These Horror Stories Will Send Chills Down Your Spine - MrBallen (4K)

MrBallen, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

How does a Navy SEAL end up telling scary stories on the internet?

(laughs) I still don't even know. Uh, yeah, I- I kind of fell backwards into it, actually. Um, the- the short version is, I was experimenting with social media content after I was out of the military, just because it was interesting to me. I saw there were all these new brands and people kind of blowing up on social media, and I was kinda struggling to find my way as a civilian again. And so I was like, "Oh, I'll just- I'll try social media," and I- I, uh, I tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work, very cringey, you know, like attempts at comedy and- and all these different things. Um, and then I- I remember I had these- I had these two documents on my computer of- of ideas for- for TikToks at the time, is what I was doing. This is like, uh, early 2020. And I had this one document that I had exhausted all these different, you know, ideas for TikToks, ranging from sketch comedy to all these goofy things that didn't work. And I had this other document and it just said Dyatlov Pass on it. And so me personally, John Allen, the person, I like to watch and consume strange, dark and mysterious content, you know, spooky, you know, non-fiction content. And the Dyatlov Pass is- is this story about these hikers who go missing in the 1950s, and it's this famous unsolved case. Basically, these nine hikers vanish and they're found again and they're- they're in different stages of decay and their bodies are radioactive and their clothes are half on and half off, and it's- and there's these totally unsettling pictures, and I- I was like, "Well, I've tried all these different things on this side. This- this document has been exhausted and didn't- didn't work. I guess I'll take a shot in the dark on this totally random, like, departure from any other type of content I had ever tried." And it was a total, like, "I just don't care how it goes." I- I'm clearly not able to hit the mark on social media. I'm just gonna do the one thing that I personally enjoy, and I was at this water park in Pennsylvania, this indoor water park, uh, called, uh, Great Wolf Lodge in Pennsylvania with my wife and my three kids, and I- I shoot this six- 60 second Dyatlov Pass TikTok where they're- it was crappily made, you know, I'm kinda like winging it, telling the story, 60 seconds long, and I post it. Because I'm going to the indoor water park, I didn't wanna have my phone, so I just left it in the room and went to the water park. And then when I came back a couple hours later, my phone was basically not working because it was getting so many notifications. There was like five million views on this video after- after only a few hours. And for- for reference, I've- I had never gone even close to viral before in any way. It was like, you know, 10,000 views over a year was like a really big deal. And now, you know, it's- the- the internet has tuned in. And admittedly, I didn't think... I- I wasn't like, "Oh, here's a career now," but I was like, "That was pretty fun. That was pretty cool." And I like making those- those stories, and I- I just went on a tear making content, having no idea where it would go, and it turned into MrBallen.