Find other great podcasts like this one at podmoth.network. Hey podcast lovers, my name is Haley and I run the Doe Identify podcast. I have been passionate about helping the unidentified get their names back. Ever since I found out I lived within miles of where Sherry and Jarvis, formerly known as the Walker County Jane Doe was found. In my podcast, I told the stories and provide information about unidentified people in hopes of reaching their loved ones and getting their names back.
So come join me and help me advocate for these people. You never know, you could recognize someone's story. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Cryptic Cocktail Party, a show where we have a few drinks, share a few laughs, take a dive into the unknown. I'm your host Dave. And today I'm joined by friend of the show, Nathy Groulon. I don't know how to pronounce your last name. Yon. Okay. So I was close. Yeah, it's close. How you doing? I'm good. How about you?
Um, I'm, my body is slowly failing me. I think it's systematically shutting down organ by organ. Uh, but besides that I'm doing just fine. So it's great. Yeah. I'm excited to have you on. Are you excited? I'm very excited. Yeah. Would you say that you're like a cryptids paranormal type person or? Hmm. I would say I like listening to the stories. Okay. Um, if I'm like a solid believer of like book, Bigfoot, maybe not there yet, but. All right.
So yeah, I mean, the stories really are the best part. I mean, it doesn't matter if they're true or not. They're just good stories. Yes. In my opinion. All right. So I chose for you one of the more weirder ones because I thought it'd be just fun to tell the story. I know you, you told Ali, my wife, that you wanted me to do the, was the Ohio green man, which is basically just Bigfoot, but green kind of, or red. I don't know. I thought he was red. I don't fucking know. He's like red.
All Bigfoots are the same. Oh God. All right. Um, all right. Second question, have you ever been to the Pacific Northwest? No. Like Oregon, Washington, nothing, nothing like that. That been just Nevada. That's the farthest to West open. That's that's West enough, I guess. All right. So today we're going to be going to Bremerton, Washington. It's located on the Kitsap peninsula.
Uh, it boasts a population of roughly 44,000 people and is home to, uh, such attractions as the Bremerton bug museum, which one reviewer on TripAdvisor gave two stars because there was quote, very few reptiles, uh, there's also the Aurora Valentine, Eddie puppet museum, which sounds like an absolute nightmare, but it's also home to the Puget sound Naval shipyard. See because of Brem, uh, Bremerton being surrounded by water on three sides, it's on a peninsula.
Uh, it was a perfect place for the Navy to build repair and dock warships. Uh, during the peak of world war two, Bremerton pretty much became like a boom town with his population jumping from just 10,000 people before the war to 80,000 during the war due to the demand for shipbuilding and all the other things required for like the Pacific war effort happening at the time.
Uh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously gave a speech there in 1944 and apparently had a heart attack while delivering the speech and didn't even flinch. He just muscled through the entire 35 minute speech and then just like, that's it done just in this left. Wow. Yeah. Uh, so none of this is technically important to the story that I'm going to tell you today, just, I think it's good to give some backstory of the place we'll be talking about just for like context.
And also, uh, it's to pad the runtime because this is probably going to be a shorter episode, but it is kind of important information because our story takes place just after the war, but still during the time when it was like a bustling hub of activity, uh, and that is in 1948, when a young woman named Virginia staples came face to face with a humanoid shrimp known only as the giant shrimp in the laundry room or as the locals call them, shrimpy. Okay. Where are we at, Nathie?
How are you feeling? This is very interesting. Um, questioning whether she was sober. Okay. Maybe. Maybe I'm sure you regret coming on now, but, uh, no, no, this is quality. This is quality. This is, I told you it's a good one. Now there's only one account of Virginia's story.
And that came in the form of a transcript from a recorded phone message that Virginia had left for paranormal investigator, Mark Chorvinsky, RIP, uh, who published the transcript in issue six of strange magazine in the 90s under a section called first person. Uh, this section of the magazine includes unverified accounts of people coming in contact with like cryptids, aliens, UFOs, that kind of stuff.
