Get ad-free episodes and support the show at ScaryMysteryClub.com
Hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Covarrubias. Episode edited & sound designed by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound
Scary Mystery Surprise (Campfire Story) is no longer being updated, but be sure to check out our other shows from Scary.fm for more scares!
I have like a funny little segue, and now I can't remember what it is. Oh, your diarrhea pills. That's what I was going to talk about. I'm looking for diarrhea pills just in case emergency recording diarrhea pills. That's a scary mystery surprise right there. You don't know when it's coming. It's scary. Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the Internet. I'm Edwin and I'm Michelle. All right, Michelle, So this episode is going to be a little bit of a personal journey for me, right, So I'm going to share with you some of the things that I went through with the paranormal, specifically dealing with Turnbull Canyon. To everyone I think that I meet, I end up talking about Turnbull Canyon. So I am now back to like being a teen in the two thousand thousands. I'm scrolling through the internet block Spot, Yahoo forums, GeoCities. It was awesome and dangerous and really cool. Geo cities was dangerous. I don't know, it was just maybe not GeoCities, but like when you have the forums and the common sections that are not moderated just like anything goes click link, it'll send you to like whatever. They'll catch your IP address with anyway, very dangerous. But as I'm there, I'm scrolling down and I find this block. By the way, the area where I used to live was around the Downy nor Walk Bellflower Repping five six two. You know, there's what I do. At that time. There was a lot of this is a very important thing to me. But at that time, by the way, like researching ghost stories, paranormal things, because I was vice president of our local Research and Investigation of the Paranormal chapter in our high school. You know how, like I'm that show ghost Writer. They have like little pens for their mystery club, Like what did you guys have any sort of like talisman? Do identify each other? No, we just had our shirts, like our polos. Did it have a little logo on it? Yeah? I did. It was yellow and I think I still have a shirt. It was a little yellow tombstone. I think that says RIP. But anyway, there was this one haunted asylum that I found and I wanted to go there and like figure it out. So I was on, you know, scrolling around. I found this forum and this person's just kind of saying, Hey, we're gonna meet up by this haunted abandoned asylum and we're gonna go from there. So me, I'm thinking, like, okay, they're meeting up at nine, I have a car. I didn't think of telling my parents. Honestly, I was just like I'm just gonna go, Like, I'm just gonna go meet up. I'll take a friend and we'll just kind of go there. And then in the comments or whatever, there was this person I think I don't know, Kathy or something. She was like, so you're for sure going I'm like, yeah, I'm going. Okay. Cool. We got a group of like six or seven people and I'm like, okay cool. They had a schedule of the guard when they do their round, so they're like, oh, once he goes past it like with a car, he does another walk through, we're gonna go right after that walkthrough. And I'm like, wait, so there's some like door or anything. It's like no, we have to hop through the roof, go through the window, and then get in. I'm like this is getting serious, right, Like I don't know how old these people are, don't even know if they're teens. What if there's just a bunch of like predators and they're just trying to get people to show up. They sent me a link to this other place that they have already seen, right Turnbull Canyon. Basically, there was a group of people just walking around trying to do this investigation in this kind of mountainy area, like imagine like a little trail park, kind of like where we went to to do the Rando Nautica episode. Oh yeah, like devs Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're going down this trail. They're going through the valleys kind of you know, down the trail. All of a sudden, one of them stops, stares out into like the darkness, and freaks out and runs back the trail up to head towards where the car was. The remaining group, like the people that were still there. One of them kind of stops and that kind of freaks out a little bit. He kind of freezes and starts looking out to see what this other guy had seen, and they can kind of see this glow out into the distance past the bushes, like something's glowing. And as they're staring the girl who posted the thing and who's also referring me to this post that she wrote. She's staring out and she sees a group of people and they're kind of like going around in circles and they're kind of waving their arms, just acting kind of strange, just like a strange fire in the middle of them. Twenty thirty people Like they're just kind of there and a little crowd, and all of a sudden, they all stock. One of them makes a call like a car just like that exactly, and then they start stabbing each other. She said that they were like a distance of like not that far, like thirty forty feet, Like they can run at you, like it's that runnable distance. We're like, oh, this is where you choose to run away from a bay. Then when she sees that they start savving each other, they're like god, they' everybody's screaming that they're just going crazy, and they kind of see this, like the silhouettes of them like stabbing like that, they run. Everybody starts running back. They feel like they're getting chased. They look back and they are, in fact, somebody's going after them. They make it to the car. They wait there, but they just don't see anybody else. They're just like Okay, what happened, right, they try to like figure it out. One of the events of going to like a church and they find out people have been known to do Satanic rituals in that area. When I found out this is like a real thing, and I believed it. I don't know how