WEBVTT
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People ask me if I believe in ghosts.
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Wrong fucking question.
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Ask me if I believe people experience things they can't explain.
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Yeah.
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Ask me if I think every creek in an old building is Casper doing laps in the attic.
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It's not.
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Old buildings make noise.
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Period.
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Steel moves, wood shrinks, wind gets in places it shouldn't.
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Rats apparently wear boots, but brushy mountain that's different.
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Brushy doesn't creak like an old building.
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It holds its breath.
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And I hate saying that because it sounds like something a guy in a black t-shirt says before charging 20 bucks for a haunted hayride.
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Some places don't feel empty when they're empty.
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They feel evacuated.
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Like something left in a hurry.
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Like the walls remembered the last bad thing and were waiting for the next one.
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That was brushy, not haunted house scary, institutional scary, which is so much worse.
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Because paperwork has killed more people than monsters ever have.
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Brushy Mountain opened in 1896 in Petros, Tennessee.
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Not because Tennessee suddenly gave a shit about rehabilitation.
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Please.
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Nobody sat around in 1896 saying, you know what?
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Violent offenders need?
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Emotional growth and a vision board.
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Russie was built for punishment, control.
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Labor.
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The old American talent for making cruelty look administrative.
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The state had bodies it could lock up.
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The mountain had coal it wanted cough.
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Somebody looked at both, saw some new math.
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That's how ugly ideas usually start.
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Not with a strike of lightning, with a budget meeting.
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Inmates helped build that prison.
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Let that sit there for a minute.
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A man could spend the morning raising a wall and the night sleeping behind it.
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That's not punishment.
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And when they weren't building the prison, they were working the mines, you left a cell made of steel to crawl into a cell made of mountain.
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Coal dust in your lungs, water dripping, explosives, bad air.
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Rock overhead that could stop being overhead whenever it fucking felt like it.
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Then, after the shift back to prison, it's not a sentence.
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That's a slow motion grinding machine.
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Brushy didn't need ghosts.
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It had history.
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History is worse because history actually happened.
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By July 3rd, Brushy Mountain had already been closed for years.
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During the day, it's a tourist stop.
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People buy shirts, take pictures.
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Everybody has a lovely little murder prison afternoon.
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Then the tourists leave.
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The doors lock, the lights change, and the place stopped pretending.
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That's when we arrived.
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Donna, Joy, me, the paranormal recon team.
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Nine at night to one thirty in the morning.
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No crowd.
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No production crew, no fake screaming, just three people, a pile of equipment, and a prison that had no damn reason to be friendly.
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Before we unpacked anything, we walked.
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The whole place.
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Warden's office, hospital, cafeteria, laundry, solitary, death row, cell blocks.
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You have to do that.
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You have to know the building before you start asking questions.
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Or every draft becomes a demon and every loose hinge becomes Aunt Mildred trying to communicate.
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That's not investigating.
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That's being gullible with batteries.
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The hospital was the first place that got under my skin.
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Empty room, nothing moving, nothing dramatic.
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But your body knows before your brain admits it.
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Nobody came into that hospital for a wellness check.
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They came in leaking, cut, burned, beaten, broken.
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Some you never walk back out.
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You stand there long enough and your imagination starts doing things you didn't ask it to do.
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Solitary was worse.
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Solitary isn't a room.
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It's a room designed to make a person disappear while he's still breathing.
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Take away time.
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Take away the little human noises that remind you the world still exists.
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Then leave a man alone with the one thing he can't escape himself.
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People worry about ghosts in solitary.
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Cute.
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Scariest thing in that room was probably the man counting his own thoughts until they started counting back.
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That'll haunt you just fine.
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Death row felt different.
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Death row felt like waiting.
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That's the word waiting.
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Waiting for appeals, for footsteps, for keys.
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For the one walk you don't come back from.
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You don't have to believe in the paranormal to feel that.
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You just have to stand there and shut up for ten seconds.
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Most people can't stand quiet that long.
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That's why silence still has a job.
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After the walkthrough, we set up in the first building MF meters, spirit box, audio recorders, full spectrum cameras, all the usual toys.
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And yeah, before the internet wets itself, I know what half of you are thinking.
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Spirit boxes are controversial.
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Dowsing rods are controversial.
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EVPs are controversial.
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Good.
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They should be.
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Every tool lies sometimes, people do too.
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That's why you don't marry the equipment.
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You document, you compare, you try not to embarrass yourself.
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At first nothing happened.
