The Haunted Bunker: Paranormal Mysteries & the Unexplained

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 a Florida artisan, a card printed on plantable wildflower seed paper, and nine recorded birthday messages from listeners who have talked with us for years without ever hearing each other's voices. Then Shane runs the bit he ran for Kim in episode 180: two real cases that share the date. An ocean apart, on the same day in 1990, a man in England vanished out of a parked car and a skull turned up in a Virginia field.
Timeline of Events
September 28, 1990: Andrew Bedford, 27, of Huntingdon, is last seen early that evening eating takeaway in a light blue Ford Cortina on Factory Bank in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire. His girlfriend expected him home by six. September 28, 1990: The same day, in Stafford County, Virginia, a property owner working a field finds a human skull under a fence line beside Joshua Road. No other remains are ever recovered. September 30, 1990: Cambridgeshire police arrest three people on suspicion of Andrew's murder. None are charged. 1990: The Smithsonian examines the Virginia skull and reports a white male, fifteen to eighteen, dead one to three years before he was found. Cause and manner of death are left undetermined. 1992: Police drain a pond on Field Road in Ramsey after information that Andrew was shot. April 10, 2015: Cambridgeshire relaunches the case as Operation Ongar and treats it as murder, naming a since demolished garage, Mongrel Cars, as the likely scene. June 2015: Pieces of bone believed to be human are recovered off Stocking Fen Road in a thirteen day search. Andrew has still never been found. 2020: Police say the leads are exhausted. Eight people were arrested over thirty years. Nobody was charged, and the prime suspect is dead. February 18, 2022: Stafford County identifies the skull as Timothy Alan Mangum, last confirmed alive between 1983 and 1984, after a Texas laboratory traced a father and a brother. How he died has never been answered.
What You Will Hear
Nine listener birthday messages, including one from Coventry and two men who hid a happy birthday inside a riddle about tracks, waters and a barn. The gifts: a chakra bracelet, a handmade wrap ring, and a card on seed paper you can plant in the spring. How a man eating takeaway in his own parked car leaves no trace at all. The skull on Joshua Road, the reconstructed face, and the DNA work that gave him his name back. What Josh makes of a road carrying his own name.
Sources
Cambridgeshire Constabulary, Operation Ongar, with reporting in The Hunts Post and Cambs Times, 1990 through 2020 Stafford County Sheriff's Office identification announcement, February 18, 2022 Othram Inc. investigative genetic genealogy case record, Timothy Alan Mangum Smithsonian Institution forensic assessment of the Stafford County remains
If you liked this: Episode 180, The Buff Ledge Abduction. Kim's birthday got the same treatment, and hers came with a UFO.
The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker
Episode 186 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide

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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, which starts with a Secret Santa draw, a big bottle of wine, a supervisor who pulled Shane aside, and a last-minute run to Bath and Body Works. The wooden crate from that gift still sits on the back of her toilet. Then she talks about Amber, her oldest daughter. Amber was blonde, kind, the first one to step in when anyone was being bullied, and forever asking for extra lunch money because some other kid did not have any. She got stuck on Muncie's first roundabout right after she got her license. Kim still takes an extra lap around it for her. On October 28, 2012, after a Halloween party, Amber was riding with two boys. The driver had been drinking and tried to beat a train. Amber and the driver both died. She was a junior and a cheerleader. Kim tells how she learned the news that morning, what the years since have looked like, and why she now speaks at schools and with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. As she puts it, as a parent, you do not get over it. Shane and Josh let her tell it her way, and the three of them find the laughter in it too, because that is how this friendship works.
The second half is Josh's, and the trail leads to the crystal skulls. He has stood in a room with one at Spirit Fest at Camp Chesterfield, Indiana, and he describes what that felt like. From there he walks through the legend of the thirteen skulls, the Mitchell-Hedges skull and the book Danger, My Ally, the British Museum skull that surfaced in Paris in 1881 and was sold to Tiffany and Company before the museum bought it, the Sha Na Ra skull found in Mexico in 1995 by what its finders called psychic archaeology, and the skull named Einstein, whose owner says it is an ancient computer. Quartz holds no carbon, so radiocarbon dating cannot touch them. Josh lays out the case for 1800s fakes and the case for something older, and tells you which he chooses.
Then the Unmasked. Shane is fresh back from Europe with stories about the postcards he mailed Kim (the one from Paris read "That's one big tower"), a tiny terracotta pot from a Walmart that got Kim to pull the car over, the man who called her three times about a silo, the stranger selling his grandmother's false teeth, a hotel plunger in Tennessee, and the crystal skull conspiracies Josh saved for the bonus, aliens included. Kim picks Velma.
What you'll hear in this episode:
How Shane and Kim met, and the Secret Santa gift that almost went very wrong
Amber: the roundabout, the outside light and the bugs, the extra lunch money, and October 28, 2012
Why Kim speaks to students and works with Mothers Against Drunk Driving
Josh in a room with a crystal skull at Camp Chesterfield
The thirteen-skull legend, Mitchell-Hedges, the British Museum skull, Sha Na Ra, and Einstein
Unmasked: the postcards, the little pot, the silo, the false teeth, and the plunger
This one is for Kim, and for Amber.
If you would like more information on the Amber Nicole Morrow Memorial Scholarship and donating information please visit https://www.randolphcountyfoundation.org

