Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. And today, I'm going to share three stories that demonstrate that, and I'm going to tell them in reverse order. So we go three, two, one, getting weirder and more bizarre as we go along. And also, these stories are of the more spooky variety, too. So stranger than fiction and spooky. But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload once a week. So if that's of interest to you, the next time the button is counting something really important and they're taking their time, counting through it, wait till they get close to the end and then begin wildly shouting out random numbers just to screw them up. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's stories. At around 5:00 PM on August 29th, 1954, a 53-year-old woman named Juliet Exline had just sat down on her couch with a book inside of her home in Los Angeles when she got this weird wave of anxiety that rushed over her.

Now, there was nothing she could think of that would cause her to feel this way. She even looked around her house thinking, maybe there was something weird going on, but there was nothing. Finally, Juliet, she put her book down and just took a few calming breaths to go back to normal. She didn't know what was going on, but she could tell she was super anxious. Now, generally speaking, Juliet was a very mellow person. She was not prone to anxiety attacks like this, and so that caught her off guard. The only thing she could think of that was different than normal was her husband, Larry, was on a much-needed vacation. The last couple of days while he'd been gone had been maybe more lonely in the house, and so maybe that was causing her to feel this weird stress. She didn't know. But she told herself, Larry's vacation was definitely a good thing. Larry was an exterminator, and over the past two years, he had not taken a single day off. He was a total workaholic. When Larry began to talk about wanting to take a break, Juliet had encouraged him to put in time for some vacation time, put in a request.

Frank had actually done that. As soon as his boss had approved a two-week-long vacation, Larry had been so pumped. He had called his friend, and they had immediately scheduled a fishing trip. Four days before, Frank and his friend had driven off to enjoy his time off. As Juliet thought about that, she told herself that, You know what? Even if she was feeling a little bit anxious about Larry being gone, it really was a good thing for Larry, and it would improve not only his life, but her life as well. This was overall a good thing, and so she just needed to deal with this anxiety that maybe or maybe not was connected to Larry. She didn't know. But for the rest of that evening, Juliet just could not get rid of this baseline low-level nervousness she was feeling. And so at some point, she began getting up and walking around her house and confirming all the windows were shut and locked and the doors were locked. She was drawing curtains, checking in closets, making sure everything was totally safe. And then by 08:00 PM, when she still just could not shake this anxiety, she decided she just needed to go to bed and sleep this off.

But after falling asleep, Juliet suddenly woke up at 10:15 PM, drenched in sweat with the most intense anxiety she had ever felt in her life. She was totally disoriented. She's looking around her room like, What's going on here? Then she heard a voice. It was Larry's voice, except he sounded funny. He sounded quiet, as if maybe he was outside the house trying to come in and he was calling to her. So in a panic, she jumped out of bed, ran into the hallway, and right in the hallway was Larry. He wasn't outside. He was right there. Except something was wrong with Larry. He was hunched over and grabbing his stomach, and he had his hand on the wall, and he also appeared to be soaking wet. Juliet had no idea what was going on. But between all that anxiety and now seeing Larry here in this weird state, she couldn't help herself. She just ran towards him to just make sure he was okay. But as soon as she got about a foot away from him, he held out his hand and said, No, don't touch me. I have to go back. What he said was so disorienting that Juliet just stopped and stared at her husband like, What is this?

That's when she made the startling realization that Larry was not soaking wet with water. He was soaking wet with blood, and he was clutching his stomach like something was bleeding in his midsection. The reason he had sounded so quiet when he had called out to her and woken her up was because he was clearly hurt. Juliet has no clue what's going on. Her husband was supposed to be seven hours away on this fishing trip, and so how is he here? It didn't make any sense. Really not knowing what else to do, Juliet just said, I'm going to call the doctor. She ran past Larry, headed to the kitchen, and she was about to grab the phone on the wall. But before she could grab it, the phone began to ring. Juliet just answered it and said, Hello, hello. What she heard was the sound of a sheriff in Eli, Nevada, and he said, Excuse me, is this Mrs. X-line? Juliet X-line? And she said, Yes. What's going on? What's happened? And the sheriff said, Ma'am, I'm sorry to tell you this, but I have some terrible news. Your husband got into a car accident, and unfortunately, he has passed away.

