The Haunted Bunker: Paranormal Mysteries & the Unexplained

Chicago, fall of 1913. The Devil Baby legend begins when three Italian women come "with an excited rush through the door" of Hull-House at 800 South Halsted and demand to see the baby. Then comes, in Jane Addams's words, "a veritable multitude." For six weeks people pour in from all over the city and the suburbs, all day and late into the night, and the answer at Hull-House is always the same: "No, there is no such baby." No baby was ever found, and no family or birth record has turned up. So why did thousands of people go looking for...

Brown County, Indiana, May 2020. A dad and his 11-year-old daughter are turkey hunting in Yellowwood State Forest when she spots it first: about six feet tall, gray, and in his words "very, very strong looking." It crossed ground in seconds that took the two of them six minutes to walk. Back in 1952, police across south-central Indiana and military observers at Camp Atterbury watched three lights in the sky for hours, and we could not find an explanation for that night in any paper we read.

Zoinks, the gang heads home to Indiana's Little Smokies. Shane walks Kim...

Muncie, Indiana, September 2026, and Shane and Kim finally put our buddy Brent in front of a microphone. He is Shane's old college roommate and the buddy behind a lot of the travel stories told on this show. Shane brought a mystery to the table. It never made it out of his notes, and by the end of the hour you will understand why.

Jinkies, it starts with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix, and the text Kim sent Shane the minute Aileen Wuornos showed up in the story. That turns into a real complaint about docudramas...

St. Augustine, Florida, 1565. Spain planted a city on this coast forty two years before Jamestown and fifty five years before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth, and most of what happened next was fire, hurricane, siege or slaughter. Shane rode the Ghosts and Graveyards trolley through it at night, four other people on board and the sides of the bus folded open, and came back with the history and the ghost stories tangled together the way they are down there.

The gang walks the oldest European city in the country, from the spring that is supposed to make old...

Stafford County, Virginia, 1990. A property owner clearing brush found a human skull under a fence line beside a country road. No other bones. No cause of death. No name. It took thirty one years, a genealogy lab in Texas, and DNA from a father and a brother before anyone could say who he was. The road he was found beside is called Joshua Road. Shane went looking for cases that landed on Josh's birthday, and that is what he came back with.

Kim and Shane set this one up as a surprise. Cupcakes, a handmade ring from...

July 2023. The show was still called Mystery Inc, and Kim was working in a corner of the studio when Shane and Josh pulled her over and put a microphone in front of her. She had edited every episode up to that point. This was the first time the gang heard her voice.

We are bringing that episode back as episode 185. It is the original recording, Mystery Inc theme and all, with the Unmasked bonus that followed it, Patreon-only in 2023, included at the end.

The first half is Kim's. Shane tells how he and Kim met...

A guy Josh works with was reviewing motion-triggered footage when the wind picked up and the leaves began to move. Then a large pile of them stood up off the ground, held its shape for several seconds, and dropped back down. Josh told him to go look up elementals. Then Josh went and did the reading himself, and that is this week's episode.

Elementals are the beings folklore assigned to earth, water, air and fire. The trail leads back through Greek natural philosophy, medieval thought and Renaissance alchemy, and it gave us four families that still turn...

The gang skipped the mystery this week and just talked, and somehow that turned into false teeth, a haunted

house in Hartford City, and a box of Charleston groceries with something deeply unserious buried at the bottom.

It started with Shane's trash company, which has now gone weeks without picking up his can and keeps insisting

in the app that the can was never out there. Then Kim opened the listener questions, and the whole thing got

away from them.

Savannah asked what the most absurd thing was that...

No mystery again this week. Just Shane, Josh, and Kim around the table, and a conversation that gets away fromall three of them inside of ten minutes.

It starts with a word. Shane had lunch with a friend who mentioned that growing up she was not allowed to say the F word or, of all things, crevice. Crevice. That sets off an hour of collateral damage, plus a real conversation about the words that were banned in their own houses. Sucks. Shut up. Hell. Anything that even rhymed with a cuss word. Josh confesses to crawling under...

