On December 31, 1992, Sam Weaton’s father beat his mother to death with a broken whiskey bottle.

His parents hadn’t been arguing.  There hadn’t been any tension between them, or some inciting incident that set his father off.  One minute the man was pouring himself his nightly two fingers of whiskey, and the next he was swinging the bottle as hard as he could.

Sam would later say that he’d never forget the sound that the bottle made as it collided with his mother’s left temple.  It was a dull thunk, followed by a brief echo.  He had never heard that exact sound before, and he hasn’t since.

That noise was followed by the crunch of bone as his mother’s skull broke inward.  Next came the escaping hiss of air as she gasped.  Finally, there was the thud of her already lifeless body striking the kitchen floorboards.

It was a momentary symphony of death.  When the instruments fell silent, Sam no longer had a mother.

At the same moment that everything was crashing down around him, another murder was taking place three doors down the block.  Jeremy Thomas’ mother was using one of her disposable razors to slit the throats of both him and his older sister.

Despite him living so close, Sam didn’t know Jeremy all that well.  Jeremy was a year ahead of him in school.  They had played little league baseball together when they were younger, but they didn’t have much in common so they didn’t spend time together except during those games.

Across the street, Ginny Sanderson’s mother didn’t murder anyone.  Instead, she used the freezer door of the refrigerator to bash her own brains in while her daughter watched in horror.  The entire time she was doing so, she screamed loudly in French.  Ginny had been unaware that her mother spoke that particular language.

That night, at exactly 8:17pm, a portion of the population in roughly a two block radius of Porter’s Grove, Indiana simultaneously went horribly and violently insane.

By 8:25pm that same night, it was over.

Sometime around 8:20pm, Sam Weaton’s father finished clubbing his mother with the blood-splattered whiskey bottle and turned his attention to him.

Sam’s father was an older man.  He had married late in life to a woman over fifteen years his junior.  He never came right out and said it to his son, but Sam always had the feeling that his father hadn’t expected to ever get married.  That was until he met Sam’s mother.  Despite the age difference, it was like they had been born for each other.  He had fallen head over heels in love with her and proposed to her less than a year after they met.

Because he was older, Sam’s father wasn’t physically able to do many of the things with him that other fathers could with their sons.  The spirit was more than willing and in fact wished very much to, but the body wasn’t able.  The arthritis he suffered from made it difficult for him to do something as simple as play catch.

Sam never blamed him for his inability to run around and play.  Even from a young age Sam understood that it wasn’t his father’s fault.  In a way, he even came to appreciate the man’s age.  What his father lacked in athletic ability he more than made up for with stories from his life experiences and his fondness for classic adventure stories.  He passed that love along to Sam.

The man’s age ended up being what saved Sam that night.

When his father turned towards Sam, his right hand clutched around the neck of the bottle, Sam knew that it wasn’t his father.  Not really, not in any way that mattered.  The sharp intelligence and gentle spirit were gone from his eyes.  Whoever or whatever was looking at him was just some husk whose soul had been hollowed out and replaced with madness.

Sam’s father took one step forward before the bottle slipped from his grip.  Sam watched it fall downward in slow motion before it struck the wooden flooring.  He heard the glass crack, and dark brown liquid poured out from underneath the cap, but it still didn’t break.

His father’s hand curled into a claw, and its fingers scraped at the empty air.  His other hand moved to his chest.  His breath caught in his throat, and within seconds of his body hitting the floor next to his wife the heart attack had taken his life.

The only reason Sam’s father didn’t murder him was because the man’s heart gave out before he could do the deed.  It’s been nearly twenty-five years, and Sam still thinks about that almost every day.  How could he not?  How does someone possibly move on from a moment like that?

Sam has tried therapy.  He’s tried medication.  He’s tried burying it under enough liquor to drown a fish.  If there’s a cure for what ails him out there, he hasn’t found it yet.

I’ve spoken with some of the other survivors of that night.  They haven’t found that elusive cure, either.

Eight minutes.  That’s all it took for dozens of lives to be changed forever.  Eight… minutes.

