165. Terrifying True Urban Legends: A Haunted Forest, The Elevator Game, Britain’s Hannibal Lecter

Welcome, welcome to another installment of Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your morbid tour guide today, Keelan Moore. What happens when a terrifying legend you've grown up with ends up being true? What happens when you follow a cry you hear in the woods and find something you weren't prepared for? Or what about when a silly internet challenge leads to one of the strangest missing person cases? Today, we're dissecting some of those legends and the dark stories that inspired them. But first, I have kind of a fun quick announcement, so March is going to be our listener appreciation month. That's right, I wanted to dedicate an entire month to you all, the listeners, we'll have highly suggested episodes for you guys, fun giveaways, small business shout outs, and free shipping on March in the Heart Starts Pounding Store. That's right, if you were going to purchase any merch this week, you might want to wait. There's going to be free shipping for all available territories starting next week. And if you're a Patreon or Apple subscriber, stay tuned for more messaging because you're going to still have your discounts on merch, 10% or 20% depending on what tier you're at. Alright, that's all I have for now. Let's get back to the legends. In Thailand, there are spirits everywhere. They're called pops, and their stories and legends have circulated throughout the country for centuries. But to some, that is what the spirits were supposed to be, legends. However, just last year, deep within the forest on the border of Thailand and Myanmar, there was a haunting so visceral that the locals knew the legends they had grown up with were true. The screams started on Friday, November 22nd, 2024. That night, villagers were laying in their beds when they heard desperate, panicked cries echoing from the woods. A few wanted to go check them out, but when they stepped out of their homes, the screams stopped. They picked up briefly an hour later, but once again, they stopped before anyone could go look. What the villagers quickly learned was that the screaming happened briefly, every hour, on the hour, there would be a piercing whale from deep within the woods, and then nothing. The whale seemed to have a curious echo to it, and none of its words were familiar to them. They started to wonder if it was some type of ghost or even demon. And the pattern continued, night after night, and every time, the villagers became more and more frightened. They thought of all the spirits that haunted those forests, like the stories they were raised on. There's Fee Pop, a cannibalistic Thai spirit that feeds on human intestines, and people can become infected by the spirit of a Fee Pop, like one local woman who walked out into the woods one day and started deteriorating after she came back. Her lips became pale and she started losing weight, withering away. She had recurring nightmares of being eaten alive, and insects like mosquitoes would no longer touch her, all of these were symptoms of becoming infected by a Fee Pop. It meant that the spirit was slowly eating her life force at night, and it would continue until she died. A medium was called to her home to make offerings to the spirit and negotiate with it, but it was too late. The woman died, just like many of the Fee Pop's other victims. With this evil lurking in the woods, you can imagine that the villagers were hesitant to go investigate. The screams were like a siren call, perhaps meant to lure them to their deaths. But after a 72 hour stretch where the screams happened every hour on the hour, the villagers became so frightened that word reached the local police. There was only one thing for them to do. Someone had to go into the woods and find this specter, whatever it was. That evening, Sunday the 24th, police dispatched a patrol to search the surrounding woods. As they were walking through the trees, the strange sound came again. But this time, it sounded like someone crying. Perhaps it was a starving Fee Pop, waiting for its next victim. They didn't know where the sound was coming from. There was no one else around them as far as the I could see. The lead officer called out, and suddenly, the crying stopped. But then just a moment later, it came back. Following the sound, the officers came to an old, cracked well amongst the trees, almost buried in the vegetation. It had no guardrail, no sign, nothing around it. It was just a wide open pit and the screams were coming from deep inside of it. Interestingly, the officers approached, they peered into the hole, half expecting the cannibal spirit to jump out from it and possess them. But instead, at the very bottom of the pit, they saw a man, a living, breathing man. His face and body were covered in bruises, and he held his left arm protectively against his chest. It was clear that he had been unable to climb up the smooth sides of the well. The officers immediately called a rescue team, and within 30 minutes, they were lifting the man back to the surface and spiriting him to the nearest hospital. He severed a concussion and a fractured wrist, but he was no evil spirit. It turns out he was a 22-year-old Chinese tourist, named Leo Shuanyi. He had gotten lost in the woods while hiking and fell into the well in the dark. Injured and unable to climb out, he had only been able to call helplessly and hope that someone heard him, and in order to save his strength, he called out every hour on the hour for three days and nights. Authorities, after hearing his