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It's that special time of year when things are just a little bit spookier! 🎃👻
As a special treat for our listeners, we brought back some of our podcast favorites and even some new faces to tell their most HAUNTING REI stories. From an attic full of bones to trying to request a draw for an exorcism, you won't wanna miss these spooky real estate investing stories from your friends at Real Estate Investing Unscripted!
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Read (transcript below)!
David: Welcome back to real estate investing unscripted where we get real with real estate investors and experts throughout the industry. I'm your host for the day, David Dugan. And, uh, usually that's Brendan's part that he reads, but, uh, you'll notice he is not here today. So this show is going to be a little bit different, uh, since we are recording.
This right at the beginning of October, we thought it might be a fun change of pace to do some spooky stories in the real estate world to, uh, to kick off the fall season, we've invited some of the, uh, the standout guests back and reached out to some of our territory managers and, uh, some other folks in the company to tell us some of the scariest.
Stories in their real estate investing careers and, their day to day jobs working in real estate. so we want to thank everyone for participating and testing this storytelling format out with us. Make sure you let us know what you think by writing into the podcast at podcast at podcast.
com. Upright dot U S and that's podcast with an or reach out to us on all our socials.
All right. First up on the spooky stories. We have our guy, Dave Kanzagore down in Charlotte, North Carolina. He runs the Carolinas Market for us. He's been doing it for a few years now and has a background in real estate and, He has, I'm sure all sorts of entertaining and also slightly spooky stories.
Dave, welcome to the podcast. And you've also brought a guest with you,
Dave: Thanks, buddy. How you doing? Yeah. brought my dad for this special spooky stories, uh, episode or version of the podcast. And, uh, yeah, I, uh, I got my, I got my start in real estate after I left a, uh, a former career and, uh, got into real estate with my dad back in. 07 or so. and soon after, I think we all know what happened.
Uh, the market promptly crashed and uh, some way or another, my dad and I figured out how to get into the back door of the banks. And before foreclosures were a thing, we became agents that they would kind of give their properties to, to go figure out what to do with before they knew what to do with them.
And we would have to go check on occupancy, do personal property evictions, and essentially get the house marketable, listed, and sold. And, uh, yeah, as, as you alluded to, and as I'm sure you can imagine, we have quite, quite a few different kind of wild stories from over the years. one or two of which, uh, my dad will regale you with now.
So, uh, I think the first one is about a. Semi gruesome discovery in a backyard one day.
Steve: Thank you, Dave.
David: welcome to the podcast. Tell us about this, uh, this spooky discovery, or as Dave said, gruesome
Steve: What we did during this time frame, um, we probably sold somewhere in the range of around 1, 100 homes. Uh, doing all the work on them and stuff. And a lot of them were scary homes. Uh, you didn't know what you were going to find when you walked in. Uh, your safety was at risk a lot of times. Uh, this particular one was up in Tarpon Springs.
And, I walked in, and I looked out into the backyard, and there was a gravestone. And it had the name Lucy on it. With a date that was like from 2009, December of 2009 to January of 2010. And I didn't know what, it also had a picture of a snake on it. So my first thought was, this is a dead baby.
David: shouldn't laugh. That's terrible.
Steve: and I didn't know, I can't sell a house when I know there may be a dead baby buried in the back.
So I called the Tarpon Police Department, they didn't want [00:04:10] anything to do with it. I called the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, they didn't want anything to do with it. They finally, the two of them got together and Tarpon Springs finally agreed to go into the backyard and dig whatever it was up.
Turned out to be a German shepherd puppy that was
David: Oh, that's, that's sad too.
Steve: yeah, but you gotta, I couldn't sell a home knowing there was a dead body in the back,
David: It's better than a, better than a a baby.
Steve: yes. So dogs and in Florida, you're allowed to bury bodies in your backyard.
David: That is, uh, that's to me.
Wild, but I guess Florida,
Steve: Pretty creepy. Yeah, that's Florida. Florida has got its own unique everything.
so they finally did that and we were able to sell it.
Dave: The other thing that I would mention is that at the time and during that market, with everything crashing and nobody having money, and people getting kicked out of the places they were living left and right, You put two and two together and it started to make a lot of, started to make a lot of sense.
