The Mistake

The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.

The first story you'll hear is called The New Member, and it's about a group of church members

who witness something horrifying as their pastor begins a ceremony.

“The second story you'll hear is called Robin Hood, and it's about a teenager who looks at his phone and thinks his life is over.”

And the third and final story you'll hear is called The Sailor's Diagnosis, and it's about a doctor who begins to lose his mind after declaring one of his patients dead. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to buy the follow button in order of their favorite food, fried chicken.

But before you hand it over, be sure to remove the crispy outer layer from each piece. Okay, let's get into our first story called The New Member.

At 1030 AM, on October 30th, 2005, a 33-year-old pastor named Kyle Lake stood on a stage inside of the University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.

Kyle had just finished delivering that morning sermon to his congregation, which included about 800 people. And now, he was about to welcome a new member, a young woman. So Kyle had been the pastor of this church for the last seven years, and over that time, the church had really grown and evolved, really directly because of Kyle's leadership. He was known as being a very thoughtful and educated pastor, who was also known to be quite fun,

“and progressive. He often would play pranks on the congregation, and keep things really light, even if he was in the middle of a very important sermon.”

And people like that, it made him relatable. And so because of Kyle's youthful energy that he clearly gave off, he had sort of gradually shifted the congregation to being a much more young crowd. Predominantly, the folks who attended the church were college kids, or roughly that age. And also his wife was an attendee at the church, as were his three little kids, who at the moment, as he was up on stage, they were across the hall attending kids Bible study.

Now, for Kyle, welcoming a new member into this church, had become a very big deal for him. He, in fact, had the special ceremony he would perform for each and every new member. And really, the whole congregation got behind this ceremony. And so today, Kyle was about to do this ceremony with this new member, this young woman. And so, Kyle, you know, in front of the whole congregation, he calls this woman up, "You know, come on up,

we're going to do the ceremony to welcome you to the church." And so the woman, she gets up, and she walks up to the front of the stage, she smiles, and Kyle says hello to her, and sort of introduce himself, and the whole church is listening. And then, Kyle, as part of this ritual, moved to the very center of the stage, where the actual ceremony was going to take place.

And he was about to call the woman up to join him in the center of the stage when there was a malfunction. Now, the malfunction itself was not really a huge deal.

All it did was just stop Kyle for a second, and he had to stop talking to the new member,

and he had to figure out what he was going to do, but quickly, he saw a fix that didn't even require him to leave the stage. However, the instant he actually made the fix, when he fixed the malfunction, as he was about to start talking to the whole audience again, he just began to scream. Now, at first, nobody took the seriously, because their pastor was known for playing

pranks on the congregation. And so, everybody just thought it was a prank. I'll be at a strange one, I mean, he's screaming at the top of his lungs, but everyone's sort of looking around like, "This is a prank, right?" But then Kyle screams began to include words. He began screaming, "Help! Help me!" And at that point, it sort of clicked for the whole congregation that this was not a joke,

something was terribly wrong. Even though they're looking up at him, and nothing appeared to be wrong. Nothing made sense. And so, immediately, it was like the church spiraled into chaos and confusion, people are bowing their heads praying as fiercely as they could, praying for a safety others are sprinting out of the church, not even knowing what to do,

and still more were calling 911, like several people calling 911. And then by the time the paramedics showed up, it was like people still had no idea

“what actually was happening. In fact, honestly, the paramedics didn't. He was like, "What is this?"”

But within a few days, they were able to figure out what happened, and it surprised everyone. So, the special ceremony that Kyle would perform for every new member was a baptism. And so, when Kyle moved to the very center of the stage and he actually called up the woman to join him in the center of the stage, he actually was stepping into the baptismal pool. Picture like a hot tub, waist high water, its warm water, and so Kyle literally

be baptized. However, before this woman actually got to the pool, Kyle has this malfunction.

“And all it was is his lapel mic shut off. It wasn't working anymore. And because the church he was”

in was huge and cavernous, sound really didn't travel well. He needed a microphone to project his

voice. And so, he had to stop the ceremony for a second and find another microphone.