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Which is normal.
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We've started dozens and dozens of investigations just the same way.
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I mean real investigations are mostly boredom.
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You walk, you wait, you stare into a hallway wondering if you made poor life choices.
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Then something happens that doesn't make you scream.
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It makes your mouth dry.
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It makes you listen for your own name in the dark.
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Around eleven we heard footsteps slow, deliberate.
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Metal concrete metal concrete.
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Not a bang, not a creak.
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Walking.
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We stopped.
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The footsteps stopped.
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We started again.
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So did they.
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Nobody said ghost.
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Nobody had to.
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We just looked at each other.
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Because there wasn't supposed to be anybody there.
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Then the cold spots.
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And I don't mean ooh a chilly ghost.
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I mean instant.
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Three steps and it felt like someone opened a freezer door.
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Three more steps and gone.
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Could it be airflow?
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Sure.
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Could it be something else?
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I don't know.
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And I don't know is a perfectly good answer despite what the internet thinks.
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Shadows were worse.
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Not full body apparitions waving from a balcony.
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Movement.
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Peripheral, quick little slide your eye catches before your brain gets there.
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You turn?
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Nothing.
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Do it once.
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Fine.
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In front of cell forty three.
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I turned quick, and it was still there.
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There was a full body apparition just for a second, and then gone, and then it happened again.
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It went on all night.
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My nervous system started packing its bags early.
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Then the doors.
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Heavy prison doors, steel, not bedroom doors, not screen doors, prison doors.
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We heard them.
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That deep metal clang that sounds like the building just swallowed somebody.
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We'd check.
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Nothing.
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No open door.
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No obvious reason.
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Just silence, sitting there like it knew something we didn't.
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After midnight we started another spirit box session.
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Just the three of us.
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No audience, no theater.
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I had the box.
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I had my dowsing rods.
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Donna sat nearby.
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Joy watched.
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I asked simple questions.
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Anyone here?
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Can you tell us your name?
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Did you die here?
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Static.
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Fragments.
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Garbage.
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Exactly what you'd expect.
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Then Donna changed.
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Not movie changed.
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No head spinning.
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Thank God.
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Oh that might have been kind of cool.
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There was no Latin, no pea soup.
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She just wasn't with us the same way anymore.
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She got quiet.
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Focused.
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Like somebody had stepped beside her and started talking where we couldn't hear.
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Then she said one word, James.
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There was silence.
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I asked, James?
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Nah.
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Then she said Nick.
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Not Nichols.
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Not Nicholas.
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Nick.
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Okay.
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Common names.
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Interesting, but not enough to make me sleep with the lights on.
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Then Donna said, His only crime was being black.
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Nobody moved.
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That's the part people don't understand.
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Fear doesn't always scream.
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Sometimes it just removes everybody's ability to make a joke.
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And for people like us, that's basically an emergency siren.
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Nobody laughed.
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Nobody moved.
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The prison didn't get louder.
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It got closer.
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And none of us knew a damn thing about James Nichols.
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Donna has done enough investigations with us that we know when she's acting and when she isn't, and she is not the type to manufacture drama.
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Joy isn't either.
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That's important.
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We packed up, we left.
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I didn't leave convinced that we'd spoken to a ghost.
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I left annoyed.
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Because now I had a question, and questions are worse than ghosts.
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Ghosts might follow you home.
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Questions sit in your skull and they kind of chew at you.
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The next morning I started digging.
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James Brushy.
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Then the name appeared James Nichols.
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That's when this stopped being a spooky prison story.
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James Nichols had been convicted in connection with a brutal nineteen seventy two robbery and double murder at Sonny Man's Club near Munford, Tennessee.
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Two men dead, another beaten.
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Nichols and James Mitchell were convicted, sent to Brushy.
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Then the case got uglier.
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Their convictions were overturned because of unconstitutional racial discrimination in the grand jury foreman selection process.
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Not because the crime didn't happen, not because everything was clean and tidy, because the system itself was dirty.
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The state retried them, convicted them again.
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Back to Brushy.
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And that still didn't explain Donna's sentence.
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His only crime was being black.
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Then I found 1982, racial tension, violence.
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Men with life sentences and nothing left to lose.
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Seven white inmates got a pistol inside a maximum security prison.
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I don't know how.
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That sentence shouldn't even exist.
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A gun in a cage full of men, the state claimed it could control.
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They overpowered guards, took keys, walked straight to the cell block housing the black inmates, not lost, not confused, directed.
