101 Tha Alamo

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0:08 The darkness awaits.

0:14 It's about to be a fun ride. Follow along, watch as we slide. Paranormal just hit the lights. Goosebumps all through the night. Mix in just a little bit of twain. That girl sure can't do a thing. Together hillbillies go insane. Laugh so hard it'll hurt your brain. Podcast you won't ever change. These two here, they got the recipe. Sit on back and listen in to some of our darkest mysteries.

0:37 Welcome to Hillbilly Horror Stories. And now here's your host. Jerry and Tracy Pauly and their dog Ninja. Hey guys, I'm Jerry.

0:53 And I'm Tracy from Hillbilly Horror Stories.

0:55 I am Shane Waters from the podcast Out of the Shadows.

1:00 And I'm Justin Rimmel from Mysterious Circumstances.

1:03 Damn, Justin, did you hear how proper and serious Shane was?

1:06 I guess when you're a guest on Nancy Grace and have 1,800 people listening to you at CrimeCon, you get real serious.

1:13 Okay, Shane, I need you to tell the people why we're doing this commercial, but I need it just as serious as your introduction. You can see all three of our shows live in Indianapolis on Saturday, July 28th. Alright, Justin, tell them what time to be there and where they can get tickets.

1:28 Showtime is 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., and the cost is only $ 10. Seating is limited, so get your tickets now. Contact any of our shows on social media to buy tickets.

1:40 And guys, your ticket gets you unlimited access to all the shows involved.

1:44 Come out, take as many pictures as you want, and don't forget your free hugs.

2:29 Hey guys, welcome to episode 101. I'm Jerry and I'm solo tonight. Tracy is not here this week, unfortunately. I'm just kidding. She's here.

2:37 Fish! Fish!

2:39 I told you fish is not a word.

2:43 Hello, everybody.

2:45 We had such a great time last week with episode 100. So many nice things that were said by podcasters and listeners and things that were sent to us. And it was an awesome week and it was a record-breaking week. So thank you guys so much for telling all your friends and family members and maybe holding guns to people's head and forcing them to listen. Whatever it takes.

3:04 And I must say, thank you for still listening if you are after my rendition. I appreciate you guys so much.

3:10 If you didn't see the video that.

3:12 No, you don't need to be telling that.

3:13 If you didn't see the video that Tim posted on our Hillbilly Horror Stories group page, it's worth checking out because he put Tracy's singing with Coolio's actual video and edited it together where it's fantastic.

3:27 I know. It's so crazy how you did that. Coolio was probably cringing.

3:31 Yikes.

3:33 That was very nice of you to do.

3:34 Yes, and it was also awesome.

3:37 Don't ever do it again. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

3:41 We're going to tell you, we got to do something fun today. Some of you may have already seen the pictures. You know, I'm confused, and I'm not sure really why this is, but we've got a whole bunch of people that listen to the show, like close to 20,000 each week. Yay. Yeah, on the new show, we'll have about 20,000 people listen to it.

4:03 That's so amazing.

4:05 But our Facebook page only has like 5,000 people, and our group's only got like 1,100 people.

4:10 Come on, y'all.

4:11 Get on board.

4:12 You guys don't know what you're missing out on. If you're on Facebook, become a member of both of those. The Facebook group is phenomenal, first of all. It's so fun. It has taken on a life of its own, especially in the last couple weeks. We've had Natasha, who started it by herself, basically, who pretty much made us do it.

4:28 which is one of the best things we've ever done. So I can't believe it took us this long, but she convinced us to do it. We recently added John and Tim as moderators. And between the three of them, they've always got something fun going on. But if you want to tell your stories or if you want to post your pictures, post them on there. And everybody, it's a safe place. Everybody just jumps in and has, you know, they have a good time with it. It's a really good support group. If you're having any personal struggles or something like that, it's all family, pretty much. You know, that's the way we look at it. But it's really just a fun place. No politics, no, nothing gross, nothing, you know, too outlandish. There's not a lot of cussing.

5:06 There's a little bit of some lewd pictures or something on occasion, but it's all out of fun. But it's a really cool place to get in there and have some fun.

5:14 Amen.

5:15 And plus we post a lot of pictures and stuff. Like for the show, when we have all these things we talk about, we post pictures and stuff in there. So if you're not getting those pictures, jump in there and you'll be able to see all these things.

5:26 Yeah.

5:27 All right, let's jump in to what we got. First of all, thank you, all of our military, civil servants all over the world, no matter which country you're in, which country you represent. Thank you, guys.

5:37 Thank you. We love you guys so much. And we're still praying for the rescuers and the boys that are in Thailand that are stuck in that dang cave, which I haven't figured out yet why they're in there. But just God look over them and get them all out safely.

5:53 And at the time that we're recording this, they've got six out.

5:56 Oh, they did? So the last time I heard it was four.

5:58 Yeah, they've got six out now. So they've still got six more in the coach. And they're in there because after a game that they had, they decided to go explore a cave. And then rainwaters came in. It got a little bit too high. So they went further in the cave thinking they were going to get shelter. And in reality, they just made a tough run themselves.

6:19 Yeah.

6:19 And then when the water and stuff came in, they just became trapped.

6:22 That's terrible. Next time, just go get an ice cream. You'll be more safe.

6:26 We've got a listener while we're on this subject. We've got a listener that she was talking about. She's an EMT. And she wanted me to remind people how tough of a job that is.

6:37 Oh, my gosh.

6:38 They have had a suicide this past week from one of their coworkers. And she said that's like the third one in the last year. And these EMT workers... they see so much trauma and horrible things that PTSD is a really big thing with them. So I know we, we mentioned the military a lot and we mentioned the firemen and all that stuff. Let's not forget. And it was what national EMS week a couple of weeks ago.

7:08 Let's not forget that these guys, they don't get paid a lot of money. These guys and girls, they don't get paid a lot of money. They, they pretty much do this because they want to help. And it's, It's one of those thankless jobs.

7:22 I mean, it takes a special person to do that too, because I know through my years, I always wanted to do that. I used to work in a nursing home before I was really thinking about getting into that. And man, I just couldn't, I couldn't handle it just because you get like, you get so close to the patients and stuff and it's just tucks at your heart. And I don't know how in the world they do what they do.

7:43 I just don't. Especially, you know, well, it's like you said, they see things we don't see and wouldn't want to see. But, yeah, thank you, God, for those EMTs because it means a lot to them. I mean, that's really sad that, you know, somebody took their own life.

8:02 Yeah.

8:02 I mean, that's really sad.

8:04 So that leads us right into the next obvious, the Suicide Prevention Hotline of the United States, 1-800-273-8255. If you're more of a texter, it's 741-741. Just remember, you never know what anybody's going through out there. I was talking to a young lady last night, one of our friends that committed suicide a couple weeks ago, and I was talking to one of his really good friends, and she said he seemed completely fine. They had talked about the Kate Spade deal when that happened, and this came as a complete shock to her, somebody who really knew him and had no clue.

8:37 Yeah.

8:38 And, of course, you know, this was a friend of ours, Alan, from a couple years ago, similar situation.

8:45 Yeah.

8:46 This guy was in a band. He was 21 years old. Fantastic guitar player.

8:50 Oh, my God.

8:51 Unreal.

8:51 Their band had just taken off. They're traveling all over the country in an ACDC tribute band. And they're probably the biggest ACDC tribute band in the entire country. Everything was great. He just had a new PS4, was playing a game all night long, laughing and joking with his grandma. And then he had set his alarm because he was starting orientation for college the very next morning. Things changed.

9:14 seemed like they couldn't be any better. And then he took his own life sometime from the last time his grandma talked to him, which was around nine or 10 o'clock to the wee hours of the morning. I mean, you just never know. I mean, it's tough out there, but you just got to know that there are people who are willing to talk to you, whether it be us, whether it be people on any of these phone numbers and text lines. Just if you feel like You're hopeless and there's no other options. I promise you there are options.

9:44 Please reach out to somebody. Okay, let's jump into, it's a tough transition, but we're going to jump into iTunes reviews. We've got Sandra Bama Fan, which Sandra personally wrote me an email to tell me if she was a Bama fan. She's a sweetheart.

10:01 Rubbing it in your face was she?

10:03 No she was not. She's SEC.

10:06 Why didn't you rub it in his face Sandra? Come on now.

10:09 So Jay Wilson 0807 Shush Shrieks He don't like us no more. Creepy Carolinas Mary N59 They said my name, Hector. Kimmy81, that's Lady Bond. So thank you guys for the awesome reviews this week.

10:33 Yeah, thank you. Woohoo! Except for the one.

10:36 But you know what? I want to talk about that for a second. Not from a negative standpoint.

10:39 Yeah, not really. Because I still said they love.

10:41 Me and Jerry. What he said was that first and foremost that he felt like that the show has gotten worse, which I will respectfully disagree. He said that he felt like that there was more interviews than topics. The interviews are always extras. I hope you guys realize that. If it's just me and Tracy doing a show, it's only going to be 40, 45 minutes. That's it. That's all it's ever going to be. If the show's an hour and a half, that's because we added an hour and a half worth of interviews or something else on there.

11:17 So the interviews are just extras. So yeah, there might be more interviews than the actual topic, but that's never going to change. That's just the way we do the show, and it's been that way from the beginning. So just look at that as an extra, because that's all that it is. And we're going to have one of those tonight, because Tyler from West Side Fairy Tales is coming on, and he's awesome. And then also, he had mentioned, and everybody's got a right to their opinion. I really don't know where to get this, but he said he didn't think that we... dove as deep into the topics as we used to, and it kind of came across as half-assed.

11:49 His words, not mine. I don't think that's the case at all. I feel like that we still give just as many details as we ever have. I think, matter of fact, the last six or seven episodes we've done, as far as, you know, we all know how to keep track of how many pages of notes we have. I've had more details and more notes than I think maybe any episode we've ever done. So, I don't know.

12:11 Like I said, for whatever reason, he feels that way, and he's entitled to that feeling. I know.

12:15 I hope he still hangs in there with us and everything.

12:17 Yeah, and this isn't getting on you by any means.

12:19 No, no, no.

12:19 But, you know, I don't know who you are, so this is the only way we can really address it.

12:23 Yeah. But we appreciate your comment and stuff.

12:27 Sure.

12:27 And we don't want to let anybody down, so.

12:30 But we also have to keep improving the show.

12:32 So we're going to start doing a full last.

12:37 Is that a word? I mean, we recorded last week's show twice. If anything, we put in twice the effort. Anyway, Patreon. And you guys, thank you so much. You're loving, according to you, I'm not making that up, but you're loving the new Hillbilly Shorts, the mini episodes we're doing. We did six last week.

12:59 That was so fun, too.

13:00 Yeah, and these things are about eight to ten minutes long, and they're just like the regular stories we do, but... They're a little bit shorter. They're the stories that really aren't long enough to put on the main show. So we give you a bunch of those. And for each, I'm not going to go into details, but for each dollar amount that you go, you get X amount of episodes based on the level of patronage. But the cheapest amount is a dollar. And you get four of those many episodes a month, plus a chance to win a t-shirt for a dollar a month.

13:26 Dollar no holler.

13:28 And when you think about that, that's about eight to 10 minutes a piece. It's the equivalent of a full episode a month that you get. Yeah. So four different stories worth doing. And just for the people who haven't heard them, I wasn't sure what they are, on the end of tonight's episode, we're going to throw about four of them on there that we did last week.

13:44 Good.

13:44 So you'll get a chance to hear what you get for your money if you decide to become a Patreon member. So Patreon members this week, Chris Key, Barry Ledum, Richard Enriquez, Carl Anderson, Alexia Gordon, Heidi from Sweden, our lovely Heidi. Love you, Heidi. She jumped from $ 10 to $ 15 a month because she wanted to get all the extra episodes.

