The MR HANSoN Podcast

The Demon House: The True Story Behind The DeliveranceBlack flies swarming a frozen porch in December. Footsteps climbing the basement stairs after midnight. A man with no face pacing the living room, and wet bootprints drying where he walked. In November 2011, LaToya Ammons moved her mother and three children into a small rental at 3860 Carolina Street in Gary, Indiana. Within weeks, two clairvoyants told her more than two hundred demons had taken the house. Then the water in the kitchen began to rain upward, the children began climbing the walls and crossing the ceilings, and the thing from the basement turned violent, choking, throwing and beating anyone who stood in its way, including the lawman who tried to carry the family out the front door. Staff at a family doctor's office watched a boy thrown into a wall with no one touching him. At Methodist Hospital, a state caseworker and a registered nurse watched a nine-year-old glide backward up a wall. Police recorded a whisper, photographed a face on the basement stairs, and dug up the dirt beneath them. A Catholic priest finished the rite in Latin. Netflix and Lee Daniels turned it into The Deliverance. Tonight, Jeremy Hanson tells it the way the people inside that house lived it, then puts the movie back on and shows you what Hollywood took out.QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERSIs The Deliverance based on a true story? Yes. The Netflix film draws on the Ammons haunting in Gary, Indiana, reported in 2014 and centered on a rental house at 3860 Carolina Street where LaToya Ammons lived with her mother and three children from late 2011 into 2012. Where is the Demon House? It stood on Carolina Street in Gary, Indiana, until paranormal investigator Zak Bagans, who bought it in 2014, had it demolished in January 2016. Who witnessed the events? Accounts came from the family, staff at Dr. Geoffrey Onyeukwu's office, DCS family case manager Valerie Washington, registered nurse Willie Lee Walker, Father Michael Maginot, and Captain Charles Austin of the Gary police. Was there a real exorcism? Father Maginot performed a minor exorcism and later a series of major exorcism rites on LaToya Ammons with the bishop of Gary's approval, the last in Latin in June 2012.

Kentucky, August 21, 1955. A family is playing cards by lamplight in a farmhouse outside Kelly when a visitor runs in from the well. Something silver just dropped out of the sky into the gully. They laugh at him.An hour later, the dog runs under the house and won't come out.Two men step outside with guns, and something small is walking toward them across the yard. Glowing. An enormous head. Pointed ears. Huge yellow eyes. Long arms raised high over its head. When they shoot it, it rings like a metal bucket, flips over, and gets back up. For four hours, the creatures come to the windows, crouch on the roof, float down from the trees, and reach down to touch a man's hair. The family flees to the police. The police search and leave. And at 3:30 in the morning, one of them is at the mother's bedroom window, its claws hooked through the screen.Years later, the story inspired a Steven Spielberg horror film called Night Skies. It became E.T. Tonight, Jeremy Hanson goes back before Hollywood turned the thing at the window into a friend.Chapters 00:00 Cold Open 03:12 The Light Over the Gully 05:47 The Dog 07:35 Hands Raised 10:31 The Window 12:53 Four Hours 15:25 The Run 16:52 The Badges 20:10 3:30 22:35 The Morning After 25:48 Night Skies 28:16 Watch the Movie Again 30:42 ClosingMR HANSoN Season Three: BEFORE HOLLYWOOD. The real stories underneath the movies. Every episode at www.MRHANSoNpodcast.comWritten, voiced and hosted by Jeremy Hanson. Produced by Fuzzy Life Studios. Distributed by Fuzzy Life Entertainment LLC.

In 2012, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu released Beyond the Hills, a two-and-a-half-hour film with no musical score, no demon, and no exorcist standing under a streetlamp while the orchestra announces that evil has arrived. What it has instead is mud, cold rooms, black robes, prayer, and two young women named Alina and Voichita. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes and a shared Best Actress prize for its two first-time leads. And almost everything in it happened.Alina never existed. Not exactly. The young woman she was built from was named Maricica Irina Cornici, and in June of 2005 she died on a hillside in Vaslui County, in the poorest corner of eastern Romania, inside an unfinished religious community called the Holy Trinity monastery.This episode walks the real case from the beginning. Irina's childhood in a Romanian orphanage after her family came apart. Her work abroad as a nanny. The friend from the orphanage who told her there was room at Tanacu, and the January arrival that put her inside a closed world run by a twenty-nine-year-old priest named Daniel Petru Corogeanu, a former footballer who had never finished his theological training and who had already told his own bishop that canon law was a nineteenth-century invention written by Freemasons.It covers what changed that spring. The giggling during Mass. The fast she said the Virgin Mary had ordered. The voice she said was the devil's, telling her she was sinful. The two weeks in a psychiatric hospital, the schizophrenia diagnosis, the April twentieth release into the monastery's care with medication and instructions to return in ten days, and the return that never happened.Then June. The hands and feet bound during the Ascension liturgy. The boards nailed together with arm supports added as an afterthought, a thing that everyone who saw it afterward called a cross. The chains. The towel. Three days in the church with holy water on her lips and nothing else. The moment the priest declared her cured, the bread and tea, the collapse, the ambulance that took an hour to reach a community with no telephone, and the six doses of adrenaline given by a doctor trying to bring her back.And then the parts most retellings skip. The hospital staff who looked at her wrists and called the police. The autopsy finding of dehydration, exhaustion and a lack of oxygen. The 2007 verdicts in Vaslui, the appeal that cut them in 2008, the Romanian Orthodox Church closing the monastery and defrocking Corogeanu, and his parole in November of 2017. The coroner who took part in exhuming her body years later and said publicly that what killed her was the adrenaline, not the boards. Corogeanu's own claim that his mistake was calling for help at all. Her brother's testimony that he watched Satan enter his sister. And the village where people will still tell you the priest did everything he could.Finally, the road from a death to a screen. Journalist Tatiana Niculescu Bran, who ran the BBC's Bucharest bureau, went past the headlines into court documents and village conversations and produced two non-fiction novels, Deadly Confession and The Book of Judges. Andrei Serban adapted the first for the stage. Cristian Mungiu saw that play in New York in 2007 while promoting his Palme d'Or winner, and five years later Irina became Alina. Then in 2017 an American production made The Crucifixion from the same case and did the thing Mungiu refused to do. It put the demon on screen, gave it a face, gave it music, and gave the audience the relief of knowing which explanation was correct.That is the trade this season exists to examine. Hollywood hands you a monster so you do not have to look at the hillside. Before Hollywood, her name was Irina.Hosted by Jeremy Hanson. Full archive at www.MRHANSoNpodcast.com..