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James Nichols was shot to death in his cell.
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James Mitchell was also killed.
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Others were wounded.
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Then came retaliation.
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The kind institutions always pretend they didn't see coming.
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The prison erupted, and the newspaper accounts describe the violence as racially charged.
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His only crime is being black.
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Now let me be painfully clear before the comments section theologians start licking their keyboards.
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I'm not saying we proved James Nichols spoke to us.
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I can't prove that.
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Nobody can.
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What I can say is this.
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Donna said James.
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Then Nick, then a sentence tied directly to race.
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Later we found James Nichols killed in a racially charged attack inside Brushy Mountain.
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None of us knew his story.
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None of us were discussing him.
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None of us were looking for him.
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Those are just the facts.
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Everything else?
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Interpretation.
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Was it coincidence?
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Maybe.
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Was it subconscious memory?
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I don't know how.
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Was it something else?
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Maybe.
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I don't know.
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And that's the part that bothers me.
00:12:36.799 --> 00:12:38.639
Because Brushy didn't give us proof.
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It gave us a name.
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Then it waited for us to do the work.
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That's worse.
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Proof lets you sleep.
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Questions don't.
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People remember James Earl Ray because history loves famous monsters.
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But James Nichols?
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Most visitors don't know him.
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They walk past his story, buy a t-shirt, take a selfie, go home.
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Maybe that's the most disturbing part of the whole damn thing.
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Not whether a ghost talked, not whether the spirit box worked, but that a man can die violently in a prison cell, make the newspapers, be part of one of the darkest racial incidents in that prison's history, and still almost disappear.
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The violence was real.
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The cells were real.
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The racial hatred was real.
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The gun was real.
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The dead men were real.
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That place is not haunted because something dead walks around.
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It's haunted because something living built it.
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Men built the cages, men filled them, men looked away.
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Then everyone acted surprised when the walls learned how to keep secrets.
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So do I believe Brushy Mountain is haunted?
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I'll tell you what I believe.
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I believe three people walked into that prison on july third.
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I believe something happened we didn't expect.
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I believe that something led us to James Nichols.
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And I believe history has a nasty habit of speaking through whatever crack it can find.
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A newspaper archive, prison wall, a woman in the dark saying a name she didn't know.
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Maybe that's paranormal.
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Maybe it isn't.
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Either way, Brushy Mountain didn't give us proof.
00:14:37.919 --> 00:14:38.799
It gave us a name.
00:14:38.960 --> 00:14:42.240
Then it waited to see if we'd bury it too.
00:14:42.320 --> 00:14:42.720
We didn't.
00:14:42.799 --> 00:14:44.960
And that's the part I still can't shake.
00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:48.720
And that is the dreadful truth.
00:00:02.240 --> 00:00:05.040
People ask me if I believe in ghosts.
00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:07.839
Wrong fucking question.
00:00:08.480 --> 00:00:13.359
Ask me if I believe people experience things they can't explain.
00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:14.640
Yeah.
00:00:15.439 --> 00:00:21.039
Ask me if I think every creek in an old building is Casper doing laps in the attic.
00:00:22.320 --> 00:00:23.199
It's not.
00:00:24.399 --> 00:00:26.640
Old buildings make noise.
00:00:27.199 --> 00:00:27.920
Period.
00:00:28.239 --> 00:00:32.799
Steel moves, wood shrinks, wind gets in places it shouldn't.
00:00:33.039 --> 00:00:37.840
Rats apparently wear boots, but brushy mountain that's different.
00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:40.399
Brushy doesn't creak like an old building.
00:00:40.479 --> 00:00:41.359
It holds its breath.
00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:50.159
And I hate saying that because it sounds like something a guy in a black t-shirt says before charging 20 bucks for a haunted hayride.
00:00:53.200 --> 00:00:57.439
Some places don't feel empty when they're empty.
00:00:57.520 --> 00:00:59.039
They feel evacuated.
00:00:59.679 --> 00:01:02.079
Like something left in a hurry.
00:01:02.240 --> 00:01:08.719
Like the walls remembered the last bad thing and were waiting for the next one.
00:01:10.239 --> 00:01:17.359
That was brushy, not haunted house scary, institutional scary, which is so much worse.
00:01:17.599 --> 00:01:21.200
Because paperwork has killed more people than monsters ever have.
00:01:21.439 --> 00:01:26.000
Brushy Mountain opened in 1896 in Petros, Tennessee.