14:07 Thank you. Athens Girl, she raised hers.

14:09 Oh, you guys are so nice.

14:10 As well. And this last one, I don't know if I'm going to butcher your name. Well, I'm going to butcher it. But I don't even know if this is your first name, last name. It came through on Patreon is Avalice Edith.

14:23 I think that's right.

14:24 But I don't know if it's really Edith.

14:26 And it's beautiful.

14:26 And that's the last name. It is beautiful.

14:28 It is very pretty.

14:30 But I might have still butchered it and Well, much love.

14:33 To you, doll. We love your name. We love you all. Thank you so much for hanging in there with us and just love you guys so much.

14:41 Oh, and the other thing on the review that he was unhappy with is he said it takes too long to get into the episode.

14:46 Oh, I know.

14:47 I was just sitting here thinking that. I said, dang, we've been talking and talking.

14:49 And talking and we haven't started yet.

14:50 And no offense, we love you. But this is what we do. And for most people, this is the charm of the show. They want to hear the story, sure. but they liked this part of it too. Cause we laugh and we joke and we're, if you seen, and I, and I'm just being honest, if you could see how many responses, emails, texts, messages that we get from every, every week of people telling us how we've helped them with the suicide thing and thanking us for doing that and telling us how we helped their life or we've helped somebody else's life. That's why we do that. And, and, We can't quit doing that. That would be a disservice to the listeners, and, you know, that's part of what takes so long. And if people are going to donate

15:34 money to us or they're going to take the time to write us a review, they deserve to hear their names mentioned. And that's, you know, not everybody's going to like that, but we feel like those people deserve that, and we owe that to them.

15:46 Yeah. So we've been talking so long. Did you tell them where we went today?

15:50 No.

15:50 Oh, we did today.

15:52 I wasn't going to tell that yet. Oh, you're not? Okay, go ahead.

15:56 Well, so we get up out of bed, and I'm thinking, we're just going to go to breakfast. And, you know, I'm just like, yeah, taking my time, getting ready to eat some bacon and eggs. Then Jerry said, hey, you want to go to West Virginia? And I'm like, what the crap? What do you mean? He's like, come on, it's only two and a half hours away. So that's what we did. We jumped in our car and had our picture made with the Mothman and went down to this pretty, what is it called? Pet, uh.

16:25 Point.

16:26 I forgot what it's called. Pleasant Point.

16:30 Point Pleasant.

16:31 Oh, Point Pleasant. Pleasant Point.

16:34 Dyslexia is a horrible disease.

16:36 Oh, my gosh. It was so cool. That place is really, it's like a, it kind of reminds me of Mayberry a little bit.

16:45 Of course it does.

16:46 It sure does.

16:47 Of course it does.

16:47 It sure does.

16:48 See, this sounds real.

16:49 I know.

16:50 But listen, I'm telling you guys, if you ever, ever get down there, You have got to see this mural, this person painted. OMG. It is awesome, isn't it? It's just so flippin' awesome.

17:03 Yeah, they've got a giant flood wall that runs along the river. Their little park that runs along the river is awesome.

17:09 Yes, it's so beautiful.

17:10 But they've got this flood wall, and on the inside of the flood wall towards the park side of it, it's got these murals that were painted. I mean, these are huge.

17:18 Dude, I just wonder how long it took him to do this.

17:21 I mean, each one of these sections is like the side of a house.

17:24 Yeah, and it's like different scenes.

17:26 Yeah, and it's scenes from the frontier days, and it's all stuff to do with their history.

17:31 Yes, it's just amazing.

17:32 Yeah, it was awesome.

17:33 I'm telling you what, this guy is so dang talented.

17:36 We got some pictures of it. Yeah. I haven't posted any pictures yet of that, and we'll post some pictures of it and some of the other statues they got. So, see, once again, this is a reason to go to the group or go to the fan page.

17:47 Yeah, it is amazing. I just could not get over it. And everybody was so nice. It had the cutest little stores. And we got some t-shirts. Oh, and they had this swing by the lake. I mean, not by the lake, but the river. And guess what? They have cup holders in the arm.

18:06 So we drive two and a half hours. We see one of the biggest cryptid mysteries of all time. And what she's fascinated with is the swing has cup holders.

18:14 Well, I just thought that was really nice. I've never seen that before. But it was a really good trip. It didn't take long. Well, we stayed, what, a couple hours or something?

18:22 Yeah, we stayed for a couple hours, and on the way down there, there's a place that I knew we had to go to if we got that way. It's right outside of Huntington, West Virginia, where Marshall University is. It's called Hillbilly Hot Dogs. OMG.

18:35 This place is crazy.

18:38 It's in the middle of, I mean, nowhere. I mean, it's like just a busy, long country road, and it sits right there, and then all of a sudden you just see all these cars.

18:46 Oh, this place was jam-packed. packed with people. It was so crazy.

18:50 A lot of people on bikes, a lot of people just visiting. This place has a reputation.

18:55 They've been there, what, 19 years, they said?

18:57 Yeah, 19.

18:57 Guy Fieri's been there from Diners, what is it? Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, or something like that.

19:03 The big triple D.

19:04 Yep, he's been there, and this place, there was a line, probably, what, 40 people waiting, 50 people?

19:11 I am not in for a daggone wiener.

19:13 So.

19:14 Waiting that, I mean.

19:15 It was.

19:16 We all know that you have no fascination with wieners, so it doesn't surprise me that you wouldn't be impressed. But the average person is impressed for hymns.com.

19:25 I don't like a wiener ever now.

19:29 But anyway.

19:30 But anyway, this place.

19:31 We did get ice cream.

19:32 It was good.

19:33 This place is set up. And the owners, the two owners. Oh, my gosh. They're right there taking the payments and working.

19:40 And they were very helpful today.

19:42 But this place, why do I post these pictures? It looks like Fred Sanford's junkyard. You know what? But it's done that way on purpose.

19:52 Yeah, because guess what? So the guy, the owner, he said that if somebody would bring in something old or something like that.

20:01 From their barn or garage or something.

20:02 From their barn, anything like that, if they brought in something, then they would give him a free hot dog. Well, then his wife said, hey, we're going to have to stop this because we're not making no money.

20:11 After about four months of collecting. But this place is, I mean, there's vans, vans, full vans up in the trees that say Hillbilly Hot Dogs. Oh, I didn't see that. It was over top of the chapel. I did not even see that. I'll post some pictures. This place is super fun. Look them up online, Hillbilly Hot Dogs in West Virginia.

20:30 It's awesome.

20:31 I know, that's so fun. I guess we need to quit yapping.

20:33 Yeah, we're 20 minutes in and we're just going to get bad reviews now.

20:35 Oh, gosh.

20:36 Sorry, guys. I was just excited to tell you about them hot dogs.

20:41 Yeah, trust me. She doesn't get excited about hot dogs very often, so you just got to allow her to do it when she can. All right. You know, I don't know why it's taken so long to do this story. The reality of it is we keep track of all of our stats, and we've talked about coming to Houston, and we've mentioned this before, because Texas... is the state that we have the most listeners in. We have a list of our top ten cities in the world, and Texas has three of those top ten.

21:16 That's great. Thank you. We love Texas.

21:18 Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas. And yet, when we look back through all the shows that we've done, we've done very little on Texas.

21:27 Well, shame on you.

21:28 I mean, we've had Andrea from Texas write a newspaper article on us. So... I thought, well, it's time to do a big Texas one. We've got a couple other Texas ones coming up, too. But this is the one we jumped in on. We're going to talk about the Alamo in San Antonio. Before I start talking about the actual story, I want to give some special thanks. You know, we had the guys from Astonishing Legends on, and they were talking about having research help. And people have offered I don't know how many times to help us with research.

22:03 And that's a very kind gesture. The problem is, I didn't really know a way around it. Because what happens is, I research. I spend a couple hours just trying to decide what show we're going to do. I don't decide on a show usually until Monday of that week. Because I'm so consumed with a prior week's show, I don't have time to look at something else. Monday, after we've done the show and it's up, then I decide. I look through several different things and find a topic that grabs me. Well, Once I do that, then I just start reading everything I can on it, and then that's how I learn it, and that's how I put together the story. So I really didn't see how somebody doing the research for me was going to benefit me in

22:44 any way, shape, or form, because if I'm not doing that research, how do I learn it, and how does it come across the same way? So I had a good friend of mine, Tanya Allen. Well, it used to be Tanya Allen. Now it's Tanya Hines.

22:57 Yes.

22:58 And her and Alan, we went to school together some 30-some years ago. God, it makes me feel old. And she reached out. She's really into all this stuff. She does tarot card reading. She's had us out as special guests at an event she does at Talbot Inn that we did last October. And she said, hey, you know, I can help you with this. And we devised a little plan, I guess, to where we could make it work.

23:23 So she did a lot of this research. And instead of me having to look in 50 different places, I told her what I was looking for, how I research. She did it the same way, put it all on basically one very long ass document and sent it to me.

23:38 That's so nice.

23:39 And I can't tell you what a help that was. I was still able to read everything I needed. So I still learned everything that I needed to learn. When I wrote the story, it actually, you know, wrote the exact same way. And I doubt if I told you, you guys would even notice a difference, but I wanted her to have the credit where credit was due. And Tanya from this point on is going to help us.

24:00 Oh, love you girl.

24:01 Thank you so much. Let me tell you how much she digs into stuff even more than I do. This is where the big plus is. I gave her a town in Texas or a site, a place called the Grove. Now what I would have done is I would have watched a couple of videos on YouTube. I would have, dug up anything I could online, and that would have been it. Not Tanya. I said, hey, look up what you can on the Grove. She gets back with me, like, literally like two hours later. Well, I contacted the owner.

24:32 Oh, my gosh.

24:33 And the owner's got a book, and he said 90% of what you find in his book is not online anywhere. So he's sending me a copy of the book.

24:40 Well, I'll be dang.

24:41 So I'm like, okay, we'll put that one off until you get the book. But, I mean, I would have never even considered calling the owner.

24:49 Yeah.

24:50 But that was her immediate, let's go to the owner, let's find out what kind of information they have. So this is going to be a big plus for everybody.

24:56 Well, good.

24:58 The thing about the Alamo is this is one of these, you see these top ten lists all the time.

25:03 Yeah.

25:04 Waverly's always on it. So many other places are always on it. Winchester, Mystery House, what have you. The Alamo hardly ever makes any of these lists. And I really have no clue why, because it should. When we get into this and you see how many different types of hauntings and the history behind it, you're probably going to be surprised that it doesn't make the list more. So like I said, of course, we're talking about the Alamo.

25:29 Like so many of these haunted places, the Alamo has a bloody and gruesome history. And we're going to get into a lot of those details. So there'll be some parts of this that may be a little bit disturbing. The Alamo itself is just a place. The battle that took place there is really where all the bloody history is going to come from. And most of the hauntings are going to come from that one instance in its history.

25:54 So let's talk a little bit about the history first. Let's talk about Texas in general. Texas was under the Spanish reign in its earliest days. A lot of people don't realize that. The Spanish settlers got there around 1519, and there were many Native American tribes that were already there at the time. Those tribes had been there for over 10,000 years.

26:16 10,000 years.

26:17 Wow.

26:17 And they found it out. The archaeologists and stuff had found that through archaeological digs and bones and stuff they found. From 1519 to 1848, Texas was claimed by five different countries. France, Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the United States. From 1861 to 1865, During the Civil War, it was owned by the Confederate States of America. So, of course, that ended up being the United States of America, somewhere down the line.

