The MR HANSoN Podcast

Brookfield, Connecticut, July 1980. An eleven-year-old boy named David Glatzel comes out of a back room in an empty rental house and tells his family a thin old man shoved him and warned that something bad would happen if they moved in. By nightfall the old man has black eyes, jagged teeth, pointed ears, horns and hooves, and David calls him the Beast. His family sits a nightly vigil at his bedside while his mother and sister watch him choked and struck by hands no one can see. Ed and Lorraine Warren arrive, Lorraine sees a black mist standing beside the boy, and the Warrens declare him possessed. During a session inside a church, his sister Debbie's nineteen-year-old fiance, Arne Cheyenne Johnson, pins David to the floor and calls out to the thing inside him: leave him alone, take me, enter my body. The boy goes still. Arne later goes to an old well the Warrens warned him to avoid, and something at the bottom looks back up at him. On February 16, 1981, Arne's friend, boss and landlord Alan Bono is stabbed to death at his Brookfield kennel, the first homicide in the town's 193 years, and attorney Martin Minnella attempts the first demonic possession defense in an American courtroom. Hollywood turned the case into The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, complete with a witch, a cursed totem and an altar that can be destroyed to make it all stop. In this episode of MR HANSoN Season Three: BEFORE HOLLYWOOD, Jeremy Hanson goes back before the movie to a case with no witch, no curse and no off switch, where the door was opened from our side. Every episode at www.MRHANSoNpodcast.com.QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS: Is The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It based on a true story? Yes, it is based on the 1981 Arne Cheyenne Johnson case in Brookfield, Connecticut, often called the Demon Murder Trial. Who was David Glatzel? He was the eleven-year-old boy whose family said he became possessed after encountering an old man in an empty rental house in July 1980. What did Arne Johnson say during the exorcism? According to the family and the Warrens, he challenged the demon to leave David and take him instead. Who was the victim? Alan Bono, a forty-year-old kennel owner who employed Debbie Glatzel and rented the couple their apartment. Was there really a witch in the case? No, the occultist and cursed totem were invented for the film. Did the possession defense work? Judge Robert Callahan barred it as irrelevant and unscientific, and Arne Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in November 1981.

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.

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..

He couldn't tune a guitar. He couldn't play a chord. And yet — without him — rock and roll as we know it could not exist. This is the cinematic true story of Leo Fender — born Clarence Leonidas Fender on August 10, 1909 in a barn on his parents' orange grove between Anaheim and Fullerton, California. The boy who lost his left eye to a tumor at age eight and wore a glass eye for the rest of his life. The teenager who saw a homemade radio at his uncle John West's auto-electric shop in Santa Maria and never recovered. The accounting major who never took a single course in electrical engineering. The bookkeeper who got fired from a tire company in 1938 and used six hundred borrowed dollars and a Ford Model A as collateral to open a small radio repair shop on South Spadra Avenue in Fullerton — Fender's Radio Service. The man whose first shop got wiped out by a Santa Ana River flood that same year, and who waded through the floodwaters in a kayak to save what he could before reopening. He never learned to play the instruments he would invent. He spent the early forties listening — really listening — to musicians complaining at his counter. The amps fed back. The pickups buzzed. The hollow-body guitars warped under stage lights. The big band guitarists couldn't be heard over the brass. Every problem the musicians described was an engineering problem, not a musical one. And while the rest of California's young engineers were drafted overseas — Leo Fender, with his glass eye and his exemption from service, was left in his Fullerton shop. With nothing but time. With nothing but tools. With nothing but the slow, patient years that other men didn't have. And he used every minute of them. In 1943 he met Clayton Orr "Doc" Kauffman, a lap steel player who had worked at Rickenbacker. Together they founded K&F Manufacturing in 1945. When Doc pulled out the next year, Leo kept going alone. By late 1947 he had the Fender Electric Instrument Company. By 1948 he had hired George Fullerton as his draftsman. By April 1950 he had launched the Fender Esquire — and shortly after, the two-pickup Broadcaster, renamed the Telecaster after a trademark dispute with Gretsch over their Broadkaster drum line. The first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar in history. While Gibson was still calling Les Paul's prototype "a broomstick with pickups" in Kalamazoo, Leo Fender was shipping Telecasters to dealers across America. The man who couldn't play guitar — beating the man who could — by eleven months. In 1951 he did it again with the Precision Bass — the first mass-produced solid-body electric bass guitar in history. The entire low end of popular music repositioned overnight. Then in 1954 — sitting at a drafting table in Fullerton with a Hawaiian-born draftsman named Freddie Tavares — Leo Fender designed the most influential guitar of the twentieth century. The Fender Stratocaster. Contoured body. Three pickups. A floating bridge with springs underneath. A whammy bar that bent every string at once. Six tuning pegs all on one side of the headstock. Two hundred forty-nine dollars and fifty cents. Buddy Holly strapped one on. A teenage Eric Clapton saw a picture of Buddy Holly with a Stratocaster in a magazine in England — and his life was decided. Jimi Hendrix bought a Stratocaster in London and made it scream, pray, burn, and resurrect itself in front of audiences who did not yet know what electricity could feel like. Stevie Ray Vaughan played one called Number One until the day he died. David Gilmour. Mark Knopfler. Bonnie Raitt. Buddy Guy. John Mayer. Yngwie Malmsteen. Every one of them bending notes through a system of springs Leo Fender drew in pencil at a desk in Fullerton. By the mid-1950s a streptococcal sinus infection began to grind at him. Antibiotics didn't work. Year after year, he got worse. By 1964 he believed he was dying. He started getting his affairs in order. He sold the Fender Electric Instrument Company to Columbia Broadcasting System on

