While on their usual weekend drive to the family home in Door County, Wisconsin, Susan and John suddenly find themselves engulfed by a mysterious and blinding light. Check out our Merch Follow us on: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter For business inquiries contact: [email protected] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at [email protected] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What mysterious event occurred during the drive to Door County?
Thank you.
Chapter 2: Who is Zoe and what is her connection to the story?
Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. A while back, we got an email from a girl named Zoe, who is from Chicago, and she emailed saying that nearly 30 years ago, her parents had a crazy experience while driving to their family's cabin in northern Wisconsin. Zoe's parents never spoke about this event, and she only found out about it from her dad when she was much older.
Her mom, on the other hand, refused to talk about this incident and would get very upset whenever Zoe brought it up. Of course, this only made Zoe and myself even more curious to speak to her mom and find out what exactly happened to her on this night almost 30 years ago. Eventually, Zoe's mom ended up agreeing to speak to me about it
I'm pretty sure that is mostly due to Zoe nagging her about it, so thank you to Zoe for that. And when I ended up hearing about this from her mom, I found the whole thing to be very bizarre. It takes place all the way back when her parents just started dating, and they were heading out for the weekend to make a drive that was very familiar to them.
driving from the suburbs of Chicago out to Door County, Wisconsin. A drive that was normally very uneventful and routine for them, but this time, things were different. This is episode 125. The title is The Light of Door County, and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello? Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science you can't argue with.
I'm worried about all the science. Up in the sky.
It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die. It's limbs were just like wrong.
Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute.
My name is Susan. I'm from Libertyville, Illinois in the Midwest. I'm 55 years old. I work at a school and have been for 25 years, nice little private school. And that's pretty much all about me. I'm divorced. I'm a mother of three children. I live alone with my three pets and my college students when they're home. Back when I was in my 20s, I was dating a guy from high school.
We ended up getting married. His parents had a cabin in Door County that we would travel to all the time whenever we could, especially before they retired there. It was kind of our getaway, especially before we lived together and before we were married. So it was something that we did. We were used to our trip. We would go Friday night. Spend the weekend, drive home Sunday.
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Chapter 3: What was Susan and John's usual routine for traveling to Door County?
You'd rent a cabin, water sports, hiking, really good breakfast places, little quaint shopping places. It was probably just a regular, we're going up to Door County this weekend. Nothing special. Like I said, it was a habit of ours. It was a pattern. We always went to Door County for the weekend. So we packed up Friday night, hit the road after work. So we probably left around five or six.
So it would be dark for some of our trip. We always stopped for dinner in one of the quaint little towns, towns like Egg Harbor and little places like that. It's about a four-hour drive. We would have... Not lived together yet. I don't think we lived together. So he would have come and picked me up from my parents' house. Oh, it would have been an old MX-6, a Mazda.
It would have been John's mom's car that he had passed, you know, she had passed down to him. So a little two-door sedan. I do think we probably would have left around five or six after work. We would have hit the road before it got dark just because we wouldn't have wanted the whole trip in the dark. But then excited, excited to go have dinner and and spend the weekend alone in Door County.
So it isn't the best drive, the best road, I guess, when you go to Door County. And once you get through Milwaukee, the road gets really rough and just really loud. So I'm sure we have the music up very loud just because you think you have a flat tire when you're driving down this road. It's just so badly, the concrete on it, it's not paved. It's weird. So we're driving, um,
hating the road that we're on, I'm sure, with the music up loud, looking forward to stopping at Connie's Diner to have their fabulous soup and then heading the rest of our way, you know, to the cabin for the night. And usually when we would get there at night, sometimes we would run to the grocery store, rent a movie. At that point, you rented movies. But that didn't happen.
So we're driving and we finally stopped for dinner. It's the cutest little diner where you can sit at the counter or maybe three tables. The soups were great. And sometimes we'd have a burger then with it. But that would be our dinner stop for the night. And then after filling our bellies, we would get back in the car.
