Stranger Than Fiction Vol. VI
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Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and today's podcast features three stories that demonstrate that. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.

The first story you'll hear is called Bad Blood, and it's about an infamous medical program in Alabama. The second story you'll hear is called Suspended, and it's about a very unexpected choking hazard. And the third and final story you'll hear is called Earworm, and it's about a song you should never sing. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

So, if that's of interest to you, please eat an orange in front of the Amazon Music Follow button, and as you eat it, make a whole scene about how amazing it tastes. And then offer them the other orange you have, but don't tell them it's not really an orange and that it's actually a fruit from a strychnine tree. Okay, let's get into our first story called Bad Blood. What time is it?

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In 1932, Charlie Pollard was a 26-year-old farmer living in Macon County, Alabama, where 82% of the population at the time was African American, and they were all forced to live under the rules of a strictly segregated society. At the time, the United States was just beginning to crawl out of the Great Depression that had started three years earlier, but you wouldn't know it riding through Charlie's town.

Like Charlie, many of the other residents in Macon County were completely dirt poor, and they lived in these wooden shacks with no screens on their windows, there was no furniture inside, and they would just throw some dirty rags on the ground to sleep on.

On average, the men in the town that were lucky enough to have a job made less than $1 per day. So when Charlie heard a rumor that the government was going to be coming to town and giving free medical exams to all the African-American men, Charlie was thrilled. He had never been to a doctor before, and he certainly wasn't going to turn down a free visit to one.

And so a couple of days later, the rumor turned out to be true when a government health service worker showed up in their town and set up shop in their one-room schoolhouse. Charlie got in line with the hundreds of other men from Macon County, and then by mid-morning it was his turn, and the health service worker told him that today they were just going to be doing a blood test. And so Charlie eagerly rolled up his sleeve and stuck his arm out. A couple of days later, the results from the blood test had come in, and Charlie was informed that he had bad blood.

Bad blood was a commonly used term in that area at the time to describe a wide array of ailments. The worker didn't get into specifics about what Charlie's diagnosis meant. They just told him that in virtue of his diagnosis of bad blood, he was now eligible to join a government-sponsored medical treatment program.

If he agreed to be a part of it, he would not only receive medical care for his bad blood, he would also receive free rides to and from the health clinic, he would get a free hot meal on examination days, and in the event he died during the program, his family would be given $50 if they allowed the doctors to perform a thorough autopsy on his body before they buried him.

Despite not really understanding what it meant to have bad blood, Charlie decided to join the program mostly because of those free meals and because he had a deep trust and respect of the government. And Charlie wasn't alone. About 400 other African American men from Macon County agreed to be a part of the program as well.

At first, the program was everything they promised it would be. It was just a couple of low-key medical examinations with a nice hot meal, and then occasionally they would take some pills and have another blood draw. But eventually they started being given regular, excruciatingly painful spinal taps that would leave them bedridden for weeks afterwards. But despite this painful and surprising turn of events that none of the men saw coming, they were not aware they would be getting spinal taps as part of this program.

Charlie and the other men were convinced this program was still in their best interest and that they could trust the government to eventually cure them of their bad blood. And so Charlie and the other men didn't resist the spinal taps or other follow-on painful and bizarre medical procedures that they were being told was good for them and would help them get rid of this bad blood.

Less than a year later, men in this program began getting sick. They started developing rashes and sores all over their body. Their bones and joints would ache. They began losing hair. They had indigestion. They had headaches. They had constant fevers. And for some of the men, these symptoms would eventually subside. But for others, they got dramatically worse. For those men, they would develop tumors and their bones would start to disintegrate. They would go blind or deaf or become paralyzed or they would simply die.

But despite the obvious ineffectiveness of this treatment program, it persisted. When America entered World War II in 1941, Charlie and many of the other men in this program wanted to enlist in the military and go join the fight. But when they went to enlist, they were told that as members of the special medical program, they could only receive treatment from the doctors in that program. And so they could not receive treatment from military doctors and therefore were disqualified from military service.

