Episode 186 - Rotating Home

Welcome to Otherworld, I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode actually comes from two other Wagner's, Janine and her husband Ethan, two possibly long lost relatives of mine. The story takes place in Texas, but these two met when Ethan was in Fort Knox, Kentucky in 2007. They were both just 18 years old at the time, and Ethan had recently enlisted in the Army. I personally love the story about how these two met. There are some really deep, early 2000s references in there. Aside from that though, this episode is very dark. I interview these people a while back, and there are some details in this story that freak me out every time I think about them, and I find myself thinking about them fairly often. Ethan and Janine eventually got married, and then Ethan was sent overseas to Iraq. Over there, he became best friends with a medic in his unit named Mark. The two of them went through some horrific stuff together, and I'll let Ethan tell that part himself. Ethan shared another story from Iraq that couldn't make it into the episode, but I'll be putting that up on our Patreon. But the night this episode was about didn't happen in Iraq. It happened after Ethan and Mark came home on a random night when a few friends decided to hang out and watch a movie together. This episode is called Rotating Home, and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello? Is this Bobbie? Look at him. That it's core of the science you can't argue with. That's a story to bow to the sun. It's almost frustrating that it's happened. I'm gonna die of buzzard. It's limbs were just like a rock. Everybody knows that it's a lie. Even if it takes them in. My name's Janine Wagner. I am originally from Southern Indiana just across the river from Louisville, Kentucky, where they run the Derby. So Kentucky, and I am 38. So I grew up in a pretty rural little town in Indiana, grew up slow, grew up good. Good parents were married over 45 years when my mom passed, so good family. And I met my husband when I was 18, and he was in the Army at Basic Training, and I met him online before online dating got weird back in 2008. We talked online for a couple days, really hit it off, ended up talking on the phone for many hours straight. And then when we were getting off the phone because I can't get off the phone, not me too in person. So shortly thereafter, he drove the couple hours I was in Cincinnati at the time with a friend for a birthday and grew up there and met me. Can I ask, what dating site were you on? One that doesn't exist anymore, but it's called True.com. Wow, I've never heard of that, actually. That's crazy. And the only two main sites that I remember being around at the time, the two that I was on, so you had match, and match was the one that was like the really expensive cost money. And then you had True, which was free, and one called Spend the Bottle. Don't ask me, like I don't even know if that one still exists. But True was the one that I met him on, and the funniest things I remember looking at his dating profile, and he had his main picture was him in a ball cap, and he's really tan because he was from Florida, and he has a hoodie over his ball cap, and he's just like kind of looking down, like cool, and I remember thinking I was like, oh gosh, this is not my type of guy. I'm like into country boys or nerds, like super nerds, like we're talking, I dressed in blue paint for one of my guy friends, turned boyfriend, for World of Warcraft when it came out, and I was a night out for him, and I dressed up, and that's the kind of nerd, nerd him, I lived in. So here's this guy that looks like he's a guy that plays beer pong, and not my type. And I was like, and I'm hoping I'm gonna talk to him. I don't know. And I was like, well, he has more pictures. Maybe it was just a bad picture and you swipe, and you know, you're going to the next picture, click next picture, and he was in his army greens, a braille, and I was just like, hello, hotness. Oh my gosh. Here I'm a league. You're way too cheap for me. But he talked to me, and he liked me, and he thought I was hot, and I was like, oh, that's awesome. He didn't go to sleep, like we had talked all night, and he's like, I have to meet him. So when I told my girlfriend who we were sharing a hotel room, like a suite, I told her, like, yeah, he's coming up, and she goes, jeez, you're insane. You have not even, you've been talking to him on the internet. You just talk about phone. Like if he's a serial killer, I'm not saving you. So my name's Ethan Wagner. I joined the army in 2007. Actually, during high school on the delayed entry, and then as soon as I graduated, I shipped out the basic training. I was in the army from 2007 to 2014. During that time, I became a cavalry scout, 19 Delta. For those that don't know that is armored reconnaissance is the best way I can put that. It's a frontline combat style job. So I joined the army when I was 17. I was pretty lonely. It's my first time really away from home. Didn't really have a lot of friends. You get close with the guys you're with, but you know, you're pretty lonely, otherwise. So I got on a dating app who was like pretender, I guess. Got on that. I went on one date before my wife, and that was awful. It was definitely a catfish situation before cat fishing was a thing. Then I kind of wrote it off, then just kind of clicked on my wife's profile. We got to talk in that first night. I remember, right? We called each other on the phone, and we talked for, I want to say it was close to eight hours. We talked all night that first time. We didn't even meet each other yet. We were just on the phone. It was, you know, Christmas time 2007. I had some scheduled time off, so I decided she was in Cincinnati with a friend skiing or snowboarding or something. And since then, he's only like an hour and a half drive away. So I hopped in the truck right after pretty much getting off the phone with her and drove up there. And we met and spent, you know, three or four hours together. I think we watched a movie. Very specifically, it was a movie called She's the Man. It was a man of bind's movie where she's a dude plays soccer. And then after that, we dated about six months. During that time, we figured out. I found out that me and the guys that I was with, we all were getting orders to either Fort List, Texas, with First Armored Division, or we were going to Fort Hood, Texas, the first cab division. This was during the search. They need more people. It was time to cycle us into the line unit. Hey, I told her I was like, I want to get married because I'm going to Iraq. It's happening. You know, I was worried about her being taken care of first and foremost. And the army, unless you're married, it doesn't count. Like there's no benefits. There's nothing. So talk to her dad asked for permission. He was very hesitant. In fact, I'm pretty sure he hated me up until like five or six years ago. I mean, I've been married 16, 17 years now. But we were both 18, got married. And then pretty quickly after that, we moved in November of 2008 to Texas. And then both our families were not happy about the situation. We basically had a loathe without without their permission. Once that bandaid got ripped off though, everybody's cool for the most part. And then moved to Texas and I went to Iraq and we got there in November. I went to Iraq and January. It's funny looking back on it because now being a mom of three kids, my kids are going to hear this story and they're going to relive like how mom and dad mate and hopefully don't idealistically go, I can just meet someone and seven months just get married because we got married in secret. Our, my family had a lot of pushback. No surprise. It's an adult Heinz X 2020 that getting married at age 18 is kind of insane. And I laughed because I said my parents were married 45 years my mom passed. They were high school sweethearts. So they got married at 18. So we you're still judging Harsley, but they knew each other for years in high school. So I think it was shocking to my parents, like they really didn't get to know Ethan before I was like, "Hey, I wanna marry him." And it seemed really fast and it was. And, but I think when you know it's right, it's right. And as insane as it was, I don't regret my decision ever. You choose to leave love each other every single day. And that's the secret of making the last. And you have to forgive. 