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Chapter 1: What disturbing lengths did David Feil go to in 'The Last Tenant'?
Today's podcast will feature two stories about people who went to disturbing lengths to carry out their plans. The audio from both 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 The Last Tenant, and it's about a man who was very stubborn all the way until the very end. And the second and final story you'll hear is called The Good Reverend, and it's about a reverend and a vagabond who are involved in a wild mystery.
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 place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to clean the Follow Buttons house.
But instead of cleaning it, just go ahead and bring in a whole wrecking crew to level their property. Okay, let's get into our first story called The Last Tenant. On the morning of July 5th, 2008, a 50-year-old man named David Feil walked up to his apartment in Bishopstoke, which is a small village in southern England. So this apartment complex was massive.
It took up an entire block, and it was comprised of several two-story buildings. When David moved in eight years earlier, this apartment complex was sort of bustling and doing quite well. There were loads of tenants. It was well-kept. I mean, it was a nice place to live. But now, the place was kind of fallen into disrepair. There were weeds everywhere. It was kind of dirty. There was graffiti.
I mean, buildings were all boarded up. I mean, this place really had fallen on hard times, almost like it was abandoned. And in many regards, it basically was. In fact, David was literally the last tenant in the entire complex. There were a total of 72 apartments in this complex, but 71 of them were boarded up and totally abandoned. It was just this last apartment that David lived in.
And on this day, as David approached his front door, he noticed there was something taped to it. It was a piece of paper. So he walked up and he read it and he quickly understood it was an eviction notice. They were kicking him out. And so he angrily ripped it off the door and he went inside his cramped small apartment.
You know, there's a full-size billiard table sitting right in his living room and everything was just tight and on top of each other. But this was David's home. He loved it here. He did not want to leave. And so he took this eviction notice and he went over to the kitchen and he just threw it on top of a pile of other papers that were mostly all from the company that owned this complex.
The company was called Atlantic Housing. So part of the reason this building had really fallen on hard times here is because two years earlier, Atlantic Housing had decided to tear this place down. And so they had offered to help relocate all the tenants and basically everybody else had agreed to leave and, you know, take the assistance from Atlantic Housing, but not David. He refused to leave.
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Chapter 2: What was David Feil's protest against his eviction?
And so he thought to himself, you know what? They can try to evict me, but I'm not leaving. And so David decides he's going to protest, but not some little protest. He's going to do something that is so big, so extreme, that it will guarantee people will pay attention and recognize that this ruling is wrong. And David knew exactly how he was going to do that.
And so later that afternoon, David made his way over to his storage closet, and he pulled out some rope, an electric timer, and a power tool, and he brought these supplies over to his living room.
And there, David rigged up this elaborate trap that he was designing specifically so that when Atlantic Housing or the police or whoever it was that showed up to evict him, that when they opened his door, they would have to be confronted by this trap. And for David, he felt like this was his last-ditch effort to prove once and for all that this eviction was wrong.
A few hours later, two police officers, along with David's very worried parents, stood outside of David's apartment. Earlier that afternoon, David's parents had tried to get in touch with David and they had called him repeatedly, but he hadn't answered.
And so at some point they had driven over to his apartment and they had pounded on the door and tried to get his attention, but he hadn't come to the door However, they had heard this strange sound coming from inside the apartment, and it was unsettling enough, and considering the whole circumstance of not being able to get in touch with their son, that they decided to call the police.
And so when they got there, you know, the police, they're knocking on the door, yelling out for David, but still no answer. And the police too, they can clearly hear this strange sound, which almost sounded like a mechanical whirring sound or something. They couldn't quite place it, but there definitely was something odd happening in this apartment.
And so given the fact that there's real concern around what's going on with David, the police decide to kick in the door and see what's going on. And so they get out of the way, and one of the officers steps back and kicks the door down. And as soon as the door flies open, that loud mechanical whirring sound becomes
way louder, so loud, and they suddenly get a complete view into the apartment and all of them just froze and gasped. So the trap that David had built had functioned exactly as he intended it to. Basically, the authorities were gonna come in the front door and be horrified by what they saw because this trap really was not for them as much as it was for David.
He was sort of putting himself into a trap as a display of his protest that you can't pull me out of here. And now authorities have arrived and they've seen the results of this trap.
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Chapter 3: How did the authorities react to David's extreme measures?
I need to save myself. And so the reverend ran and grabbed that hatchet and he forced Gideon to take off all his clothes and then he made Gideon hand the clothes over. And once the reverend had those clothes, he hacked Gideon to pieces and then burned his body in that stove.
then after this horrific murder the reverend took his own suit and basically ripped it off and shredded it to bits and then kind of threw it all around the church to make it seem like he had been the one who was killed and that was his skull inside of the stove and then he put on all of gideon browning's clothes the brown dirty shirt and the long coat and then he traveled 500 miles to miranda hughes's boarding house where he went inside and booked a room under the pseudonym john elder
And while the Reverend was hiding out inside of this boarding house, the police in Rattle Run very quickly figured out that the body inside of the church, the skull inside of the stove and the remains that were in there, did not belong to Reverend Carmichael, they belonged to Gideon Browning.
And so immediately it went from, you know, Gideon Browning must have done it, to no, no, no, Reverend Carmichael is the killer and he killed Gideon. But before they could track the Reverend down, Reverend Carmichael, aka John Elder, had gone into that outhouse and slit his own throat.
However, when the police searched John Elder's body, so Reverend Carmichael's body, they would find that bloodstained letter addressed to the sheriff in Rattle Run, and basically it was a confession.
Now, granted, it was the confession of Reverend Carmichael, who genuinely believed Gideon had hypnotized him and had all these special powers, and he basically was acting in self-defense, but nonetheless, it was still a confession to murder. Now, of course, there's lots of details in the story that we can't be totally sure of.
Like, we don't really know what the discussions were like between Reverend Carmichael and Gideon Browning when they met on that road and then eventually made their way to the church and the murder happened. This is basically just the best theory around what happened.
Also, it's worth noting that there was a history of mental illness in Reverend Carmichael's family, but this story happened at a time when nobody took mental health seriously, and so it's very unlikely that even if authorities had known about that, that this crime could have been prevented.
A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballin Podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone and Cole Ocasio.
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