Scared Straight

It's almost that scariest time of year here at What?! Explain. : HALLOWEEN! So we decided to give you not one, but two spooky stories! The first involving a woman determined to wield the forces of the supernatural against the criminal element, while the second involves a series of taxi drivers who picked up... unusual passengers. 

Note for the listeners: Apparently there was a bit of strange audio interference right at the beginning and end of the recording, so apologies in advance. I was trying out a new recording space, but couldn't get over the feeling of being... watched somehow. Anyways, hope you enjoy the episode! 

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Transcript

A man sits in a windowless dark room, a pair of manacles on his wrist. A woman on the street said that she saw him running out of a bank, gun drawn, right after an armed robbery.
He was picked up, tossed into a patrol car, and shoved into this room in rapid succession afterwards. This isn’t the first time he’s found himself in a similar situation, and he knows what he needs to do.
If he keeps his mouth shut, he walks. That being said, this is the first time he’s been put into an interrogation room without any lights. And he has been left alone for a very long time.
Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, the man sees a flash of movement. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem… human.
“Hello?” the man asked, a chill creeping up his spine in spite of himself. No reply. Whatever it was, it seemed to have departed.
Taking a deep breath, the man tried to make himself comfortable in the hard metal chair. The handcuffs clacked together as he put his hands on the table and massaged his wrists to try and restore some circulation. No matter how often it happened, you never quite got used to how tight the manacles could get.
The man’s manacle memories were suddenly stilled by a blast of blinding white light appearing from the other end of the room. Shielding his eyes, the man squinted and saw an impossible sight.
Rising up from the floor, gleaming a ghostly white, was a skeleton. It rose, taller by a head again than the average man, and loomed over the suspect. Worse still, two glowing red pinpricks of light stared from the eye sockets of the skeleton.
“You are a man of ill-repute, who makes his living off the suffering of others” the skeleton whispered, in a voice that seemed to come from the bowels of hell itself.
“Wh- wh- what ARE you?” the man stammered, trying to push himself as far away from the unnatural entity as possible.
“You have caused pain, agony, and loss, all throughout your miserable existence”, the skeleton continued, the red pinpricks seeming to look directly into the man’s soul to see the sin inside.
“What you have done today is only the tip of the iceberg of a life of misdeeds.”
Scrambling backwards, the man began screaming for help from someone, anyone who might be around.
“Confess your crimes, or I shall drag your soul to hell to be roasted upon the pit of flame until the time of revelation” the voice echoed yet again, and the man swore that the skeleton seemed to be getting closer, somehow.
“Okay, okay, I’ll do it, I promise.” The man cried. “I robbed the bank on 50th and Main. I hired one man to be the lookout, two to help carry the goods, and one for a distraction afterwards. I’ll tell whatever I can, just please leave me alone!”
As he yelled that final phrase, he curled himself into a ball and started crying, barely noticing the door opening and three police officers roughly bringing him to his feet and dragging him out of the room.
The skeleton remained still and silent for five, ten, fifteen seconds until an unassuming man with glasses walked into the room and flicked on the light. Seeing the skeleton, he smiled.
“Well, that’s another one for the prison bus, isn’t it?” he said, addressing the skeleton.
The skeleton’s shoulder seemed to pop out a little bit, and the man suddenly grimaced.
“Ah, this always happens when they do a rush set up. I’ve told them a thousand times, make sure that everything is attached correctly after they’ve set up the recording equipment, otherwise the whole operation doesn’t work. Nobody is going to confess to a skeleton whose arm falls off halfway through an interrogation”.
He sighed as he grabbed the skeleton’s arm and tried to pop the joint back in, being careful not to jostle the microphone and video recorder hidden in the skeleton.
This little bit of a scary story would have been the future of law enforcement, had a woman named Helen Adelaide Shelby had her way. Shelby had patented a device that she called an “Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions and photographically recording them”. (U.S. Patent #1749090, if you’re interested in looking at it, because it truly is a remarkable read).
Shelby had surmised a good two decades before billionaire and flying mammal enthusiast Bruce Wayne that criminals were indeed a cowardly and superstitious lot, but also noted the difficulty in getting them to confess to their criminal misdeeds. Shelby noted in her patent application that “it is a well-known fact in criminal practices that confessions obtained initially from those suspected of crimes through ordinary channels, are almost invariably later retracted,” So, whatever confessions were in fact elicited during the interrogation didn’t last, as in the courtroom, the criminal pretty much always said “Your honor, I didn’t say a word of that, they’re lying”. With that introduction of doubt, the confession could not be used as compelling evidence in the trial, so a key part of the case was deemed useless to making the charges actually stick.
Shelby decided to create an apparatus that would not only elicit truthful confessions, but would also record the confessions in both video and audio, ensuring a copy of the actual confession beyond a shadow of a doubt. How she decided to ensure the confession’s truthfulness? Fear.
According to the patent, the suspect would need to be within a dark room, unable to see the dark curtain near them. They would also need to be unaware that behind that dark curtain is an attached chamber with an interrogator next door, waiting for an opportune moment. The moment to hit a button, removing the curtain and revealing… a skeleton.
