===TRANSCRIPT START=== Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And today we are broadcasting from somewhere very special. That's right, we're actually inside your house. Did we set up in the basement, the attic, the walls? No, no, don't go looking. That would ruin the surprise.

Unless you're already watching on YouTube.

We've stuck in your place to talk about a topic that is right at home, in your home, a subject that'll make you feel like someone's watching you or creeping around your attic. It's so unnerving, it may even make you want to move or at least start stabbing your walls to see if you hit anything lurking inside of them. This week, we are tackling the social phenomenon known as frogging, or the term for when a stranger secretly lives in someone's home without them knowing. Now, you may be thinking, that's an urban legend, that can't actually happen, and I have some very upsetting news for you. It does, and it can, and it will, and it's happened a lot more than you think.

What are we scared?

When are we?

All the time.

Now it is time for.

Time for.

Scared All The Time. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Scared All The Time housekeeping. It's just Chris today. Ed is somewhere off doing a secret mission for the show. Actually, I don't know if it's for the show. He just told me that I had to do housekeeping by myself, and I assumed he would only miss the housekeeping if he was doing something else essential to keep this show afloat. So we'll assume that's what it is, and not just out there buying some beerzo's or some donuts or something. But we don't really have much in the way of housekeeping this week. I want to just get right to the episode. It's a long one and it's a very, very funny and bizarre and weird one. I can't wait for you guys to all listen to it. So just the usual, if you love the show, give us a five-star review on Amazon or Apple or Spotify, and we will sometimes read those five-star reviews during housekeeping. So we might say your name and say your review on the show for everybody else to hear. If you haven't joined our Patreon yet, there's a ton of great stuff over there. Ed always likes to say that we have the best bang for your buck on Patreon. And while I've never fact-checked that, the way that I do the research in the show, I'm going to go ahead and say that that is 100% true and confirmed. We do have the best bang for your buck. There's lots of great rewards. There's three different tiers. We do a live show once a month online. So you can join from anywhere in the world. We have people who listen to us on those live shows in Ireland and all over Europe and probably some other countries. But I haven't checked with everybody. So yeah, patreon.com/scared all the time. See what you like over there and join up. Have some fun with us. Without further ado, this is Chris saying, enjoy this trip into the world of frogging. If you've been listening to the show for a while, this topic might sound familiar to you and not just because I love frogs, the animal, those god's perfect creatures are frogs with an F and this is frogging with a pH.

Sure.

The reason you might be having a little deja vu is because we did first touch on these creeps in our Neighbors From Hell episode way back.

Back in the day, way before video.

Way before video.

There's an etching of it somewhere.

Way back in season one, I think it was episode 10, maybe.

Couldn't tell you.

And we haven't been able to talk to, we haven't been able to stop talking about froggers ever since. I feel like they come up, at least every couple of episodes, we're like, yeah, there is that chunk we talked about them for 10 minutes.

Yeah, they come up a lot. They're interesting. They're interesting lot. The Pahoggers.

Giving this subject its own episode felt like a great way to start 2026 off on the right foot. So if you remember us talking about froggers way back when, thank you for listening that entire time. But also don't worry, there is a ton of new information to discuss. We're not just gonna repeat the things that you've already heard. If you are new around here, perfect, great place to start. This episode is going to get under your skin or at the very least under your bed. It's kind of hard to kick off the show talking about our personal experience with froggers because it's very possible that we've been frogged and never knew it. The whole idea is that they're living in your place without you knowing. That said, Ed, you do hear weird noises on your roof all the time, right?

I fucking do. And it's very, it's why we don't record the show upstairs. I think it's animals. We do have like a crawlspace thing that my gut can't get through.

Right.

But some like, when I had the landlord look into it the first time, a very small man, like an Ocean's Eleven Greaseman, like slid up there.

And did he stay up there? Did he ever come out? Is he still in there?

I don't remember. I remember a lot of the wall crumbled around him when he got up. But I don't think they found any animals up there or any traces of animals. We've had rats here before and they're a lot of anything they'd be. I think what it is is in California, Southern California, it's all like that Spanish tiling on the roof. And so I think like squirrels or raccoons, they jump from the tree onto the roof. And I think the Spanish tile echoes their little ass fucking nails, like clang, clang, clang, clang. But it's out of control. I think some squirrel or something was hiding its food under some tiles or something because it was, the scratching was crazy. I have these marks on the ceiling in my bedroom that are from me thwhapping a towel, like against the ceiling. Like get out of here, you fucking idiot.

Right.

Losing my mind in the middle of the night, like thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap, like against the ceiling. I'm sure Comic Steve, if he was here at the time, was like, what the fuck is happening in the middle of the night?

So possibly squirrels or raccoons, but you've never had, like, you've never opened your fridge and found like beers missing or you've never come home and found your TV on. Well, but nothing where you think, huh, hmm, maybe somebody who's in here and I don't think they should be.

I places are places pretty big considering where we live, but I think I would know that I would notice. Not a lot of places to hide in here.

Well, I didn't.

Yeah, you have you've had real experiences.

I as some people may know, my first raccoons and Animorph, in which case the guy was here. It's possible. It's possible. You could have an Animorph style frogger that can morph in and out of animal form to get in and out of your apartment.

That's a really good way to frog.

That is a great way to frog.

I would never pay rent if I was an Animorph.

No, you just live wherever you want to.

I guess I would be better than a raccoon. I would be like a cute cat. Then people would be like, oh, cute cat. Put a little saucer out here, bring him in. Oh, he's probably cold. Then when they go to work, I turn into man form.

If you were an Animorph though, I think a raccoon would be a pretty good choice because they have opposable thumbs.

So you'd be able to do everything I want to do now.

Although it would be hard because I think Animorphs, you have to the way that they turned into animals, you had to be able to touch the animal to turn into it. I feel like a raccoon is a real hard one to get a hold of. You got to chase it down.

Yeah, cats are easy then.

Cats easy. No, my first apartment in LA was a little bungalow tucked up against a park. And there were a lot of visitors kind of who would come in and out of the property. There was one person. They weren't technically frogging in my apartment, but they would wear a wedding dress and sleep standing inside this little like there's like a little gardener's closet and they would sleep in there. And one day when they weren't standing like the International Space Station, I mean, I assume I don't there wasn't room to lay down.

Sure. OK.

One day I looked in there and the inside of the door had all this like scrawled writing about Beyonce on it. I don't remember if they thought they were Beyonce or if they were convinced that Beyonce was like the head of a secret cabal to destroy the world or something.

I don't know.

There was a lot of Beyonce slander on the inside of that door that may or may not have been the same person who did basically frog me at that apartment.

Tired of standing up.

Probably. Yeah. I mean, I understand it. I had no idea I was sharing a home with a stranger. I never found anything out of place. I never heard anybody. As far as I know, they never actually came inside. I only found out about them because as I was getting ready to move out of that apartment one day, I ran into the property's gardener and he asked if I was moving because of the person living underneath my apartment, which was how I found out that there was someone living underneath my apartment. These little bungalows were up off the ground a few feet. So there wasn't like a ton of room under there, but I guess there was enough because this person had dragged the mattress under there and according to the gardener, they had also hooked a coffee pot up to the electricity somehow. So they were making coffee beneath my apartment.

It bothers me to no end that in Southern California, as I've asked other people, I'm not alone in this, that my fuse box is outside is so weird. So I imagine all sorts of things are outside that people can like electricity base.

Yeah, just tap into.

I've always thought it was weird because it just seems like such a security issue in the sense that like someone could just come and turn all your fuses off and be like, you're not making any phone calls now. You're like, I don't know if that's how phones work.

Well, I mean, like it's it's I think the landlord had found out because it was a fire hazard. And when the gardener had discovered them, they were like this, like the electricity was a dangerous issue, which nobody had ever bothered to tell me I was the one living with a secret roommate in a house that was going to burst into flames at any moment. And I guess that was fine with everybody.

I think wedding dresses are like a kerosene level flammable.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if again, I don't know that it was the same person.

Just say it is. It's easier.

Yeah. It's quite an image. A person living beneath an apartment in a wedding dress on a mattress with a with an illegal coffee machine hooked into my electricity.

It's all they need is caffeine and a place to crash.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've been there, man. I've been there. So that's I mean, we haven't had a ton of interactions with froggers. Thank God, because it is kind of scary, the idea that this person would be living with you. But I think a good place to start is to back up a bit and try to better define what exactly frogging is, how it started and why people practice it. So to start, there is a big difference between a froggers and a squatter. Squatters illegally inhabit unoccupied buildings, although there are plenty of stories of family members or ex-girl or boyfriends who move into a place and refuse to leave and sort of become de facto squatters that are very hard to evict. We actually either just released or a just released just released the time of recording. We just released the time of recording a New Fear Unlocked episode about a guy who has built a business around evicting squatters with swords and grenades that you have to hear to believe.

It's a wild episode. Go listen. Stop what you're doing right now.

Sign up over on the Patreon and listen to that New Fear Unlocked. It is really, really funny.

Do not tell them we sent you.

No, no, no. Please leave this man alone. I hadn't thought about that. I don't think we have any fans who are troublemakers, but yeah, don't go telling this guy that we did an episode about him.

Don't you fucking dare.

We don't need him showing up, tapping on our door with a samurai sword or a single grenade. Anyway, back to Froggers. According to the article, Your Guide to Living Secretly in a Stranger's Home, posted during Lifehackers Evil Week in 2023.

That's awesome. It's better than Shark Week.

Yeah. Froggers are amoral criminals who, for reasons practical or thrill seeking, have chosen to live a rent free lifestyle in other people's homes, which, I don't know if that's better or worse than living rent free in someone's head. Probably worse, because you can kill them.

I think it's worse. Yeah.

They break in, they find a hiding spot in the house that is either out of the way or unused. It emerge only at night when the owners are gone. They then, or asleep. They then eat the owners food, drink their drinks, watch their TV, play their video games, whatever, and hide back in their spot when the owners return.

