The Haunted Bunker: Paranormal Mysteries & the Unexplained

Paranormal encounters. Cryptid sightings. UFO reports. Unsolved mysteries that defy explanation. Welcome to The Haunted Bunker—where mysteries hide. Each week, brothers Shane and Josh Waters take turns presenting the unexplained to each other. One brother researches the mystery, one reacts fresh—and the gang explores alongside us. This isn't a debate show. We don't debunk. We don't prove. We PRESERVE mysteries with wonder and respect for the witnesses who experienced them. From Bigfoot and Mothman to haunted locations and phenomena that science can't explain—if it makes you wonder "what if?"—we're diving in. 🗓️ New episodes every Tuesday  ⭐ Premium members: Early access Fridays + exclusive Unmasked episodes on Patreon and Apple Podcasts Join the gang. The bunker door is open. Where Mysteries Hide.       

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  1. 13h ago

    The Haunting Tale of Amber & Secrets of the Crystal Skulls (Re-release, Kim's First Episode)

    July 2023. The show was still called Mystery Inc, and Kim was working in a corner of the studio when Shane and Josh pulled her over and put a microphone in front of her. She had edited every episode up to that point. This was the first time the gang heard her voice. We are bringing that episode back as episode 185. It is the original recording, Mystery Inc theme and all, with the Unmasked bonus that followed it, Patreon-only in 2023, included at the end. The first half is Kim's. Shane tells how he and Kim met, which starts with a Secret Santa draw, a big bottle of wine, a supervisor who pulled Shane aside, and a last-minute run to Bath and Body Works. The wooden crate from that gift still sits on the back of her toilet. Then she talks about Amber, her oldest daughter. Amber was blonde, kind, the first one to step in when anyone was being bullied, and forever asking for extra lunch money because some other kid did not have any. She got stuck on Muncie's first roundabout right after she got her license. Kim still takes an extra lap around it for her. On October 28, 2012, after a Halloween party, Amber was riding with two boys. The driver had been drinking and tried to beat a train. Amber and the driver both died. She was a junior and a cheerleader. Kim tells how she learned the news that morning, what the years since have looked like, and why she now speaks at schools and with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. As she puts it, as a parent, you do not get over it. Shane and Josh let her tell it her way, and the three of them find the laughter in it too, because that is how this friendship works. The second half is Josh's, and the trail leads to the crystal skulls. He has stood in a room with one at Spirit Fest at Camp Chesterfield, Indiana, and he describes what that felt like. From there he walks through the legend of the thirteen skulls, the Mitchell-Hedges skull and the book Danger, My Ally, the British Museum skull that surfaced in Paris in 1881 and was sold to Tiffany and Company before the museum bought it, the Sha Na Ra skull found in Mexico in 1995 by what its finders called psychic archaeology, and the skull named Einstein, whose owner says it is an ancient computer. Quartz holds no carbon, so radiocarbon dating cannot touch them. Josh lays out the case for 1800s fakes and the case for something older, and tells you which he chooses. Then the Unmasked. Shane is fresh back from Europe with stories about the postcards he mailed Kim (the one from Paris read "That's one big tower"), a tiny terracotta pot from a Walmart that got Kim to pull the car over, the man who called her three times about a silo, the stranger selling his grandmother's false teeth, a hotel plunger in Tennessee, and the crystal skull conspiracies Josh saved for the bonus, aliens included. Kim picks Velma. What you'll hear in this episode: How Shane and Kim met, and the Secret Santa gift that almost went very wrong Amber: the roundabout, the outside light and the bugs, the extra lunch money, and October 28, 2012 Why Kim speaks to students and works with Mothers Against Drunk Driving Josh in a room with a crystal skull at Camp Chesterfield The thirteen-skull legend, Mitchell-Hedges, the British Museum skull, Sha Na Ra, and Einstein Unmasked: the postcards, the little pot, the silo, the false teeth, and the plunger This one is for Kim, and for Amber. If you would like more information on the Amber Nicole Morrow Memorial Scholarship and donating information please visit https://www.randolphcountyfoundation.org Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    The Haunting Tale of Amber & Secrets of the Crystal Skulls (Re-release, Kim's First Episode)
  2. Sep 8

    Elementals | The Leaves That Stood Up

    A guy Josh works with was reviewing motion-triggered footage when the wind picked up and the leaves began to move. Then a large pile of them stood up off the ground, held its shape for several seconds, and dropped back down. Josh told him to go look up elementals. Then Josh went and did the reading himself, and that is this week's episode. Elementals are the beings folklore assigned to earth, water, air and fire. The trail leads back through Greek natural philosophy, medieval thought and Renaissance alchemy, and it gave us four families that still turn up everywhere. Gnomes hold the earth: mines, caves, stones, buried treasure, and that one hill nobody in the village will discuss. Undines hold the water, nymph-like spirits of rivers, springs and waterfalls, and the old book that carries their name is older than The Little Mermaid and considerably sadder. Sylphs hold the air, and get blamed for sudden inspiration, lost hats, and rumors that move faster than a horse. Salamanders hold fire, and have nothing at all to do with the amphibian. Josh's framing is the best line in the episode. Elementals are what you would get if nature had a backstage crew, moving the scenery, making the fog, and occasionally setting the curtains on fire. The folklore gets specific about consequences, and it fits the punishment to the crime. Cross the earth and you get cave-ins, spoiled foundations, and a path that stops being where you left it. Cross the water and you get floods, drowning dreams, a reflection gone missing, and a voice that knows your name a little too clearly. Cross the air and you get sudden storms, broken messages, and endless wandering. Cross fire and it skips the warning entirely. The gang also ties it back to last week. If a thing can lift a pile of leaves, it can roll a ball back across a floor. Before any of that, there is a solid hour of hangout. Shane brought Amish crack from a Fort Wayne bakery, which turns out to be a box of cinnamon sugar donut holes and a genuine hazard to everyone at the table. He picked up a twenty five dollar parking ticket in Warsaw and has decided to fight it in court on principle. He got locked in a coffee shop bathroom without his phone. He walked past a former Bachelor and learned that a town once built a fake fall festival for a TV shoot and then liked it enough to keep holding it. And a friend's five trading cards turned out to be worth a great deal more than anyone at that table guessed. Plus Josh reads everyone's element, and there is a Dollywood trip on the calendar. What you'll hear in this episode: The trail cam footage that started all of this Gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, and what each one guards What folklore says happens when you disturb the wrong threshold Amish crack, a parking ticket worth fighting, and a card shop surprise The gang is going to Dollywood in Sevierville, Tennessee, December 4 through 6. Patreons and listeners are welcome to come along. Want to send the gang something? PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    Elementals | The Leaves That Stood Up
  3. Sep 1