Again, per the patent, practical effects would need to be used to maximum impact. Lighting would be placed above and below the skeleton, and a thin sheet of see-through material was draped in front to seem like the skeleton had an unearthly aura. To complete this effect, two red bulbs were put into the skeleton’s eye sockets to give it a further unnatural glow, and a megaphone was used by the interrogator in the next room to ask about the criminal’s supposed crimes. The finishing touch was the camera nestled in the skull to ensure that every reaction and word was captured to avoid any recanted statements.
Unfortunately for robotic skeleton enthusiasts, Shelby’s patent was never constructed, and more to the point, in 1961, the Supreme Court ruled that coerced confessions weren’t admissible in a court of law. While there are some legal arguments of what exactly a coerced confession entailed, a robot skeleton scaring the pants off of a suspect is probably solidly on the side of coercion.
Tsunami Ghosts
The Tōhoku earthquake in 2011 was one of the most devastating natural events to occur in Japan. The earth shook for a full sixteen minutes, creating waves up to 128 feet tall and crashing them into the shoreline of Northeastern Japan. 217 square miles of land was flooded as a result, including parts of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, leading to a meltdown. More than 15,500 people died, and almost half a million people became homeless as a result of the tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdowns. Japan’s reconstruction agency estimated that the value of the damage overall had reached approximately $199 billion dollars. What ended up happening was that as Japan went into rebuilding the areas hardest hit by the tsunami, there were additional… complications.
There were claims that cab drivers in these areas, now primarily left to pick up whatever fares they could given that most of the infrastructure they worked with had been decimated, had picked up some ghostly passengers. In 2016, a graduate student of sociology named Yuka Kudo traveled to one of the cities most ravaged by the disaster, Ishinomaki, to study this epidemic. She focused specifically on the town’s cab drivers, who claimed to have picked up passengers that turned out to be tsunami ghosts.
One of the stories told to Kudo was that of a cabbie in the summer of 2011. It had been less than half a year since the tsunami, and while many of the roads in the area had been cleared, there weren’t many customers. So, when he saw a young woman hailing his cab, he didn’t ask too many questions. A fare was a fare. Also of note was that the woman was wearing a heavy winter coat while in the middle of the summer, and was drenched head to toe. She climbed into the cab and asked to be driven to the Minamihama district, which had been abandoned due to the significant damage. The driver wanted to confirm this is where she needed to go, since there were almost no people currently living there. When he asked if the woman was sure, there was a long silence… and then a small voice asked “Have I died?”
Two things occurred to the taxi driver in that moment. The woman was soaking wet and wearing a winter coat, but it hadn’t rained in six days. In fact, it hadn’t rained enough to soak anyone in months. He turned around to face the woman and found there was absolutely nobody in the car. The woman had vanished without a trace.
Another story that had popped up was that a cabbie had picked up a confused-looking young man who, when asked where he needed to go, just pointed forward. When the cabbie finally asked for more clarification, he said “Hiyoriyama”, the name of a mountain park just outside the city. After taking the winding mountain road overlooking Ishinomaki, the driver stopped the car on a plateau near the mountaintop. But when he turned around to be paid, there was nobody in his car. Both of the Japanese cabbies, once they realized what had happened, just chalked up the fare itself as lost, and continued on with their day with a story to tell and a chill down their spine.
However, there are some people that take a more… pragmatic approach to the idea of lost fares due to ghostly passengers.
New Orleans Ghosts
New Orleans is widely considered to be one of the most haunted places in North America. The combination of it being one of the oldest settlements in the United States, as well as its history of voodoo, tends to lead many people to claim that the land is haunted.
There is no shortage of haunted hotels, wax museums, graveyards, restaurants, and truly, whatever other form of industry you could imagine, there’s probably somewhere in New Orleans with a claim of a ghost in it. In fact, taxi drivers in New Orleans are some of the people most likely to report a haunting, and right in their cab to boot.
Stories of drivers claiming that they had picked up a fare, had a strange conversation with them, and then had the fare vanish once they got to their destination are fairly common in certain corners of the internet. There are some theories that, like the Tōhoku earthquake in Japan, Hurricane Katrina’s death toll contributed to the rise of these incidents reported.
The theory is that ghosts move towards taxis to get places, not quite realizing that they are dead, and the short conversations they have with the taxi drivers are enough to make them realize that they have in fact passed on and gives them what they need to move on into the afterlife. However, there is the situation of the missing fare. These taxi drivers are often out a fair bit of money if they’ve driven their ghostly guest a significant distance, so some drivers that have been on the receiving end of one of these hauntings will not take fares from certain older quarters of New Orleans late at night, because they’ve been fooled once, and they’re not falling for it again.
Conclusion
Well, thank you all very much for joining me in yet another Halloween special of What?! Explain. I hope you all enjoyed this collection of spooky stories, and I’ll talk to you all in a bit.
Theme music and Audio mixing for this episode was done by Craig Murdock, and script editing by Sara Smith, of whom I have both checked and are both not ghosts benevolently haunting me to help put together a podcast. I think.
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