We used to do these writers retreats with friends, where it would be like six, seven, eight, nine people, so we can rent like a really big Airbnb, and it's still cheaper than a hotel for a bunch of days. I would always think about like, where the fuck is Derek or whatever? Then, he would just be in another part of the house, but the houses we rented were so big.

Well, that's the crazy thing about, one of the things about Froggers is, it does seem like it really would only work in a fairly large home.

I would think so, but we had that story in Bad Neighbors where it was like a little Japanese apartment.

A lot of these Frogging stories are in fairly small spaces that I can't believe someone got away with hiding for that long. In a big home, you can kind of understand it, but like, yeah, if they come out at night and you live there and they're trying to, they better not be watching your TV or playing video games without headphones on, because you're going to wake up and go, who the fuck is watching TV? I live alone.

And you're not going to watch or play video games with headphones on because you don't know if the owner is going to walk up behind you. Everything has to be very quiet. And because I imagine you have something wrong with you if you're frogging, but you still don't want to get caught, probably.

Yeah, no, I don't think I don't think you have to have enough wrong with you that you think that this is a halfway decent idea, but not so much wrong with you that you can't get away with it.

Exactly.

So you're in the middle. Quoting this article, quote, supposedly there is an underground community of froggers out there who don't draw enough attention to themselves to be the subject of news stories. They are said to congregate on dark web message boards. Remember the dark web? I feel like we don't.

It still exists.

Does it?

Yeah.

The web is just Facebook and Instagram now.

No, I still think the dark web. I think the dark web is entirely law enforcement. I don't think there's any real websites. But we have a Instagram account for a show that deals with crazy topics. So we get fed a lot of wild shit. So yeah, I pretty regularly see real suggestion to the Scared All The Time Instagram that are like eight websites on the dark web.

Okay.

So move into someone's house.

I don't have a Tor browser or whatever you need to access the Onion or whatever. It's to get the-

Yeah, I think I use Brave browser, which is just like a Chrome. It's basically just a Chrome.

You use Brave browser?

Yeah.

You scared a cat on the show. I guess you have to use Brave browser if you're going to be on the Internet.

There's nothing special about Brave. It helps with ad blocking and stuff. But it has a built-in. You can go to- I don't use it because it makes your Internet so slow. But I'm saying you don't even need a separate thing. Every time I have to open an incognito window, it's like, would you like to be incognito or the Tor incognito or whatever? I was like, no, I don't need to wait eight minutes for a fucking picture to open.

We'll do an episode on the dark web. But anyway, these squatters, froggers, those are different people. I shall not. Congregate on dark web message boards where they share tips for successfully avoiding detection in strangers' homes and even post videos of homeowners sleeping for bragging rights.

I don't like that. I will say, I don't like that one bit.

I tried in my research for this episode to record Anna sleeping. Yeah, I said, this is for research.

If you wake up, I know it's impossible.

I tried to find any evidence of these people congregating anywhere online. And again, I do think that maybe this was something that happened when the Internet was maybe a little bit wilder of a place. But if they are doing this, they are hiding better on the Internet than they are in people's homes because I could not find.

There's probably a code word. They're not like using frog or blog. It's probably some sort of other word.

I will say, I did find one Reddit post, I think from last year or maybe, well, yeah, I guess it would have been last year at this point. From last year, from a woman who said that she was frogging in a building. But it wasn't a very interesting post and I kind of felt like it was maybe written by AI, so I didn't include it in here. But so I did find one thing of a person sharing this information. But anyway, nobody really knows where the term comes from, although it is hypothesized on dictionary.com that it derives from the idea that these nomads hop from place to place like a frog. But you know, because it's cool, you have to change the F to a pH and that's what makes it like freaking. Yeah, like original hacking or X-Files fans are called.

The fuck are they called?

Wait, it just slipped my mind.

No one's ever called me and I love the X-Files. There's, there's, hold on, is it just fan P-H-A-N, like a Southeast Asian name?

Yeah, an X-File with a pH is a name for a fan.

Well, isn't Cinephile a pH? So that might just be part of, I think.

Oh, yeah.

I think so. So maybe that's just the way that people write fandom, like clinical fandom.

Yeah, maybe. I hadn't thought of that.

So maybe it has nothing to do with being cool.

It's pretty cool.

I mean, you know, it's not cool. It's pedophile and I think it's also pH. So I think when you're adding files to the end of a word, you might just be using pH.

True, true. All right. Well, I guess we need to do a little linguistic study to know for sure.

Yeah, but let me know how it goes with Anna tonight.

Okay, well, according to dictionary.com, the term frogging was first used, quote, in this way in 2014 as the title of an independent short film. Use of the term increased on social media after the release of the 2019 horror film I See You, which involves an intruder engaging in frogging and wearing a frog mask with an F. Oh, so they literalize the frogging by wearing a frog.

Oh, frog the animal.

Yeah.

Got you. 2014 was amazing for me.

Well, that was the short. That was a different short film.

I'm saying it was a different time then it was. It was like genuinely unrecognizable from today.

Awareness of the term frogging further increased. URTHER I'm seeing every word that way.

Well, we did that originally, right? That was like one of the pieces of art we had made for Bad Neighbors was like a find your forever forever frogger.

Find your forever frogger. Yeah.

Like a fake TLC reality reality show that I invented about a guy or just whomever trying to date their frogger.

We'll repost it. Awareness of the term further increased in 2022 due to the premiere of the True Crime series, Frogging, Hider in My House, which depicts real life reports of the practice of frogging. Now, I dug around and found that the term frog, PHROG, dates back to even before 2014 on urbandictionary.com on July 13th, 2006, a poster named Attic Fan, which is a pretty unsettling name for someone into living in people's attics. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, this is rules. I like this person.

They posted the word frog on UrbanDictionary and defined it as people who attempt to sneak into houses and live among the occupants without being discovered.

I mean, that sounds like this other article shit. Like, obviously, there's examples of this prior.

Most frogs see themselves as invisible roommates and try to respect the homeowners or renters by not breaking or taking, although mooching food is sometimes necessary for survival. Frogs may be recognized by the green string that some of them wear on their wrists. Ooh, so dictionary.com was off by over 10 years, under 10 years, under 10 years, like eight years, eight years.

Ocho, Ochoanios.

Yeah, it was defined in 2006. Now, it sounds like this person, when they defined it, this subculture was already thriving enough that they had a uniform of sorts. Yeah. The green string piece of the puzzle is another thing that I really dug around for and I couldn't find it coming up anywhere else.

You know how crazy it would be if they were like, froggers could be known in 2006. I don't know what years this would have been, but it sounds right. Like froggers, they could be known by the yellow Livestrong bracelet they had.

Yeah.

And it was like, oh my, everyone was a frogger?

Everyone. I do think this does feel a little bit like it's possible that the hobby existed and that, you know, people were forming communities around it in 2006 on websites that are long lost of time. Or this is just somebody who was like trying, who wanted it to be a thing.

Which is why their name is Attic Fan.

Well, Attic Fan is both a thing that people have and a fan of Attics, which you would be if you are a frogger.

Or he sees himself as someone who cools down Attics.

That's true. That's true.

He sees himself a bit of an Attic Fan.

So while the term frogging has been around since the early 2000s, the act of frogging, whatever people might have called it, has been around about as long as humans have been building homes. Now, granted, it's probably seen an uptick since the invention of walls and basements and Attics. I imagine it was fairly hard to frog a dirt hut where everyone could see you.

You had to be like Arnold and Predator just covered in mud in the corner.

Yeah. Also way more frightening to discover, like wake up in the middle of the night, just find a man covered in mud hunched in the corner of your hut staring at you.

You only woke up for how loud the bugles he's taken from the cupboard he's chomping on. It's probably also an uptick in the sense that wages haven't gone up in 30 years and everything else did.

Yeah, that's probably caused a little bit of some frogging. Places to rest their head. The earliest documented case that I could find that details something that we could legitimately call frogging today comes to us from a Medium article with the delightful headline, This Teen Stalker Stole Queen Victoria's Panties and Lived in Buckingham Palace Chimneys for a Year.

Wow, I love Medium. I actually subscribe $5 a month to Medium. It's like one of the few things I subscribe to.

Well, everybody find the link to this article in the show notes and throw this writer a follow. So this article begins, Around 5 a.m. the morning of December 14th, 1838, a night porter glimpsed a face in his window. It appeared to be smudged with soot and belonged to a grinning impish young man. Suddenly the face disappeared. After a brief search, the porter discovered one of the palace's rooms had been ransacked. He sounded the alarm and a chase ensued. A constable, so you know we're in the early 1800s, baby. We've got constables and night porters.

If this if this exact scenario happened today with every word the same.

Yeah.

There's no way this kid's getting this person's getting caught because they'd be like, I saw a Victorian ghost.

Yeah. Well, back then, he was just a Victorian, contemporary. A constable spotted a young man running across the lawn. He captured the intruder and brought it back to the kitchen where the light was better. Because, remember, it's 1838, so this chase is bungling through the dark on the lawn of Buckingham Palace. He captured the intruder and brought it back to the kitchen where the light was better. Not only was the boy's face covered in grease, his clothes were slick with the substance. He wore two pairs of pants, which is a detail that really never comes back or seems to play into any of this. When police stripped the outer layer off, several pairs of ladies' undergarments fell out. Quote, somehow the boy had made it into the palace, strolling through the staterooms, corridors and bedrooms like they belonged to him, wrote Jan Bondeson in Queen Victoria's Stalker, The Strange Story of the Boy Jones.

I think I have a reason. The two pants is actually brilliant. If you're taking a bunch of shit, and then you get stopped and someone was like empty your pockets, you turn out the pockets of your top pants and it was like, why did you stop me? Where? Then you kill them on your way. But if you have everything in the under pant pockets, then you know what I mean? No one knows.

This is because Ed grew up on the streets of Connecticut. They called him Eddie Two Pants.