story, decided that they were going to close up the well and prevent this kind of accident from ever happening again. And the residents could sleep soundly that night, knowing they were safe from the malicious spirits in the area. But this story represents the kind of tale that I want to tell you about today. I want to find the truth behind some terrifying legends. But just a heads up, this story is actually the happiest one we're going to discuss today from here on out. Things will only get darker. And to start, I want to get into our next legend, and the very mysterious disappearance associated with it, that I still cannot wrap my head around. Back in 2008, a post popped up on the occult section of the Japanese website 2chan, an anonymous forum site that would eventually go on to inspire the creation of 4chan, which you might be more familiar with. The post asked if there was any way to turn back time, and for the next few months, people commented all kinds of different occult ways that they had traveled through time. One anonymous poster wrote, quote, "Just between you and me, I know a way to go back in time. It's called the Kurokomida technique. But of course, there are risks. I've been through high school six times. To do this technique, you must light a candle in a small rectangular room. The room must be at an altitude of 261 meters or higher, and there can be no other light in the room, other than that of a candle. On a piece of paper, write the month and the year you wish to return to. And then sit in front of the candle in a cross-legged position at exactly midnight, close your eyes, and do not breathe. That should be enough to send you back to the time you want to go to." Other people shared techniques on how to astral project, others warned of the risks of trying to go back in time, some said that it could wear out your soul, but buried deep, deep, deep in this thread. Over 700 comments down, was a comment that would go on to launch one of the most haunting internet legends of all time, known as the Elevator Game. The comment started, "How to go to another world?" And it laid out a set of instructions on how to leave this mortal plane and travel to another. The instructions were as follows. Step 1. Find a building that has at least 10 floors. This part is crucial. Step 2. Go to the Elevator. You have to be the only one inside for this to work. Once the doors close, you must visit the floors in the following order. Floor 4. Floor 2. 6. 2. 10. And then 5. Now according to the original forum post, a woman might enter the Elevator on the 5th floor. Do not speak to her. Don't look at her. She is to quote a translation of the original post, quote, "not a person." Standing in the Elevator with this entity by your side, this is your final chance to back out. But if you still want to proceed, press the button for the first floor. Instead of down, the Elevator will go up to the 10th floor, and when the doors open, you'll be in another world. What happens when you're there? Well, no one really knows for sure. All they say is that you arrive in a world that is not your own, and you are the sole inhabitant. No one has ever made it back from this dimension. Like many urban legends, the origins of the Elevator game are difficult to fully trace, but this post seems to be the first time that this game was posted about on the internet. However, after this, it started popping up more and more. Based on Tuchan, then the next year it showed up on more Japanese websites before spreading to Korea. As the story grew in popularity, more details were added to the initial myth. A Korean retelling says that once you reach the 10th floor, the "not woman in the Elevator" will ask, "Where are you going?" And as before, you must not answer her. When the door opens, you'll know at once whether you've reached the other world. It looks exactly like the world you came from, only all of the lights are off. In the distance, there is a glowing red cross, and you're the only living being there. Though the blogs didn't say, it's implied that even the mysterious woman from the fifth floor is gone, and some say that technology doesn't work in this other world. A strange sense of disorientation might settle over your mind, making going back especially difficult, in order to return to our world, all you have to do is get back in the elevator and repeat the same sequence. 4, 2, 6, 2, 10, 5, 1. As before, the final button will take you to the tenth floor, and at that point pressing any other button ends the ritual and brings you back to the world of the living. The elevator game eventually spread all the way to the United States as the original blogs were translated into English, and in classic American fashion it became somewhat of an internet challenge. There are posts and videos of people trying the elevator game for themselves, from Seoul all the way to Florida, and while the teens who dared each other to complete this challenge were scared of what might happen, they still did it. Because, after all, this was just an urban legend. It wasn't based on anything real, no one had actually ever disappeared doing the elevator game, right? Well, in early 2008, 10 months before the first recorded blog post, the elevator game became terrifyingly real for one woman and her four-year-old daughter. On the night of January 20th, 2008, in the Taiwanese city of Yuanlin, a building manager was going about his rounds. He managed the Yuanlin finance and economics building, a mixed-use building 11 stories tall. Suddenly, the door flew open and a woman and a red coat stumbled in. She was 37 years