And now, the second the sheriff said this to Juliet, she just froze and goes, No, that's not possible. He's here with me right now. And Juliet turned around and looked into the hallway where Larry had been standing, and now Larry was gone. Larry really had died in that car accident because Juliet would bury her husband that week. But Juliet maintained that clearly after her husband had died, his spirit had somehow survived the accident because when she saw her husband standing in the hallway, hunched over and covered in blood, it was at 10:15 PM. She remembers because when she woke up, she saw the time. It was 10:15. Her husband had died at exactly 10:15 PM, the exact moment she saw him in the hallway. Juliet would ultimately write an account of what she experienced with her husband. However, from that day forward, she never once saw her husband again. That was the only time. At 12:30 PM on March seventh, 2015, a police officer named Tyler Beddows, along with his partner, were driving in his police cruiser near the Spanish Fork River in Utah, when suddenly a police dispatcher came on over the radio. This dispatcher was speaking very urgently and said, Hey, a fisherman has just called in to say that he spotted what looks like an upturned SUV partially submerged in the Spanish Fork River right underneath the bridge.

Whoever is closest to this bridge, get over there and see if there's anybody inside the vehicle that can be saved. Officer Beddows and his partner, they knew they were very near this bridge. Immediately, they banged a U-turn, they drove to the bridge, but from the road, they looked down and couldn't see any SUV. But they saw there were some firefighters and paramedics that were also converging at the spot on the road, and everybody's getting out and running down to the riverbank. And so Beddows and his partner did the same thing. They got out and they ran down. And then finally, when they got to the riverbank and they saw underneath this bridge, sure enough, there was this red SUV upturned, partially submerged. And he noticed right away that none of the doors had been opened in this SUV. And so it meant whoever was driving this vehicle when it flipped over, very likely was still inside. Officer Beddows and his partner and the other first responders just jumped into this icy cold river and began making their way closer and closer to this upturned SUV, which, again, it's not fully submerged. It's like a third of the way underwater.

If you were sitting in the seat inside of this vehicle and you were an adult, your head would basically be in the water if you were still strapped into the seat. As they're making their way towards this SUV, when they got close enough, they began hearing a woman inside of the vehicle screaming, Hey, we're in here. Come over here. Help. But when officer Beddows and the rest of the first responders actually reached the SUV, the water was so murky and it basically completely covered up the windows that they weren't really able to look into the vehicle. They could just hear this woman yelling, but that was it. Then when they tried to open up the doors, they couldn't do it because the roof had begun to cave in, and so the actual framing of the door wouldn't open. So all these first responders, it's like their adrenaline is pumping, and they're like, Come on, we got to push this thing up onto so we can get in. So all these first responders are pushing and pushing, and slowly but surely, they began to raise the side of this vehicle up until the windows suddenly were clear, and Officer Beddows and the others were able to look into the car, and they saw there was a woman in the driver's seat, and there was a baby in a car seat, dangling upside down in the back seat, still strapped in.

And so Beddos began screaming, There's a baby in here. There's a baby in here. And suddenly it was like everybody got extra strength, and they pushed this vehicle all the way up onto its side. And then one of the firefighters climbed up onto the side of the car, which now was the highest point of the car. And he reached in and he clipped these straps, holding the baby who had been upside down, dangling there, cut the straps and pulled the baby out and handed the baby over to Officer Beddows. Then the firefighter began doing the same thing to get the woman out. But Officer Beddows, at this point, he just took this baby, he turned away. He figured the first responders will handle this woman, and he's going to take this baby to safety because he couldn't even tell if the baby was alive or not. He's cradling this baby. He's rushing back through the water, back to the riverbank, and then he hands the baby over to the paramedics. Right as he does, he sees this little baby begins to move its arms and flicker its eyes, and he wanted to weep out of relief that this child was okay.