They called me Eddie Two Pants. Once they found out, once they started patting me down, what's all this beef jerky?

They figured his plan out. The boy had entered the queen's room and along with her underwear, had stolen her portrait, a letter and a collection of linens. Fortunately, the queen had been staying at Windsor Castle that night. So this was Buckingham Palace. The queen was at Windsor Castle, so she wasn't in the room, which probably made it easier for him to-

Why imagine? Yeah.

To steal all this stuff.

All those corgis would be barking and shit if she was in the room. Oh no, wait, this is not Queen Elizabeth.

This is 1838. This is Queen Victoria.

Sure. Okay. Yeah, Victorian era.

When pressed, the boy gave his name as Edward Cotton.

Shit, old Eddie Cotton?

Old Eddie Two Pants.

Shit, man.

The police learned he had hid behind the furniture or inside the chimneys during the day, which I guess is maybe why he was covered in grease.

Yeah.

So he could slip in and out of the chimneys.

Yeah. Willie from Grease Me Up when he has to go into the vents in Simpsons.

Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he gets all greased up to go into a tight space. So maybe it's the same situation.

I mean, this kid was small, but I'm sure those chimneys were also kind of small.

Also, 18, whatever. That was his job. His day job was a chimney sweeper or whatever.

They don't mention, but I do imagine at some point, yeah, he may have been a chimney sweeper.

He definitely was.

And that's part of how he figured this out.

And they're also Buckingham Palace, probably a lot more chimneys than they ever use.

Yeah.

And so he's probably like, oh, no one's going to light a fire in here.

Well, yeah, he hid behind the furniture inside the chimneys during the day, which also during the day would help you. I guess in the middle of winter, they might have fires going during the day, but generally you'd have a fire at night. So he was probably safer. Got you. At night, he strolled the halls and poked about. Sometimes during meetings between the queen and her ministers, he simply hid under a table and eavesdropped.

I love it.

The security at Buckingham Palace in 1838, which was a long time ago, but also kind of modern to have security this poor that an orphan boy could just sit under the table of Queen Elizabeth making war plans with her ministers.

Wow, yeah, that's pretty interesting.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. I mean, I also I don't I think about this too though. Maybe it's maybe there wasn't security until about 11 days ago because I I love Schlock. I mean, we're in a new part of the house right now because this is an interim part of the house.

We're five feet to the left of where we've shot every other episode just because I got this table.

We're still trying to find a way to get it back over there. But, you know, people have watched other episodes. I got a lot of Schlock posters behind me. I love Schlock. And so, you know, we live in Los Angeles, so I can go look for Schlock houses. Oh, it's the house from fucking wax work. It's the house from whatever. And in the 80s, when those movies are shot, late 70s, early 80s, the house from house. When they're shot in the late 70s through the 80s, there's nothing. There's no fence. There's no big hedges. Anyone could just walk from the street. And it's not the home alone house here. It's not like we're going to get millions of people and tourists trying to bug you. But that whole street, it's just become all fences, all huge, you know, oasis hedging, you know, the street for which house is this? That's on Rossmore from Waxworth.

Oh, the Waxworth house. Yeah.

But like that's not the only house. Like every house has this.

Yes.

And so I don't know if it's just like, I can't imagine there's more crime now than in the fucking 70s and 80s.

There certainly is not.

But there is like everything has just become like, I don't know.

People are a little more guarded.

And so I wonder if even you go back 100 years from that, maybe people were even less guarded. And it was, you know, it was probably just like a sign out front that was like royal business only.

The night porter and the constable who chased this kid at the beginning of the story, they should be fired.

But night porter is not a security job.

That's true.

I don't know what porter is, but I think it's like hotels have them.

Yeah, I guess he's just sort of like a night.

He was just moving, shuffling bags around. He was spooked by a kid's face on the window.

When the kid was hungry, he helped himself to the kitchen. When he got too dirty, he rinsed his only shirt in the wash.

Yeah, we have two pairs of pants, one shirt.

He had been living in the palace this way for nearly a year.

Wow.

And for years after, despite his arrest, he would return time and again to the palace and creep out Queen Victoria.

I feel like this is something where he can get a job from it, where he's like, hire street urchin security. Look, I was able to get past here, here, and here. Like hire me to teach you how to avoid more of these.

He's like a white hat hacker. He breaks into places and is like, I've figured out your security holes. Well, I guess maybe he wasn't a sophisticated enough businessman to figure this out. He was also a child. The staff dubbed him.

He was also a child.

The staff dubbed him Boy Jones.

Should be Boy Genius.

It should. Ed Cotton, Boy Genius. Here's my card. I will find your security flaws in your, the palace of this major empire of the time. Yeah. That he could just waltz into.

What you're going to want to do is get rid of all these chimneys. It's real too easy.

Yeah. A few days later, on December 19th, Edward Cotton, Boy Jones appeared before the magistrates, where a witness identified the young man as his former errand boy, who went by the name Edward Jones.

So Boy Jones is more accurate.

Boy Jones is more accurate.

They must have come out after they found out his own name.

Ed Jones, Ed Cotton, Boy Jones, whatever.

They're all Frank Abagnale juniors.

Yeah. He's a greasy little motherfucker either way.

You can't catch him. He's greasy.

Ed's estranged father backed up the identification. When the magistrates questioned Edward's motivations, he replied that he hadn't stolen any of these items. He'd found them all on the lawn.

Yeah.

It's hilarious. There's no security cameras.

Yeah.

You can just say whatever you want.

I mean, we need, everyone needs to be filming at all times.

I am going to send you to trial, promised the magistrate. Oh, very well, with all my heart, replied the boy with composure.

Yeah, there was no separation between like your adults at 18. So this kid's going to a prison where you break rocks.

Yeah. In the end, well, he's not, because in the end, after a trial filled with laughter and incredulity, which is how you want every trial, honestly, to be described, filled with laughter and incredulity, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The police sergeant actually turned and congratulated Jones. The fact that he had managed to live undetected for so long indicated superior talents and intelligence. He just hoped Jones directed them to something worthwhile. Thank you, sir, replied the boy Jones before leaving court.

With his pocket watch.

Now, Ed, do you think the young boy Jones dedicated his superior talents and intelligence to something worthwhile?

No, he started a numbers game.

Pretty much. Wouldn't you know it, quote, not two years later, Jones climbed the palace walls once again. On December 3rd, 1840, the Queen's governess discovered the boy Jones under the sofa in the room adjacent to the Queen's boudoir.

She found him when he said, Don't mind me.

Supposing he had come into the bedroom. How frightened I should have been, wrote Victoria in her journal.

This is like The Matrix, where it's like, I think our guys can handle one little girl. And it's like, sir, your men are already dead. That's how it feels. Imagine if you go into the bedroom and he's like, ma'am, his pockets are already filled with your panties.

So this is again, this is even further into the closer to the present. Now, 1840, we still have a boy, a man, really, at this point, no longer a boy. Two years later, we don't know how old he was exactly, but his voice is probably dropped and he is sniffing the Queen's panties again. Again.

Yeah.

Jones was again arrested and tried. His insanity plea was thrown out. No laughter and incredulity this time.

He's not the little sweet boy. He's got a little awkward phase of his.

He's breathing heavy. He's got stubble. His eyes are all crazy.

Smoking a cigar in the courtroom.

He was sentenced to three months probation. After his release in March, he attempted to gain entry to the palace again and got three months of hard labor, breaking rocks for his trouble.

Okay. Anyone who watches New Fear Unlocked, I've been bringing up Blue Streak a lot.

You have been. We're on a Blue Streak of Blue Streaks.

Yeah. We're on a Streak of Blue Streaks. I feel like maybe he's got a Blue Streak situation. He had left his favorite panties in a wall or something. He had to keep breaking back in.

I mean, the psychological profile of this guy is crazy. It sounds like he became obsessed with Queen Victoria as a child and could not, and seemingly some semi-sexual compulsion, because he's stealing her underwear. Sure. Actually, we'll get to that in a second. So at this point, he's now broken in three times. He's gotten let off, he's gotten probation, and he's gotten hard labor.

Hold on, question. Isn't this a time period where ladies, especially high society ladies, wore those huge bottom parts of your dresses that were genuinely ribbed?

Like, yeah, the, like, the-

Like, it actually physically comes out with some sort of structure to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Roughly, I think this is that time period.

I mean, he could just be living under her skirt the whole time is what I'm getting at. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Under the gown, the puffy bottom.

Yeah.

It's the same technology as like an igloo or something.

That's true.

Or a yurt.

That's true. Maybe he did. It doesn't seem like anybody here was very good at detecting him anywhere or stopping him at any point.

He can do what he wants when he wants.

This is kind of wild.

But it's also, it goes to show that the things you can do as a cute little kid.

Oh, yeah.

Don't fly either when you're not a cute kid or an adult. Like there's a, you're a child. It's innocent. It's whatever. But yeah, it's like you take anything that a child does and give it to an adult. And it's fucking all of a sudden insane.

If you sent Andy Milonakis in a time machine to 1840, he could have ended up running the British Empire. He just would have been like-

Or they gave him a huge lollipop in like a-

And chained him to a wall in some pervert's fucking little-

He's like, I'm an adult, I swear. Sure you are, little prisoner.

Anyway, so he was captured and tried three different times. This didn't stop him. The courts didn't know what to do with him. Apparently, the crime wasn't a felony. So the crime of breaking into Buckingham Palace and stealing the Queen's panties was, I guess, just a lesser. I feel like he would have been executed in the United States for doing that.

Oh, 100 percent. But yeah, I don't know. Misdemeanor, I guess, at the time.

They couldn't lock him in British prison. They tried to convince him to join the Navy. He wouldn't do it.

Yeah, get that asshole on a boat.

Quote, Edward Jones, Boy Jones, was a very weird character and apart from Queen Victoria, he was never interested in women, author Jan Bondeson told the BBC. Okay. He was a very solitary character, but he was not schizophrenic or classed as mad, just odd. So which Navy, the British Navy?