old, and she looked pretty confused. With her, was a young girl and a pink coat. The manager, who was alarmed by the sudden intrusion, locked the strange woman's way and asked where she was going. She said she was looking for a friend. Without saying anything else, she rushed past the manager and went straight for the elevator. Now, you don't really think much of it, but a few hours passed, and the woman still didn't come back down. Eventually, his shift ended and he just went back home. But the following day, he couldn't stop thinking about his interaction with the woman. He asked the security guard from the graveyard shift if he had seen the woman leave that night, but he hadn't. And something about the whole situation just seemed strange. Why was she in such a hurry? He decided that he should just check the building's CCTV footage from last night to be sure. But what he saw was stranger than anything he had been expecting. The security cameras showed the woman and the red coat pushed past him and entered the elevator with her child. Then, the camera inside of the elevator showed that she pressed the 11th floor. The door slid closed behind them. As the elevator rose, she took off her red coat and placed it on the elevator floor, and then she knelt next to the little girl and removed her coat as well. She slipped off her shoes as if she was doing some sort of strange ritual. The elevator arrived at the 11th floor and both of them exited, leaving their shoes and their coats behind. A camera in the hallway shows the woman running towards a stairwell that leads to the roof, her daughter in her arms, and after she left this camera's field of view, she was gone. None of the security cameras throughout the building showed what she did next, and none of them showed her leaving. The building manager and a security guard checked the elevators that she had taken. Both coats were still lying on the floor next to the shoes. No one had even touched them overnight, and then following the woman's path, they walked through the stairwell out onto the roof of the building where there were no security cameras. But they found nothing. No evidence that the two had even been there. The building manager then assumed what had happened to them. See, in many East Asian countries, like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, it's actually common practice to remove your shoes before jumping to your death. This practice is supposed to keep you from tracking dirt into the afterlife, and so the building manager held his breath and walked over to the ledge of the building, just totally afraid of what he might see. But once again, there was nothing. Her body had not fallen onto the streets below, and looking around, he could tell that she couldn't have just jumped onto any of the adjacent buildings because this building was the tallest on its block. She would have died if she hit another building and he would have been able to see her. The building next to it was only three or four stories high, and that jump would have been fatal. But if the woman hadn't been seen exiting the building and hadn't jumped off, then where did she and the young girl go? Police were eventually called and they searched the whole building, but they found no sign that the woman and her child were still there, dead or alive. The only evidence that the two had even been there was just the clothing left in the elevator and the footage of them inside, hitting the button for the top floor. The police still continued their investigation. The 11th floor was sparsely populated. It had four apartments, only two of which were occupied. There was also a Buddhist shrine and an HR agency, which had been closed that night. Without a search warrant, the police could only go door to door asking if any of the occupants had seen anything strange, but none of the residents had seen anything, and they didn't recognize the pictures of the woman that the police showed them. This meant that her claim that she was there to see a friend was probably not true. Police searched the other floors as well. Floors three through ten were all residential and didn't have security cameras in their stairwells. The second floor was a commercial space, which also didn't have any security cameras. Articles referred to the basement as a billiards room, which was supposedly an operation at the time of the woman's disappearance. The only part of the building that remained a possible exit was the garage, because it did have a back door. However, that door had been locked, and it was covered in dust. If she had fled through there, she would have left some evidence. Police soon learned that the only other thing she had left behind was a moped, that was parked on the side of the building and was still there the following day, which means she didn't escape on it. A security guard found it a week after the disappearance, accidentally, but it ended up providing one of the most important clues in the case, because it had a license plate that traced back to a name. And this was a crucial development in the investigation, because finally, the police knew who they were looking for. The woman's name was Leo Huizhen, and she was from the small town of Shoto, just eight kilometers away. She'd been reported missing the very same day that she showed up in Yuanlin, and the four-year-old with her was her youngest daughter, Shueying. Now, the press immediately started reporting on other details about her life. They said she was unhappily married to a man referred to as Chen. They had three children together, a boy and two girls. It had been an