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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 up everywhere. Gnomes hold the earth: mines, caves, stones, buried treasure, and that one hill nobody in the village will discuss. Undines hold the water, nymph-like spirits of rivers, springs and waterfalls, and the old book that carries their name is older than The Little Mermaid and considerably sadder. Sylphs hold the air, and get blamed for sudden inspiration, lost hats, and rumors that move faster than a horse. Salamanders hold fire, and have nothing at all to do with the amphibian.
Josh's framing is the best line in the episode. Elementals are what you would get if nature had a backstage crew, moving the scenery, making the fog, and occasionally setting the curtains on fire.
The folklore gets specific about consequences, and it fits the punishment to the crime. Cross the earth and you get cave-ins, spoiled foundations, and a path that stops being where you left it. Cross the water and you get floods, drowning dreams, a reflection gone missing, and a voice that knows your name a little too clearly. Cross the air and you get sudden storms, broken messages, and endless wandering. Cross fire and it skips the warning entirely.
The gang also ties it back to last week. If a thing can lift a pile of leaves, it can roll a ball back across a floor.
Before any of that, there is a solid hour of hangout. Shane brought Amish crack from a Fort Wayne bakery, which turns out to be a box of cinnamon sugar donut holes and a genuine hazard to everyone at the table. He picked up a twenty five dollar parking ticket in Warsaw and has decided to fight it in court on principle. He got locked in a coffee shop bathroom without his phone. He walked past a former Bachelor and learned that a town once built a fake fall festival for a TV shoot and then liked it enough to keep holding it. And a friend's five trading cards turned out to be worth a great deal more than anyone at that table guessed.
Plus Josh reads everyone's element, and there is a Dollywood trip on the calendar.
What you'll hear in this episode:
The trail cam footage that started all of this
Gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, and what each one guards
What folklore says happens when you disturb the wrong threshold
Amish crack, a parking ticket worth fighting, and a card shop surprise
The gang is going to Dollywood in Sevierville, Tennessee, December 4 through 6. Patreons and listeners are welcome to come along.
Want to send the gang something? PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992.