Luckily, there was a stand with a microphone in it right within arms reach. And so, Kyle grabbed it. However, what Kyle didn't know was there actually was a second malfunction that had happened either at this instant or just before. But either way, there was another malfunction that he had no idea about. And that was that the heaters of the baptismal pool that kept the water warm were damaged. And as a result of this damage, the water in that pool had become electrically charged.

And so, the instant Kyle grabbed that microphone, he grounded the electricity in the pool. Basically, he created a pathway for the electricity to travel through his body. When he began to scream, that was him being electrocuted. Despite the efforts of first responders and the medical

“staff at the hospital, Kyle unfortunately did not survive. As per Kyle's wife, who literally”

watched this happen from the front row of the church, she watched her husband be killed.

She ultimately sued the electrical company that installed those heaters in the baptismal pool.

And she would settle for an undisclosed amount of money. Our next story is called Robin Hood. In the spring of 2020, right when the COVID-19 pandemic was really kicking into high gear, students at the University of Nebraska were told to move out of their dorms and move back home with their families to prevent the spread of the virus. One student, 20-year-old Alex Kerns,

who was enrolled at Nebraska on an ROTC scholarship, was just as shocked as everybody else at how quickly this pandemic had turned their life upside down. But in terms of going back home again, he wasn't that upset about it because he was close with his family and he figured some unexpected

“time with them would be nice. Once he got back to his hometown of Naperville, Illinois,”

which is an affluent suburb outside of Chicago, he quickly fell into a quarantine routine which consisted mostly of screen time and lounging around. But in the evenings, he would put his screens away and he would go into the kitchen with his mother Dorothy and the two of them would chat for hours about all sorts of things. One night, he told his mom that he was still in kind of nervous about what he was going to do with his life after college. That even though he was studying

business out at the University of Nebraska, he didn't really know what he was going to do with that. All he knew was that he wanted to find a way to help people and his mother and everybody that knew Alex would say that that's just Alex. He was this really gentle, nice, awesome person that everybody just adored. After being home for a few weeks, Alex was starting to get bored of his quarantine routine and he began looking for other things to do. He had seen a number of ads for a new

brokerage app called Robin Hood that was becoming increasingly popular amongst people his age. Unlike other trading platforms, Robin Hood was designed for the common person. There was not huge fees that needed to be paid by the investor as soon as they logged on and the app was very sleek and it turned trading kind of into a game on the app. Alex had a few thousand dollars in his bank account and so he figured you know what, what the heck, all download Robin Hood and see what

I can do. What's the worst that can happen? After trading on Robin Hood for a couple of days, Alex was hooked and he showed his family that he was actually making a little bit of money and he was learning about the stock market. His parents would later recall when they found out he was using

Robin Hood, they weren't concerned because Alex had always been incredibly careful with his money

saving most of it and very rarely spending much of it and so they figured, you know, he might lose his savings but he's certainly not going to fall into significant debt. That's just not Alex. Also, there was a safety mechanism in basic accounts on Robin Hood that protected first-time users from going above $10,000 in debt so even if Alex tried to lose more than that the app wouldn't allow him so long as he was using a basic account. As the weeks went on, Alex got more and more

confident in his trading ability and he got really familiar with the Robin Hood app and one day he noticed there was one function he had not tried on the app called options trading. For context, traditional trading goes like this. Somebody identifies a stock that they like and then they gamble on it and the way they gamble on it is they buy shares of that stock and if the stock increases in value, they make more money. If the stock loses value, they lose money. Very simple. But some people

either can't afford the shares or don't want to buy the shares but they still want to get in on the action of the stock market and for those people they can use something called options trading.

who have already purchased shares and this insurance policy they're offering is known as an option.

