Ep.74: Reddit Rabbit Holes

A ribbon-like object drifts across the sky on video, a lake photo hints at Champy, and a family recounts keys jumping bowls, footsteps pounding at 3 a.m., and three earth-shaking knocks. We pull these stories from Reddit and bring them into the light—slowly, carefully, and without sensationalism—so we can ask better questions and spot real patterns. If you’ve ever felt the tug-of-war between skepticism and wonder, this one will feel like home.

We start with the strange sky clip and talk through what cameras do to distance, wind, and motion. Is it a kite with a tail, a drone artifact, or something closer to the “atmospheric beast” accounts? From there we revisit modern misidentification with Starlink, where even seasoned observers get fooled by those sparkling chains. The goal isn’t to embarrass anyone. It’s to show how context, compression, and expectation sculpt “unknowns” from ordinary elements.

Then we step into haunted territory. A listener watches The Exorcist as a power strip “jumps” on the floor—timing that unnerves even when logic offers options like cable tension or electrical noise. Another tale takes us to Lake Champlain and the legend of Champy, where folklore meets photographic ambiguity. Next comes a vivid rental-house haunting: vanishing and reappearing keys, thunderous footsteps at 3 a.m., and a terrifying door slam. We weigh sleep states and building sounds, but the repetition keeps the case sticky. We visit a 1700s manor with motion alarms tripping near a root cellar—later linked to Underground Railroad history by a Quaker meeting house—where environment, memory, and meaning overlap.

We also examine Bigfoot tracks and a rock allegedly thrown at night, checking stride length, toe definition, and substrate. Rock throwing appears in both Sasquatch lore and poltergeist accounts, a reminder that categories blur at the edges. The centerpiece is a multi-witness family story: a “bloody man” on the stairs later matched to a deceased relative, a grandmother’s voice calling from beside the bed, and a subsequent family who saw a man in mirrors until the mirrors were removed. Independent observers, recurring motifs, and place-bound phenomena make this one of those cases that lingers.

Have you had an encounter with the paranormal? Have you seen Bigfoot!? Call our Hotline 

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Transcript

Opening And Reddit Game Plan

SPEAKER_03 0:00

What's going on, guys, and welcome back to another episode of Exploring the Unknown. I feel like that's robotic anymore, to be honest with you. We can switch it off. I just want to be excited. I want to let everybody know that I'm excited. My name is Dustin.

SPEAKER_00 0:18

I'm Luke.

SPEAKER_03 0:20

And welcome back to another episode. Today, Luke and I are going to be diving into some Reddit rabbit holes, some stories and encounters that we found on Reddit. So who wants to go first? I think you should go first. I'm excited to see what you what you found. Because you're you're excited, so now I'm excited.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Okay, I'm gonna have to share the screen. I'll share the screen because mine's uh this is a video. Oh this one is a video. Oh, I didn't find no videos.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

Now I feel some type of way.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Go ahead. Okay. Look at this thing. This was recording. I forget where it's at. See if I can make that bigger. Here we go. Does that help any?

SPEAKER_03 1:17

Kinda. Play it again from the beginning. That is strange. What are they saying in the video? Are they saying anything? They're not saying anything. No. The way that it moves, it almost looked like it could be like some sort of kite or with a really long ribbon tail or something, maybe. I don't know. What is what did the thing say? What do you think it is?

Strange Sky Video Breakdown

SPEAKER_00 1:52

It says it just says look what we see. It doesn't really it says what am I looking at. It doesn't really say what am I looking at. Yeah. That is weird. I found it interesting. Well, I'm not on the screens anymore. I noticed. There we go. There we go. The first thing that came to my mind was like atmospheric beast.

SPEAKER_03 2:18

Yeah, I I definitely can see that. That's what my that's what I thought at first too, because I've definitely seen things in videos that look similar to that. That one's hard to say. It is strange.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

The way it moves, it like kind of like flows, like a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 2:40

Yeah. Yeah. You know what it reminds me of? Like, what's the weirdest thing that you've seen in the sky?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

I haven't seen that many weird things in the sky. No?

