Haunted in America: True Ghost Stories, Part Two | Grave Talks CLASSIC

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2:03to fight for what better could be, to secure our future together. We are Marines. We were made for this. Today on The Grave Talks, haunted in America continuing our conversation with author Leslie Ruhl. Then Leslie has written paranormal suspense and true crime books. And Leslie, I have a question for you. What do you find more terrifying, paranormal or true crime? True crime, no question. I'm not afraid it goes, but I am afraid of human beings who kill people. Well, you wrote a book called A Tangled Web and that's about a really horrific crime out of Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha, Nebraska. And when you research that, and because you've researched both paranormal and true crime, I would imagine when you realize how dark and twisted people's minds can be,

3:09maybe ghost and paranormal stories seem kind of pleasant compared to that. Oh, yes. Writing to crime is depressing. When I write the ghost books, it's uplifting because I'm seeing proof that life goes on after a body style. Now your mother was Anne Ruhl, who wrote a lot of books. That was what she did was true crime. By writing the Tangled Web, was that kind of a brought on by your mother and her influence in your life that gave you that interest in your own true crime book? Well, I helped my mom quite a bit over the years. I assisted her at trials. And with her last book, she was very sick. So I wrote a portion of it and I realized that it came naturally to me. By assisting your mom, like you would go to trials with her and take photos for her books, started shooting killers when I was 17. Isn't that crazy?

4:09When you think back on it now, there's nothing more blood chilling. Then having a killer glare and grilly at you. And that happened to me a few times as I was in their faces taking their pictures. They didn't always like it. Sometimes they liked it. There was a killer by the name of David Brown in my mom's book, if you really love me. And this was in California. He had tricked his 14 year old daughter into killing his wife. He told her, if you don't kill Linda, she's going to kill me. And he convinced Cinnamon his daughter to shoot her stepmother and she did. And it took years before Cinnamon told authorities about what had really happened. She'd been sitting in prison, forgotten by David Brown and his new wife,

5:12who was his dad wife's little sister. Cinnamon was, she was victimized. David Brown wasn't a very physically attractive man, but for some reason women fell under his spell. He was short and squat and kind of a scarred face look like acne scars. And when I was in the courtroom and I ate my camera at him during the break, he whipped out his calm, fixed his hair, and turned around and stare right at me so I could get a picture of him. That's almost as creepy as someone scowling at you and angry that you're taking. I'm sure. You know what I mean? Yeah, one of the scary ones was Randy Roth. And my mom called him a modern day blue beard. He was in her book, A Rose for Her Grave, that was just aired as a lifetime movie the other night.

6:15Randy was coming down the hallway outside of the courtroom. He had a cop on each side. He was handcuffed. I was standing at the end of the hall with my zoom lens clicking away. I took 16 photos of him as he moved toward me. At one point, it looked like he was right next to me and he was glaring. He was pissed off. And so I jumped back and I blurred the last photo. Did I read correctly that your mother actually knew Ted Bundy? Oh yes. This is a really unbelievable story. And my mom always said it would not have worked in fiction. In the 1970s, my mom was supporting the family by writing articles for detective magazines. True stories. She wrote two or three a week. My dad was dying of cancer, so it was up for her, up to my mom, to take care of the family.

7:17And I have no idea how she found the time to volunteer. But suicide hotline had just opened in Seattle. And some friends of hers had started it. And it was called the crisis clinic. And they needed volunteers to answer the phone. My mom volunteer, she went through the training program. The crisis clinic was in this old Victorian house upon Capitol Hill. And teams worked in pairs back then in the 1970s. They didn't have caller ID. If somebody called and they said that they had overdosed and they wanted to die, they usually wouldn't give their address. So it would be up to the people who answered the phone to try to get to them. And so one team member would talk to the potential suicide victim on the phone while signaling the other to alert the police who would start a trace on the call.