true it was when she shared it, but I was like, when I believed it, I bailed on it. I'm like, I'm not going. And I'd never showed up to that haunted asylum that really like scared me. Everybody freaked me out. And then that really triggered the idea of Turmble Canyon, like investigating like what happened here, And it turns out there were a couple of cases in that place that could explain some of the hauntings and things that people I've seen. Now, Turmal Canyon is this area and Wittier in southern California. The area itself is dark, very creepy. If you drive there at night, it's like it can just be you along the road because there's a road that runs through it, and then once you get to the top you kind of see I think it's a sand of heights that you see all the lights from the city and people just go and hang out there. At least when I was in high school, we used to go like get Jack in the box and hang out, say, by the side of the road. Then they made it like illegal for you to just hang out there because I guess somebody always has to ruin it. I guess I was always into that creepy vibe, you know. Yeah, but that's like a teen move, like you're not gonna go somewhere nice, really, You're gonna go somewhere empty. Yeah. I remember going with my friends, like, you know, just get in the car and we're like, okay, what do we do. All let's go to Turnable Canyon. It would just literally just drive through it and then stop and then drive back. My friend Jonathan and I we were there. Jonathan had these like intense flashlights where like police style, like it would stop, turn off all the light at first, like okay, this is creepy, and then we turn on the lights and then go drive through right. Well, one time, as we're going through this car from behind, it just kind of appeared behind us. It just kind of flew turn on the headlights. We were going super slow by the way all this time, so We're like, there was a car behind us, we would have sped up, so we knew. We were kept looking behind to see if there's a car. Hills. Yeah, it was really creepy, and then we're like what do we do? We kept driving. We kind of went normal speed and make the turns. It this very twisty road, like you have to make these turns. You can't see in front of you. Like the car behind us is following pace, like we're speeding up, it speeds up, we slow down. It slows down obviously instead of passing us by. We're like, what don't we turn off to like the curb side and just kind of let it go because you have these little areas where you can pull off and let the car pass. We pull off to the side and the car slows down, pulls up right behind us. No, no, whoa. My friend freaks out. He's nervous now, so he like steps on and we're just like going and the car starts following. We're like, what do we do? Like that we're being followed by a car. We're going down to this place where there's houses now and we're going down all the way down the hill, down the hill. We keep looking back and there's no one there. There's no car behind us. Right. The only way that this car could have disappeared quote unquote is if they just lived there and they pulled into a house right, or they parked and they turn made a U turn and go back because we lost sight of them. And that said, we never we waited at the base of the hill. Like now at this part, there's like lights, there's other places, other things, other cars, So like every park we're gonna blend in. Nobody canna know it's us. Another car showed up for a while. We were just there, so like what do we do. We have to go back to the same place, or we can take the round, or we can go all the way around to go back home. So we just went right through. We didn't see anything else after that. That's brave. I would have taken the long way. Later on we researched stuff and they say that there are cases of people that have been followed by cars there. It can either be like just some weirdo that is just trying to scare people, or it could be a ghost car, like as in ghost vehicles. In two thousand and nine, this woman from Bellflower, she went with this bizarre claim saying that three people from this city called El Monte try to kill her, basically saying that they try to slash her throat, cut her jem needles into her neck, and then throw her down a steep hill in Turble Canyon. She was getting a ride home with three other who she thought were friends and then they ended up trying to kill her there in Turnble Canyon. Eventually the people were caught sent to jail, which is good. There was another case of this woman that was dragged, like literally tied and dragged along the roads in Turble Canyon. But the place itself has way more than just like serial killer stuff, murder people that try to commit crimes and stuff. They also have this area that's called the Gates of Hell. There's a set of gates literally just gates, and they have signs that say like no trespass or do not cross, don't go in. But it's so beat up. The rumors was that there's Gates of Hell, like you go in there, like there's an abandoned haunted place or whatever. Yeah, we used to go there and hang out by the entrance and like try to get in there and take like crappy pictures with the flip phones, like oh we we find but yeah, nobody ever sign anything there. But it was just part of the lore. But there was one thing. Turboal Canyon itself started with the story of a murder. And right now we just think of like, oh, it's just the gates of Hell. It's the accidents and the people getting murdered and the Satanic rituals, all that stuff, all claims I kind of take more to prove if they're true or not. But this one actually is facts. The name Turnbull Canyon comes from murders. There was this guy, Robert Turnbull, and he was actually an Irish immigrant. He arrived in California in eighteen seventy three and he saw this opportunity to buy and sell real estate and he started making a lot of money and he owned that area of Turnbull Canyon like it was all his. The Quakers starting in June eighteen eighty seven, who were really trying to make like try to buy it from him, and they were