You a, a not pet name on a headstone. Um, a, a very young age to death thought it was a baby. Maybe these people didn't have any money for a burial. They were, they were broke, whatever it was, and then coupled with everything else, I think it's a dead baby.
Steve: It's a natural assumption. That was one of the tame, spooky stories. I'll do one other one because it's sort of quick. Anyways, we had this, uh,
Dave: now.
Steve: yeah, we had one that was in a place called Moon Lake. And Moon Lake, the, uh, the two principal businesses in Moon Lake are meth labs and pit bull racing.
David: those are their big exports, huh? All right
Steve: That's the big exports. And, We went, and the sheriff has to come with us, or the deputy sheriff has to come with us on these things. So, the sheriff came with me three days before the eviction date. This was a 900 square foot home with four people and two dogs in it. And 900 square feet is not very large, obviously.
So we come back three days later, and the sheriff walks through the place and says, and it's empty, so he calls me and says, Okay, it's yours. And in those days, we used to have to bring our own cleaning crews with us. So I hear one of them screaming from the backyard, I need help back here! So we all go to the backyard, and the people left a rottweiler chained to the fence.
So, we had to now get animal control involved. So, while animal control is getting to us, I'm leaning up against the police car with the deputy sheriff, and here comes this guy that looks like Yosemite Sam on a banana bike, not looking at us, being pulled by a pit bull.
David: Like a like a chariot,
Steve: yeah, yeah, and this guy is just looking straight ahead. He's not looking at the sheriff at all. And the sheriff and I are going, What was that we just saw? the, uh, animal control guy comes along finally, and we learned out that the Rottweiler's name was Rommel. I, I have a name for him. So, he doesn't even take a leash, he doesn't take anything.
He goes over to Rommel and says, Rommel, sit! And Rommel sat. Turned out that he had a choke chain on that was embedded in the dog's neck. That's how bad this, these people treated this thing. So, this crazy guy takes an angry Rottweiler and sticks it between his legs to pull the choke chain off. Which he managed to do, and the dog was so happy he just jumped right into the van.
Not the end of the story. So I go, I'm now free, I can go do my own stuff. Sheriff, we go to another, uh, foreclosure a couple weeks later and he finished the story for me. He said, he went to the, uh, animal control guy and said, well, I'll see you. And the, and the sheriff said, nope, we gotta go find the pit bull that was being abused.
So the two of them drive around the neighborhood and they see the pit bull in a yard. The guy ran share, uh, uh, warrants on the house. And Yosemite Sam had warrants out against him, so they arrested Yosemite Sam and took the pit bull into custody.
David: This was also in Florida
Steve: Yeah, it's all in Florida.
David: Real estate in Florida. Never a dull moment.
Steve: Definitely.
David: thank you Steve for, uh, for sharing and thank you Dave for, uh, for bringing your dad on here. That's awesome. Love the, uh, love the tales of the past. That's good stuff.
Steve: Some of it was
pretty scary.
Dave: Tales of the past, pun intended.
Steve: What, what?
David: Nice. Our next guest is actually I guess technically now a a repeat guest on the podcast We have Megan Sarles back here. She's uh Jack of all trades here at fund that flip. I don't even know what she's doing these days. Something cool. I'm sure I'll let her tell that, but also a real estate investor who has all sorts of, uh, fun and spooky experiences, investing in real estate, Megan, last time you were here, you talked a little bit about what you do with, uh, FTF now upright, but also talked about your, your real estate investing experiences and how you were getting into a midterm rentals.
Uh, so first welcome back. And, uh, second, tell us what's going on.
Megan: Yeah, thanks, thanks for having me back and uh, in the spirit of spookiness I'll give you a little Tidbit about what I'm doing right now at Upright, so I'm still managing the construction risk team But I've been helping out a little bit with the asset management world Trying to drive down that delinquency rate making sure that stays, you know at a good spot for us I've been on the phone with borrowers of all type and really just learning the ropes there So it's been really exciting and a great experience getting to you know, wear another hat at the company.
So it's really cool
David: Working in the, uh, the underworld of Upright and the lone origination space. That is spooky.
Uh, well, very cool. you've got a story to share with us. Why don't you go ahead and tell us what's going on.
