Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Get to Smoothie King today and try the new blueberry, raspberry, or watermelon lemonade smoothies. They're all made with real fruit, real juice, and no bad stuff. Just check out the no-no list at SmoothieKing.com. Try the new lemonade smoothies at Smoothie King today.
To the teachers, assistants, and support staff who see potential in every child, Grand Canyon University recognizes you. We created the National Center for Teacher Preparation at GCU, along with a generous scholarship so you can become a licensed teacher with paid benefits. Over 100 GCU alumni have been recognized award recipients, including Superintendent, Administrator, and Teacher of the Year. Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University, private.edu.
Christian affordable. Visit gcu.edu/parapro. Hi guys, how are you today? My name is Bailey Sarian and it's Monday, which means it's Murder, Mystery and Makeup Monday. If you are new here, hi, my name is Bailey and every Monday I sit down and I talk about a true crime story that's been heavy on my noggin.
and I do my makeup at the same time. So if you are interested in true crime and you like makeup, I would highly suggest you subscribe. You know, since it's October and things are kind of spooky ooky out there, I thought it'd be nice to kind of throw in, throwing it in. You can either catch it or you could dodge it. A little bit of a ghost story.
Whether you believe in ghosts or not, that's up to you, baby. But I'm just gonna share this one. So let's get into today's story about Allie and Debbie Tolman. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
So this story takes place in February of 1987. Allen and Debbie Tallman and their three children moved into a new home in Horicon, Wisconsin. Let me double check that. Is it Horicon? I have a feeling it's not. Okay, it's Horicon.
Horican, Wisconsin. Now at this time it was a very small farming community and there was like under 3,000 people who lived there. I forgot to check what it is now, but it's probably still small I'm assuming. So they have three children, two little girls and they are about three years old and then they have a little boy and he's about seven. They didn't want their kids be named at all, they wanted to keep them
I'm just going to be referring to them as like the children and whatnot. The family moves into this new home and Debbie described this home as being her dream home. I mean, everything she could want or could have wanted for her family. It was the perfect three bedroom suburban home. The house needed a little bit of fixing up, you know, some like painted walls, maybe some new carpet eventually, but for the most part they could move in and like,
It'd be great. Now, upon moving in, Debbie kind of took notice that her kids seem to be getting sick all the time. Now kids get sick a lot because they're constantly around germs and whatnot, little rascals. She just thought it was strange because the kids rarely got sick. She couldn't figure out why they were getting the flu back to back to back. I mean, she says that the kids were just
constantly sick. Debbie would take the kids to the doctors and they would have a fever, they would get some medication, they'd be fine. And then again, they would all get sick. And it was just strange, but Debbie and Alan just assumed it was, I don't know, stress from the new place, the weather changing. So the two youngest daughters would be sharing a room together and then they have their younger son who would have his own room. And then the parents obviously have their room.
Debbie decided to go to a local thrift store because she wanted to see if she could find like bunk beds for the daughters. I mean that'd be perfect. She comes across a bunk bed that was in perfect brand new condition and it would be great for the younger girls. Bunk beds? Who doesn't like bunk beds?
So once the bunk beds were brought back to the home, they assembled it and they set it up in the bedroom. Voila, it was perfect. It's May of 1987 and the first night all the kids are finally sleeping in their own rooms. Alan, the father was in his son's room saying goodnight to his son in his bedroom, like tucked him in at night and his son,
tells Alan, his father, can you turn on the radio for me because I like sleeping with the radio on. He liked that noise. Alan turns on the radio, kisses his son goodnight, turns off the lights and goes to his room. So his son is in bed and he turns over and he hears that the radio changes channels. It's one of those radios that has the dial to find the channel. He doesn't really know how to like find his way back to the correct channel.
channel it was on, so he gets up out of bed and he goes to his parents' room and he's like, can you come fix the radio for me? It turned channels. So Alan gets up out of bed and he goes back to his son's room and he adjusts the radio for him. Alan just goes back to bed. Few minutes later, the son is in his room, right? And he's just like trying to sleep.
This time he sees the radio dial was turning on its own. Like it was just turning stations. Obviously it freaks him out. So he screams and he goes back into his parents' room. I mean, he's terrified. He just saw a radio dial turning on its own. And he's trying to explain to his parents, like I saw the dial moving on its own. Can I sleep in here, please? And at this point, Alan is a little bit upset because...