“These option traders will go up to these shareholders and they'll say for example,”

I'll give you $500 in exchange if your stock tax and you're losing a ton of money. You can exercise your option, i.e. cash in your insurance policy and i, the option holder will cover all of your losses. But if your stock stays steady or gains in value, I still get to keep your $500 that's non-refundable. Naturally, these options traders, they need to be savvy about which stocks they're prepared to cover with their option because if that stock tanks and the shareholder

decides to sell sell sell, i.e. exercise their option, then the option holder is obligated to immediately buy all of the shares at a premium and if that shareholder has let's say hundreds of thousands

of shares will too bad the option holder is buying all of them. So when Alex clicked on the

options trading button inside of his Robinhood app, it brought him immediately to an application because Robinhood had to make sure anybody on their app that was going to be buying or selling

“options they needed to be an experienced trader and they needed to understand the risks because”

they were much higher than a basic account. There was no limit how much debt someone could fall into in trading options. Alex was a smart guy and a motivated trader but he knew nothing about options trading and so when he saw this application I'm sure he thought to himself yeah I know nothing about options trading there's no way I could possibly get into this. But he decided you know what the heck I will apply to go on to their options trading side just to see if they'll accept

me. So it fills up the application and almost immediately he is accepted onto that side of the platform. It would later turn out that application was kind of a sham. It did not really do very much to restrict access to that side. Alex was surprised at his acceptance but he was also very excited and right away he started trading options and he was pretty good at it and pretty quickly he was making a little bit of money. But then on June 11th he got a notification on his phone

“from Robinhood and so he pulled his phone up he opened the app and he saw his account was restricted”

he couldn't make any new trades and he couldn't make any withdrawals and so as he looked at it he scrolled down to the bottom of the page and he saw his current balance and it read negative 730 thousand dollars. A trader that Alex had sold an option to was exercising his option because his stock and tanked and he owned over 7000 dollars worth of shares that now Alex was obligated to buy. Alex couldn't believe what he was looking at and he immediately fired off an email to Robinhood

customer support saying they're had to have been a mistake that he had done the math before he had sold that option and he thought at most he was exposed to losing maybe $10,000 certainly not $700,000. And so after he sent this email a couple of minutes later he got a message back from Robinhood but it was just an automated response that just said hey you know we got your email and we're busy and we'll be sure to be in touch with you as soon as we possibly can. And so at this point Alex has

started to panic a little bit because he's looking at his phone and this looks real he's trying to go through his phone to find some place that would show him this was a mistake but there's nothing that indicates this is a mistake. And so after a couple of hours Alex is just laying in his bed he can't sleep and he sends another message to the customer support team at Robinhood, pleading with them to please check his account there has to have been a mistake.

There's no way I would have exposed myself to $700,000 of debt but again all he gets is an automated response that says we're busy and we'll be in touch with you soon. A couple hours later at 326 am Alex is still away probably pacing around his room totally panic-stricken and he looks at his phone and there's another email from Robinhood and he's thinking oh my goodness thank you someone's gotten in touch with me to tell me this has been a horrible mistake so it opens his email

and the header of the email is immediate action required and what it was was a notice for him to

make his first payment on this enormous debt it was going to be about $170,000 that he had to pay

in the next couple of days and if he didn't make this first payment they would seek legal action against him. Alex was probably terrified and also he was ashamed and didn't want to tell his parents and so all alone in his room he writes a third email to Robinhood now straight up begging them someone please look at my account this has got to be wrong but again he just got the automated message and so for the rest of the night Alex probably laid on his bed thinking the world was just

crashing in on him he knew there was no way he could pay this enormous bill and if he didn't pay it he would either go to jail or hand it off to his family which would financially ruin them and just the idea of doing that to the people he loved made him sick he just could not face that as one of his options and so by the time the sun came up the next morning Alex had come to a conclusion about what he was going to do he started by pulling out his phone and pulling up the Robinhood

app and screenshotting the dashboard that showed his enormous negative balance and then he went on his laptop and he wrote a long letter to his family and he put it on his desktops they would

peddled away a couple hours later a police officer arrived at the current's household and he told

them that their son their brother Alex was unfortunately deceased he had thrown himself in front of a train the family was beyond devastated this caught them so completely off guard it didn't make any sense Alex was a happy funny guy with plans for the future he had shown no indications that he wanted to harm himself it really just didn't make any sense and so at some point that day they went to his laptop they opened it up and there was that note he wrote and in this letter he explains to his

family how he had fallen into this enormous debt on Robinhood he attaches the screenshot that showed his huge negative balance and he said it was just crazy that this company would allow a 20-year-old with no income to be exposed to over $700,000 a debt he thought that was crazy but he admitted he

didn't know that much about options trading and probably shouldn't have been accepted into their

program to begin with and then he tells his family that he did want to live but unfortunately

