Brown County, Indiana, May 2020. A dad and his 11-year-old daughter are turkey hunting in Yellowwood State Forest when she spots it first: about six feet tall, gray, and in his words "very, very strong looking." It crossed ground in seconds that took the two of them six minutes to walk. Back in 1952, police across south-central Indiana and military observers at Camp Atterbury watched three lights in the sky for hours, and we could not find an explanation for that night in any paper we read.

Zoinks, the gang heads home to Indiana's Little Smokies. Shane walks Kim and Brent through the Brown County Bigfoot file, from a caver near Harrodsburg in 1979 to call-and-answer howls at Yellowwood Lake, the Finding Bigfoot town forum in Bloomington, and the Nashville couple running a Bigfoot research center today. Then the sky takes over: the summer of Operation Skywatch, two weekends of saucers over Washington, and the night police from Seymour to Franklin reported what one civil defense director called a dogfight over Franklin.

Timeline of Events

July 14, 1952: Operation Skywatch puts Ground Observer Corps volunteers on round-the-clock sky watch in 27 states.

July 28, 1952: Indiana troopers and Camp Atterbury observers watch three objects over south-central Indiana from 1:07 a.m. until after 4 a.m.

July 29, 1952: The Air Force holds its largest Pentagon press conference since World War II about the Washington sightings.

November 1979: A caver near Harrodsburg, west of Lake Monroe, reports a six to seven foot figure covered in long dark brown hair.

November 2011: Finding Bigfoot holds a town forum at the Monroe County History Center in Bloomington.

August 8, 2015: Campers at Yellowwood Lake hear deep howls answered from across the water.

May 9, 2020: A father and daughter report a gray figure about six feet tall in Yellowwood State Forest.

What You Will Hear

The 2020 Yellowwood sighting and the six-minute walk that makes it hard to shakeA rainy night on a cabin porch near Greenbriar Lake and prints that looked like fuzzy bedroom slippers What happened when Finding Bigfoot came to Bloomington The trooper logs from July 28, 1952, ending with a red, white and blue object seen from Camp Atterbury Why one military base keeps turning up in both the sky stories and the woods stories

Sources

Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, Brown, Monroe and Bartholomew County reports

Seymour Daily Tribune and Anderson Daily Bulletin, July 28, 1952

Indiana Daily Student, November 2011

Indiana Public Media, July 3, 2026

Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Brown County State Park

If you liked this: Episode 163, The Phoenix Lights. Another night when ordinary people watched lights in the sky that nobody could explain.

The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker

Episode 189 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide

Muncie, Indiana, September 2026, and Shane and Kim finally put our buddy Brent in front of a microphone. He is Shane's old college roommate and the buddy behind a lot of the travel stories told on this show. Shane brought a mystery to the table. It never made it out of his notes, and by the end of the hour you will understand why.

Jinkies, it starts with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix, and the text Kim sent Shane the minute Aileen Wuornos showed up in the story. That turns into a real complaint about docudramas that never tell you how loosely they are based on a true story, Primetime included, the new Chris Hansen film starring Robert Pattinson. Then Brent and Shane start trading road stories from Hollywood, Washington State and a snowed-in Crater Lake, and Kim wants to know why she got left home.

Timeline of Events

August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are killed in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts.

June 20, 1893: A jury acquits Lizzie Borden of both murders.

Summer 1999: The Blair Witch Project opens and convinces plenty of people, Shane included, that found footage is real.

September 17, 2026: Netflix releases Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.

September 25, 2026: Primetime, with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, opens in theaters.

September 29, 2026: Shane, Kim and Brent sit down in Muncie to record this episode.

What You Will Hear

Why Kim texted Shane that Monster had just turned weird, and what Shane thinks the show was going for.

Shane's review of Primetime and his case for a loosely based on a true story warning on every docudrama. Shane alone at two in the morning in a Muncie movie theater, previewing found footage he believed was real.

A Hollywood hotel room with a see-through shower, and a borrowed CPAP setting that nearly drowned Shane

Zoinks, Brent at airport security with a backpack packed full of individually wrapped rocks

Gunshots on a Washington gold-sifting trip and a snowbank that gave way at the edge of Crater Lake

Sources

Netflix, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (2026)

A24, Primetime (2026)

National Park Service, Crater Lake National Park

Fall River Historical Society, Lizzie Borden collection

If you liked this: Episode 183, Grandma Took Her Teeth Out. Another week where the mystery stayed in the bag and the stories took over.

The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker

Episode 188 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide

St. Augustine, Florida, 1565. Spain planted a city on this coast forty two years before Jamestown and fifty five years before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth, and most of what happened next was fire, hurricane, siege or slaughter. Shane rode the Ghosts and Graveyards trolley through it at night, four other people on board and the sides of the bus folded open, and came back with the history and the ghost stories tangled together the way they are down there.

The gang walks the oldest European city in the country, from the spring that is supposed to make old men young to the coquina fort that cannonballs could not crack. Then the graveyards. There is a boy buried where he landed, under the tree he fell out of, alone at the front of what the tour calls the oldest European burial ground in the country, and the locals will tell you he still plays out there after dark with the friends he used to talk about.

Timeline of Events

1513: Juan Ponce de Leon reaches Florida. The story tying him to a spring that makes the old young again does not appear in writing until 1535, fourteen years after he died, and his landing place is disputed to this day.

September 8, 1565: Pedro Menendez de Aviles founds San Agustin, named for the saint whose feast day fell when his fleet first sighted land. He holds a mass of thanksgiving and shares a meal with the local Native people, fifty six years before the Plymouth feast of 1621.

September 20, 1565: Spanish troops take the French Fort Caroline, near what is now Jacksonville, while most of its defenders are away at sea.

Autumn 1565: Jean Ribault's fleet is wrecked by a hurricane. Roughly three hundred French survivors are put to the knife at the inlet south of town. That inlet is still called Matanzas, which means slaughters.

May 1586: Sir Francis Drake arrives with twenty three ships, takes the town and burns it. The residents rebuild.

1599: A fire and then a hurricane hit in the same year.

May 1668: The pirate Robert Searle sacks the city, kills sixty residents and carries others off for ransom or for sale. Spain decides it is done building in wood.

October 2, 1672: Work begins on the Castillo de San Marcos, out of coquina shellstone quarried on Anastasia Island.

1695: The first major construction phase ends. The Castillo was never taken in battle. It only ever changed hands on paper.

1780: After Charleston falls, three signers of the Declaration of Independence are held prisoner inside that fort.

What You Will Hear

Why coquina, a limestone made of packed seashells, swallowed cannonballs instead of shattering, and who was forced to quarry and lay it.

What the Florida Historical Society actually says about Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth, and what archaeologists found under the park instead.

The boy buried under the tree he fell from, and the gatekeeper's daughter said to walk the same ground.

One of the earliest patented Ouija boards, a folding portable embalming table, and a wall of death masks.

Why there is always a fire, and what it costs us every single time.

Sources

National Park Service, Castillo de San Marcos National Monument

Florida Historical Society on Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth legend

City of St. Augustine historical record, and the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park excavations

Period accounts of Drake's raid of 1586 and Searle's sack of 1668

Ghosts and Graveyards night tour, St. Augustine, ridden September 2026

If you liked this: Episode 170, Lady in Red and Tonopah's Mizpah Hotel. Another old building that never quite emptied out.

The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker

Episode 187 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide