84: 3 Stories That Prove You Shouldn't Go In Your Basement
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Our first story today actually comes from one of you. So this was in a letter I received here at the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters from a listener named Ryan. He writes, When I was growing up, the house I lived in was one of the oldest in the area in northeast Pennsylvania where I lived. I

I had extremely bad allergies as a kid, so when I was 12, my parents redid the basement to be my room. It was much easier to keep it clean down there and dust-free, and it was huge, so I was good with it. About a year after I moved down there, though, I started hearing knocks and bangs. I just chalked it up to basement noises like...

the water heater or settling pipes. In the basement, there was this huge and heavy door against the back wall. It was a mixture of wood and steel and it looked old, like it was part of the house when it was originally built.

I noticed that the knocking and banging was mostly coming from the other side of this door. It was so heavy that when I was 13 or 14, I couldn't budge it at all. And plus, it had an old iron sliding lock, two wood blocks in front of it, and one of those skeleton key locks keeping it closed. So I

I never really knew what was on the other side. By my 14th birthday, the knocking had been going on for years. I almost couldn't hear it anymore. But one morning, I woke to find my room freezing and musty. I looked over to the wall and to my horror, the door was open. Even with all of those locks, the door had somehow opened.

After that night, the door would open nightly. Always when I was asleep, I'd get up, close the door, and then the next morning, I would find it opened again. After a month of struggling to close and lock the door daily, I was finally awake when it happened. I was pulling an all-nighter to finish a project for school, and I heard it at like 2 or 3 a.m. The knocking on the door started, but much louder than before. ♪

Slowly, I heard the first block sitting in front of the door scrape against the wood. Then the second. Then more knocking. And then the iron sliding lock slowly undoing itself. Finally, the click of the old lock disengaged and the door swung open.

I was so freaked out, I couldn't sleep after that. I told my parents, but they chalked it up to a bad dream. We secured the door more with an exercise bike and some old cinder blocks and just called it a day. I'd still hear the knocking at night, but at least the door stayed closed. Eventually, I left for university, and that's when I did some digging. It turns out,

The house was a boarding home for coal miners that came into the area. There were a ton of mines by where I lived, and the door must have opened into one of them. I also found that there were two murders in the house, an escort and a miner, plus several mining disasters involving people who'd lived there for months or years at a time. I still have nightmares about that house, and when I go home,

I don't sleep in the basement, no matter how bad my allergies get. For those of you who grew up in homes with basements like myself, you know how scary they can be. Well, today I want to tell you some stories of truly horrifying things people have encountered in their basements, both supernatural and of our world. But first, we're going to take a short break. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp.

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- Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, coming to you from inside the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters. I'm currently sitting upstairs in my study, but today I wanna take you down with me to the basement. For many of us, basements are a part of the house that we rarely go into. Sure, some people have finished basements with sectional couches and mini bars,

but I'm ignoring those. No, I'm talking about unfinished concrete rooms that lie under our houses in the dark. The kinds where you have to turn on the light and quickly run to grab a can of vegetables for your mom. The ones where you can almost feel something on your heels as you bolt back up the stairs.

That's the kind of basement I had growing up. And that's what the basement of the RDS headquarters also looks like. But before we head down there for some stories, let me just say thank you to everyone who came out to see me join Annie Elise on stage for her live show last week. It was so much fun to hang out. And thank you so much to Annie for having me. She'll be in Salt Lake City next Thursday, October 17th, and Denver, Colorado the week after that. So make sure you check out her show if you're around.

Okay, now to the basement. On August 5th, 2013, an Ohio State University student named Brett moved into a house off campus, tucked away in a neighborhood near the school. It was a three-story house and he and 10 other students were moving into the top two floors. It was exciting to be living off campus with so many friends, even if the house needed a little work. For one, it was a little bit of a mess.

None of their bedrooms had locks on them. Not great. And then there was how the power kept going off on the third floor. The breaker was located in the basement of the house. And each time the power went out, all of the roommates would look at each other. You go down there. No, I'm not going down there. You go down there. Finally, Brett would stand up and walk down into the basement, flip the breaker, and the lights would come back on. That happened every few days or so.