26:49 The Alamo building itself was built from 1718 to 1724 by some Franciscan monks. The Spanish used to use this building to educate Native Americans in the area when they were forcing them to convert to Christianity. Because that was what a lot of people did back then. They'd capture the Native Americans and say, oh, well, you need to be Christian, so you're going to do it. Like the schools that we talked about back in the day. In 1793, Spain had the area secularized, and it was pretty much abandoned for 10 years, which secularized pretty much meant that it was no religious base or anything like that. So there was really no need. Ninja, you do not practice your karate while we're doing the podcast. We've covered this. Yes. Anyways,

27:42 there was a cavalry unit there in the early 1800s, and they opened the first recorded hospital there in the Long Barracks. Okay, here's the main focus of this. So we got that much down. The Battle of the Alamo. Then just heard of it. In December of 1835, Texas was fighting for their independence from Mexico, who owned them at the time. A group of Texas volunteers occupied the Alamo at the time. On February 23rd, 1836, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna sent thousands of members of his military force to siege the Alamo. It's important to note that there were only 200 volunteers at the Alamo. Wow.

28:26 Among these were some pretty famous people and some American icons, really. He had American frontiersman Davy Crockett.

28:33 Hey, we saw him today.

28:34 No, we saw Daniel Boone.

28:36 Oh.

28:38 He was an American icon, as I said. He was the king of the wild frontier. Remember there was a song.

28:42 King of the wild frontier.

28:45 James Bowie. Jim Bowie, as most people call him. He was a Kentucky guy.

28:50 Yeah, I've heard of him.

28:51 Some of you may have heard of the Bowie knife.

28:54 The Bowie knife.

28:55 Yeah, it's like a pretty big ass knife. Not like the kind on Crocodile Dundee, but it was a pretty big knife. Oh. Anyways, the Bowie knife was designed by James Black for Bowie, and that's why it became the Bowie knife. Anyway, that's what he was known for. You can look that up. There was also William Travis. Now, William Travis was a lawyer and a lieutenant in the Texas Army. He was 26 years old at this time.

29:21 So they were the three people that most people knew at the time. Despite the fact that there was only 200 of these volunteers, they lasted for 13 days. Against thousands of the military.

29:37 13 days.

29:38 So they hunkered down in this basically a fort, fortress right there in the Alamo, and they just did everything that they could. On the 13th day, they unfortunately succumbed to the Mexican forces. Despite their valiant effort, on March 6, 1836, Santa Ana's troops stormed the Alamo, killing every single one of the Texas defenders.

30:01 You've got to be kidding. Every single one.

30:03 Including Bowie, Davy Crockett, and William Travis. They also pulled some of the women and children from their beds, killing them as well. No surrenders were accepted. All were killed quickly.

30:17 That's horrible.

30:17 We'll get into some more of that detail later.

30:20 I don't like that.

30:22 They allowed approximately 20 women and children to live, so that they could go and tell other Texans what their fate would be if they continued to fight the Mexican authorities. So after the slaughter, the Alamo defenders were then looted, dismembered, buried in mass graves, dumped into the river, or burned.

30:46 Though the Mexicans won this battle, it came at a huge cost to their forces as well. Over 600 Mexican soldiers were killed, during this raid. An aide to Santa Ada made the remark, one more glorious victory like this and we are finished. What these 200 defenders did was nothing short of incredible. It's become a symbol of the amazing pride that Texans have. We've probably all heard the saying at one time or another, remember the Alamo.

31:18 Yeah.

31:18 And that's why they say remember the Alamo. Their 200 stood so strong that they were able to fight off thousands of Man. For 13 days and then killed over 600 of them during the time.

31:32 Wow.

31:33 Texas would go on to win their independence a little later that year, though. Now, the hauntings, that started almost immediately after the bloodshed. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Santa Ana ordered Mexican engineers to tear down the Alamo. But when they started tearing down the walls, they saw ghostly hands come from the walls to stop them.

31:55 What?

31:56 Yes. Some of these hands held torches. A loud ghostly voice warned them that if they continued to tear down the building, they would face a terrible death. Colonel Sanchez, he was the one that was leading all this, that's who Santa Ana put in charge of this, he told his men to tear down the chapel. Once they started, six ghostly monks materialized from the walls of the chapel, and the men abruptly stopped the demolition. The soldiers were stunned.

32:27 They watched silently as these monks came towards them, waving flaming swords over top of their heads. Oh my gosh. They warned in this inhuman type of screech, do not touch the walls of the Alamo. Many think that these were the monks that actually built the mission back in the 1700s. So instead, the Alamo was actually rebuilt. So instead of tearing it down, it was rebuilt.

32:52 That's incredible.

32:53 And that's just the start of the ghost stories from the place that we know was the Alamo. And we're going to tell you a bunch of them here tonight. Most of these are really quick stories. So I kind of wanted to start with one that I thought was my favorite out of them. You are aware of who John Wayne is. The Duke.

33:13 Yeah.

33:15 Well, John Wayne directed the movie The Alamo back in 1960. He played Davy Crockett in the movie. During research for the movie, John Wayne became so obsessed with the history of the Alamo that he wanted it to be as historically accurate as possible. So, what did he do? He personally toured the Alamo on several occasions. He spent $ 1. 5 million to recreate an exact replica in Brackettville, Texas. He used the actual blueprints from the Alamo.

33:50 To build this thing.

33:51 Wow. Not only that, but he also, he did the mission house, but he also did an entire village, made an entire village to go there. Oh, man. That's awesome. And the movie set's actually been used in a couple of different occasions, but it's like a huge tourist attraction now.

34:04 Oh, I bet.

34:05 As many people come to that almost, they go to the actual Alamo, to this little place. Now, shortly after John Wayne died in 1979, the staff and visitors began to report sightings of John Wayne's spirit. Walking around the grounds of the Alamo.

34:20 Oh, my gosh.

34:21 That's amazing.

34:23 They say that they've even seen him talking to some of the spirits of the original Alamo defenders. So how cool would that be if you were John Wayne and you were so fascinated with the place.

34:32 Yeah.

34:33 And then you pass on and then you show up there and like Davy Crockett and, you know, William Travis and Jim Bowie are there. Would that not be the coolest thing ever?

34:42 Or the monks?

34:44 You probably don't care about talking to the monks. They don't talk anyway.

34:49 Oh, that's.

34:52 Right.

34:55 Well, they built it.

34:56 If you build it, they will be silent. So anyway, the stories were coming so often that they had a psychic come in and check things out. So the psychic, she substantiated that John Wayne's spirit stops by the Alamo about once a month, but had no idea where he spends the rest of his time.

35:17 On the other movie sites.

35:19 But could be because that one's where he got the cancer and stuff from. I remember he was doing the movie out at, what movie was it? Genghis Khan. He was doing that and it was out there where all the nuclear testing was. And like everybody that was in that movie got some form of cancer.

35:34 Why in the world would they do that there?

35:37 Well, they didn't think that that was, I mean, it wasn't his idea. The director that made it put him out there.

35:42 Nobody warned them that, hello, this was a nuclear site?

35:45 The director didn't think it was going to be an issue. I don't know.

35:51 I don't know.

35:52 So anyways, many think that he spent so much energy and enthusiasm on making the movie and learning the history that it's, you know, no big surprise that he would end up there afterwards. It kind of actually seems only natural that he would end up there in the afterlife. Mm-hmm. I thought this was an interesting little tidbit of information.

36:14 John Wayne's real name is Marion Mitchell Morrison. Well. So if he was a rapper, he would be Eminem.

36:24 That's pretty good. Gosh, I didn't know that was his name.

36:27 I didn't either. Wow. So let's move on to the next.

36:29 Yay for John Wayne.

36:30 Several people report seeing a Mexican officer kind of just wandering around the grounds. They said that his face is filled with sorrow. His hands are clasped behind his back. and he just slowly shakes his head. Now, the reason for this is probably because most seem to think that this is the ghost of General Manuel Fernandez de Castrillon.

36:53 He was one of the few officers who opposed the assault on the Alamo, and he said that this was going to be a bloodbath. So he kind of knew what was going to happen. His opposition was, of course, ignored, and they continued to bombard the Alamo. When the shooting stopped, Six of the Alamo's defenders surrendered to General Castrillon. He offered them his protection. But Santa Anna, who was kind of pissed off about how this whole deal anyway, he refused and ordered them to be executed. Castrillon refused to do the execution, but then Santa Anna's men hacked them to death with sabers.

37:32 Oh, Jesus. Why didn't he just go hide somewhere?

37:36 So they think that this is his ghost just kind of wandering around shaking his head because... I told you so. Well, that and the fact that, you know, he didn't want to execute these people who surrendered because that's the whole point of surrendering.

37:49 Of course.

37:50 You can't do that. Tell somebody that and then you kill them. That's stupid.

37:55 One of the most sighted ghosts is a small blonde haired little boy. This little boy is usually seen in the left hand window of the upstairs of the building that the gift shop is currently in.

38:06 Very cool.

38:07 He's usually seen the first few weeks of February. He's sometimes seen walking around the complex as well, other than just being seen in the windows. Some think that he was executed by the Mexican soldiers and returns looking for his father, who also died there.

38:20 Oh, that's so sad.

38:22 Now, the mission building itself is now used for storage and meetings and stuff like that today. Staff said that at times they've been crept up on by a tall Native American. After getting a feeling that somebody's watching them, you know, like you get that feeling every once in a while, they'll turn only to see a broad-chested Native American standing there. Oh, wow.

38:42 That would be cool.

38:43 But after he notices that you've seen him, he either disappears or he walks through a wall that used to hold a doorway because there was a tunnel that led to the, there's a hotel across the street called the Menger Hotel, and this used to lead from the basement, that's where that door and that tunnel led over to there, but they've since blocked all that off. Blocked that off.

39:02 But he would walk through there where that tunnel used to be. Staff are so afraid of this entity down there that they won't go to the basement because of all the numerous sightings of this Native American.

39:13 No way.

39:15 Now, since we just talked about the Menger Hotel, there's many apparitions. Some are severely deformed. It was specifically mentioned that have been seen when people take evening strolls from the hotels or like walking around the area.

39:30 Yeah.

39:31 And these guests will see these apparitions. These spirits, they come from the Alamo's walls. They'll always see them like coming out of the walls and they will wander into the hotels sometime.

39:43 Oh my Lord.

39:44 Because apparently there's like these hotels are all like right there on the same grounds and stuff now. Two of the locations where bodies of the battle are buried are also said to be haunted. Many of the bodies that were burned after this bloodbath were at the spot where the River Center Marriott Hotel is today. There's a bookstore in that area under a bridge that has had several paranormal experiences. One corner of the bookstore stays extremely cold and books will fly off the shelves on a regular basis.

40:17 The bodies of Mexican soldiers were actually taken to what is now the Children's Park, right across from Market Square, about a mile from where the Alamo is, and this park is supposed to be extremely haunted. Oh my gosh.

40:30 I wonder if the kids go over there, the ones that died.

40:33 I don't know.

40:34 You know what I'm saying.

40:35 That would make sense, like the Dead Children's Playground.

40:37 Yeah.

40:39 Guides at the Alamo tell visitors that almost every storefront building on Alamo Plasma that faced the church is haunted. That's because it was built directly over the old compound walls. Oh, man. Because many of those things are actually buried under the streets.

40:54 Oh, really?

40:55 Of San Antonio now. A woman is seen by the water well on the other side of the church. And she's only seen at night, though. Which, I guess that's that way for a lot of them. But some of these ghosts apparently just come around whenever they want to.

41:10 Yeah.

41:11 But she's only seen at night. And they said she materializes as a vaporous torso. like spirit, and nobody has a clue who she is.

41:20 No kidding. Maybe it's one of the wives.

