My favourite WTF story is a cautionary tale about DNA.
A woman and her husband had two children, and she was pregnant with their third, but the marriage had ended and they were going through the court system to determine custody of the kids. As part of this, a paternity test was done, but while it showed the children were in fact their father’s, the test said their mother was not the woman he was divorcing. This was a shock to everyone; the children hadn’t been conceived via IVF, and a hospital mix-up which swapped both children with ones the husband had *also* fathered seemed astronomically unlikely.
The Court assigned an officer to stay with the ex-wife as her pregnancy progressed, and attend the birth. The officer did so, and took a DNA sample from the baby and mother moments after delivery.
Same result. The child which the officer had watched being born was not the child of the woman they had watched it be born from.
Turns out the mother of these three children had medical chimerism. When she was in the womb, she had a twin who did not survive, and who she absorbed during development, meaning that some of her cells had her own DNA, and some (including the cells collected for her DNA tests) had her twin’s DNA.
Yeah! I think the inside of her cheek (where they do cheek swabs) was maybe the twin’s DNA, whereas her bloodstream (if you do a blood DNA test?) was the DNA which matched her children.
But then which is actually *hers*, like, how could you tell for sure? Human biology is infinitely weird and defies our attempts to pin it down, and I love it.
Can't beat that but i have funny little ghost story. Saw Peter Cushing's Frankenstein when i was about 13...ran home down the middle of the road (Hastings) arrived at the front gate in a bit of a lather...turned up the path...and saw, hanging right in front of me, a classic 'ghost in a shimmering sheet' image...like Munch's 'Scream' through a diffuse lens. I screamed and threw my hands up in front of my face. Took my hands down and it was gone. Then i saw another, weaker one, and realised that it was a sweat drop on an eyelash refracting the porch light. Bloody hell...those Hammer films!
This sounds like the plot of the movie Return to Me with David Duchovny and Minnie Driver. That one didn’t end in suicide though.
It’s not the craziest story, but something odd did happen to me the other day. I was driving home when one of the cars in front of me suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. An old man with a camera got out of the car and started taking pictures. First of the car directly behind him, then of me and my car, then of all the passing cars. Then he got back in his car and drove away. This was all in the span of about a minute. I can’t help but wonder if a picture of me looking very confused is pinned to a conspiracy board somewhere with lines of string crisscrossing to other pictures of confused drivers.
This situation sounds very dangerous! I had a tire blow out last year. I ended up parked on the side of a very busy freeway waiting for road service - cars and trucks speeding by. Felt helpless and very exposed. Then a car pulls up behind us - maybe a dangerous move, as on the shoulder of a very busy freeway. Guy gets out - in a full suit - I assume to help. Instead, he does a dance in front of my car while someone inside films him.
Then he gets back in the car and they speed off, narrowing getting missed by a truck going 100mph.
I guess somewhere I'm on TikTok, the victim of some dance trend put on me against my will!
One of my favorite insane true crime stories is Hallie Illingworth’s. Her husband killed her and sank her body in Lake Crescent (which is notorious for never giving up its dead), in Olympic National Park and told everyone she’d run away. Everyone believed his story for four years or so, until her body resurfaced perfectly preserved having undergone a process called saponification while in the lake. Essentially what happens during saponification is that fatty acids in the body are converted into soap, of all things.
So, Hallie resurfaces, having been turned into soap, with physical marks that make it clear she’d been murdered. Her husband had wrapped her in cloth and tied it with rope before he sank her into the lake, and unfortunately for him the police were able to trace the rope back to him and pin him for the murder.
Doubly unfortunate, however, is the fact that this happened in 1940 something so he only served like 9 years before he was paroled. So I can’t say he really got the comeuppance he deserved.
Sucks to be Cheryl 😳 lol the thought crossed my mind too. My boyfriend died in a car accident when I was a teenager and now whenever my husband is running late and I start worry there’s always that wee thought in the back of my head “he died too, people might start to wonder about me” 🤣
Oh I'm sorry - ugh. I know years ago, but this stuff still sticks.
And yeah - everyone involved in the story had a lot of issues, Cheryl included. I have tried to track her down a few times (sensitively) but no luck. Didn't pull out all stops, but did a soft search. I think her story is incredible.