And usually there's a gas station, too, that at that point, if we had to stop and fill up, we would stop and fill up there just because it was one that would have the snacks. And there are these they're called cow tails that I always have to get. So after the gas station and we'd gotten our snacks, I'm sure I was eating one of my cow tails.
And at this part, it is just a two-lane highway that we're driving on. The cars come straight at you. There's no median or anything in between. You're going... Speed limit's probably 45, but then you'll hit a stop area where there's a little small town. It'll drop down to 15. So we knew that these little towns were coming. It was our usual ride. There's no streetlights.
You can't even tell if there's a house or a farm right off the road unless their house lights are on. So pitch black. It is just a drive that we we've taken. So we weren't nervous, maybe looking out for deer, but just cruising along, enjoying ourselves. Music still up. So we were driving along and I don't remember if we passed the power plant yet or not.
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Chapter 4: What strange light did Susan and John encounter on their drive?
from what I remember the night before, if we were in, like I knew where we were, the Menards commercial was playing on the TV, which neither of us liked because of the save big money at Menards. It was just old and corny and we didn't like it.
But that was the first thing that we woke up to that helped us realize we were in Wisconsin and we had made it to Door County hearing the Menards commercial. We didn't know when we woke up, we were both surprised that we were there. I think that's when we were both like, how did we get here? I'm on the couch and John's on the chair next to the couch. I mean, I was sitting, I wasn't sleeping.
Like I wasn't laying. I do remember waking up in a sitting position. It didn't feel like any time had passed, which was, but it was bright outside. Like it was the light from outside. I think that woke us up and the TV and, We both were wearing what we had traveled in. So we didn't change. And yet we weren't tired.
I think that was another thing we were kind of weird about, like, why aren't we tired if we had been up all night sort of thing, do you know? But it was weird. John had woken up at the same time I woke up. I mean, I just remember both of us just looking at each other and being like, what happened? How did we get here? And we just kind of went over what happened, first of all. And I think...
John's first question to me was, do you remember crossing over the highway? And I don't. And then we realized we don't even know, like, where's the car? Where's our stuff? We checked the time. It was probably nine o'clock in the morning. A lot of time had passed. We don't remember any of that at all. And that's when we started worrying about the car. Just because we don't remember...
pulling it in the driveway, unloading our stuff. And it was, the car was in the garage and our stuff was inside, not up in the bedroom where it would be where we would carry it, but right inside the door. Like we had just gotten there. I was really scared and really freaked out. Like once we realized the car was in the driveway and our stuff was inside, I was freaked out.
We both looked at each other and tried to remember really hard how we got there and then talked about stopping in the road. Like, you remember stopping in the road. And I think I acknowledged, yes, I remember stopping in the road and the light, but I did not want to talk about it. I did not want to acknowledge that it actually happened. I didn't want to write it down. Do you know?
I've never told anyone in my family even. We never talked about it again. I wanted to black it out like it didn't happen. I just, I remember looking at John and just saying, we're never going to talk about this. I don't ever want to talk about this. And he kind of agreed and was just like, okay, let's go to breakfast. Our regular breakfast spot was Piggly Wiggly right in Sturgeon Bay.
And we got up and we went to breakfast. I can't imagine what anybody else at Piggly Wiggly thought because I doubt we talked at I think we were just in shock. There's a whole night that I don't know what happened to us. I don't know how we got home, how our bags got inside. I don't know any of that. I don't know why I fell asleep on the couch. I don't remember any of that.
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Chapter 5: What happened when the light enveloped their car?
Something very snake-like lifted its head out of the water.
Hosted by me, your guide, Derek Hayes. Somehow I lost eight whole hours. Listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
If someone had told Charles and Melanie that after their Tinder match, they would start a channel with crazy tasks together. So really crazy. Spend five days on a lonely island, crawl down a zip line on a belt, crack one million views, climb a wall with a lot of buttons and jump a parachute in Egypt? The two would never have believed that. But that's the thing with Tinder.