The introduction to this part of the magazine starts out with quote, the following are alleged firsthand experiences with the stranger side of life. None of the following extraordinary experiences have been investigated. They are reproduced here as raw data to be analyzed by some and enjoyed by others. End quote. So, you know, take all of this with a grain of salt, which I was assuming you were probably going to, to begin with, but you know, wait, so wait, was that it?
That's the end of the story. Oh God, no. And okay. I'm very parched. This ended quickly. No. Oh my gosh. So the story goes that in 1948, Virginia staples, Virginia staples, uh, decided it was a good day as any to head down to the basement to do a load of laundry. She said that the apartment building where she lives had a gigantically huge basement where the housing manager kept a washing machine, a wash tub and a clothesline for the tenants.
She also noted that in the basement, there were massive holes in the walls. Apparently. Yeah, I don't know. Apparently the apartment buildings on the street were like super close together and they all had basements. And I guess these holes were kind of like passageways between the different basements, which I don't know if that's an actual thing that has to be a thing somewhere. Uh, it was also rumored by her apartment manager that these tunnels led to the ocean.
I assume he meant like to a beach and not just open water. So after Virginia finished washing her clothes and getting them hung on the line, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching her. She shook it off.
She shook it off at first and continued hanging her clothes because I mean, we've all, I felt like that in basements before when you're alone and you just like, you definitely, it's like when you finish being in the basement and you go to go up the stairs and you turn the light off and you like scurry up the stairs a little faster because a ghost might get you. You know, yes, I've been there. That's probably what she was feeling.
But the feeling persisted and she went on to say in the transcript, quote, it was such a creepy feeling. I finally turned around and looked towards the back of the basement and froze. I couldn't move. End quote. Now what she saw standing there in one of the holes in the wall was a five foot tall creature that she described as having bright orange colored body, little spidery thin legs and antenna on its head that kept moving back and forth and in
and out. How you feel in that face made it seem like you're not okay with this. How many antennas? How many? It's just, I'm assuming two. I'm assuming like shrimp, like shrimp eye antenna things. Now after staring, it's not, it's not good. It's not ideal. If I was in my basement doing laundry and I saw something like that, I'd lose my shit. I'd be like, okay, what chemicals are in this laundry detergent? She's just tripping balls on like bleach fumes.
She said I put the bleach with the detergent. Oh no. She accidentally mixed like bleach and ammonia and made like mustard gas. She's just gassing herself at this point. Yes. Oh man. That's. Now after staring each other down for what I'm assuming is like a forever, apparently the creature started towards Virginia. So she got the hell out of there.
Just fucking hoofed it out of the basement and back to her apartment where she immediately packed all of her belongings and moved to her cousins in Seattle, which I mean, yeah, dude, get the fuck out of there. How would you react in that situation? I wouldn't live there anymore. I think it was reasonable because like, first of all, why does a basement have holes all over the place? You know, like, and then what's, what constitutes as a whole?
Is it just like a nice hole in the wall or is like a punch? See, I would, in my head, I was thinking like an arch, like an arch passageway, but she keeps calling it a hole, but it's clearly big enough to see for, it's big enough for a five foot tall shrimp man to screw you through. You know what I mean? Yeah. Ew. Oh, I'm sorry. Ew. Yeah, I would, I would move because if you see a big shrimp and holes in the wall, as one does, you're like, okay, gotta go.
And then what, what, I wonder like why it approached her like, oh, a human. Yeah, I don't know, man. It's yeah, she did good running. Yeah. Good point, point one, Virginia. But even this thing, even though this thing pretty much like forced her from her home, her curiosity regarding this giant shrimp man, chimera thing kind of got the best of her. So she decided she was going to do a little digging.