Yes, I really want to know about Cheryl, but I'm not sure how to ask the question or who to ask it of. Is Cheryl ok now (how could she be, really? but if she is, I really want to know what enabled her to transcend these experiences)? Is Cheryl that bad a person (wait, I don't think we can we blame suicide on those near them)? Will David answer any of these questions? Does he want to? Has he answered them for himself and has he decided it best not to share them further?
Yeah - there's a lot to Cheryl. Everyone was a bit of a mess. This from a news piece at the time:
"But within a year, that marriage, too, began to crumble. On Thanksgiving 2003, sheriff's deputies were called, and both husband and wife accused the other of domestic abuse.
During a Yuletide reconciliation, Johnson says, a chilling incident occurred. One evening, while they lay in bed, he says, Cheryl began talking about suicide. When she failed to return from a bathroom trip, Johnson went to investigate and says he found her clutching his .22 caliber revolver."
That story is wild! It's so crazy how some people seem to attract...death? I realize that sounds awful, but I swear it seems to be that way sometimes. My aunt, who was divorced from an abusive man, dated two different people that died of cardiac arrest within the same 1.5 years!! What are the odds? Of course, my mom (who is delightfully irreverent) made the comment that it wasn't surprising and said she too would have had a cardiac event if she was in a relationship with my aunt.
On a lighter note...I do love both You've Got Mail and Love Actually despite how poorly they've aged.
Little fun fact: You've Got Mail is actually a reboot of a movie called The Shop Around The Corner starring Jimmy Stewart. The bookshop in You've Got Mail is called The Shop Around The Corner.
Shop Around the Corner is superior for many reasons, must watch! I watch it every Christmas, and usually a few other times in between. Not only is it a nice story, but it also doesn't do the whole shameless promotion of capitalism thing.
I am one of these people. One of my favorite suggestions from my therapist, probably after I said something superstitious, was “what if you notice all the people in your life who DIDN’T die on Thanksgiving weekend?” And it’s true, there are a lot.
Jerry Orbach famously donated his eyes (“Jerry Orbach gave his heart and soul to acting, and the gift of sight to two New Yorkers.” -subway ad). According to his widow, one eye went to someone who needed a nearsighted eye and the other went to someone who needed a farsighted one. My favorite part of this is that his widow is quoted in the Daily Mail as saying "I cannot remember a day that went by where he didn't say, 'I want to donate my eyes.’”
(For more on this and a rom-com connection, listen to John Mulaney’s comedy bit in his special The Top Part, where he imagines a meet-cute between two people who each have one of Jerry Orbach’s eyes.)
Also there’s a song by The Adverts called Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, which is about a real murderer who got the death penalty and donated his eyes. In the song, the patient also becomes a murderer.
The field of epigenetics has suggested that trauma can have transgenerational effects. The Överkalix study noted that the grandsons of men who had suffered from famine were less likely to die of cardiovascular disease and (if food was plentiful) more likely to suffer from diabetes.
That said, Cheryl REALLY needs to ask herself some questions about her choices of men.
Epigenetics is pretty mind blowing. I remember reading that article about the Dutch Hunger War and its knock on health effects for the next generation years ago. Similarly (yet opposite) was an article on the first IVF babies and how their conception in perfect Petri dish materials primes them for balanced and healthy nutrient storage and outcomes later in life ..
I can’t find that exact article but this one gives you the gist. (But bleak in comparison to rhe positive one I read back then.)
Also no shade whatsoever on IVF. We’ve got one natural and epic 7 year old and tried and failed IVf for years. Just interesting that 2 hours in a Petri dish can have such an incredible knock on effect years later. Science rocks 🧬
My mother, whose mother died in a freak accident when she was a child, is convinced my siblings and I are anxious people because of epigenetics - that she passed her trauma on to us through her DNA. Which, who knows, maybe is true. But also maybe we just knew that story, and have been aware from day one that people can die at any minute?
Funny thing, coincidences. In my mind, this story caused a temporal hiccup and group named The Bastards wrote a song by that name. Sounds a lot like Dear Prudence.
thanks for sharing this story, David. I wonder if you once mentioned it in podcast, (not sure if Armchaired or Cryptid) but when talking about coincidences.. It really stayed with me back then, and, as you said, it never left me.
There's a '48 Hours' episode called Broken Hearts ( https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7tiltz ) that a friend recommended to me. There's a murder and a heart transplant and a happy ending (I thought) and then my friend said "now google the heart transplant recipient" I just about cried. But definitely worth a watch!
