the beliefs of their ancestors. The rock turned
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out not to be any kind of meteorite, nor was
it the gigantic spear of some Titanic Hunter of yore.
But interestingly enough, the geologists estimated that it did extend
deep into the earth, potentially for almost a mile, and
unless the area was actually some kind of extinct volcano,
he had absolutely no clue how it had gotten there.
(24:28):
I say all this because I was very interested to
know why my dad had visited the place. I didn't
remember him having any kind of interest in geology, but
then again, he might have figured seeing that it was
just something to do while he was in the area.
But then, after Winston filled me in on Hunter's Rock
and I showed him the pictures one more time, he
started staring intently at the girl in the second picture.
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He asked if I knew who she was, and when
I said no, he asked if it was okay if
he took the picture into the back while he made
a phone call. He proceeds to tell tell me that
with about eighty percent certainty, the girl in the photograph
was the same one that had gone missing back in
the early seventies out near Great Bear Lake. He said
that there were some people that I should check with
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to be one hundred percent shore, but that her face
was remarkably similar to the one that he'd seen on
missing posters back when he was a kid. I then
asked him whom he needed to talk to in order
to be certain I mean, and he told me that
I needed to visit the local government office, which was
inside of the town's medical clinic. Since I arrived in
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the very late afternoon, the office would be closed until
the following morning. So after Winston wished me luck in
finding my dad, I took a walk around town and
then headed back to my car. The next morning, I
walked over to the gas station to get some coffee
and breakfast and swap small talk with Winston before heading
over to the clinic. There, I met with Irwin, chief
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of the Pedzikey First Nation, and while that sounded like
an awfully grand title, he told me he felt like
little more than a clerk at times, and that his
title was almost purely ceremonial. He was a welcoming and
generous man, and the moment I met him, I just
knew that he'd be willing to help, But unfortunately Chief
Erwin had some bad news to share with me. The chief,
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who operated out of an office of the size of
a broom closet, was happy to welcome a rare visitor
into town, and, assuming I was some kind of tourist,
to offer to answer any and all questions I had.
He even offered to set me up with a guide
who'd take me around the area in an off roder
so I could see all of his tribal lands from
the comfort of a passenger seat. But when I told
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him my story, as in then I was looking for
my dad, his face softened. Then when I showed him
the second picture, the one from what I assumed were
his college days, I'll never forget how the Chief reacted.
He went from happy and smiley to having looked so
cold it almost scared me. And then he said simply said,
(27:01):
I think you and me should step into my office. Now.
It might sound morbid to some, but I was excited.
He was clearly in possession of some valuable information, the
exact thing that I'd driven more than fifteen hundred miles for.
But what he told me raised many more questions than
it answered. Chief Erwin told me that the girl in
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the picture was named Susan Calvert and was a King's
University graduate who disappeared in the summer of nineteen seventy three.
But then he pointed to my dad and told me
that he'd been one of the potential suspects arrested by
the RCMP, and that he'd been questioned in connection with
Susan Calvert's disappearance, not once but twice. Obviously, that it
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was all very shocking, and again this might make me
sound like a kind of psycho, but it was progress,
solid progress for the first time in literally eighteen months.
Everywhere I'd gone, every one I'd turned to, it had
all been dead ends. So even if it was bad
news that my dad had potentially been a murder suspect,
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it was still something solid to cling to, which gave
me an idea on why he might have left us
in the first place. I mean, think about it. You're
in college, you head up to Canada for a summer
hiking vacation, You meet a girl, maybe fall in love,
but that girl ends up going missing, and you're one
of the suspects that it be just about enough to
(28:28):
screw any one up for life. I mean, provided you
weren't the cause for her disappearance. So by that point
it seemed highly probable that Dad had made a late
life pilgrimage back to Wrigley to get answers about the
girl he'd loved and lost. That last point kind of
circles back to why I was so suspicious Mom was
hiding something from me. She was so upset then so
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angry at my dad, and it made me think that
she knew something about this girl, Susan, and that my
dad's sudden disappearance might be connected to her own. Chief
Irwin went on to tell me that Susan Colbert's remains
had never been found, so no one had ever been
charged in connection with her disappearance, but he also mentioned
that her last known location was in the jaws of
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Great Bear Lake, out in what are known among the
tribes as the sawtou Lands, and that was where the
Mounties had found her camp site, totally abandoned but also
totally undisturbed. He took a good look at the more
recent picture of my dad before telling me that he
hadn't seen him, But the chief was also quick to
add that if Dad had been heading straight toward Hunter's Rock.
