Case 1 | Case 2 | Case 3 | Case 4 | Case 5 | Case 6 | Case 7 | Case 8
It’s been a while since last I shared one of these cases. After my grandpa passed, I assumed there would be no more of them to share, that any opportunity to hear of any other Impossible Ones had died with him.
I was wrong.
My wife and I have moved into my grandparent’s house to help my grandmother, who has been struggling a bit since my grandpa passed. When we cleared out my grandpa’s office to set it up as our bedroom, my wife came across a shoebox containing a voice recorder and a handful of tapes labelled “Nick”.
I would later learn that my grandpa had indeed told my grandma about them, and that they were to go to me if and when he died, but, be it from the grief and commotion of his death, her failing memory, or any other circumstance, she hadn’t remembered to do so. Nevertheless, my grandpa had recorded more instances of Impossible Ones that he was either directly or indirectly involved with.
He specifically held off from telling me some of them to leave me with a surprise when he passed. What an awesome guy. He also left me with as much of the casework he could collect to go along with the tapes.
I’ve transcribed these tapes. I’ll begin with #4, as it pertains to this time of year.
Tape #4: Halloween
This is probably where I’m supposed to say something clichè like “if you’re listening to this it means I’m dead”, which…well, it’s true I guess. I know how much the folks on your website [*he meant you all here on NoSleep*] like the, the scary stuff, so I hope you’ll use this for Halloween, if you’re still doing these at all, I don’t know.
But it was uh, it was about two weeks before Halloween, few years after I retired, they brought me on as a consultant for a…a real weird one.
There was an arrest made sometime during the overnight shift, two men in their 30’s had been found with…how best to explain this one…they’d been spotted in front of the library, down there on 76th? They were caught standing in front of the library on the sidewalk, and they had…another young man, and he was…he was upside down, and half of him was…in the sidewalk, legs sticking up.
Now, that concrete has been in front of that building for decades, but the way the body had been positioned, it was like they’d dug up the old sidewalk, and poured new concrete around the body, which obviously they hadn’t. And that’s just the first, ah…first part of this one that makes it an Impossible One.
So, the two guys, they were found just standing on either side of these legs that were sticking out. And they looked EXACTLY alike. They were obviously identical twins, but…but I mean, they were both wearing the same clothes, and those clothes had the same marks, you know, a scuff each on side of the left shoe, a small scratch each next to the buckles on their belts; their hair was messy, but it was messy in the same way. It was bizarre.
They didn’t put up any fight when the uni’s moved in to arrest them…they didn’t say a word, whole time, nothing from either of them. They take them down to the district station, and there’s no hits on fingerprints, they don’t have any ID on them, they just sit there staring straight ahead.
So, there’s any…any number of folks on the force who know all about these weird cases, but, you know, for whatever reason they called me in to consult on this one, wanted me to come down, check out the scene, just get my take on the situation. The lead on the case, it was his first case since making detective, that poor bastard [at this point my grandpa laughed, and it brought a smile to my face to hear it again as I listened to this, and again now as I transcribe it]. And you know, I’ve told you a whole bunch of these, told you the ones that still keep me up some nights, this one wasn’t so bad in terms of lasting impressions, but that lead just wasn’t ready for it. He quit after his second Impossible One a couple years after.
Sorry, so it takes about a week for them to pull the block of cement up and remove it from around the body without damaging it too much. Meanwhile I was just sort of on the sidelines for the lead, helping where I could. But they called me down to take a look at the body, and it turned out that the guys MPD had in custody weren’t twins…they were triplets. The victim was a spitting image of the other two, except…you know…a little worse for wear.
Now, when they cracked the cement open and took this poor son of a bitch out, his head had been wrapped in plastic, but they did an autopsy, and the victim had…Christ…he’d had cement pumped into his skull, but it wasn’t…it couldn’t have been done manually. It’s like his brain was encased in concrete. There were no entry points that anyone could’ve taken to do it, no wounds…it just wasn’t possible.
