Chapter 1: What are the three unsettling stories about devotion and madness?
Today's podcast will feature three stories about acts so strange and unsettling, they blur the line between devotion and madness. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.
The first story you'll hear is called Exit Interviews, and it's about one of the most infamous cult cases in history. The second story you'll hear is called A Family Ritual, and it's about a sickening act a family performs together. Keep in mind, for this story, listener discretion is advised. And the third and final story you'll hear is called The Helping Hand.
And in this story, a literal hand washes up on a beach in Florida, after which a very mysterious case begins to unravel. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays.
So if that's of interest to you, please offer to make the like button a nice peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But make sure you employ a six to one peanut butter to jelly ratio. Okay, let's get into our first story called Exit Interviews. In the early 1970s, a man named Marshall Applewhite was fired from his music teaching job for having an inappropriate relationship with a male student.
Shortly after, he admitted himself into a psychiatric institution where he met a nurse who worked there named Bonnie Nettles. Both had a deep interest in biblical prophecy, and Applewhite, after meeting Nettles, was convinced they had met in a previous life. Nettles agreed and took it a step further, saying extraterrestrials had come to her and preordained that she would someday meet Applewhite.
The two did not have a romantic relationship at all. It was strictly platonic. They bonded over a desire to ascend to a higher level of existence and ultimately reach the kingdom of heaven. Applewhite began calling himself Bo, and Nettles became Peep, and together, they would start an infamous cult known as Heaven's Gate.
The premise of Heaven's Gate was that an alien spacecraft that they simply called the UFO was going to come to Earth and whisk away Heaven's Gate cult members, elevating them to a new world and a better life that they referred to as Tela, or the evolutionary level above human. There was a catch, though. Anybody on Earth who did not get on the UFO whenever it got here would be recycled, i.e.
destroyed, along with everybody else on Earth. And then at some point, a new human population would grow and another UFO would come and whoever got on that would be saved over and over and over again. That was just how it worked. And Bo and Peep were telling everyone they talked to about Heaven's Gate that we're already in end times.
Apparently there were signs that this UFO is going to be here any day. And so now is the time to join the cult. And so by 1975, Bo and Peep had recruited 20 people to be a part of their cult, which meant they gave up their families, they gave up their possessions. They basically gave up everything in their life and moved to Colorado to live in total poverty as they waited for this UFO to arrive.
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Chapter 2: What is the story behind the infamous cult case of Heaven's Gate?
They are remarkably cheerful and happy considering what they all know they are about to do. Here are some highlights from those exit interviews.
Okay, we have Thirsotty with us, and I believe that you chose the name Thirsotty because you wanted to be reminded of your thirst for next level knowledge, is that correct?
That's right. I know my vehicle, or this vehicle that I'm wearing, is pretty nervous, pretty scared. Some may say, well, boy, that's quite an irreversible step.
This isn't a troubling circumstance. Don't take it as that. It's just a gateway, just a doorway. Okay, thank you. You're going to find this old crummy vehicle in a bunk someplace that I'll probably be watching when you check it out and observe your responses and your reaction when you look at these vehicles.
And they're all nothing but containers that we've used and bored for the short amount of time. People in the world who thought that I had completely lost my marbles, they're not right. Our next story is called A Family Ritual.
On April 9th, 2005, in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, a young man was home alone inside of his apartment watching TV. And as he sat there watching TV, he heard a loud thumping sound coming from right above him. As soon as he heard it, he muted his TV and he listened for a second. And a minute later, he heard it again, a loud thump. And then he heard another one and another one and another one.
And before long, all he heard was a succession of thumps and also what sounded like chanting coming from upstairs. However, as unusual as these types of sounds might be to the average person, to this young man, these actually weren't that weird. Because the family that lived right above him, the Wu family, were pretty eccentric.
They were very religious people who often did these ceremonial dances and rituals at all hours, and a lot of times they involved stomping around and chanting really loudly. And as annoying as that could be, this young man never complained.
He was very respectful of the Wu family, and he knew, you know, these sounds he was hearing were connected to their religion, and he felt like that was none of his business. And so, like he did basically every other time he would hear these noises, he simply turned the volume up on his TV and tried to forget about them.
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Chapter 3: What led to the tragic events of the Heaven's Gate cult members?
And so Captain Lewis asked Paula about Willie's burial, and she would tell him that Willie had actually died in poverty without any family members to help cover his burial expenses. However, when Paula had found out about this, she said she had agreed to do the burial anyways for no cost as sort of a community service.
However, when Captain Lewis poked and prodded and tried to ask for more information about exactly what that meant, Paula would eventually concede that there actually was slightly more to her rationale behind wanting to do Willie's burial. It was not just for charity. Two days after this interview, police arrested both Paula and her son.
And at Paula's trial, the truth surrounding what happened to Willie finally came out. It would turn out Paula's funeral home business was really struggling to the point where if she couldn't start generating some real money, her business might go under and she couldn't have that. And so Paula decided she would conduct a prosperity ritual to write her business.
But to perform this prosperity ritual, Paula needed a body. And so along comes Willie Suttle, who's died in poverty and his family can't afford his funeral. And Paula says, don't worry, I'll take him on for free. But really what she needed was Willie's body. And once Paula and her son had possession of Willie's body, they began the ritual.
which started with Paula's son carefully cutting off Willie's left hand, and then the two of them cut Willie's midsection open, removed all his internal organs, and then Paula got out all these voodoo dolls, and she wrote on pieces of paper the names of the other funeral homes, her competitors in the area, and she pinned these pieces of paper to each of these voodoo dolls, and then she took those voodoo dolls and jammed them inside of Willie's abdomen in the empty cavity they had created, and then they stitched them back up.
And then she took Willie's body and his organs, and she chucked them into a cheap casket and had him buried. And then she also took the hand that her son had removed, she put it inside of a plastic bag, added some weight to it, and chucked it into the Manatee River.
Paula believed this voodoo ritual would literally cause the owners of the other funeral homes, whose businesses she wrote down on the dolls and jammed inside of Willie's body, that this ritual would literally cause all of them to be struck down and killed, putting their businesses out of business, thereby leading to her business prospering once again.
However, none of these things came to fruition. The ritual did not work the way Paula intended it to. Instead, the hand that she had thrown into the river ultimately washed ashore, and before long, the police figured out what Paula and her son had done. In 1999, so two years after Willie's hand had washed up on shore, Paula and her son were found guilty of desecrating Willie's corpse.
Paula's son ultimately served one year in prison. As for Paula, her conviction was actually quickly overturned due to a technicality. It was discovered that during an interview with Paula that police detectives told her that she could not be convicted if this ritual was part of a religious practice, that she was protected under the U.S. Constitution.
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