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There was no real reason for him to stop back
in town, especially if it was a place that held
the bad memories of being arrested. If he wanted to
really look for the missing girl, or even if he
just wanted to pay his respects at the place that
she was last seen alive, it made sense that he
went straight up to the Great Bear Lake, at least
if he was up there in Canada and not some
(29:58):
place else entirely, And the only issue was getting there
from Wrigley. It was about a two hundred mile drive
to get to a place called de Leane, and if
you didn't have a decent four by four, which obviously
I didn't, then there was no point trying to make
the drive. But even if I did have one, I
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was still looking at a thirty mile hike out into
the marsh lands through all kinds of crap and mosquitoes,
yes they still have them up there. To the police,
Susan Colvert's camp site was found, I could go through
the process of hiring a four by four driving up
to de Lean than hiking for three days through some
pretty hellish terrain, and it could end up being for nothing. Granted,
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I considered it all a very noble pursuit. There was
literally nothing more important to me than trying to find
my dad and potentially bring him home. But like any
great effort, the spirit was willing, yet the flesh was weak,
and in my case, my bank account was even weaker.
I say, couldn't afford to extend my stay by another
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few days, as I had already taken a whole week
off of work and had spent a ton of money
on gas, motel, rooms, and road food. It was either
throwing the towel or call mom and beg her to
transfer some money into my account. I'd then have to
call work and risk getting fired after begging for a
few extra days off, when I'd already put my manager
(31:22):
in a pretty bad bund by requesting a week off
at relatively short notice and calling it quits and then
maybe heading back at a later date seemed like the
logical course of action. Being up there in the Northwestern
territories made me feel like I was close, you know
what I mean, so close that I could practically feel
him up there with me. Somehow, Then the more I
(31:44):
thought about it, the more I realized that there was
no turning back. Not unless I wanted to live with
the regret of inaction for the rest of my goddamned life.
But the thing that really sealed it was when Chief
Erwine told me that de Leen had an RCMP office
and how that was the place they'd questioned my dad
after his friend Susan disappeared. They'd have records, written, reports, everything.
(32:06):
I needed to get more information about what had happened
to her and my dad, And with that in mind,
I called work and then I called my mom. Now
getting the time off was easy because I was just
honest with my manager and told him what I was doing.
My Dad had left, we were worried about him, so
I was off looking for him in the hopes of
bringing him home and hell, maybe even saving his life too,
(32:29):
And at that my manager said, take all the time
you need. Mom, on the other hand, was not so
easy to convince. She didn't know where I was or
what I was doing, so when I called her and
informed her of the situation, she was not happy at first.
In light of what I was doing. She refused to
wire me any money and told me to return home immediately.
I had to argue with her for about a half
(32:51):
hour straight using the phone in the Wrigley gas station's
office before she finally relented and agreed to send me
some money. I'd be lying if I said that it
didn't get a little tearful at points. And I'll be
forever grateful to Old Winston for giving me my privacy
during that phone call. It was quite possibly one of
the most intents I've ever had. I also owe Winston
(33:12):
in another way, an even bigger one, too, because it
was he who agreed to drive me all the way
up to de Lean near Great Bear Lake in exchange
for nothing but gas money. And I guess he was
pretty invested in my little story by that point, especially
once I shared what I'd learned from Chief Irwin. But
before we set off the next day, he told me
that he wouldn't be following me out into the marshes.
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I told him that I wasn't expecting him to, and
how I wasn't one hundred percent decided on whether or
not I was headed that far anyway. But then he
said something that sticks with me to the day I die.
He asked, if your dad's out looking for the girl
and you're all looking for him, who's going to end
up looking for you you ever think about that? And
(33:57):
I remember those words, and I hadn't. I'd never even
paid one single iota of thought towards that concept. But
when I did, and the moments after Winston asked me,
it chilled me to the bone. On the drive up
to Delane the next day, Winston managed to completely talk
me out of walking thirty plus miles into the marshes.
(34:18):
If my dad was out there and he hadn't gone
completely crazy, then he would have had at least some
basic camping gear with him, whereas I didn't even have
a tent let alone enough camp food or the right
footwear to make it through thirty miles of marshy wilderness
and back. And so realistically, there was no going after
my dad in the sawtou Lance. But what I could
(34:40):
do was check in with the r c M p
up in de Lane, let them know about the situation
with my dad, and then give them my contact details
so they could get in touch if there were any
sightings of him, and maybe, just maybe some one up
there would be able to tell me more about why
my dad was arrested in connection with his friend's disappearance.