While frustrated by this rule, Charlie and many of the other men still considered themselves to be very fortunate to be allowed to be a part of this program that was curing them of their bad blood. And Charlie specifically felt like he was one of the luckiest men inside of this program because his bad blood had not led to these terrible symptoms that his friends were experiencing.

And so over the years, in between his medical appointments, Charlie got married, he had a child, he even managed to buy a little plot of land that he farmed on nearly year-round. Then, in 1973, so over 40 years after they began this medical program, Charlie and the other survivors of this program had their lives completely turned upside down.

That year, a very junior assistant within the Public Health Service secretly mailed off all of the records of this Macon County medical program to the Associated Press. And then a couple of days later, the Washington Star newspaper ran this huge story on their front page that said syphilis victims in United States study went untreated for 40 years.

It would turn out Charlie and the other 400 men in this medical program, they didn't have bad blood. That was just kind of a made-up term to get them not to ask any questions. What they had was syphilis, a deadly disease that ravages the human body in three stages that can unfold over a lifetime. And so these doctors that treated Charlie were not actually treating him. They knew he had syphilis. That was why he was even part of the program to begin with.

When they tested his blood, they were trying to see who had syphilis in Macon County, and then they took those people and they entered them into this phony program, not to make them better, because this was not a treatment program. It was a US government-backed medical study of what happens to African American men with syphilis if their condition goes completely untreated for their entire lives.

The leaders of the study did not care what happened to these men. And that point was made crystal clear when in the 1940s a cure for syphilis was discovered, penicillin. But instead of giving it to these men and saving their lives, they intentionally hid the cure from them and prevented them from getting it.

This is why these men were not allowed to enlist in the military or seek outside medical care because those doctors would discover these men had syphilis and they would just give them penicillin, curing them, but that screwed up the study and so they couldn't have that.

The public health service chose Macon County, Alabama because at the time 35% of the population was already infected with syphilis and because they knew the men in this town would be largely uneducated and poor and desperate and therefore easy to trick into joining this highly unethical study. At least 28 men in this study died as a result of their syphilis infections and countless others suffered from long-term side effects.

Charlie was 66 years old when he heard the news. Finally, he had an answer. Bad blood meant he had syphilis, but fortunately his syphilis had either burned out or gone dormant. But he thought about all the other men in the study that had not been as lucky, and Charlie felt so betrayed by the government. He and the rest of the men had no idea they were getting taken advantage of.

Charlie got in touch with a lawyer who eventually sued the federal government. And in an out-of-court settlement, Charlie and the other 73 survivors of the so-called Tuskegee experiment were given $38,000 each as compensation. After the settlement, Charlie just went back to his simple life in Macon County. And then 27 years later, on April 29, 2000, Charlie passed away at the age of 94. Our next story is called Suspended.

On the evening of March 15th, 2018, a 55-year-old man named Jian stumbled out of this fine dining restaurant in downtown Singapore and promptly threw up on the sidewalk. Pedestrians jumped back to get out of the way, and a woman in high heels and a beautiful fancy dress mumbled something insulting about how drunk Jian must be.

But Jian was not drunk. He was totally sober, and now he was absolutely mortified. Jian was actually a businessman who was attempting to impress his clients at dinner, but as he had been sitting at the table with his clients, he had started to feel this pressure in his chest that became so intense that at some point he just had to get up and run outside and vomit.

And so after Jian had stood up and wiped his mouth, he thought, now that he had been sick and thrown up, that he would feel better. But as he was standing there, he noticed the pressure in his chest had not been relieved at all. And so, as much as Jian wanted to stick around and talk more with his clients, he felt like the only thing he could do now was to go in and politely excuse himself for the rest of the night and just go home and sleep off whatever was going on with him.

But when Jian went back into the restaurant and was actually back at his table, before he could even say a sentence to his clients explaining the situation, he was turning around and running back outside and vomiting on the street again. At this point, Jian knew something was definitely wrong. And so he didn't have time to tell his clients what was going on. He just needed to get to a hospital. And so he sprinted across the street, got in his car and began driving.

