My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 265

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

This week’s hometowns include a friendly ghost named “Frienderick” and a VW bus converted into a death-mobile. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And welcome. To my favorite murder, the mini-soad. It's mini. It's the one where we read you your emails. I know at this point in your life, and if you just got here, what we just said is what's about to happen. It's pretty easy. Do you want to go first?

Sure. Do it. I will go first. I'm going to do it. Okay. All right. This one's called, what are the SWAT team and a 10-inch dildo have in common? Right off the bat, starting hard and heavy.

Shock and awe. The shock of them. Hi, y'all. Hope everyone is doing dandy. I'm a sophomore in college. I've been listening to your podcast since I was 16. It's the only one I listen to, and I absolutely love it. Well, thanks.

I know. Thank you. I'm an only child, so listening to y'all is like getting to have the older sisters I always wanted. Now let's get into the story. When I grew up, I lived in Texas, not Republicans, I promise. My parents loved to flip houses and would often rent them out to tenants after the remodel. This next door to the one I grew up in was purchased by my family and split into an upstairs

unit and a downstairs unit, because both houses shared a yard. We always became good friends with our renters next door, adorable. The upstairs unit housed a woman that I called Princess Shannon, because every morning she would brush her long, beautiful, brunette hair out on the balcony, and I thought it made her magical. What is up, Shannon? Shannon's living her best life, for sure. All of this happened over the summer during my seventh grade year, where horrid neon Chevron

prints were all the rage, as well as those weird clip art mustaches. No offense, Stephen. Clip art mustaches. People were getting them tattooed on their fingers. They were a part of our lives. They were hot. Sure. Princess Shannon had a boyfriend that lived with her, but was always out of town on business

trips because he said he had meetings in Dallas with big money corporations. They were both run-of-the-mill people and very sweet anytime we chatted or ate a big outdoor dinner together. So it was to my dad's surprise when he got back home from dropping me off at drill team practice to see the SWAT team swarming our property. My dad raced up to the nearest officer and frantically asked what was going on and explained that he was the landlord. Apparently, those business meetings Shannon's boyfriend had been taking were actually trips

to the Texas border and then to New Mexico smuggling drugs into the U.S. My dad gobsmacked to be on belief, watched as the boyfriend was escorted from the premises and to the squad car next to where my dad stood with the officer. My dad recounts that the boyfriend turned to him in cuffs, shrugged and said, sorry about this, Fred. We're not sure if Shannon knew or not, but she promptly moved out after this ordeal. And wait, there's more. My parents didn't tell me this fact until just a few months ago because they deemed me old

enough and I was like, finally, I can tell the girls something juicy. That's us. When my parents were checking over the empty unit after she had gone, they found, and I kid you not, a 10-inch double-ended sparkly pink dildo. Wow, wow, and then there's seven or eight exclamation marks. For some people, that would only be three exclamation marks. We're not trying to kink-shame anybody. No.

But you know. We're talking about Texas, so like, you know, everything's bigger in Texas. That's right. It's pinker and more sparkly. That's right. My father, much to my mother's horror, recounted to me the girthiness of it and wondered why she would leave it behind. Maybe it was actually the boyfriend's.

Who knows? My mom staged the entire unit before accepting new applicants to rent and we've had great tenants ever since. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the story. Anytime my cat, Calcifer, hears Elvis' meow, he always perks up, so I like to think that they're cat friends now. Stay sexy and take your double-ended dildo when you're moving out, even if you are a drug mule.

Love, Jessica. Yeah. You're right, Jessica. Great advice. It really is, really, it's great advice. Also it's that kind of thing, what was her name, Princess? Shannon. Princess Shannon.

Princess Shannon contains multitudes. She's not just a hairbrush or princess on the balcony. She also has a very active and very, you know, seemingly satisfying sex life. Yeah, good for her. Go for it. Go for it. Yeah, Shannon. Wishing you well wherever you are.