41:25 There's one entity that has to be like a spirit of one of the defenders. He sticks his head and shoulders out of the large rectangular window right over top of the double doors of the church, and he just kind of scans the area, looks both ways, and then he leans back in and disappears. It's like he's just checking out what's going on.

41:44 Oh, wow.

41:45 And it sounds just like something he probably would have done during the time. Of course, people shooting at me and stuff. I probably wouldn't just stick my head out in this candy area.

41:52 Yeah, I wouldn't either.

41:54 There's a bunch of these types of sightings that are around the building and on the building, just like the one we just talked about. For example, there's a tall, thin man and a small kid that's often seen on the roof of the mission at sunrise. Only at sunrise. Now, in the last hours of the attack, over the Alamo, Colonel Juan Andrade, and several Mexican officers swear that they saw a man with a small child jump off of the rear of the church to the ground. They were horrified, which I find odd because they're sitting there killing women and children, but they're horrified that somebody would jump off a building.

42:39 So were they trying to take their own lives?

42:41 I think they were probably just trying to get away. I don't know.

42:43 Trying to get away? Oh, my gosh. Well, at least they're together in the afterlife. That's good. They found each other.

42:48 Some of these apparitions, they happen all hours of the day and night. So like federal marshals, this is actually one of the funnier ones. Federal marshals that patrol the grounds of the front of the Alamo, this is where the lawn is that covers part of the old cemetery. They've quit their jobs after some of the encounters they've had with these entities.

43:07 No kidding.

43:07 These are federal marshals. They had to quit their jobs.

43:11 Oh my gosh. Pansies. Just kidding.

43:15 There's a soaking wet cowboy that's often seen in the garden area next to the mission. He's dressed in a cowboy hat, a black duster, and it looks like he's been riding through some kind of a heavy rainstorm. Some Texas historians seem to think that this is the spirit of a rider that William Travis sent for help. Because William Travis sent like 22 people on horseback out to try to get help and bring back.

43:40 Wow.

43:42 That's the best guess of what this could be.

43:45 Well, that must be annoying, being wet all the time.

43:49 I think. There's also an apparition in a black cloak that looks like it's in solid form, but when you ask him a question, he dematerializes in front of your eyes.

44:02 Did he say nunya?

44:05 One apparition is seen running back and forth on top of the Alamo roof as if he's looking for a way to escape.

44:10 Oh, man.

44:12 God, that is so sad.

44:14 There's the spirit of a monk. He's seen in the courtyard on the north side of the church. He's just minding his own business. And then he walked into a wall that used to be a doorway. He disappears. And, of course, there's a Davy Crockett sighting. Park rangers have seen a man in a buckskin clothing and a coonskin cap.

44:36 He stands at attention, holding a flintlock rifle at several different locations throughout the premises. How cool is that?

44:43 That's very cool.

44:44 Now, is he king of the wild frontier?

44:45 Yeah, he's trying to defend and stand guard still.

44:50 So those are most of the sightings, but it doesn't stop there, because there's also hearings, I guess we'll say. Every March, a few days after the Alamo was brought down, People are awakened in the early morning by the sound of horses galloping on the pavement. Some think that there was a gentleman by the name of James Allen. He was like a rider. He was the last courier to leave the Alamo. And it happened he left on the night before the battle.

45:20 He did.

45:21 So they think that, you know, he may be coming back attempting to give his report to William Travis, not realizing that.

45:29 Oh, my gosh.

45:30 That he's dead and gone, which he left. He didn't get killed.

45:33 Well, wait, I was going to say, if he left, how did he get killed?

45:36 I'm not sure. Well, he could have just died in life anyway.

45:38 Right, and then still.

45:39 And still come back. Oh, my goodness.

45:42 Others have heard the faint trumpet notes of El De Gallo. That's the Spanish call to no quarter that Santa Ana ordered to be played during the final assault on the Alamo. In the gift museum, voices can be heard. Heavy pounding on doors and sobs from a woman are also heard in the gift shop. Sounds of laughter from children who perished, unfortunately, can be heard at night all over the grounds. In Alamo Hall, furniture shakes by itself. Oh, wow. So that one doesn't fit in with sightings or the sounds. An apparition of a cowboy in solid form appears in that same place. And then windows and doors open and close.

46:25 Lights turn off and on. So those are kind of normal things. But these all happen in Alamo Hall. There are two small boys that are often seen following tour groups on the property. They just appear behind the group instantaneously. Like they're not there and then boom, they're there. As soon as they reach the sacristy room, they disappear. Every time.

46:49 It's thought that they were the sons of Anthony Wolfe. He was an artillery man at the Alamo. These boys, which were his sons, were killed during a mishap deal. They were hiding in the mission, and when the Mexican soldiers came upon them, they thought they were defenders, and they shot and killed them. They were 9 years old and 12 years old.

47:10 Oh, my gosh.

47:12 Poor babies.

47:15 We talked about the Alamo Plaza a little bit earlier. Another ghost is seen here, but not from the battle. She's seen walking across the plaza, but legend says that in the 1700s, two women were struck by lightning while walking on the mission grounds. One of them died and one of them survived, and they think that this is the lady who died when she was struck by lightning.

47:39 Oh, dang, she was struck by lightning?

47:41 Yeah, I just said that. Dang.

47:45 I know you just said that. Dang.

47:48 So here's the last story. We're going to talk about a gentleman by the name of Moses Rose.

47:58 I like that name. Well. Oh, he's a bad guy, I guess.

48:02 No, he's the Alamoza-only coward. Oh. He refused to join the Defenders, and he chose to escape instead.

48:09 Well, I think he's pretty damn smart.

48:11 Well, looking back, just outside of town, on a road that leads from Nacogdoches to San Antonio... There's been dozens of reports of a man dressed in 19th century clothing carrying a rifle walking down the highway. When Carr stopped to talk to him, he just says, I'm trying to get back to the Alamo where I belong.

48:31 That really happens?

48:32 Well, that's what they said. They said he's riddled with guilt and this is like the only way maybe that he can regain his honor in the afterlife.

48:40 Bless his heart.

48:41 My question is, how many people are going to stop to see a guy in weird clothing carrying a rifle?

48:47 I don't know. That is kind of bizarre.

48:49 Yeah, I wouldn't know what he was saying because I'd be passing him right up.

48:53 Aw, you wouldn't give him a ride?

48:54 I don't know. So today, the Mission House and Long Barracks are surrounded by much taller and more modern buildings. These two buildings are small in comparison, but that fortress used to be five and a half acres back in its heyday when it was fully built. It once had several outbuildings and surrounded by thick walls. Over the years, the fortress walls were dismantled and new buildings were built around what was left of the Alamo many of these walls are now buried beneath the streets of San Antonio as we said earlier the restless spirits they're still there though well good so they've got no problem venturing into buildings that had nothing to do with the Alamo itself.

49:38 That's so cool Hey, that's still their pad, man.

49:42 So that's the story on the Alamo.

49:44 That's so interesting. I really want to go, like, really bad.

49:47 And one of the more unique stories to come about the Alamo is the fact that Ozzy Osbourne, back in 1982, he was staying, I guess, pretty close. And he'd been drinking, as rock stars are known to do on occasion. And Sharon decided to hide his clothes because she didn't want him going out. So he found her clothes, put on a dress. came out to Alamo Plaza and there's a monument that they put there that was to honor the people who had died there. And he was peeing on it and he got, uh, caught as you would think would happen. And the city of San Antonio was a little pissed off about it. But about 10 years later in 1992, he came back, apologized, said he'd grown up.

50:34 We've all done things that, uh, We regret in life, and he wanted to show that he had grown up, and he thanked them for having him back in the city. He was going to play back-to-back concerts there, and he donated $ 10, 000 to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, who are the ones who actually take care of the grounds of the Alamo. Yeah, and San Antonio is supposed to be a really cool city.

50:57 Yeah.

50:58 So the Riverwalk and everything's there. I know Kentucky won a national championship there in 1998.

51:02 Go Cats!

51:03 Hello!

51:06 Well, that was a very good story. And thank you, Tanya, for getting all that detail and stuff. That was amazing.

51:12 It was. That was really great. I definitely couldn't have done it any better myself. And it saved me enough time to be able to work on those little hillbilly shorts that we used for the Patreon episodes.

51:22 Yeah, that was really good.

51:24 Man. So what we're going to do real quick, we're going to jump into Tyler's interview. Tyler is awesome. Let me just say, first of all, he spent two tours in Iraq. Thank you for that. Yeah, thank you for your service. I thank him during the interview as well. This guy is one hell of a talented writer. When you listen to his show, I'm telling you, it's done like an audio book. Picture somebody just reading word for word what a book is. He's very descriptive. He's very Stephen King-esque. And I've even seen where somebody in USA Today compared him to Stephen King.

51:59 Oh, wow.

52:00 Yeah, it's top notch. This guy's in Louisville, so we've got to give him some love. He's right there from our hometown.

52:05 Yeah.

52:07 But give Tyler a listen and go listen to his show. You know I don't tell you to listen to anything that I don't listen to myself and that I don't think is worth your time. So listen to Tyler. I think you'll probably head over and listen to his show after you hear him. Hey, guys. This is something I probably should have done a long time ago, but to be honest with you, Sometimes you see names of podcasts and you're just not sure if it's something you would like or not. And sometimes those names are completely misleading, at least to me. And it may not be when you hear the reason behind the title. But I keep seeing on my Twitter feed, West Side Fairy Tales. And then I realized a while back that the gentleman that

52:47 hosts the show, Tyler Bell, actually lives in Louisville. So I'm thinking, hey, this guy lives in my neck of the woods. I got to listen to the show. And man, was I blown away. I had no idea, Tyler, that this show was going to be, well, one, the genre that it is. I didn't think that it was going to be, you know, a horror type genre. And then I also started looking at your press kit and I started seeing all these reviews from major places all over the country, like USA Today and stuff like that, comparing you to Stephen King. And I'm like, come on now.

53:23 Surely not. And then I listened to some episodes and I'm like, I could literally see a lot of these stories being a Stephen King short story in, you know, like I know you make reference in the last episode to night shift collections. And I'm one of these people that I don't like to read a long book. I don't have that kind of a spam, but short stories I can do. And Stephen King's night shift collection is by far the best short collection of short stories I've ever read in my life. And, You obviously have a big same opinion, I should say, as what I do on that. So that was a long way to go to introduce you. But Tyler, welcome to the show.

54:03 Hey, thanks a bunch for having me. Hello, everybody.

54:07 So tell me a little bit about West Side Fairy Tales and how you came up with the name.

54:13 Yeah, I get a little bit of flack for it. You're not wrong. People pick my podcast up and like, what's going on here? Um, I, I grew up in a very fairly German area, uh, in Cincinnati and, you know, I'm used to fairy tales. I grew up with some of the old school ones and they're horrifying, you know, morality tales. And sometimes they just don't even have a point.

54:35 They're just these dark things. And, uh, West Side is the part of Cincinnati that I grew up on. And it's kind of like, to me, a mixture of these kind of ethereal, dark tales, but also, you know, a sort of a blue collar vibe like I had when I when I grew up. Most of my characters are, you know, average nobodies like me, security guards, writing a story about guys that work in a moving van, prison guard.

55:07 just a random car salesman's kid, you know. And I feel like those kind of people aren't really represented in horror enough, except for as stooges. And so West Side Fairy Tales is kind of like my send-up for people that normally don't get to be in those. And it's a scary story collection. It's a little bit of a blue-collar vibe, I guess, in a rambling way.

55:29 Well, I know when you listen to your... There's a lot of podcasts out there that talk about horror and scary subjects and stuff like that. Yours is. It literally is like an audio book. It's, you know, it's like you're reading the book, but you wrote this book, uh, or the, in this case, the short stories. And I think you do a phenomenal job of, of not only the writing, but the, uh, um, documentation of it. So, I mean, I, I, I'm just fascinated by the, by the, your whole storytelling technique.

