From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where I kind of feel bad that I never really
ask you guys how you're doing, but hey, that can be put right back on you too.
So you should also feel bad that we don't talk to each other and see how we're doing,
even in a superficial sense.
Anyhow, we're you're, I don't know, slightly upset.
I don't know how to call that mood.
Taylor and Chelsea podcast host here today doing a Chelsea episode and checking in Chelsea.
How are you doing?
Because I don't think I've ever asked you that on air before.
I don't know that you've ever asked me that period.
So I'm glad that we're finally breaking that ice.
Thank you for finally.
I feel like our relationship is about to get so much deeper now.
I'm doing fine.
Thank you.
Just like I usually am, but you asked this time.
Anyhow, today is another death episode.
Actually, I don't think the last one was death.
I forget the last one that happened.
No, the last one was the police.
So it was death.
And today we're talking deathbed confessions.
Finally.
Now, Chelsea, should I save it for the end?
Are you holding on to any good deathbed confessions or is this a now kind of topic?
I don't know.
Bring it up now if you want.
OK, now Chelsea.
Now seems like a good time.
And I hope that this doesn't end with like our deathbed confessions.
Like that's not where this is going.
Oh, that would be a good one.
Yeah.
I didn't think that far in advance, but.
Well, that's good.
That could be a future episode.
OK.
And I guess my real question is, does anybody make a miraculous comeback from their deathbed
having made very awkward confessions?
Another good future episode.
I didn't have that come up either and I didn't specifically search it.
OK.
What a twist.
Both of them.
What a twist.
Yeah, because I'm thinking these are scenarios where there are things that people didn't
want known while they were alive because there's likely implications from it, either
it being part of something going on in their life or an NDA in a contract that requires
them to not say anything or things like that.
Yeah.
So that's my first kind of introduction here.
But so it was a great segue.
And I also think that was your major question.
Am I going to give a deathbed confession?
Are you saving up anything to be a deathbed confession at this point?
Are you still waiting for that thing to come by?
I feel like you got to have a good one to go out on.
It can't just be like, take out the garbage.
It's really going to smell.
If you don't take it out or something like that, that would be so shitty.
You got to leave something that's going to be like requiring some follow up, but you're
not there to give the follow up, right?
Or is that morbid?
See, I don't know.
And I guess that's going to be the question as we go.
My other question kind of from this as well is have we missed out on many good deathbed
confessions just because of unforeseen deaths, like let's say in a car accident where they
were holding onto something good and nope, didn't get the chance or they yelled it out
knowing they were dying.
But in which case, someone probably wasn't there to hear it.
Exactly.
Huh.
That didn't come up either.
You always bring up the things that I didn't actually look into, but let's just get into
the episode.
Okay.
Before we just do an entire episode on what we didn't.
No questions that Chelsea didn't look into with it.
I mean, that's usually how it goes anyway, but let's get into the episode before I start
saying I didn't look into that at least.
You know, I wanted to start this episode assuming you knew what a deathbed confession was, but
I want to throw in some structure to what a deathbed confession is.
So this is the admittance or confession made by a person on their deathbed.
So when they are nearing death, most of them are days away from death, knowing that there
is no return.
They need to get this off their chest and such confessions may help alleviate any guilt
or regrets the dying person has by allowing them to spend their last moments free from
any secrets or sins they have been hiding for a long part of their life.
This could be for a few reasons.
If you're religious, the confessor may believe that confessing will earn them forgiveness
from a higher power granting them entrance to a better place after death, such as Catholicism,
where you confess your sins to a priest, and that's the whole thing behind Catholicism
is confessing your sins, therefore being granted access to heaven.
A further rationale may be that a person nearing death will not be able to face any significant
punishments for the confession such as shame or imprisonment.
Deathbed confessions can be given to anyone with family members, medical staff, particularly
likely to hear them, and they are often present in a person's last moments.
In some cases, a deathbed confession may be legally admissible in a court of law despite
rules of hearsay.
Yeah, it's one of the exemptions to hearsay rules.
Generally what that means is the person who said it should be here to say it.
Oh, that's what that means.
Thank you for clarifying that.
Yeah, generally if you're giving a testimony in court, it has to be things that you said
or were said to you.
You can't be giving testimony on behalf of somebody else doing something.