No, I'm saying I haven't finished my sentence. I haven't finished my sentence. Which Navy was John Paul Jones in?

John Paul Jones? Who's John Paul Jones?

I think John Paul Jones is like during the Revolutionary War era which would have been later, I guess. But no, earlier, 17 something. But I think John Paul Jones is like a major naval figure. Or am I just thinking of the drummer from some band?

Well, John Paul Jones I know, I'm pretty sure is the bassist for Led Zeppelin.

Okay, the bassist. But either way, should look up John Paul Jones. I'm just saying in case he comes from Navy stock.

Oh, shit. Okay. All right, John Paul Jones is both the bassist and keyboardist for the rock band Led Zeppelin and also a Scottish American Naval officer who served in the Continental Navy.

Oh, so he's our guy. He's our guy.

Yeah.

Continental's us. Okay, cool. All right. But I knew it was like a Navy person during like Red Coat shit, so.

We're loosely somewhere in the vicinity of Halfway Correct.

I'm just saying, you said boats, you said Jones, I got there.

So after Boy Jones's latest release, when he was released, was he dropping a single? Well, yeah. After he joined Led Zeppelin. Everybody loves him.

You and me in the walls. Chimney Girls. It's like what?

You're onto something there. That's good.

It's all just empty.

That's a hose boys single. So, I mean, I don't know. I don't think he was arrested and released any more times. So this is, I guess, the third or fourth time he was arrested and released. He was once again caught loitering near the palace once more, and the government finally decided we've had enough.

We gotta put a law on the books.

They didn't. They shipped him to Brazil. He was kept on a prison ship offshore for six years.

So they just have like a roving ship that never came to shore.

I guess they...

It's like a super max prison.

They just at some point were like, fuck this guy, whatever. We don't have... Instead of passing a law and charging him with it, we're just, I guess, gonna kidnap him and throw him on a ship.

There's no one else on the British Isles who does this. So if we just get rid of him exclusively, our order is returned.

Just like when you send people who commit misdemeanors to prison in the modern day, sending Jones to a prison ship off the coast of Brazil did nothing to help him. He became an alcoholic and later a burglar and managed to return to Britain.

So he's not on a roving ship. They did bring him on the land, I guess, to drink rum and burgle.

Or they just put rum on the ship.

So he's burgling other people on the boat?

Oh, that's true. I don't know how often they let him off the ship. Maybe he escaped to burgle.

I mean, I am not a burglary expert.

Yeah.

But I feel like you want an exit for burgling. So I can't imagine there's a lot of famous, maybe there are, famous cruise ship burglars because it's like, check the boat. So it's got to be around here unless you do it and then you get off one of those kind of islands when you do those. Like, I've never been on a cruise.

That's a cool idea. A cruise ship burglar.

It's not the first time. It's obviously this guy was it first.

Well, when we did an episode on cruise ships and I did not even think to research if there was ever a famous cruise ship burglar, but now I'm curious.

It's got to be you stop at those places, so.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure there's people who steal things on ships, but I mean, almost like an art thief.

Sure.

Here's Brosnan style.

Got you.

Smoothly getting on and off and just like makes their living stealing jewels on a cruise ship.

I mean, that's that's actually that's what we should do. Yeah. We have to Google like, when is the Hope Diamond going to be in the on the Queen Mary on the Queen Mary? Well, the Queen Mary doesn't move, but that's true. It's sort of like Carnival Cruise Museum.

Mm hmm. So this is a terrible idea.

All the sea salt water is wrecking the art.

Yeah. I guess you don't put a lot of valuables on ships.

No, things that famously sink or get just kind of soggy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Jones returned to Britain, then was caught for something and deported to Australia, where he sold pies before managing to sneak back to London again.

I mean Australia is beautiful.

Finally, he returned to Australia and worked as the town crier in Perth. So he did make something of himself eventually became the town crier.

I think Perth, Australia is if you drill the hole, this might not be true at all. If you drill the hole from New York City through the earth, I think you end up in Perth.

Really?

I think it's like the actual opposite.

Nice.

It could genuinely be a bullshit. I just said, but I think that's true.

It might be a bullshit. That should be a segment on the show. It might be a bullshit.

We have so many segments we haven't done yet.

The article tells us, this is the last two sentences of the article. Jones died in 1893 after falling off a bridge while drunk. By then, Queen Victoria had added more palace guards. By 1893, pressing up against the year 1900, you finally couldn't simply crawl through a chimney and live in Buckingham Palace.

What year did this start?

1834?

He lived a long time.

Yeah. I don't know how old, or 1838. I don't know how old he was in 1838, but he was a youngin.

I mean, he would have lived longer if he didn't fall off a bridge.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's funny how he went from like town sweetheart to town creep to town criminal.

He took the arc of really pretty much every child actor.

Every child actor, yeah.

If only there had been stage plays for him to parlay his fame into, maybe he could have.

Maybe he was a shit actor, that's the problem.

He might have been. So that story I love.

That was great.

That guy rules. That is the earliest case of what I would consider modern frogging that I could find.

Also, by 1890 when he died, we got electric light by that point, right? Yeah. So you could see the frogger as much easier. You don't have to drag him to the kitchen to be like, do you work here?

Yeah.

No, I've never seen your face before.

You can also see what valuable objects you've stored on the lawn and which ones are still inside.

There's nothing in your pockets, but your legs are lumpy and weird.

Yeah. How many pairs of pants do you have? Four. Oh my God. One of the things that I think is most sinister about frogging, besides the obvious creepiness and invasion of privacy, is that the signs of having a frog, and I think we discussed this in the first time we talked about frogging all those years ago, the signs of having a frog, things being moved out of place in subtle ways, doors left open, sounds in the night, mirror the symptoms of psychosis, mental illness.

I'm not gonna give the person's name away here because they'll deny it, but I know a friend who...

Severely mentally ill.

You'd think. Their grandmother lived in an in-law apartment type thing, like in their house. And I think they used to at night move a bunch of shit around in her apartment just as a joke, but I can't imagine it'd help with her mental health.

No, that's not a funny joke at all.

So she would wake up and be like...

That's terrifying. That's being the main character in Dark City.

Yeah. Yeah. So I won't bring up their name, but I remember them saying it in a very ha-ha funny way, and I'm like, that's terrible.

No, that's terrible.

Especially with old people who get to mention all that shit.

Yeah, man. That's... Yeah. You can tell me off air which friend this is. I'm going to chastise them privately. So yeah, it's really sinister because you really can fuck with someone's head. As a frog, you can make a person of sound mind feel like they are of ill mind and that is no good. I also think it's interesting, although perhaps a little bit less sinister, that these are also all signs that people point to when they think their house is haunted.

Sure. You think all hauntings in history were froggers.

Not all, but many. Strange noises, a dog sniffing somewhere that you're like, well, there's nothing there. Maybe there's a man living in the wall.

Did you watch The Rip?

Not yet.

It's pretty good. I mean, it's whatever. But I was surprised that there were a couple of things where I'm like, oh, they do a really good job with a few things. But you can see in the trailer, it gives nothing away. But it's like this dog is trained to sniff for money.

Yeah.

And yeah, we had like a frog sniffing dogs.

Frog dog?

We have a frog dog.

That could be a good button of the month.

Yeah. Then then I think we'd be in a good, because I kept making jokes with the person, the people I was watching it with. I just kept making jokes that like everything had a sniffing purpose.

Yeah.

So it was like, it's one of these cops dirty. And it's like, I have a fucking bad cop sniffing snail in my pocket who secretes a juice when I'm near a bad cop. And it was like, in my pockets, wet as hell. So they were like, will you please stop talking during the film?

I think every dog is a frog dog. It's just a matter of whether or not you search enough to discover the frog. Every dog is going to sniff out a man in your walls. It's just, do you open the wall to find the man? You know what I mean?

I mean, that sounds like there's layers to what you just said.

Yeah. I'm not saying that every ghost, as you suggested, is really a frog. But a lot of the cases that I found in my research, I think it's telling how many frogging victims thought their home was haunted before they caught the person living in their house.

Sure.

One of the more disturbing ones is the case of the Bowen family in Peperell, Massachusetts. This article comes to us. Well, there's two articles I used here, according to All Things Interesting, and an article on darkdowneast.com.

Was it in Maine? No, you said it was Massachusetts.

No, it's Massachusetts.

Down East is usually a Maine term.

Yeah. Maybe it's just a New England, spooky New England site. But I used these two articles to source this. Tina Bowen was convinced that the spirit of her deceased mother was speaking to her through the walls of her home in Pepperell, Massachusetts.

Why does my deceased mom want us to get more Oreos?

Tina, Tina, Tina.

Tina, we're out of Oreos.

Oh, by the way, this is 1986 this happened. So Tina Bowen was convinced that the spirit of her deceased mother needed more Oreos and continually said that she stinks. No.

No, what to say?

She smells her at night.

I would love, I mean, I thought, it would be great if that's where the story was going. Like they discovered them because they were so stinky.

For weeks, Tina and her sister Karen received cryptic messages scribbled onto the walls in condiments like ketchup. Items mysteriously rearrange themselves around the house. Full bottles of alcohol suddenly became empty.

None of that seems like a haunting.

Small household items would turn up in odd places and on several occasions, the television would switch channels on its own when no one was in the room. That sounds like a haunting.

That's the only thing so far.

Well, cryptic messages on the walls.

But in cat shop?

That's true. That's more of a less spooky ghost, although it would look like blood.

Until you smelled it.

Until you smelled it or dipped a fry in it. Yeah, full bottles of alcohol definitely doesn't sound like a ghost. No.

I mean, they are spirits, but they're not interested in them.

But I could see why.

I feel like people are going to appreciate that at home.