    Grandma Took Her Teeth Out

    The gang skipped the mystery this week and just talked, and somehow that turned into false teeth, a haunted house in Hartford City, and a box of Charleston groceries with something deeply unserious buried at the bottom. It started with Shane's trash company, which has now gone weeks without picking up his can and keeps insisting in the app that the can was never out there. Then Kim opened the listener questions, and the whole thing got away from them. Savannah asked what the most absurd thing was that their grandmothers ever did. Josh remembered dentures slipping mid-hymn on a church stage, and a grandmother who simply took them out and kept right on singing. Shane confessed to prank calling his own grandma as "John from the bank" about fraudulent charges in Nigeria and New Zealand, which ended with her cussing him out and then driving to the bank anyway, just to be sure. And then there is the story that gives this episode its name. One afternoon Grandma rose out of her chair, removed her false teeth, kicked off her slippers, and went after a houseguest who had used the F word one time too many in her house. Shane caught her mid-flight and got dragged the length of the living room for his trouble. Kim's memories run a little differently. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's while Kim was still in high school, so the one she holds onto is a camper at Cabin Creek shaking hard enough that Grandma hollered at Grandpa to knock it off. It was an earthquake. Trevor wanted to know what one snack each of them would carry into a haunted house. Josh picked Doritos, on the grounds that they burn. That set Shane off on the night he agreed to go live on Facebook from a house in Hartford City without knowing it was a haunted house, discovered the only air conditioned room was the one he then refused to leave, watched a curtain move behind him on camera, and turned down an invitation to the basement where someone had just been scratched. There was a room lined with mirrors that the owner called a portal, and a room full of dolls with a Ouija board sitting in the middle of it. He left at one in the morning for a Holiday Inn rather than sleep on an army cot. Kat asked whether Shane is married, and he answers that about as directly as you would expect from a man of mystery. MT asked whether solving a case like JonBenet Ramsey with DNA would ever quiet the arguments online or only make them louder. Nobody at this table is optimistic. There is a tender stretch in here too. It was Amber's birthday, and Kim brought her cake for everyone. Josh brought the news about Dolly Parton, and the room sat with that for a while. Then Savannah's box got opened, and the trail leads somewhere none of them saw coming. What you'll hear in this episode: The trash company saga, and why the chat support keeps insisting it is not AI Three grandmothers, two sets of false teeth, and one earthquake blamed on Grandpa Shane's night in a Hartford City haunted house, the mirror room and the doll room A care package from Charleston, a Bigfoot figurine, and an award nobody asked for Want to send the gang something? PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    Grandma Took Her Teeth Out
  4. Aug 25

    The Cigarette Turtle (No-Mystery Hangout)

    No mystery again this week. Just Shane, Josh, and Kim around the table, and a conversation that gets away fromall three of them inside of ten minutes. It starts with a word. Shane had lunch with a friend who mentioned that growing up she was not allowed to say the F word or, of all things, crevice. Crevice. That sets off an hour of collateral damage, plus a real conversation about the words that were banned in their own houses. Sucks. Shut up. Hell. Anything that even rhymed with a cuss word. Josh confesses to crawling under the bunk beds to practice swearing where Jesus was the only witness, and Shane remembers the one night in the back of Grandma's Buick when he was handed actual permission to repeat every word their aunt had said, and used it. Which is the on-ramp to a full Grandma episode. Her purse was stocked like a pharmacy, which is how Shane once got handed two blood pressure pills in the middle of a sermon instead of Tylenol. When he asked if he was going to be okay, she said, "We'll find out." She kept the good candy bars in her panty drawer, right next to a cow taser. And years after she quit smoking, their uncle found a pile of cigarette butts in the grass under her bedroom window, told her a stranger must have been standing out there watching her sleep, and got to watch her stare at the ceiling and say, "Huh. That's weird." The rest of the evidence turned up much later, inside a heavy stone turtle that came apart in his hands. Zoinks. Shane also finally tells the Eagles Theater story. He accepted a calendar invite with no description, showed up for what he assumed was a normal evening downtown, and looked up to see his own name on the screen between two doctorates. Two hundred people. Doors closing. A panel on community food needs that nobody had mentioned he was speaking on. What he said up there came out of nowhere and turned out to be the most honest thing in the episode: go to the people who are barely making it, because they are the ones who know what next week feels like. That opens into food bank boxes full of things they could not cook with the gas shut off, and a carton of peanut butter milk nobody in this family has recovered from. Everything else lands where it lands. Josh's tarantula molted and then earned its keep by clearing a man out of his living room. The hissing cockroach Shane's college roommate kept spent a weekend in the freezer and survived it. Death cap mushrooms after the floods. Stop signs in this state you cannot see around until you are already in the intersection. A nine person salt water hot tub that dropped six thousand dollars because somebody drilled one light two inches too low. Josh talking honestly about labels and where he actually lands on them. And Kim stating for the record, more than once, that she is never calling Shane Dr. Waters. The postcard wall has room on it. PO Box 690, Wabash, Indiana 46992. Pull up a chair in the bunker. The only thing getting unmasked this week is Grandma. What you'll hear in this episode: The words they were not allowed to say as kids, and the one night in Grandma's Buick when Shane got permission to say all of them Grandma's purse pharmacy, the good candy bars stored next to a cow taser, and the hollow stone turtle where the cigarette butts went The Eagles Theater panel Shane got ambushed onto, and the food bank answer he came up with on the spot A tarantula that molted and then cleared a man out of Josh's living room, plus the hissing cockroach that survived a weekend in a freezer A nine person salt water hot tub discounted six thousand dollars over one crooked light Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    The Cigarette Turtle (No-Mystery Hangout)
  5. Aug 18