So one night, the lights went out, like they usually did, and Brett walked down the wooden steps into the dark basement. He went over to a chain dangling from the ceiling and tugged on it, dimly illuminating the basement. The breaker box was on the other wall across from the stairs, and as he went over to it, he heard a noise behind him.

Brett whipped around, half expecting to see that one of his roommates had followed him down there, but behind him, there was nothing except for the chain of the light swinging back and forth. He went back upstairs to tell his roommates what he had heard. And as he told the group, one of his roommates' faces went pale, like this had confirmed something she knew all along. "'Guys,' she said, "'I think the house is haunted.'"

And all of a sudden, other roommates started looking like they too had seen a ghost. Apparently, Brett and this other roommate weren't the only ones who had experienced something strange in the house.

One roommate confessed that he had come home once and all of the drawers in the kitchen were open. Not like someone had been cooking, though, like someone had pulled out all the drawers at once. Another roommate confessed that one night she was up studying late after everyone else had gone to sleep and she went into the bathroom and turned off the light as she left. But when she walked to her room, the light was on.

"Yeah, but maybe someone else got up and turned on the light and forgot to turn it off," one roommate, Jeff, suggested. But another roommate, Devin, spoke up. "No, that's happened to me too. And I promise no one else was around to turn the light on." "So it sounds like we've all had strange things happen to us, but just assumed that one of the roommates was responsible," Jeff said. The group all looked at each other. No one was suggesting otherwise.

Maybe calling out what happened actually helped them though, because the next day, no one reported any problems. No drawers were left open, no lights mysteriously turned on, no sounds had unknown sources. That night, the roommates were all having dinner in the living room, laughing because of the big deal they made about the night before. Of course, when 10 people are in a house, things are gonna get rearranged. Obviously, there was no ghost. But just then,

the lights went out, causing some of the roommates to shriek. Someone screamed for Brett to go turn on the lights. Brett tried to calm everyone down. Guys, it's not a ghost. This has happened before. Relax. But deep down, he got a really bad feeling. He begrudgingly turned on his phone's flashlight and started downstairs towards the basement. Again, he creaked down the wooden steps and tugged the chain attached to the light, turning it on.

He started towards the other side of the room when then he heard the sound again. It was like something tumbling on the other side of the basement wall. He turned his flashlight where the sound was coming from underneath the staircase and through the dark, something reflected back at him, something small and shiny. What was it? He wondered as he approached it. It was a door handle.

That was strange, Brett thought. He didn't realize there was a door down there, but then again, he never took time to really look at the basement. He would just flip the breaker and leave. But there that sound was again, definitely coming from behind the door. Against his better judgment, he reached forward and turned the knob, only to find that it was locked.

"Must just be the water heater or something. "Of course it was something normal. "What was he thinking?" He walked out from under the stairs where it was a little bit brighter, almost laughing about how spooked he had gotten when he got the overwhelming feeling he was being watched. And out of the corner of his eye, back towards the stairs, he could see a figure. He whipped around and standing there on the last step was a man.

He was a little older than Brett, with bad posture and deep-set empty eyes that stared straight into him. He looked tired, like he hadn't slept in days. "Oh, you scared me," Brett let out a sigh. "Do you live on the first floor?" But the man didn't say anything. He just kept staring at Brett. Finally, he spoke. "Do you live in the house?" he asked. Brett nodded. And with that,

The man walked back up the stairs.

Brett followed after him, but when he got back to the first floor, the man was gone, almost like he didn't exist. That evening, Brett called his landlord and told him about the sounds coming from behind the door downstairs. He told his landlord he'd probably want to check it out just in case there was something wrong with the water heater. The next morning, his landlord called him right back. He said that he had gone down to the basement to check out what was happening behind the door and that the police were with him now.

The police? Why were the police there? His landlord explained that he had opened the door knowing there was a small crawl space on the other side. But when the door swung open, he found that someone had been living there. The space was filled with clothes and had a mattress on the floor.

It was the man that Brett had seen in the basement the day before. Apparently, the man's cousin had lived in the house years before and he had started living in the basement without anyone realizing it. His cousin moved out, but he stayed. And while he was there, he had access to Brett and his roommate's living spaces. Their doors were all unlocked.