They put the baby onto a stretcher, they put the baby in the ambulance, and they whisk the baby away to the hospital where this baby would survive. But after the baby had been taken away, Officer Beddows turned his attention back to the SUV and back to the woman to see how she was doing. But he could tell right away from the way people were acting, all the other first responders that were still dealing with the crisis in the water, the way they were acting indicated that something is off here. Well, it would turn out 14 hours earlier, so at around 10:00 PM the previous night, a 25-year-old woman named Jennifer Grossbeck had just left her father's house in Salem, Utah, and in her car was her little 18-month-old baby, Lily, who was in the back seat. After Jennifer pulled away from her father's house and her father's on the porch, waving to her, she began driving towards her home. But something happened around 10:30 PM that night. We don't know what, but something caused Jennifer to careen off the road on that bridge and flip over and land in the water. Maybe she fell asleep at the wheel or an animal jumped out.

We don't know. But we know at 10:30, she careens off the bridge and she lands in that river. Then for 14 hours, she and her baby remained upside down in that river until finally, officer Beddows and the other first responders came rushing over to to open it up and get them out of there. If you recall, all the first responders, officer Beddows included, heard Jennifer screaming that they were in the car, Come save us, please. But what they would find out is that could not have been Jennifer because Jennifer was killed on impact when the car fell into the water. Only Lily survived the crash. Then Lily, who's nearly hypothermic and she's upside down with water like two inches away from her head for 14 hours, she dangled there. When she was pulled out, according to was like a couple of minutes before she would have died from hypothermia. Without that voice, Lily almost certainly would have died because it was the sound of that voice that really encouraged all these first responders to find the strength and get that car up on its side and then get the baby out of there. We don't know whose voice that belonged to, but for sure, it saved Lily's life.

And again, baby Lily would make a full recovery. And to this day, Officer Beddows and the other first responders, they know what they heard and they do not have an explanation for it. Do you like scary stories about cryptids, the paranormal, the supernatural, bizarre true crime? Of course you do. Well, I have a podcast for you to check out. It's called Bedtime Stories, and it's a weekly podcast from our studio, Ballin Studios, that I know you will love if you're a fan of the Strange, dark, and mysterious. With every episode of Bedtime Stories, I feel totally creeped out by the end. They're just so good at building the suspense and just making it feel really unsettling. You may have heard of Bedtime Stories because they actually have an amazing YouTube channel that I've been a subscriber to for years. They're literally my favorite YouTube channel, not a lie. That's the one I go to. That's my favorite channel. But now they're available in podcast form as well. If you stick around till the end of this YouTube video, I will play you a clip from one of their newest podcast episodes so you can get a feel for what it's going to be like.

When you're done listening to that clip, if you liked it, please go and follow and binge Bedtime Stories on whichever podcast platform you listen on. Okay, back to the stories. At around 9:00 PM on October 26, 2009, a 19-year-old college student named Miako Hiroka, bagged up the last bit of trash inside of the ice cream parlor where she worked, and she dumped it into a bag, and she tied that bag up. It was closing time, and so Miako looked around the inside of the parlor, made sure everything was where it was supposed to be, and then she flipped off the lights, threw her purse over her shoulder, she grabbed that bag of trash, trash. She headed outside the parlor, she shut and locked the door, she dumped the trash in a nearby bin, and then began walking towards the exit of the mall, which is where this parlor was located. It was inside of this big mall. Miako went to school in a city called Hamada City, which is located on the Coast of Japan in an area called the Shimane Prefecture. And Hamada City was a totally beautiful and very remote location with these amazing beaches and unbelievable mountains with all these ski resorts on it.

I mean, this was an incredible place to live. But as much as Miako did love living there, she was actually far more excited about where she'd be living the next year because she was doing an exchange program. She'd be studying in Russia, and that was so exciting for her. And in fact, this exchange program was the reason why Miako had picked up this job at this ice cream parlor because she came from a family that was not poor by any means, but they didn't have a lot of extra income. Miako felt strongly that she really wanted to pay her way to go do this big Russian exchange program because it wasn't cheap. She was picking up as many shifts as she could to save up money to pay her way. And so Miako eventually reached the exit of this mall, and she stepped outside into the night, and then she had a decision she needed to make, and she needed to make this decision every night after work. There were two ways that she could get back to her dorm, which was located about a mile away. The quick way would be to just hop on a bus and have the bus take her to her dorm, but that cost money.