At this point, they weren’t any closer to figuring out who these three were. They had the victim, and they had the two of them that were down in, ah, in county lockup. And I saw the interrogation room tapes, I forgot to mention that. They took each of the John Does into separate rooms and interviewed them, and neither of the guys said anything. Not a word. Well, they said one word, one time.
But the weird thing about those interviews…and really every time these two guys weren’t together, weren’t in each other’s line of sight, they…how do I explain this? We had John Doe #1 in Room A or whichever, John Doe #2 in Room B, and while John Doe #1 is being interviewed, he keeps, he kind of maybe twitches, or he gets an expression on his face, or he nods his head or shakes his head, but he hadn’t been asked a yes or no question.
Now, this might seem strange on its own, might make you think he was maybe, you know, on something, or he was suffering from some kind of mental illness, yeah? But the thing is, down there in Room B or wherever we had him, John Doe #2 was doing the same thing, but out of sync, like #1 nods and winks, then down the hall, #2 crooks his head to the side and taps his foot.
It was like they were communicating, but they couldn’t hear each other, see each other, nothing. We didn’t notice that aspect of it until after, we all just thought they were, like I said, like they were on drugs or something. But after, we went back and watched the interviews, put the tapes side by side with the timestamps and everything, and sure enough, it was a back and forth.
And at one point, at the exact same moment, in the exact same tone of voice, exact same volume, exact same inflection, cadence, all of it, they each said the only word either of them said throughout this entire thing.
“Halloween.”
Didn’t have anything to do with what they were being questioned about at the time or anything. They each just blurted it out, perfectly in sync.
So anyhow, they each went through arraignment, got started with public defenders, but then Halloween came. Your grandmother and I were at home, handing out candy, and I get a call from the lead asking me to come down to district. Turns out our two guys? They decided to up and let themselves out of jail.
Cameras down at county showed these guys, about 3AM on Halloween, you know, the 30th leading into the 31st, and they just…walked out of their cells. And like everything else with them, they did it the *exact* same way. They were in two different pods, er, uh, cell blocks, and at exactly…it was, uh, 2:57 and 12 seconds something specific like that, down to the second, they both opened their cells, making the same movements, same tiny motions and expressions.
There’s computers that log every time a cell opens, cause it’s all done electronically, and even if one is opened manually for whatever reason it still logs it, kind of a failsafe thing. But on that night, it didn’t show either cell opening. And it obviously wasn’t a coincidence.
But these two, they just casually walked on out of their cells, and, oh, and on night shift there’s a pod supervisor who just kind of kicks back, does counts, addresses any overnight needs inmates have, so they just do the rounds. There aren’t set times for these C.O.’s to do their rounds. Now, it could be a coincidence that the two pod supervisors on duty that night did that set of rounds at the same time, but there was no way two people in completely different areas of the jail could communicate that they were.
So while these two guards were busy doing counts, our two John Does just walked on out of their pods. Through a bunch of…I guess you could call them…I don’t know…miracles of circumstance? They ended up finding each other; the whole time they were walking to one another, they both took the same steps, both took the same pauses, hell, they both scratched their heads at the same time. Just perfect mirror images of one another.
And once they found each other, the camera showed them stand next to each other and head down a hallway. Once they turned the corner, they were gone. Vanished. The camera in the adjacent hallway never showed them come around. They just disappeared into thin air. That was the last we ever saw them.
And what’s more, because of the unique circumstances of the death and the strange findings during the autopsy, city morgue had kept the body of the third one. Halloween morning, when the coroner showed up, at the morgue, the body of John Doe #3 was in the middle of the, you know, whatever room they do autopsies in.
The body was upside down, halfway down through the linoleum floor, once again like the floor had been laid around him.
Never had any more leads on that one. I know its anticlimactic, but you know a lot of these are. I don’t know, I hope the folks on your website [again, he meant all you wonderful people here on NoSleep] enjoy it, and I hope you all have a fun, safe Halloween.
[NBH](http://www.nickbotic.com) | [YT](http://www.youtube.com/nickbotic)