Many old movies have aged badly because they showcase terrible behaviour that once upon a time we barely blinked an eye at. Back To The Future is an ordeal with the casual sexual assault on Marty's mother. Did the behaviour once seem 'normal'? I struggle to understand.
There's no odd twist to the story of Mary Vincent, except for the fact of her survival. Have been haunted by it since watching her tell it first hand in an episode of 'I Survived' (S03E01). It's the most horrific story which you're only able to process because she is siting there alive and calmly telling it to you (very grim so don't google casually).
My favourite WTF story is a cautionary tale about DNA.
A woman and her husband had two children, and she was pregnant with their third, but the marriage had ended and they were going through the court system to determine custody of the kids. As part of this, a paternity test was done, but while it showed the children were in fact their father’s, the test said their mother was not the woman he was divorcing. This was a shock to everyone; the children hadn’t been conceived via IVF, and a hospital mix-up which swapped both children with ones the husband had *also* fathered seemed astronomically unlikely.
The Court assigned an officer to stay with the ex-wife as her pregnancy progressed, and attend the birth. The officer did so, and took a DNA sample from the baby and mother moments after delivery.
Same result. The child which the officer had watched being born was not the child of the woman they had watched it be born from.
Turns out the mother of these three children had medical chimerism. When she was in the womb, she had a twin who did not survive, and who she absorbed during development, meaning that some of her cells had her own DNA, and some (including the cells collected for her DNA tests) had her twin’s DNA.
I can only imagine the thoughts running through this couple's heads, while also under the pressure of a divorce.
Incredible.
Had never heard of this medical situation.
A+ essay. Good work.
I don't know if it's the same woman, but her DNA was different depending on which part of the body the samples are taken from.
Yeah! I think the inside of her cheek (where they do cheek swabs) was maybe the twin’s DNA, whereas her bloodstream (if you do a blood DNA test?) was the DNA which matched her children.
But then which is actually *hers*, like, how could you tell for sure? Human biology is infinitely weird and defies our attempts to pin it down, and I love it.
Wow
Can't beat that but i have funny little ghost story. Saw Peter Cushing's Frankenstein when i was about 13...ran home down the middle of the road (Hastings) arrived at the front gate in a bit of a lather...turned up the path...and saw, hanging right in front of me, a classic 'ghost in a shimmering sheet' image...like Munch's 'Scream' through a diffuse lens. I screamed and threw my hands up in front of my face. Took my hands down and it was gone. Then i saw another, weaker one, and realised that it was a sweat drop on an eyelash refracting the porch light. Bloody hell...those Hammer films!
Terrified by a bead of sweat.
I love this for you, Dick.
Love it. Thanks for sharing. Can’t stop grinning. Such a great visualisation
This sounds like the plot of the movie Return to Me with David Duchovny and Minnie Driver. That one didn’t end in suicide though.
It’s not the craziest story, but something odd did happen to me the other day. I was driving home when one of the cars in front of me suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. An old man with a camera got out of the car and started taking pictures. First of the car directly behind him, then of me and my car, then of all the passing cars. Then he got back in his car and drove away. This was all in the span of about a minute. I can’t help but wonder if a picture of me looking very confused is pinned to a conspiracy board somewhere with lines of string crisscrossing to other pictures of confused drivers.
This situation sounds very dangerous! I had a tire blow out last year. I ended up parked on the side of a very busy freeway waiting for road service - cars and trucks speeding by. Felt helpless and very exposed. Then a car pulls up behind us - maybe a dangerous move, as on the shoulder of a very busy freeway. Guy gets out - in a full suit - I assume to help. Instead, he does a dance in front of my car while someone inside films him.
Then he gets back in the car and they speed off, narrowing getting missed by a truck going 100mph.
I guess somewhere I'm on TikTok, the victim of some dance trend put on me against my will!
One of my favorite insane true crime stories is Hallie Illingworth’s. Her husband killed her and sank her body in Lake Crescent (which is notorious for never giving up its dead), in Olympic National Park and told everyone she’d run away. Everyone believed his story for four years or so, until her body resurfaced perfectly preserved having undergone a process called saponification while in the lake. Essentially what happens during saponification is that fatty acids in the body are converted into soap, of all things.
So, Hallie resurfaces, having been turned into soap, with physical marks that make it clear she’d been murdered. Her husband had wrapped her in cloth and tied it with rope before he sank her into the lake, and unfortunately for him the police were able to trace the rope back to him and pin him for the murder.