Megan: Yeah, so like you said before, uh, on the last episode that I was on, I told you I was just getting started in the midterm world. So, since we had last talked, I now have three Airbnbs up and running. Uh, I self manage them all, which is spooky in itself. Um, good story, just happened this week. It's kind of a two for one.
So, I finally got one of my units up and running on Airbnb. It had taken a little bit to turn it over. It was actually a unit that I was previously house hacking and living in. So just getting out of it was taking a little too long as is. So I finally get a tenant that reaches out on Airbnb and she wants to do kind of like a special.
Circumstance in terms of payment, which, you know, just is never going to be a good idea, but I was a little bit desperate for the money. So I was like, all right, let's do it. So we went off of Airbnb and I made up a lease through my property management site where she would have to pay for the week that she lived after the fact.
So she would live through one week and then pay that Friday. And so far it's been going good. But the day that she moved in. She told me the fridge is not working. So I was like, Oh, okay. Like I just plugged it in, like no problem. And then of course, in true fashion, I had to run over and do some last minute things there.
And I stuck my hand in the fridge. I'm like, Oh shoot, this is hot. So then first tenant moved in. Fridge is just. So I run over to Home Depot, grab a mini fridge, cause I'm no slumlord and I had to make sure that, you know, she had an operating fridge at least to throw some groceries in. Got the mini fridge, called my repair guy over to find out that the free online shot.
So, already just dumped four grand into this Airbnb to get it up and running. Had to spend another thousand on a fridge. Get that delivered, she had to throw out all of her groceries. Um, so that was a little bit of a horror story. We tried to, tried to make it right with the mini fridge and we gave her, I think, 150 off her, her next rent payment and tried to compensate for the groceries.
But that was just the worst.
David: The joys of, uh, AirBnB management, which, turns out is also, also the hospitality space.
And, uh, yeah, that sucks. Sorry that happened, Megan.
But you made it right.
Megan: Is what it is, but then just to, to add the cherry on top, this morning I got a, uh, another text. Different Airbnb tenant that she smells gas in her unit. So I just had to have Dominion rush over to my unit this morning to find out that we had a gas leak.
David: Uh, that's more problematic than a broken fridge,
Megan: mhm, mhm,
David: don't don't level, level the neighborhood.
Megan: Yeah, it sounds like they, they got it all set.
I didn't even have to go over there, which was great. The tenants kind of all helped out, let the Dominion guy in the unit, and he identified where it was leaking and seemingly fixed it up, but I'm just glad my house didn't explode.
David: Was there any really gross shit in that fridge? Like some salmon that sat there and baked for five days or anything?
Megan: Luckily not. No, no, luckily because she moved in that day. So, you know, there was nothing there yet to get all gross and green, but um. Oh, what a time.
David: Well, thank you for hopping on and sharing. Thanks Megan.
Megan: Yeah, thanks for having me, Dugan.
David: Alright, so I've got my own spooky story to tell here while we, while we wait for our next guest to pop in. So, The day job when I'm not podcasting, I'm cruising around, uh, the Midwest with, uh, with, with my guys here that, uh, that I work with. And a lot of what we do is, you know, we sit down in coffee meetings, lunch meetings, and, and meet with borrowers, but we also walk a ton of properties, right?
So that's a big bulk of my week is just hopping in and out of properties at, at all different phases of construction. Some are new construction sites. Some are pretty much completed. Some are totally dilapidated homes. And, You know, all different conditions and you see a lot of, see a lot of wild shit.
So, recently I've been spending a little bit more time in, in, uh, Detroit, Michigan. Now, uh, shout out my guy, Jake Barnes. He's, he's been working hard in Detroit and growing that territory. We've been doing quite a bit there. Detroit's got a long way to go right now. It's not the city that, uh, went through bankruptcy, you know, 12, 13 years ago.
It's come a long way. There's a lot of nice parts of Detroit, but that's a city that was built for two and a half or three million people in the peak of the auto industry. And now it's down to, you know, 700, 000 or so, and probably probably doesn't get much bigger than that population wise. So you've got all these vast areas of kind of grasslands and empty lots there and, all these kind of strange neighborhoods that are halfway back, right?