00:01:26.480 --> 00:01:30.959
Not because Tennessee suddenly gave a shit about rehabilitation.
00:01:31.359 --> 00:01:31.920
Please.
00:01:32.079 --> 00:01:35.120
Nobody sat around in 1896 saying, you know what?
00:01:35.280 --> 00:01:36.879
Violent offenders need?
00:01:37.200 --> 00:01:39.280
Emotional growth and a vision board.
00:01:39.519 --> 00:01:41.840
Russie was built for punishment, control.
00:01:42.799 --> 00:01:43.439
Labor.
00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:48.000
The old American talent for making cruelty look administrative.
00:01:48.159 --> 00:01:50.719
The state had bodies it could lock up.
00:01:50.959 --> 00:01:53.280
The mountain had coal it wanted cough.
00:01:53.840 --> 00:01:56.239
Somebody looked at both, saw some new math.
00:01:56.400 --> 00:01:58.799
That's how ugly ideas usually start.
00:01:59.040 --> 00:02:01.599
Not with a strike of lightning, with a budget meeting.
00:02:01.760 --> 00:02:04.239
Inmates helped build that prison.
00:02:04.400 --> 00:02:05.760
Let that sit there for a minute.
00:02:05.920 --> 00:02:10.159
A man could spend the morning raising a wall and the night sleeping behind it.
00:02:10.240 --> 00:02:11.039
That's not punishment.
00:02:11.120 --> 00:02:19.439
And when they weren't building the prison, they were working the mines, you left a cell made of steel to crawl into a cell made of mountain.
00:02:19.759 --> 00:02:26.240
Coal dust in your lungs, water dripping, explosives, bad air.
00:02:26.879 --> 00:02:32.240
Rock overhead that could stop being overhead whenever it fucking felt like it.
00:02:32.479 --> 00:02:36.719
Then, after the shift back to prison, it's not a sentence.
00:02:37.039 --> 00:02:39.840
That's a slow motion grinding machine.
00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:41.599
Brushy didn't need ghosts.
00:02:41.759 --> 00:02:42.879
It had history.
00:02:43.360 --> 00:02:47.280
History is worse because history actually happened.
00:02:47.360 --> 00:02:52.000
By July 3rd, Brushy Mountain had already been closed for years.
00:02:52.240 --> 00:02:54.960
During the day, it's a tourist stop.
00:02:55.599 --> 00:02:58.319
People buy shirts, take pictures.
00:02:58.560 --> 00:03:01.520
Everybody has a lovely little murder prison afternoon.
00:03:01.680 --> 00:03:03.120
Then the tourists leave.
00:03:03.280 --> 00:03:08.240
The doors lock, the lights change, and the place stopped pretending.
00:03:08.400 --> 00:03:09.439
That's when we arrived.
00:03:09.599 --> 00:03:13.520
Donna, Joy, me, the paranormal recon team.
00:03:13.680 --> 00:03:16.159
Nine at night to one thirty in the morning.
00:03:16.479 --> 00:03:17.439
No crowd.
00:03:17.759 --> 00:03:26.960
No production crew, no fake screaming, just three people, a pile of equipment, and a prison that had no damn reason to be friendly.
00:03:27.120 --> 00:03:29.599
Before we unpacked anything, we walked.
00:03:30.080 --> 00:03:31.360
The whole place.
00:03:32.080 --> 00:03:39.919
Warden's office, hospital, cafeteria, laundry, solitary, death row, cell blocks.
00:03:40.080 --> 00:03:41.439
You have to do that.
00:03:41.919 --> 00:03:45.599
You have to know the building before you start asking questions.
00:03:45.840 --> 00:03:51.840
Or every draft becomes a demon and every loose hinge becomes Aunt Mildred trying to communicate.
00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.199
That's not investigating.
00:03:53.280 --> 00:03:55.759
That's being gullible with batteries.
00:03:55.919 --> 00:03:59.120
The hospital was the first place that got under my skin.
00:03:59.439 --> 00:04:04.159
Empty room, nothing moving, nothing dramatic.
00:04:04.560 --> 00:04:07.599
But your body knows before your brain admits it.
00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:11.120
Nobody came into that hospital for a wellness check.
00:04:11.199 --> 00:04:17.920
They came in leaking, cut, burned, beaten, broken.
00:04:18.160 --> 00:04:20.160
Some you never walk back out.
00:04:20.319 --> 00:04:25.040
You stand there long enough and your imagination starts doing things you didn't ask it to do.
00:04:25.199 --> 00:04:26.560
Solitary was worse.
