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Your support goes a long way to keep this podcast going and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. He was drawing us away from civilization. He got more and more and more insistent. That's when he grabbed my younger friend. It happened so quickly that guy just disappeared. From HV Studio, this is unnerved. Welcome back to the Unnerved Podcast. It's where normal people share their abnormal stories, and if you enjoy true stories of the strange and terrifying, then
you're in the right place. I'm your host, Chris Fricke. Today's episode is a little different than usual. The story you're about to hear is from an upcoming podcast called The Basement Tapes. Last year, I connected with a creator named Nick Usher, who was in the process of producing a similar podcast. He shared some recordings with me and I really enjoyed listening to them. Nick and the storyteller you're about to hear were both kind enough to let me share a story with you today.
Give you a little taste of his upcoming podcast. In today's story, Samantha recalls A terrifying encounter she had with her friends in Mauston, WI in September of 1994. What seemed to be a perfect day in a small town would soon turn into a desperate attempt to escape a stranger's grasp. This. It's her story. So I grew up in a very small town. The population was about 3000. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone was, you know, very close knit, a small high school. My graduating class was about
100 people. My parents worked in like a factory and around town. My my mom owned a gas station on the outside of town. It was very quintessential growing up. The same person that you went to kindergarten with, you graduated next to them. So if your name started with an M, you graduated right next to your best friend because their name started with an N So me and my best friend were 14. Her parents were out of town.
She was staying with me and I lived kind of on the outside of town, right at the very edge of where residential houses kind of stopped. And past that was just a very rural area. There was a river. So we walked about two miles to get to the midsection of town. And then we met up with a friend of ours who was 13. So she was a little bit younger than us. And that's what we did. When we, you know, in a small town like that, we just, you walked around. There was nothing to do in our town.
There weren't any bowling alleys. There wasn't like a movie theater. There was nothing really to do except you ride your bike or you walk around. So we were walking to McDonald's, which was very far away from the residential part of town. It was out near the Interstate where, you know, lots of transients get off and they, you know, get gas up and they get fast food and then they get back on the Interstate and they get out of town. But that's where we were going was to McDonald's.
Our plan was we were going to walk from my house to McDonald's. We were going to get, you know, lunch or whatever, and then we might have walked to a store and buy some CDs. It was kind of a warm day. We were walking and we got to this part of town where there's a large river that goes through the town and there's a a bridge that goes over the river and you have to, you know, drive over it, walk over it. And while we were walking over, there was a man. It was not a man that we knew
who's older. He had a baseball cap on. He was just wearing like an oversized T-shirt and and some athletic shorts and white tennis shoes. And he he seemed like he had a lot of things that he was carrying. He didn't stand out in any other way except for having all of the bags. He had a lot of shopping bags, and for a small town we didn't have a lot of shopping places. So it seemed out of sorts that
he had all of these things. And I remember he had like a foot Locker bag, and we definitely didn't have a foot Locker in the small town that I grew up in. He was asking for directions and he looked lost. He looked out of place for one and he was standing on the side of the bridge. And so that was initially, you know, you just try to be helpful. This guy didn't know where he needed to be and he was asking for directions. But I do remember him asking
many, many questions. It was question after question and and not congruent, like they didn't go together. It was just a ploy to keep us engaged, you know, He kept asking questions and stepping away from us and stepping further down the hill using a quieter voice. So we had to, you know, get closer to him to hear him. It was all very calculated in the moment. We didn't know that it was calculated, but it was. In hindsight, you can tell what he was doing.
He was drawing us away from the Main Street. He was drawing us further and further away from civilization. So eventually we had shifted from being on the sidewalk to being, well, off the sidewalk. And we were out of view of the, you know, passing traffic. Eventually he was like, oh, I'm a photographer. I need to, I need to take your picture. You guys are so beautiful. Would you like to take your picture? And that was a little off putting at that point.
We're kind of like, Oh no, I don't think this is OK. I think we need to move away. He got more and more and more insistent. I don't remember which one of us, but we were like, no, we have to go. Either me or my other friend tried to leave, and that's when he's like, oh, if you're not comfortable with me taking the picture, my girlfriend is back at this motel. She'll take the pictures for you. We were still teenagers. We were still not making good
decisions. We were like, oh, maybe, you know, maybe if your girlfriend takes the pictures, it'll be OK. And I just wanted to get back up to the road. I just didn't want to be in this secluded spot where no one could see us. And it felt wrong. It felt bad. You know, I was like, oh, we have to go. We have to go. And as me and my older friend were leaving, we were trying to get up back to the road. That's when he grabbed my
younger friend. And I just remember hearing a commotion, turning around and seeing her face. I I can't get her face out of my mind. He had grabbed her by her forearm. He was yanking, yanking her, and she was sliding down the hill, but she just started sliding with him like he was pulling her. And she went probably 5-10 feet. Maybe she went with him. It happened so quickly and it was such a bold move. The fact that he had physically grabbed her and she was, she was gone.
It was like instinct, you know, you just run and you grab her. And we pulled her back. He didn't give up right away. It was a little bit of a tug of war, but she, she's a a tough kid, you know, she was fighting too. And he had all those bags. And that's another thing I remember is like the rustling of the bags. He had them on his arms and he's trying to hold on to her, but it was a lot of shaking. She got released quickly enough that we were able to run up to the road.