My name is Brian Eddings, and you’re listening to Dead and Buried Crimes.

The Porter’s Grove massacre has been a subject of debate from the moment that it happened.  There are countless questions that have never been fully answered.  Why did it happen?  How did it happen?  What was the inciting incident?  There had to be one, right?  Dozens of people don’t just randomly go crazy at the exact same time.

The official statements provided by the authorities don’t provide many insights.  There don’t seem to be any facts, just a series of assumptions and hypotheses.  The general consensus from the various agencies is that terrible night was the result of a particularly violent case of mass hysteria.

That explanation doesn’t feel very satisfactory, does it?  It’s no wonder that many people have stated publicly that they believe the government is trying to hide something.  It’s the belief of many that the officials know more than they are saying.  A simple shrug and a statement that amounts to “We don’t know” can’t be the entire story.

As I dug deeper into what happened that night in Porter’s Grove, I got in contact with a number of the people that had issued these official reports.  I had expected there to be resistance to my inquiries, or at least that I’d have some difficulty getting people to speak with me.

To my surprise, almost everyone that I spoke with seemed eager to assist in any way that they could.  I went into the interviews prepared for almost anything.  I wasn’t prepared to come out of them convinced that no one that I talked to was lying.

While I appreciated the honesty, it also meant that these interviews were something of a dead end.  The people that had worked on the official reports had presented everything they knew in those reports.

The story would have ended there if not for pure dumb luck.  While doing research for a different episode, I found myself in communication with a local historian in the town of Hampton, Nebraska.  While he wasn’t able to provide much information on the topic I contacted him about, he did send over a series of documents detailing other strange events in the town’s history.

One of those events took place on July 8, 1974.  During a screening of The Man with the Golden Gun, a number of unrelated individuals attacked the other people there to see the movie.  The movie had been playing for roughly an hour when eight people began violently assaulting the other moviegoers around them.  Four people were killed and nearly a dozen others were injured.

Based on the point in the movie where the attacks began and when they ended, it was determined that the entire incident had lasted a total of eight minutes.

These reports had something that the Porter’s Grove ones did not: comments from the attackers themselves.  Each of them stated that they remembered everything leading up to the incident and everything after, but the eight minutes where they were brutally attacking everyone they could get their hands on was a complete blank.

Now that I knew that the length of time the event took was a shared detail, I was able to focus my research and find another event that fit the pattern.

This event occurred on February 16, 2004.  It took place in a more isolated area, but in a way that made it even more terrifying.

Dennis and Brianna Ingles were newlyweds, having been married just days earlier.  While many couples would have spent their honeymoon on a tropical island or taken a cruise, they had always been more outdoorsy and instead decided to rent a cabin at Yellowstone National Park.  It provided them with everything they wanted: access to hiking trails, new places to explore, and, of course, privacy.

Their second evening there, Brianna went to bed earlier than usual.  They had been hiking through the park all day, and the exhausting exercise had given her a migraine.  Dennis read a few more chapters of the book he had started their first day at Yellowstone before joining her.

At just after two in the morning, Dennis awoke to find that Brianna was no longer in bed next to him.  He assumed that she had gone to the bathroom, and he rolled over to go back to sleep.

He immediately returned to full consciousness as Brianna brought the fire poker down as hard as she could on his right ankle.

Brianna wasn’t a large woman.  She stood barely over five feet tall, and she weighed under a hundred and twenty pounds.  Because of this, the blow didn’t do as much damage as it could have.  It was still enough to crack bone, however, and it split the skin just above the foot.

More out of instinct than anything else, Dennis rolled off the far side of the bed before the second swing struck him.  Instead, it landed on the bed with a muffled thump.  With foam coming out of her mouth and rage written into every inch of her face, Brianna quickly followed him around the bed and attempted to bludgeon him again.

Dennis managed to get upright enough to wrestle the poker away from his wife.  Now disarmed, she immediately reached out with her hands to attempt to wrap her fingers around his throat.