Personal Sky Sightings And Starlink

SPEAKER_03 2:58

Give me give me one second. So you've not you don't think that you've really seen anything that weird in the sky? Nothing like that, no. Uh uh. What's the weird the weirdest thing I seen in the sky before I really even knew about it was the the Starlink satellites. When I seen that, I really thought that it was it was gonna be like alien evasion or something. But yeah, that's wild. Put down in the comments, guys. What do you what do you think that that is if you guys are watching this on YouTube? Yeah, what's the weirdest thing that you've seen in the sky? So what do you have? What do you think? Okay, give me a second. I gotta I gotta pull it up here. So I got oh, I got like four stories. So I didn't find any videos or pictures or anything like that, but I do have a few stories. This first one's kind of short. I I don't know how much I believe it. I can't remember if it was from my post because I put a post on Reddit. I put a post on Reddit, ask Reddit, and I said, What is your true paranormal story story? And I had people respond, and this was one of the things, and I think that I've heard other people talk about having experiences with or like after watching that exorcist movie. Do you remember the exorcist, like the original Exorcist movie? Yes, I do. So have you ever heard anybody having experiences after watching the movie?

SPEAKER_00 4:43

Yes, but I'm not sure how much I really feel about it. I think it might be like psychological.

SPEAKER_03 4:50

I think so too. I think you know, we kind of scare ourselves into believing these things are happening while we're, you know, because we're watching a scary movie. But I've I've definitely heard there'd be times where weird things happen while like the Passion of the Christ. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of weird things that happened while they were filming the movie. So with this one, this person said that they were watching The Exorcist when something completely unexplainable happened. Uh, it was the scene where Reagan is under or undergoing those intense medical exams in the hospital. Everything was quiet, and then out of nowhere, the power strip on the floor started jumping around for two or three seconds. There was no visible reason for it, no one touched it, no vibrations, no pets, nothing that could have moved, caused it to move. We stopped the movie immediately. I still got goosebumps thinking about it. Weird things happening during these movies, I think, are caused by us believing that they're happening. Why do you think what what would you think the reason for a power cord to be jumping around like that would be?

SPEAKER_00 6:02

I don't see any logical reason for it to be jumping around, but not like I've never seen one be jumping around. So I mean it's interesting that he's having that experience and that during the movie, but I don't see any logical reason for that to be happening. So I mean it could be something paranormal, and to be jumping around looks different, but if it's like start sparking or smoking and some other weird stuff like that, that could be easily like explained.

SPEAKER_03 6:35

Yeah, I think hold on a second, I'm getting a ton of notifications from the security camera, and it doesn't need to be happening because there's somebody in the living room, it's like, hey, somebody's been spotted, hey, somebody's been spotted. It's like, okay, I'm glad you're doing your job, but can we stop for a minute? Because it's like every two seconds. All right. My phone was going nuts. Whenever I think about it jumping around, I think about like when electrical wires go down, how they'll kind of flail a bit. Wonder if it was like something like that.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Like it had more power.

Paranormal Movie Anecdotes

SPEAKER_03 7:20

Yeah, something like that. Something like that. But that one was a short one, just a little, just a little bit of of an experience. I thought was kind of weird. I've heard other people talk about experiencing weird things while watching scary movies. But do you want to do your next one? I think you're muted.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Yeah, that's exit my other thing out so we can check it. So this is my next someone took a picture of something, and this is what they seen. So I found this one interesting because we talked about these once before. Can you see that?

SPEAKER_03 8:22

I can. Click the click the sign in box, click the X on that so it kind of drops out of there. What is it? It looks like a turtle.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

This was captured at Lake Chapman. This was came at a lake. I'm not sure. Um, let me get out. This was taking eight twenty eighteen, roughly twenty nineteen. Which the thing is they don't have sea titles in lakes. So no, what are they saying it is?

SPEAKER_03 9:27

They didn't say it's anything. They didn't say it's just some weird thing that somebody got a picture of.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

Yeah, they didn't say what it is. They just say it was capture in 2018, 2019 at the chat. Okay. Uh here right here. It looks like a turtle. Could there be a I mean it could possibly be?

SPEAKER_02 9:54

Wait, no, that's like you have you ever I'm pretty sure this is what it is, but have you ever heard of Champy?

SPEAKER_00 10:01

No.

SPEAKER_03 10:03

I'm pretty sure that it's like Ray's Towns Ray.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Then that would be very interesting.

SPEAKER_03 10:14

American folklore champ or champy is the name of a lake monster said to live in Lake Chaplin. Yeah, so I didn't even know that. No, I didn't know that. I I I forgot it. I remember we were talking, we did that episode on the serpents, you know, or there are there monsters in our lakes, and Lake Chaplin was not one of the ones that we covered.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Well, there we go. Now we're covering it now.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

There we go.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

So that means there's I found that really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

Yeah, heck yeah. That's a good find. I like that one. Did you have any more on that one, or do you want me to go to my next one?

SPEAKER_00 11:04

You can go to your next one.