Yes. High five, all around. Okay, this one gives it away, but I think in a good way, because it's just kind of what it is. The time my badass grandpa wrangled a giant owl, hello, I don't want my intro to disappoint, so I'll just get started. You did it. You did it.

People feel intense pressure about the intros. We want to alleviate that from you. We love them all. We do. You can send them in even if you can't think of one. Absolutely. And in fact, that is a really good writing tip. The hardest part is to get started.

So let the beginning be bad and then get into it. You can always either go back later or don't and say, hey, hey, you guys aren't paying me. Here's your dumb intro. That's what I would have said, okay, anyhow. Or as my friend Lydia used to say, hey, you didn't pay for it. Give me half. Right?

I love it. Good rule. 10 years ago, my grandparents, Michael and Sally, were sleeping when they were woken up by a very loud thumping sound coming from the bathroom. Instead of calling the police, my almost 90-year-old grandpa decided to investigate. Yes, he did. He walked down the hallway into their bathroom, turned on the lights to discover a very large owl repeatedly crashing itself into the bathroom mirror.

Oh, no. An owl. An owl. Owl, they're such magical, like, you know, distant creatures to have one in the bathroom. Okay. Without even hesitating, my grandpa grabbed a bath towel and threw it over the owl. He managed to wrestle the owl and grab it talons and all. Instead of walking over to his bedroom balcony and letting it go, he carried this owl through

the bedroom down the hall, down a large staircase, and let it out through the front door. We figured that somehow, the owl had managed to make its way down the chimney. Fly through the living room, go upstairs, down the hall, and into my grandparents' bedroom than the bathroom. On the ceiling above the staircase was a soot outline of the owl, and you could see a full owl outline with the wings outstretched. The wingspan of this owl was about seven feet long. Holy sh- I can't even picture how large owls get.

Yeah. Owls are considered raptors. Seven feet long is longer than Vince. Yes. That's how I, that's how I can do it in my mom. If Vince laid down, this bird would have, like, a foot on him, roughly, or half. Okay. We still to this day do not know how my grandpa managed to do all this on his own without

getting a scratch on him. Dude. Grandpa's. Right? My grandpa will be turning 97 in April. He survived the Holocaust, a massive brain injury, and is still one of the most outgoing, positive, and kind people I have ever known. On a side note, I was listening to your mini-sode about someone's badass grandparent burying

their bike from the Nazis. After surviving the Holocaust, my grandpa went back to his old backyard, pushed a cow out of the way, and dug up all his family's jewelry and money that he, too, had buried from the Nazis because fuck them. Oh my God. Right. That's so rad. That's so rad.

Sorry for the long email, and thank you for all you do. Stay sexy and don't underestimate your badass grandparents, Erin. Yes. Erin, please give your grandpa a hug this birthday. Yes. He sounds like a total ass kicker of the highest order. Old people know how to handle shit. They've been through shit.

They've been through shit that we don't, well, we've been through shit, too, but they don't. This man, he survived the Holocaust, and Owl is nothing to that man. It's nothing. This is just one more problem he has to deal with throughout the day. Right. Before he can go back to bed. Yes.

He's tired from all of his life. He's complicated. Oh, I just love it. I just love it. What a victory. I love it. Totally. Okay.

This is called Haunted by Possibly an Animatronic Moose. Oh. Hello, wonderful people. I work at an undisclosed retail location that was built over the remains of a shuttered animatronic family restaurant. Think Rainforest Cafe meets Chuck E. Cheese, but with a Canadian theme and a moose mascot. Is that Bollingham? I think Bollingham is American.

That's true. I think. Yeah. When we were working at this job, we joked a lot about how all the weird stuff we encountered there was due to the ghost of the animatronic moose that used to live on the site. Over the years, though, it stopped being a joke and we started to believe we actually had a ghost. It's gotten to the point where our store being haunted is the more sensible option.