That was a good one. I could see loosely, roughly why a teenage girl might think their house is haunted. These strange happenings occurred only when the girls briefly left a room and returned, suggesting that this unseen presence was playing tricks on them. Tina and Karen grew convinced that this might be a ghost, but their father, Frank Bowen, brushed it off as either the girls pranking each other or just watching too many scary movies and freaking themselves out. But it all continued and with no obvious culprit, the family lived in an increasingly tense home. Then on December 8th, Tina and her father returned home to find the activity had escalated to the point that even Frank could no longer ignore it.

No cell phones, man.

No cell phones. The house was not as they left it. Lights were turned on. The radios and TVs were blaring at full volume in multiple rooms. And Frank was like, OK, something is wrong and began to search the house.

But also this frogger is a piece of shit.

Oh, he's a big bad piece of shit in a way that we are going to get to in a few minutes.

Great.

In the basement, Frank noticed that someone had recently used the toilet.

How does he know?

I assume he left a shit in it.

Oh, man.

Several belongings were out of place. Clear signs that an intruder had been inside. As Frank searched the house, he opened the front closet door and found the culprit. Someone far more frightening than any ghost, never mind the ghost of your mother would have been. This guy looked like he was in a horror movie. He was a man with a painted face, a Native American style jacket, a ninja mask and a hatchet in his hand. He forced the Bowens into the bedroom.

Oh, no.

Before running off to another part of the home, Tina used the opportunity to escape and call the police. Authorities arrived and found that the stranger was a teenager named Daniel LaPlante, whom Tina had briefly dated and he'd been living in the crawl space of the home People you know sometimes, I guess. for several weeks, taunting them the whole time.

Okay, that's gotta be a situation where it's like, is that Daniel? Yeah. What the fuck are you doing here?

Well, Daniel.

When did you start appropriating these cultures?

Was not. Yeah, I don't know what a Native American style jacket means. I assume like a leather fringe kind of Western.

Don't make any assumptions. It's better.

That's true. That's true. That's true. I don't know why he wasn't prosecuted. He would later go on to brutally murder a young teacher and her two children while he was out on bail for the Bowen family.

So this is it's the same today where it's like people, they just come out the same day. Like people act like this is a new thing. It's like, no, I mean, he made bail. Someone paid it. Yeah, I'm saying like, even if there's like these bail, bail lists situations now where it's like, oh, this person's been arrested. I mean, people I know who who've been arrested and then like let out the same day. This guy could just go to murder the family. Like anyone can.

Well, he only planned. This was a year later and he planned to burglarize the home of the Gustafson family in November of 87. But he caught off. He was caught off guard when Priscilla Gustafson and her children came home early.

So he decided, I'm going to pivot to living here for months.

No, no, no, no, no. This is what he did after. He was caught living in Tina's home. This is the second home while he was out on bail.

They moved.

No. Let's back up.

No, this is good. The audience needs to know this.

Daniel LaPlante was the police came to Tina Bowen's house.

Get in our car, you're out of here.

He said, come here, we've got a free ride for you down to the police station.

For eight minutes. You can murder later today.

He was out on bail a year later.

A year later?

In November and December.

That's not when he was out on bail a year later. A year later, this other event happened.

Well, yeah, this happened while he was out on bail. And this happened in November, December 87.

How long did it take to get a fucking court case for this guy that he's on bail the whole time?

I don't know. He planned to burglarize this home that he was in, but he was caught off guard because the mother and her children came home early. Instead of running, he decided to murder them in a way that is so horrific, I don't even really want to discuss it.

Okay, sure.

Because it sucks the air out of the room. Okay.

But this was the same family. This was the Bowen family.

Different family.

So he's now burgling new people.

Yes. I don't know why it's so hard to...

So in many ways, the Bowen family locked out.

In many ways, I want to kill you in a horrific manner.

Well, you got to hit me with these family's names, man. And you can't.

I did the Gustafsson family.

I thought Bowen was going to be the first.

Needless to say, La Plante was easily linked to this second crime scene and subsequently arrested.

Because of all the turquoise jewelry he left behind.

Well, he left something behind and it was not turquoise jewelry. During his trial in October 1988, a jury found him guilty of murder and he was sentenced to three life sentences.

I thought you were going to say three years.

No, no, no, no. This is in 1840s London. This was 80s in America. So he was not getting out of prison. The second and even more heinous haunting turned likely frogging murder that I found in my research is actually one of Germany's most famous cold cases, the Hinter-Kaifchek murders. According to a Mental Floss article, it was April 1922 when neighbors grew concerned that something was amiss at the remote Gruber family household.

Hans Gruber?

Like Hans Gruber.

Okay. And Simon.

At the Gruber family homestead in Hinter-Kaifchek, Bavaria. The remote farm was, quote, located near the woods outside the Bavarian town of Grobern, about an hour's drive from Munich and a half mile behind, or Hinter, the town of Kaifchek. It was the home of 35-year-old Victoria Gabriel and her two children, seven-year-old Kaizilia and two-year-old Josef, as well as her elderly parents, Andreas and, confusingly, a second Kaizilia Gruber.

Oh, boy. You think the last story is going to fuck me up?

It's got two Kaizilias.

It's got two Kaizilias.

So two Kaizilias, junior and senior. The Gruber family was known to keep to themselves, but on April 1st, Kaizilia, the younger, missed school and the entire family failed to show up to church where Victoria was a member of the choir. Kaizilia missed school again on April 3rd, and by then, mail for the family had begun to pile up at the local post office. On April 4th, the family's neighbors decided to investigate. Lorenz Schlittenbauer, a farmer who lived nearby, led the search party, and what he and the search party discovered shocks the town to this day. In the family's barn, the search party found four battered bodies covered with hay. Victoria, Andreas, and both Kaizilias. Inside the house, they discovered the bodies of two-year-old Joseph and the maid Maria Baumgartner.

First time named.

It had been Maria Baumgartner's first day on the job.

No.

The previous maid had abandoned her position for reasons that will become clear shortly.

Oh my god.

Again, according to Mental Floss, the elder Kaizilias showed signs of strangulation and seven blows to the head, which left her with a cracked skull. The face of her husband, Andreas, was caked with blood and his cheekbones protruded from shredded flesh.

Oh my god.

Victoria's skull.

The bear that was living in their walls?

Victoria's skull was also smashed. Her head showed nine star shaped wounds, and the right side of her face had been hit with a blunt object. The younger Kaizilias lower jaw had been shattered, and her face and neck were covered in gaping circular wounds.

They had a Galookago.

They might have had a Galookago. Inside the farmhouse, little Joseph and the maid Maria had met a similar fate. Maria was killed by crosswise blows to the head in her chambers, and Joseph by a heavy blow to the face in his cot in Victoria's room.

I don't know what anyone would do. I feel like cowardice would for sure win the day for me in the event of a horrific event.

But in the event of you discovering all this?

No, no, no. In the event of being a participant, like on the receiving end of this.

Yes.

I have no qualms about the fact that I don't think I would rise to the occasion.

To save your family?

Yes.

Sure.

But there's a lot of you. So it can't just be one perpetrator, right?

Well we'll get to that in a minute.

Like even in cold blood at two people if one of the guys didn't want to do it.

So the family was found outside except for the two-year-old and the maid who were found inside. Like the bodies in the barn, their bodies were also covered. Maria with her sheets and Joseph's with one of his mother's dresses. The farm animals and a Pomeranian watchdog remained unharmed. I mean, what's a Pomeranian going to do?

It's a bad watchdog.

Even the term Pomeranian watchdog didn't tell anyone about this intruder. Chillingly, the animals and the watchdog had been taken care of and fed for several days that passed between the murders.

One of those weird things were like this person is a disconnected. They love animals, but they kill humans type of thing.

Possibly. Yeah. So the culprit definitely frogs after the fact because there was evidence that someone had been eating food in the house and taking care of the animals. But that's not what defines this as a frog.

It doesn't really feel like frogging anymore when everyone's dead.

Well, sure. But that's not what really defines this as a frog in case. Earlier, when I said it was the maid's first day on the job, that's because the previous maid had become so convinced that the farm was haunted that she quit without warning. Quote, when the police questioned her about her belief that the property was haunted, she said she had come to the conclusion after constantly hearing sounds in the attic and experiencing an unsettling feeling of being watched. Andreas, the older man who was living there, the dad of Victoria, had not believed the maid that the place was haunted. But when police questioned the neighbors, it turned out that he had confided in them about some very spooky doings in his home days before the murders. A newspaper he did not buy was found in his home. And a set of footprints was discovered leading from the forest to the farmstead.

I mean, that's, that seems like something to investigate.

Concerningly the footsteps were in pristine unmarked snow leading in only one direction.

Yeah, but I don't think, you guys are a little bit, you're an idiot, I don't think you should have been slaughtered by someone who's obsessed with crushing heads. But I do think maybe it's like, hey, did anyone have a visitor today who's still here?

Well, nobody knew who the footsteps belong to.

It's not a ghost, so.

Well, it's a ghost that...

Maybe set the Pomeranian out to take a look.

It's a ghost that came out of the woods and said, I'll haunt here.

Because that's the things I, you know, there's things I don't love about living in the city. There's a lot of things I fucking super love about living in the city. But one of those things I love about living in the city is like, if I lived in any of the houses I drive by when I drive across the country, and it's just like a farmhouse in the middle of a bunch of acres, the idea of someone knocking at my door when I'm really, it's so much scarier than someone knocking. Someone knocks at the door here, now it's packaged, being delivered, Joe has witnessed whatever. But like, if you live in the, you live in a hinter town, like in the middle of the woods, and like there's anything that seems like me and my family didn't do it, like I am so scared immediately.

I've said before on this show, having grown up in central Pennsylvania and having been a lot of places where there's not really anybody except maybe people you don't want to run into, I've always felt, or I should say, I have at times felt that my life was more in danger in the boonies of Central PA than I ever have in Boston or Los Angeles.