And remember, Miako is trying to save up as much money as she can to pay for Russia next year. And so taking the bus just felt like not really worth it. The other option, which was free, was much longer and frankly just plain spooky, and Miako hated it. What it entailed was basically just walking to her dorm, but it would mean walking for about a third of a mile through this really spooky forest. It looked like it was straight out of a horror movie. Now, up until recently, Miako's coworker had always left with her at the same time, and they lived roughly in the same area, and so they would walk together through that forest, saving money, and also providing each other's security as they went through the spooky area. But recently, the coworker had quit, and so now Miako was all alone. As Miako stood there wondering what she should do, take the bus route or take the forest route, she just thought about, next year, it's all going to be worth it. I'm going to go to Russia. I'm going to pay my way. It's going to be awesome. After all, what's the worst that can happen?

It's just a few minutes walking through a forest. I've done dozens of times. Before long, I'll be in my brightly lit, safe dorm room, studying away, and everything will be fine. Miako turned and walking towards the forest. The following day, a little past 4:00 PM, the owner of the ice cream shop where Miako worked was standing inside the parlor feeling really annoyed because Miako had not shown up for her shift, and now the owner, who normally did a lot of administrative and managerial things, was stuck at the counter serving all the customers, basically doing Miako's job. But when 5:00 PM came and still Miako had not shown up and the owner had tried calling her and she didn't pick up and there was just no sign of her, The owner went from being annoyed to being somewhat worried. And so after, again, not being able to call Miako to figure out what was going on, he wound up going through her file and finding her mother's phone number, and he called her. And when he spoke to Miako's mother, he knew right away there was something wrong because Miako's mother actually was pretty panicked. And she said, You know what?

Last night when Miako was coming home from work, she told me she would call me when she got to her dorm, but I never heard from her, and I haven't been able to get in touch with her since. And so after this conversation, investigation ended, Miako's mother would call the police and report her daughter missing. And pretty much instantly, the police in Hamada City responded in force. They launched a huge investigation to go figure out what happened to Miako. And really, the reason behind that is because Hamada City is this unbelievable place, this secluded, safe place, where things like this did not happen. Frankly, it scared everybody, and they wanted to deal with it as quickly as possible. And so what police did at first is they went and looked at security footage from the an ice cream parlor where they knew she had been working on the night she went missing. Sure enough, at about 9:16 PM, there's footage of her walking out of the ice cream parlor in the mall. She's got a purse over her shoulder, and she shuts and locks the door. She throws the trash away, and then she heads towards the exit.

But after that, nobody saw her. There was no more footage. There was no more tips or anything. She just vanished once she left the mall. And so very quickly, this story gained lots of attention because, again, Hamada City is like this quintessential vacation spot It's so perfect. It's so safe. And to have this girl just go missing, it was scandalous. And so it made the news all over Hamada City. And also people who lived in Hamada City were suddenly on edge at night. What's out there snatching people up? In fact, Miako's College, during the few days following her disappearance, they set a curfew for all their students. All their students had to be back in their dorms at a certain time to keep them safe. But again, despite the police really leaning into this case from the jump and putting all their manpower and all their resources into this, they really had no idea what happened to Miako. Then on November sixth, 2009, so 11 days after Miako went missing, a man who was hunting for mushrooms up on this mountainside about 15 miles away from the ice cream parlor, believed he spotted this beautiful mushroom sitting underneath a few fallen leaves.

And so excited, the guy runs over and he begins moving away the leaves to grab this big meaty mushroom. But as soon as he grabbed the skin of this mushroom and began to pull, he stopped. And then he quickly turned and began sprinting back down the path that had brought him up here. And as he was running, he pulled his phone out and he saw he had no service, and he just kept on running and holding the phone up, looking for service. And then finally, when he was about halfway down the mountain, he saw he had service on his phone, and he called the police. The second the dispatcher answered, this man began screaming, I found a human head. When police arrived on that mountainside where this man claimed to have found a human head, well, they confirmed he was right. They found Miako a severed head right underneath those leaves. The reason this guy thought her head was a mushroom, a dark-colored mushroom, because it was obvious that Miako's face had been so badly beaten, and it was all black and blue before she lost her head. So this Hunter had literally thought that was a big, big mushroom.