56:00 Uh, thanks. Um, I, I love telling them it's, Uh, I like reading my stories too. I read them out loud to my girlfriend and, um, her mom is probably my future mother-in-law and we're extremely close in our relationship. But, um, she's like, you have a really good voice and you should, you should read stuff like that sometimes.

56:23 Like, okay.

56:24 And so I kind of just jumped into it and I was like, you know, I'll just read my own stuff like an audio book and hopefully it'll catch on just because I enjoy it so much, which is kind of the exact opposite of my Stephen King is pretty much my biggest horror influence. I don't know if you've ever heard him read any of his stories, but he does not have the pipes for it.

56:45 No, I've heard him a couple of times and you're right. It's not his forte. Go ahead. I want to get back a little bit. Let's go back to the roots of, you know, a lot of people similar to yourself have dreams when they start off, especially early in school. And then way too many times teachers and people that are above them kind of without, I don't know if they should necessarily, but they unintentionally basically tell you, you can or can't do something. And that sets the tone when you're very early age and, You said that you basically had some people when you were younger and wanted to be a writer that kind of tried to force you to go the other way, correct?

57:32 Oh, yeah. Like in one of the most blatantly straightforward ways. The story I always tell that I get to bring up is my German teacher, actually, when I was in high school, Frau Martich, she took a notebook that I had been writing in. And it was actually my basically first time I'd ever tried to write anything on my own for myself. I kind of just had, you know, inspiration.

57:57 And it's a very common feeling to me now is like, I just got to put this down. So I spent $ 250. I bought a composition notebook and a pen in the school bookstore. And then I was just kind of sitting down in her class. I wasn't really paying attention. I was just doodling that. And she comes and snatches it right out of my hand, which is like– it's like she just stole my baby. She took your dog right off the leash. And I was like, what– She's like– she reads it. She's like, you can get this back after class. And I go and talk to her after class and she's like, actually, I've looked over this and this is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.

58:37 I'm not going to report this to the principal, but I will not see this in my classroom again. You need to focus on like– some shit that's gonna get you a job in the future and put this behind you because no one wants to see this and i i remember the scene uh it's a kid with a backpack full of drugs in his in his high school bathroom reading all the nasty shit that's written on the on on the dividers you know and the stall doors and one of them's like you know i can cuss on this right yeah yeah yeah and it just says you know, I fucked your mother on the thing. And he's kind of like thinking about it and he doesn't want to have to deal with the drugs. And that was like the scene that I got to. And she

59:16 couldn't take it. She took my book, she threw it away. And being the shit that I am, I tried to write it again and she found it in my stuff again the next day. She said, did you do it again? And, uh, she never wrote me up with it for it. And, you know, thinking back on it, I was always in trouble back then. Anyway, I wasn't, I wasn't a good student by any stretch of the imagination, but, uh, I kind of wish she would have written me up on that one. Cause I would love to see her defend that in front of the fucking front of the principal.

59:46 What did you do? I just smashed his dream. He wasn't learning how to say, you know, shit in German. So I just murdered him, shot him down on the spot.

59:58 So, Then you ended up, and thank you for this, but I know you spent some time over in Iraq.

1:00:05 Yeah. Well, I was a Marine, but yeah, I did three combat deployments to Iraq. Given my history in school, I didn't really think I could do anything like I wanted to, like writing. So I figured, why not join up with the military and make something of myself that way? And I did. honorable discharge. I ended up being a 0331 machine gunner, second battalion, eighth Marines, golf company for two deployments. And then to make a very long story short, I was getting out shy of when they were going to do their third deployment. So I got sent to the regimental unit, just eighth regiment. And I deployed for a third time with them.

1:00:43 Wow.

1:00:44 So how did that, how did the experience of spending time in a war zone affect your writing?

1:00:52 I mean, it's it's you can't even really just say what it affected. I mean, it's that's that's where I kind of like became a man, you know, before the guy that was Tyler Bell before I went to Iraq. Like, I understand him, that kid. But it's such a sea change in who you are and your personality and how you understand people. I'd say if I had to say one thing that it did for my writing that's individualistic just to the experience, it grounded it. I don't kind of go off my head. I know people. I understand people and what they're capable of. I don't lie about them to make them better or worse, because I've seen as bad as it gets, and I've seen as good as it gets out there, you know, on some dusty-ass

1:01:41 streets in Iraq, and I kind of know where I am and where I stand, and I understand the world, I think, in a very, not bleak sense, but direct and, you know, somber. That made it sound so sad.

1:01:57 It makes sense, though. I mean, I see where you're going with that. So let me ask you this. So you get back, then where does life take you as far as how do you end up back writing? Uh, not that you ever stopped, but how do you decide this is what you really want to do? And I'm going to take some steps to make it happen.

1:02:14 Um, it actually took me a fairly long while to get to, to get back to writing. It was a very roundabout path. Uh, so to say when I got out of the Marines, I was fucked up. It's the only way to describe it. Um, I have PTSD. I'm diagnosed with it. It's not like a big sad thing. It just comes with the nature of what happened and what I lived through in Iraq. But I didn't really expect to survive. We went to Aramadi. We were in the outskirts of Fallujah on my first deployment. Some real shit went down, like not even bragging wise. I'm lucky to be alive, and I can't say that about a lot of other people, but... After I got out, I was kind of lost and I was drinking a lot.

1:03:03 I went to college basically because I didn't have anything else to do. And, you know, they gave you a little bit of money and stuff. And I was like, well, you know, whatever. You just keep walking. It's kind of a mentality that you get when you're in the Marines. It was a phrase a friend of mine used to say all the time, like, dude, just keep walking. You know, we could be in these horrible situations. You just got to put another foot in front of you and just get out of it. And all of college was kind of a drunken, idiotic blur. A lot of misfit youth type things happened, but eventually I kind of found journalism and I was like, Oh, I can, I can write.

1:03:42 Like I remember when I had that dream before I was this jaded 24 year old, you know, misfit. I've worked, I was a bouncer in bars and stuff, cracking heads, things like that in between classes. And, uh, you know, that kind of, reinvigorated me and just being able to sit down and write and have people read what I wrote and kind of get back to me on it like dude it's like that first breath of air someone pushes into your lungs and they find you drowning off the coast I was like awake again and I almost instantaneously cut a lot of really really bad dangerous activities out of my life and got myself back on track and And, you know, journalism kind of went for a while and that was all over the country. I lived

1:04:28 in North Dakota, Virginia, West Virginia, where I met my girlfriend. And it was there that she, I, I, I'd been writing a thing, you know, kind of an offhand. I always had that hanging over my head, you know, frown martyrs just being like, do, do something worthwhile with your time. So it was, it was a hobby instead of something I thought I was good at and that I could really do. And she read it and she's like, you need to do this. Like, I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, this is like some of the best things I've ever read. And this is like a first draft. You should just be doing this. Like, you're not that happy doing journalism. Why don't you focus on that? And, you know, kind of two years of

1:05:06 getting into it and, you know, working over stuff with her, trying to sell novels. I eventually started the West Side of Fairy Tales. And the reactions I've been getting from fans, it's like, you know, I'm almost like tearing up sometimes. I'm like, dude, people get, they get me. I'll put my stories out there and they understand. Like, I'm legit.

1:05:29 So I feel like a real person for the first time since I was like, I don't know, 18.

1:05:34 Well, I mean, like you said, I definitely can understand where the accolades are coming from because it really is remarkable. When I read somebody like a Stephen King, what draws me to them and sets them apart is the descriptive nature that they tell the story. You really can't. get that picture painted so well with somebody like Stephen King that you forget you're even reading a book and you think you're looking out your window or something. And you do have that same type of ability. That's one of the things that when I'm listening to one of your episodes, it's amazing how much detail you go into to set that, I guess, that environment that people are listening to. And it definitely... goes without saying that you do a remarkable

1:06:23 job of putting somebody into the story.

1:06:26 Thank you. Go ahead.

1:06:28 I was going to say, normally we have somebody, you know, when they come on the show, it's pretty close to what their show is, but it's hard for you to do that because yours is scripted. What I wanted to do, though, is if you could just touch on a couple of subjects that you talk about in some of your podcasts and maybe just a brief little synopsis of one or two episodes just to kind of give people an idea of what they were in for if they tune into your show.

1:06:55 Okay. Well, our motto is a horror story for everyone. So I'll talk about two of the best received episodes that we had this season. The most recent is episode 209, Last Chance Gas, which is It's really like a very traditional type of horror story. It's one of my favorite kinds. It's one of my favorites to write because it's so much fun. But you've seen it a million times. It's like just one of those tropes where it's people trapped in a gas station somewhere in the desert or trapped in a, you know, some sort of station or a lone area. When I was growing up, some of my favorite movies were Tremors and even Maximum Overdrive, which is the movie version of that short story from Stephen King, which I didn't even realize it was the same thing

1:07:45 that I'd seen when I was a much younger kid. Because that movie's, I think, two or three years older than me. But it's fun and it's cool. I like seeing people trapped inside. in an area and then them trying to, to smart their way out of it. And, you know, there, there's this alien thing and they've got to figure it out. They got to figure out its weaknesses and then they got to try to get away from it for all of their supplies run out. And it's just a, such a traditional type of horror story.

1:08:10 And it's so American that I, I love it to death. Gas stations, the desert, you know, cars out on the highway.

1:08:17 It's funny when I was listening to it, you're right. Cause it reminded me of maximum overdrive was one that initially hit. And then The Mist was another one that was kind of a similar type setting when you had everybody trapped in a grocery store or something like that. But yeah, it definitely comes across as, like you said, classic American horror.

1:08:38 Yeah, that's kind of what I try to go for. I think there is an American horror genre. Aesthetic and no one's really kind of quite nailed it down. It's that Stephen King feel Even though he's not one of my favorites Dean Koontz gets a little into it all kind of comes from a dude I can't remember his name now, but he's the guy that wrote in completely escaped my mind. It's that old horror movie, Grubb, Davis Grubb, Night of the Hunter. Um, that, that kind of, kind of, you know, characters and, and like people and cars. I just, I love it. Kids on bikes, American horror.

1:09:16 So, well, you, so that was one of the stories. What was one of your other ones that was well-received?

1:09:20 Um, yeah, it's, uh, they all come by episode 202. Um, and that's also, uh, you know, a fairly kind of traditional way. It's not really traditional. Um, but it's, it's got a feel to it that I really like. And, uh, when I sat down to write it, I kind of wanted to write. What could become a Twilight Zone script for the old, you know, 1960s era Robert Serling Twilight Zone.

1:09:44 And it's a story about a guy who's trapped in a bar, but he doesn't he's not really trapped in there. He's he's kind of stuck. And he talks to people and other people kind of come by and you get the feeling that this bar isn't really a bar. It's something a little bit darker. The bartender has a strange way of talking. He's got ugly, thick black nails. And it's a story about a dude kind of trying to understand himself and people around him and one of his shortcomings and maybe not really understanding it or maybe not really wanting to change it. And that's kind of where the story goes without spoiling it.

1:10:20 So aside from your stories being fantastic, you also have a badass logo.

1:10:24 Thank you. That's new. Actually, one of my one of my very good friends from high school who we kind of fell in and out of contact with became a watercolor artist in the industry. She's always a kind of person that would doodle. Her name is Yui Breedlove. She's based out of Nashville. And, um, she's just a monster talent.