00:04:26.800 --> 00:04:28.079
Solitary isn't a room.
00:04:28.160 --> 00:04:31.680
It's a room designed to make a person disappear while he's still breathing.
00:04:31.839 --> 00:04:32.879
Take away time.
00:04:33.439 --> 00:04:38.079
Take away the little human noises that remind you the world still exists.
00:04:38.240 --> 00:04:42.000
Then leave a man alone with the one thing he can't escape himself.
00:04:42.160 --> 00:04:44.720
People worry about ghosts in solitary.
00:04:45.199 --> 00:04:45.519
Cute.
00:04:45.839 --> 00:04:51.279
Scariest thing in that room was probably the man counting his own thoughts until they started counting back.
00:04:51.360 --> 00:04:52.639
That'll haunt you just fine.
00:04:52.800 --> 00:04:54.160
Death row felt different.
00:04:54.319 --> 00:04:56.560
Death row felt like waiting.
00:04:56.720 --> 00:04:58.639
That's the word waiting.
00:04:58.800 --> 00:05:02.240
Waiting for appeals, for footsteps, for keys.
00:05:02.399 --> 00:05:05.279
For the one walk you don't come back from.
00:05:05.439 --> 00:05:08.480
You don't have to believe in the paranormal to feel that.
00:05:08.879 --> 00:05:11.680
You just have to stand there and shut up for ten seconds.
00:05:11.839 --> 00:05:14.879
Most people can't stand quiet that long.
00:05:15.360 --> 00:05:17.600
That's why silence still has a job.
00:05:17.759 --> 00:05:28.160
After the walkthrough, we set up in the first building MF meters, spirit box, audio recorders, full spectrum cameras, all the usual toys.
00:05:28.399 --> 00:05:33.600
And yeah, before the internet wets itself, I know what half of you are thinking.
00:05:33.839 --> 00:05:35.839
Spirit boxes are controversial.
00:05:36.160 --> 00:05:37.839
Dowsing rods are controversial.
00:05:38.079 --> 00:05:39.839
EVPs are controversial.
00:05:40.160 --> 00:05:40.800
Good.
00:05:41.360 --> 00:05:42.639
They should be.
00:05:42.879 --> 00:05:45.839
Every tool lies sometimes, people do too.
00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:48.800
That's why you don't marry the equipment.
00:05:49.120 --> 00:05:54.480
You document, you compare, you try not to embarrass yourself.
00:05:54.639 --> 00:05:56.639
At first nothing happened.
00:05:56.959 --> 00:05:58.800
Which is normal.
00:05:59.120 --> 00:06:03.279
We've started dozens and dozens of investigations just the same way.
00:06:03.519 --> 00:06:06.240
I mean real investigations are mostly boredom.
00:06:06.560 --> 00:06:13.759
You walk, you wait, you stare into a hallway wondering if you made poor life choices.
00:06:14.079 --> 00:06:17.839
Then something happens that doesn't make you scream.
00:06:18.160 --> 00:06:20.000
It makes your mouth dry.
00:06:20.160 --> 00:06:22.560
It makes you listen for your own name in the dark.
00:06:22.800 --> 00:06:26.720
Around eleven we heard footsteps slow, deliberate.
00:06:26.959 --> 00:06:31.839
Metal concrete metal concrete.
00:06:32.399 --> 00:06:34.480
Not a bang, not a creak.
00:06:34.879 --> 00:06:35.519
Walking.
00:06:35.680 --> 00:06:36.319
We stopped.
00:06:36.480 --> 00:06:38.160
The footsteps stopped.
00:06:38.480 --> 00:06:40.000
We started again.
00:06:40.399 --> 00:06:41.199
So did they.
00:06:41.439 --> 00:06:43.519
Nobody said ghost.
00:06:43.680 --> 00:06:44.879
Nobody had to.
00:06:45.360 --> 00:06:47.120
We just looked at each other.
00:06:47.439 --> 00:06:50.959
Because there wasn't supposed to be anybody there.
00:06:51.199 --> 00:06:52.879
Then the cold spots.
00:06:53.120 --> 00:06:55.839
And I don't mean ooh a chilly ghost.
00:06:56.160 --> 00:06:57.680
I mean instant.
00:06:58.000 --> 00:07:01.439
Three steps and it felt like someone opened a freezer door.
00:07:02.000 --> 00:07:03.680
Three more steps and gone.
00:07:03.759 --> 00:07:05.040
Could it be airflow?