    Boto Encantado | The Amazon's Enchanted Dolphin

    It's a Josh mystery week in the bunker, and this one comes with a warning: Josh's reading habits are involved. Deep in the Amazon lives a freshwater dolphin that starts life gray and turns pink as it ages. By day, the boto swims the tannin-dark river hunting fish. But in stories told up and down the Amazon for generations, some nights one of those pink dolphins rises out of the black water as something else entirely: a handsome stranger dressed all in white, charming, magnetic, and always wearing a hat. The hat is not a fashion choice. It hides the blowhole he cannot quite leave behind. He is the Boto Encantado, the enchanted dolphin, and in the legend he appears at riverside festivals as the literal life of the party. He drinks, he dances, he sings, and by dawn he is gone, slipped back beneath the river as if he was never there. The villagers are left with a vague memory of the man in white. That is, until some of the women he charmed begin to show up pregnant. In communities that believed in the boto, naming a river spirit as the father carried more honor than admitting a stranger passed through, and a boto child was a blessed child. Josh has thoughts about this arrangement, and about Mr. Boto's parenting record. Other branches of the tale go darker. The boto can take people under the river entirely, not to drown them but to carry them down to Encante, a shimmering sunken city beneath the Amazon, the river's own Atlantis. For centuries, that one legend quietly explained the river's drownings, its disappearances, and its surprise pregnancies all at once, in a jungle where jaguars, anacondas, and fast black water gave it plenty to explain. Josh walks Shane and Kim through where the legend came from, why water spirits in folklore are almost always women (nymphs, sirens, mermaids, even Nessie) and what it means that this one is a man, and how the myth still protects the real animal today. Along much of the Amazon the pink dolphins are treated as sacred, and fishermen work around them rather than against them, a striking contrast with their propeller-scarred saltwater cousins. The species is genuinely endangered, which makes the old story one of its stranger guardians. Also in the bunker this week: Kim's birthday celebration rolls on with cake and gifts, Shane's grandma's full-sheet-cake miscommunication gets told at last, the robot mower fails to make it home two nights running and has to be rescued from a flower bed, and Josh lands the "multiple porpoises" pun he is far too proud of. Plus a tease for next week: the gang takes on the Idaho student murders and Netflix's College Nightmare. **What you'll hear in this episode:** - The real pink river dolphins of the Amazon, and why they turn pink - The man in white with a hat over his blowhole - Unexplained pregnancies, blessed children, and folklore as social cover - Encante, the glowing city beneath the river - Why the legend still protects an endangered species today - A sheet-cake miscommunication, a runaway robot mower, and birthday week in the bunker Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    Boto Encantado | The Amazon's Enchanted Dolphin
  6. Aug 11

