There's a Ghost in Your Bed

In the spring of nineteen eighty six, Allen and Debbie Tallman moved in with their three young children into a modest ranch house on South Larrabee Street in Horicon, Wisconsin. The house was new, it had been built in nineteen eighty four, although it's worth noting that being nwe did not mean it wouldn't come with problems, and no, I'm not talking about the faults and the home inspection. For a while, life was ordinary and it was expected. They were living in a small Midwestern town after all. But all of that was going to change. They were still furnishing their home, so Allan and Debbie went to a local furniture shop in Horicon and found a set of bunk beds perfect for their two younger daughters. So they paid the second hand shop one hundred dollars and took it home. They took it straight to the basemind and stared it there before putting it together and then taking it upstairs. Eventually they got them into their daughter's bedrooms, but when they started sleeping in them, the first signs of trouble began. Soon after the bunk bed was moved into place, the children began experiencing health problems. They visited doctors more than usual, and one of them was hospitalized twice for illnesses that seemed unrelated to one another. At the same time, one of them was telling her parents that she kept hearing a strange voice telling her to be quiet at night. Danny, the oldest of three, claimed he saw a suitcase slide across the floor on its own before returning to where it had been. Allan and Debby assumed that these were the kinds of things children might imagine, but the events continued, the children's fear grew, and their stories were told with a consistency that was hard to dismiss. Over the weeks that followed, what began as strange noises and shifting objects would developed into something far more disturbing, marking the beginning of one of the most unusual hauntings ever reported in Wisconsin. Now, I came across this story in an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries, and although it was a very short segment, it still brought a long lasting type of fear of objects, things that don't move, that don't have a life of their own. I'm going to tell you the infamous tale of the tall, mean bunk bed incident. My name is Edwin and here's a horror story. It was late May of nineteen eighty seven when the bed was moved into the children's room. The arrangement was that the two girls would share the bunk beds and their oldest, a boy, would have his own room. The first incident came from the oldest son, Danny, who was sleeping in the room next to the bunk bed when he saw the clock radios dial moved by itself from one side to the other. He told his parents, but they were like, no, that can't happen. But still the mom, Debbie, thought that it was interference, so she went and took a look. That's when she saw that the knob was turning by itself and the red signal indicator was moving across a frequency bar. She found it really odd and took the radio out of the room. A few weeks later, mister Allan Tallman was painting in the basement when Debbie called him up for dinner. He laid the brush down and went upstairs. But when he went back down to the basement he found the brush he had been using bristles down in the paint. Now he would have never left it like that, so he tried to explain it to himself, but still couldn't. And yet he didn't want to even begin to think that his house was haunted. At first, Allan and Debbie try to calm themselves and the children down by suggesting that they were only dreaming or imagining things, but the consistency of it became harder to dismiss. Two of the children spoke of similar events, often separately, but their fear was real, and as parents, they were aware of it. In interviews, Debbie said that their two year old daughter had woken up screaming several times, saying that there was a fire on the door of her room, going shhh. Now, she mentioned that her son had told her of an old lady that was standing by the door in his room. It was a little old lady, quote really ugly, with long black hair and a glow about her like fire, with sounds of feet moving across the carpet. At one point, a babysitter saw a chair at the kitchen table that was rocking back and forth, with absolutely no one sitting on it and no explanation. Now, they themselves would sometimes see strange glowing shapes around the house as well. So at this point Debbie began to think that her house was proudly haunted, and the possibility that something in their home was intentionally trying to unsettle them. Near that last part of nightineteen eighty seven, they kept hearing doors banging open and shut, strange voices calling to them, and visions that were scaring the children. Things were getting out of hand. A week before Christmas, something had scared their son again, so Alan reached his breaking point. He started running around the rooms, challenging the entity, screaming to it, pick on me, leave my kids alone. If you want to fight, I'll fight. And he heard nothing back. But then one night, when he was getting home, he heard the howling of the wind, even though there was no breeze. He then heard it say come here, clearly audible. He started searching around to see who might have said that, expecting to find a prankster. He rushed over the front steps when he saw something glowing inside the garage. It was orangish red. He could see flames coming out of the overhead door, and that's when he saw two eyes in the windows. He