arranged marriage, and she really struggled to live with him. He was an alcoholic, he was frequently abusive. On the evening of January 19th, they had a long fight which carried into the night, and the next day, mid afternoon, Leo took their youngest daughter and she left. Chen thought that she had gone to her mother's place and would be back, but when she didn't return, he called her mother, who had not seen her all day. Chen then filed a missing person's report that evening. And according to her family, she knew almost no one in the city, meaning she most likely did not have a friend in the building, but also they couldn't understand why she had taken only one of her daughters there. And legends about her started not long after she disappeared, fueled by rumors and speculation. Some said that she had been murdered by secret lover in the building. Her body taken out with the trash once the investigation died down. Others said that the floor was simply cursed and cited other paranormal activity that had been happening there. Word started spreading far and wide about a woman who went into an elevator with her daughter in a building with more than 10 floors and then seemingly vanished into another dimension at the top. And then, within just a few months, the elevator game legend was born on the internet. But eventually, Leo's story started to fade into the background as the legend took off. I mean, after all, she didn't hate a bunch of different numbers on the elevator like the game suggests you needed to. And so, this legend started to take on a life of its own void of any real world connection. And people really just started to think it was an internet legend and nothing more. However, in 2013, something happened on the other side of the world that brought renewed attention to the case. In early 2013, a Canadian tourist named Alisa Lam was staying at the Siso Hotel in Los Angeles. The day before she was supposed to check out, she vanished without a trace. Her last known appearance was on a security camera feed in one of the elevators. You can still see the video online, I mean it's all over YouTube, but it is very unnerving. It shows her on January 31st getting into the elevator. She backs up against the corner of the elevator and then the door doesn't close. After a beat, she peeks anxiously out into the hallway as if she's afraid of something. And then she ducks back into the elevator, now pressing herself up against the wall as if to make herself invisible from the outside. After about 30 seconds, She sidles out of the elevator and appears to stand to the side of the door for a prolonged period of time, maybe talking to someone, before going back in. She presses a bunch of other buttons, but the elevator doesn't close still, so she steps back out of the elevator, doing a series of strange gestures. One odd detail in all of this is that even though she pressed so many of the buttons, the elevator doors never close. After standing by the door for another few seconds, she steps fully out of view, and a few moments after that, the doors finally close as if they had been waiting for her to make her final exit, and that was the last verifiable appearance of Elisa Lam. 19 days later, her body was found in a water tank on the roof, contaminating the hotel's water supply. Now, today, we know that Elisa suffered from bipolar disorder and was not taking her medication properly, which could very much have affected her behavior and the elevator, though there are still lingering questions about how she got into the water tank, which would have been nearly impossible for a woman of her size to do on her own. But the strangeness of the Elisa Lam case prompted Taiwanese police to reopen Leo's case. Even though this case had happened five years prior, the press began referring to her as Taiwan's Elisa Lam, and her story started circulating again, police ended up searching the building's water tanks, which had not been previously searched to see if they would find her or her daughter, but they never found anything. As recently as 2021, police have been attempting to match her DNA with that of Jane Doe's in the area, and so far, that has also been unsuccessful. So what happened to Leo and her daughter that night? The first theory, as I mentioned earlier, is that she had a secret lover in Yuanlin, who she left her husband for. She went into the building where he worked and hid inside until the investigation was done. This theory suggests that she and her daughter are alive, living with them somewhere, and honestly, I hope that's the version of events that are true. But other theories say something far darker happened. Some say that her secret lover killed her when she went to visit him, and that's why she hasn't resurfaced since. Another theory says that she did jump to her death, but this one is difficult to prove because it doesn't explain where the bodies went. They would have had to die in a corner so secret that it hasn't been discovered for 16 years. There's also the chance that she just wanted people to think she had jumped so she could make a clean escape and start a new life. By leaving those jackets and shoes behind, she would leave evidence that she intended to take her own life before fleeing to somewhere else where no one knew her. Maybe taking on a new name, some articles suggest that the Yuanlin building had a fire escape that wasn't covered by the cameras, and maybe she took that way out and slipped far into the night. In Taiwan, people started calling Leo "the woman who played the elevator game for real." Not because she actually followed that