The Tallman Bunk Beds: The Ordinary Object Linked to a Terrifying Haunting — Ep. 34

In the late 1980s, a family in Wisconsin brought home a simple set of bunk beds for their children. Nothing about them seemed unusual. There was no known history tied to them, no warning signs, and no reason to think they would change anything at all.

But soon after the beds were assembled, the house began to feel different.

Footsteps were heard moving through empty rooms. Objects shifted on their own. The children reported seeing a figure standing in their bedroom. A babysitter experienced something so unsettling that she refused to return. And eventually, the father came face-to-face with something in the hallway that convinced the family to leave their home in the middle of the night and never come back.

In this episode, Robert Barber tells the story of the Tallman Bunk Beds, a case later featured on Unsolved Mysteries, exactly as it has been passed down over the years. Once the story is complete, the episode steps back to examine what can be verified, what remains unconfirmed, and why this case continues to resist a single explanation.

Was this a genuine haunting, a buildup of fear, or something in between?

Chapters

• 0:01 A Babysitter’s Quiet Turns Cold
• 2:01 The Tallman Bunk Beds Arrive
• 3:00 Strange Sounds And Cold Rooms
• 5:10 Fear Spreads Beyond The Bedroom
• 6:48 The Babysitter’s Door Slam
• 8:05 Red Eyes In The Hallway
• 9:25 Flight, Rumors, And A Blessing
• 10:38 What We Can Confirm
• 12:02 Theories, Uncertainty, And Why It Lingers
• 17:46 Closing Notes And Listener Requests