And that's when my boyfriend was driving over the bridge and he saw us running up the hill and he said you guys look terrified. We had successfully gotten her away from the guy and the guy just kind of scuttled off. He just like walked off. He didn't run, he didn't anything. He just kind of like took his bags and, you know, scuttled away and we got in the car with my boyfriend. That guy just disappeared. He just walked away. He didn't come back up the same way that we went.
He walked another way. He just disappeared. We were like, we were trying to get to McDonald's, blah, blah, blah. So he took us, he dropped us off at McDonald's. And when we walked into McDonald's, we were still very heightened. We were very like, Can you believe that just happened, blah, blah, blah. And that's when we ran into our teacher, our 8th grade teacher, and he's like, what happened?
We told him the story and he's like, OK, yeah, that's not great, That's bad, that that's not supposed to happen. You guys are very lucky that nothing bad happened to you. Let's go report this. So like I said, it was a very small town and the cops didn't have much crime to to solve. They didn't have much to do. We were very familiar with all
of the police there. But when we walked in our our teacher walked us in and he was like, hey, something happened to these girls and they need to tell you what happened. I do remember that we were all separated. They separated the three of us and we each went into a room with an interviewer. And when I had talked to my mom about this, she was absolutely upset at the fact that when we showed up at the cop shop, they separated us and they interviewed us separately. And we were minors.
We were 14 and 13. We were looking through line UPS. We were looking through like perpetrator books with, you know, mug shots and stuff like that. And they never once called our parents. We were there for a long time. I do remember it being very tired and sitting in the room alone by myself for a long time and just like not believing that this whole thing was happening and that we were at the police station and that, you know, we were having to do this thing.
It was, it was surreal. I had researched to see if there were any abductions in the area or any, you know, assaults and nothing had happened prior to that and nothing had happened after that for maybe 10-15 years. So it was just a really random encounter with a really random guy that just there was something up with him and he he I I feel he was really desperate to be that bold.
So I have a a couple of kids of my own and I have been very careful about how they go about the world, you know, and it has kind of colored my the way that I allow them to be. I want them to go out and experience the world. But also, you know, you don't have to be polite to people and adults should never ask children for help. They don't need children's help. If a guy is lost, he doesn't have to ask teenagers to help him. You know, there are other ways about the world that that should
have been. Our first inclination that something was wrong is that he was asking for help from us. And we just have been taught to be so polite and help. My kids are super sheltered. They are not Streetwise. You know, we grew up in the 80s and 90s where parents were kind of like just go out and do whatever. Now we're more kind of helicopter parents where you don't go out and do whatever, You know what I mean?
They are very sheltered and I worry about them more than my parents ever worried about me. Even though it felt bad, I still didn't say no until it got really, really bad. I still didn't be rude to the guy. Even when it felt like this is wrong, I knew it was wrong. It felt wrong and we were still entertaining his questions and his, you know, we just got taken in very easily. Even though we knew better. I wish I knew what happened to him. I wish I knew.
So I know that even though we went and we reported him, we did the right thing. I wish I knew what happened to him and made sure that he didn't do something bad to someone else. Samantha and her friends were not taken that day, but not far away. That wasn't the case for another innocent girl.
That very same month, on September 5th, 1994, only one hour and 30 minutes away from Samantha's encounter, a young girl named Cora Jones was last seen riding her bike in Dayton, WI. On Labor Day weekend in 1994, the Jones family changed forever. Cora was at her grandma's house. And she kept calling and calling, and I just said, Cora, you know, I got to run to work and then I'm going to come and get you and your brother. Cora hopped on her bike and headed down the street.
Her mom says she and her cousins used to always ride there. When Cora hadn't returned after a few hours, her grandma called her mom. Her parents say when they found out Cora hadn't returned home from her bike ride yet, they were worried her biggest fear could have come true and the days and days of searching began. Cora had fear being kidnapped and she always talked about it. I I don't know. I just instantly knew something
was wrong. I thought just go down to the next bridge and wait for her because she's floating down the river on an inner 2. Then that guy got a lot more worrisome when I found out her bike wasn't right by the bridge. Hundreds came out to help the Jones search for Kora. Didn't sleep much after darkness. Me and some of my friends would go out with spotlights. Drive. Slow down the country.
Roads. Six days later, the family got their answer 75 miles north when two men were driving by and felt like something wasn't right. Really deep ditch. And since September, it's all covered with leaves and unbelievable she was ever found. Authorities investigated for three months before David Spanbauer was charged with Cora's murder. Spanbauer, a serial rapist and
multiple killer. The Jones family went to court with two other northeast Wisconsin families whose daughters were killed by Spanbauer Spanberrow. Was sentenced to three life terms in prison plus 400 years. He died in prison in 2002. When I showed a photo of David to Samantha, she said he did look similar to the man they came across, but that was so long ago it's hard to know for sure. If it was him. Could David Spann Bauer be linked to Samantha's story?
Was this a kidnapping attempt by David? Or perhaps it was just a random stranger with evil intentions? Once again, I would like to thank Nick Usher for producing this story and allowing me to use it. When Nick releases The Basement Tapes podcast, I'll be sure to link it in the show notes of this episode and also inform you in the future of its release. As always, thanks for listening to Unnerved. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends and leave a review
wherever you get your podcast. If you guys want to see photos related to each episode, including this one, be sure to follow us on Instagram at Unnerved Podcast. And for AD free episodes and bonus content, please visit patreon.com/unnerved Podcast. Special thanks to Yvonne Brykovich for mastering this episode. Until next time, take care.