Bill Ramsey became known around the world as the Southend Werewolf, but his disturbing story raises a much older question: What if the legends of werewolves were never simply legends?In this episode of MR HANSoN, Jeremy Hanson investigates the strange case of Bill Ramsey of Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England—a carpenter whose unexplained violent episodes, extraordinary strength, animal-like behavior and memory gaps eventually attracted paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.One of the most dramatic incidents occurred at Southend police station in July 1987. Sergeant Terry Fisher encountered Ramsey after a frightened woman reported that the man who drove her to the station had somehow “changed.” Ramsey allegedly attacked Fisher with extraordinary strength, and roughly a dozen officers became involved in restraining him.After Ramsey was placed in a cell, witnesses reported even stranger behavior. His head, shoulder and arm reportedly came through the food hatch in the cell door. Sedatives failed to immediately subdue him, and the fire brigade was eventually called to help officers remove him.But the Bill Ramsey werewolf case is only the beginning.This episode travels through the forgotten history of werewolves, lycanthropy and European werewolf trials, when courts and governments treated reports of werewolves not as entertainment, but as a genuine threat.We examine the 1573 Parlement of Dole werewolf edict, Gilles Garnier, the infamous Peter Stumpp werewolf case of Bedburg, Judge Henri Boguet, Jacques Roulet, and the transformation of the werewolf from a legal and supernatural category into what modern medicine recognizes as clinical lycanthropy.Then the story returns to Ramsey.Following earlier unexplained episodes and a 1983 incident at Southend Hospital, Ramsey eventually traveled from England to Connecticut, USA, where Bishop Robert McKenna performed an exorcism attended by Ed and Lorraine Warren, Nina Ramsey, John Zaffis and others.Was Bill Ramsey suffering from a rare psychological or medical condition?Was the Southend Werewolf story exaggerated by newspapers and paranormal investigators?Or do centuries of werewolf folklore preserve fragments of something we stopped allowing ourselves to consider?The mystery isn't what we can prove Ramsey did.It's what witnesses believed they saw.Criminal investigations depend on descriptions. But when witnesses describe something impossible, investigators have little choice but to remove the impossible details.Animal movement becomes confusion. Impossible strength becomes adrenaline. A distorted face becomes poor lighting. A growl becomes a frightened memory.Eventually, the description becomes human again.There hasn't been a box on the form for “werewolf” for centuries.Maybe there shouldn't be.But what if that's exactly why we would never find one?MR HANSoN — Season 3: Before HollywoodDiscover the true stories, historical mysteries, folklore, cryptids, paranormal encounters and unexplained events that existed long before Hollywood transformed them into monsters.Topics: Bill Ramsey, Southend Werewolf, werewolf true story, werewolf history, lycanthropy, clinical lycanthropy, Ed and Lorraine Warren, Southend-on-Sea, Essex England, Peter Stumpp, Gilles Garnier, Bishop Robert McKenna, exorcism, paranormal investigation, cryptids, supernatural legends, unexplained mysteries, true crime, MR HANSoN Podcast.

A boy walks a frozen dirt road in rural Sweden with boxes of matches in his coat pocket. He buys them cheap in bulk in Stockholm and sells them one at a time to his neighbors for a few coins. The matches are beside the point. What he is really doing on those doorsteps is teaching himself how to take the plainest object anyone can name and move it in a way that makes people reach for their money. His name is Ingvar Kamprad, and the habit will become IKEA.This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast traces the rise of the man who built one of the largest retail empires on earth out of ten thousand small refusals to accept waste. From the stone-choked soil of Småland, to founding IKEA at seventeen with his father's gift money, to the accident on a loading dock when a worker pulled the legs off a table to fit it in a car, to the industry boycott that only handed him a cheaper cost base, to the radical proposition that good design should not be a privilege of the wealthy.It is told straight, hard parts included: Kamprad's extreme frugality, his tax-minimizing foundation structures, and — handled with full gravity — his documented youthful ties to Sweden's pro-Nazi and fascist movements, which he called the greatest mistake of his life, and which historians later found ran deeper and longer than his apologies admitted. The achievement and the stain, held in the same hand. The story of a man who built a company, and underneath it, a way of thinking. Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA history, who founded IKEA, IKEA flat-pack origin, Smaland thrift, Kamprad matches, IKEA name meaning, Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, flat-pack furniture invention, democratic design, affordable design for everyone, Kamprad frugality, Kamprad Nazi ties, Per Engdahl, Elisabeth Asbrink, IKEA boycott Poland, retail empire history, narrative history podcast, biography podcast, MR HANSoN Podcast, Empire Builders, relentless incrementalismThis has been a Fuzzy Life Production