The Haunted Bunker: Paranormal Mysteries & the Unexplained

The Michigan Dogman has claw marks, a police report, grainy film footage, and decades of eyewitness accounts. It also has a birth certificate: April 1, 1987. This week Shane brings the gang a mystery about how legends get made, and a radio prank that refused to stay a joke.

Steve Cook, a DJ and production man at WTCM in Traverse City, needed an April Fools bit. So he wrote "The Legend, " a spoken-word song over a cheap keyboard, credited to a singer who did not exist named Bob Farley. Morning host Jack O'Malley slipped it into rotation with no...

Shane and Kim are back from Las Vegas, and the bunker has some catching up to do. Josh spent the week working twelve-hour shifts, so the gang skips the mystery, pulls up chairs, and settles in for a full CrimeCon debrief instead. No Unmasked this week. It all got folded into one long hangout, exactly the way these conversations want to go.

The trip got off to a rocky start. Caesars Palace, home base for CrimeCon this year, hid its elevators, parked Shane and Kim a half-mile hike from the front desk, and kept the minibar fridge...

The gang investigates a mystery where the legend came first and the archaeology came second.

In 1883, Northern Paiute author Sarah Winnemucca published something extraordinary. In "Life Among the Piutes," she described an ancient enemy her people called the Si-Te-Cah. Red-haired. Cannibals. According to Paiute oral tradition, the tribes united against them, cornered them in a cave, and set it on fire. Winnemucca wrote that she personally possessed their hair, handed down through her family for generations.

Twenty-nine years later, two guano miners cracked open a cave eighteen miles south of Lovelock, Nevada. Under six feet...

There's a five-story hotel in the Nevada desert where guests wake up to find a single pearl on their pillow. Nobody brought it. Housekeeping didn't put it there. The staff keeps a guest ghost story book at the front desk. The pearls keep filling it.

The gang investigates the Lady in Red — the ghost of the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada. USA Today named it the #1 Most Haunted Hotel in America in 2018. Shane flew to Vegas early for CrimeCon, Jennifer joined them, and he brought a Lady in Red mystery worth the trip.

The legend sa...

Le Nain Rouge has cursed Detroit for three hundred years. Antoine Laumet made up the name "Cadillac, " stole a coat of arms off a gate in France, and founded the city under a lie. Three weeks after he arrived, something small and red stepped out of the riverbank fog, and he swung his cane at it.

The fortune teller in Quebec had warned him. His wife recognized it. He hit it anyway.

Tonight is a special. Our friend Jennifer brought this one from Detroit. She's sharing the mystery of Le Nain Rouge — the Red Dwarf — whil...

Dave brings this mystery to the bunker with Kim and Josh this week, and the gang explores a case where an entire city's survival may have depended on keeping the music playing. The Axeman was never identified, never caught, and left behind only questions.

Some researchers believe the letter wasn't written by the killer at all, but by a musician hoping to sell copies of a song called "Don't Scare Me Papa, " inspired by the events. The Axeman's attacks resumed briefly afterward, with possible additional murders as late as 1920, before the killer simply vanished from history. Theories...

Zoinks! The trail leads from a Cleveland bank vault to a quiet Massachusetts life, and the only person who ever knew the full truth took most of it to his grave.

Josh brings this mystery to the bunker this week while Kim and buddy Dave join him, asking the questions that remain: How did a man who supposedly couldn't find his own socks maintain a double identity for five decades? How did he explain away his missing family, his absent past? And perhaps most intriguing of all, did he really do it just because of a movie?<...

Zoinks! What do pheromones, the Pentagon, and an elite ancient Greek army have in common? More than you would ever guess, and Josh is here to connect the dots in one of the wildest episodes the gang has tackled yet.

It started with cologne. Josh has been on a lifelong quest for the perfect scent, one powerful enough to, as he puts it, land a big hairy silver fox. While researching pheromone-based fragrances, he stumbled onto something the United States government would probably rather forget: the Gay Bomb. Yes, that was the actual name. In the late 1990...