00:07:05.360 --> 00:07:05.680
Sure.
00:07:05.920 --> 00:07:06.959
Could it be something else?
00:07:07.120 --> 00:07:07.680
I don't know.
00:07:07.839 --> 00:07:12.240
And I don't know is a perfectly good answer despite what the internet thinks.
00:07:12.480 --> 00:07:13.839
Shadows were worse.
00:07:14.079 --> 00:07:16.959
Not full body apparitions waving from a balcony.
00:07:17.120 --> 00:07:17.920
Movement.
00:07:18.319 --> 00:07:23.279
Peripheral, quick little slide your eye catches before your brain gets there.
00:07:23.680 --> 00:07:24.639
You turn?
00:07:25.199 --> 00:07:25.680
Nothing.
00:07:25.920 --> 00:07:26.800
Do it once.
00:07:27.120 --> 00:07:27.759
Fine.
00:07:28.079 --> 00:07:30.240
In front of cell forty three.
00:07:30.639 --> 00:07:32.720
I turned quick, and it was still there.
00:07:32.879 --> 00:07:38.720
There was a full body apparition just for a second, and then gone, and then it happened again.
00:07:38.800 --> 00:07:39.600
It went on all night.
00:07:39.759 --> 00:07:42.639
My nervous system started packing its bags early.
00:07:42.800 --> 00:07:43.759
Then the doors.
00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:50.720
Heavy prison doors, steel, not bedroom doors, not screen doors, prison doors.
00:07:51.040 --> 00:07:52.160
We heard them.
00:07:52.560 --> 00:07:57.920
That deep metal clang that sounds like the building just swallowed somebody.
00:07:58.160 --> 00:07:59.199
We'd check.
00:08:00.480 --> 00:08:01.360
Nothing.
00:08:01.680 --> 00:08:02.879
No open door.
00:08:03.519 --> 00:08:05.199
No obvious reason.
00:08:05.519 --> 00:08:08.800
Just silence, sitting there like it knew something we didn't.
00:08:08.959 --> 00:08:11.600
After midnight we started another spirit box session.
00:08:11.759 --> 00:08:12.879
Just the three of us.
00:08:13.120 --> 00:08:14.959
No audience, no theater.
00:08:15.040 --> 00:08:15.839
I had the box.
00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:17.360
I had my dowsing rods.
00:08:17.600 --> 00:08:18.720
Donna sat nearby.
00:08:18.959 --> 00:08:19.920
Joy watched.
00:08:20.079 --> 00:08:21.600
I asked simple questions.
00:08:22.079 --> 00:08:22.959
Anyone here?
00:08:23.360 --> 00:08:24.480
Can you tell us your name?
00:08:24.639 --> 00:08:25.519
Did you die here?
00:08:25.680 --> 00:08:26.240
Static.
00:08:26.399 --> 00:08:26.879
Fragments.
00:08:27.040 --> 00:08:27.519
Garbage.
00:08:27.680 --> 00:08:29.279
Exactly what you'd expect.
00:08:29.439 --> 00:08:31.600
Then Donna changed.
00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:33.519
Not movie changed.
00:08:33.759 --> 00:08:34.960
No head spinning.
00:08:35.279 --> 00:08:36.080
Thank God.
00:08:36.559 --> 00:08:38.320
Oh that might have been kind of cool.
00:08:38.559 --> 00:08:41.279
There was no Latin, no pea soup.
00:08:41.519 --> 00:08:45.600
She just wasn't with us the same way anymore.
00:08:45.919 --> 00:08:47.200
She got quiet.
00:08:47.759 --> 00:08:48.480
Focused.
00:08:49.120 --> 00:08:53.759
Like somebody had stepped beside her and started talking where we couldn't hear.
00:08:53.919 --> 00:08:55.440
Then she said one word, James.
00:08:55.600 --> 00:08:56.639
There was silence.
00:08:57.039 --> 00:08:58.159
I asked, James?
00:08:58.399 --> 00:08:58.559
Nah.
00:08:58.879 --> 00:09:00.559
Then she said Nick.
00:09:00.720 --> 00:09:01.440
Not Nichols.
00:09:01.600 --> 00:09:02.559
Not Nicholas.
00:09:02.879 --> 00:09:03.360
Nick.
00:09:03.519 --> 00:09:03.679
Okay.
00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:05.039
Common names.
00:09:05.279 --> 00:09:08.399
Interesting, but not enough to make me sleep with the lights on.