The landlord threw the man out and changed the locks, but the event had a lasting effect on Brett and his roommates. Every time one of them came home to see a drawer open, they would always wonder who really opened it.

That story gives me chills because finding out someone else has been living in my home without me knowing is one of my biggest fears. I mean, think about how many times you've walked into your kitchen to find that a drawer is open. How can you be sure that it was someone you know that opened it? Sometimes, though, it's not who you find in your basement that is scary. It's what you find after a short break.

Every time I would go into my basement growing up, I was terrified of seeing something I didn't want to see. That's what happened to a woman who bought a house in Gainesville, Florida. In 2020, she was having some work done on the foundation and a bunch of contractors were downstairs in the basement when all of a sudden she hears one of the workers running full speed up the stairs. He told her that she had to come downstairs now. There was something that she needed to see.

In a crawl space attached to the side of the basement were dozens of jars sealed shut. And though they were all closed, she could see that there were specimens floating in the liquid inside each one.

She leaned in to get a better look and saw that every jar had a tongue inside. So immediately she calls the police. I mean, at that point, she was thinking she bought the house from a serial killer, but an investigation actually proved that the man who owned the house before her was an oral pathology professor from the University of Florida. He had specimens for his classes stored in the crawl space because it was cool and it was away from sunlight. At least...

That's what his wife told investigators, so who really knows? The university actually couldn't confirm that the specimens were used in their classes and said that it was not protocol for professors to keep specimens in their home. However, those were the only body parts the woman ever found.

I guess the point is you never really know what the person who lived in your house before you got up to and what remnants of that activity might be left over. And that's really apparent in our next story.

In 1999, Hamed Tafagoti and his wife moved into a split-level house in Long Island, New York. It was an adorable home in a neighborhood of manicured lawns. It had a cute white fence with an arched entrance and had bushes growing all around it, which added a little bit of privacy. And that was nice since the houses next to it were all closely packed together.

Hamid and his wife spent the first night in the home unpacking boxes and figuring out where everything would go. In the back of the house, there was a den and it looked like it had been an addition to the house. Hamid walked around picturing everything they could do with this space. Perhaps a big sectional would fit there for all of their friends. They could put their TV over by the back wall, maybe even a nice coffee table in the middle of the room. He paced around measuring out the space with his feet

when he noticed that part of the floor looked like it had been cut out and placed back. Upon closer inspection, it appeared as if the part that was cut out was the size of a small trap door. Hamid stuck his fingers in the cracks of the floor and found that he could pull part of it away, revealing gaping hole to another room of the house underneath the den.

It was dark and humid inside. It was too small to be a room, but too big to be just a crawl space. At first, Hamid thought, great, another storage area. He needed another place to put seasonal decor and winter clothes during the off seasons. But then something caught his eye.

The light from the den spilled into the hole, not enough to be able to see the entire room, but just enough to catch the outline of something down there. It was bulky, but had rounded edges. It wasn't boxes that the previous owner had left behind,

Hamid called for his wife and asked her to bring him a flashlight. Together, they stood over the trapdoor, the light from the flashlight illuminating the concrete floor below them, cobwebs and dust bunnies filled the space. It definitely had not been used much in the last few years if it was that dirty down there. She moved the light over to the object that Hamid had seen and what they saw only raised more questions. It was a barrel.

A black, worn down, 55 gallon barrel. "It must have belonged to the guy before us," Hamid's wife suggested. "But what should we do with it?" "Well, it can't stay here." Hamid hopped down into the hole to get a better look. The black sides of the barrel had been worn away, revealing a silvery metal underneath. Rust had also accumulated on the lid. He knocked on it to try and hear what might be inside,

It wasn't hollow. The barrel's mysterious contents definitely filled it to the brim. "Can you help me get this out?" Hamed's wife was hesitant, but she too slid through the hole down into the small room.

Inside, she could feel how much colder it was in there than the rest of the house. The walls were so black, it almost looked like each side went on into infinity. Together, they tried to hoist up the barrel, but it was heavy, like it was full of concrete or something. What was the owner before them using this barrel for?