Lake Monster Photo And Champy

SPEAKER_03 11:06

Okay, so this one this one is a little bit longer, but it's interesting. So it's called This is the Haunted Rental and the Stomping at 3 a.m. So this was this was this wasn't somebody that are you know what no? I think they did. This was another comment on my post, but they said it all started in 2003 when my dad found what seemed like an unbelievable deal: a small two-bedroom, one-bath house house with a detached garage. Rent was only about$300 a month, which was insanely cheap even for that time. That's wild. You're not gonna find that anywhere. The landlord gave the standard disclosure, someone had passed away there within the last five years. My dad shrugged it off and signed the lease. For the very first week, strange things started happening. We'd hear noises all over the house, drawers opening and closing, doors creaking on their own, and even the bathroom faucet turning on and off. It was like someone else was living there with us. The front door had a weird setup too, a keep hole on both sides, meaning if the house was locked, you couldn't get out without the keys. That's weird. About a week after we moved in, we lost them. Boxes were still everywhere, and my dad, already stressed, started tearing through the place, yelling and accusing me of misplacing them. Then, in the middle of his rant, we heard the keys drop into the living room floor right in front of the couch. They just appeared out of nowhere. My dad froze, picked them up, muttered something under his breath, and then left for work. After that, the keys became a constant theme. Every night, my dad would put them in a glass bowl on top of our old tube TV, and every morning they'd be somewhere else. We once found them shoved into the handle hole of a sealed moving box full of pots and pans. No idea how they got in there. At first, it was just weird. Then things got darker. Most nights around 2 or 3 a.m. we'd hear heavy footsteps pacing up and down the hallway outside our bedrooms. It was so loud that it shook the floor. It was about eight years or I was about eight years old at the time, and one night I snapped, I yelled, stop stomping around, I need some sleep. There was silence for about 15 seconds. Then something came running full speed down the hallway and slammed into my door. Three violent, thunderous knocks in a row. My dad came running out, half asleep, asking if I was okay. I tried to answer, but my whole body was trembling. I felt sick and dizzy. I could barely walk. I ran to the bathroom, but I didn't make it in time. I'm gonna skip that part because it gets kind of gross. I was sobbing, shaking, and completely humiliated. He told me, if you ever get scared again, just come sleep in my room. Nothing can hurt you when I'm around. A week later, his girlfriend, who had been staying over more often, got dragged out of her bed by her ankle. She said she woke up as she was being pulled onto the floor and screamed, Whatever it was, let go. And she ran to turn on the lights. After that, my dad sent me to stay with my aunt while he finished packing up the house. He stayed behind alone for a few months. When his friends came to help him move, they all said the same thing. They saw a small white dog through the house. We never owned a dog. Even now, I still wonder if the people living there today experienced the same things we did, or if whatever was there finally stopped.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

That is wild. That's one of my biggest fears is getting jogged off the bat. Same.

SPEAKER_03 14:59

Same. Oh man. You want to live in that house?

SPEAKER_00 15:06

No, I'm good. I can deal with it, like the movie keys and stuff like that. But like shit, gotta stop when I'm trying to sleep. Like that's where the limit is.

SPEAKER_03 15:23

I I would have left right then and there. I wouldn't have I wouldn't have stayed. I wouldn't have gone to dad's room. I'd have went I would have went and slept in the car or something in the in the front yard by the road. I'm not sleeping in there. See, that's my fear. That's that's the not only okay. So I have the fear of getting drugged out of bed, but I also have this fear of things that I cannot see. If I can't see it, there's a problem.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Yeah. See, that was a big well, that was my biggest fear is when we bought this house. It's like, well, shit starts happening. Like if it's haunting as fuck. There's nothing we can do.

SPEAKER_03 16:11

Okay, buddy. I love you. And there was a part, there was a small part of me that was like, man, I hope his new house is haunted. Is that terrible? I'm sorry.

Haunted Rental And 3 A.M. Stomping

SPEAKER_00 16:23

No, I I can deal with like there were stuff, like things moving, like footsteps or like stuff like that. And speaking of paranormal situations, we were laying in bed this morning after Chelsea got the call about her grandma. Hang on. She's laying there. And I'm laying there. And she's like, You're scratching my back. Thanks for scratching my back or something like that. And I was like, I have a scratch to that. Okay, yeah. Hang on. I was like, I'm gonna have a scratch to that. And she's like, oh. That's weird.

SPEAKER_03 17:12

That is weird.

SPEAKER_00 17:14

I'm amazed. Maybe as a grandma like coming back to say, hey, I'm okay, or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 17:20

It could have been, yeah. It could have been. I feel a presence at your at your house. I'm gonna be honest. No, it's not that bad. But there's two places that it it seems to enjoy, or at least kind of stay in, and that's upstairs and in your room and down in the basement. Yeah, I don't care in the basement very often. Well, if you ever want to go and talk to it, that's that's where it is.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

How does that mean? No, this is my final. I mean, I'm okay with that as long as it's not back. It's not that bad.