It's solitude. It's as simple as that. Like, like, well, because the bar is in Greenwich Village or really anywhere in Manhattan except for like Wall Street. Yeah, like at a certain, it's two in the morning. It's all these crazy people, but you're not alone.

Yeah. Bad stuff can, and bad stuff can definitely still happen.

But like, you know, don't give a shit culture of like, yeah, I'm not going to get involved. But you don't feel afraid because you're like, I'm trying to always be.

You have a chance. You can scream and there's a chance.

I'm not saying that's going to work out for you. I am saying that like you don't get that creep out feeling though. Once the event's happening, you might be on your own. You might see people, not literally alone, but you're not going to feel scared or worried.

But in the boonies, you will definitely be alone.

You're definitely going to be alone. And I think you get the hair on the back of your neck more when you're just kind of taking something from under a sulfur lamp from a barn to the farmhouse.

Well this will also make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. To make matters even stranger, one of the family's two keys disappeared shortly before the murder. So combined with the footsteps from the woods, the sounds in the attic, and a smoking chimney in the days following the crime, the odd details comprise a profile of a ruthless intruder who may have, Reed definitely did, taken up residence in the house.

I don't wish ill will towards anyone, but I feel like there's a level of due diligence not done by this family based on evidence that seemed overwhelming numerous times. Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, If the fucking hired help is like, this isn't great, you're not looking into it?

It seems like the responsibility is upon you, the family, that if you're going to live in your homestead and not really interact with your neighbors much and be far away from anyone, that you would want to investigate strange doings around the home. You don't want to let that go. You don't want to let that fester. You know, like I'm sure if they saw bugs in the kitchen, they probably tried to take care of the problem.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess they couldn't call it Exterminator back then.

I mean, the fact that this guy's talking to neighbors at the tavern being like, oh, my house is a fucking nightmare.

You wouldn't believe how haunted my house is. There's footsteps coming out of the woods and never leaving.

There's huge Bavarian pretzels being half eaten.

I hear at least two guys having screaming fights in the attic over who's going to murder my family.

I said, keep it down.

I said, I called a priest. We put a cross up. Nothing worked. Nothing worked.

I cannot believe that this family was slaughtered.

The murders remain unsolved. There's a long list of potential suspects. We won't go into all of them.

Probably the person that quit the day before. Yeah, they're probably the first person they talked to.

Well, one of the suspects is somebody who the maid was dating. No, but the maid said, like pointed the police in their direction. I didn't go deep enough on all this to see how much.

She's like, that guy has one of the keys. Yeah, you should talk to him.

I didn't go down to see how much they questioned the maid. I mean, I feel like the maid herself probably didn't do this, but maybe someone she knew could have.

I mean, it's one of those things. It's like, anytime someone doesn't show up for work when the bank is robbed, you have to be like, hey, why didn't you show up to work today?

I do think, just like my knowledge of profiling from film and television, I would say the fact that the bodies were covered and that somebody took care of the animals and that the crime was so violent.

Oh, it's someone they know.

It's someone they know. This is a personal, you know, done by hand. Then I feel bad about it. I don't want to look at the faces.

Kind of someone who this family stole their pets. Maybe they've come to get them back, but they didn't see a way out. So they had to stay with their pets for a couple of days.

Wikipedia lists eight potential suspects, including Carl Gabriel, the second Ocho of the episode, Victoria's husband, who was reportedly killed in action fighting in France during World War I, but his body was never recovered.

Oh my God. He's like a wow, phantom stranger.

Then there's Laurens Schlittenbauer, who was the guy who came, who led the search party, the farmer who lived nearby, who led the search party and found the bodies.

He then injected himself into the investigation.

He had started a relationship with Victoria after his first wife died in 1918.

Was her head just crushed?

No, no. His relationship with Victoria didn't last, and he did act very suspiciously after the bodies were discovered. Not to mention, he was the one who said, hey, gee, no one's heard from these guys. You should go knock on the door. Well, look, piles of bodies.

Sure. Wow, that's not great.

But my favorite suspects are the unbelievably named Anton and Adolf Gump, who were named as suspects just a week after the murder due to their connections to a far right paramilitary organization.

Oh, OK. So this is in their birthright.

Called the Freikorp Oberland.

Never name someone this again.

Anton and Adolf Gump. As Freikorp members, at least one Gump, Adolf, was said to have participated in the murder of nine farmers in Upper Silesia during the Polish uprising of 1921. So, so yeah, again, killed before.

Retire this name.

Yes, retire.

Retire this name. Gump you can keep because there could be shrimp involved.

Possibly.

I don't like shrimp, but I don't want to see shrimp disappear.

My my high school gym teacher was was a Gump.

Yeah, exactly. That's fine.

Yeah.

Hold a stopwatch, sell some shrimp. These are the Gump trademarks.

Yeah.

To Adolf, they have is not one thing that's fallen in the great column.

I do think it's funny that according to Wikipedia, like Wikipedia didn't list any other reason that these guys were any non heinous Adolfs. Well, no, no, they didn't list any other reason that these two were named as suspects.

Other than being like local legends of being pieces of shit.

Well, they yeah, they'd murdered nine other farmers, which to me suggests that somebody was just like, like that was the MO, like farmer murders or something.

You're saying you said it was what? You said it was a farmer? I mean, I think these guys were out of town, but our only farmer murderers we have in the area are these two guys. You should check into it. I'm not again, I think they have a good alibi. Yeah, I think they were murdering another farmer somewhere else. So they probably couldn't do this. And they've had numerous occasions that they hate animals. So I don't know if they would. And there's none of the other farmers they've killed they covered. The more I say out loud, I think they didn't do it, but they should definitely be suspects.

Thankfully, most of the more modern frogging cases that I found are far less violent, though no less unsettling. I actually found two from 2019, both really weird in their own ways. The first happened to a college student named Maddie in North Carolina. A report on the WGNO news site starts with a familiar line. Quote, a North Carolina college student says she thought a ghost was haunting her off-campus apartment until this past weekend when she found a man in her closet dressed in her clothes.

Oh, I guess there is a, I'm not saying there's a correlation, but we've had, in the hundred years, you've had a couple of guys being like, I gotta get in these walls to wear your clothes or sniff them or something.

Now, this one, though, this is where the size of the home comes back into question. It's a dorm room? This is an off-campus apartment.

Okay.

Bigger than a dorm room, but I don't think particularly big.

Our off-campus apartments were not big.

No. This happened at the Summit at the Edge Apartments.

Also, we had a hundred roommates to make it, even that work.

Yeah.

I don't know if this person living alone in their apartment, I don't know.

I think she does have a roommate that comes in here somewhere.

Okay.

It happened at the Summit at the Edge Apartments, just steps from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Quote, I've been having like pieces of clothes missing, like shirts and pants, says Maddie, a junior at the college.

It's 2019, so it's like 25 years since panty rating was a thing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

God. She told the news that she is scared for her safety and declined to show her face on camera. So this really freaked her out. Items were disappearing and handprints were left behind on the bathroom wall. It wasn't until Saturday that she uncovered a mystery that she and her roommates thought was a ghost.

The roommates with an S was just like us. They couldn't afford anything.

Quote, I just hear rattling in my closet. It sounded like a raccoon in my closet.

Oh, shit.

Check the fucking roof ahead.

Yeah. It's an animorph.

You're going to end up with your head smashed in and I'm going to be like, I don't know. I mean, he said there was a raccoon up there.

I thought it was a raccoon.

It sounded like a raccoon in my closet.

A raccoon dragging a sledgehammer.

It sounded like a raccoon, Matt, he said. I'm like, who's there? And somebody answers me.

Got to not answer, bud.

He's like, oh, my name is Drew. I opened the door and he's in there wearing all of my clothes. All of them.

Just like that little boy in the beginning. So many levels of pants.

I think she means the clothes that are on him are all hers, not that he's wearing every item of her clothing.

He's actually very thin, but he just looks gigantic. He's got like so many layers on.

My socks, my shoes, and he has a book bag full of my clothes. Police said that was 30 year old Andrew Swafford. He appeared in court on Monday via video conference from the Guilford County Jail.

From her closet. Now he's on my computer, on my Zoom.

She's in the background of the Zoom being like, what the fuck?

Mam will be with you in a moment.

Maddie said she called her boyfriend. As she calmly waited for help, she talked to Swafford to keep him distracted. Quote, he tries on my hat. He goes in the bathroom and looks in the mirror and then is like, you're really pretty. Can I give you a hug?

Oh, no.

But he never touched me. Thank God. The big question the women are trying to get answered is how he got inside.

How he looked so good in outfits. I never made work.

They said their doors are always locked and they did not see any damage to them. But what really scares the women is that this is not the first time strange men have been inside their apartment.

This is why you watch movies.

I bet not.

No, you watch movies. They always had sorority mothers or ladies would live in the 30s and 40s in New York. It would be like women only apartments and there'd be like some old lady being like, you can't bring your boyfriend in here. You wait for her downstairs.

Yeah.

I think we have to go back to that.

Well, this was not the first time strange men have been inside their apartment. Quote, there was two guys in the living room, Maddie said on December 19th.

I mean, that's kind of having roommates though, right? Well, that's like you're going to walk in and people you don't know.

They alerted the leasing office. So none of the women here seem to know these two guys.

You're saying the whole group that you're out as a group and then they came back maybe and there's two guys playing Xbox.

I guess. Yeah. So their apartment was both really easy to break into. Apparently, lots of men knew that you could get in there. And then this Andrew guy in her closet, this is what I mean. There's multiple roommates. How the fuck did they not catch a dude living in one of their closets for at least a couple of days?

It sounds like it must be a potentially at least a two floor apartment. Maybe my hope is that it's two floor. So that way it's I don't know. I mean, a lot of apartments I knew, especially when I was in college, were not two floors.

But no. Anyway, the women alerted the leasing office when they found the two guys in the living room. An employee confirmed that the locks were changed, but no one filed a police report, which was the news station was told was standard protocol, which is weird. That standard protocol for strangers in your home would be, we changed the locks, but we didn't tell the cops.