1:10:45 Like I love everything she does. Um, it kind of just came to her. Um, I, I bought a painting from her because we'd hung out again in Nashville and I was like, Hey, do you think you might want to draw something for my podcast sometime? And she sat down and she listened to like, uh, I think it was water out adult, which is two or three and two or four this season. And she just started drawing stuff and sent it to me. And she's like, something like this. And I was like, dude, will you just do episode art for me every month? This is unbelievable.

1:11:19 And we built up an artistic relationship in addition to the one that we already have. And I eventually asked her to do a logo. And we kind of spitballed stuff. And what she delivered is six times better than what I had imagined before. And I was just like, I want a skull with like a flower. She's like, how about this? I was like, oh my God, that's intense.

1:11:42 We got the book and the lettering. And hopefully that kind of curbs the people not understanding what the West Side Fairy Tales is all about. My old logo is not great. The logo that was before that was terrible. I'm not an artist in that sense. I can write my ass off, but I can't draw for shit.

1:12:03 Yeah, this is, it's a, it's a badass logo without a doubt. I looked at it and I blew it up and I'm like, yeah, that's awesome.

1:12:09 I'm so happy with it.

1:12:10 So how can people not only listen to your podcast, but I noticed like on my podcast app, I've only got, you know, eight or 10 episodes up there, maybe a few more than that, but I definitely don't have all the backlog. Is there a way to be able to listen to the backlog as well? And how can most people find out more about you, Tyler?

1:12:28 Oh, well, everything is available at WestsideFairyTales.com. Just spell it just like it sounds, Westside Fairy Tales. And we have listen links to everything. The whole backlog is free. It shouldn't be too hard to find. I think it's on iTunes and most other places. Uh, I'm a little bit smaller and I host off Squarespace. So occasionally there's errors, but, uh, everything is on, on Squarespace. And, um, if you, I do send me an email at, uh, west side fairy tales at gmail.com. And I will, I will get an episode to you. I'm not too proud to work, work some of my fans through, uh, you know, their internet based issues. We have some older listeners who have actually asked me for help. I have guided them through the

1:13:12 process to get to, uh, other episodes.

1:13:15 Well, that's awesome, man. I appreciate you coming on the show. It was very short notice. I sent you a message very early today and said, hey, can you come on? Mainly because that's when I was listening to one of the episodes and I thought, man, I need to get this guy on the show. Awesome.

1:13:29 Well, hey, thanks again for having me. I'm really, really happy about the opportunity. I'm glad that you enjoyed the podcast.

1:13:36 The show is West Side Stories. I'm just kidding. It's West Side Fairy Tales. It's awesome. If you like good old-fashioned horror read out exactly as if you're reading the book. This is definitely the podcast you need to listen to, not to mention the fact that you have my gratitude for being a vet. Thank you so much for what you've done for the country, and thank you what you're doing for entertainment.

1:14:03 Hey, you're welcome. Thank you so much for your support.

1:14:06 All right. Well, thank you, Tyler. We'll talk to you soon, brother.

1:14:08 All right. Talk to you soon. Thanks so much.

1:14:11 Well, that was Tyler. The show is West Side Fairy Tales. Give it a listen. See what you think. And send him some love on Twitter. He's on Twitter. I like it.

1:14:21 Send him some love on Twitter.

1:14:23 I'm trying to get Tracy to get on Twitter.

1:14:25 I was on Twitter years ago. I don't even remember my name or anything.

1:14:28 So then you really weren't on Twitter then. You just had a screen name.

1:14:31 Oh.

1:14:31 Anyways, guys, we love you. Thank you so much. We want to end tonight's show, though. We're going to give you four of the many episodes we did. If you're a $ 15 subscriber, you get six of these. If you're a $ 10, you get five. $ 5 subscriber, you get four. $ 3, you get three. I don't know. Dollar. I don't know. Anyways, you get a whole bunch of these damn things.

1:14:53 Yeah.

1:14:54 So.

1:14:56 We love you. We want you to have a great week.

1:14:59 So the first one is our very first one we did. And I'm just going to tell you it was more funny than anything. We had a lot of fun with this. But then the next three are more serious ones that we did. So thank you guys so much.

1:15:21 You are listening to Hillbilly Shorts. Thank you so much for your patronage.

1:15:30 Hey guys, we are back for our very first mini episode, which we are calling the Hillbilly Shorts episode. Which has nothing to do with Tracy's height.

1:15:39 Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

1:15:41 And of course, I'm Jerry.

1:15:42 And you're short too.

1:15:43 So.

1:15:44 And this is Tracy.

1:15:45 So in your face.

1:15:47 And we're going to start these things off. We promised you guys a bunch of a little smaller episodes. These are basically going to be stories that are too short to use on a regular episode. And they're going to range from seven, eight, nine minutes long, mostly. And some of these will be even less than that. And we'll do two or three stories in the little span that we've got.

1:16:07 So.

1:16:07 But they're still cool stories and they're worth telling. They're just not enough to put on a regular show.

1:16:11 So these are the stories of the Misfits.

1:16:14 Yes. The Island of Misfits stories. All right. Okay. We mentioned on the 100th episode when we did Bridgewater that there were so many stories that it would take three or four days to tell them. And I thought there would be no better way to start this thing off than to tell some of the stories that we left out of the main episode.

1:16:34 All right.

1:16:35 The very first one we're going to get into is basically an eyewitness account. We're going to do, over the course of this week, we're going to put out six episodes, and probably three of them are going to be eyewitness accounts from Bridgewater. Well, technically, I didn't witness them, so they will not be eyewitness accounts. They'll be they-witnessed accounts.

1:16:57 You better get it straight.

1:16:58 All right, so this first one involves a sighting that is different than any of the ones we talked about on the regular show. This person grew up on West Monposit Lake on the Hanson-Halifax line, which is technically just outside of Bridgewater. In 1986, when they were approximately 10 years old, they woke up one morning, looked out the window, and saw two barrel-sized humps in the lake about 40 to 50 feet from the shoreline. They were brown and shiny.

1:17:32 What?

1:17:32 What? Brown and shiny humps in the river.

1:17:38 Yep, they were brown and shiny humps in the pond.

1:17:40 Oh, I thought you said lake.

1:17:42 It was a lake. Well, you said river. Ain't you hump was about four feet from sticking.

1:17:48 Are you ready? Why are you snorting?

1:18:04 People are going to think we're unprofessional. This is what it sounds like when we don't cut stuff out.

1:18:10 Okay. Surely you're not going to leave that in there.

1:18:13 I am leaving it in.

1:18:13 Oh, Jesus.

1:18:13 And don't call me Shirley. Come on.

1:18:22 You've been waiting to say that, haven't you? I have.

1:18:24 All right. So anyway, these things, these homes were brown and shiny and each hump was about four feet and they were four feet across and they were sticking. Oh, okay. Two feet out of the water. At first, it looked like some type of an inanimate object. But, he soon realized that it wouldn't. He had thought that it was like two large rubber sacks just floating there.

1:18:49 What's a rubber sack?

1:18:51 I don't know. It's a sack made of rubber. I don't know. So anyways, he said eventually they started moving. And then it all submerged under the water in one motion. Oh, dude. Which led him to believe that it was one creature and not two different animals. Yeah. Yeah. He said he'd seen large snapping turtles, muskrats, and beaver on the lake, and it definitely wasn't any of those things. He said it was also not a log or floating debris. They weren't sure exactly what it was, but it was definitely a living animal. And he said he's not sure if there have ever been any kind of lake monster sightings in the area, but that's definitely what he thinks he saw that day.

1:19:35 Yeah.

1:19:38 That's it.

1:19:39 Oh.

1:19:39 I mean, you know, what do you want? Came out and attacked a dog or something? I mean, that was all it was.

1:19:45 It's just like minding its own business, chilling, right?

1:19:48 But anyway, that was something he was convinced was true.

1:19:51 Yeah. Oh, I mean, I guess it would have to be.

1:19:53 And just like I said, when you look at all the other stories we told, we didn't cover any kind of sea creatures or anything.

1:19:58 I wonder why it was shiny. Like maybe it had a hard shell.

1:20:02 No, no, no.

1:20:02 I mean, maybe it like, well, duh. But I mean, maybe like it had a hard shell or something.

1:20:08 I don't know.

1:20:08 You think?

1:20:08 I have no idea.

1:20:10 Oh.

1:20:11 So let's move on to the next story.

1:20:12 You said it was lit.

1:20:14 Well, it was. It was in a damn lake. So this is from Tim, and this was from July of 2008. He said he and some friends went to a building that was across from the dog track in Reynon. We mentioned the dog track. He said it was about 8 p.m., and it was just starting to get dark. They went towards the woods to park their dirt bikes. Now, they noticed at this point in time there were some trailers there that weren't there like a month earlier.

1:20:44 Yeah.

1:20:44 When they came. They noticed a horrible smell coming from one of the trailers. Oh, no. It was kind of open already so they could see into it. He said there was a tarp laying down and there was three or four deer, or at least that's what they think that it was, that were all ripped open. Guts were hanging all over the place.

1:21:03 Oh, dude. That's terrible.

1:21:05 There was evidence that somebody was there because there was some footprints and some unopened cans of soda. The building was also more closed up than it had been before. They heard some noise coming from the building that sounded like, it was like a tower part of the building, but it sounded like metal or something being thrown around inside.

1:21:26 Tim had been in that building before, just kind of walking around, but he said that there was no electricity and it was dark. So he didn't go to any of the back rooms because he didn't have a light at the time when he was in there. He said he'd also seen dead animals like that before in that area. He saw them out by the power lines. You're going to hear a lot of these stories that we talk about involve the power lines. I guess that's in some of this area that's like where their little point of distinction is for everything. I hear the power lines mentioned in a lot of these stories.

1:21:57 Oh, that's interesting.

1:21:58 But he said he had seen animals in the power line. And they were at least stacked six high and ripped apart.

1:22:05 Oh, my gosh.

1:22:07 He said there was even some hanging from the trees. And another odd thing that he saw there were black SUVs. He said he'd seen it on more than one occasion. There was usually two of them. And they would go back to the rear by the trails. And then a couple of guys would get out. They'd go walking in the woods and then come back about an hour later and just leave. He just said that seemed extremely strange to him.

1:22:31 Yeah, what a bunch of sickos.

1:22:34 So, anyways. That's our first little story from the Bridgewater.

1:22:39 I don't ever want to go there.

1:22:41 I think it'd be fun to go there. Why? I just do. And then on the Facebook page where we posted the pictures, somebody had made a comment today that their husband is from there.

1:22:53 Oh, wow.

1:22:54 And she told the town, but I don't remember which town it was.

1:22:56 Yeah.

1:22:56 Oh, gosh.

1:22:57 That's... There's just too much shady crap going on around there.

1:23:01 So anyways, guys, that was our first little hillbilly short. If you like this and you are a three or a five or $ 10 subscriber, you're going to get several of these a week. So thank you so much for your patronage. And this is our way of trying to pay you back. And we'll see you next time.

1:23:28 You're listening to Hillbilly Shorts. Thank you so much for your patronage.

1:23:38 Hey guys, Jerry and Tracy back for a Hillbilly Shorts number four.

1:23:41 Hi, I'm good. How you doing?

1:23:45 Oh, I love you.

1:23:46 I love you.

1:23:47 Well, are you ready? We've done a bunch of Bridgewater stories thus far. And I figure everybody's probably getting sick of those by now. I know I am.

1:23:55 So.

1:23:56 I thought, what's something we really haven't done much on the show? And a haunted theater is one of those things. Because we did the Birdcage Theater out in Tombstone. And the other one we did on Patreon, we did the Cincinnati Music Theater. Oh, yeah. That was a good one. And then you had the one in Manila that was the theater that they built. All the people got buried in the concrete.

1:24:22 Oh, that was horrible. Yeah.