He's trying to sleep. Alan even says in an interview that he got pretty like upset with his son, told him to go back to his room. So Alan unplugs the radio, he takes it from his son's room and is like, "No, now you don't get this radio because you're making stories up and I just need to go to bed. So let's just take it out
That's that. Now he doesn't even get the radio and now he's in trouble for something that happened and no one believes him. So summer now turns into winter and by this time the family is just not doing well. They were all really struggling to get like a good night's sleep.
Either nightmares would wake somebody up, like the children would wake up because they had a nightmare, or even the parents, Allen and Debbie, they said that they were like having just really strange dreams. And then some nights they would hear noises, just like creaking noises, things that could easily be dismissed. Like it could be the wind that was causing that noise. Nightmares are happening because of stress.
And it really wasn't anything for them to fully worry about because again, it was just things that you could brush off. Now, Debbie said sometimes in the middle of the night, she would hear the two youngest girls in their room. It sounded like they were giggling, they were laughing, they were playing, but it was like 2:00 AM. So she's like, what the hell are they doing up? And Debbie would go into the room. She would see that all of the kids were asleep.
No one was up, nobody was playing. So it's like, okay, I must be losing my mind. I don't know what is happening. So a few weeks later, Allen is down in the basement area because he decided he's gonna give the basement a little makeover. Well, first of all, it needed to be painted because it was just grimy looking and he wanted to turn it into like his man cave. So Allen's like, okay, I'm just gonna be down here. I'm gonna be painting.
So Debbie comes downstairs and she tells Alan, "Hey, lunch is ready. Let's go have it together as a family." So Alan is like, "Okay, cool." And he puts his paintbrush down. He's gonna come right back when he's done having lunch and finish the job. He sets his paintbrush on the table, making sure that the bristles are kind of like hanging off of the edge. Alan goes upstairs, he has lunch with the fam. And once he's done, he comes back downstairs.
He sees that the paintbrush is now sticking into the paint container itself. The brush is in there and it's just kind of standing straight up. Alan's thinking like, I know for a fact that I set the brush down on the edge of the table and everybody was upstairs having lunch, so who the fuck
move the brush into the paint container. Now, Alan is just one of those old school dads where he's just like a logical dad. He's like, there's nothing going on in this house. It's me. I'm just like losing my mind. I must've placed it in the bowl, in the container and I just forgot about it or something. Alan didn't want to believe that there was like ghosts or anything, but deep down he knew that this is weird.
Suspish. That night, once again, one of the girls sleeping in the bunk beds began screaming in the middle of the night. Debbie and Alan, they both ran into the bedroom because it was just like an intense scream. Not a normal scream, but like a...
Debbie and Alan, they run to the bedroom to find their daughter just screaming and crying and they asked, you know, what's happening? What's going on? Their daughter claimed that there was a witch in her bedroom. Uh-huh, a witch, okay. And the daughter said that this witch was watching them. She was by the door and she had red eyes and she liked to hide behind the bedroom door when the parents were around.
She goes on with saying that the witch had set her room on fire and that's why she was screaming because she was trapped in this fire. They kind of told her, the daughter, you know, it's just a nightmare. Don't worry, everything's fine. You're safe. There's no fire. Just go back to bed. Everything's okay. Then their son comes rushing into the room because he heard the screaming as well. And he said to his parents, I saw the same thing.
She's an old lady and she's watching us and she keeps setting things on fire. Now, Debbie is the one who starts believing her kids. I mean, she feels like there is something weird going on around the house. Obviously she doesn't wanna mention this in front of the children, but Debbie is taking what her kids are saying seriously. Like, fuck, I hate this house.
Like it's giving me the creeps. I just don't feel safe here. Now, as the days went on, the family would be having dinner and then they would just hear doors kind of creak open. They would hear a door slam shut and just really like weird noises just continued, which if I was hearing this stuff, I would just run out of the house slamming shut. No, mm-mm.
But they stayed. I mean, yep, they stayed. Anyways, and then when Debbie was doing her laundry or just doing laundry in general, she heard strange voices calling out to her, either calling her name or saying like, come here, come here. No, no.
No, no. And Debbie would tell Alan about this. He was just like, "You guys, stop it." Then at that same night that Debbie heard these weird voices calling out to her, their son woke up in the middle of the night screaming. And when Debbie or Alan went in to check on him, he claimed that he saw like a dark cloud by the door of his room. Whatever it was, like it was watching him and it was telling him that they were going to kill his family.
