Your Custom Text Here
Content Warning - Discussion of death, including child death and some description of violence
The search for one of the missing in Kansas finally finds its way to the Bender homestead. What is discovered in the apple orchard shocks the nation. The Benders are suddenly the monsters of the nation. Now if only someone could find them.
Kansas of 1870 was the edge of civilization in the U.S. at the time. When an immigrant family from Germany named the Benders open a way station along the Osage Trail in southeastern Kansas in 1871, it wasn’t long before travelers started going missing. It would be tragically too long, though,before anyone began to suspect what happened to them.
It’s tough keeping up with strange stuff happening every day all around us. So relax and let us tell you about crab-flavored whiskey, giant snails, people-swallowing whales and so much more.
Something big, hairy and scary was out in the woods surrounding little Port Chatham on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Finally the town gave up and its residents fled en masse. What exactly made Port Chatham a ghost town?
McDonald’s Monopoly game gave customers tons of free Coke and french fries. But a select few could win serious cash money. That was supposed to be random. One man decided he didn’t like those odds. Like all crazy schemes, this one eventually collapsed, but it was a hell of a ride.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/arts/television/mcmillions-hbo-explained.html
https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/mcdonalds-monopoly-game-fraud-true-story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/business/mcdonald-s-gives-millions-to-patrons-but-very-quietly.html
HBO documentary “McMillions”
In April 2001 Branson Perry walked out his front door to put jumper cables back in the garage. He was talking to his friend at the window upstairs. Two men in front of the house never saw him leave. Yet somehow Branson Perry fell off the face of the earth, never to be seen again.
Do you know anyone from Bielefeld? Have you ever been to Bielefeld? Do you know anyone who’s ever been to Bielefeld? No? Then, how do you know that Bielefeld, a German city of 340,000 really exists?
No friends? No problem. At least in 1987 when a genius made a tape of himself absorbed by your every word and just really getting you. He called the video Rent-A-Friend and at $49.95 for a new best friend it was a hell of a bargain.
When David Hahn got a chemistry set age 10, it was only a matter of time before he got his Atomic Energy badge in the Boy Scouts. From there it was only a little more time before he built a workable nuclear reactor in his mom’s potting shed.
Fairies and elves, furries and therians. Some of us aren’t just human. We are Otherkins.
Sources
https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Otherkin
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/otherkin/
2 Girls 1 Podcast – 178 Otherkin
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/people-politics-law/politics-policy-people/sociology/who-are-otherkin-and-how-should-we-view-them
First came the scratches in the wall of the farmhouse on the Isle of Man. Then growls and hisses and screeches. Then Gef the mongoose told the Irving family all about himself. Because he was a talking mongoose. And soon the world wanted to hear what Gef had to say.
The Aswang of the Philippines can be a witch that curses, a shape-shifter, and a vampire-like creature that sucks your blood and viscera. And then there are the actual monsters…
Who was that mysterious leather-clad stranger who each month tramped through the same small towns in New York and Connecticut - for over 30 years? Was he an old French fur trader? A zombie? A lonely man who just— wait, did you say zombie? We vote for zombie.
Why shouldn’t we text each other by tapping on telepathic snails? Why shouldn’t we use bats to drop bombs and dolphins to do - well, all sorts of things? No one can say we haven’t tried, because we have, and this episode tells us how.
We’ve always had fun with animals. Playing frisbee with dogs. Chatting with parrots. Using canaries to tell us if a coal mine will kill us. Turning pigeons into bombs. Using leeches to predict the weather. The usual stuff.
In early 1900s Oklahoma, the Abernathy brothers decided they wanted to go see the new governor’s mansion in Santa Fe, NM. 1,300 miles away. On horseback. Alone. They had to ask their dad for permission first - since they were nine and five years old. He said go for it.
Sources
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/19/ultimate-free-range-kids-two-boys-rode-horses-new-york-oklahoma/ By Eliza McGraw
https://www.405magazine.com/the-astounding-adventures-of-the-abernathy-boys/ by M.J. Alexander
We don’t want to give it away, but Jack Lohrke led a charmed life on his travels from minor league baseball to World War II and back again.
So what did happen to those unlucky Roanoke colonists? Were they absorbed into the native population? Were they massacred? Enslaved by the Spanish? Lost at sea? Victims of a nefarious plot? Let’s follow the breadcrumbs.
It’s Oscar night so we bring some strangeness from the annals of the Academy Awards. And we’re not even counting Will Smith’s slap-down of Chris Rock.
When John White finally got back to Roanoke he found nothing - no daughter, no granddaughter, and none of the other 100+ colonists. The Lost Colony quickly became legend as every search brought no sign of where they had gone.