    The Buff Ledge Abduction | Kim's 1968 Birthday Special

    August 7, 1968. The number one song in America is "Hello, I Love You" by The Doors, Richard Nixon is being nominated in Miami Beach, and Congress has just spent a day asking scientists whether UFOs are real. It's also the day Kim was born. So for her birthday, the gang investigates the strangest thing that happened on her actual birth date: the Buff Ledge abduction, one of the best-documented UFO cases in American history, which played out on a quiet Vermont lake the very day she arrived. Buff Ledge Camp sat on the shore of Lake Champlain, just north of Burlington. That Wednesday evening the camp was nearly empty, the swim team away at a meet. Two teenage staffers, sixteen-year-old Michael Lapp and nineteen-year-old Janet Cornell, were on the boat dock watching the sun go down when a bright light appeared in the darkening sky. It descended, flattened into a disc, and released three smaller craft that looped and fell like leaves over the water. One of them plunged into the lake, resurfaced, and glided straight toward the dock. What Michael described next has kept this case alive for more than five decades: a transparent dome, two childlike beings inside, a strange feeling of mental contact, and then a beam of light so intense he said he could see the bones in his own hand. His last clear memory of that stretch of evening is screaming "We don't want to go!" When the world snapped back, the sky was fully dark, time was missing, and Janet was groggy beside him. Then came the silence. The two never reported it, went their separate ways after camp, and said nothing for about ten years, until recurring nightmares drove Michael to the Center for UFO Studies. Investigator Walter Webb spent roughly five years on the case, regressing both witnesses under hypnosis, separately, after a decade with no contact between them. Their recovered accounts matched on the small, strange details, and Webb tracked down other former camp staff who remembered unexplained lights over the lake that same night. He published the full investigation in 1994. Jinkies, and that's only half the episode. This one is also a time capsule of the world Kim was born into: the Doors on the radio, Cream taking over the album chart, Rosemary's Baby and 2001: A Space Odyssey in theaters, six-cent stamps, and a country that spent the summer of 1968 staring at the sky. What you'll hear in this episode: The world on August 7, 1968, from the number one song to the news that night Two teenagers, an empty camp, and a light that fell like a leaf onto Lake Champlain The beam, the missing time, and ten years of silence Walter Webb's five-year investigation and the separate hypnosis sessions that matched Where the case stands today, and what the skeptics say Happy birthday, Kim. The universe apparently threw you quite a party. Join the gang for the case, the time capsule, and the question nobody has answered in fifty-eight years. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    The Buff Ledge Abduction | Kim's 1968 Birthday Special
  7. Aug 4

    Ghost Soup & Grave Hunting | A No-Mystery Hangout

    No mystery this week, just the gang around the table with snacks, big travel plans, and way too many cemetery stories. Shane, Josh, and Kim start with a follow-up on the Herb Baumeister case after watching more of the Fox Hollow Farm documentary on Hulu, including the detail about the original detective that Kim could not stop thinking about. Then some very cool news: one of the show's Patreon members is going to be in Indianapolis on Monday, and she has offered to take Shane and Kim to see the Fox Hollow memorial in Westfield honoring the victims. Full report next week. From there it turns into a tour of every famous grave the crew has ever hunted down. Muhammad Ali and Colonel Sanders in Louisville. President James Garfield in Cleveland, plus a certain sun-baked death angel statue that people still leave offerings for. John Dillinger at Crown Hill in Indianapolis, unmarked on the map, with concrete poured over the grave so nobody could dig him up. The Wright brothers. Tammy Wynette's mausoleum in Nashville, which you can only reach by walking through a working funeral home. And the little memorial pond where families scatter ashes, which instantly gets named ghost soup. Zoinks. There is also a genuinely useful travel tip in here: if you are ever trying to find a famous grave in a huge cemetery with no map, open Pokemon Go. The notable stones are almost always PokeStops. The rest of the night wanders exactly where you would expect. A robot lawn mower gets christened Muhammad Ali. Banana chips and Fiber One bars get reviewed, along with a cautionary tale about half a gallon of unpast- eurized apple cider. Josh mixes up Death on the Nile with Death on the Lanai, a Golden Girls cozy mystery, and somehow both end up on the watch list. Alton Brown is coming to the Honeywell Center. And Kim reports back from her guest spot on the Thriving Wabash County podcast, where she accidentally roasted the nicest member of the panel. Pull up a chair in the bunker. The only mystery this week is what that smell was. What you'll hear in this episode: A Fox Hollow Farm documentary follow-up and the plan to visit the victims' memorial in Westfield Famous grave road trips: Muhammad Ali, Dillinger, Garfield, the Wright brothers, Tammy Wynette, and the Cleveland death angel Ghost soup, the Pokemon Go grave-finding trick, snack reviews, and a Golden Girls cozy mystery mix-up Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    Ghost Soup & Grave Hunting | A No-Mystery Hangout
  8. Jul 28