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

What would you do if you were babysitting and the house suddenly didn't feel empty anymore? It's late. The kids are asleep upstairs, and you're downstairs in the living room with the lights turned down and the TV playing quietly. Nothing about the night feels unusual. You're just waiting for the parents to come home. Then you hear footsteps coming from the floor above you. They're slow enough to notice and heavy enough to make you stop what you're doing. You assume one of the kids got out of bed, so you call out to them. No one answers. You head upstairs to check. The hallway feels quiet in a way that makes you hesitate. You take a few steps towards the bedroom, and before you can reach the door, it slams shut right in front of you. The sound echoes down the hallway. The kids are still asleep. No one else is in the house. And nothing explains why that door just closed on its own. That's when you realize you're not alone in that house. In the late 1980s, a family in Wisconsin bought a wooden bunk bed for their kids. It was ordinary, in exactly the kind of furniture thousands of families brought home every year. They set it up in the kids' room and didn't think twice about it. Not long after, the atmosphere inside their house began to change. At first it was subtle, easy to ignore, and easy to explain away, but it didn't stop. And over time, the family became convinced that everything that followed began the moment those bunk beds entered their home. Hey, it's Robert. Before we get started, this is one of our mini episodes. These are the shorter, more laid-back episodes where I talk through something strange or interesting without all the extra production and cinematic buildup that the full episodes get. Today's story comes from Wisconsin, and it centers on an ordinary set of bunk beds and a series of events that eventually drove a family out of their home. This is the story of the Tallman bunk beds. When the Tallman family brought the bunk beds home, nothing seemed off. The kids liked them. The room looked fine, and the house felt normal. A few days later, that started to change. One night while the family was eating dinner, a small radio in the kids' room suddenly turned on at full volume. It didn't fade in, it clicked on hard and blasted static through the house. They shut it off. It turned itself back on. They unplugged it, and it still came on. Sometimes it switched stations on its own, jumping from static to voices and back again, as if someone were standing there playing with the dial. Not long after that, the kids began talking about someone they were seeing in their room. They described a woman with long hair who stood near the doorway or the closet and never said anything. The parents assumed it was imagination, bad dreams, or stories feeding into each other. Then one of the kids said they woke up in the middle of the night and saw a figure standing near the ladder of the bunk bed, staring at them with glowing red eyes. After that night, the room stayed cold for hours at a time, even when the rest of the house felt warm. The activity didn't stay in the bedroom. Objects began moving throughout the house. A chair slid across the kitchen floor when no one was in the room. Toys rolled out of corners as if someone had pushed them. Cold spots appeared without warning. You could walk out of a warm room and suddenly feel freezing air wrap around your legs, even though nothing else in the house had changed. One afternoon, a wooden cross hanging on the wall fell and shattered on the floor. No one was near it. Nothing had brushed the wall. The mother later said it felt like the house itself had turned against them. Even the father, who tried to stay rational, began noticing movement he couldn't explain. He would catch something out of the corner of his eye near doorways, like something stepping back just as he looked. Every time he checked, the room was empty. Before long, the family stopped turning the lights off at night. As the days passed, the activity didn't just continue. It settled into a pattern. Nights became the hardest. The kids started waking up crying and asking not to sleep in their room anymore. They said someone was standing near the bunk beds, watching them and waiting until the lights were off. Sometimes they said the room felt crowded even when no one else was there. The parents tried sleeping in the room with them, hoping it would help. It didn't. They heard footsteps moving back and forth across the floor late at night, slow enough to count, like someone pacing. When they went upstairs to check, everything was quiet. Doors were found open in the morning. Cabinets were left standing wide open too. Lights were on in rooms no one remembered entering. And the cold became constant. It wasn't limited to one spot anymore. It showed up in hallways, near doorways, and around the bunk beds themselves. You could feel it wrap around your legs or shoulders without warning, then disappear just as quickly. Everyone was exhausted. Sleep became shallow and restless. Every sound at night felt sharper, and every quiet moment felt heavy. Without realizing it, the family began changing how they lived inside their own home, staying together in the same rooms and avoiding parts of the house that felt wrong. That's when fear stopped being a reaction and started becoming routine. The turning point came when someone outside the family experienced it. A babysitter who knew the house well came over one evening. Late at night, she heard footsteps upstairs and assumed one of the kids had gotten out of bed. When she reached the top of the stairs, the hallway felt colder than the rest of the house. She walked towards the bedroom, and the door slammed shut in front of her with enough force to shake the frame. The kids never woke up. No one else was home. She refused to babysit for the family ever again. That was the first time the Talmans admitted to themselves that this wasn't stress or imagination. Someone else had experienced it too. In the days leading up to that night, the father had already started feeling like something in the house was focused on him. Lights flickered when he walked beneath them. Cold air seemed to follow him from room to room. Late at night, he heard movement start near the kid's bedroom and stop just outside his own door, as if someone were standing there. The night everything finally broke, he woke suddenly with the feeling that he was being watched. When he stepped into the hallway, he saw a tall figure at the far end. It didn't move right away. It stood there, hunched slightly forward, its head tilted towards him. The eyes were red. Believing it was an intruder, he rushed towards it. Before he could reach it, the figure vanished. The hallway didn't return to normal. The air pressed in on him. The lights flickered violently. The house felt like it was vibrating around him. Then a voice whispered his name from right beside him, close enough that he felt it. The wall shook, the floor vibrated. He ran back into the bedroom, woke his wife, grabbed the kids, and told them they were leaving immediately. They never slept in that house again. They didn't pack carefully. They grabbed clothes, shoes, and whatever they could reach without going upstairs more than necessary. No one wanted to be alone in any room, especially near the