'Cause there's a lot of forgiveness. I had to pretend to like the food fighters for a long time for him. That's his favorite man. And I never listened to the food fight. I was a backstreet boy, he's been seeing like country music fan. And I was like, "Sure, I listen to the food fighters. "I've seen them on TRL." Now we have a lot of music we share, but it was back then it was like, "Oh yeah, I'll find something I agree with you on." We played Halo. We played a lot of Halo, that's what started as how I met all these friends. All these friends used to play Xbox Live. So we all play Halo together. And I'm terrible at it, but he forgave me for it. (laughs) So after we got married very shortly after, we got married in July. We started the PCS, the military move to Texas to Fort Hood. And we had gotten our house and got established. It was a little house just outside the airfield on Fort Hood. It was in a nice little neighborhood. And just after Christmas, he left for Iraq and he was gone for a year. That first deployment was extremely hard. He, they lost one of his friends got blown up by an IED. He had numerous other injuries within his unit, friends getting hurt. And one general man by the name Mark, who was a medic for his unit, this wasn't his first deployment. And I wanna say he knew what to expect, but he was, this wasn't his first rodeo. So he gave a lot of peace to my husband who as tough of a guy as he is and how he pretends everything's okay. He struggled during that first deployment, not only being away from family, but being in a war zone. When you go to sleep and you're hearing bombs go off, they were getting a lot of attacks when they were out on control 'cause my husband's not a desk guy. Now the frontline guys, they're the guys that are getting shot at and blown up and it's rough. And I don't think I was ready for that, but I grew a lot in that year he was gone. And Mark was a very strong person for him and really helped him emotionally process a lot of things he was going through and was that ear to listen. - Got to know Mark and Equate when we were in our holding area doing our slight turn-ups and getting everything ready to go north. It was his second deployment. He was a specialist so he was the next rank above me. He was our medic for our platoon. We had two medics. He kind of took me under his wing in a sense. Me and him had a lot of the same likes. We both, he played a semi-professional football after high school. Me and him were really tied on that. We'd go to the gym, things like that. We got really bonded over that. And he was a good guy and he had some experience. He had been to our act, he'd done the thing. He had a wife, he had three kids. So he kind of understood better than most like what I was going through. It was a lot, you know, you're 18, 19 and you go through training, you don't know what to expect until you get there. And he really helped me mentally get through that just by being a friend and looking out. I would say, beyond a shout out of doubt that Mark was my best friend during that deployment. He was the guy that I could always depend on. We were the tightest with. Me and Mark, we did just about everything you could do together, we did it together. Now that is a lot of missions and screwing around and playing basketball and doing things like that. But in that environment, you really want to loan time and we spend a lot of that valuable loan time to decompress with each other. So like I said, Mark was definitely my best friend. And come on and just like, I hate to put the trope out there. But it was like forest and boba, you know? It's the best, the closest I can get to it as far as what that is. So we crossed the border into Iraq from Kuwait. We crossed over and went up to Mizzoul. Now we were getting ready to start our first mission on February 9th, 2009, which was my wife's birthday. My wife's birthday is really bad luck and I don't go anywhere on it. So that day, the big boss, the battalion commander that we were attached to, he went out into Mizzoul on a mission. When the big boss goes out, he goes to talk to another leader, like an indigenous leader or a shake or something like that. He was going out on a mission and they got hit by a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. And him and his entire crew would kill instantly. That was our welcome to Iraq. This is how this is going to be moment. We were there for only a few days when it happened. I mean, you're talking less than 10 days. So that's where we started. It was very scary. It becomes very real very quickly. Me and Mark, we do missions from, like I said, beginning of February is when we started. And I'm fast-forward to about April. And we had done this mission two dozen times. And just like any other day, we parked our trucks in a defensive formation. It was one road, and then four alleyways coming into that road. We were securing buildings. So our leadership could go in and do their meeting. I was a driver on another truck. Mark's truck was across the street from mine. And we had parked and you inspect the area you're in for any IDs or mines or explosives. So I'm outside of the truck. Mark's across the street doing the same thing. And they had not pulled into the alleyway because there normally is a car there and that wasn't there. And it was a shop owner, the guy who owned the shop that was on the corner. He normally parked there. Well, he pulled up while we were there. And when he pulled in, he set off an ID that Mark was pretty much within two feet of standing on top of. He was standing on a bomb when it went off. I was hit with shrapnel in my helmet and vest, which was very lucky for me. Pretty much at that moment, my world came crashing down. I just-- my buddy was standing there, and now he's gone. I don't know what happened. There was an explosion. I got rocked a little bit by it. I'm confused. I'm worried. And then I see Mark coming out of the smoke of that explosion. He was hit. He took a bunch of shrapnel all over her. But the biggest piece hit him in the ankle and actually severed the artery in his lower leg. When he got in the truck, he was-- he started doing what aid he could to himself. And then my truck commander, which ran over, dove in the truck, and started working on him. So he gets a turn to get the staff starting and puts a turn to get on Mark's leg. And we're 10 minutes from the hospital. So we're doing all this. This is seconds that's going by. And in my mind, and with the adrenaline and everything, it's a very long 45, 50 seconds. They got Mark stabilized enough. They told us we couldn't make the hospital run from where we were in less than 15 minutes. We got there at 9. We were doing 70 down the back streets of Mosul. We had inadvertently set off another IED as we were doing this. I didn't know about it because we had blown past it so quickly. It blew up way behind us. We didn't even know it. Got him back to the fog and into the hospital. And my truck, I said, was the first truck. I pulled past the entrance. And I hopped out. And I was crying like a baby because my best friend was all I knew was he was wounded. He could be dead. I don't know. I was a mess. And I looked at the first person I saw in scrubs. And I said, we've got wounded. And I'll never forget. And it looked like something out of the show, Mash. All of a sudden, everybody had