8:19That could take an hour. My mom's partner was a young man. She thought very highly of. She'd come home just raving about her friend, and oh, he was too skinny. She'd make him sandwiches. She'd bring him to the crisis clinic because she worried he wasn't getting enough to eat. He was 15, 20 years younger than she was. He wasn't interested in him romantically. But he reminded her of her younger brother. Her brother had committed suicide. And that was the reason that my mom volunteered at the crisis clinic. She hadn't been able to save her brother. She tried to talk him out of his depression and she couldn't. This was in the 1950s before they had the medications they have today. So she had always had tremendous guilt about that. So that's, I guess where she got the energy to go in two nights a week and work sometimes two or three in the morning answering phone saving lives. My mom and Ted Bundy worked together.

9:21It was, I believe, it was about a year, two nights a week. And during the times when the phone would not ring, they would talk. And he would tell her all about his life. His disappointment was his girlfriend who rejected him. And she learned a lot about him. And she thought he was a really wonderful young man. She thought he was very sensitive on the phones. So her stint at the crisis clinic eventually ended. She didn't keep a close touch with Ted, but she took him to a crisis clinic reunion party at some point. And she went back to working on her writing. And then in the mid 1970s, this was about a year to after my mom and Ted worked together. These girls started disappearing around Seattle. My sister was friends with one of them. They were mostly girls who were very studious, who wouldn't go out at night by themselves.

10:23They weren't the types to take chances. But suddenly these girls, and I was 16 at the time, 15, 16, 17, when all this was happening, these girls were disappearing. And it was all over Washington area. Most of them had long hair parted in the middle. And there seemed to be a tight. My mom, of course, was writing the detective articles. And she had become close friends with a number of homicide detectives at the Seattle Police Department. At one time, my mom had been a Seattle cop, but she had to give up her job because she's legally blind without her glasses. And that was the most crushing thing in her life was to lose her job as a police woman. As a dream job before she had kids. My mom was good friends with a number of homicide detectives. And she was invited to a meeting where detectives with some of these different jurisdictions were getting together to discuss the girls who were vanishing.

11:28The leading theory among detectives was that a cult was sacrificing maidens. So my mom, she'd never published a book. Other than then she wrote the text for a pictorial on Seattle. My mom decided to write a book proposal about these girls that were disappearing. She found an agent, the agent submitted it. The perspective was that there was a cult behind this. But no one knew, of course, for sure. So my mom's proposal was just a chapter or so on an outline of what she planned to do. And so she got a contract on that proposal. But this stipulation was, we're not going to publish the book unless the case is solved. Well, wouldn't you know it? It turns out that her good friend Ted Bundy was the killer. Now there's a lot of stuff I left out. There's people who have to read the book.

12:28But one point, my mom became suspicious of him and turned his name in. That was a really, really bizarre coincidence. So that book, the title, Strange of Assigned Me. When my mom got the book done, she turned it in. And you know what the editor said? I have no idea. He said, no one's heard of Ted Bundy. I don't know if this was worth publishing. She was absolutely crushed. But he saw it through and they published the book. And I think it's probably one of the top three best selling true crime books of all time. I would think so. It's been over 40 years has continuously been in print. At the time that the book was published, my mom had done some writing for Cosmopolitan magazine. And so she asked the editor, she knew, would you review the book in the magazine? And they said, no, by the time the article comes out, your book will be out of print.

13:29Because it takes six months when you write an article for a magazine before it shows up. So the editor basically was saying to her, your book's going to be out of print in the six months. And again, she was absolutely crushed. It really hurt her feelings. But she had the last laugh. So over 40 years later, the book is still doing well. I actually wrote an afterward for the new edition of Strange of Assigned Me that was published in May of 2022. So there are a whole bunch of different editions out. I added about 10 pages with some things that have happened since then. Now, even though my mom got the story of her life that she'd always dreamed of getting, it was very painful. Had to have been. Her innocence. She thought she could spot evil. She thought she would know a criminal when she saw one. But we can, nobody can. And also, it was a friend that she thought highly of.

