Episode 221: The Haunted Hallway & Joseph D. Ball aka The Alligator Man

This week on Another F*cking Horror Podcast, Monique and Amy officially embrace spooky season with a haunted hospital basement, a Texas bar owner with a backyard full of alligators and enough deeply questionable decisions to make “just keep walking and don’t look back” feel like solid life advice. First, Monique takes us down to Minus Two, the mortuary level of a hospital in Northern England where a porter named Ray has spent more than two decades transporting bodies through a long, windowless basement corridor. Older staff have one very specific rule: never whistle on the way to the mortuary. Ray never did, but that apparently didn’t stop something from showing up anyway. One night, the lights change, the temperature drops, his gurney suddenly becomes impossible to push and he hears breathing right beside him. Because apparently transporting dead bodies alone at night wasn’t unsettling enough already. Then Amy heads to 1930s Elmendorf, Texas, for the story of Joseph D. Ball, a World War I veteran, bootlegger and owner of the Sociable Inn. And because a regular Texas saloon apparently wasn’t enough of a business model, Joe kept a pool of live alligators behind the bar and entertained customers by feeding them live animals. Then women connected to Joe started disappearing. After police finally came asking questions, Joe took his own life, and the investigation that followed uncovered the murders of Minnie Gotthardt and Hazel Brown. But if you’ve heard the legend of the “Alligator Man” who murdered women and fed their bodies to his gators, things get complicated. Only two murders were confirmed, several supposedly missing women were later found alive and no human remains were discovered in the alligator pond. Over the years, pulp magazines, rumors and increasingly fucked up retellings turned an already horrifying true crime case into something even more sensational. Because apparently two murdered women, a bloody axe and five backyard alligators weren’t enough for people. So, yes. This one has haunted hospital corridors, mortuary superstitions, disembodied breathing, murder, alligators, Depression era Texas chaos and the very important reminder that if an older hospital employee tells you not to whistle in the mortuary, maybe just fucking listen. Watch On ⁠YouTube!⁠ Join Our ⁠⁠Patreon For Uncensored Video Episodes! Check Out Our ⁠⁠Website!⁠⁠ Follow Us On ⁠⁠Instagram!