And so at this point, the Hamada City police shifted their area of search from around the mall and the ice cream parlor where they thought they would find Miako to this forested mountain area where her head was found. And now, of course, it was no longer a search and rescue. It was a recovery mission. They're just looking for the rest of Miako's body. And over the next couple of days, as police searched this forested mountainside, they would find different parts of Miako all over the place. Then after they had found all the pieces to Miako, the running theory, based on what they were seeing, is that very likely she had been strangled to death, and then her body was burned, and then she was dismembered and scattered throughout this forested mountain area. But there was very little evidence about who had actually done this to Miako. Miako had no enemies to speak of. Everybody who spoke about Miako said she was incredibly lovely and kind, and really, there wasn't anybody in her life that would want to do her harm. Also because Miako's body had been destroyed and left out for so long, any trace evidence left behind by her killer or killers was basically nonexistent.

The police really had no leads to speak of. They had no suspects or anything. They called in psychologists to try to make a profile of who they thought might have done this. The best theory anyone could come up with was that this had been a random crime of opportunity, that the person who killed her didn't know her, and that likely her killer was a man who was likely between the ages of 20 and 40. But even that information really didn't narrow anything down. So quickly, this case began to go cold. But as the police investigation itself began to go cold, the lure around the story was only growing. I mean, this really seemed like totally unbelievable case, considering where it happened. I mean, Hamada City is this perfect place. How could this happen here? So what started as being a local news story, albeit a big local news story, became a major national story all over Japan. So all these TV outlets and journalists were descending on Hamada City, and they were taking video of the ice cream parlor and of the police Department and filming Miako's dorm and her school and her parents house.

I mean, there were people all over the place trying to get any bit of information to report on about this case. And despite there being dozens and dozens of these live reports basically every day coming out of Hamada City about this case and about Miako, there was one particular news report that took this case from being totally unfortunate and sad and tragic and horrible to completely unbelievable and bizarre. Shortly after Miako's remains had basically all been found, but they were still doing some recovery operations up on that mountainside, one of these random TV reporters who was in Hamada to report on this crazy case decided to set up their TV camera, so it was pointing towards the dark entrance of that spooky forest that Miako would walk through to get back to her dorm. So this TV news reporter has got their microphone, and they're standing with the forest entrance right behind them and the camera man's filming, looking towards this opening of the forest. The actual report was pretty generic. I mean, this reporter was basically saying, Well, coming at you live from Hamada City, just outside of the forest where perhaps Miako was killed.

It was just like that. It was just talking about the case, and there was nothing to it, at least not to the TV reporter and the cameraman who were on site, because for them, the entire report was pretty routine. They did their job, they got their shot, they got their report, and then they left. But they streamed it live. While they were doing it, all these people are tuned in watching this news report live in front of this forest. Something really unsettling happened on this broadcast. While that news reporter was talking, another voice began to be heard by people watching this broadcast. It was not the cameraman, and it was certainly not the TV journalist. It was a woman's voice. There was no woman anywhere near the shot. After the fact, the journalist and the cameraman would also attest that there was nobody around. It was just them. But this detached, very pained voice said very clearly, and all these people heard it live, This is very painful. Why only me?. And so after this news report happened, this story, this case about Miako, went from being just a Japanese story to being like an international sensation because everybody believed when they saw this video that that voice that was heard was Miako's ghost basically talking on camera.

That's why you can't see her. It's her spirit communicating with the living world. However, despite that drawing even more attention to this case, it didn't remotely help the police actually solve the case. They still had no idea who did this. That's how this case would stay for years, just totally stalled. That is until seven years later when a police officer was conducting a routine police review of old criminal case files that hadn't been solved, going through them all to see if maybe evidence had been missed, and maybe that was why the case had not been solved. So as police officer is looking through all these case files, and when they landed on the Miako case, they did discover a piece of evidence that had been totally overlooked. It was the file of a convicted sex offender named Yoshiharu Yano. Yoshiharu was a 33-year-old man who had served time in prison for assaults on three different women in Tokyo, which is 500 miles away from Yamada City, where Miako was killed. Because of that 500-mile gap between Tokyo and Yamada City, Yoshiharu had been completely overlooked in terms of being a suspect in Miako's murder. It just seemed like he was too far away to be involved.