(35:00):
It took us about five hours to get up to Delan,
and then when we arrived, Winston drove us straight over
to the RCMP office, which thankfully was right next to
a grocery store. He said he'd pick us up some
sodas and hot food, and then I headed into the
office alone. The office was just a small reception area
with a larger room behind it, and after looking through
(35:22):
the open doorway, I traded greetings with a younger looking
red coated Mountie, Constable Jacobs, who was around my age,
seemed only too happy to help me, but when he
realized that I had more than just a basic inquiry
in mind, he told me to sit tight while he
radioed the only other Mounte in Delane, a man named McKenzie.
(35:43):
Not his real name, and the need for the pseudonym
will shortly become clear. McKenzie, who was considerably older than
his junior co workers, seemed far more equipped to help
with inquiries of a historical nature, and he did help.
He was a little frosty with me at first, but
after I had told him the whole story about looking
for my father, he warmed up enough to talk to me.
(36:06):
Mackenzie actually remembered the incident involving Susan Calvert, and my father,
because he'd been a junior constable way back in the
seventies at the time of the investigation. He remembered my
dad stumbling back into the lean on his own. He
remembered how it was he who had reported Susan missing,
and he also remembered how, following the initial round of questioning,
(36:28):
the Mounties basically had no choice but to consider my
dad as a suspect. Mackenzie hadn't been present for either interviews,
so all he knew was that my dad had somehow
implicated himself. But that's all he knew. They had all
the files and reports on site, but Mackenzie said he
couldn't share them without the proper clearance, and that might
(36:49):
only come after a lengthy freedom of information request. If
he had showed me the files, he might actually lose
his job, and as he put it, he hadn't worked
just shy of his thirty years, only to lose his
pension after a little snaffoo like that. It was frustrating,
but also strangely cathartic. I kind of hoped that they
(37:10):
might just show me the files in the back room
or something, but I guess that was purely wishful thinking
on my part. Filing out a foyer request might take months,
but to me it was just another step on what
had already been a long journey of tracking down my dad.
I've been searching for like eighteen months by that point,
and I sure as how could have waited a little longer.
(37:31):
And even though I traveled all that way, I knew
I wasn't going home completely empty handed. Mackenzie and Constable
Jacobs both promised to keep an eye out for my
dad and even promised to call me if they had
heard or saw anything out there in the jaws of
the Bear, and by that I mean the Marshlands were
Susan Colvert when missing. And before I left, Mackenzie asked
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what my plans were. I told him I was heading
back to Wrigley and I would probably spend another night
in my car before heading south in the morning. He
wished me luck and I thanked him, and then I
walked outside to meet Winston near his truck. He picked
us up some sandwiches, and then as we had got
on the road back to Wrigley, I gave him the
low down on what the Melnies had told me. Winston
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said that he had been keeping me in his prayers,
hoping that I get my hands on those interview tapes
sooner rather than later. I wouldn't say that I was
a religious person, not by any stretch, but sometimes, just sometimes,
I think Winston's prayers found some one's ears, because that night,
as I was trying to get as much rest as
possible prior to my drive back south, I woke up
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to hear some one knocking on the glass of my
car's window. Then, when I looked outside and saw a
distinctive red jacket, I realized who it was. It was Mackenzie,
the Mounte from up in de Lean. I lifted my
seat up, opened my car door, and he asked if
he could come sit in the passenger seat, and I
(38:57):
told him sure. Then, when he climbed inside, remembered that
he reached into his pocket and produced a cassette tape
with a scribbled label. I couldn't read it right away.
I had my internal lights switched off so I wouldn't
kill my car's battery and be stuck out there. But
I had a strong feeling it was something very specific,
something he definitely should not have been showing me Mackenzie
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told me to turn on my car's tape player, and
so I did, and then after he slid the tape
into the slot, my suspicions were confirmed. It was the
tape with my dad's first interview on it, the one
from before he was arrested, since he wasn't considered a suspect.
During the first police interview, my dad was very forthcoming
with certain pieces of information, and as it turned out,
(39:43):
he and Susie as he called her, were out camping
near the marsh Lands when Susy got up in the
night to go pee outside the tent. After Susie's exit
woke him up, my Dad had simply rolled over and
attempted to go back to sleep, but just seconds later
he heard Susan Calvert scream. Dad said, hey rushed to
(40:03):
put his boots on, grabbed a flashlight and then ran
out into the night to see what had scared Susan
so badly, and that, according to him, as when he
saw them. One of the interviewing mounties asked my dad
who they are, and my Dad responds by saying that
if he tells them, they'll think he's crazy. Dad then
(40:24):
says something about how if he knew they were out there,
he and Susie wouldn't have gone anywhere near the place,
not in a million years. One of the Mounies then
asked my dad where they took Susan Calvert, and Dad
said he didn't know, but wherever it was, he knew
Susy was probably dead. She had to be, because there
(40:45):
was no way that she could survive what they were
doing to her. Again, one of the Mounties asks who
they are, and Dad explodes. He asked one of them,
how do you guys not know you live out here?