a stethoscope. They were throwing around their neck. And then one dude had a stretcher on like a trolley. And he was running towards me with that stretcher. And yeah, I'll never forget. They had cut most of his clothes off to get to all the wounds and make sure they didn't miss anything. So they pulled him away. And that's the last I saw him for probably two weeks. It was a very chaotic time, like I said, super scared. I was worried about my friend. I was a pretty young kid at the time. So it was rough in that respect. Guys that didn't smoke cigarettes were smoking like chimneys after that. You know, he gets stabilized. He ends up actually dying twice on the table while they're working on him. They bring him back. They do a series of. temporary surgeries to just kind of hold them together. He gets evac to Germany and eventually gets back to the states where they do more intensive surgeries. And we didn't know, this is hindsight. When he actually got back to the US and was stable and could move around a little bit, by the time he got back to Fort Hood, his wife had left, took the kids, and he couldn't bank accounts. So he walked in alone, wounded, and has nothing. Everything's gone. His children, his wife, she had left. I guess she didn't want to deal with it. I'm not sure. So I talked to my wife and I said, hey, Mark's coming back. Would you mind reaching out, helping them out. My wife was called the family writing this group. It's all the wives. They get to get wives, husbands, sons, daughters, et cetera. They all get together and they kind of take care of each other when the guys aren't there. So I asked her, hey, can you look in up on them, check them out and renown again, make sure he's good. We can't do it. And we've got a couple months left. When Mark got hurt, I had met his wife, Candace, at the time. And unfortunately, Candace was not very faithful to her husband. And I learned the hard way that there are a lot of military wives that when their husbands deploy, that they are not faithful. That's a common theme and that's the reason you see it. And all the military shifts. But I really try to be a good influence on her that like you should be faithful to your husband. But eventually she left him and took the kids, and which is what led when he got home. And he was kind of abandoned that when he was up for this surgery after the guys I got in back, I still have pictures of the welcome home. My husband and the way the first cab does when they come home from a deployment, it's called the Cavalry Charge. And they put you on what is like a big football field, size field, and the guys are released from buses and the families are in the other end. And they literally do a canon explosion. And everyone just charge and the everyone runs together. It's insane. And as someone who has five foot four and small in this world, you get lost very easily. And I didn't know that. The second deployment, I had a balloon attached to me. And I became a meeting point for everybody on the second deployment. But this one I didn't know what to expect. So I was all dolled up and I had a big sign and I was looking for him and he couldn't find me. I look over on the bleachers where we had put Mark with some of the other guys that had gotten hurt. They were sitting on top bleachers. My husband was up there hugging Mark before he found me. But that shows like how important he was. And so Mark was due for another surgery. He was recovering from it. And the dormitories where the guys stay, the barracks, aren't really conducive when you're on crutches to get around very easily. And he didn't have anyone to take care of him. So somehow we volunteer. I probably volunteer knowing me. And we were like, hey, come stay with us. She did so much for my husband, come stay at our house. Well, while he was there, he had one of the other guys who I guess he had met when he had gotten back. That was another medic that was in rear attachment, Clark. He wasn't a mutual friend, but he was very nice. He was taking care of Mark and his medical needs in our house. And he stayed with us too temporarily. And one night after his surgery, Ethan had gotten home. We were all sitting on the couch, recited a paranormal activity had just come out on DVD or at least home video. So we had gotten the DVD. And we were like, we're going to watch a scary movie. I don't like scary movies. 'Cause the day I still don't like scary movies, but I love going to Halloween or nights. I love going to those things. I just, for me, if I'm going to watch a horror movie, one's that make logical sense that people were just making dumb decisions. I normally would not watch a paranormal one. I have a healthy respect for the paranormal. I just know there's just something you don't mess with. Although ironically enough growing up my best friend on her birthday, we always pulled out a Weedee board and did the Weedee board. And I never thought that that was a bad thing. So that was almost like a party thing to me. But I grew to have a respect enough that, you know, say a prayer, like some candles have good intentions when you come to the board more than asking about what Backstreet Boy I was going to marry when I was kid. So it was a little different. But my friend Sherry came over, which she was, if Mark was his rock, Sherry, Shireen became mine, Sherry was my rock, she still is one of my best friends, near and dear, even though she lives halfway across the United States, she lives in Texas still. Hi, I'm Sherry. I am one of Janine's friends. And we were super close around this time when we were both military wives in clean Texas. I'm not really a horror movie fan at all. So I didn't, I honestly, I know it's stupid, but I honestly didn't even look at the previews of it. I was thinking I was going to watch the movie behind my fingers, type of thing, you know. And so I go there and I'm thinking, oh, it's like a ghost movie, like a polvergeist thing, you know? But in the movie, when it started going toward the demonic aspect, I was literally like, I'm not watching this. We watched Paranormal Activity, it absolutely scared the crap out of me. But of course, in great fashion, when you're scared, why not talk about any paranormal experience you had? So we're all sitting around and joking and saying, oh man, I can't believe they were able to do that. I was almost a little too real. But Mark was like, oh, you still have a Ouija board? And I was like, yeah, it's in the closet. And there he goes, we should pull it out. Stu's Ouija board. Okay, why not? Why not? So we're going to get the board, we set up the board, we have a candle lit. And we do our little thing of only good intentions, you know? We're protected by God. Kind of it, looking back on it, it's stupid to me that I ever thought that was somehow going to save us from doing. I mean, nothing creepy had happened, so why not? I knew we were fine. We were doing the right things. Sherry, she's from the Philippines originally, her family is. And she looked at me as we're getting the board out. She goes, ah, no, I don't do that kind of stuff. She's like, you don't mess with that. And I'm like, oh, I want me bad, Sherry, come on. She's like, no, no, no. I'll stand by, Carol, watch y'all. That's like a hell no on my part, you know? Because I'm like, not only are you watching something demonic and now you're like literally inviting it. I was like, okay, this is a terrible idea, guys. So she didn't produce it, but she sat there with us. For some reason, we had decided to pull out a Ouija board. I think it was Mark that suggested it. I think in most circles, like 90% of the world thinks it's all just a bunch of hui, or it's, you know, you bought it at Target, you know, it's a board game. It's not, it's not actually paranormal, right? Like that was our thinking back then. We had decided to pull out that Ouija board. And then the weird stuff started