But the police officer who was doing that routine review, they discovered that right before Miako was murdered, this Yoshiharu guy had been let out of prison and decided to live in Hamada City. On the night Miako was killed when she decided to walk into that forest, well, they found security footage of Yoshiharu's car driving along around that forest and up near that mountain where Miako's remains were all discovered. And so this investigator who discovered this piece of information got permission from higher ups to search Yoshiharu's home where he was living right then. And when they searched his home, they discovered a digital camera with 40 photos on it that would explain what happened to Miako. It was very clear Yoshiharu had murdered Miako because some of the pictures contain photos of Miako, and they are just horrible. But figuring out who Miako's killer was was not the end of this case. In fact, it wasn't even the most shocking part of this case. The most shocking part of this case is what happened to Miako's killer, Yoshiharu, basically right after she was murdered, and that voice, that detached female voice, was heard on that TV news report.

Seven years earlier, right around the time that Miako's head had been found, and also after that voice had been heard on the TV newscast, some people who were driving in a car north of Hamada City began calling the police to report something very strange. They called the police and said, There is this small white Toyota Corolla car that has two people inside of it, and they've driven to the side of the road, and the driver is ramming over and over again against the railing. They're smashing into the railing, backing up, smashing over and over again. The car is somehow in control. They don't understand how these people are not getting out of the car. What are they doing? Traffic had stopped on either side. It was just totally nonsensical. Then by the time the police showed up, this car that was just repeatedly driving into the side of this guardrail, it burst into flames with the two people inside still clearly alive and looking terrified, and they caught on fire and died. Now, at the time, this did make the news. It looked very much like some weird murder suicide where the driver had intentionally driven the car until it burst into flames and killed themselves and also their passenger.

But it didn't really amount to more than just a really weird news story because there was no connection to the Miako case. This is like a totally isolated thing. However, seven years later, when that police officer discovered the link that Yoshiharu was in Hamada City, and then they figured out, yes, Yoshiharu was the killer. Well, suddenly, that totally weird murder-suicide took on a whole new meaning because the driver of that car was Yoshiharu, and the passenger was his mother. Again, from eyewitness testimony, it didn't really make sense the way this all happened. It was almost like the car was possessed something that the passengers couldn't control it. Now, who knows if that's true, but when you combine it with the sound of that female voice on the TV news camera that everybody assumed was Miako's ghost saying, This is so painful, why only me? Suddenly, those words took on a new meaning. People thought, You know what it is? Miyako's Ghost must have taken control of that car and made sure not only Yoshiharu suffered and died, but his family member died as well, that she was seeking her revenge on her killer. As promised, here is a clip from the newest episode of the Bedtime Stories podcast.

Enjoy.

Despite the invention of satellite communications and GPS tracking, ships and planes continue to vanish from across the globe, leaving no trace of their passing. Simultaneously, the remains of mysterious boats wash up on remote shorelines, their identities long since removed by effects of weathering and decay. It has been theorized that there are places on this Earth where time operates in a somewhat different manner, where some invisible portal or corridor is capable of propelling a vehicle and its occupants to a very different moment in history, both in the future and the past. Could it be that this outlandish theory is the reason behind some of the inexplicable disappearances that take place on a near daily basis? This.

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed that clip, be sure to go follow and binge the Bedtime Stories podcast on whichever podcast platform you listen to. New episodes come out every Wednesday. So that's going to do it. I hope you enjoyed today's stories. If you want to hear more strange, dark, and mysterious stories, remember, we have a whole slew of podcasts under the Balin Studios bannerhead. Just search for Balin Studios on any podcast platform, and you will have hundreds and hundreds of Strange, Dark, and Mysterious stories to bitch. Thank you so much. Until next time. See you. Wait, don't go anywhere. If you're looking for more Strange, Dark, and Mysterious videos, click here.