SPEAKER_03 18:07

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Your final thing.

SPEAKER_03 18:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

I'm not sure my screen. So this was taken by Hunter. These were taken by Hunter. So these footprints were found. Whoa. So there's a story with this one, too. There's a story with this one. Okay. So it says, my uncle just got back from Elk Hunting trip near Oregon. He says that one night he was heading back to camp in the dark when a 25-pound rock was throwing at him, almost hitting him in the head. The next morning he went back to the site where he found these tracks in the mud. He wanted to keep following them, but got a bad feeling, so went back instead. I got this story through my dad, who my uncle contacted once he got back from the trip. I have not talked about I have not talked to my uncle directly. However, my dad has pestering him, wondering if it was real or not. Knowing my uncle's staging as a hoax is not something he would do. When so they're saying his uncle wouldn't do this, which I this doesn't look like his footprints. And he says he has no reason to believe that he didn't hoax it. He is about 220 pounds. The guy is his uncle. And you can see his footprints in the mud, of course. I have my own suspicions, as I have not talked to my uncle directly. So these Bigfoot shots.

SPEAKER_02 20:23

Blow it up again? Those are kind of interesting. My only suspicion is look here.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Is like you can tell where his footprint is compared to that one. Okay, yeah. And but it looked it got one, two, three, four, five toes. Right.

SPEAKER_03 21:29

I'm like looking for inconsistencies and like my thing, it's hard. Well, not so much the toes, but the distance. The distance between each footstep doesn't seem like although if you're telling me that that foot that what you just showed me is the the human, the dude's footprint, then I guess that would be about right. Because didn't they say that there's their strides about five feet? Yeah. That's really interesting. You should reach out to them. You should reach out to them. Like I can't. We should reach out to them. You're just better, you're just better at doing it.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

You do you do it all the time. Go ahead. I sent you the link for that thing, so you have it. Well, I'll reach out to them.

Home Presences And Unseen Touch

SPEAKER_03 22:22

I'll reach out to them. That's cool, though. I would like we haven't done a whole lot of Bigfoot stuff in a long time as far as like episodes go. Maybe we should kind of circle back a little bit and kind of refresh. We might have to do that. Yeah. So I got two more. Okay. This one. This one, actually, you know what? I put all these together yesterday or last night. So I was looking at people's posts that like already posted, and then I was looking at people that submitted posts. I think these are all submitted posts. I don't think these are these are all people that commented on my thing. But this one says, after a few years ago, I house sat for a family that owned an old manor built in the mid-1700s. It was huge with several additions added over the centuries, and it had one of those deep root cellars far beneath the house, the kind used for storing food before refrigeration. Every time I walked past the door to that cellar, I felt uneasy. I wasn't, or it wasn't just nerves. It was this heavy, foreboding feeling like something wanted to be left alone down there. I never actually went inside. During my stay, the alarm system in that older section of the house, the part with the cellar, kept going off in the middle of the night. I'd get out of bed, enter the code, silence it, and then it would start again. It happened seven or eight times before morning. I figured it was just old wiring or a faulty motion sensor. When the family came back from vacation, I mentioned it to the father. He looked genuinely confused and said that that had never happened before. He added something that made the hair on the neck stand up. All the alarms in that section of the house were motion activated. Later, I learned more about the history of the area. The manor was located near a Quaker meeting house, and that religion that region was heavily involved in the Underground Railroad. Families in the name in that neighborhood had used their roots cellars to hide people escaping slavery. My own family is ancestrally Quaker.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

Interesting. I wonder if it was like a relative or something, like an ancestor. Maybe of his extensive Quaker. That would be interesting.

SPEAKER_03 25:05

I was thinking like maybe map rats or something.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

Yeah, that too. I was getting more on a paranormal aspect first.

SPEAKER_03 25:17

Yeah. Yeah. I I jumped straight to what it logically was.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

Yeah, but uh like you said logic, you asked.

SPEAKER_03 25:28

Oh, dude, I'm not gonna lie, that thumbs up scared me. Oh, you didn't see it? I went like this. I didn't I didn't see how it popped up air.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

Oh, yeah, see it.