They've got some nice new builds and some nicely refurbished homes. And, um, so we see a lot of cool stuff there. A lot of, a lot of, good opportunity. And, uh, we were meeting with a, an investor. Uh, this is actually just a few weeks ago. And, we were in, in one of the not nice neighborhoods. This was not one of the, you know, neighborhoods.
It was halfway there. It's kind of at the beginning of beginning stages, but, we'll say there was some potential there. So he was showing us some homes that he was, Had owned for a little while and and had some plans to rehab somewhere mid rehab, right? And we get into one that he is he's owned for about four years now, and he hasn't started rehab He was working on some other projects and Jake and I were walking that house with him And, uh, obviously needed a ton of work.
the home was in, you know, kind of disrepair. but, you know, that's not uncommon for us. So, no, no red flags there. And then we walked down to the basement. And he's showing us the basement. It's a little bit, you know, dirty and, you know, kind of like, like a dungeon down there. Right? Kind of a typical basement of an old home.
And he's standing in the corner and he's kind of bouncing up and down. And he's telling us about the house. And he said, yeah, right here we found a dead body. Jake and I paused we said like a dead a dead human body. He goes. Yeah. Yeah You know, I'd owned the place for a couple years already and we said that that body had been there for at least two years Well here.
Oh, oh, yeah a lot longer than that. In fact, I had my contractor down here and you know, he was looking around and he kind of felt some squishiness in the floor and He lifted up the floorboards and sure enough There was a dead body. It was just a torso. There were no limbs and no head. And I said, that's pretty wild, my man.
And, uh, what did you do about that? And he said, uh, well, you know, we called the authorities and, of course, they had me as a person of interest at first, but, you know, I cleared my own by. I was all good. Turns out... The guy that owned this was, uh, you could call him a serial killer. He was, he was accused of a number of murders and he had a, a specific type of target, which was, uh, we'll call them women of the night.
and, uh, he invited one back to that house one night and, Well, the end result was she was then buried under the floorboards of the basement and Jake and I had the pleasure of being in that basement and hearing that story and uh, we were actually still going to fund that house, but some other things came up.
So we decided, not, not the best project for us to fund, but another fun story and walking properties in beautiful Detroit, Michigan.
Hello, Val.
Val: Hello, Dave.
David: Glad to have you back. We have Val Moses back on the podcast, another repeat guest of ours. Another, uh, I guess in the grand scheme of the company, a tenured, uh, FTF slash upright employee who's, who's done several things with the company and also a real estate investor and, very smart gal. So Val, why don't you give us a 30 second update on what you've been up to with the company and, uh, and then you've got some.
Cool and maybe spooky stories to share with us. You go ahead
Val: Yeah. Hey guys, I'm Val Moses. I'm the VP of Asset Management, uh, which means I'm responsible for risk that occurs after origination in lending at Upright, and I'm a big fan of all things, real estate and money.
David: That's what we love about you and we're a fan of you
Val: Thanks, Dave.
David: You're welcome so you were telling me you've got a Story from your childhood that it in the spirit of Halloween might be good to tell for this episode. So You go ahead and tell us that story, Val.
Val: Sure. So I am Canadian and I grew up, uh, in a very small town. in southern Ontario that is right on the border of Buffalo, New York. And there is a section of that town that is called the Niagara Boulevard, and it is a very, very short distance between, on the river, the Niagara River, between Buffalo and Fort Erie.
Like, to the tune that you can swim in. so there's a long history of smuggling of all kinds of things that exist in that little precious span of real estate, that kind of, for all of time, has been... Somewhat legendary in my hometown. So there is a place there, um, that's a real house. It's an incredible Greek revival, house that was, I think, built in the early 1800s.
But when I was growing up, it's been kind of several things. It was at one time, uh, a gentleman who owned, uh, if anyone's familiar with Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls, he owned the Table Rock section of that, which is overlooking Niagara Falls. So, very affluent guy. who is also allegedly a smuggler, he owned that and raised his 19 kids in this house that I grew up knowing as the dollhouse.