MR HANSoN Podcast "The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Tinkering: The Rise of Les Paul" He was told flat-out that what he built wasn't even a guitar. They called it a broomstick with pickups. Eleven years later, every guitar company in America was racing to copy it. This is the cinematic true story of Les Paul — born Lester William Polsfuss on June 9, 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The boy his teacher said would "never learn music." The kid who heard a ditch digger play harmonica on a sidewalk and never recovered. The eight-year-old who built a crystal radio from scratch. The ten-year-old who bent a coat hanger into a hands-free harmonica holder — a design still manufactured today. The twelve-year-old who pulled a piece of railroad rail from the train tracks behind his house and proved, with a single guitar string and a phonograph needle, that a note could live longer than it should. That note — the one that wouldn't die — became the obsession of his life. He chased it from Waukesha to St. Louis. Dropped out of high school at seventeen to join Sunny Joe Wolverton's Radio Band on KMOX. Moved to Chicago in 1934 and lived two lives at once — country picker Rhubarb Red by day on hillbilly radio, jazz player Les Paul by night in the South Side clubs where Django Reinhardt records spun until the grooves went silver. Two stage names. Two careers. On the same kitchen table. By 1938 he was on national radio with Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians. By 1941 he was sneaking into the Epiphone guitar factory in New York City after hours — owner Epi Stathopoulo had handed him the keys — and building the most important guitar prototype in the history of recorded music. A four-by-four piece of pine. A guitar neck. Two homemade pickups. He called it The Log. Gibson laughed. They told him to take it home. That same year — 1941 — Les Paul was nearly killed by electrocution in his apartment basement. It took him almost two years to recover. By 1944, on the advice of Bing Crosby, he opened a recording studio inside his garage on North Curson Street in Hollywood. Tape machines. Microphones bolted to the rafters. The smell of solder. Every musician in town came through that garage. Bing Crosby. The Andrews Sisters. Nat King Cole. And in between sessions, Les Paul kept stacking sounds — figuring out how to make a single guitar sound like four, a single voice sound like a chorus. In 1947 he cut a song called "Lover" with eight different guitar parts. All of them him. Layered. Stacked. It was the first time anyone had ever heard a record like it. And then came January 1948. On icy Route 66 west of Davenport, Oklahoma, the Buick convertible carrying Les Paul and his fiancée Iris Colleen Summers — soon to be known to the world as Mary Ford — plunged through a guardrail and dropped twenty feet off a railroad overpass into a frozen ravine. Mary's pelvis was broken. Les's right elbow was shattered in three places. Doctors at Wesley Hospital in Oklahoma City told him the arm could not be rebuilt. Their best option was amputation. A guitarist. Without his right arm. So he asked for a pencil. From a hospital bed in Oklahoma — with morphine dripping and the future of his career hanging on a single decision — Les Paul drew up plans for a guitar synthesizer he could play with one hand. A full decade before Robert Moog would build the actual machine. Then he asked the surgeons to set the arm at slightly over ninety degrees. Bent inward toward his chest. So he could still cradle a guitar. It took eighteen months to recover. Mary Ford moved into his Hollywood house and nursed him back. They married in Milwaukee in 1949 — Steve Miller's parents stood as best man and matron of honor. Les Paul became Steve Miller's godfather and gave him his first guitar lessons. Then the couple moved to a small apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, and built a recording studio inside it. What happened next changed every record ever made after. Between fire-truck sirens and planes coming into LaGuardi