14:32And she was crushing to learn about the horrific things he did. And it would be so difficult for her because here she's in on the beginning with these detectives thinking it's a cult. She's writing this book. And she finds out it's someone she knows. It's unbelievable. It just would not, if you did that as fiction, it wouldn't work. I really think the interesting book slash would be turned into a movie would be from her perspective. Well, they did. Barbara Hershey played my mom. I think it was about 20 years ago when that first aired. I think it was, it might have been the A&E network. I watched it the one time. But it was amusing to me because my mom had four kids. But they eliminated, the screenwriters eliminated all the siblings, but me. Oh. And nobody else existed. No. This is the way it always is when they make movies from books. They create composite characters.

15:32If there's too many, they get rid of them. They make up the dialogue. The character was nothing like me. And to this day, I have people emailing me saying, did Ted Bundy really give you a ride? Because there's a scene in the movie where that happens. But that didn't happen in real life. I didn't meet him, though. Oh. That's good. See, this kind of story gives me as many goosebumps as a paranormal story. Worst on goosebumps. Yeah. This is how evil people are. No, I do think, in paranormal, spirit-wise, ghost-wise, I think there are some definite evil spirits because people like Ted Bundy die. And I think when that does happen, some, that's where you can get some really evil, nasty spirits. When you research a paranormal book, is the technique rather similar to than when you research true crime? Well, not really. True crime is much harder because you have to be so accurate with this one-long story.

16:34With the ghost stories, there's a whole bunch of short stories in my book. There's little bite-sized stories. Few of them are longer than 10 pages. But with a tangled web, it was a very complex story. I had to purchase the trial transcripts. And this case was so confusing. It was 2,300 pages of transcripts. I had to read through twice before I got a grasp on what had happened because it was a bizarre case. It was a love triangle murder out of Omaha. The victim was a wonderful woman, a carry-farver. And she unfortunately started dating a guy that another woman was obsessed with. She ended up a victim. Because of it, the killer tried to make it appear that carry was still alive. The killer sat over 20,000 emails and texts in the name of carry over the next four years.

17:36She pretended to be a stalker. She made it look like carry had become a stalker. And carry was a very nice person. She was a dedicated mother. She was close to her own mother, a very responsible worker, a good friend to all. So this fraud perpetuated by the killer was way off the mark. A carry's family knew that she wasn't a stalker. They knew something terrible had happened, but they couldn't get police to listen to them. Luckily, great detectives came on the scene, and they solved the case. It was a detect of Ryan Avis, detective James Doty. And with the help of special deputy Anthony Cava, they untangled the web that the killer had created. There was a lot of digital forensics involved. Because the killer did use social media to stalk.

18:40She signed up for all kinds of dating sites with all kinds of fake personalities. She sent texts from a number of different phones to a number of different people. She stalked a number of people in Dave Krupa's life. Dave Krupa was the guy in the middle that both of these women were dating. Really, literally, a tangled web. It was a tangled, literally what it is. Now, your most recent book was Haunted in America. And if you've missed part one of our conversation, we really go in deep and talk about several stories. It's compilation. You've written four other paranormal books, and you've gone back in and done some additional research and some of those original stories and added some new ones. And I want you to share one more paranormal story with us today, the Haunted Amusement Park. When I looked for a good ghost story, I tried to find something unique.

19:41So I was especially fascinated with the haunting of the Parker Carousel that for years was at the Jensen Beach Mall near Portland, Oregon. And I included that in my book Go Some Menus. I talked to two different people who witnessed the same thing on the Carousel. One of them was a grown woman, and she remembered seeing this when she was a child. And the other was a man about 20 years older than she was, who his name was Mike Ball, and he would take his daughters to the Carousel. And in Mike's case, they were waiting in line, and he saw these two. What do you thought were variety kids, weird costumes that clothing was actually realized later from the 1920s, but he thought maybe they were foreign because the kid, the little boy wore a little flat hat and the suspenders and the girl had a long dress. And he couldn't understand why the ride operator