So then a week before Christmas, they got the Christmas tree all set up. It's supposed to be a happy time. And their son is out sleeping on the couch because he wanted to sleep next to the Christmas tree and like all the lights and stuff. But really, I think he just didn't want to sleep in his
couch in his bedroom anymore so the son is sleeping out on the couch in the living room and he opens his eyes and he starts screaming again because he sees an older woman and she was evil and she had these red eyes and she wanted to hurt the family and she was going to set the house on fire this is what she's telling the little boy and he's just screaming for his parents and his mom comes running in and he's
begging and crying to his mom like please can we leave can we get out of here which i don't know how you say no to that now at this point alan has just grown sick of this shit okay he's tired of it he's not sleeping everybody's just like freaking out over nothing and he's just sick of it all so alan's like you know what i'm gonna tell this ghost to go f itself pretty much so alan just has like all this anger that's just been
building up and then he explodes and he starts just screaming at the top of his lungs that these spirits to get the hell out of his house, they were not welcome here. And then he goes on to say, which you should never do, leave the kids alone and if you wanna fight somebody, come fight me, mother effer. Come on, you coward.
Whether you believe in ghosts or not, that's up to you. If you're new to ghosts, you should never challenge them, okay? Actually, I don't even think you're supposed to acknowledge them, really, because as soon as you do acknowledge them, it's just game over, which, this is a side note, I did that. I was not really fully a believer in ghosts ever. It was kind of
like, yeah, it could be true. But at the same time, I don't want to know if it is or isn't. I just kind of like let it be. And then once we moved out here to Los Angeles, the last place we lived at, unless you've experienced it, I swear to you, it's easy to be like, no, it's X, Y, and Z that are causing these issues. But once you experience it, it's so, it sucks. These damn spirits.
And I tried to be nice and offer a lipstick to my ghost in the house. And apparently that was not very good. And everybody says that like, oh, YouTubers always have ghosts in their house. Well, that's because a lot of YouTubers live out here in Los Angeles. And Los Angeles is a very, very old,
old city. I mean, people have lived and died here for a very long time. Like the old apartment we lived in was built in 1920. So the next day, Debbie and Alan decided to contact their pastor, who then came over to the house to check it out, you know, to see like if there's something evil in the home. And this pastor said as soon as he walked into the home, he felt a presence of
evil and he wanted to help because he could see that the family that whatever this presence is is using like energy from your children and that's why they're like getting sick all the time because the kids were still getting sick and he just wanted to help the family so he comes over and he blesses the house telling whatever's in that home that it needs to leave
Cause that always works. So three weeks later, around 2 a.m. on January 7th, 1988. This is when Alan returns home from work, pulls up into his driveway, right? It's late at night. He's working the night shift. So he gets home at about 2 a.m. He gets out of his car and then he starts walking towards the front door. And while walking, he hears eerie howling sound. You know that noise of like a really heavy wind outside? Woo.
He's hearing that noise, except there was absolutely no wind going on. It was like a completely still cold night, but no wind was happening, so he's like,
What the fuck is that noise, you know? And then he's like continuing to walk towards the front door and he hears a voice that's coming out of like this howling noise. And this voice is saying, come here. Come here. So Alan went around the back to see if anyone was there, which if you hear someone saying come here and it sounds like creepy and suspish, don't come here.
keep it moving. Well I guess he has to, he's dad, dads have to, it's in the rule book. Anyways, so he goes around the back to see like what the hell that is, he sees nobody, so he walks again around the front, grabbing his keys to unlock the front door, before he's able to unlock the door, he looks over and the garage is right there you know, and he sees like this glow
that's coming from inside the garage. And he's like, what the hell is that? There's just a lot of what the hell is going on. So he kind of moves closer to the garage to go check it out. And he sees, oh my God, like there's a fire, it's smoke. Alan is just like unlocking the door. He had a lunch bag that he was carrying. He sets that down, he runs inside, he grabs the fire extinguisher and then he runs back outside to come put out the fire. And when he comes back outside, there is no fire. The fire was gone.
No fire. The garage door was completely undamaged and it was clear that there was no, there was no fire. Like there was no obvious sign that a fire was happening. So Alan just goes back and he grabs his lunch pail that he set down and he's just carrying it and he's moving on with his life. That's when something came up behind him and like,
punched or just threw the lunch pail across the room and it broke a lamp. Now it's super easy to sit here and be like, why don't you move out? Why don't you move? What are you doing? But here's the thing, kids. You can't just pick up and move sometimes. That costs money.
A lot of money. You see, you need this thing called a deposit, security deposit. It doesn't make much sense because a lot of times you don't get the security deposit back, but it's like you have to pay double the rent upfront. Are you gonna have to break a lease? It just costs a lot to move. You can't just pick up and move and everything's fine. After this incident, that's when Alan started sleeping in his daughter's room. He said he was there to protect the youngest kids. That's why he started sleeping in their room. But you know, maybe he was scared.