like, hey, here's her offer, like take it or whatever. By the way, at this time dollars not adjusted or anything. He finally ended up selling for thirty thousand dollars, which was a lot of money. So he's like, yeah, I'll accept it. By the way, this guy just would always drink, and one evening on his way back home, he fell off his horse and he was arrested. They're like, you can't be drunk in public, even though he was always drunk. For drunk riding, he got an RUI writing under the influence. So the next morning, after he gets arrested, he gets home and he's beaten up, bloody, but he couldn't remember like how he got into that state, you know, falling off a horse. But it turns out he had also gotten beaten up pretty hard beating, and he suffered a brain anerism oo and he died. Shit, this is what the coroner said. No, this guy, this was in an accident. He'll just fall off his horse. This guy was murdered, so who would want to kill him? Nobody really knows who could have done that. I don't know what technology they used back then to say like, oh, he was definitely murdered in this thing. But it's what the story that's stuck and the one everybody accepts. And basically from then on the Quakers were like, oh, man, that sucks. This guy was not that bad, so they named the canyon after him, Turnbull Canyon. Along with those true stories, though there are more. On April fifteenth, nineteen fifty two, the La International Airport lost contact with Lewis Powell, the captain of this flight, Flight FORCED sixteen. This airplane was supposed to land in Inglewood and sometime in the middle of the night, like around three in the morning, but it never made it. So they ended up calling the captain and the crew, but nobody ever answered. They're like, well, I don't know what happened. Moving on, we'll never find it. That's it. Oh well, he changed his mind. He kept flying somewhere. He just disappeared. A rancher actually discovered who was driving around wer Whittier Heights. He saw smoke like that morning, like around ten in the morning, and he was like, oh man, So he climbed up one of the hills and saw that there were flames and metal and like all this stuff on the hillside. That was Flight for sixteen. The reason why I crashed literally ten feet made the difference. This is just a altitude was just ten feet higher. He went ten feet lower. It was really foggy and he crashed. Shit. Yeah, and now people that go around looking for ghost stuff or even just regular people, they say, wires just spoke coming out of there. It turns out the ghost the residual of the ghost. Yep. They say they also hear sounds like metal hitting rock, things that sound like bombs. Basically that's what they say. Oh yeah, that sounds a lot like when metal hits a rock, like when a there's a car crash, imagine a plane crash. It's like there's a lot more stories. The one that I said that was the the girl that was dragged around Turnbull Canyon. It's actually it's it's super tragic. Basically she was shot and then dragged by two of her friends. Her name was Gloria Gaxiola. Who were these friends drive into Turnbull Canyon and try and kill you? Yeah, it was. It's messed up finally, like the body was found like a Santa Boulevard and Khalima Road. But when I say dragged, you might imagine her being dragged by like a rope behind the car. But no, it turns out her foot was stuck on the seatbelt. No, when the door was closed, the car was going away and Gloria was drag ooh brutal. Yeah, they were all convicted of first agree murder, so makes it really creepy. If anybody's around that area of you've visited a Turnbull Canyon, have you had a strange experience? I want to know about it. It's really creepy. Michelle and I actually got to hear a story of this place, remember, Michelle, Oh I do. We were We went to see Sapphire Talk and she asked her audience if they had any ghost stories, and this guy stood up and it was me, you and your friend Natalia. Natalia actually shared her Turnbull experience on tell Me a Ghost Story, but this guy just stood up and basically kind of repeated her experience of like seeing weird shapes in the bushes. The story you shared was he was out in the car and they start seeing these little heads kind of pop out of the bushes. When he's telling this, Natalia next to me is like like this, like are you serious? Like this telling? Like what is that what we saw? Because one of the very I think the very first story on true Scary Story is Natalia and Felipe, which are two of my friends that are were there when Natalia's story happened, the one that she shared with you. But yeah, if you want to hear the rest of the story, tell me a story has Natalia's version. It's pretty freaky. It was funny. After she told that story, I googled Turnbull because it was like, is it Turnball or Turnbull? And Google what did you take? No? No, no, no, no, it was Turnbull. It was Turnbull. But like you know how places get reviewed. One of the first reviews that popped up for Turnbull Canyons don't go there at night. It's an interesting place, like it has a different vibe. Like when you're there, you're like, huh, you could be parked there and all of a sudden, it's misty, right, Like all of a sudden, it's like, whoa, we just got covered and missed. You're driving along and all of a sudden, like you feel like what's next to me? You feel like a thing, like you feel something. It's a very dark place. It really messes with your mind. So if anybody's visited, or anybody has stories about Turnbull Canyon or any areas around there, please send them in let us know. Or if you have a specific place in your city, or town that's known for this kind of thing. Let's hear about it. But yeah, hold on, let me see if I have my conclusion. No, I don't. I said it in the very beginning. Oh well, I ruined my conclusion. We just end abruptly and abruptly. What are we gonna talk about next week? Edwin, I don't know. We couldn't be a surprise. Scary Mystery Surprise is hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was edited and sound designed by Sarah Borhe's Wendel, a VW sound