20:46was not keeping the kids in order. They were running all over, and they were climbing into the center of the Carousel was a big open area where the engine was. And he thought that does not look safe. But the ride operator just seemed to ignore them, and he didn't think that much about it until years went by. And he decided to put up a website about one of his favorite hobbies, which was the paranormal. And he got an email from a woman named Sarah, who said, can you tell me if anything ever happened on the Carousel? Well, when she was a little girl, whenever she rode the Carousel, if she was on an inside horse, and if the door to the engine was open, and the big cylinder in the center, she would see two small children, a little girl and a little boy wearing the same clothing that Mike had described, and they would stare up at her

21:47solemn faces. And she'd get a horrible feeling. And she had the sense they wanted her to join them. Her mother would never believe her. So years go by. She grows up, has a little boy of her own, who is just turning free. And she takes him for a ride on the Carousel. And afterward, he looked very troubled. And he said, mom, there's kids down there. And she realized that he had seen what she saw. She asked him how many. And he said two. And she said two boys. And he said, no, a girl and a boy. He said, they got her and they can't leave. And he was really, really troubled by this. So first time around when that story appeared in Ghost Among Us in 2004, I was not able to find an accident on the Carousel. Possibly I found something that connects to it.

22:48Now, with this new book, I searched newspaper archives online, spent a couple of weeks on it, was actually shocked by how many accidents there have been on Carousels. Back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, before safety was a priority, there were a lot of deaths. A lot of very gruesome deaths. There was one case of an employee was doing some work on the engine, not at this Carousel, but a different one. And he was working on it while the ride was operating. And he got pulled into the machinery and died. But no one realized it until it started turning very sluggishly. And the operator went to look and saw the guy caught in there. That wasn't probably a wise way to do it. I'm sure that they changed the rules after that and made sure that people turned off the ride before they worked on the engine. A lot of accidents involving kids. I didn't find anything specific to that Carousel,

23:50but I did find that Charles Wallace Parker, who was known as the King of the Carnival, and he manufactured Ferris Wells and shooting boosts and merry-go-rounds. And for all over the world, they were shipped overseas and they were all over America. He had a factory in Kansas. And when a machine broke down, rather than just throw away the expensive parts, sometimes he would reuse them. He would recycle the materials. I discovered that there was a terrible accident in Indiana where a merry-go-round started turning so quickly that it became dangerous and it shirked circuited. And the operator was on with the kids and he couldn't get it to stop. So in order to rescue the children, he plucked them off the horses and threw them. And in the end, the horses just went spinning off. They just flew off. And some of the newspapers reported deaths

24:52because it was in the same area where Charles Wallace Parker had so many of his machines. I think there's a strong possibility that recycled parts from that machine may have ended up on the Parker carousel. If so, that would explain the ghosts. And you want me to add something to that that I think's interesting? Sure, because you said it was manufactured in Kansas. I live in Wichita, Kansas. I know. I have an amusement ride manufacturing place in my town. I'll bet that came from here because how many amusement ride manufacturers are there in Kansas? There's this one. And I love the approach of taking a ghost story, something that has passed down a lot of times from generation to generation or it's passed down from, through employees or people who have been in the hotel and you hear these stories. I think it's interesting to take the approach to research it. Yeah, dig and dig and dig until you find something

25:54that matches what's happening. Well, the book came out last fall, haunted in America and check that out. It reads like a book of short stories, which is really what it is. And I love reading stories like that because you read one and then you go, okay, one more before I get back. Okay, one more. And it's all nonfiction. I quote people who actually have seen the apparitions. I have absolutely loved getting a chance to talk with you. And I really appreciate your time, Leslie. This has been so insightful. Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you. And this wraps up our conversation with author Leslie Rool. If you missed part one of our conversation, please check that out. And if you'd like access to all of our episodes, including the archive and advanced episodes, everything commercial free, you can become a Gravekeeper. You can sign up on Apple Podcast, write for three days free. You can go to patreon.com slash the Grave Talks and get everything they're free. For all of us at the Grave Talks, I'm Carol Hughes and thank you so much for listening.

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