happening. After we had lit the candles, we said like, quick prayer of protection that we were going to, you know, be okay doing this. Sherry had already made the decision. She's like, I don't mess with that and walked away. And so it's just Clark, Mark, me and Ethan, sitting at the table, put her hands on it. We're moving her, you know, just wait and see if anything will happen. And Mark asked about, was there something following him that he thought maybe something was looming over him, if he will? So it starts to move. And it doesn't go yes or no or anything else. It starts spelling out a name. My husband doesn't remember it. Sherry doesn't remember. So I know that it started with a Y and I think it was Yara. It was spelling this name out. And at that point, I'm like, I don't think it, I think something's wonky because I had done enough research over the years as we had had the board that, when it started doing that, you stopped. Goodbye, turn the board upside down, closing that door because something wasn't right. It started very slow and it was very small things. The Ouija board was telling us kind of weird stuff. It was, it was like we were talking to an entity. I don't remember, I remember it started the spell its name, but I don't remember what it was. I just, I remember being very scared. Like it's that pittier stomach feeling, like something's not right here. We need to get out of here. And I remember it was, it was masquerading as someone else. But it was getting things wrong. She would ask the question, knowing the answer and it would get it wrong. And then we started getting weird kind of, I don't want to say threatening, but kind of in the pittier stomach, you feel like it's not good. I was like, we gotta stop. And Mark started acting weird. Mark had gotten really quiet. I mean, we'd all been kind of chattering like that was weird. And Mark was just staring off in space. He wasn't talking and he was just kind of looking off. and we're like, you're all right? You okay? And he, nobody could like pull him out of this just kind of 10 mile stair that he was in. And it almost felt like he started like twitching and I don't even know how to like describe it. And we were worried, Clark, I mean, he thought he might be having the same with Sherry. We're like, here's our two medical professionals. Basically, he might be having a seizure because he was, I mean, he was like twitching real strange and his head just doing his little micro movements. The guy Mark, he started getting very uncomfortable because like getting a little bit more squirmy, a little bit more like kept shifting and like kind of acting strange and acting different. I remember him like his head kind of moving like a snake where his like, I guess his neck and average like swaying, almost like a snake. I remember that because it creeped me out. He kept twitching and throwing his head left and right and then like rolling it backwards. It almost looked like somebody kind of like tweaking out on like some kind of drug. To the point where I think this dude's having a heart attack or something, I'm like, what is going on here? And then he had a cross necklace on and then he pulled at it and he goes, it's burning. It's burning. And he flung his necklace off because it's hard to describe him. The male cross necklaces that were very popular in the early 2000s when the real sick went in it. On his chest where it was red. I remember him at one point taking off his crucifix that he was wearing and it had made like a red line. It's like almost like, I don't know if it was like a burn or something and he had removed it. I'm still like remembering it and it's creeping me out. The vibe was like a, I guess a slowly dawning horror that this is not normal. At this point, Mark's been in the state for about an hour and he is sitting in the same place on the couch and very straight back. And like I said, he would twitch and turn his head. He kept sticking his tongue out almost like he was looking at his lips and then almost seemed like he went calm and he just turned his head and he started looking at everyone in the room. And the look on his face, that terrified me. When I say sinister, it doesn't really even do it justice. His eyes were off, his pupils were weird. You look in the face of someone that is not the person that is your friend or who you thought you knew and it's not them. It wasn't Mark. We trained to read body language and things like that and the body language was different. We were trying to figure out what's going on and none of it, none of it's making sense. I remember his eyes, they didn't look like his eyes anymore. He had, they were like a blue-green color eyes and they got darker. I always go back to the eyes. The eyes kind of, it still kind of freaks me out to the days. He would like close his eyes and they would like flutter a lot. She had pinpoint pupils, so you barely saw the pupil in his eye. All the black was almost gone. I remember that because I'm like, that's not something that you can fake. It was almost like a personality shift where I guess, I don't know how to describe it. He was kind of cocky, kind of smug. I know it sounds crazy, but the vibe was off. It felt almost like sucked the energy from the room. It was kind of like a darkness about him that wasn't there before. Suddenly it just felt heavy and dark and oppressive and it just felt wrong. It made me uncomfortable enough that I was like, you know what, I'm, I'm, I always kept because of the Ouija board and I, you do have some sense of knowing that you're not always going to play with nice things when you're on this. There's always that thing and it understand the paranormal. You know, if you believe in God, you believe there's demons. I feel like those things go hand in hand. I went to my bedroom. My mom's side of the family is Catholic. I was never baptized Catholic, but I am a hoarder of things that are sentimental to me. So I still have my grandfather's rosary and his Catholic perbook and these are things that he prayed on and had with him all the time till the day he died. So it was very big deal that they were passed to me. I brought out the book and I had the rosary kind of on the front cover. I had it kind of slung over it and I walked over to Mark and he was standing, he was sitting kind of very upright on the couch and I put it on his back and immediately it was as if I had took a hot pan or something or some hot and put it on his back, he immediately jolted and was in pain. And we lift up his shirt and you see where and I placed it red. And it kind of reminds me of what your skin looks like when you get sunburned, like really bad sunburned, that really deep red because I didn't press hard. And I hadn't even raised his skin nearly just placing it on his back. And at this point we're getting kind of freaked out because he's still talking and he turns to me and he goes, "Your light can't save you now." It's freaking me out. He is now freaked everybody out in the room. At one point he started calling me Jason and I'm like, "You know what my name is. It's not Jason." And he started talking in a weird voice. It was like Mark's voice but it was deeper and raspier. Like at one point I tried to restrain him because he was actually actively trying to hurt himself and he was much stronger than he should have been. I was always, I mean, him were pretty close but I was always strong and a much larger person than him. I couldn't hold him down. He shouldn't have been able to do some of the things he was doing physically. It's like his leg didn't bother him anymore. I remember he started on the couch, I remember correctly. And then as he was riding he slid onto the floor and he was talking, arch back, it looked like he was having a full body spasm like nodding up, like his muscle and the dude was pretty strong dude. I mean, he played running back in middle linebacker, he was a pretty