Jinkies! What happens when a family moves into a 512-acre cattle ranch in northeastern Utah and discovers every door, window, and cabinet bolted shut from the inside? For the Sherman family, the locks were just the beginning.

In 1994, Terry and Gwen Sherman purchased a remote ranch in the Uintah Basin, lured by cheap land and wide-open skies. Within weeks, they understood why the previous owners had fortified every inch of the house. Cattle started turning up dead with surgical wounds, organs removed, and not a drop of blood anywhere. One cow had an 18-inch hole cored straight...

The gang investigates a mystery hiding in plain sight. Humanity is headed back to the moon, and while the Artemis 2 crew circles our closest neighbor for reconnaissance photos and crater naming ceremonies, the real question might not be about exploration at all. It might be about what is buried in the lunar dust.

Helium-3 is one of the rarest minerals on Earth. A single kilogram costs roughly $18.7 million, and the entire global supply is valued at around $125 million. That is about seven kilograms total. On Earth, the only way to produce it is through the decay of...

Jinkies! On March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona looked up and saw something that would change their lives forever. From Henderson, Nevada to Tucson, a massive V-shaped formation of lights moved silently through the desert sky, and nearly three decades later, no one can explain what it was.

The Phoenix Lights weren't one event. They were two. The first began around 8:00 PM, when a structured formation of five to seven lights traveled roughly 300 miles across the state. Retired police officers, pilots, and families watched it pass overhead. The second event at 10:00 PM featured a row of amber...

Jinkies! When you think royal mistresses had it easy, think again. The story of Madame de Montespan reads like something the gang would uncover in a crumbling French castle, complete with accusations of satanic rituals, infant sacrifices, and poisoned gowns.

Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart came from one of the oldest noble houses in France. Beautiful, ambitious, and cunning, she caught the eye of King Louis XIV and became his official mistress, bearing him seven children. Her entire world revolved around keeping the king's attention. But as the years passed and her beauty beg...

Zoinks. Six people killed on an isolated Bavarian farm in the middle of a snowbound March night -- and then, for four days, the killer didn't leave. He fed the cattle. He stoked the fire. He ate their food. He slept in their beds. And nobody knew.

The gang is heading to Bavaria.

In the early hours of April 1, 1922, the Gruber family farm at Hinterkaifeck -- a remote homestead about 70 kilometers north of Munich -- fell silent in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Six people were dead: farmer Andreas Gruber, his...

Jinkies! Three ancient civilizations, separated by oceans and thousands of years, independently built the same thing -- a structure that marks the exact moment the sun crosses the sky's midpoint. No GPS. No satellites. No communication between them. And every single one of those structures still works today, right on schedule.

This week Josh brought a mystery that swings in the opposite direction from most of what the gang explores. No crime. No ghost. No cover-up. Just a category of question that might be harder to answer than any of those: how did ancient people, using only...

Jinkies! The gang stumbles onto a mystery hiding in plain sight this week - the water in your glass right now might be older than the sun itself, and it definitely did not originate on Earth.

Josh brings a cosmic puzzle to the bunker that rewrites everything you thought you knew about the most common substance on our planet. Water has no natural formation process on Earth - it arrived here during the Late Heavy Bombardment Period, roughly 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, when our planet had no atmosphere and was pelted by asteroids and...

Jinkies! The gang stumbles onto a mystery hiding in plain sight this week - the water in your glass right now might be older than the sun itself, and it definitely did not originate on Earth.

Josh brings a cosmic puzzle to the bunker that rewrites everything you thought you knew about the most common substance on our planet. Water has no natural formation process on Earth - it arrived here during the Late Heavy Bombardment Period, roughly 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, when our planet had no atmosphere and was pelted by asteroids and...