Because of their size difference, Dennis was able to fight her off and pin her down on the floor.  Without hesitation, she sank her teeth deep into his shoulder.  No matter how hard he tried to pull away, she kept biting down.  Pushing as hard as he could, he finally forced her to release her grip.  Skin tore away and blood poured out of the wound.

Not sure what else to do, Dennis pulled the mattress down on top of Brianna and covered her with it, keeping her pinned to the floor as he pleaded with her to come to her senses.  He was careful not to push hard enough to suffocate her, but this compassion made it much more difficult.  Eventually, mercifully, she stopped her thrashing and called out her husband’s name.

When he removed the mattress, Brianna was staring up at him in fear and confusion.  She had no memory of attacking her husband.  From start to finish, her temporary insanity had lasted just eight minutes, but to Dennis it had seemed to go on forever.

He drove them both to the closest medical facility.  While his wounds were being treated, Brianna went through a battery of psychological tests to try to determine what had caused her to snap.  When she passed those tests and no signs of mental illness were detected, the determination was made that it hadn’t been a case of temporary insanity after all.  Instead, she was told that she had been going through a rare form of sleepwalking and hadn’t been in control of her actions.

If this was an isolated case, sleepwalking might sound like a perfectly acceptable diagnosis.  Brianna Ingles’ doctors were only able to work with the information that they had.  Eventually she was released and there have been no further incidents.  I was surprised to learn that she is still married to Dennis.  I can only imagine how much of a strain such an event is on a marriage.

—

[There is a long silent pause in the recording]

—

Normally when I put together these podcasts, I try to keep myself out of the narrative as much as possible.  I’ll drop in a personal opinion from time to time, yes, but I make it clear when that is happening.  I’d much rather be the vessel for the story rather than be a part of it.

In this case, though, through no desire of my own I find myself having been brought into the story.

I’m not sure how someone found out that I was looking into these particular events.  It wasn’t that I was trying to keep my interest a secret or anything along those lines.  When I contacted the involved parties I used my real name and was honest about wanting more information so that I could present it to my listeners.

One of the people that I had contacted either passed my interest along to another party, or that party learned of my inquiries some other way.  My contacts have all told me that they didn’t speak with anyone else about the matter, and I have no reason not to believe them.  Still, it’s possible one or more of them are lying to me.  I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a possibility.

The other possibility, the one that I believe to be both more likely and more frightening, is that my research raised some red flags and led to me being monitored by… someone.  I don’t know this person’s identity, but simply to have something to refer to that person as I’ve taken to calling them X.

Not a very creative moniker, I admit, but appropriate given my lack of information about the person.

Two days after speaking with Dennis Ingles, I received my first email from X.  All of my communication with the people involved in the eight minute events had been done through the podcast’s email account.  X’s email, however, came to my private account, one that I only give to friends and family.

Thinking back on it, I’m convinced that this was a flex, a way to impress on me that X knew more about me than they should.

The email was titled ‘Eight Minutes’, and there wasn’t anything written in the body itself.  Even the From field was blank, which I didn’t know was possible.  There were only a pair of attachments.

The first attachment was a simple list of twelve items.  Each of those items consisted of a date, a time window of eight minutes, and a location.  All three of the events that I had discovered independently were on this list.

I stared at the list for a long time, trying to wrap my mind around the implications.  Twelve events over a fifty year period, with the most recent of them occurring in May of last year.  All of them on American soil.

It seemed impossible.  How could that possibly be the case?  Surely the existence of these events would be common knowledge if there had been that many.

The second email was a series of spreadsheets that were heavily redacted.  Each sheet was labeled with the name of one of the towns on the list of events.  It was difficult to tell because of the redacting, but they appeared to be a listing of personnel assignments for some unnamed agency.

I had barely finished reading through the spreadsheets when my cellphone rang.  When I checked it, I saw that the call was from an unknown caller.

I’m not ashamed to say that I was feeling pretty freaked out at this point.  I seriously considered ignoring the call and deleting the email.  There was obviously something going on that went well beyond what I was comfortable with.

My curiosity won out over my apprehension, however.  Taking a deep breath, I answered my phone.