Well, maybe if the guys left and then they're like, who needs the headache?

I guess they could have just been drunk guys.

I don't know. I mean, there would be two dead guys in my apartment if I came in and there was drunk people in my house. Maddie and her roommates say they had said that I was cowardice earlier. Yes, I'm cowardice if the drunk guys got a sledgehammer. But if I feel like I'm in control, then maybe then I wouldn't be a cowardice.

Maddie and her roommates say they've had enough. Last night, I did not feel safe. I slept with my roommate in her bed, Maddie said. I can't stay here. My closet, it stinks. Every time I go in my room, there's a bad vibe. I'm just ready to leave.

Oh my God. Do you think it stinks like he was stinky?

I think he was stinky.

She just said, oh, it stinks if I lost access to my closet.

There's a picture of him in the article. He looks stinky.

Okay, sure. He has stink lines, cartoon stink lines coming off of him.

Yeah. Berkeley Communities, the property management company, told the news that they are going through all the details and trying to figure out how something like this happened.

Oh my God. We had installed keyless entry and we used the default 1234 password.

Yeah. I mean, possibly. It seems like somebody knew that these apartments were easy to break into because three guys in a couple of weeks seems crazy if there's not word going around.

Sure.

Swafford was jailed in Guilford County on $26,000 bond and 14 felony charges, including larceny and identity theft.

They threw the book at him.

I guess he wore her clothes and that was considered identity theft.

That's really great. Well, he, he, yeah, he wore her clothes into the bank and was like, yes, I'm Susan.

Yeah.

All the money, please.

They found that out later.

In my account.

The second frogging story from 2019 is even worse and one that could have gone really, really bad if it had gone on undiscovered.

Now, this first person really lucked out that there was like a simpleton in her.

Yes. Yes. Who answered to is someone there and he's like, oops, my name's Drew.

Drew. Just looking for an outfit, you know? And so that lucked out that she just was like, it was able to kind of corral him out into a different area for a bit. Like, that's, that's so much better than a violent person jumping out.

This next Frogger committed no violence, but oh boy, was he gonna. This story comes just from the New York Post, chroniclers of all things upsetting and terrible.

Okay.

Quote, it was the bike sitting outside that tipped off Brittany and James Campbell that something was amiss. The couple and their two young sons had been away from their Honolulu home for about a week. They returned home on September 20th, 2019 to find something terrible. James went to open his home's front door, but found he couldn't because a stranger was inside pulling it close.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Quote, you got to hire a guy with a samurai sword and one grenade.

Quote, there is a man peeking through the door. He's trying to hold it shut and the man says, this is not your house. Very calmly. James 36, who is in the US Navy, says, Here's the thing, though, you what is what's the what's the percentage of time?

Was it like two seconds where you you you have to like step back and look up, right? Like, am I the asshole? Like, you know what I mean? Even though you know it's your house, there has to be a moment where you go, oh, oh, fuck, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And like, you have to back up and look up at your house.

And then the guy's like, you said you're sorry. It's not your house. It's my house. I live here.

I'm going to lease. Uh, that's so scary, man. I will. We go away for long patches. But, you know, we were alerted to the rats in our house from the security system we have, right, which has motion detectors in the house when you're not there. Well, this guy needs to get that.

They did not have that.

James grabbed a safe wants to use us for a code or something. Give us a call.

This would be a great episode. If only we had a security company that could tell of our listeners about here right now would be great. James grabbed a sledgehammer for protection. Oh, or a sledgehammer company.

This is an outdoor sledgehammer.

I guess it's the outside. Got it from his like, the garage hammer. Yeah. He grabbed it for protection and managed to get the man out of the house while Brittany called 911. Once the intruder was in the front yard, James says, we notice he's wearing my clothes.

What year is this?

2019.

And this is whose clothes?

James's clothes.

OK, so this is a different MO.

Different MO. Things are getting crazier by the moment, he says. The police arrive and arrest.

Well, this is probably wearing his clothes because he's been living there for a bit. He's never gone for a week.

Least a week. Yeah, a lot longer than a week, it sounds like, though. The police arrived and arrested the man, a 23 year old named Ezekiel Zayas. But after he was hauled away, the nightmare was just beginning.

Like Dr. Zayas?

Like Dr. Zayas.

Dr. Zayas, Dr. Zayas.

This guy wanted to be a doctor. Listen to this.

Oh, boy.

The inside of the home was in utter chaos. Pots and pans were piled on top of each other. In the living room, James's musical equipment had all been taken out. The bedroom was in complete disarray, just trashed, Brittany37 and a stay-at-home mom told the Post. But it gets worse. Someone had used one of their old laptops to record disturbing diary entries. Someone obviously.

Gotta be the guy.

To record disturbing diary entries and details about the family. Quote, there were all these typed notes called the Omnivore Trials, a rehabilitation for rat-like people, James says.

That's a great title.

This is when we noticed this person had been in our home a lot longer, Brittany told The Post.

Because they dated it. It was like June 5th. They sleep 10 minutes longer than normal.

I think so.

Yeah.

Brittany noticed knives had been laid out next to the computer and she found a typed manifesto about gruesome plans that this man had for the Campbell's, including surgeries such as a sexual reconstruction and a hand transplant.

Why?

He wanted to play doctor on us and not in the cute little kid way, Brittany said. He wrote about how he could make us into perfect people.

I mean, that's, he's got the outlook is good. Like he's not saying he's ambitious. Yeah. He wants you to make you into perfect people, not, you know, well, dead. This, this detail is one hand away from being perfect.

This detail wasn't in the post article, but I found that his surgery plans detailed the desire to turn the family from what he called omnivores into quote Ezekiel's.

Named after him.

Named after him. He wanted to do some sort of surgery on them to turn them into, I guess, clones of him or robot versions of him or I'm not sure it really made a lot of sense. But, yeah, sexual reconstruction and hand transplant are also two wildly different surgeries.

I think it's just two things where I think he yeah, I think these people were just one or the other away from being perfect.

It's still unclear how Zayas got into the Campbell's Two-Story House or how long he lurked there, but the journal mentioned very personal details about them, such as the fact that Brittany was undergoing fertility treatments, which she hadn't shared with anyone.

Oh, so he's lurking.

He's lurking.

He's there lurking.

After his arrest, Zayas was charged with burglary and released. Shortly after he was-

I'm sorry, other person gets 14 counts at the college?

I know, and this guy is plotting out-

This guy has a fucking-

Human centipede style body games to play.

We had a simpleton who you were able to kind of usher out of your apartment with a broom. And he got 14 counts. And this person, yeah, has a manifesto, time stamped journal entries, knives on the ready. And they're like, we call that a Honolulu whodunit or something, and we just keep moving.

I actually did see in the comment section on one of the local news sites that I was reading about this on.

It's the guy being like, I'm still free.

No, I briefly glit- Somebody had left a comment that was like, well, hold on a second. So he was charged with burglary and released. Shortly after he was arrested again, this time for vandalizing a Buddhist temple. And then in 2020, while in the correctional facility for that crime, Ezekiel Zayas killed a fellow inmate and was finally sentenced to 40 years, which somebody commented, wow, that's a lot of time for the Hawaii justice system or something.

Okay, so there's this person saying that like, nobody does much, nobody does time there, that it's a corrupt and terrible. I think that's most blatantly these catch and release type things is pretty prevalent. So this is a person who, or it's a fucking Russian bot, who knows who made that comment. But I mean, it's always upsetting, and I don't know what the line is or how you even discover how to, do you get stricter because maybe it's all bullshit or maybe you shouldn't be more lenient maybe, but it's too often that we do these episodes where it was like, oh, he was arrested for his 40th time when they finally skinned that family alive.

I think there's, in America, part of the reason that we've developed a lot of these catch and release or bail lists or whatever is because our jails are so overstuffed that there's no, we have so many people in prison that there's no room to put more people. And so some of the releasing of folks has come at the lobbying of law enforcement or jails who are like, we can arrest people, but we don't have anywhere to put them.

I mean, a lot of jails are private here too, so I'm sure they want more. But then they have to also give a bunch of beds to different organizations.

And in other countries, like in Britain, I know we were joking about it earlier, but they have a system that I think is a little bit more humane in that they will put people, more severe crimes will get less time, but there is a heavier emphasis on rehabilitation and the hope being that you won't have as many repeat offenders. So you'll have people in prison who have done pretty awful things, who were there for six years or something for a murder. But the idea is we're going to rehabilitate them and hopefully they won't.

How do you rehabilitate a murderer? And this is a conversation for a different episode, but it seems like a hardwired thing. So I don't know, but this is my own, you know, I don't know. Like this is, I genuinely don't know. Anything about anatomy or brains or psychology. So just from an idiot's perspective, knowing nothing, I feel like it would be hard to rehabilitate a murderer.

I think all I really know about the British justice system is what I've learned from reality shows about prisons.

I mean, they used to have a lot of space for it. They just sent them to Australia.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think the idea is a little bit more of like, you do a crime, you serve your time, and you are considered part of society again.

All right. I mean, if there's no private prisons, I don't know, I guess there's no reason to keep people in there. Oh no, this guy's got to go.

This guy's got to go. This guy went away for a long time. So it does seem that throughout history and through the modern day, Frogger's can be found everywhere, particularly poorly secured dorm rooms and apartments.

Well, off campus, yeah.

But celebrities fall victim to Frogger's too.

Oh, I mean, it's got to be a nightmare.

The rich and famous.

My buddy was dropping... I don't want to maybe give all the names. I'll bleep it here. But my buddy was dropping a script off years ago to... *** And he was lost because this was years ago. And he's like, oh, what are the ***?

He didn't have maps.

Maybe he... I think whatever...

He didn't have digital Google Maps.