The Sleeping Sickness | The Plague That Vanished

Character count: 45/60

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SEO Package: HB Episode 158

157: The Tombstone Thunderbird

Jinkies! When an 84-year-old woman vanishes from the same home she's lived in for half a century, and the only witness is a doorbell camera that someone deliberately disconnected -- the gang knows something deeply wrong has happened.

In this special combined episode, Shane brings the mystery of Nancy Guthrie's disappearance to Josh and Kim for a full deep-dive investigation and unmasking. On the night of January 31, 2026, Nancy was dropped off at her Catalina Foothills home outside Tucson, Arizona, by her son-in-law after a family dinner. By 1:47 AM, her Google Nest doorbell camera had been disconnected. By 2:28...

Zoinks! The gang is going back to where it all started.

Three years ago, two brothers sat down in front of a microphone with nothing but a shared love of mysteries and a beat-up Tesla they called the Mystery Machine. Episode 1 was raw, unpolished, and absolutely chaotic—and now it's been remastered for a whole new generation of mystery lovers to experience.

This special throwback episode takes us deep into the Appalachian Mountains, where locals have whispered for generations about things that live in the caves. Not bears. Not mo...

What's up, gang!

Pull up a chair in the bunker—we're going off-script tonight. After recording our Bridgewater Triangle episode, something clicked, and we decided to try an experiment: what happens when the skeptic and the believer trade places?

Shane attempts to make the case FOR the paranormal. Jinkies, it's harder than he expected. The arguments have emotional weight. He has to actively work to stay skeptical in his normal life.

Josh plays devil's advocate and discovers that being the skeptic is exhausting. You have to explain everything. No mystery is allowed. It fe...

The Wampanoag called it Hockomock—"place where spirits dwell." They named it that twelve thousand years before anyone else noticed something was wrong with this swamp.

Tonight we descend into the Bridgewater Triangle, a 200-square-mile region in southeastern Massachusetts where Bigfoot stalks the wetlands, UFOs hover over highways, and the ghost of an 80-year-old war captain still guards the rock where he surrendered three centuries ago.

In 1978, Joseph DeAndrade walked into Hockomock Swamp and walked out describing a seven-foot creature covered in hair. He wasn't the first. He wouldn't be the last. Drivers on Route 44 st...

What's up, gang? This week, Josh takes the wheel for one of the most heartbreaking mysteries in Hollywood history—the tragic story of Judith Barsi.

You probably know her voice even if you don't recognize her name. At just ten years old, Judith had already appeared in over 70 commercials and landed iconic voice roles that still resonate with audiences today. She was the voice behind Ducky in The Land Before Time and Anne-Marie in All Dogs Go to Heaven—characters whose optimistic catchphrases like "Yep! Yep! Yep!" masked a devastating reality happening off-screen.

Josh dives deep in...

Two men in suits. Two homemade lead masks. One cryptic note. And a mystery that's haunted Brazil for nearly sixty years.

In August 1966, a teenager flying a kite on a hillside outside Rio de Janeiro stumbled onto a scene that would become one of South America's most baffling unsolved cases. Two electronics technicians—Manoel Pereira da Cruz and Miguel José Viana—lay dead on the grass, positioned side by side like they'd simply fallen asleep. But they weren't sleeping. And the crude lead masks covering their eyes weren't for rest.

Jinkies—wait until you hear what wa...

Jinkies—since 2007, at least twenty-one human feet have washed ashore along the coastlines of British Columbia and Washington State. All of them still wearing athletic shoes. No bodies. No explanations. Just feet.

In this episode, Shane, Josh, and Kim investigate one of the strangest forensic mysteries of the 21st century. The gang traces the trail from that first disturbing discovery on Jedediah Island—when a twelve-year-old girl found a Size 12 Adidas sneaker that was far too heavy—through seventeen years of shocking discoveries that had the world convinced a serial killer was stalking the Pacific Northwest.

The...