strong dude and he was pretty cut as far as his muscles go and you could see them things. It looked like every muscle in his body had contracted at the same time. I remember a lot of his movements, him moving in a way that he could not move before because he was so injured from my rack, like he was walking with a cane, he had like a lamp and at one point it was almost like his body curved where it was like his head in his feet touching and that was it, like a sea and he was like kind of like bucking and I knew Mark couldn't move like that, like normally, you know, because it would hurt him too much. I remember seeing that and I remember at one point in time he was being choked and when he was being choked, he was turning purple, like turning purple, like someone being a fixated. And I remember being freaked out because there wasn't anything to grab onto, you know what I mean, like it's not like there's something tight around his neck that I could grab and loosen, you know, or anything like that. I just remember him like grunting and then his face turning purple, purple, purple, like he was literally being choked by something and he was scrabbling at it with his hands. Like there was nothing he could grab onto but he was like trying to grab something to pull it away, you know, but there wasn't anything there. I just remember thinking as a nurse, like you can't fake that, like how do you fake that being choked with nothing around you or nothing in your mouth, nothing around your neck, you know what I mean? And how do you fake pinpoint pupils? Like you will usually see that with like drug use and, you know, neurological issues. So those two things stuck out to me because it felt like you can't fake that. And I remember that really like freaking me out because I'm like, you can't just explain this away. You know, it's not like I saw him take drugs or something and now he's acting crazy. All right, we'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is brought to you by RocketMoney. I used to spend way too much time staring at my credit card statements, genuinely stressing out over where my paycheck was disappearing each month and then I started using RocketMoney and it totally shifted how I handle my finances. It connects all of your accounts into one place with a seamless dashboard so you can actually see your. your entire financial picture in one place. My favorite part is how it tracks all your recurring charges. I was shocked to find a couple forgotten subscriptions, quietly draining my bank account every single month. But Rocket Money makes it super simple to identify them and cancel unwanted ones right in the app with just a few taps. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel unwanted subscriptions. Monitor's your spending and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at rock-and-money.com/otherworld. That's rock-and-money.com/otherworld. The wilderness can hide a lot, but it can't hide the truth forever. I'm Delia DeAmber, a host of park predators. And every week, I investigate true crime cases, hidden in national parks, forests, and beaches. I follow every lead, every clue, and every overlooked detail. Because even when a trail seems to disappear, the truth has a way of resurfacing. Listen to park predators wherever you get your podcasts. Get ready for more of the gripping mysteries you love because forensic files is back and they're revisiting some of your favorite episodes. Come along as investigators, scientists, and experts, peace together evidence, clues, and data in search of the answers behind violent crimes, unexplainable mysteries, and other strange occurrences. Listen to forensic files on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, I wanna tell you about a head gum podcast. I think you're gonna love. It's called Too Scary Didn't Watch. Have you ever read the entire plot of a horror movie on Wikipedia because you have to know what happens but are terrified to actually watch it? Obviously, I do not fit that description, but I know many people who do, including a friend of mine that had nightmares just from seeing a poster of a certain horror movie. If you are like that, Too Scary Didn't Watch is exactly what you need. It's hosted by Sammy Smart, Emily Gonzalez, and Henley Cox. Too Scary Didn't Watch is a horror movie recap podcast that gives you all the gory details of scary movies without you ever having to actually watch them. They've recapped almost 200 movies from classics like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby to recent horrors like Hereditary and Barbarian. The past guests include Zach Kregger, Haley Joel Osment, Allison Williams, Sarah Sherman, friend of the show, shout out, Paul F. Tomkins, and many more. So, ditch Wikipedia and join Emily, Henley, and Sammy as they face their fears and explore the wild world of horror, one recap at a time. Subscribe to Too Scary Didn't Watch on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday. I took a knife away from a guy once that was intent on killing me. I took it up on the knife, and I tacked two to circle around his heart, lasting circle. That was a very intimate act. He said, "Here's a list of all Aaron Brotherhood dropouts. Go through this list, send a letter to each one of these M.F.A. rats, and ask them if you could come and interview them for me." Tell me, Eric, you're kind of a borderline con person most of your life, too, but you got conned by a con man. Blood memory, a new podcast series from Love and Radio. Search for blood memory, wherever you get your podcasts. Like I said, arching his bag, throwing his legs around, and stuff, even me, 20-year-old me couldn't do with my joints. He was a couple years old with me. He was at the time. He was 23 or 24. He had this very distinctive one vein in his neck every time he worked out at pop. And that thing was going-- all of his muscles were bulging. That vein sticks out to me the more I think about it. But actually, at one point, I looked at Clark, and I thought he was having a seizure, which I'd never seen-- and I still, thankfully, have never seen one in real life. So I looked at Clark, and I go, hey, is this guy having a seizure? He goes, no, he's not-- and we're trying to put him in a recovery position, and he's not having it. At the time, I was very, very strong. Age makes us all pretty weak in the end. But normally, I could have restrained him pretty easily. And it's not-- that wouldn't happen in that day. He shouldn't have been that strong. He shouldn't have been able to put weight on his leg like he was. This is only a couple months removed from his-- I think that was surgery five or six. I think he had a total of 12 surgery zones leg. But yeah, he shouldn't have been able to do half the things he was doing without at least an intense amount of pain. It just, as we kept going on, I'm getting more and more worried. I'm kind of freaking out, and I'm not going to lie to you. I'm freaking out. I remember that it had been going on so long, and he went down on the ground. And he kind of came off the couch. And they were trying to lay him flat, thinking he was having a seizure at this point. And he was bending backwards. It was making me really upset, because I thought at that point, if this wasn't possession, and he was having a seizure, were we missing something new? We need to call him on one. That was the other thing. But here we have a nurse and a medic. I trust these two people to know their stuff. They're very knowledgeable folks. So if that were the case, they wouldn't know. For me, as a medical person, this is-- I'm thinking he's not faking this. Like, you can't fake your eyes going-- being pinpoint people as you can't fake getting, like, hypoxic, like you're being choked to death by yourself, you know? Sherry is standing back, kind of having that moment of, I told you so. You shouldn't have messed with the Ouija board. We all