Doubly unfortunate, however, is the fact that this happened in 1940 something so he only served like 9 years before he was paroled. So I can’t say he really got the comeuppance he deserved.
9 years. Oh jeez.
Also - I like the idea of turning into soap. Chop me up and sell the bars at top dollar. Webworm soap!
You begin to wonder about Cheryl, right?
Sucks to be Cheryl 😳 lol the thought crossed my mind too. My boyfriend died in a car accident when I was a teenager and now whenever my husband is running late and I start worry there’s always that wee thought in the back of my head “he died too, people might start to wonder about me” 🤣
Oh I'm sorry - ugh. I know years ago, but this stuff still sticks.
And yeah - everyone involved in the story had a lot of issues, Cheryl included. I have tried to track her down a few times (sensitively) but no luck. Didn't pull out all stops, but did a soft search. I think her story is incredible.
🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️ “IF he died too,...” FFS my brain moves faster than I can type
I didn’t leave the story with a good feeling about Cheryl.
Yeah - that is fair. That's a story for another day.
Yes, I really want to know about Cheryl, but I'm not sure how to ask the question or who to ask it of. Is Cheryl ok now (how could she be, really? but if she is, I really want to know what enabled her to transcend these experiences)? Is Cheryl that bad a person (wait, I don't think we can we blame suicide on those near them)? Will David answer any of these questions? Does he want to? Has he answered them for himself and has he decided it best not to share them further?
Yeah - there's a lot to Cheryl. Everyone was a bit of a mess. This from a news piece at the time:
"But within a year, that marriage, too, began to crumble. On Thanksgiving 2003, sheriff's deputies were called, and both husband and wife accused the other of domestic abuse.
During a Yuletide reconciliation, Johnson says, a chilling incident occurred. One evening, while they lay in bed, he says, Cheryl began talking about suicide. When she failed to return from a bathroom trip, Johnson went to investigate and says he found her clutching his .22 caliber revolver."
Gotta wonder what became of the kids as well, what their lives were like in the before, during, after, during again, and after again.
But, really, no pressure, David. eye roll on myself. Sorry about that.
:P
That story is wild! It's so crazy how some people seem to attract...death? I realize that sounds awful, but I swear it seems to be that way sometimes. My aunt, who was divorced from an abusive man, dated two different people that died of cardiac arrest within the same 1.5 years!! What are the odds? Of course, my mom (who is delightfully irreverent) made the comment that it wasn't surprising and said she too would have had a cardiac event if she was in a relationship with my aunt.
On a lighter note...I do love both You've Got Mail and Love Actually despite how poorly they've aged.
Little fun fact: You've Got Mail is actually a reboot of a movie called The Shop Around The Corner starring Jimmy Stewart. The bookshop in You've Got Mail is called The Shop Around The Corner.
IS THERE NOTHING ORIGINAL IN HOLLYWOOD?!!
(no, apparently not)
Shop Around the Corner is superior for many reasons, must watch! I watch it every Christmas, and usually a few other times in between. Not only is it a nice story, but it also doesn't do the whole shameless promotion of capitalism thing.
Not much I'm afraid to say! Though I have been enjoying Severance! :)
I am one of these people. One of my favorite suggestions from my therapist, probably after I said something superstitious, was “what if you notice all the people in your life who DIDN’T die on Thanksgiving weekend?” And it’s true, there are a lot.
That is a VERY good suggestion! I feel like we can prove anything once we're convinced it's the "truth." The mind is a powerful thing!
Jerry Orbach famously donated his eyes (“Jerry Orbach gave his heart and soul to acting, and the gift of sight to two New Yorkers.” -subway ad). According to his widow, one eye went to someone who needed a nearsighted eye and the other went to someone who needed a farsighted one. My favorite part of this is that his widow is quoted in the Daily Mail as saying "I cannot remember a day that went by where he didn't say, 'I want to donate my eyes.’”
(For more on this and a rom-com connection, listen to John Mulaney’s comedy bit in his special The Top Part, where he imagines a meet-cute between two people who each have one of Jerry Orbach’s eyes.)
Also there’s a song by The Adverts called Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, which is about a real murderer who got the death penalty and donated his eyes. In the song, the patient also becomes a murderer.
Had not imagined eye donors before, and the state of the eyes. Thanks!