Long before Santa Claus squeezed down chimneys with bags of presents, Scandinavian families knew something else watched over their homes during the darkest nights of winter—something small, ancient, and very particular about its porridge.

The Mystery

In the folklore of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, the Tomte (or Nisse, depending on where you're from) has been guarding homesteads for centuries. These diminutive spirits—typically described as elderly men the size of young children with long white beards and red caps—were believed to protect families, tend to livestock, and bring abundance to farms that earned...

Alright gang, buckle up—because this case gets weird.

In January 1897, a young bride named Zona Heaster Shue was found dead in her rural West Virginia home. The local doctor took one look and said "heart trouble." Her husband Erasmus—who went by "Trout," which should've been everyone's first red flag—played the grieving widower perfectly. Case closed, right?

Not so fast.

Zona's mother, Mary Jane Heaster, wasn't buying it. Something about her new son-in-law just didn't sit right. So she did what any determined mother would do: she prayed for answers. For four s...

The Case of the Vanishing Paralyzed Dude

Like, this one's gonna give you the creeps—and there's not even a guy in a rubber mask at the end!

Picture it: June 1763, a spooky little English town called Shepton Mallet. There's this old timer named Owen Parfitt just chillin' in a chair outside his sister's cottage. And here's the thing—the dude couldn't walk. Like, at all. Hadn't moved those legs in years!

Farm workers were right there in the field, practically close enough to wave. Travelers on the road. Witnesses everywhere!

His s...

In the Bay of Bengal lies an island where no outsider has ever returned alive after setting foot on its forbidden shores...

North Sentinel Island may be only the size of Manhattan, but it holds one of the world's most enduring mysteries. For thousands of years, the Sentinelese tribe has lived in complete isolation, untouched by modern civilization, hostile to any contact, and protected by Indian law that makes approaching the island a criminal offense. Their language remains unknown. Their customs are a mystery. And their response to outsiders? Deadly.

The island's dark history includes...

In the hills of Rajasthan stands a city so cursed that the Indian government forbids anyone from entering after dark.

Bhangarh Fort rises from the dusty landscape of India's Alwar district like a warning carved in stone. Built in 1573 by Raja Bhagwant Das for his son Madho Singh, this sprawling complex of temples, palaces, and crumbling havelis was once home to over 10,000 people. Today, its roofless ruins stand silent beneath the Aravalli hills—abandoned, allegedly cursed, and officially restricted by the Archaeological Survey of India, which has posted signs forbidding entry between sunset and sunrise.

Wh...

Ruh-roh! The Mystery Inc gang is hitting the road for a two-week adventure, but before we go, we've got some news you're NOT going to want to miss.

Shane, Josh, and Kim are taking a little vacation to scout out some brand new mysteries - and trust us, we've got something REALLY exciting cooking for when we get back. Let's just say things might look a little different around here... in the best way possible.

We'll be back with a fresh mystery on December 2nd for everyone, and if you're hanging with us on Patreon, yo...

What if you stumbled upon a perfect circle of mushrooms in the forest at midnight—would you dare step inside? Shane, Josh, and Kim dive into one of nature's most mysterious phenomena: fairy circles. From ancient folklore warning of fairies, witches, and dancing with death, to modern scientists spending millions trying to explain perfect patterns in deserts and forests, this mystery proves that sometimes the line between magic and science is thinner than you'd think.

The Folklore That Kept People Away

For centuries, Europeans knew one rule about fairy circles: don't step inside. These mysterious ri...

Aaron Burr's brilliant daughter boarded a ship in 1813 and vanished without a trace. Decades later, her portrait appeared in a tavern. What really happened to Theodosia Burr Alston?

The gang investigates one of early America's most haunting maritime mysteries. Theodosia Burr Alston was no ordinary woman—she was one of the first American women to receive a college-level education, the daughter of Vice President Aaron Burr, and the wife of South Carolina Governor Joseph Alston. But in December 1812, grieving the recent death of her only child, Theodosia made a fateful decision to sail from Georgetown, South Carolina to...