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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 their grandmothers ever did. Josh remembered dentures
slipping mid-hymn on a church stage, and a grandmother who simply took them out and kept right on singing.
Shane confessed to prank calling his own grandma as "John from the bank" about fraudulent charges in Nigeria
and New Zealand, which ended with her cussing him out and then driving to the bank anyway, just to be sure. And
then there is the story that gives this episode its name. One afternoon Grandma rose out of her chair, removed
her false teeth, kicked off her slippers, and went after a houseguest who had used the F word one time too many
in her house. Shane caught her mid-flight and got dragged the length of the living room for his trouble.
Kim's memories run a little differently. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's while Kim was still in
high school, so the one she holds onto is a camper at Cabin Creek shaking hard enough that Grandma hollered
at Grandpa to knock it off. It was an earthquake.
Trevor wanted to know what one snack each of them would carry into a haunted house. Josh picked Doritos, on
the grounds that they burn. That set Shane off on the night he agreed to go live on Facebook from a house in
Hartford City without knowing it was a haunted house, discovered the only air conditioned room was the one
he then refused to leave, watched a curtain move behind him on camera, and turned down an invitation to the
basement where someone had just been scratched. There was a room lined with mirrors that the owner called
a portal, and a room full of dolls with a Ouija board sitting in the middle of it. He left at one in the morning for a
Holiday Inn rather than sleep on an army cot.
Kat asked whether Shane is married, and he answers that about as directly as you would expect from a man of
mystery. MT asked whether solving a case like JonBenet Ramsey with DNA would ever quiet the arguments online
or only make them louder. Nobody at this table is optimistic.
There is a tender stretch in here too. It was Amber's birthday, and Kim brought her cake for everyone. Josh brought
the news about Dolly Parton, and the room sat with that for a while.
Then Savannah's box got opened, and the trail leads somewhere none of them saw coming.
What you'll hear in this episode:
The trash company saga, and why the chat support keeps insisting it is not AI
Three grandmothers, two sets of false teeth, and one earthquake blamed on Grandpa
Shane's night in a Hartford City haunted house, the mirror room and the doll room
A care package from Charleston, a Bigfoot figurine, and an award nobody asked for
Want to send the gang something? PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992.

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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 the bunk beds to practice swearing where Jesus was the only witness, and Shane remembers the one night in the back of Grandma's Buick when he was handed actual permission to repeat every word their aunt had said, and used it.
Which is the on-ramp to a full Grandma episode. Her purse was stocked like a pharmacy, which is how Shane once got handed two blood pressure pills in the middle of a sermon instead of Tylenol. When he asked if he was going to be okay, she said, "We'll find out." She kept the good candy bars in her panty drawer, right next to a cow taser. And years after she quit smoking, their uncle found a pile of cigarette butts in the grass under her bedroom window, told her a stranger must have been standing out there watching her sleep, and got to watch her stare at the ceiling and say, "Huh. That's weird." The rest of the evidence turned up much later, inside a heavy stone turtle that came apart in his hands. Zoinks.
Shane also finally tells the Eagles Theater story. He accepted a calendar invite with no description, showed up for what he assumed was a normal evening downtown, and looked up to see his own name on the screen between two doctorates. Two hundred people. Doors closing. A panel on community food needs that nobody had mentioned he was speaking on. What he said up there came out of nowhere and turned out to be the most honest thing in the episode: go to the people who are barely making it, because they are the ones who know what next week feels like. That opens into food bank boxes full of things they could not cook with the gas shut off, and a carton of peanut butter milk nobody in this family has recovered from.
Everything else lands where it lands. Josh's tarantula molted and then earned its keep by clearing a man out of his living room. The hissing cockroach Shane's college roommate kept spent a weekend in the freezer and survived it. Death cap mushrooms after the floods. Stop signs in this state you cannot see around until you are already in the intersection. A nine person salt water hot tub that dropped six thousand dollars because somebody drilled one light two inches too low. Josh talking honestly about labels and where he actually lands on them. And Kim stating for the record, more than once, that she is never calling Shane Dr. Waters.
The postcard wall has room on it. PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992.
Pull up a chair in the bunker. The only thing getting unmasked this week is Grandma.
What you'll hear in this episode:
The words they were not allowed to say as kids, and the one night in Grandma's Buick when Shane got permission to say all of them
Grandma's purse pharmacy, the good candy bars stored next to a cow taser, and the hollow stone turtle where the cigarette butts went
The Eagles Theater panel Shane got ambushed onto, and the food bank answer he came up with on the spot
A tarantula that molted and then cleared a man out of Josh's living room, plus the hissing cockroach that survived a weekend in a freezer
A nine person salt water hot tub discounted six thousand dollars over one crooked light

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