THE MR. HANSoN PODCAST "The Story of Alexander Selkirk" The Real Story Behind Robinson Crusoe Put me ashore. The captain did. What followed was one of the most remarkable documented survival stories in recorded history — four years, four months, and twelve days of complete, unbroken isolation on an uninhabited island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, four hundred miles off the coast of Chile. No rescue came. No ship stopped. No voice broke the silence except his own. Selkirk had to survive not just the practical challenges of the island — finding food, building shelter, staying healthy in an environment with no medical care and no margin for serious injury — but the far more dangerous challenge of surviving his own mind. Isolation, researchers now know, activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. It produces hallucination, paranoia, and cognitive deterioration. It is, in the truest sense, a threat to the self. Selkirk broke. Then he rebuilt. He ran the island's hills barefoot until he could outpace the feral goats he hunted. He tamed hundreds of cats to keep the rats from his shelters. He constructed two huts from local timber, fashioned clothing from goatskins, and read his Bible until the words were memorized. He sang hymns into the dark because the alternative was silence and the silence had a weight he couldn't afford. When a rescue ship finally arrived in 1709, the men who found him on the beach struggled to reconcile what they saw with what they had expected. He was lean, fast, wild-eyed, and almost impossibly fit — and deeply changed in ways that four years of English civilization could not entirely reverse. His story inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. But Crusoe is a fantasy of mastery. Selkirk's story is something far more uncomfortable: a true account of what total freedom actually feels like from the inside, and what it costs. In this episode, MR. HANSoN traces the full arc — from a difficult boyhood in coastal Scotland, through the privateer world of the early 1700s, through the argument that changed everything, and into the island years that remade a man. He was right about the ship, by the way. It sank. Alexander Selkirk podcast Robinson Crusoe real story castaway survival story MR. HANSoN podcast survival isolation history true history podcast Scottish explorer podcast Pacific island survival who was Alexander Selkirk and what happened to him the real story behind Robinson Crusoe podcast what happened to the Cinque Ports after Selkirk was left behind true survival stories podcast cinematic storytelling how did Alexander Selkirk survive alone on an island best narrative history podcasts Paul Harvey style psychology of isolation and survival historical stories was Robinson Crusoe based on a real person Alexander Selkirk Juan Fernández Islands 1704 prestige storytelling podcast similar to Wondery and HBO Who was Alexander Selkirk? A: Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish privateer born in 1676 who became the inspiration for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In 1704, he voluntarily demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific after declaring his ship — the Cinque Ports — structurally unsafe. He survived alone on the island for four years and four months before being rescued in 1709. Was Robinson Crusoe based on a real person? A: Yes. Robinson Crusoe, published by Daniel Defoe in 1719, is widely believed to have been inspired by the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who lived alone on an uninhabited Pacific island from 1704 to 1709. Defoe never publicly acknowledged the connection, but the parallels between Selkirk's documented experience and Crusoe's fictional one are extensive and well-documented by historians. What island did Alexander Selkirk live on? A: Selkirk was marooned on Más a Tierra, an island in the Juan Fernández Archipelago located approximately 400 miles off the coast of Chile in the South Pacific. The island was later renam

There are signals moving through the air around you right now. Carrying voices, messages, data — your entire connected world riding on invisible frequencies at the speed of light. Your phone. Your wireless headphones. Your navigation system. The Wi-Fi router humming in the background of every room in your house. Behind all of it is a system. Behind that system is an idea. And behind that idea is a woman the world decided was too beautiful to be taken seriously. Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914. Her father — a banker with an engineer's curiosity — taught her to look beneath the surface of things. To understand systems. To ask how mechanisms worked and where they failed. That habit of mind would eventually change the world. But the world saw something else first. European cinema called her the most beautiful woman in the world. At nineteen she married Friedrich Mandl — an Austrian arms manufacturer whose dinner parties were attended by military officers, weapons designers, and government officials who spoke freely about torpedo guidance systems, signal vulnerabilities, and the specific technical failures that were costing lives. They assumed she didn't understand a word. She understood everything. When she eventually escaped that marriage and made her way to Hollywood — signed by MGM, positioned as a star, reduced to her face by an industry that specialized in reduction — she went home every night to a drafting table. While the world watched her perform, she was working on the problem she couldn't stop thinking about. What if the signal didn't stay still? What if it moved — frequency by frequency, too fast to track, too precise to jam? She found a collaborator in avant-garde composer George Antheil, whose experimental work with synchronized player pianos gave them both the mechanical model they needed. In 1942 they were granted U.S. Patent 2,292,387 — a frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system designed to protect radio-guided torpedoes from enemy jamming. They brought it to the U.S. Navy. The Navy told them it was too complex. That the technology wasn't there yet. That she could contribute more usefully by selling war bonds. She did. She raised tens of millions. And the patent sat on a shelf. It expired in 1959. Unimplemented. Uncompensated. By the late 1950s and 1960s, military engineers were independently arriving at the same conclusion she had reached in 1942. The Cold War had made secure wireless communication existential — not just useful, but necessary for civilization's survival. Frequency-hopping spread spectrum was classified, deployed, and never attributed to anyone by name. And then it became everything. Bluetooth. Wi-Fi. GPS. CDMA cellular architecture. The foundational technology beneath nearly every wireless communication system on the planet. All of it tracing its roots — directly, architecturally — to a patent filed by a Hollywood actress and a composer of experimental music, ignored by the people who needed it most, and left to expire without a word of acknowledgment. In 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Hedy Lamarr its Pioneer Award. She was eighty-two years old. She couldn't attend the ceremony. They reached her by phone. Her response: It's about time. In this episode of The MR. HANSoN Podcast, we tell the full story — from the walks through Vienna with her father, to the dinner parties of Friedrich Mandl, to the drafting table in Hollywood, to the Navy meeting, to the fifty-year wait, to the moment the world finally caught up with a woman it had never bothered to look at twice. The signal was always there. It was just waiting to be understood. The MR. HANSoN Podcast — Fuzzy Life Entertainment www.mrhansonpodcast.com Hedy Lamarr Hedy Lamarr inventor Wi-Fi history Bluetooth inventor spread spectrum frequency hopping WWII technology forgotten inventors women in STEM history Hedy Lamarr patent secret communication system George Antheil Hollywood invent

