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MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories

Ballen Studios

The Strange, Dark & Mysterious delivered in podcast format.

Follow the MrBallen Podcast on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes publish twice a week—every Monday and Thursday. Prime members can listen to new episodes 1-month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Wondery+ subscribers can listen ad-free in the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts.

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True CrimeTrue Crime

Episodes

The Hitman (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
2d ago
The Hitman (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
In April of 1990, a bleary-eyed detective stepped into a townhouse in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. The detective had been on call for days, and all he wanted to do was sleep. But now, he’d been called in to investigate a double homicide. The detective opened the door to the basement, and started walking down the steps. The overhead light cast shadows on the floor below, so he couldn’t get a clear look at what he was walking into. Then the detective reached the bottom of the steps, and he suddenly felt wide awake. The scene in the basement was far more gruesome than he’d imagined – two dead bodies lay there on the floor. And there was one thing that jumped out at the detective immediately. On a cardboard box sitting between the bodies, a heart and the letter “U” was scrawled in blood. The detective had no idea if one of the victims had left the message, or if this was a scene staged by a deranged killer… and it would take him six months to get the answer he was looking for… and to discover what really happened in that basement.For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Blood on the Concrete (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
10-06-2024
Blood on the Concrete (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
On a cool, spring evening in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a man burst out of a bar and started running down the sidewalk, chasing a woman who had suddenly stormed outside in the middle of their conversation. The guy grabbed the woman’s arm, and she spun around to look at him with a furious expression on her face. He asked her what was going on, and she slurred her words as she said that she didn’t want to talk about it. The guy asked her to please come inside — it was dark and she shouldn’t be walking alone at night. But this just made her even more upset. She started pounding her fists into the guy’s chest and screaming at him to leave her alone. The man backed up so she would stop hitting him, and he asked her again to just calm down and come back into the bar. But she refused. She turned around and started speed-walking away from him. The guy didn’t know what else to do, so he went back into the bar by himself. But what he learned the very next day would keep him awake at night for years, wishing he had tried to chase the woman down a second time.For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Dealing with the Devil (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
03-06-2024
Dealing with the Devil (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
At 6:45 AM on an ordinary Tuesday in Salt Lake City, Utah, a father and son lugged a heavy jewelry case into the lobby of a high-rise building. They ran a jewelry store together on the third floor, and had come in early to set up their new display. They heard the lobby door open behind them and turned to see a man holding a cardboard box. The man said he was making a delivery and asked where the elevator was. The father and his son were heading that way, too — so, all three got on the elevator together. As they stood, the father looked at the box the man was carrying. There was a name written on the top in black marker, but no return address, which seemed odd. And the man didn’t really look like a delivery driver, either. He was wearing a green letterman jacket, like a high school athlete would wear. But the father kept his thoughts to himself. When the elevator doors opened to the third floor, he and his son carried their jewelry case out and went on with their day. Later that morning, a firefighter pounded on the jewelry shop door and said that the building was being evacuated. The father and son rushed outside, where they saw fire trucks, police cars, and a crowd of other people who worked inside the building. As a woman in the crowd filled them in about what had just happened, a horrible realization dawned on the jewelry shop owner: That delivery man was not who he claimed to be — and the cardboard box contained something more sinister than anything the shop owner could have imagined.For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
A Butterfly's Secret (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
17-06-2024
A Butterfly's Secret (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
On a January afternoon in 2015, a medical examiner stood over a dead woman’s body in the county morgue. He’d already opened up the woman’s abdomen, and he was using his scalpel to cut the tissues around her stomach. The woman had been murdered, and the medical examiner had already determined her cause of death — but now, he was searching for something specific. He placed the stomach on a metal tray and sliced it open, revealing everything she’d eaten before her death. To his surprise, there was almost nothing there, which meant the woman hadn’t eaten for several hours. This struck the medical examiner as very odd, because detectives had told him that the woman bought Mexican food less than half an hour before her death, and they found the empty wrapper at the crime scene. But if the murder victim didn’t eat it, that left only one other possibility: her killer did. The medical examiner put his scalpel down and looked at the woman on his autopsy table. He tried to imagine what sort of person would want to murder her and then eat her lunch, while standing right beside her body.For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.