The voice on the other end of the call was so distorted that it could have been either male or female.  It instructed me to remain silent, and stated that it would not answer any questions.  Before I could even think about responding, it continued on.

On July 16, 1945, the United States performed the first nuclear weapon test a little over 200 miles outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico.  The testing of this plutonium implosion device was code named Trinity, and the officials responsible for the test were more than satisfied by the results.  The detonation was so powerful that it turned the sand and asphalt into green glass.

As this was the first test of its kind, there was no way to know what other effects the detonation would have.  The radiation levels were higher than expected, for example, and the explosion area was larger than the initial prediction.

Eight days after the detonation, in a small town called Christensen, New Mexico, the first eight minute event occurred.  Six people attending a church baseball game went into a psychotic rage and began to attack both the other players and the people watching the game.  It resulted in three deaths and at least a dozen people hospitalized.

Due to the closeness of the event to the bomb test, both in time and proximity, the government responded by sending in representatives from a number of different agencies to investigate any possible connection.  This was done without the knowledge of the residents of Christensen.

The government agents were able to determine that the event and the bomb test were indeed related to one another.  X didn’t give me any specific details as to how it happened, but he told me that the detonation of a nuclear device had inadvertently caused a temporary change in the area’s electromagnetic field.  In a small section of that area, where the change happened to be exactly what it needed to be, it would cause a catastrophic interaction with certain individuals whose brains’ electrical impulses happened to be firing in exactly the right way.

In other words, some people’s brains would short circuit for a small amount of time, causing uncontrollable rage and bloodlust to take over.  After further investigation, the government agents found that it would take the human brain eight minutes to reset.

A flood of questions came to mind, and without thinking I attempted to ask one when X paused to take a breath.  Instead of allowing me to proceed or reminding me that I was told I wouldn’t be able to ask questions, they instead continued on as if they didn’t even hear me.

Although the result hadn’t been expected, the government welcomed it.  Officials immediately saw the potential in it.  If they could find a way to replicate the change in the electromagnetic field and control where that change happened, it could be a potent weapon.  Plant a device inside of an enemy town or base, turn it on, and let the people inside tear themselves apart.

Of course, that was easier said than done.  Duplicating a side effect of a nuclear detonation wasn’t a simple process, especially considering the very first of those detonations had just happened.  It would be a long and difficult process, and even if it was indeed possible to recreate the results, those results would also need to be improved upon.  The government officials didn’t want just some of the people in the targeted area affected.  They wanted them all to be.

That was the beginning of an ongoing series of experiments performed by the United States government on its own population.  Twelve experiments, to be precise, performed between 1945 and 2023.  According to X, a different device was used during each experiment, with each iteration improving on the last.  The experiments are still ongoing, meaning that there are more planned for the future.

WIth that, X ended the call.

That call took place two weeks ago.  Right up until the moment that I pressed the Record button, I debated whether or not to release this episode into the wild.  I don’t know if I can trust X, or if it’s just someone screwing around with me, but if what they say is true, this is way above my pay grade.

Ultimately, I decided that it was best to put everything that I have together and present it to you listeners to come to your own decisions.  If everything X has told me is a hoax, it still adds an interesting twist to the three eight minute events that I was able to verify before they contacted me.  I’ve tried to verify the other nine events on X’s list but haven’t been able to one way or another.

If what X is telling me is true, though… that’s an entirely different thing.  It would mean that our own government is using us as guinea pigs in a horrible experiment designed specifically to drive people into a state of violent insanity.  It would explain why I haven’t been able to prove or disprove the other events on X’s list.  The government would be only testing in places where it knew that it could tightly control the narrative.

I wish that I had more answers for you, listeners.  Maybe someday I will.  What I’ve laid out for you today is all the information that I have at this moment, though.  If someone out there knows more, please, get in touch with me.  This is one of those stories that I don’t think that I’ll be able to let go.

Thank you for listening to the Dead and Buried Crimes podcast.  I’m Brian Eddings, and as always, stay safe out there.