knew better. But we're trying to get answers like, well, what do we do? None of us are super religious people who are sitting here. None of us had the answers to how to help him. And I called the chaplains office trying to see if there was a Catholic priest on duty and could come to our house and because that was the answer that I thought would solve it. They laughed at me on the phone when I tried to say, I think, our friends possessed. They were like, how drunk is he? We didn't drink. How drunk are you? I did not drink. Well, ma'am, if it's still a problem, you can submit something in the morning or form. And I'm like, that's right. Military, I'm deocrecy, yay. We were so scared and worried. We came out right with it. I think my friend has a demonic possession right now and we need help. As plain as we could put it out there, and they were like, either we don't handle that or you're full of it with what we were getting. And to be honest, if I was in their shoes, I think they're crazy. So some drunk ass soldiers screw it off somewhere just wasting our time. So we get off the phone and Sherry goes, you know, my little sister, she's at a youth conference this weekend actually, a youth retreat with the church. Let me call her. Maybe she can talk to her pastor there. A youth pastor. So she calls him and the pastor speaks to Mark. And I am not privy to that conversation I went ahead, but I guess he even freaked out the pastor. And I remember them singing songs because I had it on speaker. I had my phone on speaker. And I remember them singing like hymns and stuff, Mark or whatever was getting mad about it. And so as the pastor comes to the phone, and he's praying. And Mark who's never talked to this guy, you know, there is absolutely no connection to him, says, well, hello there pastor and he says his name. Like they were friends. Like he knew him. And I remember the pastor being really like mad at it. Like, no, like you do not know me. You know, like just mad that the demon knew who he was and was like talking to him like in a familiar way. He was also taunting him while he's trying to read scripture. And I don't know how the dude got through it, honestly. Like he did that guy did give a beat while he was going. Mark would call him out and call him by his name. If I remember right, he was calling out family members of this guy. And that guy wouldn't just didn't stop. And I remember he said, I knew your grandfather or something like that. And he would do things like that. He would say things like, oh, I've seen where you live. You know, there'd be things like that. Trying to get like dig into and just get under the skin of by attacking loved ones. He started to say things to people that only they knew, like dark secrets or names of people that no one else would know about, but that person almost kind of to prove that, hey, I'm super powerful. And I know these things about you. I'm powerful, I am all knowing. I know things that you don't want anyone to find out about you. And that was like the kind of vibe he was giving off. And he knew he could squash us like a bug if he wanted. A one big thing I remember was making eye contact with whatever it was. And it winked at me and it was so malevolent that it just I shrank away. Because I didn't want it to, I guess, acknowledge me and bring it into its world, you know? I kept it on speaker. I still remember my sister's friend, like I could hear her sobbing while she was singing. Like I think they were all scared in their own way even though they were far away. But I remember them seeing him and he's just telling them to shut up. And like, I don't want to hear this and stuff like that. - Now I don't remember who grabbed the cross. There was a cross. And as these prayers are going on, we take the cross and we put it on him. I believe it's on his back. Right, right, the base of his shoulders and neck. Where his shoulders neck me. And the phone was in front of him. And he would win so away from the cross. To the point where I thought I was actually hurting him to touch it and not living in reality. I'm like, there's no way it's just a piece of metal. It looked like it burned him. He said it hurt and somebody had pulled his shirt back. And it was red marks like he had just been burned with like a lighter or a cigarette or something. During, you know, we're going back and forth doing, you know, we don't want to put the cross on constantly 'cause it obviously is distressing him. And I don't want to like cause something else, some other problem. I remember him looking me dead in the eyes. And there, this pastor group is going between singing hymns and actually reading scripture. They're like flipping back and forth. He would re-scripture for a while and then they would sing. They would all sing together. And then he would go back to scripture for a little while and then they'd all sing together. He goes, "You want to see something funny?" And I go, "What do you mean?" And he goes, "Watch this." And he said something. I don't know what it was 'cause it wasn't a word I'd ever heard before. And this phone was on speaker as a cell phone on speaker. It went to static. Just pure, you couldn't hear anything coming across that phone anymore. (eerie music) And then he could turn it off and on. He would say that word and it would just come right back. Right? Like it was. And then it would, he'd do it again. It would come right out. And I'm like, "Whoa, what is going on?" And you just not prepared in any sense. The phone goes static. Like you've lost signal. And the phone's now, you lose signal, it just blurts out. This was like static on a radio. And like he's trying to show, "Look what I can do." And if we were not already freaked out, this is the accumulation of, "I'm done, I'm out, I'm out." And we didn't know what to do 'cause it didn't seem like it was affecting him. - I'm a combative person. And there's a certain point where being caring and nice is not getting me anywhere. I've got to do something. And I think, if I remember Greg, I eventually restrained him against me. And I held him there. This is the only thing I could think to do. It was basically a big ass bare-hoat and just hold on to him. I guess in my mind I held on to the thought that, he's just screwed with me for quite a long time. You get a couple hours into this and you're like, "All right, the game's not funny anymore." But I don't have anything hard to hold on to that says, "This is what I think it is." Him with that phone thing, that phone disconcerted me more when he could turn it on and off with just his voice. It just freaks me out. That was the, for me, that was the moment where I knew I was dealing with something. 'Cause in the back of your mind, you're trying to ride it off. And no matter what, this is not, there's no way this could be a possession. This guy is, something else is going on on it. That was the moment for me. When somebody would, I remember the guy was reading the scripture. He would, he would talk about it like he was there. He would say things like, "That's not how it happened." Say, the verse was about Mark or one of the apostles. He would say, "That guy didn't know what he was doing." He would talk about it like he was a witness to or a Jason to it like in real life. - I remember him reading Bible verses without a Bible in front of him. Like he was just spouting Bible verses off. And when I had grabbed a Bible to read what he was talking about, it was about demons. Is this a guy who normally could quote Bible verses like that? - No, absolutely not. I know, for sure, one of them is when Jesus cast a demon into the pigs and they ran off a cliff and drowned themselves. He would just say like, "Mark 18, da, da, da, da, da, you know, read it." And I was like, you know, like, so I don't know if Janine had a Bible or someone had a Bible. So I grabbed it and was looking up the verses he was reading out