immediately thought it was fire, but then he took a second look, and there was nothing. It was late around the same time again, at around two in the morning, and Alan had just returned from his late shift. He worked as a supervisor in a manufacturing plant, so it wasn't anything unusual for him, and on this occasion, Alan was in his daughter's bedroom waiting for them to fall asleep, when suddenly he heard a vacuum like sound. Startled. He looked around the room when he saw a foggy thing rise directly out of the floor with green eyes. As he stared in disbelief, he heard it say you're dead, and then it vanished instantly in a flash of flames. Now Alan was traumatized. He was visibly shaken when his wife, Debbie, saw him, describing him as white as a ghost and with blue lips. She kept asking what happened, what's wrong, but he wouldn't say anything. He was just standing there, tears coming down his face. His wife got on the phone and called a pastor from their church and told him what was going on, begging him to come right away, saying that Alan was crying and wouldn't tell her what happened. From the Unsolved Mysteries episode that I watched where they talked to the pastor. He said that Alan gave no signs of having made everything up. The pastor had been around terrified people before, and this is what was in front of him. So the pastor blessed the house, gave the family communion right there, and then gave them the tapes of church music for them to play in the house. However, the paranormal events resumed. This time had happened to a relative who was asked by Alan to watch over their daughters while they fell asleep since he had to go to work later than usual. This relative was skeptical of ghost so he was like, okay, we'll do it. But then he too saw quote the same specter, the one that had been seeing by the Tallman family. So he left the bedroom completely scared, saying, I am never coming back to this house. I cannot handle this. The family decided to leave the house for good that same night, opting instead to stay at a motel before the church provided them with a place to stay for the time. Now, around this time, word had spread around the neighborhood about the haunted Tallman home, something Debbie mentioned in an interview where she says how tough it was because she had to deal with the unknown in their home and the talk of around town. The house was in a subdivision of ten other houses noted by the Horricon Police Chief Douglas Claman. He, the pastor, and the homeowner had toured the house searching for recording devices, amplifiers, anything that showed that everything might have been a prank, even considering projection equipment, but nothing unusual was found. After all those nights of fear and sleeplessness, Alan and Debbie concluded that the bed was a source of the problem and that it had to be removed. So in early February of nineteen eighty eight, they arranged for the bunk bed to be taken to a local landfill. That wasn't just discarded, It was buried to ensure that no one else could ever use it. The family wanted to be absolutely certain that the object could not return to their home or passed to another family. Now at this point you might be thinking, what about this story made it about the bunk bet. What turns out, the activity throughout the Tollman home was strongly connected to the second hand bunk bets, the ones that were purchased. You see, they moved into November of nineteen eighty six, and the problem started six months later when the bunk beds were purchased, more specifically for the moment they were actually used for the first time. Now, something like a trigger came from those beds. Based on comments and polls from you guys, have found that we generally believe that entities might be tied to places or people themselves. This house was a relatively new construction and everything was fine until the beds were used. Plus, the new family who purchased the house in April of nineteen eighty eight reported no paranormal activity after moving in. Their story might have ended there had it not been for local press coverage and then the national attention through the television series Unsolved Mysteries. When the episode aired in October of nineteen eighty eight, it introduced the Tallman Haunting to a white audience. The segment featured dramatizations of the events, but also included interviews with Reverend Wayne doe Brats and police Chief Doug Glammon, both of whom vouched for the family's sincerity. I described them as credible, ordinary people now that supports at the Tallman case apart from many ghost stories, which often lack outside witnesses. Although the Tallman family never saw publicity, their experience quickly became a talking point in paranormal circles. It was unusual in that the disturbances seemed to be tied not to a house or a location, but to a single object. This gave the case a unique place, and discussions of cursed or haunted objects often mentioned alongside items like the Hope Diamond or the Annabel Doll. Although it never gave the same level of fame, the Taumans themselves did not pursue further media appearances. They gave no book deals, no follow up interviews. They avoided turning their story into entertainment. They would turn to private life, leaving only the original episode of Unsolved Mysteries and a handful of reports as a record. Some ways, this reluctance has added to the story's power. Unlike the Amityville Horror or Enfield Poulter Geist, the tall Men haunting was not commercialized or exaggerated