MrBallen - Ouija Boards, Aliens Hijacking an Aircraft and Real-Life Horror Stories | SRS #249

Storyteller MrBallen shares two chilling real-life horror stories: one about a disturbed teenager living in a family's walls who later committed murder, and a personal paranormal experience involving his deceased friend's father, which he recounts alongside a host's own eerie encounter in a haunted cabin.

• Disturbed individual Danny Llant lived in a family's walls, manipulating them with tapping sounds, leading to a tragic triple murder.

• MrBallen experienced a personal paranormal encounter in a cabin where a ghostly figure of a deceased father appeared and vanished.

• The host had a documented experience with unexplained footsteps in a haunted cabin, confirmed by numerous online reviews.

MrBallen, a former Navy Seal turned master storyteller and New York Times best-selling author, joins the host to discuss his career and share unsettling true stories for Halloween. He recounts the terrifying tale of Danny Llant, a disturbed teenager who secretly lived in a family's walls, manipulating them with tapping sounds before being discovered and later committing a triple murder. Additionally, MrBallen shares his personal, unexplainable experience with a ghostly presence in a cabin following a friend's father's death, which is corroborated by the host's own documented paranormal encounter in a rented cabin with a history of supernatural occurrences.

MrBallen's Background

• 00:01:19 MrBallen is introduced as a former Navy Seal and master storyteller with over 10 million YouTube subscribers and a popular podcast, known for redefining storytelling. He is also a New York Times best-selling author, with his first graphic novel topping charts and a second recently released, and an innovator in content creation, earning consideration for a Golden Globe nomination for his podcast.

• 00:06:47 MrBallen details his transition from a Navy Seal to an entrepreneur after a medical retirement in 2017 due to an injury and mental health struggles, which forced him to leave the military earlier than expected. Without a plan, he initially created networking events to help veterans find jobs before transitioning into his storytelling career, also mentioning his prolific sleepwalking as a reason for not keeping guns in his house.

• 00:59:09 MrBallen explains his unique approach to storytelling, focusing on building suspense by placing the audience in the POV of relatable, normal characters rather than leading with the antagonist. He aims for the 'bad thing' to feel ambiguous and the payoff to be at the end, making the stories more heart-wrenching and impactful by allowing the audience to feel the characters' emotions.

• 01:01:40 MrBallen discusses the surprising prevalence of people being found living in others' walls, particularly in urban areas with squatters. He shares a story, allegedly true and viral, about a man in a New York City apartment who discovered an elderly, impoverished woman had been living in his cupboard for a year, highlighting the hidden realities within shared living spaces.

• 01:09:16 MrBallen shares his nuanced belief in the paranormal, suggesting that given humanity's limited understanding of existence, it is not outlandish to consider supernatural activity. He supports this by citing credible yet unexplainable phenomena encountered through his research into strange and mysterious stories.

• 01:13:09 MrBallen recounts the story of a Mexican civilian pilot named Raphael, who, during his first solo flight, lost control of his aircraft in a fog and later woke up hours away with no memory of the interim. During this time, air traffic control recorded a strange voice, claiming to be from another planet and using Raphael's body as a microphone to warn humanity about self-destruction, an incident supported by fuel anomalies in Raphael's plane.

• 01:21:48 MrBallen shares a personal paranormal experience from when he was 16 at a friend's cabin in New Hampshire, shortly after the friend's father passed away. For two consecutive nights, he witnessed a tall, dark figure enter their bedroom, walk past him, and vanish into the floor after bowing towards his friend, leaving him terrified and seeking rational explanations.

• 02:00:30 The host corroborates MrBallen's paranormal experiences by sharing his own encounter in an old Civil War cabin rented for a survival series debrief. He, his team, and cameras captured unexplained footsteps upstairs, leading them to quickly vacate the premises. Later, online reviews of the Airbnb confirmed its haunted reputation, with guests reporting similar ghostly activities, cementing the host's belief in the paranormal.