Though we're not exactly sure who's haunting us. It changed from a joke to us taking it seriously during an overnight shift a few years ago. It was just me and one other employee trying to get stuff done with no customers to bother us. We began to hear footsteps coming from the roof and assumed it was just the roof expanding and crumpling as I've been told roofs do. That old, the house is settling. Excuse.

The roof is breathing like a lung. Don't worry. We know how roofs do. Sure. It sounds exactly the same as when an AC repairman is walking around up there. After we started feeling watched around the store, continued hearing strange noises and were further freaked out by a sudden, violent rainstorm that battered the outside of the building and then we got outside to leave and discovered that not only was the parking

lot dry as a desert, but no one else we knew had experienced any sort of rainstorm or windstorm that night. What? A little while later after that, I named the ghost Frederick and then changed it to Frendrick to ensure he was a friendly ghost and not a scary one. Yeah, that'll do it. This did not stop the ghost from further activity and slowly everyone in the store began to believe it.

After the phantom rainstorm, we encountered large truck carts that slid uphill with no one pushing them. Heard men's voices coming from the truck during unloads when I was the only man in the store. Saw a single light swinging back and forth in the stock room like someone was riding on it. In the video of it, none of the other lights are moving at all. We need that video. We heard someone playing the guitar in the break room when only one employee was in there.

We heard women whispering in the aisles when we were closed. Saw a binder fly off the shelf and land three feet away. Heard things being tossed in the stock room when no one was in there. Heard our own voices speaking back to us on the phones. Oh my God. Your own fucking voice. Hello? Hello, Karen.

You're scared right now because this place is haunted. Hey, it's me, Karen. Karen. Okay, talk to you later, Karen. Go stock the toilet paper. Pretty much all electronics in the store fail in bizarre ways. There are things our corporate resource center has been trying to fix for years to no avail. We just generally seem cursed for a whole host of reasons I won't bore you with.

I will note that we've had several technicians come to fix things in the store failed to be able to figure out where wires led to because they go into walls and then quote, unquote, disappear. And then technicians give up saying, I've never seen anything like this before. We obviously say good night to friend Rick every night when we leave. The freakiest encounter happened a few months ago during an overnight. We heard a woman scream at two o'clock in the morning when there was only two of us in the store.

We were in separate but adjoining rooms. The scream came from the hall connecting them and we both thought it was the other person. We even tried to replicate it by screaming from our prior positions to see if it made the same sound and it did not at all. We have no idea what it was. I've tried going through local archives and graveyards to find friend Rick's identity. There was a recent murder on the other side of the mall and a horrific car accident on the road leading up to our store.

I could not find any account of someone dying at the Moose restaurant we were built on top of. It's like getting built on top of a fucking graveyard. I mean, what was the Moose restaurant built on top of is what I don't know? Dhing-da-ding! What about? It's always been there. It's been there since the beginning.

Yeah. Fuck. And nothing was on the site before the Moose restaurant, except for a large parcel of land owned by a local religious group. I can find absolutely zero records for this religious group's farmland, except that it cult, except that it existed prior to the 1950s. So, being a Murderino, I'm obviously thinking it's a cult. Yeah.

Also, I've not been able to figure out what happened to the animatronic moose, but did find out the adjoining mall once had an animatronic circus as an exhibition. It's got to be them. Thank you guys for all that you do. I've been listening since episode 20 or so, and more than half of our store's full-time staff are also full-time Murderinos. Hi. All week about the stories you guys bring us. Huh. And then it says, Tootaloo, Sam Goldberg.

Sam, what an epic, first of all, an epic email. And yes, now I would love some questions answered. Yeah. We need photos of the vintage moose restaurant. Why is it don't go anywhere? I mean, what? Absolutely not. The hell? What the hell? Please.