for decades. It remains what it always was, a short, intense burst of terror centered around a single ordinary piece of furniture. The concept of things being haunted is way more common than you think, with even museums filled with objects that are set to be haunted. I remember when I visited Zach Begen's Haunted Museum in Las Vegas with my friend Michelle and left with a strange sense of dread because of the things that they had in there. At the paranormal field, they say that there are a few ways that an object can become haunted. One is residual energy or an energy attachment. The idea goes that living things energy and that it's this energy that can be stored or recorded with an objects. During my research, I kept finding stone tape theory, so I looked it up. It turns out it's a BBCTV play that was back from nineteen seventy two. It's actually called The Stone Tape and the story scientists investigate a haunted mansion, suggesting that the stone walls can record traumatic human events, kind of like how magnetic tape records sound. The idea seemed to make sense to paranormal research circles, so it stayed. They say that under certain conditions, these events can be replayed like a recording, and that's when people experience them as apparitions, sounds, or sensations. This is different than a ghost because they are seen as residual hauntings like mindless echoes of the past with no interaction. A second way is an actual spirit attachment, where if the objects was particularly loved by a spirit during their life, like a favorite doll or a toy, the bond to the item can be so strong spirit remains connected to it after passing away. This is where activity happens after buying a secondhand item. It's when we hear that a spirit may become upset if someone else tries to claim it. The third theory is a negative energy from traumatic events, where a negative imprint remains on a physical object, like if a weapon was used in a murder. It might retain the negative energy, making people feel uneasy if they hold it now. This is not to be confused with demonic type or energy. But then here's the fourth, which is an actual curse is on the object, but they are linked to malevolent forces like demons sometimes that will bring bad luck, misfortune, or death to their owners. This is one we hear about the most, at least in this podcast, because folklore and paranormal research is filled with them, some like stories of cursed diamonds that cause death to their owners or the recent stories circulating about Annabelle. These are just some examples and how this activity manifests through haunted objects, while it varies with things like electronic disturbances, movement of objects, sounds and voices, apparitions, illness and fires. Another famous example of haunted objects is the story of the Hexham Heads. The Hexham Head story begins in nineteen seventy one when two boys, Colin and Leslie Robson, reported digging up a pair of small carved stone heads in the garden of their families home in Hexham, Northumberland. Soon after the discovery, members of the rocks and household and the next door family, the Dods, described poltergeist like disturbances, objects shifting position when no one was near them, bottles thrown across the rooms, hair pulled, and in one neighbor's account, citing a strange part human before leaving the house. The heads, each only a few centimeters hi, quickly became the suspected focus of the activity. The artifacts were passed on to doctor Anne Ross, a noticed Celticist who had publicly written about the ritual importance of human head imagery in iron Age and Romanto British contexts. Ross later stated that she witnessed an apparition a part wolf, part man figure walking out of a room in her house and vanishing downstairs. Her daughter subsequently reported a similar encounter. Now Anne associated these events with the heads and returned them. Decades later, she repeated her first reactions and experiences in interviews, some that are cited by academic research. They were keeping the heads linked to uncanny phenomena. Eventually people examined how the pieces were made. One academic assessment concluded that the heads were molded rather than carved, suggesting a modern origin. The chain of custody during the mid nineteen seventies included museum staff and later independent investigators. After a period of private examination in the late nineteen seventies, the original heads reportedly went missing and the present whereabouts are unknown. Nineteen seventy four, a local lorry driver, Desmond Craigie, who was known as des claimed that he had made the heads in nineteen fifty six as toys for his daughter while living in the same address that the Robsons later occupied. He demonstrated the claim by producing new examples cast from local materials, though observers noted his replicas did not convincingly match the originals. DES's claim, if correct, would explain both the molded manufacture and the presence of the objects in the garden, but the debate over authenticity has never fully settled. The case briefly entered UK popular consciousness in nineteen seventy six via a BBC nationwide segment that featured Doctor Ann and reference a reported werewolf idea, a broadcast later restored and resurfaced by BBC Archives. The TV coverage helped cement the Heads as a nineteen seventies folklore touchdoone half archaeological curiosity, half contemporary legend. Today, the Hexham Heads set at the intersection of folklore studies, archaeology, and modern