Luckily, Hamid had the phone number of the old owner, a man named Ronald. And the next day, he decided to give Ronald a call. He told him that he must have forgotten the barrel in the space when he was moving out and that it was too heavy for his wife and him to move. Ronald seemed really confused by this call. He hadn't put a barrel in the crawlspace, he explained.

It must have been there since before he had lived in the house, which was a long time ago. But Ronald agreed to come help get the barrel out of the basement, and he hired some movers to bring it out to the curb for trash collection.

The only problem was, when the garbage men got there, they wouldn't take the barrel. For one, it was way past their weight limit. It was actually a miracle that the movers got it out of the hole in the first place because it was a whopping 345 pounds. And two, it was a miracle that the movers got it out of the hole in the first place

One of the garbage men got a really bad feeling when he saw the barrel. Something about it told him that there was something inside that should not be thrown away. Maybe it was hazardous material or something else, but he insisted that the barrel not get brought to the dump. So not knowing what else to do, Ronald posed a solution to the group.

Should we just open it and find out for ourselves? Hamid and his wife looked at each other hesitantly. There could be toxic waste in there. They didn't want to risk any exposure. But before they could express any of their concerns, Ronald was prying the lid off the barrel with a screwdriver. And to their shock, inside the barrel...

was another barrel with a tightly sealed lid. What was the point of that? Ronald got to opening that one as well. Maybe there was just another barrel inside and this would be a Russian doll situation, a barrel just filled with other barrels. How strange. But when Ronald got the lid off of the next barrel, his expression faded into abject horror.

Hamid and his wife watched as Ronald stumbled backwards, bringing his hand to his mouth as if to stifle a scream. They caught a glimpse of something poking out of the second container, the thing that made Ronald retreat in horror, a human hand. Call the police, Hamid's wife screamed.

The police found that inside the barrel was a nearly perfectly preserved woman. She was about four feet, nine inches tall, and the New York Times reported that she was wearing, quote, a skirt, a button-down sweater, high socks, and a shoe with a mid-high heel. Around the neck was a locket with the words, Patrice, love Uncle Phil. On the left hand was a wedding band with the inscription, M-H-R-I-L-E.

XII-59, and another ring with a green stone. An imitation leopard skin coat and a pocketbook filled mostly with makeup were also found in the drum. She was also pregnant, nearly to full term.

The double lids of the barrels had been sealed so tightly that the inside of the barrel had been starved of oxygen, preventing a lot of decomposition. It wasn't apparent at first how long ago she was placed there, but they did notice that the barrel was from 1963. Who this woman was after a short break.

The police noticed that along with the woman and her clothing, deep within the woman's purse was an ID, Reyna Angelica Marroquin, an immigrant from El Salvador who was last seen by her friend Kathy in 1969. Kathy had called the police when she went to Reyna's apartment one day after not hearing from her for a while and saw that Reyna wasn't there.

The police seemed unconcerned, to say the least, and never looked into the case. But Raina's purse also contained an address book. And in a wild twist of fate, Kathy was still alive and had the same phone number. She told them to look into a man named Howard Elkin. ♪

Back in the day, he owned a plastics company, one that the police were quickly able to discover made the plastic of the barrel Raina was stuffed inside of. And not only that, Howard was registered as living at the address the barrel was found in when Raina went missing.

Police immediately went to question Howard, who was still alive, but the day after they asked him to take a DNA test to see if the child that had died with Raina was his, he bought a gun at Walmart and took his own life. Through the autopsy though, police were able to confirm with 99.93% accuracy that the child

was Howard's. The leading theory became that he had killed Reyna to keep his family from finding out about the affair they were having. But one good thing did come out of the investigation. After the case was closed, Reyna's body was transported back to El Salvador and returned to her 90-year-old mother, who never knew what became of her daughter who had moved to America. She

She passed away a month after she received her daughter's body, giving her the closure that she always wanted. So maybe think twice before going into your basement. You never know what you might find hiding down there, what secrets the previous owner kept, or who might have taken up residence right under your nose. What mysteries may lie here within our own Rogue Detecting Society headquarters basement?

That's all for now. Next week, join me as we go to a haunted house. And not just any haunted house. The most extreme haunted house in the world. Until then, stay curious.

Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research by Marissa Dow. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious.

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