“this was the only way he could get out of this problem without inflicting enormous financial”

penalties on his family and so he believed he was protecting his family when he took his life 24 hours later Robinhood sent Alex another email and it said oh that $730,000 debt that we said you owed that was a mistake you don't know anybody any money the next and final story of today's episode is called the Sailor's Diagnosis one morning in the summer of 1876 a doctor named Lewis Allard walked down the hallway

up hospital in Pappit Tahiti Tahiti is an island east of Australia Lewis was just about to step into his office when he heard the hospital doors open and he looked over to see a few policemen walking in carrying this unconscious man on a stretcher just from the looks of the way this guy was dressed doctor Allard could tell he was a sailor so a lot of doctor Allard's patients were sailors because Pappit was a port town so if people got sick or injured at sea and then docked in Pappit

“they would come to the hospital right there so doctor Allard walked over to the police and asked”

them what was going on with the sailor and the officers explained that this man's friends had found him on responsive that morning apparently after a very long night of drinking doctor Allard nodded and then motion for the police to follow him and bring this guy with him and he led them over to an exam room where he had them lay out the sailor on a table so the doctor Allard could look him over. The sailor appeared to be pretty young he was in his 20s maybe and he appeared very

healthy and strong but when the doctor checked for a pulse there was none and so after checking

a couple more times to make sure it wasn't just a very weak pulse the doctor ultimately concluded

that you know this sailor was not just unresponsive the sailor was dead and if Dr. Allard had to guess he very likely died from alcohol poisoning given his friends said you know the night before of the sky it had a really heavy night of drinking and here he was so alcohol poisoning. So this

“hospital had a policy for how to handle the death of foreign sailors and Tahiti basically the”

doctor who pronounced the sailor dead would then arrange for them to be buried in a public cemetery and in fact the hospital kept these cheap wooden coffins in the hospital morgue for this exact purpose and so Dr. Allard followed protocol and asked the police to go and form the sailor's friends of his death and then the doctor went to the hospital's morgue to arrange for a coffin. A few hours later Dr. Allard was back in his office when he heard a knock in his door. He told

over was to come in but when the door swung open the doctor was surprised that who he saw there. It was the four local gravediggers who he had called earlier to bury that sailor who had just died. Now generally speaking Dr. Allard had virtually no interactions with the gravediggers after he hired them. He would tell them to bury the body and they would do that and go on their separate way like there was no reason for the gravediggers to come back and check in with the doctor.

But as the doctors looking at these four guys trying to figure out what was going on here he quickly assessed that you know these guys weren't here just to chat. They were here because they looked spooked and before Dr. Allard could ask any questions about you know what was going on here. One of these gravediggers began to speak and then sort of a rapid and sort of anxious tone he said you know as we were carrying the coffin over to the graved side. It began to shake

like the person inside the coffin was alive and then we heard all these moaning sounds coming from inside of this nailed shut coffin and we all got so panicked that we just dropped the coffin and we ran here to tell you. Now Dr. Allard was pretty surprised by what he was hearing but he's also thinking that you know when he hired these four gravediggers they were at a local pub and they were drinking and so he's thinking to himself you know maybe something strange happened

you know with this coffin or much more likely these four guys are drunk and that what they've sort of said here is just some figment of their imagination that they're not professional they're just

uh I'm telling you that guy is dead okay this isn't a ghost scenario but if you're so worried

“about it why don't you go get a police officer have them come over and inspect the coffin you”

know make sure the person is really dead in there and then once they confirm that please do your job and bury this guy and so the gravediggers they kind of you know look down sort of awkwardly in there like okay you know we'll go do that and they turned and they left and then Dr. Allard got back to work and then a few hours later Dr. Allard heard another knock on his door and this time when the door opened it was a police officer and it was actually the officer that the four

gravediggers had gone and found at Dr. Allard's suggestion and he had gone over check the coffin and you know the coffin wasn't moving it wasn't making any weird sounds it was sealed shut there was nothing going on and so the officer eventually instructed the gravediggers you know to go ahead and bury it there's nothing going on here and so the gravediggers had at that point buried the coffin and that had been that and so the officer was here just to tell Dr. Allard