Okay, I didn't know that that's what that actually means.
Unless it's somebody's dying word as one of the exemption, generally because somebody's
not going to be lying when they're dying.
And we're going to look at a few things here.
That actually also...
Where it comes up, whether someone's lying or not, and like other types of confession,
some deathbed confessions are false confessions, which I do have a few examples of.
I think I didn't take them out.
I shouldn't have if I have the set, which I found interesting that on your deathbed,
there could be some false confessions.
But there's a whole phenomenon of false confessions that you would think you would never give
a false confession, but there are tons of examples out there of people giving false
confessions.
So let's get to some deathbed confessions.
This is what this episode is about.
So these are some famous deathbed confessions.
Emma Ellis Smith, many decades after the 1926 disappearance of a 16-year-old girl named
Emma Ellis Smith in Sussex, which is the name of this particular case, obviously, England.
A man named David Wright claimed in 2009 that his deceased great-aunt Lillian Smith, a sister
of Emma Ellis Smith, had told her niece that in the 1950s she had taken a deathbed confession
from a man claiming that he murdered Emma Ellis on her way to the train station in Horam.
The case was reopened not to find a killer, but to find the body of a young girl to give
her a proper burial to give her relatives closure.
In 2011, Sussex police concluded that despite the alleged deathbed confession, Emma Ellis
Smith had not been murdered but had in fact eloped with a married man named Thomas Wills.
Police concluded the pair had probably ended up in the Republic of Ireland.
I didn't like that one.
I left it in because it is apparently a very famous one.
I don't like that it just says she probably ended up in the Republic of Ireland with no
further evidence than that.
That's what you want to hear from the police, eh?
Especially when somebody gave a deathbed confession and they're like, she probably ended up here.
I didn't particularly like that one.
She's probably outside our jurisdiction is what I'm hearing from them.
So I left that in just because, ah, a few reasons.
One, the police, which we saw in the last episode, am I right?
But also the false one because I think it borders on false, but it also borders on police.
So have what you will with that one.
Margaret Gibson is the next one.
On October 21st, 1964, 70 year old American retired actress Margaret Gibson suffered
a heart attack and then confessed to the February 1st, 1922 murder of film director William
Desmond Taylor.
Gibson was never mentioned during the investigation and no surviving documentation refers to any
association between Taylor and her after 1914.
All of the police files and physical evidence relating to Taylor's murder disappeared by
1940.
And aside from circumstantial evidence, no confirmation of Gibson's involvement in it has since emerged.
However, Gibson's reported confession does not conflict with the known historical record.
Again, it's kind of saying, we don't know for sure, but this person gave a deathbed confession.
Yeah, they only get better from here.
But I thought I would share these very well known ones.
I'm at least glad they didn't fall back to their probably in the Republic of Ireland right now.
So we don't need to investigate.
And William Desmond Taylor actually alive and well.
Did actually die.
James Washington in 2012, James Washington admitted to the murder of Joyce Goodner, a
35 year old Nashville, Tennessee woman who was found dead by firefighters inside an abandoned
home 17 years prior, ended up recovering and was convicted of murder.
Oh, here you go.
And was convicted of murder despite trying to recant his confession.
That's a good one.
I'm glad that I covered your question.
Phew.
Yeah, look at that.
That's the first.
There's a first for everything here.
I actually covered something.
I would love to feel his thought process of like, he didn't die.
He thought he was dying.
So that must be like a good feeling or a relief feeling.
But also, oh, shit, I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life now.
Yeah, like, do you not covered in this episode at all?
Like at what point are you dying enough to give your secret that you've kept up your
whole life?
I get what points are you like, okay, now's the time.
But you don't want to get too far where you can't give in.
Do you want to get into heaven?
Well, and I think that comes down to the idea of a death bed.
Does it not have to be the bed you're dying in?
And it's probably the last time that you don't get out of that bed again.
So is it when you see the grim reaper?
Or is it too late at that time?
No, not by the episode.
I think it's a balance of the kind of news you're trying to get off your chest.
But I'm learning that if you have murdered somebody, probably just keep that to yourself.
Yeah, but sometimes you just got to tell somebody.
And we got to be honest, especially through this day and age.
I mean, ancestry DNA and stuff like that is, you know, taken away the murder death bed confession
need because it's, you know, not if you're Catholic.