    Fox Hollow Farm | The Full Story

    Shane took the documentary pick this week, and he brought the bunker home to Indiana. Both Fox Hollow documentaries on Hulu, the Emmy nominated 2025 series The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer and the brand new July 2026 follow-up Return to Fox Hollow: New Victims, Darker Secrets, plus the parts of the story neither film had room to tell. A heads up before you press play. This is a heavy one. It involves the murders of at least 25 men, most of them gay men taken from Indianapolis bars in the early 1990s, and their families are receiving answers right now, in 2026. We handle the victims with care, we attribute every theory to its source, and we keep the focus where it belongs: on the men who were lost and the people still working to bring them home. The story: Herb Baumeister was a married Westfield thrift store owner with a Tudor house, an indoor pool, and 18 wooded acres called Fox Hollow Farm, about 90 minutes from where we record. In 1996, after a witness's tip and a two year investigation that could not get past his front gate, his wife consented to a search while he was away. Investigators recovered roughly 10,000 charred bones and bone fragments from the woods. Baumeister fled to Canada and died by suicide before he could be arrested. Eight men were identified in the 1990s. Then the county closed the case, and the remaining bones sat in boxes for 26 years. That is where the documentaries begin. Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison reopened the identification effort in 2022 after one message from a victim's cousin, and Fox Hollow started giving up its answers: Allen Livingston in 2023, Daniel Halloran in 2025, a memorial in Westfield with room left for more names. The 2025 series brought the case 500 new tips and the first on-camera interview with the witness whose story started everything, and then changed. The 2026 special picks up the hardest question of all: could one man really have done this alone? Shane, Kim, and Josh walk the whole timeline, sit with the identification effort that is still running at this hour, and then step onto the show's home ground: the haunting claims at Fox Hollow Farm, the red shirted figure, the pool, the recordings, and the honest question of what it means to tell ghost stories at a place where the victims are still being named. If you have information about the Fox Hollow victims, the Hamilton County Coroner's tip line is (317) 770-4415. What you'll hear in this episode: The full Fox Hollow case, start to finish, including what both documentaries leave out The 2022 to 2026 identification effort and the names it has returned to their families What the new 2026 special adds: new interviews, unreleased case files, and the accomplice question The haunting claims at Fox Hollow Farm, reported with respect and a healthy dose of skepticism Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    Fox Hollow Farm | The Full Story

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About

Paranormal encounters. Cryptid sightings. UFO reports. Unsolved mysteries that defy explanation. Welcome to The Haunted Bunker—where mysteries hide. Each week, brothers Shane and Josh Waters take turns presenting the unexplained to each other. One brother researches the mystery, one reacts fresh—and the gang explores alongside us. This isn't a debate show. We don't debunk. We don't prove. We PRESERVE mysteries with wonder and respect for the witnesses who experienced them. From Bigfoot and Mothman to haunted locations and phenomena that science can't explain—if it makes you wonder "what if?"—we're diving in. 🗓️ New episodes every Tuesday  ⭐ Premium members: Early access Fridays + exclusive Unmasked episodes on Patreon and Apple Podcasts Join the gang. The bunker door is open. Where Mysteries Hide.       

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