loud. - I guess being naive enough to think that in the real world you can just call a church and we'll send somebody right away when something's happening, but they won't. Like, that's not real. I didn't have any answers. I didn't know what to do. - It kind of started to calm down slightly towards the end of the phone call. Like, he was not saying weird things and for the lack of a better term. It seemed like whatever we were doing with this phone and the cross and I remember we had a physical Bible with us, all that kind of combo was working. He was starting to, starting to come out of it. - They moved him to our, one of our guest veterans and the boys kind of kicked Sherry and I out. - I'm holding him like a baby with his head on my chest and he's coming down and coming out of whatever just happened. And it was, it's kind of a, it kind of went away like a tide going out, you know. And he was just laying on my chest and I remember somebody, I might have been Clark, and somebody said don't let him just lay on your chest. You could pass whatever is going on with him to you and that's what the people around me, you know, the other people in the room were worried about and I'm just trying to get my buddy back. And I was like, don't worry about it, it's fine. I held him for probably two to three hours. And then we're talking, the sun's coming up pretty quickly now. I mean, we're getting into 6 a.m. and we've been at this all night. I was exhausted, everybody else was, they looked tired but I was just, if it helped, I was doing it and be damned if there was any consequences or what would happen to me. So he kind of came out of it, had no recollection whatsoever of anything that transpired. Talking to him more, he'd actually, his last memory was before the movie ended. He had no memory from probably about three quarters away through the movie to the point where he woke up in my arms. He didn't remember any of it. You can imagine when your friends drinking really, really hard and having that black out episode of being drunk, that's about what his memory was. And he actually assumed he drank and he didn't because with his injury, he couldn't and he wasn't recommended for him to, especially trying to recover after surgery. So he has no memory of that happening. Like it was a blip on his radar. He didn't remember anything that night. He woke up and he was like, dazed. And he was just like, what happened? He's like, I feel like I've been hit by a truck. Like he had no memory of what happened. And I just remember him saying like, everything hurts and he feels like he got hit by a car. And we're talking, this is like eight hour period that we were going through this. Had no memory of it was weirded out because we were acting weird because of what we just went through and he goes, what is wrong with you guys? What's going on? Why am I sleeping on your chest? But when he came out of, he had nothing. No memory whatsoever. We kind of explained it to him, but and we didn't like talk about it beforehand but we didn't go into high detail with him. He said, hey, some rich stuff happened. You got out of hand, just played it off. I didn't want to worry him so much, it was. probably a couple weeks later that we it was it was me and me and my wife for sure I don't know if anybody else was with us. We actually sat down and explained to him what had happened. I think that he had said to me at that time and we had kind of did the play by play with him on what had happened that night. It's sticking out to me that he had gone through that before. He had had this situation happen to him previously. That was the immediate aftermath. Needless to say our our relationship whenever really was the same after that. He didn't come around as much. It's not that we didn't want him but he just didn't. I think he changed and he didn't realize it so he didn't hang out at the house as much. Relatively quickly as probably within a month of this incident he had had some issues mentally and he was put on what we call linosight so it's basically somebody has to be able to see you at all times meaning he had to sleep guarded in an area that somebody could see you. During that he had a surgery scheduled. He got up one morning and he looked at the guard and he said hey I got to go to my surgery and walked out and didn't go to his surgery just vanished. We didn't know what happened to him. What was going on we had no idea. All of a sudden marks gone. Nobody can get a hold of him. Nobody could find him. He was declared a wall. What it ended up happening is he had he had had enough of the army and he had left and gone back home and then about eight months later his leg was bothering so much. He went to go to a good treatment. You have basically a warrant for your arrest at that point and he was arrested and brought back to Fort Hood to be processed out of the army once and for all. More or less like that's the last last that's the last time I spoke to him. We're talking the end of 2010 beginning of 2011 was the last time I laid eyeballs physically on him and spoke to him and the social media world as it is we didn't really reconnect but you know we friended each other on Facebook since. After that incident that house never felt the same. I have never touched the Weedy board since then that board I put it upside and put the placard upside down the board folded upside down put everything in their box. I still own this board it sits and claws it and I will never touch it again because I don't know how to properly get rid of it. I don't want I don't want touch it. I don't want to do anything. I've read horror stories that people just throwing them out and horrible things happening so I won't do that. I just keep it in the back of my closet and just won't touch it. That house felt horrible. I'm so glad it was a rental. I mean I feel bad for whoever moved in afterwards but it gave a lot of creepy feelings after that experience. Kind of the feeling like someone was watching you. I truly in that house never felt comfortable 100% after that incident and lucky for us I guess in some ways is that my husband as soon as he got home he knew that there would be another deployment to Iraq and it wasn't but less than a year later he was back in Iraq again. During the second deployment I moved back to Indiana with my family just stay with them because my mom her health was going down hill so I went home. We left that house I was so happy to get out of that house. I was so happy and I am happy that we never touched the board again. After that my husband got out of the military we moved to Florida and the only scary incident we ever had was that we talked about. In my mind what it actually happened that night was that Mark was predisposition for severe PTSD that opened him up mentally to being attacked by an outside supernatural force whether it be demonic or otherwise that's what I think happened. I think both things are linked. He had a severe PTSD issue that he had not dealt with and at that time we did not have the tools with that we do now to deal with and that turmoil and that that mental health problem opened him up to an outside force that has done irrevocable damage to his life since that point and as far as you know what I believe it I would have never until I had seen it I would have never thought it would have actually happened. I would have thought all that was just movie stuff and we wouldn't have to. that doesn't happen in real life. No way but yeah it definitely happened to me and watching it in real time. Yeah it's scarred me. It's something that I'll never forget the feelings. Some of the details I've gotten fuzzy over the years but the feelings I had and the fear not only for my friend but you don't know what's happening and you can't explain it. It shakes you too. And whatever in my opinion whatever was following him did him no favors on top of everything else that happened to him. How confident are you in the name Yara? Somewhere in the 70% range. It's gonna sound funny how my brain will remember things in the weirdest ways and why I lean towards Yara or somewhere in that realm was I remember when it spelled out the name it made me think of an old Nintendo or Atari game I used to play like NES the Atari years and it had a bug on the front it was like Yaris but it wasn't Yaris it was Yara and that's why I thought it was so weird I was like oh it's almost like the Atari game. I'm showing my age here but a long time gamer but that's what that it was just such a weird name it would not be something that any of us would have just filled out. I think that's like an Arabic girl's name so like do you think there's a chance that had some kind of relevance to whatever he was doing during his deployments? I don't know I mean Mark and Ethan both had some stories of what they did over there I know between the first and second deployment from my husband at least I can speak for him there were a lot of fire fights there were a lot of guys getting hurt there were I mean my husband has some demons of his own since he has some I guess things that are gonna sit heavy with him military men especially those that are combat veterans have very dark sense of humor because I think that's how they deal with the trauma of what they see and what they experience over there and when you are told the carry a gun sometimes that means shame people that you may or may not know if they're threat but they've potentially put themselves in a situation where it would make them look like a threat it's a lot carry emotionally mentally everything so a lot of them turned a dark paper and the story that I've heard from my husband and what he has seen and done over there and what I can only imagine Mark who had even more deployments under his belt than Ethan and ones that were much more I guess much worse I would not put it past that it could be related to something over there or something he had went through because if I just base it off of what my husband's experience is in first cab or like with with that unit they saw a lot of action they saw a lot of firefighters they saw a lot of roadside bombs and IDs and things like that so I would not put it past that Mark had experienced something or Lord help that something had attached itself from over there in the beginning it freaked me out because I was actually more worried that he was having a medical episode and I mean here's this guy who helped my husband survive his first deployment in Iraq where not everybody came home but as it progressed you realize yeah this isn't medical I I could handle if he was having a PTSD episode I could handle if he thinks he's back in Iraq and you know gonna come after it I got two big strong guys in Clark and Ethan that could step in there and restrain him not like I'm alone with him but it's a whole different ballgame it was terrifying because the the other side of it is you don't know what to do no one gives you directions oh your friend got possessed what do you do I have no idea you know I don't know Like, I thought maybe putting that book on his back was gonna help him somehow. I don't know why that was an idea, but it felt like a good idea. And there were plenty of times during the time my husband was gone. It was my first time being away from home that I would hear every bump in the night in that house and think someone was gonna break in. What am I gonna do? My husband left me a loaded rifle to save. Someone breaks in. You take the safety off and shoot. I never shot a gun in my life. And I was terrified of that, but that seemed more manageable looking back on it. If that would have happened compared to what we experienced that night. 'Cause there's no right answer. There's no way to help. There's no way to defeat it. You don't know what to do. And then when you're calling, the people you think are supposed to help you. You're calling a chaplain who is a man of God and you assume if they're in the church that they're gonna have an answer for that. I will never forget absolutely have terrifying, it felt like to feel like you're helpless. And that's the worst feeling in the world. To not have an answer how to fix it. (ominous music) Thank you to Janine, Ethan, and Sherry for speaking to me. This is one of those episodes that has really stuck with me. And part of why it's so compelling to me is the amount of witnesses that were there. One was a nurse, another, an arreametic. On top of that, these are people who have seen a lot. I'd imagine they are not easily phased and it's clear to me that this event really stuck with them and it's not something that they enjoy reliving. The way Mark kept taunting and threatening people around him, saying those disjointed and ominous things like calling Ethan Jason and saying, I knew your grandpa quoting long Bible verses and knowing information about people he couldn't possibly know. And then kind of turning playful and somehow making that cell phone turnostatic. All while this random pastor is trying his best to help them, all of that really irks me. The highly specific and also fragmented nature of it is part of why I find it so haunting. Some of the possible explanations for possession include seizures or extreme mental health crises. In this situation, not only were there multiple people present equipped and trained to handle such situations, there would also be many people available on base that could help with that as well. And I think everyone in that room would have preferred that to be the case. Instead, they were stuck desperately calling the base chaplain who did not take them seriously at all and looking for anybody who could help them out with this really frightening situation. I did try my best to track down that pastor who they spoke to on the phone but had no luck. I found myself wondering how he thinks back to that day, getting such an urgent phone call while at a busy conference. I could not reach out to Mark for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is that he couldn't remember this event at all. The last detail that has stuck with me is that name Yara. If that was the name, Janine isn't 100% sure after all these years. If it is Yara, that is an Arabic girls name and part of me wonders if that has a significance to Mark's two tours in the Middle East. It's also a name that appears in the aromatic version of the Old Testament. That being said, it's possible that the name could have been slightly different so it remains a mystery. To me, this isn't just a story about possession. It's about the horrors of war, decades of violence being unleashed on a place and what that does to the people involved. I mentioned before that Ethan had another story from his time in Iraq, a paranormal story in fact. It couldn't really fit into this episode, but I'm gonna put it on our Patreon because I really liked it. Thank you once again to Janine, Ethan, and Sherry for speaking to me. This episode was called Rotating Home and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our producers are Theoshafer, Theocrants, Hailey Person and Nikki Kate Delgado. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by Wikifase Springs Eternal, Juice Jackal, and North Americans. Our artwork is by Koldasak Studios. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review and telling your friends about the show. If you wanna hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you could become a patron at patreon.com/otherworld. Our social media is @otherworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey, Leo Riestennis, Mora Curran, Josephina Francis, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Colin Gainer, and Hilary Schuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural or unexplained, you could send us your stories at [email protected]. (soft music) (soft music)