“that hey it's all good you know he's buried we can move on about a week later Dr. Allard”

had basically forgotten about this whole snafu around the coffin and whatever was going on with it

he was sort of onto the next thing and he was out like he normally was at night to go for a walk and the area that he liked to walk in the most was actually the cemetery not because he had some sort of morbid obsession but because you know it was often you know vacant there was nobody there and so it was a peaceful place to go walking and so you know he's strolling through the cemetery like usual and he's not seeing anybody like usual but as it began to get dark he was walking down

this one row of headstones and he looked up ahead and he could have sworn he saw somebody standing behind a tree with their bodies sort of half out of the tree half behind the tree sort of half obscured and he stopped and he's looking and the whole thing just sort of felt off like what is this person doing is that a person like what's going on here and so he's staring and as he's looking

“sure enough this dark silhouette steps out from behind this tree and the way they stepped out it”

was like they stepped out turned and faced Dr. Allard and just stood there clearly looking right at Dr. Allard but they're pretty far away from Dr. Allard like there's a good distance between them but immediately Dr. Allard felt threatened by this person or whatever it was he didn't even know if it was a person he couldn't tell if it was his mind playing tricks on a marnaud he's just staring at this thing that looked like it was looking at him and so Dr. Allard instinctively who's

now feeling a little bit frightened turned and just started walking away like he was done walking in the cemetery for the night and so he turns and he starts walking but then it's like the hairs in the back of his neck stood up he just felt like this person whoever it is they're still watching me and so he stopped after just a couple of steps and he turned back around and now this figure is clearly marching directly towards Dr. Allard they're almost running they're walking

real fast right towards Dr. Allard and so now Dr. Allard's terrified he knows there's something happening here why would this person be doing this like is it a person like what's happening here and so Dr. Allard he turns and starts to run and as he's running he hears this horrible high pitch scream echo across the entire cemetery and then he looks back one last time and he sees the face of this figure this person charging towards him and it's the same guy who died a week ago

the same sailor that he buried the one who presumably was moving around in the coffin the grape diggers for so scared of it was him and he jumped on Dr. Allard and began throttling him and Dr. Allard's on the ground staring at this ghastly face the scream is coming out of him he had no idea what was going on and then Dr. Allard just blacked out a few minutes later Dr. Allard came to and he sat up suddenly and he's looking around and there's nobody there it's just a dark vacant cemetery

no sign of the dead sailor's ghost or whatever or whoever it was they're gone and Dr. Allard's just sitting there as hearts racing still and he's telling himself like did that even just happen like it felt so real as neck was sore from you know what he felt was this guy this thing attacking him but at the same time he was so sure that the face that he had seen on this person was the dead sailor's face but how could that be he's dead he's buried how could that be and so ultimately

Dr. Allard he got up and he hustled back to his house but over the coming weeks Dr. Allard sort of spiraled into madness because it was like every day all the time he would see out of the corner

of his eye for a second like a glimpse of this dead sailor's ghost and it was always that face

that ghastly face that shrieking face looking right at him and he turned and you know the face would disappear but Dr. Allard he just felt like he was almost being haunted that's something it happened you know like that attack in the cemetery it had felt so real he felt like now this ghost was literally haunting him but he couldn't tell anyone I mean he's a doctor what's he gonna do tell people that a ghost is haunting him he didn't know what to do and so what he ended up doing after

several weeks is he just began staying home and laying in bed basically feigning illness to

as soon as he opened his eyes he would see this dead sailor's face you really was losing his mind

“and then eventually when Dr. Allard knew he had to stop basically staying in bed all day”

and go back to the hospital and sort of function in society again go back to work you know otherwise people were gonna start asking questions here like what's going on with you and he didn't have an answer you know when that time came and he knew it was sort of like okay go back to normal

or tell people about this well what Dr. Allard ultimately did is he decided to walk up to the

roof of his house and throw himself off he literally couldn't live with what he believed was this ghost haunting him 24/7 when the doctor's close friends found out that the doctor had taken his own life they immediately went to the police and said hey wait a minute like we think this has something to do with what he was dealing with over the past several weeks so the doctor despite not wanting to tell anybody about you know his haunting he did sort of begin to tell a couple of his close friends

now he was sort of subtle about it but he began telling people that he's like yeah just keep seeing