Still got to do it. Yes, if you want to get that's true.
You still got to confess to it on your death bed.
It's true. Maybe.
You're a hot bull.
Maybe the Pope's just came up with it because they wanted to like hear these
juicy details as people were dying.
Have the Pope's ever taken like a last right?
I feel like that's below the thing that popes.
Man, I wish more of them spoke English.
They just I'm getting nothing from them.
They speak the Lord's language.
German.
Yeah.
Satoshi Kirishima.
January 2024, a Japanese man died of terminal cancer at the hospital of
Kamikura Kanagawa Refpture.
A few days prior to his death, the man claimed to the nurses to be the Satoshi
Kirishima, a wanted terrorist associated with the East Asia anti-Japan armed
front who had evaded capture for 49 years.
At the time of the man's death, Kirishima was one of the most wanted men in
Japan with his wanted poster found ubiquitously throughout the country.
It was confirmed that he was a Kirishima through DNA tests on the second of
February of some year.
So was it this year?
I don't think it was this year.
But yet we don't have a year.
So maybe it was.
So I have some stories coming up for you.
And those are just some fairly well known ones, the ones that I just went
through. If you could call them that.
I am not well read on deathbed confession, so they weren't well known to me.
I thought we'd move on to some better ones that might find a better
audience on this podcast, perhaps.
A more fringy side of it, I see.
In 2007, an astonishing twist to the Roswell story came to light and
reignite it claims that aliens did visit Earth in 1947.
Lieutenant Walter Houtt worked at the military base near the town in 1947
as a public relations officer.
He was the man behind the original press release, which at first
denounced that a flying disc had been found on the orders of the base
commander, Colonel William Blanchard.
Houtt died in December 2005 and on his deathbed left a sworn affidavit
only to be opened after he passed away.
That's the way you got to do it.
Here's the answer.
In 2007, his message was released and cast more doubt on whether the US
government's explanation of the Roswell incident is accurate.
The text claims that the government's weather balloon explanation was a cover
story and that the actual object found by the military was stored in the
base's hangar.
It goes on to describe what Houtt had seen and he describes not just an
alien aircraft but also claims to have seen alien bodies too.
When he arrived at the military base, he was apparently told that a UFO had
crashed and a small body recovered.
Affidavit shared after his death, describes a meaning at the base with
Colonel William Blanchard and General Roger Rayme.
Houtt claims at the gathering pieces of wreckage were passed around, but nobody
was able to identify the material it was made from.
He stated the press release was put out because Roswell residents were aware
of the crash site, but in fact, there was a second site where more debris was
found.
He claimed the press release was intended to distract the public's interest
from the second and more important location.
He mentioned a cleanup, which happened over several months and involved
military personnel searching both crash sites for any other pieces of debris left.
During the search, any signs of unusual activity were erased to cover up what
had really happened.
Houtt recalls how he was taken into one of the hangars at Roswell called
Building 84 where he saw the craft, described it was a metallic egg shaped
object around 12 to 15 feet in length and around six feet wide.
His account described that.
That is small.
Like that's, I think that's smaller than a car.
12 to 15.
Well.
Oh, 12 to 15 feet.
15 feet. Okay.
Yeah, about the size of a car.
A big, a large van probably.
Yeah.
That is average maybe.
I don't know.
It sounds like a car.
His account described it as windowless and without wings, tail, landing gear,
or any other features.
Two bodies were on the floor and partially covered.
He claimed and were around four feet.
Did he really?
Did he really give no description of what it looked like other than it was
roughly the size of a car?
Yeah.
Uh, no, but it had no identifying features.
I guess apparently at all.
It didn't have a tail, landing gear, or features.
It lacked everything.
It could be a car.
What he was seeing was a car.
A hot concluded his note, quote, I am convinced that what I personally observed
was some kind of craft and it's crew from outer space and quote, good for him.
I am unsure where I sit on that.
That's all of that depth bed confession.
Obviously the original crash happened in 1947.
Then we have, what's his idiot face?
Bill Moore.
He wrote his follow up to it, was it 20 or 30 years later, which would put it into the,
yeah, it would have been 20 some odd years later in the 70s.
Bill Moore wrote his infamous Roswell and that's where he got the bodies 20 years
after the original crash.
And then this guy is saying this in 2005.