00:09:08.639 --> 00:09:12.799
Then Donna said, His only crime was being black.
00:09:14.639 --> 00:09:16.000
Nobody moved.
00:09:16.320 --> 00:09:18.720
That's the part people don't understand.
00:09:19.200 --> 00:09:20.879
Fear doesn't always scream.
00:09:21.039 --> 00:09:23.919
Sometimes it just removes everybody's ability to make a joke.
00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:27.440
And for people like us, that's basically an emergency siren.
00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:29.200
Nobody laughed.
00:09:29.519 --> 00:09:30.720
Nobody moved.
00:09:31.039 --> 00:09:33.200
The prison didn't get louder.
00:09:33.519 --> 00:09:34.879
It got closer.
00:09:35.200 --> 00:09:39.279
And none of us knew a damn thing about James Nichols.
00:09:39.679 --> 00:09:48.080
Donna has done enough investigations with us that we know when she's acting and when she isn't, and she is not the type to manufacture drama.
00:09:48.320 --> 00:09:49.840
Joy isn't either.
00:09:50.080 --> 00:09:50.960
That's important.
00:09:51.120 --> 00:09:52.480
We packed up, we left.
00:09:52.559 --> 00:09:54.960
I didn't leave convinced that we'd spoken to a ghost.
00:09:55.120 --> 00:09:56.399
I left annoyed.
00:09:56.639 --> 00:10:00.799
Because now I had a question, and questions are worse than ghosts.
00:10:01.200 --> 00:10:03.120
Ghosts might follow you home.
00:10:03.440 --> 00:10:06.240
Questions sit in your skull and they kind of chew at you.
00:10:06.320 --> 00:10:08.159
The next morning I started digging.
00:10:08.480 --> 00:10:10.000
James Brushy.
00:10:10.559 --> 00:10:13.919
Then the name appeared James Nichols.
00:10:14.240 --> 00:10:17.120
That's when this stopped being a spooky prison story.
00:10:17.360 --> 00:10:25.360
James Nichols had been convicted in connection with a brutal nineteen seventy two robbery and double murder at Sonny Man's Club near Munford, Tennessee.
00:10:25.519 --> 00:10:26.960
Two men dead, another beaten.
00:10:27.039 --> 00:10:31.039
Nichols and James Mitchell were convicted, sent to Brushy.
00:10:31.279 --> 00:10:32.639
Then the case got uglier.
00:10:32.879 --> 00:10:40.399
Their convictions were overturned because of unconstitutional racial discrimination in the grand jury foreman selection process.
00:10:40.720 --> 00:10:46.399
Not because the crime didn't happen, not because everything was clean and tidy, because the system itself was dirty.
00:10:46.559 --> 00:10:50.000
The state retried them, convicted them again.
00:10:50.240 --> 00:10:51.360
Back to Brushy.
00:10:51.600 --> 00:10:55.360
And that still didn't explain Donna's sentence.
00:10:55.519 --> 00:10:57.600
His only crime was being black.
00:10:57.679 --> 00:11:01.200
Then I found 1982, racial tension, violence.
00:11:01.759 --> 00:11:04.879
Men with life sentences and nothing left to lose.
00:11:05.039 --> 00:11:09.600
Seven white inmates got a pistol inside a maximum security prison.
00:11:09.759 --> 00:11:10.639
I don't know how.
00:11:10.720 --> 00:11:12.399
That sentence shouldn't even exist.
00:11:12.720 --> 00:11:16.960
A gun in a cage full of men, the state claimed it could control.
00:11:17.120 --> 00:11:27.200
They overpowered guards, took keys, walked straight to the cell block housing the black inmates, not lost, not confused, directed.
00:11:27.519 --> 00:11:31.039
James Nichols was shot to death in his cell.
00:11:31.840 --> 00:11:34.639
James Mitchell was also killed.
00:11:34.879 --> 00:11:36.559
Others were wounded.
00:11:36.799 --> 00:11:38.559
Then came retaliation.
00:11:39.120 --> 00:11:43.200
The kind institutions always pretend they didn't see coming.
00:11:43.600 --> 00:11:50.480
The prison erupted, and the newspaper accounts describe the violence as racially charged.
00:11:50.960 --> 00:11:52.879
His only crime is being black.
00:11:53.039 --> 00:11:59.120
Now let me be painfully clear before the comments section theologians start licking their keyboards.
00:11:59.279 --> 00:12:02.799
I'm not saying we proved James Nichols spoke to us.