“that dead sailor's face everywhere I go I just keep seeing him now he didn't highlight the fact”

that he was basically losing his mind over it and thought it was literally a ghost but a couple of his close friends were aware that it almost seemed like you know Dr. Allard was effectively having a mental breakdown over this dead sailor and they did sort of connect that Dr. Allard

sort of felt haunted by this dead sailor and so said close friends ultimately went to the police

and said hey I know this is a stretch but the doctor kind of thought he was being haunted by this dead sailor before he died we think that has to do with why he took his own life and sort of amazingly the police the way they responded to this was okay we're gonna look into this we're gonna investigate the haunting so to speak and what they did is they exhumed the coffin of that dead sailor they didn't know what else to do they just decided they would do that and so they

raised the coffin out of the ground and they opened it up and they cannot believe what they see

“so it would turn out those four grave diggers had been totally justified in being scared about”

what they thought they heard and felt in that coffin when they were going to bury it because these sailor was not dead he was just so drunk that it felt like he was dead they couldn't feel his pulse Dr. Allard had been wrong these sailor was not dead he was totally alive and so as he was being carried over to the grave site to be buried he really was moving around inside the coffin and moaning because he was horribly hung over but totally alive and you know grappling with

the fact that he's now you know confined inside of this coffin he likely had no idea what was going on so you can imagine the types of sounds and things he might be doing and so the grave diggers they were right to be scared they did get a police officer the police officer came over and for whatever reason when he inspected the coffin you know he saw it was sealed there was no movement inside the coffin it was totally quiet so you know the sailor inside he just wasn't moving or

making any sound and so the police officer greenlit burying him so the living sailor inside the coffin is buried underground by these grave diggers and they go their separate ways afterwards but then that sailor wakes up again you know he begins thrashing around after being buried in the ground and he actually managed to break out of the coffin and climb out of the ground he's saved himself he literally you know survived being buried alive but he was furious at the doctor

who so cavalierly just decided he was dead and now go bury him and so he decided he would play a prank on the doctor to get back at him so what he did is he filled his coffin up with rocks and he sealed it back up and he rebarried it so nobody would know anything and then for the next week or so he just kind of hit out and didn't let anybody know that he was actually still alive and then after about a week he knew the doctor took his walks in that cemetery and so he hid

behind a tree in the cemetery and waited for the doctor to be alone making his walk and when he saw him it was the sailor fully alive in the flesh stepping out from behind the tree looking at the doctor that was him it really was the sailor and he really did run forward shrieking pretending to be

a ghost and he attacked Dr. Allard basically giving him the impression that his angry ghost was

attacking him and then after Dr. Allard passed out on the ground the sailor ran off but for Dr. Allard who fully believed that sailor was dead can you imagine what he thought when he saw you know the sailor attacking him and shrieking in the middle of the cemetery he fully believed that was the sailor's ghost and he had this totally real experience getting attacked by the ghost and so even though he survived the encounter it drove him mad he began seeing the dead sailor

the ghost everywhere he went and it eventually drove him to kill himself and so when the police opened up that coffin all they saw were all the rocks the sailor had left behind but following the

a quick note about our stories they are all based on true events but we sometimes use pseudonyms

“to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes”

the Mr. Ballon podcast strange dark and mysterious stories is hosted and executive produced by me

Mr. Ballon our head of writing is Evan Allen produced by Jeremy Bone and Coleucasio

“research in fact checking by Shelley Xu Samantha Van Housse Evan Beamer Abigail Shumway”

Camille Callahan Alex Paul Ben Fassiano research in fact checking supervision by Stevenier

audio editing and post-produced by Whitlicasio and Jordan Stittam production support by Antonio Manada and Delana Corley artwork by Jessica Klogst and Kiner theme song something wicked by Ross plugged in thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballon podcast and just a reminder every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballon podcast you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballon YouTube channel that very same day and trust me some of these stories you truly

“have to see to believe again my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballon if you want to listen”

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