The reason it was called the dollhouse is because with maybe the most creepy retail, kind of concept I've ever heard of in my life is what it was used for when I was growing up, which was a dollhouse museum. Uh, and what that was, was Handmade, wooden dollhouses that were like multi story, authentic people and furniture and items and kind of everything else.
and real life looking dolls on several stories of a mansion that was known kind of for its history. So we used to tour it, for some reason, um, in school once a year. And it's been the subject of many paranormal activity shows and podcasts, uh, over the years. but one of our kind of main things was, grade 12, so for us that was graduation in high school.
Um, we used to do grade 12 and 13, which existed when I was in high school. a dare, and that dare was to break into the dollhouse at night. I'm not saying I did that, but there was a group of people who did that, and with it, tried to figure out if the legends behind the dollhouse were true.
The legend is that there is an underground tunnel below the dollhouse that was used to help escaping slaves from America and part of the Underground Railroad, uh, in the 1800s. So our job was to try and find... proof of that, which has never been able to be materialized. What we didn't know at the time is the rest of that legend.
The rest of that legend is the reason the tunnel is sealed off, is because the gentleman who owned that, whose name was William Forsythe, his son drowned in the tunnel trying to go back and forth. So we went down to the basement, which as you can imagine in a Greek Revival mansion's basement. Looks a whole lot like a Cleveland basement.
Um, we were down there, and we were trying to find, or these people, I should say, we were down there, and we were trying to find, you know, exactly what, some, some proof of this tunnel existing that's kind of been legendary throughout our lives. So we were hunting around, and they had these like church pews that you could sit on.
that were down there and, you know, there, there may, may or may not have been a few Molson Canadians involved in this activity at the time and, you were a bunch of kids in this basement, this, you know, five foot ceilings in it and a friend of mine and her friend sat on one of the church pews and it made a weird sound, right, and, and suddenly there was like Some very cold air that we could feel that we were convinced that we found the tunnel that no one has ever found, by the way, so we thought, you know, we're real smart, smarter than everybody else.
We found this tunnel, we heard this creek and, you know, you ever seen like Catholic church pews that are super long. It was like one of those, but a shorter version of it. And there was a few of them down there and we bent over thinking it was like underneath. and realized it was like flat all the way to the ground.
So it wasn't like just the shelf of a bench, like normal, where it's like enough room for you to kneel underneath. And one of the guys had the bright idea of like open the church pew and maybe it's holding something inside. So we opened the church pew and inside of it was by far the creepiest porcelain doll I've ever seen in my entire life. Which was not that out of place relative to a doll and dollhouse museum. Um, which this is a real thing. You can look this up. It is known. I think it was called Bertie Hall was the name of it. but we of course thought it was a baby that we found in the church pew in that moment. but was not. It was a doll.
Um, but hands down, still to this day, I will no longer go near that building despite having toured it. Every year on a class trip for my entire school experience after that, and kind of forgot about the place. Years and years later, um, heard it on a paranormal activity podcast. Very similar story about this basement, and eventually learned kind of the rest of the half of that.
Uh, you know, some of the kids were saying they saw a ghost. I did not see the ghost, uh, but they described a young boy as the
ghost.
David: I have so many questions. Uh, first of all, did they ever find this secret tunnel?
Val: No one has found the tunnel. There are historical records of the tunnel.
David: And since you may have just incriminated yourself, I hope there's a statute of limitations in, uh, whatever part of the world this was. I don't know if it's Canada or New York, but, uh,
Val: Canada, which has very low
crime rates anyway,
David: yeah, you're across the border. Now you're yeah. You're good. Uh, wow. That's awesome. well, thank you for sharing Val. I do have two follow up questions for you.
Val: What does a creepy dollhouse museum look like?
David: Well, no, because I don't want to know. There's so many elements to that story. 19 children? That's spooky enough in its own. The guy had 19 kids, so, and then he filled the house with dolls. Yeah, I, you're insane for going in there multiple times, it sounds like.
Val: Who brings their kids there? That's what I want to know.
Like, whose idea was that?
David: This is, hey, you grew up there. I don't know, you tell me.
Val: It was also one lady's collection, which makes it a little bit weirder even.
David: That seems like a good place to wrap up. Val, Thank you, as always, for hopping on here and, uh, and sharing your stories. We love you. Thanks again. Talk to you soon.