exact combination of floors, we know that she just pressed 11, but because the story felt like the ritual, the legend, brought to life. A woman arrives at a building with more than 10 floors, she steps into an elevator with her child, she leaves her shoes and coat behind like offerings, rides to the top, walks toward the roof, and then, as far as any camera or witness is concerned, she's gone forever. And that's the real horror that's underneath the elevator game, isn't it? Not that a ritual might open a door into another dimension, but that sometimes, people disappear from the most ordinary places in the world, and no amount of button pressing will ever bring them back. Our next legend takes us to the UK, and also deals with someone who may be permanently trapped in a liminal space. He's one of the most dangerous prisoners alive, and he's been kept from human contact for almost 50 years. There's a prison in England that has been standing since the Victorian era. Its walls are imposing brick and mortar, and inside, it holds hundreds of the most dangerous criminals England has ever seen. And because of the nature of this prison, legends have always circulated around it. But if you were to go visit today, there's one in particular that you would hear. As we tell you that in the basement of this building, beneath the cells holding murderers, there's a cell that's made of bulletproof glass. It was built to hold one single prisoner, who was too dangerous to be kept with the general population. They say he's been there in solitary confinement for 40 years because he'll kill anyone he comes into contact with. The British press have even dubbed this man Hannibal the Cannibal because they say he ate a man's brains with a cafeteria spoon after he killed him. Other prisoners are said to call him the brain eater. Now that all sounds pretty extreme. When I first heard this tale of a brain eating maniac living in a glass box in this prison, I knew I had to investigate it further. And what I found is that there is a lot of truth to this story. This man is real. For the actual reason he's been the longest living prisoner in solitary confinement, was pretty surprising. The man's name is Robert Modzley and as of last year, he's 72 years old and it's true. He has spent the last 42 years in solitary confinement at Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire. He was on 24 hour watch and was only allowed to leave his specially designed glass cell for a single hour of exercise every day. And even then, he would have to be accompanied by four guards because they couldn't trust him. He is called Hannibal the Cannibal, but that wasn't his first nickname. But let's start at the beginning of his story. In the early 1970s, Modzley was a runaway from Liverpool, living in a big city for the first time. He had just runaway from a foster care home and he found life on the street to be even rougher than the foster care system. He fell into this horrible cycle of getting addicted to drugs and then needing to find ways to pay for those drugs, and that often got him in a lot of trouble. And then, on March 14th, 1974, Modzley lured a 30 year old man named Farrell into a public restroom where he strangled the older man to death. He then turned himself into the police claiming that he needed psychiatric help, though he did confess to police that there was a reason behind this killing. He said that the man had told him that he was a child predator, which, in Modzley's eyes, was the worst thing a human being could be. The rage he felt after learning this drove him to kill the man. And that landed Modzley in a maximum security mental hospital called Broadmore to be detained indefinitely amongst other troubled men. The press called him blue because of the color of the man's face when he was strangled to death. Modzley complained that he couldn't stand being around the other patients at Broadmore. Because of the nature of the institution, he found himself surrounded by more child predators, and this psychologically tormented him worse than being on the street. One day, in 1977, Modzley and a fellow patient named David Cheesman cornered a man named David Francis in one of the cells. Francis was a convicted child predator, and Modzley felt like he wasn't receiving the appropriate punishment for his crimes. But he said he had a way to fix that. When the guards weren't looking, he and David Cheesman barricaded the doors so no one could get in, and they proceeded to torture Francis for nine hours. Guards desperately tried to break down the doors, but they were too late. Francis was dead. Modzley had sharpened a spoon and stabbed him in the brain through his ear canal. And this is actually the origin of the cannibalism claims. There's no evidence that he ate any of the brains with said spoon that didn't stop the legend from spreading. Modzley was subsequently convicted of manslaughter, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release. That's when he was moved from Broadmore to Wakefield prison, an infamous dumping ground for the worst criminals in the UK. Now, if you're not familiar with Wakefield, I honestly don't even advise you to google it. It's really the worst of the worst people that gets sent there. Most recently, it was actually in the news this past October, when Ian Watkins, the lead singer of the band Lost Profits, was killed by fellow inmates. And Watkins was a child predator, which is a common theme amongst a lot of the inmates there. So if Modzley was looking to get away from those kinds of people, Wakefield was not the place to do it. Now by this