Bigfoot Tracks And Rock Throw

SPEAKER_03 25:43

I scratched my nose. I wasn't giving a thumbs up. It popped up, and I seen it, and I thought it was something in the background. I was like, all right. It's not working for you. Nope. Oh, well, anyways. This last one I got is probably the best one of all of them, to be honest with you. This is a really interesting story, and here it is. It started when I was five or six, around 1988 or 1989. I used to see what I called the bloody man walking up and down the stairs in my grandfather's house. I never saw his face. Oh, I never saw his face face either because it I didn't look at it or because he didn't have one. But I remember his hospital gown, the bloody bandage around his head, and that strange sinking feeling that something about it wasn't right. I wasn't scared though. Maybe I was too young to understand fear, or maybe something about him made me feel like I wasn't supposed to be afraid. Years later, I learned who he was. He was my uncle. Back in 1982, he'd been beaten in the head with a baseball bat. He came home afterward, he went to bed and never woke up. His brain swelled during the night, and he died a few days later in the hospital. I wasn't Well, that doesn't make any sense. Oh no, it does make sense. Maybe he was like in a coma. I wasn't even born yet. I came along in December of 1983. I saw the bloody man somewhere between 15 and 13 times before my mom and I moved out. Years later, around age twelve or thirteen, we moved back into that same house. I never saw him again, but the house wasn't quiet. One afternoon I was showing my little sister how to play Sonic the Hedgehog. As I was explaining it, a woman's voice said my sister's name, clear as day. My sister jumped up, thinking it was our mom calling, but I froze. It wasn't our mom's voice. It was our grandmother's, who had been dead for ten years. Even worse, the voice hadn't come from downstairs, it came from right beside the bed. When we told our mom, she said she'd been washing dishes and hadn't called us. My sister looked shaken and said she didn't like the bloody man on the stairs. That stopped me cold. She was five, the same age I'd been when I used to see him. We compared notes and it was clear that clear she had been seen the exact same thing, even though I never told her about it. After that, things got louder. Every time I had friends sleep over, my bedroom door would start shaking violently, followed by clawing sounds down the wood. We'd open it mid-shake, no one there. It happened so often we got used to huddling in the corner waiting for it to stop. Between me, my sister, and three friends that made five witnesses. When my mom finally sold the house, she said she just wanted to move on from the bad memories. Then she admitted something that still gives me chills. My grandfather, who'd been in a wheelchair by then, had started saying, Your brother's still here every night, up and down those damn stairs, up and down, up and down. He was talking about his son, the bloody man. Years later, after we moved away, the man who brought the house who bought the house ran into my living uncle at a gym. He told him what that he told him what the hell is in that house. Me, my wife, and my kids keep seeing someone walking around. When I later met that family's youngest son, he told me they'd see a man behind them in mirrors throughout the house. Once they removed the mirrors, it stopped. That's three people in my family, three of my friends, and four people from another family all seeing the same thing. To this day, I'd give anything to understand what really happened in that house. That's wow.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

I'd be terrified if I figured out the party back.

SPEAKER_03 30:01

See, that's remember when we were talking to Amy and we had asked her, I think we asked her like what she sees. One of my fears is like if if I start tapping into that stuff or being more tuned with it or whatever, I don't want to see how the like don't show me how you died. Don't show me like what you looked like when you died, because I couldn't handle it. No freaking way. But that's all the ones that I was.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

We sure do jump to that. We sure jump to that guy. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 30:49

Sorry. I had to take a drink. That was a long one to read. I was gonna say, if you're on Spotify and you missed it, I just I poured half of it down my face the first time I brought it to my mouth. Yep. But if you guys have a story, you know, if you're listening to this, you have a story, an encounter, a cryptid that you've seen, you want to come on the show or tell us your story, reach out to us at exploring the unknown pod at outlook.com. Or you can call our hotline, which is 412. Oh crap. It's 412 something. Give me a minute. Something for fast. Nobody nobody's called it yet, so like I don't think about it. I don't know. I need to remember it. I need to try to remember it. Jeez a whiz. It's 412-533-3483. I'm gonna create some kind of jingle that way I can remember. Like, never mind. Take it away, Luke.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Thank you guys for listening to another episode. This episode was fun digging into the crazy stuff they have on there. You have a lot of good stories. Thank you. I think it's time to spin the wheel.

Manor Cellar Alarms And History

SPEAKER_03 32:25

It is time to spin the wheel. And you know, if you're listening from Reddit and that was your story, thank you for submitting your story. We like whenever we hear from you know our viewers and kind of bring something new to the to the table. We got a problem. We got a problem. I did, so there's there's nothing on it. There's nothing on the wheel. What are we gonna do, Luke? What's next episode?

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Next thing so I went to Moundsville yesterday, XD Penitentiaries, and okay. Jails.

SPEAKER_03 33:12

Okay, that's good. We'll do that until next time, everybody. Keep exploring the unknown. See you guys.