Val: Thanks guys, For our next guest, which you all should be very, very familiar with by now, is my esteemed co host, Brendan Bennett. Brennett! Welcome to the podcast. You've been doing a lot of, uh, important stuff today, but, uh, glad you could hop in and, uh, join us for, for your portion here. How's it going?
Brendan: It's going pretty well. Thanks for having me. This is fun. Kind of being on the other side of the coin here, getting interviewed instead of having to
interview.
That's kind of nice.
David: Yeah. We're telling spooky stories today. Uh, we we've had a lot of good ones, uh, but glad to have you on it. Cause I know you are, uh, In addition to being my co host, you do a lot of important stuff with, with Upright, but also a real estate investor and have your own set of stories. So, please, why don't you, uh, take the reins here and, and tell us something about your real estate investing adventures.
Brendan: Yeah, so I think I've been fortunate to not have too many, crazy or scary scenarios, but I do have one that comes to mind. So. the first property I ever bought was in my hometown, uh, Elyria, Ohio. It's like 30 minutes to the west of Cleveland. Um, Elyria, very old housing stock. you won't see two houses that are the same.
They're, they're very creepy, old Midwest basements. you know, they're, they all have their own character. I was probably 22 at the time. I had just bought my first duplex with a business partner. And, I convinced this business partner to come with me to view, uh, this other duplex in Elyria that was like a 3000 square foot, uh, side by side duplex.
So, on the surface, looked like a great house. It was listed for like 150k at the time, which was, uh, which was a good deal. so it's myself, my business partner. We also brought our inspector with us just to kind of get an eye on the property. we're walking through and, David, you own a house.
You've done some showings and some investing. they go the easiest when there's no one home. But in this case, we had like a whole family that we were kind of walking through, kitchen, the living room, the bedrooms, all that kind of stuff. So we check out the basement, nothing, nothing too crazy.
First floor, pretty standard. We get up onto the second floor and, uh, there's like two or three kids there. And, uh, the one kid was like, well, Hey, if while you guys are here, you might want to check out this little attic area. And the attic was. Connected to one of the bedrooms that one of the kids had. So no other context from, from said child, he would just say, Hey, go, go check out the attic here, make sure you guys, you know, see the full property.
So myself, our inspector, my business partner, we go up into the attic. Super dark. It's unfinished there. There's nothing going on up there. And with our flashlight, we're just shining it around and we just see, different like piles of like animal bones. It was just everywhere you look, there was like skulls.
There was, just a ton of. Animal remains, right? And we're like, this is really strange. Like there must have been animals that got up into the attic over the last however many years just just died up here. We keep going and we keep scanning across and with no warning. There's like a 15 year old kid that just pops up that it just like up in this attic area.
David, this house is a four bedroom house. He's got room to sleep in one of these bedrooms. He is camped out up here in the dark, told no one. And when we, uh, like kind of got startled, you know, we, we jumped back a little bit. We're like, what the hell's going on? he just acted like it was super normal.
And we, we had a million questions, but we're, we really can only answer or ask a couple. And we were just like. Hey, what's with all the animal votes and just very, very, uh, factually, he was just like, yeah, I just collect them. He's like, I just like them a lot. So this, this guy, uh, wherever he is now, that was five years ago.
So,
David: Probably jail, but that's
Brendan: what, you know, I didn't want to say it, but I'm glad you did. It was, it was concerning my inspector who I'd known for like five years, just looked at me and you just kind of whispered, he's like, you owe me dinner. He's like, this is, this is insane. I've never had an experience like this. sad to say we did not buy the house.
We ended up terminating our contract, did not move forward. Uh, I've not bought a house in Elyria since I've since taken my talents to the Cleveland suburbs. But, uh, weird, weird
scenario.
David: Well, thank you for telling us about your run in and experience with Jeffrey Dahmer 2. 0. I'm sure that was delightful. And, uh, I hope for all of our sake, nobody runs into this kid or man, however old he is at this point and, uh, glad you to live to tell about it.
Brendan: me too. Let's, uh, let's hope he's not an avid listener of the podcast and, uh, you know, here's us telling a story
and that
David: Now, Brendan, you've got another, uh, another person with you. Another, uh, we'll call him a repeat guest at this point there in the office with you. Why don't you bring John in?