point, Modzley had killed two men, both of them child predators, and now he was surrounded by the very men that he hated, and he was sentenced to life, which meant he really had nothing to lose. On July 29, 1978, Robert Modzley calmly walked into the security office at Wakefield prison, and he set up bloody homemade knife on the officer's desk and told him calmly that the roll call would be two people short that day. The officer was in shock. What happened, he asked. And Modzley really wanted to explain, because he was proud of his work. At just 25 years old, he apparently decided he was going to kill seven people that day. Earlier he started by learning a man named Solny Darwood into his cell. Darwood is actually unique amongst Modzley victims, because he was the only one not convicted or accused of murder. child abuse, he was actually imprisoned for murdering his wife, and once Starwood was in the cell, Modsley cut his throat and then hid him under his cot. He then went prowling around the prison trying to bring more predators into his cell for the same treatment, but things didn't go like he had hoped. The other prisoners were terrified of him, and they all knew what he was capable of, so none of them went with him to his cell. He became very frustrated, so he went into the cell of William Roberts, another convicted predator, and their Modsley viciously attacked him, cutting him all over the head before killing him by slamming his head into the wall. And this is where Modsley's murders become something of a legend. To the media, he had really gone from this kind of psychopathic, unstoppable serial killer to kind of this vigilante, someone who killed child predators behind bars. And let me tell you, no one was trying to stop him from doing that. But how do you sentence that sort of crime? How do you punish a man who has already been locked up in the worst prison in the country? The answer became you build a prison inside of a prison. 1983 is when his solitary confinement began, and a specially designed cell in the wake field basement, made of bulletproof glass and steel. It was described at the time as a cement coffin, and that is where he sat alone for over four decades. Now, solitary confinement is incredibly hard on your psyche. Dr. Stewart Grassian found that solitary confinement typically made pre-existing mental health issues worse for inmates and even contributed to the sudden onset of mental illness. When you're in there, your mood deteriorates, you develop insomnia, you can start hallucinating, and your brain functioning just starts to go away really fast. And because this cell was made of glass, it was very visible to others as he deteriorated over time. Reporters described him growing pale from a lack of sunlight, his hair thinning, and losing its color prematurely from the stress. Several years into his confinement, the despair caught up with him, he asked for a pet bird to keep himself company, and he even added the caveat that he wouldn't eat it. This request was denied. Wadsley also requested a cyanide capsule just so that he could take his own life, but that was also denied by the guards. Over the following decades, though, the prison became a little less horrible for him, it seems like some guards may have felt bad for him. He was allowed to have music and games, sometimes he'd get books to read. He received visitations from his family, he wrote correspondence to friends. His nephew described him as a man, kind of frozen in time in the 1970s. Now there's a lot of writing about Wadsley over the years, various media outlets have been covering him on and off for the last four decades, and throughout the decades, his name is brought up with every renewed debate about how inhumane solitary confinement is, though I will say, as of writing this episode, his time in a glass box beneath the Wakefield prison seems to have come to an end. In early 2025, he was relocated to a different prison, this one at Whitemore, and we have very few other details to go on. Some people close to him say that this is a punishment for a recent hunger strike he put on, though it also could maybe represent a positive step towards rehabilitation of a man who is honestly at this point too old to be a serious threat to society, but for now, we just don't really know the circumstances surrounding his move. But even though he's not in the prison anymore, his legend still lingers around the area, a legend of a cannibal killer who eats the brains of child predators and has been confined to a glass box for almost 45 years. But what do you think? Should he have been left to prow the halls of the jail attacking predators as he saw fit? Some people out there argue that yes he should have, but you tell me, I also want to hear from you all, what were the legends that you grew up with, and have you ever been able to find out the truth behind any of them? You can leave a comment wherever you listen, and you can also send me a message on our website, hartzartspounding.com. But that is all I have for you today. I will be back with another episode for you all next week. I cannot wait to see you here once again in the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters. And until then, stay curious. hartzartspounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. hartzartspounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juneau Hobbs, additional research and writing by Rob Teamstra, Sound Design and Mix by Redrum Creative. Special thanks to Travis Dunlop, Grayson Journigan, and the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out hartzartspounding.com.