The Haunted Bunker: Paranormal Mysteries & the Unexplained

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 and Brent through the Brown County Bigfoot file, from a caver near Harrodsburg in 1979 to call-and-answer howls at Yellowwood Lake, the Finding Bigfoot town forum in Bloomington, and the Nashville couple running a Bigfoot research center today. Then the sky takes over: the summer of Operation Skywatch, two weekends of saucers over Washington, and the night police from Seymour to Franklin reported what one civil defense director called a dogfight over Franklin.
Timeline of Events
July 14, 1952: Operation Skywatch puts Ground Observer Corps volunteers on round-the-clock sky watch in 27 states.
July 28, 1952: Indiana troopers and Camp Atterbury observers watch three objects over south-central Indiana from 1:07 a.m. until after 4 a.m.
July 29, 1952: The Air Force holds its largest Pentagon press conference since World War II about the Washington sightings.
November 1979: A caver near Harrodsburg, west of Lake Monroe, reports a six to seven foot figure covered in long dark brown hair.
November 2011: Finding Bigfoot holds a town forum at the Monroe County History Center in Bloomington.
August 8, 2015: Campers at Yellowwood Lake hear deep howls answered from across the water.
May 9, 2020: A father and daughter report a gray figure about six feet tall in Yellowwood State Forest.
What You Will Hear
The 2020 Yellowwood sighting and the six-minute walk that makes it hard to shakeA rainy night on a cabin porch near Greenbriar Lake and prints that looked like fuzzy bedroom slippers What happened when Finding Bigfoot came to Bloomington The trooper logs from July 28, 1952, ending with a red, white and blue object seen from Camp Atterbury Why one military base keeps turning up in both the sky stories and the woods stories
Sources
Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, Brown, Monroe and Bartholomew County reports
Seymour Daily Tribune and Anderson Daily Bulletin, July 28, 1952
Indiana Daily Student, November 2011
Indiana Public Media, July 3, 2026
Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Brown County State Park
If you liked this: Episode 163, The Phoenix Lights. Another night when ordinary people watched lights in the sky that nobody could explain.
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 189 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide

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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 that never tell you how loosely they are based on a true story, Primetime included, the new Chris Hansen film starring Robert Pattinson. Then Brent and Shane start trading road stories from Hollywood, Washington State and a snowed-in Crater Lake, and Kim wants to know why she got left home.
Timeline of Events
August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are killed in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts.
June 20, 1893: A jury acquits Lizzie Borden of both murders.
Summer 1999: The Blair Witch Project opens and convinces plenty of people, Shane included, that found footage is real.
September 17, 2026: Netflix releases Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.
September 25, 2026: Primetime, with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, opens in theaters.
September 29, 2026: Shane, Kim and Brent sit down in Muncie to record this episode.
What You Will Hear
Why Kim texted Shane that Monster had just turned weird, and what Shane thinks the show was going for. 
Shane's review of Primetime and his case for a loosely based on a true story warning on every docudrama. Shane alone at two in the morning in a Muncie movie theater, previewing found footage he believed was real.
A Hollywood hotel room with a see-through shower, and a borrowed CPAP setting that nearly drowned Shane
Zoinks, Brent at airport security with a backpack packed full of individually wrapped rocks
Gunshots on a Washington gold-sifting trip and a snowbank that gave way at the edge of Crater Lake
Sources
Netflix, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (2026)
A24, Primetime (2026)
National Park Service, Crater Lake National Park
Fall River Historical Society, Lizzie Borden collection
If you liked this: Episode 183, Grandma Took Her Teeth Out. Another week where the mystery stayed in the bag and the stories took over.
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 188 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide

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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 men young to the coquina fort that cannonballs could not crack. Then the graveyards. There is a boy buried where he landed, under the tree he fell out of, alone at the front of what the tour calls the oldest European burial ground in the country, and the locals will tell you he still plays out there after dark with the friends he used to talk about.
Timeline of Events
1513: Juan Ponce de Leon reaches Florida. The story tying him to a spring that makes the old young again does not appear in writing until 1535, fourteen years after he died, and his landing place is disputed to this day.
September 8, 1565: Pedro Menendez de Aviles founds San Agustin, named for the saint whose feast day fell when his fleet first sighted land. He holds a mass of thanksgiving and shares a meal with the local Native people, fifty six years before the Plymouth feast of 1621.
September 20, 1565: Spanish troops take the French Fort Caroline, near what is now Jacksonville, while most of its defenders are away at sea.
Autumn 1565: Jean Ribault's fleet is wrecked by a hurricane. Roughly three hundred French survivors are put to the knife at the inlet south of town. That inlet is still called Matanzas, which means slaughters.
May 1586: Sir Francis Drake arrives with twenty three ships, takes the town and burns it. The residents rebuild.
1599: A fire and then a hurricane hit in the same year.
May 1668: The pirate Robert Searle sacks the city, kills sixty residents and carries others off for ransom or for sale. Spain decides it is done building in wood.
October 2, 1672: Work begins on the Castillo de San Marcos, out of coquina shellstone quarried on Anastasia Island.
1695: The first major construction phase ends. The Castillo was never taken in battle. It only ever changed hands on paper.
1780: After Charleston falls, three signers of the Declaration of Independence are held prisoner inside that fort.
What You Will Hear
Why coquina, a limestone made of packed seashells, swallowed cannonballs instead of shattering, and who was forced to quarry and lay it.
What the Florida Historical Society actually says about Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth, and what archaeologists found under the park instead.
The boy buried under the tree he fell from, and the gatekeeper's daughter said to walk the same ground.
One of the earliest patented Ouija boards, a folding portable embalming table, and a wall of death masks.
Why there is always a fire, and what it costs us every single time.
Sources
National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos National Monument
Florida Historical Society on Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth legend
City of St. Augustine historical record, and the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park excavations
Period accounts of Drake's raid of 1586 and Searle's sack of 1668
Ghosts and Graveyards night tour, St. Augustine, ridden September 2026
If you liked this: Episode 170, Lady in Red and Tonopah's Mizpah Hotel. Another old building that never quite emptied out.
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 187 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide

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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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