Oh. Someone do something. Someone scream. Just start screaming. Yeah. Okay. The subject line of this is why you need to wear a seatbelt, a 70s survival story. Hi, Karen, Georgia, Steven and Petz. I thought I sent this in before, but I can't find it

in my sent mail, so I'll try it again. My mom grew up in the 70s in Southern California. Her dad, my grandpa, Bruce, died before I was born. But I've grown up with stories about all the ways he fixed, built and Jerry rigged things around the house to make them work quote unquote better. One of these things was the family VW bus. He took out all the back seats and put in a mattress and set up some sort of dividing wall behind the driver and the passenger seats. This sounds sexy, but it really was just so the kids could bounce around wildly in the back and the parents could ride up front in peace without having to hear or see them.

Oh my God, right? And apparently it worked a little too well. This story starts with my grandma Marianne needing to pick up some papers. What those papers were, she has never been clear. She and her friend piled my four year old mom Trisha and her eight year old sister Trina and the friend's kids in the back of the outfitted VW bus and went on their way on the Los Angeles freeway. A short time later, Trina poked her head through the divider and said, Trisha's gone on the freeway. Can you imagine? Oh my God. Apparently the back door had not been closed tight. So when the kids were gone, so when the kids, imagine, I mean, it's like when you said, mom, the bed's on

fire. Yeah. And it's so much. And actually, it's funny that that's the comparison because listen to this. Apparently the back door had not been closed tight. So when the kids were bouncing around seatbelt lists on the mattress, the door flew open and my mom bounced right out. And my grandma apparently unable to make sense of the news that her youngest was no longer in the car, just kept driving. Can I suggest that the papers that we're going to get were rolling papers because they were stoned as fuck. To that bone. Yeah. Meanwhile, my mom had landed right in between the lanes and was relatively unharmed. No. Traffic around her slowed and people just drove around the toddler on the freeway. Oh, I was like hoping

eight or nine at least. No, no, she's the four year old. Oh, that's right. A good Samaritan stopped and ran into traffic to pick her up and carry her to the side of the road. Like, yeah, I'm sorry. But this is the definition of Los Angeles. People being like, honk, honk for you. Get out of the way. I'm on my way to a meeting. Get out of the way, toddler. My grandma exited the freeway and looped back around and found my mom with the quote nice fellow as she always refers to him. Oh my God. My grandma's never been able to live this story down between the fact that she kept driving and then that she still picked up the papers before taking my mom to the hospital. No. And here's the quote. Well,

I needed to ask directions, she always says. Yeah, it's called a gas station. It's called pull over to gas station. Yeah, it's called figure this out, please. Yeah. My mom was a little scraped up, but altogether fine. This is now everyone's favorite story to tell once someone new meets the family. Yeah. Thanks for creating an amazing show and community where I've met all my best friends. Oh, that makes you want to start crying. Stay sexy and wear your seatbelt, Lauren. Oh, no, don't wear your seatbelt. Don't tell a four year old to wear your seatbelt. Tell the fucking parents. We always have to say this shit. It's not the kids fault that they didn't have a fucking seatbelt on. It is not the kids

fault. Oh my God. That there was, it was basically a converted VW bus made for something unsafe to happen. Yeah, it's converted to a deathmobile. Or truly. All right. Wow. That was, oh my God. Right. Was it Trisha's not here? Trisha's gone. What was it? Yes. Wait, wait, wait. Trisha's gone. Trisha's gone. Trisha's gone. Trisha's gone. Mom. Stop at you. Yeah. Enough already. We're trying to listen to the radio. Fibs. Fuck it. Tom Petty's on or whatever. Okay. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping, and prepping handled, Hello Fresh has you covered. Hello Fresh makes home cooking easy and affordable so you can stay on track and on budget in the new year. Hello Fresh