1:24:23 So we really haven't done a whole lot of theater stuff. So I dug us up a good one. And it's fairly close to home. It's in the south. This is the Orpheum Theater. And the Orpheum Theater is a 2,300 seat venue in downtown Memphis, Tennessee.

1:24:38 Dang, that's huge.

1:24:39 Yeah. Well, it's not really huge. It's about the same as the Palace Theater.

1:24:45 Oh.

1:24:46 Yeah. But I mean, for what they're using it for, it's pretty good sized. All right, so here's the deal. This thing is at the corner of Beale Street and South Main, and everybody's heard of Beale Street in Memphis because that's where you're walking in Memphis, like the song says, down Beale Street. It opened in 1928 and has beautiful artistic millwork, a beautiful, mighty Wurlitzer organ. You know what that is, right? Those steam pipe organs?

1:25:16 Mm-hmm.

1:25:18 This thing was saved by the Memphis Development Foundation in 1977 because they were trying to turn it into a shopping center.

1:25:25 Oh.

1:25:25 Tear it down and turn it into a shopping center.

1:25:26 Well, I'm glad they didn't.

1:25:28 The Orpheum is one of the first buildings in Memphis to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Very cool. So that kind of helped it. In the last 35 years, it has undergone about $ 15 million worth of renovations. So now it's a really cool place.

1:25:43 Oh, yeah.

1:25:45 This theater has a very famous ghost. as a permanent resident there. Her name is Mary. She's a 12-year-old little girl. Nobody knows exactly how Mary died. Most people say that she died from an accident on Beale Street in 1921. Others say that she died on a fire that struck the theater in 1923. Now, if you're paying attention, those dates really don't add up. You're probably thinking, Well, wait a minute. You said that it opened in 1928, but now you're talking about a fire in 1923. That's because the version that's now opened there opened in 1928. Before that, there was the Grand Opera House that was built in 1890 in that exact same spot. It was very successful when it joined the vaudeville Orpheum circuit in 1907, which

1:26:39 is where it got its name now. It was a huge hit. There were tons of people that came to this thing over the years, but in 1923, a fire completely destroyed the building. The people around the area couldn't do without their fantastic little theater, so they rebuilt, and the Orpheum that they built now is twice as big as the original building, but a bunch more bells and whistles.

1:27:04 So let's get back to Mary. Whatever the cause of her death was, Mary has found herself as an eternal patron of at this theater and has haunted it for way more than 90 years.

1:27:20 She must love that place.

1:27:21 And she's a friendly ghost.

1:27:23 Good.

1:27:23 Like Casper. She sometimes enjoys playing little games, like she plays the pipe organ when nobody's around. She also likes to be a kid, you know, and run up and down the aisles. She likes to appear to nonbelievers in the form of disembodied voices and footsteps, and mysteriously open doors. She loves to laugh and sing. So a lot of times when people will hear her running up and down the footsteps of running up and down the aisles, they'll also hear a little girl singing and laughing.

1:27:59 Aw, I love her already.

1:28:02 She's got a favorite seat in the place. She's often seen sitting at seat C5, that's up in the mezzanine level.

1:28:08 Mm-hmm.

1:28:10 She's described as a dark-haired girl in an old-fashioned dress with dark eyes.

1:28:14 Aw.

1:28:17 She likes to mess with the maintenance crew at night. In fact, sometimes she's pretty helpful. They said that one night the pipe organ had completely broken down. There's an organ restoration specialist by the name of Harlan Judkins. He was at his wit's end. He had tried everything. Everything. He's an expert on this thing, and he couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. it he got so frustrated that he decided he was going to take a break go grab some coffee when he got back the organ was mysteriously fixed and had no issues at all nobody had messed with it nobody had been there and he's only gone for like 30 minutes oh This is a cool story. In 1977, there was a New York company that arrived down to Orpheon to perform Fiddler on

1:29:06 the Roof, the famous musical. After opening night, they had so many different things that happened while they were there. And then they heard about The Legend of Mary.

1:29:17 Ninja.

1:29:19 Doing a show. They heard about The Legend of Mary. And they decided that they wanted to have, conduct a seance with in the balcony that overlooked the stage. So that's what they did.

1:29:32 That's cool.

1:29:34 But the best story that I heard on this place was from Teresa Spoon. She came to the theater to see her friend, Vincent Astor, play the organ in 1979. When he started playing the song, was it Never Never Land from Peter Pan?

1:29:53 Yeah.

1:29:55 The theater turned bitterly cold, they said.

1:29:58 All over.

1:29:58 Just almost instantly. They said a faint light darted into the theater from the lobby area and it vanished behind the last row of the seats. That's when they witnessed the ghost of a little girl dancing by the lobby.

1:30:17 Mary? It was Mary? Mm-hmm. Aww.

1:30:20 Spoon said she felt drawn to the little girl like something was calling her but she said that she didn't go Because she felt like that if she did go over to see the little girl, that when she came back, she probably wouldn't be the same.

1:30:33 No way.

1:30:34 So that's the story of Mary.

1:30:37 I love that little girl. That's so nice.

1:30:42 So I like little ghost stories like that. It's like there's nothing bad about it. It's just playful stuff that happens.

1:30:50 Right.

1:30:50 And you don't feel threatened. It's like if all ghosts were like that, people wouldn't mind being haunted. No, no doubt.

1:30:55 I would. Wouldn't mind being haunted, especially by that little thing. So. She's sweet.

1:31:01 Anyway, guys, thank you so much. That was episode four. We hope you are enjoying these things as we go.

1:31:06 Love you guys.

1:31:17 You are listening to Company Shorts. Thank you so much for your patronage.

1:31:26 Hey guys, Jerry and Tracy, and we are back for the Hillbilly Short number five, and we're going to do this one on the Tutwiler Hotel. Have you ever heard of the Tutwiler Hotel?

1:31:36 I have not.

1:31:37 Okay. Are you shocked? No, no, I've kind of, that went without saying.

1:31:41 Okay. Hey guys, how are ya?

1:31:44 Well, the Tutwiler Hotel is in Birmingham, Alabama, and it's funny how I came upon this. Originally, we were talking about going to New Orleans for Potter and Love. And unfortunately, the convention was canceled, but we decided to still go on a trip, and we were going to make it like a little tour of nothing but haunted places as we made our way to New Orleans. Originally, we wanted to drive a little past Nashville and stay at Loretta Lynn's Haunted Plantation, which we did the story on last Halloween. Well, that was booked up. Apparently, there's a dirt bike convention of some sort. It's motocross, but That just.

1:32:22 Seems like a weird place to have that.

1:32:24 For some reason. I know. We tried to have our live show there for the Nashville live show in October. It was booked up because of the motocross convention.

1:32:32 Yeah.

1:32:32 And then I tried to just book a regular night there in August, and it's booked up because of a motocross convention. So it's just not meant to be.

1:32:40 I guess it's not meant to be.

1:32:41 So I started routing around. I was like, well, where else can we find to possibly go through? And we're going to go through Huntsville. Huntsville. Because that's where Dead Children's Playground is.

1:32:53 Excited about that.

1:32:54 And we'll go look at that for a few minutes, but then we're going to make our way to Birmingham because that's where Sloss Furnaces is. Do you remember?

1:33:02 Sloss Furniture? We can get some furniture while we're up in there.

1:33:08 So we're going to have to, and it's going to be kind of tricky because I want to get up early the next morning and start heading straight out to New Orleans because it's still like a six hour drive from there.

1:33:19 Okay.

1:33:20 But in order for us to get to see Dead Children's Playground and get before they close the Sauce Museum that day, we're going to have to be there by like four o'clock.

1:33:30 Oh.

1:33:31 And they're an hour behind us so that'll help us a little. Oh, okay.

1:33:33 I was going to say, I wonder what the time difference was.

1:33:35 But yeah, we're not going to have a whole lot of time. But all this came about because this story anyway, because I thought, well, if we're going to stay in Birmingham, maybe there's a haunted hotel in Birmingham we can stay at. So I started looking up haunted hotels in Birmingham, like, Lord knows nobody else would, but that's what we do.

1:33:53 And I looked it up, and the number one haunted, there were three actually, but the number one haunted hotel was the Tutwiler Hotel.

1:33:58 Oh.

1:34:00 So, oh, and we're not staying there, by the way, because it was.

1:34:03 Because it's booked up?

1:34:04 No, it was, they had rooms, but it was a little more expensive than I wanted to pay. And it really was not expensive. It was like $ 135 a night, but I found a hotel for $ 75. So that's what we did.

1:34:14 What's it like?

1:34:15 Unhaunted.

1:34:16 Oh. You're so romantical.

1:34:19 It's a nice hotel, but it's just, I didn't want to pay an extra 75 bucks just to stay in a hotel that's haunted and let's not see nothing. Then I'm like, because we're just spending the night there. We're not doing anything in Birmingham. Okay. Anyways.

1:34:31 This other one don't have bugs though, right?

1:34:33 As far as I know.

1:34:34 Okay.

1:34:35 As long as they don't.

1:34:35 But what's the matter? I mean, either one could have something crawling on you in the middle of the night.

1:34:38 Hmm.

1:34:40 So the Tutwad Hotel in Birmingham is a beautiful hotel. It was built in 1914 by Robert Osborne. and he had some major investment from Major Tutwiler. You see what I did there? Yeah, I did.

1:34:55 So he was a Major Tutwiler?

1:34:56 Yeah, Major Tutwiler. It was built in an effort to get the, get this, the American Iron and Steel Institute to have their convention in Birmingham. So they built this fantastic, beautiful, majestic hotel there. In order to get the American Iron and Steel Institute to have a convention there.

1:35:18 Well, what about an iron and board?

1:35:21 Well, you got to remember that, remember this was when we did the sloth story. Sloss. Now you got me saying sloth. When we did the sloth story, they had nicknamed Birmingham Magic City because of all the iron work and all that stuff going on there.

1:35:38 Gotcha.

1:35:39 So I guess that was a big deal to have it come to Birmingham. Back then, this was one of the nicest and best hotels in the country. The original hotel had 343 guest rooms and a grand ballroom that would hold up to 1,200 people.

1:35:54 That's pretty big.

1:35:55 It was, especially back in 1914. Now, this made the hotel the center for any kind of business meetings or conventions. It was perfect for the area. In 1974, the hotel was imploded to make way for the first Alabama bank And for the next 12 years, there was no hotel of any sort by the name of the Tutwiler Hotel.

1:36:22 Well, that wasn't the only hotel there, right?

1:36:25 No. Yes and no. In 1985, the city of Birmingham, they were awarded some kind of Urban Development Act grant. And with some of that money and some financing, they rebuilt the Tutwiler. Now, where the hotel is now used to be originally apartments. And they've turned it into a hotel. So we went through a complete renovation from 2005 to 2007.

1:36:48 But it's still got the original marble floors and the exterior and the vaulted ceilings.

1:36:54 Well, that's neat.

1:36:54 Yeah.

1:36:56 So what about the ghosts? Guests and staff have plenty of stories to tell. There was a bartender who used to work there. And this was back in 1995. He had several experiences, to say the least. The boss that he worked for got pretty pissed at him because... He left the lights on for an entire week. Oh, dude.

1:37:18 Because he was scared?

1:37:19 Not really. His first job at closing time was to turn off the lights in the bar area and the kitchen area. Well, he would turn them off, but they would turn back on by themselves. So after turning the lights off four times, he just left for the evening. I don't blame him.

1:37:37 I do the same thing.

1:37:38 The next day, the manager asked, why did you leave the lights on? So he tried to explain, but of course the manager wasn't going to believe any of that. This happened for five straight nights. On the sixth night, the boss called the bartender and told him to come back to work immediately. When he got to work, what they found was a complete multi-course meal, lit candles, and a bottle of wine setting out.