After a few nights of sleeping in there, Alan said he would hear something whispering, "You're dead. You're dead." Which like he's not dead. So the ghost is just being lazy with choice of words. If you wanna be spooky, say you're gonna die or something, you know? Anyways, after that, everyone slept in the same room. I don't blame them. A few days later, Alan was working late and asked his brother to watch the girls.
He wanted a man there to protect his kids. Alan got in the habit of all of them sleeping together, but since he was working late and Debbie was alone, Debbie was gonna sleep with their son and then the brother could sleep in the room with the girls and just make sure, you know, nothing happens.
So it gave Alan peace of mind knowing that his brother was there to watch over everybody. So Debbie was going to sleep with her son and protect him and then Alan's brother would be sleeping in the bedroom with the girls. Alan told his brother, look, there's something weird going on in the house. We think there's a ghost or like some shit, but I can't leave my family there alone. Debbie doesn't like to be alone. So please stay the night and make sure nothing happens.
His brother's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure buddy, ghosts. Sure, Alan. Sure. Needless to say, his brother was a non-believer here, okay? While sleeping with the girls, the brother wakes up because he hears like a loud bang. It scares him, it just kind of wakes him up. And when he wakes up, he kind of looks around and he sees a dark figure by the door. He couldn't make out what it was, but it was watching him and he just knew it was watching him. He screamed and he
grabbed the children and yelled to Debbie to get the hell out of the house that they were leaving right now. Debbie is like, oh, thank God because Alan doesn't want to leave, but okay, we're leaving. Yep. Debbie puts like some important stuff in a little bag, some clothes, the stuff she needs. And then they get the hell out of there. They never went back to the home. On that note, let me put on my final look and I'll be right back. I'm a cat. Okay.
Okay, so let's finish the story though. Two weeks later, the Tolmans had the bunk beds destroyed. You see, they kind of thought that maybe the bunk beds had something to do with it because it seemed like things really got amped up once the bunk beds came into the girls' room. Now the kids were getting sick and whatnot before the bunk beds were there,
they thought that it was indeed the bunk beds. They ended up dropping the bunk beds off at a dump place where it would be destroyed because they didn't want anyone else to go through it. And then afterwards, once they moved out, the family moved to a new house and everything.
They had no further paranormal experiences, no more voices, nightmares. Everybody was great. In April of 1988, a family moved into the old Tallman's house. They had reported to have no haunting experiences
Many media outlets had heard about this ghost story and that there was a haunting in the family and at this house too. And many people came to them asking to cover the story. And also the local gossip was happening about how they were making it all up for attention, that they were just drunks.
that they just wanted money. But the Tallman family stood by their experience. They also wanted no media attention. They had turned down a lucrative tabloid offer about their experience. They didn't think it was right to make any money off of their children's misfortune. That's great, good for them. The Tallmans did agree to share their story with Unsolved Mysteries in 1988 under three conditions.
One, they were censored during their interview, they didn't want their faces to be shown. Two, their children's names were protected. They didn't want anybody to know who their kids were. Three, reenactments of their experiences be done by actors playing the Tolman family, which I thought they did in every episode.
but that was their request. The Tallman's house activity was described in a greater extent in a book called "Haunted America" by Michael Norman and Beth Scott. But at no time in their research do they link the hauntings to the bunk bed itself. They believe that the activity was linked to the property as being located on a former burial ground. I'm bad at putting sentences together, aren't I?
And that is a story about the Tallman family and the paranormal activity they had experienced in their home. A lot of people do not believe in paranormal activity, but you know, I don't know man. Carbon monoxide poisoning is always like the number one thing that they say is linked to paranormal activity. Carbon monoxide poisoning can make you see things, hear things,
it starts to make you feel like you're crazy, it only happens in your home if you're having like a leak, and a lot of people confuse that with ghosts. Because I mean the side effects of carbon monoxide poisoning, you hear things, you see things, you start having nightmares, your chest starts to hurt, you start to feel dizzy, lightheaded, you can't smell it, you can't see it, it's hard to know if you're having a leak.
So that's always the first thing that people mention in these types of stories. It could be the case, but who knows? Anyways, let me know your thoughts down below. Do you believe in ghosts? Thank you so much for hanging out with me today.
See, I'm a great cat. I hope you have a wonderful day today. Make good choices. Please be safe out there. And if you leave here with only learning one thing, that one thing I'm gonna tell you to not do, don't ever, ever challenge a ghost. Nay nay. And I'll be seeing you guys later. Bye.