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slash murder 20 with code murder 20. That's up to 20 free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to hellofresh.ca slash murder 20 and use code murder 20. Goodbye. Hey, I'm Aresha. And I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about the incomparable diva, Whitney Houston. Whitney's voice defined a generation and even after her death, her talent remains unmatched. But her incredible success hit a deeply private pain. In our series, Whitney Houston, Destiny of a Diva, we'll tell you how she hid her true self

to make everyone around her happy and how the pressure to be all things to all people led her down a dark path. Follow Even the Rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. This is called Mom Spills on My Virginity or Does She? I grew up in a tiny town in mid Ohio, cornfields and dairy farms everywhere, and future farmers of America range supreme. On a spring afternoon of my junior year, 1985, Gen X are here. And my prom date, let's call him Dan, stopped by my house to pick me up to go tuck shopping. Before we left, he made small talk with my mom and dad. My friends loved to chat with my mom and hear her talk

as she was British. I'm in Ohio, British accents is like the top. It's the best. Somehow we got around to talking about a story in our local newspaper about some strange findings by the local police in the nearby woods and fields. There appear to have been some small animal sacrifices and general mischief about my date piped up that he had heard that there was speculation about Satanists. There were a lot of urban legends of Satanism in the 80s. My day went on to say that in extreme cases, rather than sacrifice animals, they would sacrifice humans, specifically blonde haired virgins. Immediately, my mom piped up insert British accent. Oh, Jan, thank

God, you're safe. There was an awkward pause and my date raised his eyebrows at me. Mom, I said, as I felt my face turn 15 shades of red. To which she replied, Oh, bloody hell, your hair, your hair. She's safe because she has brown hair. Needless to say, I was mortified and we made an awkward departure for tuck shopping. Oy vey. Stay sexy and don't let your British mom spill the beans about your virginity to your prom date. Janet. Is her name Janet? Oh, that's real good. Well, you're safe then. Well, you're safe. Yes, slut. Mom, come on. Bloody hell. Bloody hell. Okay, this last one. Grandparents in a sinkhole. Hello, Stephen, Karen, Georgia at all. Hmm. I am listening a few months behind and had a sudden

realization that I have a grandparents plus sinkhole story that I can't believe I haven't thought to share. Whoa. Right. My grandparents, William and Mary, or better known as Bill and Midge. That's adorable. It's so good. Move my mom and her siblings into a new house on a nice estate in Sutton cold field just outside Birmingham, UK in the fifties. My granddad wrote his autobiography down before he died. And when I was reading it, I came upon a crazy story. My mom and granddad would often garden in the front of the house, particularly when my mom was small and she would help plant vegetables and flowers. One day, my grandma was looking out the front window of the house and realized that the entire front garden

was missing. It collapsed in on itself. It turns out that when the builders were constructing this new estate, they didn't bother filling in an old well properly that had existed in the exact spot my grandma was now staring at. If my mom or any one of the family had been in the garden, they would have dropped a terrifying distance down and might not have made it. Oh my God. As it was the fifties, I'm not sure much was done in the way of compensation or legal restitution, but it makes for a good family story. Lots of love to you all from afar, Sarah in London. Bloody hell. Bloody hell. That makes me think of when we went to and I want to say this happened in Manchester, but I could be wrong and it happened in London.

But someone gave me tea towels that they had made of their parents standing in front of the sinkhole that had made it into one of the newspapers. I still use them. I use them every day. I love that. They're in full. I mean, they're tea towels, but I use them as dish towels. They're in my full rotation. How much do you love that? And would you ever have thought that part of your persona would be sinkholes? Like in your love of sinkholes? It really suits me. It does. You know what I mean? Yeah. Drama. I like drama and I like things going below. Collapsing. Like collapsing in on itself. Yes. Suits. Can we have your stories about sinkholes and collapsing and fucking? Grandparents. The grandparents stories

are always A plus. Always. Always. So good. And your haunted stories too, please. Or anything. Whatever you think is good. Give it to us. That's right. What you say. Give it to us right away. And also stay sexy and don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an exactly right production. Our producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton, associate producer Alejandra Keck, engineer and mixer Steven Ray Morris, researchers J. Elias and Haley Gray. Send us your hometowns and your fucking hurrays at myfavoritmurder at gmail.com and follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at myfavoritmurder and Twitter at myfavoritmurder. And for more information about this podcast, our live shows, merch or to join the fan cult,

go to myfavoritmurder.com. Rate, review and subscribe.