Brendan: No problem. Here he comes.
Hey, guys.
David: Hey, John.
Jon: How you doing?
David: Looking at your face and seeing Brendan Bennett on the screen is throwing me off. It's weird. Anyway,
John, tell us, tell us a funny story, a spooky story about your, uh, I don't know, encounters with people, properties, et cetera.
Jon: Uh, yeah, so we did a, uh, we did a loan for a gentleman in Missouri. Uh, I think it was actually, I'm not gonna say the location so we don't make it, we don't make it weird, but, um, it was in Missouri, kind of middle part of the state, you know, and not, not, not a like, uh, not a super major MSA, right? A little bit out there and, um, the, uh, it was a borrower who had been, been good to us before we'd had, we had a good relationship, so it wasn't like, It wasn't like it was new, right?
It wasn't like it was like, we don't know this guy and not sure what we're getting into. Um, and, uh, he reaches out, you know, so we, so we originate this loan, normal, small loan, uh, should have been kind of right down the fairway, something he was going to fix up and get a tenant in there and get it moving.
And, uh, we get this, we get this invoice, you know, it comes into our construction draw management team, uh, who does, who does a fabulous job servicing our customers, you know, making sure their draws are processed, things like that. And, and they come to me and they say, Hey man, uh, we need, we need some guidance here.
Can we pay this? I was like, yeah, send an invoice to you. Let's get it. Let's get the draw out. And they're like, no, it's, it's, it's for an exorcism. And I was like, the hell are you talking about? And the guy's like, my house is haunted and my contractors won't show up. Because the ghost is harassing him. I was like, you sound like on the phone with this guy.
I think he's like, maybe he's messing with me. You know what I mean? I'm not, I don't want to belittle anyone who believes in the paranormal, you know, that sort of thing, but I'm like, Hey, my guy, like we don't do draws for exorcisms, like it's just not. It's not in the, it's not in the loan docs, pal. Like I, that's a tough break, but like, why don't you get some, I told him, get some big lights from home Depot, get those, those big work lights, you know, that you have in the garage to get those set up, get the guys, the headlamps, you know, and some flashlights.
I was like, tell him to hustle up. Like tell him to pay him extra and like, get the dang thing completed so you can be sure of it. and, uh, the guy, it, it went over budget over, I think he ended up like losing money on it. He couldn't get. The crew to go back in there. I think part of it was like a self fulfilling prophecy thing.
Cause like he believed that he was freaked out and like, he wouldn't go there. I think he might've like sold it to someone else or something, but I don't think he ever finished it. but that was the, uh, that was the, the, the first and only time we've ever had a draw change order request, uh, for, you know, ghost removal, like it was some, so, I was thinking most busters, you know what I mean?
Like. Slimer comes out, you hit the button, boom, you bring him out. But like this guy was dead serious and couldn't do the project. And
off we go.
David: I, so I gotta know more, Jon. This guy, did he, like, did he have a plan for the exorcism? Did he have like a priest that he was going to pay? Was there a process in place here? Like
Jon: There was an exorcist guy that was going to help him. I did not get into the workings of that, but he had a guy that was like a ghost removal guy and like the validity of that You know how they were gonna go about that. That was not, I did not get into that line of questioning I kind of stopped it like hey man, we're not gonna fund your exorcism But uh, he had a, he had a, he had a whole plan with a guy that was gonna do it how that works, how that's executed
beyond me.
David: what a career exorcism guy. Did, have we, uh, have we lent again to the guy that wanted the
Jon: No, uh, I think maybe he's, he's shifted gears a little bit, uh, I'm not sure what he's got going on. but, uh, we have not, he, he, he wound down a couple loans that were on our books and, I hope he's doing quite well, but, we have not, we have not kind of
continued that, that relationship.
David: like the prudent choice on on all parties there. Uh,
All right, John. Well, thank you for hopping in and, telling us your exorcism draw story. That's good stuff, man.
Jon: Absolutely. You guys have a good Halloween. We'll talk to you.
David: All right.
All right. Lots of fun stories today and thank you all for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you guys all enjoyed the, uh, the multiple guests and stories that we had, should be a fun one. Make sure to let us know what you think or write in with suggestions or topics for the show at podcast at upright.
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