It's a Josh mystery week in the bunker, and this one comes with a warning: Josh's reading habits are involved. Deep in the Amazon lives a freshwater dolphin that starts life gray and turns pink as it ages. By day, the boto swims the tannin-dark river hunting fish. But in stories told up and down the Amazon for generations, some nights one of those pink dolphins rises out of the black water as something else entirely: a handsome stranger dressed all in white, charming, magnetic, and always wearing a hat. The hat is not a fashion choice. It hides...

August 7, 1968. The number one song in America is "Hello, I Love You" by The Doors, Richard Nixon is being nominated in Miami Beach, and Congress has just spent a day asking scientists whether UFOs are real. It's also the day Kim was born. So for her birthday, the gang investigates the strangest thing that happened on her actual birth date: the Buff Ledge abduction, one of the best-documented UFO cases in American history, which played out on a quiet Vermont lake the very day she arrived.

Buff Ledge Camp sat on the shore of Lake Champlain, just...

No mystery this week, just the gang around the table with snacks, big travel plans, and way too many cemetery stories.

Shane, Josh, and Kim start with a follow-up on the Herb Baumeister case after watching more of the Fox Hollow Farm documentary on Hulu, including the detail about the original detective that Kim could not stop thinking about. Then some very cool news: one of the show's Patreon members is going to be in Indianapolis on Monday, and she has offered to take Shane and Kim to see the Fox Hollow memorial in Westfield honoring the...

Shane took the documentary pick this week, and he brought the bunker home to Indiana. Both Fox Hollow documentaries on Hulu, the Emmy nominated 2025 series The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer and the brand new July 2026 follow-up Return to Fox Hollow: New Victims, Darker Secrets, plus the parts of the story neither film had room to tell.

A heads up before you press play. This is a heavy one. It involves the murders of at least 25 men, most of them gay men taken from Indianapolis bars in the early 1990s, and their families are...

Shane's pick this time. The challenge is always the same: grab a documentary off a streaming service and let the gang talk the whole thing through. Shane went with Should I Marry a Murderer? on Netflix, and it might be the most unsettling one yet, because the story is not really about the killer. It is about the woman who got engaged to him first.

The gang follows Caroline Muirhead, a Glasgow pathologist who matched with Highland gamekeeper Sandy McKellar on Tinder in October 2020. He proposed within months. Then, during a visit to the estate where he...

The gang investigates three mysteries stitched together by one date on the calendar: the Fourth of July. This week Josh brings the holiday and everything strange hiding inside it. What starts as hot dogs and bottle rockets turns into a night sky that changed forever, a coincidence that still makes historians shiver, and a cold case that has gone unanswered for more than three decades.

First, look up. On July 4th in the year 1054, Chinese and Japanese sky watchers recorded a brilliant "guest star" that flared in the constellation Taurus. It burned so bright it was visible...

This week Shane handed the pick to Josh, with one rule: choose a documentary worth talking through start to finish. Josh chose Trust Me: The False Prophet on Netflix, and it turned into one of the heaviest, most gripping conversations the bunker has had.

A heads up before you press play. This episode deals with a polygamous sect and the abuse of children. We handle it with care, we keep the focus on the survivors, and we do not sensationalize what happened to them. Everyone named as a perpetrator here has been convicted.

The story...

Shane handed the reins to Kim for this one. The challenge was simple: pick a documentary off a streaming service, and the gang talks the whole thing through. Kim picked The Jewel Thief on Hulu, and honestly, it is one of the most jaw-dropping true crime stories you will ever hear.

The gang investigates the life of Gerald Blanchard, a Canadian thief who treated high security like a personal insult. Adopted, raised in poverty in Omaha, dyslexic and bullied, he started by forging receipts and returning stolen electronics for cash, and he never really stopped climbing. By...

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...