When he got to the hospital, he was so scared about what was happening to him that he actually parked his car crooked in the spot and left his door open as he sprinted towards the emergency room.

And then once he was inside the hospital, he ran up to the receptionist and tried to tell them what was going on, but he literally couldn't speak. And then he just collapsed in a chair right nearby. Now, the hospital was extremely busy, but all the nurses could tell whatever was going on with this man, it could not wait. And so they ran over to him, they lifted him up, they put him on a stretcher, and they wheeled him into a private exam room.

And then once he was in there, they began taking his vitals, and also they began assessing him, looking for some sort of trauma on the outside of his body that could explain what was going on with him, but they couldn't find anything. And so after they were sure that Jian was stable, he was breathing okay, his heart rate was okay, he just couldn't speak, but, you know, he was going to be okay, the team decided that the next thing they should do would be to give him a CT scan.

A CT scan is a specialized type of imaging that can show what's going on inside someone's body. It's like a really detailed x-ray. And after they gave Jian a CT scan, his results were baffling. There was this solid, fairly large, white object that was lodged at the base of Jian's esophagus. Your esophagus sits below your throat and above your stomach. It's basically the tube that food goes through to get to your stomach.

But whatever was stuck inside of Jian's esophagus was not something that looked like food. It actually kind of looked like a human hand.

Now, the doctors had no idea what this thing was, and you gotta remember that they really don't have much information here. All they know is this middle-aged guy who's dressed really well has come running into the hospital, he can't speak, and he's collapsed, and here we are. He has this obstruction in his esophagus. And so even though the doctors really had no idea what they were dealing with, what they knew is they had to get this foreign object out of Jian.

So they wheeled Jian into the operating room for emergency surgery, and then at some point a doctor came in with this long skinny tube that had a camera at the top of it.

Their first step for this operation was putting this camera down into Jian to see what this thing was that was stuck inside of his esophagus. And so after Jian was prepped for surgery, the doctor with this camera began snaking it down Jian's throat until finally the camera could actually see this white object in his esophagus. And when the camera revealed what this thing was, the entire medical team in the operating room just gasped. They could not believe what they were looking at.

To understand what they were looking at, we have to go back several hours. That night, Jian had decided he really wanted to impress his wealthy clients. And so, he had decided to take them to this very special restaurant that none of them had been to, and he wanted them to try a very special and very rare dish that this restaurant sold. It was called Sanakji.

Sanakji is a Korean delicacy that is very popular in certain circles, but it's also very dangerous. Every year in South Korea, at least six people die from eating sanakji, because sanakji is just a living octopus. You literally eat the octopus as it's moving around, and the risk of it getting stuck in your throat is pretty high.

And so as Gian is trying to eat this living octopus, the octopus decided it didn't want to be eaten, and so it flailed its tentacles around, and finally its suckers lodged onto his esophagus, and that's where it stopped.

Now, we don't know how long this octopus remained alive inside of Jian's esophagus, but we know it was alive at least for a little bit because after Jian managed to swallow it down, it kept wriggling around and grabbing and trying to escape, and that's what created that intense pressure in Jian's chest and kept causing him to go vomit. And so when the doctors put that camera down Jian's throat, they saw a whole octopus.

The octopus was removed from Jian's esophagus, and two days later, Jian was discharged, fully recovered. It's unclear if Jian ever tried Sanak-Chi again.

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The next and final story of today's episode is called Earworm.

On the night of May 29th, 2007, a 29-year-old man named Romy Baligula sang to himself as he and a big group of his friends wandered into a karaoke bar in the city of San Mateo in the Philippines.

Life had not been easy lately for Romi, but tonight he was feeling good. He and his buddies had begun drinking alcohol about an hour earlier, and so he already had a nice buzz as he walked into this bar, he had a brand new shirt on, and for the first time in weeks, Romi actually had money in his pocket.

Romy had lost his job a couple of months earlier, and since then he had not been able to find new employment. And so this city he was living in, San Mateo, even though it was one of the wealthiest places in all of the Philippines, it was also known as a place that had lots of poverty and really no safety net for people that fall on hard times. And so if you lose your job, like Romy had, you could find yourself out on the streets really quickly looking for scrap metal to sell and dumpster diving just to find your next meal.