kids' bedroom. Before they left, the father went back inside to turn off the lights. As he walked through the living room, he heard movement upstairs again, slower this time, like someone deliberately pacing. He didn't go up. He shut the door and locked it behind him. That was the last night the family spent in the house. The family stayed with relatives, believing the distance would end whatever had been happening. For a short time, things were quiet. Then one night, the father heard a voice outside the window calling his name. He said it sounded exactly like what he had heard inside the house, with the same tone and the same presence behind it. He refused to go back. Neighbors noticed the family wasn't living there anymore, and word spread quickly. Cars began driving past the house at night, and rumors took on lives of their own. Eventually, the family asked their pastor to bless the house. After that, things calmed down, but the Talmans had already made their decision. They dismantled the bunk beds, took them outside, and destroyed them. After that, the activity stopped completely. Now that the story has been told, this is where we step back and look at what we can actually confirm in what lives on only in retellings. The Tallman family was real and they lived in Wisconsin during the late 1980s. Their case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, which confirmed the family, the timeline, and the core sequence of events. The bunk beds were real too, and the family consistently said the activity began after they brought them into the house. There's no documented history tied to the beds and no record connecting them to earlier events. It's also unclear whether the bunk beds were bought new or secondhand. Some people point to the idea of an attachment, which would make more sense if they were used, but that detail isn't confirmed in early accounts. The babysitter's experience stands out as one of the strongest elements of the case because it involves a non-family witness. Her account of the footsteps and the slamming door appears consistently across versions of the story. Police were called, but there's no record of officers witnessing anything paranormal. They responded to a distressed family and found no obvious explanation. Many of the other details, including the radio turning on, the figures seen by the children, the red-eyed apparition, and the voice calling the father's name, come directly from the family's testimony. These details are repeated in interviews and summaries, but they aren't independently documented. The destruction of the bunk beds is something the family said they did, and there is no physical record beyond their statements. One reason this case still circulates today is because it appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, a show known at the time for treating cases carefully. The episode didn't present a conclusion. It didn't claim the bunk beds were cursed, and it didn't suggest possession or a specific cause. Instead, it presented the family's experience and left the question open. That mattered. Once a case appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, it tended to take on a second life. Details were repeated, emphasized, and sometimes exaggerated as the story moved from interviews to books to forums and videos. Over time, darker and more dramatic versions of the Tallman story began circulating. New elements appeared that weren't part of the early retellings, while others became more extreme. What stayed consistent were the core events, the activity beginning after the bunk beds arrived, the babysitter's experience, the father's encounter, and the family leaving the house. That consistency is one reason the case continues to draw attention decades later. As with most cases that sit between documentation and experience, the Tolman bunk bed story has attracted a range of theories. Some people believe the bunk beds acted as a trigger, not because they were cursed, but because they came from another environment and brought something with them. Others believe the timing was coincidence and stress played a role with fear building over time and feeding back into itself. There are also environmental explanations, including electrical issues, temperature fluctuations, and the normal sounds of a house at night, all of which can feel overwhelming once fear takes hold. And then you've got the explanation the family lean toward, that something in the house responded to attention, escalated when it was acknowledged, and stopped once the object at the center of it all was removed. None of these theories fully account for every detail, and that's why the case remains unresolved. When I sit with the Tolman Bunkman's case, what stays with me isn't any single moment, it's the shape of it. It doesn't arrive loudly, it doesn't announce itself, it just settles in. And that's unsettling in a very specific way. Nothing about this story starts out strange. There's no reason for alarm, no moment where someone should have known better. It's just a family doing something ordinary, bringing something ordinary into their home, and then slowly realizing that the atmosphere of that home has changed. And I keep coming back to how gradual it is. The early experiences are the kind of things most people would try to explain away. Sounds, movement, a feeling that something's off. Things that don't immediately demand belief or disbelief. They just sit there, unresolved. And that unresolved feeling builds. What's hard to shake is how the fear spreads. It doesn't stay with one person, it moves through the house, through the family, through people who weren't looking for it, like the babysitter. And once that happens, it stops being just a personal experience and becomes something shared. That's when it gets heavier. Because whether you see this as a haunting or as a case of stress and suggestion feeding on itself, the end result is the same. The house stops feeling safe. And once that happens, everything else changes. I think that's why this story lingers. Not because it proves anything, but because it doesn't resolve. There's no clear moment where you can point and say, that's what it was. There's just a family reaching a breaking point and deciding they can't stay. And that decision says more than any explanation ever could. It reminds me how fragile our sense of safety really is. How much we rely on our homes to be neutral ground, and how deeply unsettling it is when that trust breaks down, even if we can't fully explain why. The Talman case doesn't demand belief. It just asks you to sit with uncertainty, to consider how easily the familiar can become uncomfortable, and how once that shift happens, it's almost impossible to undo. And maybe that's the most unsettling part of all. Thank you for spending your time with me and for continuing to listen and support the show. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, leaving a rating or review really does help the show reach new listeners. If you're on Spotify, tap the stars and check the question under the episode to share what you think was happening in the Tallman Home. And if you have a story or an idea for a future episode, you can reach me anytime at state of the unknown.comslash contact. Until next time, stay curious, stay unsettled, and remember that sometimes the most ordinary things carry the strangest stories.