…1 campfire…

…1 dark forest…

…31 bone-chilling stories…

…Will YOU survive the night?

This Halloween season, enter the woods for a unique and truly epic podcast experience! Around the campfire Shane Waters will introduce 31 crime podcast hosts. Each host brings a new, nerve-wracking true story to the circle. It’s an extra special, two part, five-hour, Halloween event, but before hitting play you might want to ask yourself…can you really handle this much murder and mayhem?

So, pull up to the fire and brace yourself for ‘A Nightmare B...

This Halloween we want to re-release a VERY special treat, A Nightmare Before Halloween. This Collaboration was originally put together by Shane a couple years ago, and is done in his signature collab style.

…1 campfire…

…1 dark forest…

…31 bone-chilling stories…

…Will YOU survive the night?

This Halloween season, enter the woods for a unique and truly epic podcast experience! Around the campfire Shane Waters will introduce 31 crime podcast hosts. Each host brings a new, nerve-wracking true story to the circle. It’s an extra special, two part, five-hour, Halloween event, but before hitti...

Zoinks, gang! Shane's taking us to a small Spanish village where faces started appearing on Maria Gomez's kitchen floor in 1971—and they wouldn't stop! These mysterious faces changed expressions, faded, and reappeared for over 30 years, baffling scientists and paranormal investigators alike. When excavators found human remains beneath the floor (some missing their skulls!), this mystery went from creepy to downright chilling. Were the Belmez Faces a haunting, an elaborate hoax, or something science can't explain? Grab your Scooby Snacks and join Josh, Kim, and Shane as we investigate one of the world's most documented paranormal phenomena—and try to unma...

Jinkies, gang! This week Josh is leading us into the wild, snowy mountains of 1874 Colorado for one of American history’s most chilling survival stories—or is it a tale of cold-blooded murder?

Alfred Packer set out with five prospectors into the San Juan Mountains during one of the worst winters on record. Only Packer walked out alive. When the bodies were discovered months later, the evidence was… unmistakable. But was Packer a desperate man pushed to the edge by starvation, or a calculating killer who saw his companions as a meal ticket?

This is a stor...

Live from CrimeCon Denver! Mystery Inc. takes the stage for a whirlwind of banter, speculation, and a Denver mystery that’s more “what on earth?” than “whodunnit.” Joining Shane, Josh, and Kim is legendary CSI and podcaster Sheryl “Mac” McCollum (Zone 7) — who brings along a baffling local case for the gang to unravel in real time.

Expect laughs, audience participation, and a few surprisingly sharp insights as our “questionable investigative skills” collide with Mac’s decades of forensic expertise. It’s a session that feels less like a lecture and more like a late-night chat with friends about a wonderfully weird s...

Zoinks! The gang hits the Rocky Mountains and things get a little… wild. From a moose making waves in the lake to Josh braving altitude like it’s a boss-level villain, we’ve got tales taller than the peaks themselves. Toss in a candy factory tour, a brush with Molly Brown’s Titanic-sized legacy, and some mischief at CrimeCon Denver, and you’ve got one spooky-sweet adventure. Buckle up—this mystery’s got mountains, moose, and more mayhem than you can shake a candy cane at!

Zoinks, gang! We’ve got a bonus episode—and it’s a big one. Shane is joined by Amy Bruni, ghost hunter, author, and host of Haunted Road. You’ve seen her on Ghost Hunters and Kindred Spirits, but tonight, she’s right here in the Mystery Machine with us (okay, metaphorically).

Amy and Shane swap ghost stories that sound straight out of a Scooby-Doo adventure:

👻 A window ghost nicknamed “Mr. Green Jeans.”

📸 A skeptic who mocked the spirits—until a picture frame floated.

💡 The surprising rules that keep ghost hunting ethical and real.

And he...