The Cape of Good Hope has always been the place where the world feels unfinished. Where two furious oceans collide, where storms are born with teeth, and where — somewhere in the fog and lightning and silence — a ghost ship has been sailing for centuries without ever making port. The Flying Dutchman legend begins with a real man, or at least a man real enough for legend to need. Hendrick van der Decken — Dutch East India Company captain, cold-eyed and unbreakable — encounters the Cape in full murderous fury. His crew begs him to turn back. He refuses. And in the howling, black-throated heart of the worst storm of his life, he speaks an oath so reckless, so proud, so perfectly designed to offend both God and ocean that the world holds him to it forever. But this episode doesn't stay at the Cape. It follows the legend across centuries and continents — into the frozen Norse seas where the draugr still row their phantom longships; into the fog-wrapped British coastline where corpse-lights dance above hidden rocks; through the Caribbean trade routes where phantom crews tried to pass sealed letters to the living; and across the Pacific to Japan, where the Funayuurei rise from black water with wooden ladles and hollow hands. It examines the official records — naval logs, sworn testimonies, a sighting by a young Prince George who would become King George V — and finds that the reports are not the product of simple superstition but of something far stranger and more marvelous. Then MR. HANSoN does something no campfire storyteller ever does: he explains the science. The Fata Morgana. Saint Elmo's fire. The atmospheric conditions that produce genuine, credible, repeating optical phenomena so convincing that trained, experienced, fully sober sailors have staked their reputations on what they saw. And in the end, the story becomes something richer than either ghost tale or debunking — a portrait of what happens when human pride meets something genuinely, magnificently larger than itself. Some legends don't need to be true to be real. They only need to be seen. Flying Dutchman ghost ship Flying Dutchman legend explained ghost ship legend true story cursed ship legend maritime Cape of Good Hope ghost ship haunted ship legends maritime folklore podcast best history mystery podcast MR HANSoN Podcast Flying Dutchman Hendrick van der Decken Flying Dutchman sightings real accounts ghost ship sightings history Fata Morgana optical illusion sea Saint Elmo's fire sailors Dutch East India Company legend Cape of Good Hope storms sailors Prince George Flying Dutchman sighting cursed captain sea legend Funayuurei Japanese ghost ship what is the true story of the Flying Dutchman did Prince George really see the Flying Dutchman is the Flying Dutchman based on a real captain Flying Dutchman vs Fata Morgana explanation maritime ghost ship legends around the world why do sailors fear the Flying Dutchman ghost ships in Norse mythology draugr Norse ghost ships explained Japanese Funayuurei ghost ship legend storytelling podcast Paul Harvey style Flying Dutchman · ghost ship · cursed captain · maritime legend · sea folklore · Cape of Good Hope · haunted ships · Hendrick van der Decken · sailor myths · ocean mysteries · Fata Morgana · Saint Elmo's fire · history mystery podcast · Paul Harvey podcast · MR HANSoN "what is the legend of the Flying Dutchman" "is the Flying Dutchman a real ghost ship" "why was the Flying Dutchman cursed" "what did sailors see at the Cape of Good Hope" "ghost ship sightings in the Royal Navy" "what causes ships to appear to float above water" "podcast about maritime history and legends" "best storytelling podcasts about historical mysteries" "Paul Harvey style history podcast" "did anyone actually see the Flying Dutchman" What is the legend of the Flying Dutchman? The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship said to haunt the waters near the Cape of Good Hope, condemned to sail the