So I really don't know what to make of that.
I mean, I also find it's an interesting interpretation of a deathbed confession
because it's not actually released on his deathbed.
It's released after his death.
Yes.
So it's a more liberal use of the term just because it's not something that came out
on the deathbed.
It came out due to.
It is.
I mean, I think you can take some liberty with deathbed confession.
I mean, if you're giving something to be put out after you die, I think it's probably
even though it didn't make it into my definition, I think it could be considered
still a deathbed confession because you're saying you can only share this after I die.
I don't know.
I'm torn on this one, particularly.
I am too.
And also I would be curious when he wrote this thing and gave it to whoever it was
to like not open until I die.
Like, was this something that he wrote like immediately after and it was going to give
to somebody and check him out basically and just said, no, this is this is how I'm going to do it.
Or if he wrote it down like a couple of weeks, I don't know, he was diagnosed with cancer
or something, and it was like 40 years after the fact.
No, I would have to agree with that as well.
Because those would be two different scenarios in my mind for how much weight we should give this.
Yeah, that's my next question.
How much weight do you give a deathbed confession?
Should more trust be put into it because somebody is giving a confession on their deathbed?
Well, here's the problem I have with it, though.
It's not necessarily an utterance like we've talked about with a deathbed, an utterance from a dying person.
This was written with intention when the person was perfectly healthy in my mind.
Perhaps. We're not really given that information.
No, but you would think-
But that's the difference here.
In writing something out and having it come out after you've died, that would be the case, I think, is why you're thinking that.
Well, and the problem I have is when we're talking about the idea of a deathbed confession,
it's something that's spontaneous, where it's something you want to get off your chest,
so you just have to say it in my mind.
Whereas this, it could almost interpret it as he didn't want it to be scrutinized or questioned.
But what is-
Because he had intention.
He wrote this down.
And he had the thought process.
He wanted it out in his-
But he didn't want it to be questioned in any way.
However, there are cases in which you could foresee this.
Like you said at the beginning of this episode, what if your death is very sudden?
And what he wanted to ask for, said for it to come out.
What if he had this information and there's someone that didn't want him to get that information out,
and perhaps he was being hunted?
Yeah.
Hunted may not be the right word, but you know what I'm kidding.
Saw it.
Yes.
Saw the death.
But yeah, that's the problem I have is that like that you could equally say,
as opposed to something just coming out of your mouth when you're dying.
If you have the foresight to write it down like that,
one of the things you need to wonder is why didn't they want this to be questioned?
Yeah, it might just be that they fear repercussion.
But it could be that the story doesn't hold up at all if you ask them any questions.
Yeah, you know what question this brings up to me is,
did this guy even actually exist?
Just knowing how this story originated after it came out.
And the year is what I'm questioning as well, 2007,
and versus Bill Moore writing this.
Oh, and that means like 50 years after the fact he died.
So he had to be quite young when he was in the military.
Yeah.
So.
And apparently very trusted.
Would track for something that Bill Moore would be associated with
because he wrote a whole book about it 20 years after Roswell
that gave completely different information.
So I digress.
I hate Bill Moore.
Okay, next one.
We are moving on to the ocean.
Yeah, these are different ones from the sky to the ocean to the Titanic,
where Patty claimed that he was an ordinary seaman aboard the Titanic in 1912.
And at that time he would have been 22 years old.
He always maintained that the iceberg alone did not sink Titanic,
that it had a fire burning in the coal bunkers for a week prior to that,
and that the captain and the company knew about it.
Patty also said that when the crew joined Titanic,
there were rumors that the company had switched ships at layup,
and that an insurance scam was going on.
They sailed.
Oh, the old insurance scam on the Titanic.
I love that.
I really hope that we come back to the story in a follow-up episode.
Well, it wouldn't be a follow-up on one tiny story we're telling on a deathbed confession,
but I hope we revisit this again because this is such a fun story.
Just all the conspiracy theories around the Titanic.
They sailed in a great hurry from Belfast and said that when they hit the iceberg,
it did not do serious damage, but when the cold water hit the coal fire,
it exploded and caused the fatal damage.
The chief mate put Patty in charge of a lifeboat,
keeping older hands on deck for lowering boats.
When the surviving crew got to the port,
they were all taken aside and met by two men,
one in high position in the company,
the other man was in a very high position in the government.