And that's exactly what Romi had been doing for the better part of the last two months. He had been living out on the streets. But just a day earlier, he had discovered this stash of very valuable scrap metal, and he had sold it that day for a nice profit. And with that money, he had bought a nice big dinner, a brand new shirt, and tonight he had bought a night out.

And the best kind of night out for Romi was going to a karaoke bar. Because Romi loved to sing. And his friends did too, but Romi sang basically all the time. Whether he was full-time employed, making lots of money, enjoying life, or if he was in a dumpster looking for food to eat, Romi would be singing.

Now, Romy was not the best singer, certainly not compared to some of his friends who were excellent singers, but he felt like the more he sang, the better he got. And he was kind of proud that he felt like he was progressing and becoming a better and better singer. And Romy's favorite songs to sing were these big ballads. He just loved to close his eyes and let the words of the story kind of take him away. It really was his escape. It was like no matter how bad his life got, he could always sing and that would make him feel better.

Once Romi and his friends went inside the karaoke bar, they made their way across the very crowded space to the far side of the bar, they found two unoccupied tables, they pushed them together, they all sat down, and then they ordered a round of beers. And then after the beers came, the friends all did a toast to their wonderful night out they were having, and then one by one, each of Romi's friends began getting up and making their way over to the karaoke machine,

and began going through all the music and deciding which songs they were going to sing that night. One of Romi's friends chose an American country song, another one of his friends chose a pop song from the 1980s about unrequited love. But regardless of the songs that any of Romi's friends chose, when they began getting up there and singing their song, it was like the karaoke bar came alive.

People in the Philippines love karaoke. It's really a part of the culture. In fact, many people in the Philippines have a karaoke machine of their own in their house. And so what that means is in karaoke bars like the one Romy was at, the

The crowd is both really appreciative of good singers who go up there and do karaoke really well and everyone will get up and cheer and dance along. And then also, if there are bad karaoke singers, the crowd is just as quick to begin jeering and booing at them and getting them to stop.

And Romy knew that when he went up on stage that night, he was taking a bit of a risk, because when he went up and identified the song that he was going to sing, he knew it was a questionable choice. But he was confident in his abilities, he had been singing and practicing, he really felt like he was ready to nail this really challenging song, and the crowd was going to love him for it.

As Romy sat at the table watching one of his friends perform a fast-paced song about a race car, the bar's bouncer, a 43-year-old man named Robilito Ortega, came over to Romy's table with a big grin on his face.

Robolito didn't recognize Romy or his friends, they were new at this bar, and so Robolito wanted to introduce himself and get to know these people. One, because Robolito was a big karaoke enthusiast just like everybody else was, and two, Robolito felt like it was easier to keep the peace in this bar when everybody knew him and he knew everybody.

And so Romi and his friends, they chatted happily with Robolito, and then after Romi's friend, who was singing the song about the race car, wrapped up and came down off the stage, Robolito gave him a nice congratulatory pat on the back and told the friend he did a great job up there.

And the friend, in turn, turned around and flagged down the bartender at the other side of the bar and kind of gestured, "Hey, we want another round of drinks." And the friend also made it clear that he wanted to give a drink to the bouncer as well, as like a thank you to the bouncer for giving him the compliment. And the bouncer said, "Thank you very much." And then before long, the beers arrived and Romi and his friends and the bouncer, they all cheersed and toasted the night and enjoyed their drinks together. And then just a couple of minutes later, it was Romi's turn to take the stage.

And so he got up and as confidently as he could kind of jogged up onto the stage and he took the microphone and he looked out at the crowd. And everybody's having a great time. It seemed like the mood was really positive. And Romy really felt like, again, even though this song was a questionable song choice, that this crowd was going to love it and that he was going to do a wonderful job.