00:12:03.039 --> 00:12:04.559
I can't prove that.
00:12:04.879 --> 00:12:05.919
Nobody can.
00:12:06.240 --> 00:12:07.919
What I can say is this.
00:12:08.240 --> 00:12:09.840
Donna said James.
00:12:10.080 --> 00:12:12.879
Then Nick, then a sentence tied directly to race.
00:12:13.039 --> 00:12:18.639
Later we found James Nichols killed in a racially charged attack inside Brushy Mountain.
00:12:18.799 --> 00:12:19.919
None of us knew his story.
00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:21.759
None of us were discussing him.
00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:23.440
None of us were looking for him.
00:12:23.600 --> 00:12:25.039
Those are just the facts.
00:12:25.279 --> 00:12:26.000
Everything else?
00:12:26.240 --> 00:12:26.879
Interpretation.
00:12:27.039 --> 00:12:28.080
Was it coincidence?
00:12:28.240 --> 00:12:29.039
Maybe.
00:12:29.279 --> 00:12:31.039
Was it subconscious memory?
00:12:31.279 --> 00:12:32.080
I don't know how.
00:12:32.240 --> 00:12:33.279
Was it something else?
00:12:33.519 --> 00:12:33.919
Maybe.
00:12:34.080 --> 00:12:34.559
I don't know.
00:12:34.720 --> 00:12:36.559
And that's the part that bothers me.
00:12:36.799 --> 00:12:38.639
Because Brushy didn't give us proof.
00:12:38.720 --> 00:12:39.519
It gave us a name.
00:12:39.600 --> 00:12:41.120
Then it waited for us to do the work.
00:12:41.279 --> 00:12:42.480
That's worse.
00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:46.159
Proof lets you sleep.
00:12:46.480 --> 00:12:47.519
Questions don't.
00:12:47.679 --> 00:12:51.759
People remember James Earl Ray because history loves famous monsters.
00:12:52.000 --> 00:12:53.519
But James Nichols?
00:12:53.919 --> 00:12:55.919
Most visitors don't know him.
00:12:56.159 --> 00:13:01.440
They walk past his story, buy a t-shirt, take a selfie, go home.
00:13:01.759 --> 00:13:04.960
Maybe that's the most disturbing part of the whole damn thing.
00:13:05.279 --> 00:13:23.679
Not whether a ghost talked, not whether the spirit box worked, but that a man can die violently in a prison cell, make the newspapers, be part of one of the darkest racial incidents in that prison's history, and still almost disappear.
00:13:37.759 --> 00:13:38.960
The violence was real.
00:13:39.200 --> 00:13:40.879
The cells were real.
00:13:41.120 --> 00:13:43.279
The racial hatred was real.
00:13:44.159 --> 00:13:46.320
The gun was real.
00:13:46.799 --> 00:13:49.120
The dead men were real.
00:13:49.600 --> 00:13:53.440
That place is not haunted because something dead walks around.
00:13:53.679 --> 00:13:56.879
It's haunted because something living built it.
00:13:57.360 --> 00:14:01.360
Men built the cages, men filled them, men looked away.
00:14:01.519 --> 00:14:05.519
Then everyone acted surprised when the walls learned how to keep secrets.
00:14:05.840 --> 00:14:08.000
So do I believe Brushy Mountain is haunted?
00:14:08.080 --> 00:14:09.120
I'll tell you what I believe.
00:14:09.279 --> 00:14:12.000
I believe three people walked into that prison on july third.
00:14:12.240 --> 00:14:15.039
I believe something happened we didn't expect.
00:14:15.279 --> 00:14:18.159
I believe that something led us to James Nichols.
00:14:18.320 --> 00:14:23.200
And I believe history has a nasty habit of speaking through whatever crack it can find.
00:14:23.360 --> 00:14:29.360
A newspaper archive, prison wall, a woman in the dark saying a name she didn't know.
00:14:29.679 --> 00:14:32.000
Maybe that's paranormal.
00:14:32.240 --> 00:14:33.519
Maybe it isn't.
00:14:33.840 --> 00:14:37.759
Either way, Brushy Mountain didn't give us proof.
00:14:37.919 --> 00:14:38.799
It gave us a name.
00:14:38.960 --> 00:14:42.240
Then it waited to see if we'd bury it too.
00:14:42.320 --> 00:14:42.720
We didn't.
00:14:42.799 --> 00:14:44.960
And that's the part I still can't shake.
00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:48.720
And that is the dreadful truth.