myth. The core facts a garden discovery, reported disturbances, expert interest, and a modern manufacturer claim, and the artifact's disappearance are reasonably well documented. However, the supernatural elements are mostly tied to witness testimony instead of some evidence, which is why the story persists as both a cautionary archaeological curiosity and as a classic haunted object story. But here's another one you might know. Back when I was taking a ghost tour in poor the tour guide told me a story about a very famous cursed object, one that I had heard of in Zach Began's museum. Although this story might not be exactly what you thought it was. Now this is a story of the Dibiic Box, and it begins in two thousand and one. Now a man named Kevin Mannus, a Portland, Oregon antique stealer, bought a small wooden wine cabinet and an estate sale. In his later accounts, Mannu said that the cabinet had belonged to a Polish Jewish woman, one who survived a Nazi concentration camp and brought it to the United States after World War Two. According to his story, the woman's granddaughter told him that the box had been kept hidden away and was never to be opened. She supposedly referred to it as a depic box. It's important to note, however, that this backstory has never been independently verified, and Manus himself has since admitted that much of it was a creative embellishment. Now Jewish folklora a typyk is understood as a restless spirit, one that can attach itself to a person, often portrayed as malicious or troubled. The figure of the dibik has been part of Jewish storytelling for centuries, though not all traditions accept it literally. The specific idea of a dibic box, however, does not come from Jewish religious practice, and appears to have originated with Manis tail A. Man Is described opening the box and finding two nineteen twenties pennies, a lock of hair tied with a string, and a small statue engraved with the Hebrew word shalom, a wine goblet, and a dried rosebud, also a candle holder. He claimed that soon afterward strange events began. According to his story, he had nightmares of an old hag attacking him, and his mother suffered a stroke on the very day he gave her the cabinet. He also described flickering lights, unexplained orders, and visitors who felt dread or illness in its presence. These reports come solely from Manus's own testimony, and while they have been repeated often, there's no outside confirmation that such events took place. Over time, Manus tried to give the box away. He said that each new owner reported misfortunes, including insomnia, hair loss, and severe anxiety. One owner, a college student named Josef Nitzke, listed the box on eBay in two thousand and three, calling it a cursed object, and that list thing went viral very quickly. It just spread across the Internet forums and news outlets, capturing attention as one of the first widely shared online ghost stories. Eventually, the box was purchased by Jason Haxton, the director of a museum in Missouri that Haxton later wrote a book about the object in twenty eleven, where he claimed it caused welts to appear on his skin and interfered with electronics. He said he once sealed it in a military container and buried it for safety before finally donating it to Zach Began's Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. Today, the box is displayed there as one of the museum's main attractions. Begans has said that multiple visitors, including musician Post Malone, experienced frightening incidents after interacting with it. I actually got to see it and the story behind it. Even though it might be made up partially, it's pretty cool. In twenty twenty one, reporting revealed that Kevin Mannis had admitted to crafting much of this story. It was kind of a creative exercise that later took on a life of its own. Despite this, the Devic Box has endured in popular culture, largely because of its viral spread online, its appearance in books and television, and it's continued to display at the Haunted Museum. Today, the story persists less as a matter of document minted fact and more as a blend of modern folklore, marketing, and the timeless fascination with cursed objects. The power of story behind objects is a very powerful one, enough to make people pay much more for what they're getting, and at times quite literally, like for the bunk bets, the family paid one hundred dollars and ended up losing more than three thousand after giving up their home because of the incidents. And if you're like thrifting, have you ever purchased something that didn't quite feel right? Because when it comes to secondhand items, the shared walls of hotel rooms, and perhaps the physical memories of those who lived in your home long before you, can you actually trust what remains now. This episode of Horror Story was researched and written by me Edwin Komar Rubias regarding the story of the Tallman bunk beds. Was it actually the beds? Let me know what you think about it, and if you want to watch the original Unsolved Mystery segment, I'll link to it so you can watch it on YouTube. That show was one of my favorites back in the day. Anyway, to support this and my other shows, you can try out Scary plus over on scaryplus dot com. You get all these episodes at free and keeps everything going. Or if you can drop some stars for me in the reviews, that always helps. We're following the show. I'll be back next week with another story. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it Scary everyone, See soon.