She said, quote, I went to an aquarium to see if I could see anything that looks like what it was. And the only thing that I could find that looked like anything like it was, was this little tiny shrimp, but it just doesn't make sense. End quote. Yeah. No, it doesn't make sense, Virginia. God damn it. Shoot. Still, it doesn't make sense. Hmm. Shrimp man. This is just, I, I'm a speechless. I don't know. I was expecting something that's like, oh, like a goblin or, but a shrimp man that beats it.
It's pretty goblin ask. I mean, it's not, Yeah. I wonder what color it was. She said it was bright orange, but I mean, are shrimp naturally bright? I feel like they're only that color after you cook them. I think they are. They are. Without cooking them. Are they? I have, but they're like this size though. I didn't do any research on, on shrimp before this. So I'm not really. Shrimpology. Yeah. I wasn't, I wasn't going to delve down that right. Well, I'm sure it's a whole fucking thing.
But yeah, after years of being plagued with horrible nightmares, Virginia finally worked up the courage to go visit Bremerton again and her old apartment on Danny street. But according to her message, the naval operation there had grown so much that the apartment building had been torn down, leaving her unable to try and get closure on this mystery that has haunted her for years. And Nathy, that is the story of the giant shrimp in the laundry room.
Okay. Well, but it's interesting that you say the Navy kind of like took it over. What if they knew what that creature was and they were like, gotta clean this up. It probably, that could be, I mean, I mean, the army and the U S government does have some weird fucked up shit. I'm assuming. I have no idea, but who's the same? They say aliens exist already. Yeah, it was, it was during the world war two.
So I mean, maybe they were doing some weird fucked up like Cronenberg experiments and they actually made a shrimp human hybrid. Like they're trying to make super soldiers that could go into the water. That's my theory. And one of them just have to get one of them got loose and they're like, fuck dude, we have to cover this up. Just demolish the whole block. Yeah, just like a, just like a four by four block radius, just fucking gone. They're like, no, we had to make, oh my goodness.
Now the one thing about this story is that there was some dude who ended up trying to do like some digging into it as far as like trying to find Virginia and all that stuff. She would have to be like in her nineties now if she's not dead. You know what I mean? But they did find evidence that there is a Virginia living in Seattle, but her phone number is disconnected and she wasn't returning any letters.
The other thing too is that someone did some digging in Denny street where the original apartment building was apparently hasn't changed. It's been the same since the forties and none of the houses are connected by tunnels or even close enough where it makes sense, let alone the fact that it's like super inland in Bremerton. So there's no way it could even lead to the ocean unless that's just what they want us to think. And in reality, the Navy created super soldiers and then bombed the area.
What are you thinking right now? I don't know what this is. I'm stumped. But if you do research now of that kind of the architecture there, it'll be completely different and wouldn't be close. So true. I just don't understand whether it be tunnels leading from building to building to building unless that's like a weird northwest thing. I have no idea. I mean, you can compare it to, I guess, Pennsylvania row homes where they like just stack next to each other.
Maybe like you have neighbors and they just like cut it a hole between the houses. Well, I guess the houses like the apartments were built in like the thirties and forties according to what I found out. But I still don't know. I don't know. But anyways, Nathy, that was the story. It's a shorter episode today, but I just had to do the story because it was so good. Thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything you want people to like follow your Instagram or anything?
Or do you have anything you want to plug? I guess my Instagram is N-E-T-H-Y. I don't know my Instagram. Never mind. I'll just stop it there. I'll find it. You can search me, but my name, I totally forgot it just now. Is it underscore? No underscore. You know, never mind. I'll figure it out. All right. And if you want to follow us on Instagram, it's at Cryptic Cocktail. Follow me on TikTok at Cryptic Cocktail Party. Also, we just launched a Patreon where you can support the show.
It's five dollars a month. I'm going to be doing some cool bonus stuff. And then also, I think that's it. Oh, I wanted to give a shout out to Mark for subscribing to the Patreon. You're the real one. And with that, Nathalie, do you want to say goodbye to everyone? Goodbye, everyone. And thanks for having me.