And all this other unh hinged sounding stuff like it's
no wonder The Mountes assumed that he murdered Susan Calvert
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because he really did sound out of his goddamned mind.
The Mountes asked a few more questions, but with each answer,
my Dad kept getting more and more agitated. He didn't
know why they didn't take him too, They hadn't seen
anyone following them over the previous few days, and he
couldn't explain why there wasn't a drop of Susan's blood anywhere,
(41:26):
despite my dad's claim that they were violently attacking Susan.
And after that, the Mountes announced that they were terminating
the interview and the tape went dead. When I asked
Mackenzie if he'd brought the second tape, he shook his
head and told me it wasn't worth listening to, and
based on what my dad had said during his first interview,
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the Mounies placed him under arrest on suspicion of Susan
Colbert's murder. Remember, my dad said that he knew for
certain that she was dead, but then put him through
a second round of questioning. But the reason it wasn't
worth worth listening to was because my dad totally stonewalled
the two Mounties asking him questions when he figured that
they might at least partially believe his story. My dad
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was very chatty, but then once he realized that he
was a murder suspect, he did the smart thing and
didn't say another word until he was released due to
lack of evidence. Mackenzie said that after he was released,
my dad left town, but the search for Susan Calvert
continued for another ten days, and the search and rescue
(42:30):
team found the camp site that she'd shared with my dad,
but they didn't find any trace of the girl herself.
Though clothes or blood or human remains, and the search
effort was eventually called off, and many years later her
parents had her declared dead for some sort of legal
purpose and she was taken off the missing person's register
up there in Canada. But according to Mackenzie, there was
(42:54):
something in the files that caught his attention. At one
point towards the end of the search, a dog from
an RCMP's search team ran off and was never seen again,
and the dog's disappearance sparked a whole new search and
rescue operation, a kind of mini search within the larger effort.
Mounties searched high and low for this missing hound, as
(43:15):
well as Susie Calvert, but neither of them were ever recovered.
Mackenzie said the dog's disappearance was eventually put down to
an operational hazard and it was mourned and then replaced,
But he thought that there was a lot more to
it than just a dog getting a little over excited
and then drowning in a marsh. Remember, they never found
Susan's body or the remains of that dog, in which case,
(43:38):
where the hell did they go? Mackenzie finished by saying that,
in his opinion, my dad and Susie Culvert had come
across some kind of gross site, either marijuana, opium, poppies,
or maybe both, and he was quick to add that
he had absolutely no proof of that theory, but very
little else explained some of the comments my dad made
(43:59):
during that first interview. After I expressed my gratitude for
bringing me the tape, Mackenzie left and left me to
an uneasy sleep. It was weird hearing my dad that young,
though he sounded a lot like me whenever I heard
my own voice on tape, But that's obviously not what
stuck with me that night. It was what he'd said
(44:20):
during that first interview, along with how he'd said it now.
Driving back, I had these strange mixed feelings of sadness
and fear. I'd never felt so close to finding my dad,
and at the same time, he'd never felt so distant
all his life. He'd probably been dealing with the aftermath
of what had happened up in the Northwest Territories. And
(44:42):
I can't speak for my mom because I still don't
know to what extent she knew all of this, But
personally I had no idea. And that was almost two
years ago, and at the time of writing now, this
is in April of two thousand. I'm still no closer
to finding out the whole truth of my dad's disappearance.
But these days I have a much better idea of
(45:05):
where to look, and now that I can hold my
own on a solo hiking trip, I think I'm just
about ready to go looking for him. I'm planning on
heading back up to Delan in the summertime, sometime possibly
in June, and I'll be sure to write up everything
I find. I don't know how many of you will
actually read this, but I don't care. This is good
for my sanity, and when I find out anything else,
(45:28):
this will be the first place I post to. I
imagine that I'll be posting another blog in a few months,
and if I don't, I either found my dad or
something else happened. I guess we'll just have to wait
and see. Hey, friends, thanks for listening. Click that notification
(45:49):
bell to be alerted of all future narrations. I release
new videos every Monday and Thursday at nine p m
e s T. And there are super fun live streams
every Sunday and Wednesday night. If you get a story,
be sure to submit them over email at Let's Read,
submissions at gmail dot com and you might even hear
your story featured on the next video. And if you
(46:10):
want to support me even more, grab early access to
all future narrations and bonus content over on Patreon, or
click that big join button to hear by the extra
perks from members of the channel, and check out the
Let's Read podcast where we can hear all of these
stories and big compilations located anywhere you listen to podcasts.
All links in the description below. Thanks much, friends, and
(46:32):
remember you are loved
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