He might have, but it was like maybe the person, you know, mailed... the service wasn't great. Anyway, he was lost. And so he called. He gave you a number and even had an issue. Called like an assistant or a person or whatever. And I guess he got a hold of the head of security. And he's like, hey, sorry, I'm lost. I'm... and he's like, are you in a blue sedan? He's like, yeah. He's like, all right. You're gonna go like one more street down and you're gonna take a left and then I will meet you at the gate or whatever. And he was like, you know where I am?

Yeah.

He's like, yeah. He's like, I'm not on his street. You understand?

Yeah, yeah.

He's like, I'm on a different area.

I'm sure the neighborhood is the kind of neighborhood that has cameras.

And that's what I'm thinking is like, for specifically this, celebrities might have a different level of like, we can't fall victim to Froggers. So I'm excited to learn about the Froggers who, fucking Catherine Zeta Jones, their way through the lasers that is a celebrity's security system.

Well, both of these stories are pretty short, and I thought they were kind of a fun place to end. So the first one I have is about Pamela Anderson, who in 2001 had a frightening encounter at her Malibu home when she noticed an unfamiliar face peering from her guest house window, and it was not Boy Jones. It turned out to belong to a homeless woman who had quietly moved into Pam's poolside guest house and put on her iconic red swimsuit from Baywatch.

I guess she would keep that in the pool house.

It would make sense. I don't know if it was a screen worn version or she just had a number of them, but Pam confronted this woman who was 27, later identified as Christine Roth, a French national, and Christine handed Anderson a note saying, quote, I'm not a lesbian. I just want to touch you.

Which kind of feels like change the wording a little bit. I think we should all have notes for everything we do. Because that way people have the opportunity to say no, thank you.

Yeah.

We should not be touching pregnant ladies' stomachs to feel a kick or anything like that. We should have a note for everything.

I believe what you're describing is commonly referred to as consent and is something that we don't usually need notes for. It's just something that we ask.

I'm not saying the note can be signed to override consent.

Yeah.

I'm just saying, it's not like, hey, this is a doctor's order to wear your clothes. I'm just saying it's interesting that this person came prepared with, the first part not necessary, but I do like that there was an element of like, hey, I'd like to touch you.

Well, yeah. She seems-

Now you're aware of my intentions.

Yeah. Security was not as good for Pam as they were for the **** because she called them.

They got a note from the girl that says, you don't have to work today.

Yeah.

They had notes for everything.

They were all at home. No, security was called and they showed up, but they couldn't find the intruder because she hid under Pam's house for several more days, completely undetected, only coming out to break into Pam's home and eat her food. She eventually was caught under a bed, wearing, still wearing the bikini, and Pam called the cops. The stalker then tried to slit her own wrist with broken glass, but she survived and the police arrested her. Apparently, as the police led her away, the cops asked Pam if she wanted her swimsuit back, and she said, no, Christine can keep it.

Wow.

So she got a parting gift.

She got a gift.

Pam's always seemed like a real one. I'm glad she's having a little comeback.

I do like, yeah, the last show girl was good.

And Naked Gun.

I'll say the last show girl was good. Yeah, good for her. I guess you just, 2001 eBay's around, but yeah, maybe no one's trying to buy.

I don't think eBay was this woman's motivation.

No, no, I'm saying for Pam to get it back.

Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She probably had plenty, I'm sure.

I don't know. Have you ever seen any actors get to walk home with anything ever?

That's true.

They never let them take shit.

And then finally, I found an article about a fan who frogged in singer George Michael's house. And this article is on a website called ohnotheydidnt.com. Although in this case, I dare say yes, they did. Because the article tells us, quote, George Michael sings a song called Freak. And once again, like H, F, okay, freak with multiple E's. And once again, life imitates art. Michael has revealed that somebody one can only describe as a freak or I would say a frogger was found living underneath the pop star's London mansion. That person described as a female stalker, you should all have P.H.'s, apparently figured out a way to get into Michael's home's crawl space and then camped out right underneath Michael's living room floor. In a chilling interview with British GQ, Michael says he had no idea the female stalker was under there until quote, I was talking to one of my friends one night and I thought I could hear my name being called out. Then Michael says the woman suddenly jumped out at him from the floor, from beneath the floor.

Yeah, I don't know what situation.

George says he called the cops, but there was nothing they could do because, and you can learn more about this in our stalkers episode if you go back beginning of season two, I think.

There weren't laws yet.

At the time, there were no anti-stalking laws. Michael says the only reason the police eventually took the woman to the station was because she punched one of them. But that wasn't the end of it. Quote, she came back a few times, Michael says in the interview. And a few months later, I found her performing a, in parentheses, sexual act in the corner of my garden.

Wow. Garden is how they say yard.

Yeah.

I don't think she's amongst the tomatoes and stuff.

No, no word on what the sexual act was, but I'm sure she was-

He's been a-

Performing-

Use of some of those, I guess, in a place you shouldn't, right?

So yeah, man, that brings us to the end of our entire episode dedicated to Froggers, and if you guys like frogging content, I implore you to go back to episode 10, listen to the frogging stuff there.

Neighbors From Hell, I think it's called.

Neighbors From Hell, and if you want more frogging content, there are so many frogging stories, we could do a bunch more of these, so let us know.

We should've just had someone come out of one of the vending machines that are beside me in the recording of this.

Maybe someone's in them, they're big enough.

Well, before we go, I was house-sitting at a mutual friend of ours' house, it's like a pretty big house, and it has like crawl space entrances, like the way the house is kind of built into a hill, and it has alarm systems on all the doors in the house, and I was there and the alarm system was still on, but it was set like in a home mode so I can like live my life, blah, blah, blah. I think it was early in the morning, like I hadn't gotten out of bed yet or whatever, and the alarm starts blaring, like crazy blaring, and I was like, oh, fuck, like, and I've been not accused, I actually have like forgotten to turn it off and open the door, I'm like, oh, shit, the cops are coming now, blah, blah, blah. But this time I fully was in bed, and I was like, oh, my God, what the fuck's happening, holy shit. And so I went over there and I looked, and it has a little thing that says like what door was opened, and it was one of the crawlspace doors. It's one of the outdoor crawlspace doors.

I don't like that one bit.

And I was like, oh, my God, blah, blah, blah. And so I looked out there, I didn't see anyone, and the cops came, they went around, they didn't see anybody, and then I had to, they were away on a trip, I had to go buy like locks and like install like.

So someone tried to get in this crawlspace.

Somebody definitely opened the crawlspace at like six in the morning. And for all we know, had been successful at it in days that maybe I was up before they came, like the alarm's only on when you're away or when I'm asleep. And so for all we know, they've been living down there, but then we installed all those locks, never had an issue again.

You should have told this story when we were talking about Froggers and that we've encountered at the top.

I forgot about it until right now when we started talking about crawlspace.

All right, well, before we forget anything else, let's hit the fear tier for this episode. Ed, where on your fear tier do Froggers find themselves?

It's up there. I hear noises all the time between your personal experiences, my personal experiences, the economy in shambles, mental health issues also in shambles, like mental health epidemic as well.

Ours for sure.

Our mental health is deteriorating as every noise we hear. Yeah, and from doing the show. Yeah, I'm, whew, I'm gonna go seven. Just because like every time I hear a voice, a voice, if I hear a voice, it goes up to a nine. Every time I hear a sound, because I have a two floor place. So every time I hear a sound and I got these raccoons and everything, it enters my mind. It enters my mind, is someone in here in a way that's not necessarily burglar situation. And we drink enough that I don't remember if it was me who ate that or left it out.

Right, right.

So I'm going to go seven. Woof.

All right. Well, I am going to put Frogger's hiding behind the number six on my fear tier. A little bit lower, I think partially because I've had one and the experience was not negative. It was neutral.

Yeah. But how did you when you first heard about it, you were probably creeped out at least a seven level creep out.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Holy shit. They've been hearing me fucking.

But now, but now I don't feel as creeped out and I feel like.

I mean, it does help that a locks ended it at the other place. It was like, well, I put a lock on the door.

I moved away at the other. Oh, at the place where you were.

Yeah. Like the the the crawl space person was defeated by their their one weakness, which was a lock.

Right. It's not it's not a very difficult. Well, you don't have to have a system of laser traps in place to deter a frogger. You just need to have a lock that's not digital. It's not digital.

It's not like a number you can guess or watch someone do or use some thing that's advertised. That's like the way a garage door opener can be cloned.

Right. Right.

Or I guess garage doors in general are probably one way in for people. You can clone it. You can they drive away. You can roll under it.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. I'm not as frightened probably as I used to be. So, I would put Frogger's at a solid six and.

What number would you put it at in terms of likelihood that the Frogger once discovered becomes a friend? Probably low.

If my Frogger became my friend, where would I put that on the fear tier?

No, not on the fear tier. This is on a friend likelihoods tier. Do you think you might look into the eyes of your Frogger and be like, I'm in love with this man or woman? I'm in love with this man or woman. Or, yeah, you know what? I can see how this happened. Like your life's not great. I'm not going to press charges.

Unlikely. Depending on the situation, I might not press charges, but I don't know that this would be a person that I would invite back into my life. What if it's a whole family?

What if it's the family from the beginning of Lethal Weapon 4? You know what I'm saying?

Only specifically them.

I think Murtaugh takes them in.

Yeah. I don't really have a lot of room to take anybody in right now.

Sure.

Okay. So I would say-

But you said it's a non-zero chance.

I would wish them well. I would maybe give them a 10 spot. But-

What are you going to buy for $10? I think the likelihood that this person might become my friend is higher than yours. You have a family that sustains these needs for you. I like the attention. I don't like the attention-

You'd be a little flatter that somebody had been watching you for weeks.

Yeah, I don't like the attention in clandestine attention, but it's always nice to talk to someone.

That's true. All right, guys. Well, thank you for joining us for this episode. If you have not joined our Patreon yet, head over to patreon.com/scared all the time.

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And I'm Ed Voccola.

The show is Scared All The Time and we will see you next time. Bye bye. Bye bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Fieffel.

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