It takes you to places you would never have expected. Wherever it takes you. It starts with a swipe. Tinder.
So, after talking to Susan and hearing her version of events, I obviously wanted to speak to her now ex-husband, John, aka Zoe's dad, just to see if he had any additional information about the night. His version of the story was pretty much the same, but I did notice one big difference in his recollection in terms of where they woke up in the morning.
I was a little concerned when I first heard this, thinking it might be an issue that they remembered things completely differently. But as I continued to listen to John explain things, I realized that... Their stories actually did not conflict with each other.
It just turns out that John woke up somewhere completely different from Susan quite some time before she woke up and ended up in the same room with her by the time she woke up. I don't think she ever even knew this until now. For me, it added an entire new spin on that part of the story, and I thought it was so interesting. So here is the conversation that I had with John.
I'm John Murphy from Chicago. I think I'm 55. We had just gotten married. We were on our way to spend the weekend together in Door County, Wisconsin. But when we were driving... It's just dark farmland. There's no lights. And that's when we noticed way off in the distance, a tiny little light.
And I remember sort of talking about it and it kind of kept getting closer, but it looked like, I thought it was just maybe a truck 50 miles up the road or 10 miles or whatever my sight of vision is. And it kept getting closer and closer until it looked like an, like an oncoming headlight of a freight train. like coming right at us until it was literally right in front of us.
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Chapter 6: What were Susan and John's memories after the encounter?
And I'm like, yeah, you're right. So I don't know if she woke up and I just said, come on, let's go to breakfast. Or if like, like two zombies, we just, she woke up and I just, we walked to the car and the, Normal thing to do is just go out to breakfast when you're in Door County. There's not a whole lot to do there except eat and have fun. And I just could tell she didn't want to talk about it.
But when I finally brought it up, that's when she made it clear that, yes, it did happen, but let's never talk about it again. And of course... Every few months I would like tease her a little bit just to get her reaction. And I think I just, we both just forgot about it and never really discussed it again.
But when Zoe got older, I remember telling her the story maybe when she was seven, eight or nine. And that's kind of when me and Susan started talking about it again. I'm sure the kids asked her about it and stuff when I wasn't around. If I had to say in my gut what that light was, my gut and my brain is telling me that that light was something, something not from this planet.
I don't know why it came at us. I don't know what it did with us. I don't know why it took us, but it did something with us. And yeah, no memory of any sort of impact or crash. I just remember for some reason as clear as a bell, waking up on that down comforter with all my clothes on the next day.
What scares me most is the lost time. and just wondering, do you know, I don't, I don't know if I let myself really go crazy about it, wondering if, you know, if there was an alien abduction of some sort, if I was tested on, if is there possibly part of me somewhere else that's not here is just, that's what scares me the most. I think I love my kids. I love my family.
I, I want to be with my kids and family. I, The thought of, I don't know, sometimes I can go down into the deep webs where, you know, they say it's hereditary, abductions are hereditary. And then I wonder, should I talk to my family about it? Has anything like this happened to my siblings or my parents? But I think it would be too weird for them. They'd think I was crazy.
So it's not anything I ever felt comfortable bringing up with my siblings or my parents. I mean, it wasn't like I forgot 10 minutes. We're talking 10, 12 hours that I have no memory of. None at all. Sometimes I get scared. I live alone now. So something could happen to me in the middle of the night and I would never remember and no one would know.
So I do often wonder if it's happened again and I just don't know that it's happened again because I'd be in my bed sleeping and wake up in my bed so I wouldn't know. So that I get scared about, that maybe it wasn't just a one-time thing. But that's when I let my thoughts get creepy, I guess. I try not to go there.
Okay, thank you so much to Susan and John for speaking to me. First of all, I thought it was wild how John's version of that night ended up changing things a little bit. Like I said, at first I was a little concerned when they had different versions that they were recalling, which does happen sometimes. I mean, this is a 30-year-old memory that's normal, but it can also be an issue. However...
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