1:38:05 Gosh.

1:38:07 Many people think that it was the ghost of Major Tutwiler who the hotel is named after. In order to stop the major from making a mess ever again, the bartender would then call out to him before leaving, telling him good evening and please not to make a mess. They haven't had that experience again. Oh, wow.

1:38:27 Oh, that's cool.

1:38:28 And it's important to mention... that, like I said, that used to be the Ridgely Apartments there.

1:38:32 Yeah.

1:38:33 And Major Tutwiler lived in the Ridgely Apartments.

1:38:35 Oh, he did?

1:38:35 Yeah.

1:38:37 Now, there's another ghost there. A lot of people report knocking on the doors in the middle of the night. Several guests report loud, rapid knocks on their room. Okay.

1:38:48 Your lucky ninja didn't bark at that moment.

1:38:50 So what if he did?

1:38:51 Oh.

1:38:52 It would make it authentic. They would quickly jump out of bed, run to the door, and not see anybody standing there or in either direction of the hallway. The ghost is known as, get this, the knocker. Well.

1:39:07 What else?

1:39:08 It's believed that it's a male ghost because it only knocks on women's doors. I thought that was funny because a knocker likes knockers. The sixth floor seems to be the most active because they get the most reports from the knocker than any other floors. And that's our little story on the Hotel Tutwiler.

1:39:29 Oh.

1:39:29 Which we might go there anyway.

1:39:30 I would love to go there to see what it looks like.

1:39:32 Yeah, I mean, we're going to be there. We're not going to have anything else to do.

1:39:35 Maybe they'll let us, like, lay in the bed for, like, 20 minutes. Can we just go lay in the bed for 20 minutes and see what happens?

1:39:43 I'm sure they'll say no.

1:39:45 Oh, rude.

1:39:46 But anyway, this place is awesome. I saw pictures, and I mean, it's like as soon as you walk in, it's like, honestly, as much as I was complaining about the price of the rooms.

1:39:54 It's probably worth it.

1:39:54 For what the hotel looks like, that's a very fair-priced room.

1:39:58 So then you're just saying you're cheap.

1:40:00 That's exactly what I'm saying. I thought I made that abundantly clear.

1:40:03 Yeah, that's how we roll, folks.

1:40:05 Anyways, we will see you tomorrow with another Hillbilly Short.

1:40:10 Later.

1:40:20 You are listening to Hillbilly Shorts. Thank you so much for your patronage.

1:40:29 Hey guys, welcome to Hillbilly Shorts number six. Jerry and Tracy and we got a kind of a spooky story today. What are you doing?

1:40:42 Episode seis.

1:40:44 Is that right? You literally had to count out loud to know what.

1:40:47 Six was in Spanish. Well, I can't help it. I tried. Was I good?

1:40:54 I guess. Okay. We've got kind of a. It's kind of a gory story.

1:41:00 Oh, no.

1:41:01 Okay. What are you going to be rhyming for?

1:41:02 That's just the name of it.

1:41:03 Oh.

1:41:04 It's the story of the Gore Orphanage.

1:41:08 Well, who in the hell would name an orphanage Gore?

1:41:11 Al Gore, if he had an orphanage.

1:41:12 That's terrible. That's terrible.

1:41:14 Have you ever heard of the Gore Orphanage? Let me save you some time. No, you haven't. We both know where we was going with that one. But if you ask Northern Ohioans, if that's even a word.

1:41:25 That's Buckeyes.

1:41:27 I don't think you, they don't, no.

1:41:29 Ohio people are called Buckeyes. I promise you.

1:41:32 I understand that, but I'm not calling them Buckeyes. If you ask Northern Buckeyes, it's not even, don't even sound right. If you ask Northern Ohioans. What their favorite local legends were, they would almost surely mention the Gore Orphanage in their list. It's in Vermillion, Ohio. Wait a minute. It's in Vermillion, Ohio.

1:41:57 Oh, that's good, babe. Didn't put your finger to your face, though. I guess they can't see it, so it don't matter.

1:42:04 Yeah, it's irrelevant. They wouldn't have known had you not told them. Yeah. This is well talked about. It's a popular haunted destination, and even though the events... happened like well over 200 years ago, the Gore Orphanage is still very well known in the minds of people up in that part of Ohio.

1:42:25 Wow.

1:42:26 The site's deserted now and only bits and pieces of the foundation remain. So the orphanage was in operation sometime in the 1800s. A mysterious fire started that quickly engulfed the whole building and.

1:42:40 Oh, please don't tell me. What? A bunch of little kids passed away.

1:42:45 Oh, I wasn't going to tell you that yet. So there are several different versions of what happened to cause this fire. Let's run down some of these scenarios. Some say old man Gore, who owned the place, which is how it got its name, started the fire. And it was because, it's two different reasons here. He wanted to get insurance money or he hated children. That's the story.

1:43:15 Then number two, number two, sorry.

1:43:20 Dose.

1:43:24 Some say it was this disgruntled male employee and, um, he was never named, but apparently had a beef with the owner, Mr. Gore, who in this version loves children, just to show you how these stories go around. And, uh, He burned the place down for revenge, basically.

1:43:47 Yeah.

1:43:48 Now you got another story that says it was an unknown crazy man. And the article I read said he also wasn't named. Well, thus the unnamed.

1:43:59 Yeah.

1:44:00 Thus the unknown crazy man. It's hard to name unknown people. But they said that he supposedly lived in the woods right there that surrounded the orphanage. And he hated the noise that the kids made. So he burned the place down. And last but not least, it was just an accident. The most common story has it that Miss O'Leary's cow knocked over a lantern. I'm just kidding. That was the Great Chicago Fire.

1:44:25 Oh, dude, I was going to say, you have got to be kidding me.

1:44:27 Well, that's what they said started the Great Chicago Fire.

1:44:29 A cow? Mrs.

1:44:30 O'Leary's cow knocked over a lantern. That's what started the Great Chicago Fire.

1:44:34 Oh, my gosh.

1:44:35 But in this story.

1:44:37 That's just too dumb to be true.

1:44:38 It was an orphan who accidentally knocked over a lantern. It was either in the orphanage or nearby in the barn that spread quickly to the orphanage.

1:44:45 Oh my gosh.

1:44:46 Regardless of how it happened, the results were catastrophic. All the orphans died.

1:44:52 In the blaze.

1:44:53 Oh no. How many was in there, I wonder?

1:44:55 I don't know. Well, I think it says a little bit later. Authorities took away Mr. Gore's license and refused to allow him to replace this orphanage with another one that they were going to rebuild on the site. The nearby townspeople, they just wanted to forget the whole thing that happened, as you could imagine, and so they decided to come down and tear down the rest of the remains and then let nature just kind of reclaim the land.

1:45:23 Out of sight, out of mind was the thought process.

1:45:27 I don't know how that could be out of your mind ever. That's just horrible.

1:45:32 A tragic event like that doesn't fade away that quickly, as they found out. and the fire somehow left a stain on the area. Locals began telling stories that if you went out there at nighttime, that you would see ghostly shapes of dead orphans running and playing in the woods. Some of the kids would be on fire and scream, help me, or something similar to that. A stench of burning flesh could be smelled in the air. Others reported seeing bright lights swirling and weaving in and out of the woods. Most assumed those were ghostly images of the kids.

1:46:13 That took a terrible turn.

1:46:16 Why?

1:46:17 Oh my gosh. I mean, running through the woods and saying, help me?

1:46:23 Well, that was the other ones.

1:46:24 I don't like this story.

1:46:26 Well, those who believed that the fire was intentionally set They report seeing the spirit of the guilty party, whoever set the blaze, in the form of a shadow-type creature lurking by the foundation remains. Sometimes people would park their cars and walk around, only to come back and find that their car was covered in little tiny handprints. It's a very isolated place, so if anybody was to show up while you were there, you would know they were coming.

1:47:00 So obviously... when they came back and saw handprints all over the car, and they knew nobody else was on the property, they just assumed that, you know, it's the children's way of trying to push in the car out of the way, I guess, so people don't face the same fate that they had. Now, question time. Is this the truth?

1:47:23 I hope to God not.

1:47:25 Well, there was an orphanage on this road. Now, the name of this road is... Gore Orphanage Road. Okay? And there was an orphanage here. The actual orphanage was known as the Orphanage of Light and Hope, and it was started in 1903. Remember, we said the 1800s is when the other one started. The remains that all these curiosity seekers go out to see is actually the remains of the Swift Mansion. It was built in 1840, so that part lines up. The Wilbur family bought the mansion in 1874. Now, this is going to open up probably one of the biggest chapters of the Gore Orphanage legends. Between January 13th and January 19th in 1893, four of Nicholas Wilbur's grandchildren all died from diphtheria. You know, that's four kids in

1:48:25 a matter of six days. Four grandkids, I should say. None of these children, though, died inside that mansion.

1:48:34 Where were they?

1:48:36 Well, they were in a hospital. Like wherever his sons or daughters lived with their kids.

1:48:42 Oh, okay.

1:48:44 All four children were buried, though, in the Maple Grove Cemetery, which is pretty close to there. He had 11-year-old Jesse, 9-year-old Ruby, and twins Roy and Mary that were two years old. Wilbur was so distraught that he held several different seances to try to make contact with the kids, grandkids.

1:49:10 In 1895, they sold the property to the Sutton family, who then sold it to Reverend Sprunge, who started the Orphanage of Light and Hope. So you can see all that happened way after the fact. So what about the fire? There was a fire that took place in December of 1923. But this place was abandoned by then. There was no one ever inside. So as far as we know, there never was any of that. So what about Gore Orphanage Road?

1:49:43 How did it get its name if there wasn't a Gore Orphanage? Well, this was actually called Baldwin Road at one point. But the Gore, Gore is a shape of land. And the road went through there. So people started calling it. gore road and then when the orphanage was built they changed it to gore orphanage road but the gore is just because of the shape of the land which is called a gore i didn't know that it has nothing to do with an orphanage named gore oh thank you lord that's how most the rumors about what.

1:50:14 Happened started well good i'm glad that wasn't true because i was really really sad.

1:50:18 But it's a cool story though it is a.

1:50:20 Cool story but that's really traumatizing.

1:50:23 And the other part to that, people claim to hear whales and not whales, like, you know, beached whales and Rosie O'Donnell. They're talking about... You're stupid. They're talking about, you know, like.

1:50:37 That's not like a ghost.

1:50:39 Yeah.

1:50:39 It's not like no whale.

1:50:40 Yeah, that kind of whale, like whales from a ghost.

1:50:43 Oh.

1:50:44 Anyway, people claim to hear that out there and... What they've determined that it is is that there's a bridge nearby that trucks go over and the sound of the trucks going over the bridge from a distance.

1:50:56 We've heard that on the interstate almost.

1:50:57 Make it sound like a whale. Right?

1:51:00 I think that's kind of weird noises, I mean.

1:51:03 But I guess because this is out in the middle of nowhere and that's coming from a distance.

1:51:06 That'd be pretty creepy, yeah. I wouldn't be digging that.

1:51:10 So anyways.

1:51:10 Yay for no kids dying.

1:51:13 Well, kids die of diphtheria. Let's not take it away from them.

1:51:15 Well, that's just horror. I mean, that's terrible, but it's not a whole story.

1:51:18 Four.

1:51:19 I don't mean it that way.

1:51:19 You don't know how many orphans were in the home. We never set a number. It could have just been three of them and this was worse.

1:51:25 Yeah.

1:51:26 And you're celebrating it.

1:51:27 I'm not celebrating it.

1:51:28 Celebrate it. There you go. Come on.

1:51:32 You're dumb.

1:51:33 All right.

1:51:35 We'll see you guys next week.

1:51:37 Bye.

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