But when the song began to play in the background, Romy noticed that right away the mood in the bar completely shifted. It went from loud, happy, and talkative to almost silent as everybody in the bar turned and looked up at the person who had chosen this song. But Romy had anticipated this and he knew as soon as he actually began singing this song that he could win them over. He was going to nail this song.

And sure enough, Romi began to sing, and right away it was like the mood began to kind of return to what it was. People in the audience could tell that Romi was doing a good job, and so about a third of the way into his song, Romi noticed that the bar was basically back to normal. He even looked over and saw the bouncer, who was still standing with his friends over at the table, had raised his beer, kind of saying, "'Keep it up, you're doing great.'"

And when Romi saw the bouncer really getting into it, Romi had the surge of adrenaline and suddenly he felt so confident that he really leaned into the song. And so he began dancing on stage and really belting out each of the lines of the song.

But at some point in the song, there's this moment where the singer really needs to hit a high note. And when Romi very confidently attempted to hit this high note, his voice cracked. And it was a really loud, like obvious cracking of his voice. And it kind of threw Romi off rhythm and he couldn't really get back on rhythm.

And so right away, the audience reacted by going quiet again and looking angrily up at Romi like, "We knew you were gonna screw this up, this was a bad choice." And Romi actually looked over and saw the bouncer. And now the bouncer had his beard down and he's glaring angrily at Romi like, "What are you doing?"

But Romi, even though he was kind of faltering here, he did his best to kind of regain his composure because he knew he had practiced this song so many times. He knew he could do it and he tried so hard to get back on track but he just couldn't do it.

And it was around this point that he looked back at Robolito, the bouncer, and all he would have seen is Robolito angrily belting out the words of this song, almost like he was trying to override how badly Romy was singing it. And then at some point, as Romy is staring at Robolito, Robolito, while singing this song, pulls out a gun, aims it at Romy, and fires. In the Philippines, there is one song that everybody knows you do not sing.

In fact, this song is often banned in most karaoke bars, and then even when it's not banned, nobody sings it. And the reason this song is so forbidden is because since 1998, people have begun being murdered for singing it. Reason's unknown, but it just keeps on happening. Since 1998, 12 people have been murdered either while they were singing this song for karaoke or immediately after it.

The forbidden song is called "My Way" by Frank Sinatra, and that was the song that Romy chose. Now, no one really understands why this song somehow elicits all this violence in people in karaoke bars in the Philippines, but it does.

Some have said that the message of the song, which is about a man being a man and doing it his way, kind of brings out a lot of masculine energy amongst people that are listening to it, and it can apparently prompt people to just suddenly start acting violent. But that's just a theory. No one really understands why this song just keeps leading to murders.

But on May 29th, 2007, when Romy sang this song, Robolito, the bouncer, who liked Romy and liked his friends and was having a nice drink with them, he just couldn't handle it. When the song was getting butchered and he hated the song to begin with, and in fact, ironically, Robolito had been hired by that karaoke bar specifically to keep the peace if the song were to come on. But as he listened to this song, something happened inside of him and he pulled his gun and shot and killed Romy.

Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. If you enjoyed today's stories and you're looking for more strange, dark, and mysterious content, be sure to check out all of our studios' podcasts. They are this one, of course, Mr. Ballin Podcast, and we also have Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, we have Bedtime Stories, and also Run Full. To find those other podcasts, all you have to do is search for Ballin Studios wherever you listen to your podcasts.

To watch hundreds more stories just like the ones you heard today, head over to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya.

Imagine you're walking through the park one day and you see a suspicious backpack sitting underneath a bench. You report it to the police and upon investigating, they discover two live pipe bombs inside. You

This was the story of security guard Richard Jewell. After the Centennial Park bombing killed one person and wounded more than 100,

Public pressure and a media witch hunt pushed a desperate FBI to find a suspect. Despite obvious holes in the case and unethical tactics used by the FBI, security guard Richard Jewell was under pressure to confess. I'm Aaron Habel. And I'm Justin Evans. Join us as we explore the aftermath of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing.

in the newest season of our podcast, Generation Y, the Olympic Park Bombing. Follow Generation Y on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Generation Y ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.