The field of epigenetics has suggested that trauma can have transgenerational effects. The Överkalix study noted that the grandsons of men who had suffered from famine were less likely to die of cardiovascular disease and (if food was plentiful) more likely to suffer from diabetes.
That said, Cheryl REALLY needs to ask herself some questions about her choices of men.
I wish I understood the theory behind this, but I really don't. I'll go read up.
Genes are genes and how they're treated during a lifetime can't change anything!
This is an interesting snippet https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.html
Epigenetics is pretty mind blowing. I remember reading that article about the Dutch Hunger War and its knock on health effects for the next generation years ago. Similarly (yet opposite) was an article on the first IVF babies and how their conception in perfect Petri dish materials primes them for balanced and healthy nutrient storage and outcomes later in life ..
I can’t find that exact article but this one gives you the gist. (But bleak in comparison to rhe positive one I read back then.)
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2102065-babies-health-could-be-affected-by-variation-in-ivf-nutrients/
Also no shade whatsoever on IVF. We’ve got one natural and epic 7 year old and tried and failed IVf for years. Just interesting that 2 hours in a Petri dish can have such an incredible knock on effect years later. Science rocks 🧬
My mother, whose mother died in a freak accident when she was a child, is convinced my siblings and I are anxious people because of epigenetics - that she passed her trauma on to us through her DNA. Which, who knows, maybe is true. But also maybe we just knew that story, and have been aware from day one that people can die at any minute?
I hope Cheryl has a good therapist.
This kind of thing is being looked at with descendants of Holocaust survivors. Look up epigenetic transmission of trauma and Holocaust
That is insane. Poor Cheryl.
Funny thing, coincidences. In my mind, this story caused a temporal hiccup and group named The Bastards wrote a song by that name. Sounds a lot like Dear Prudence.
Poor Cheryl
Whose turn is it today?
Poor Cheryl
Give my heart away
The second time is twice as true
Mum nagged a lot, and so do you
Poor Cheryl
Whose turn is it today?
Poor Cheryl
Open up your eyes
Poor Cheryl
Hear unfunny lies
Your heat is low
The sleet does sing
That you are made from wintering
Poor Cheryl
Won't you ever hear my sighs?
One single, round round, round, round
Round, round, round, round, round
Insert a round, round, round round, round
Round, round, round, round, round
Took a round
Poor Cheryl
Let me see you smile
Poor Cheryl
Like a little child
My world will be free of pain
So let me see you smile again
Poor Cheryl
Ooh-ooh-ooh
Won't you let me see you smile?
Poor Cheryl
Whose turn is it today?
Poor Cheryl
Give my heart away
The second time is twice as true
Mum nagged a lot, and so do you
Poor Cheryl
Whose turn is it today?
Oh this really is appropriate, eh. Poor Cheryl.
Right‽
thanks for sharing this story, David. I wonder if you once mentioned it in podcast, (not sure if Armchaired or Cryptid) but when talking about coincidences.. It really stayed with me back then, and, as you said, it never left me.
I think it would have been Cryptid Factor! You're memory is better than mine!
Reminds me of the car that James Dean.
https://www.hagerty.co.uk/articles/the-curse-of-james-deans-little-bastard-porsche-550-spyder/
There's a '48 Hours' episode called Broken Hearts ( https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7tiltz ) that a friend recommended to me. There's a murder and a heart transplant and a happy ending (I thought) and then my friend said "now google the heart transplant recipient" I just about cried. But definitely worth a watch!
I’ve heard about heart donor recipients developing the same allergies at the donor had but I don’t know how accurate that is!
Morbid story!
Many old movies have aged badly because they showcase terrible behaviour that once upon a time we barely blinked an eye at. Back To The Future is an ordeal with the casual sexual assault on Marty's mother. Did the behaviour once seem 'normal'? I struggle to understand.
Yes it was seen as "normal", and I know because it is still seen as"normal" today in certain parts of society.
😭
There's no odd twist to the story of Mary Vincent, except for the fact of her survival. Have been haunted by it since watching her tell it first hand in an episode of 'I Survived' (S03E01). It's the most horrific story which you're only able to process because she is siting there alive and calmly telling it to you (very grim so don't google casually).
So would you get Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts to play Cheryl? It’s almost dark enough for a Streepy role even...
Lena Headey (aka Cersei Lannister).
She has form.