The government man read the crew the official secrets act,
explaining that if they...
There's an official secrets act.
I gotta look this up.
Explaining that if they told the real reason for the sinking, where the rumors of an insurance scam,
they would serve a minimum of 20 years in jail and would never get a job when they got out.
Patty's there is.
Are you serious?
Yeah, the official secrets act of the UK.
It was implemented in 1911.
What? We need to do an episode on that?
Wait, huh. Canada has one too.
Was adopted in Canada with minor modifications in 1890.
Gotta revisit this.
Wow.
Patty said that the guilt of keeping quiet all those years had taken a great toll on his health
and the sanity of the surviving crew.
This statement was relayed by a man called Dennis Finch.
I don't even know if I should be giving you this information.
I like what this guy is saying, to be honest with you.
Apparently it's false.
They did some background digging on him and found he was never on board.
However, something like the official secrets act,
you would think that they would have, you know, control over that manifest and might take his name
off of there to make it seem as if if he did confess something that there would be no record of him being on board.
And likely it would be a lot easier in the early 1900s to make a name change on a document.
True. There's only one handwritten document.
And this confession was retold in a book called Titanic or Olympic Witch Ship Sink
by Steve Hall and Bruce Beverage.
I would love to have a Titanic episode of all the conspiracies around the Titanic.
There are plenty and I always loved one of these.
But I mean the question still stands.
How did he know about the official secrets?
I think it's not for all this story.
That was my question.
Exactly. I thought that that sounded fake until you said there is one.
So I definitely didn't know about an official secret.
Can you imagine someone being like, actually you can't say anything about this because of the official secret act?
And you know what my reaction would be at that point?
First of all, now that I know that there's official secrets act,
I'd be like finally something to put in my deathbed confession.
Because right now I got nothing. I tell everybody all my secrets.
Of course, your deathbed confession is going to be getting a lot better because we now have the knowledge of the official secrets act.
Yeah.
That we can just add to it.
Yeah, that's true.
So yeah, this episode just keeps getting better.
I'm done with those confessions right now.
Those are good conspiracy minded confessions.
Now let's get to some Reddit deathbed confessions.
This one's from anonymous.
Quote,
My mom had a patient who was terminal and confessed to killing his twin brother in Vietnam so he could blame the death on the war,
steal his identity and then return to the US to be with his brother's wife.
The wife had passed away years earlier and the patient's children blamed the confession on dementia until after his passing.
But as it turns out,
patient's daughter ended up finding a handwritten confession from decades ago stuffed in an old Bible.
End quote.
But it never disappoints.
Next one is from Reddit user anonymous.
I don't know how this is anonymous on Reddit, but here we are.
Quote,
I had a patient who was an 86 year old woman who had a bunch of crosses around the room.
I had to ask her.
Uh oh, she's Catholic.
Yep, I had to ask her to fix them down.
She's gotta do it.
Due to the inability to create the care she needed.
She insisted they all stay up because it was one cross for each soul she took.
If that's true, she took 14 souls.
End quote.
That wasn't really, well kind of a confession.
That's like an off base confession, right?
Yeah.
A little bit.
Yeah, I guess it's a confession by implication.
Yeah, sure.
Next one.
By mtjobijob.
Whoa, my great grandmother told us her birthday was October 30th, her whole life.
In her death bed, we found out it was October 31st.
She apparently had lied for 80 plus years on a superstition.
Iberworth proved it after she was gone.
End quote.
Okay, so you don't gotta have a heavy hitter for a death bed confession.
I mean, to be fair, we don't know if that was a heavy hitter for her or not.
For her, that could be up to a lot of people.
Yeah, maybe it was like tightly guarded.
Next one by anonymous again.
Quote.
When my grandpa was dying, he confessed to my mom that her younger brother was not his biological son.
My grandma had passed away years earlier and had gone to her grave with the secret.
My grandparents were not together and lived separately, but during that time,
it would have been scandalous to have a child by another man.
The grandfather raised my uncle like he was his own son and none of the kids or anyone suspected he had a different dad.
It wasn't until later when my mom told my uncle and he didn't care.
Basically, no one in our family knows even I found out by accident.
Next one quote.
My dad told me that when his grandfather was about to die, he finally told his family why he had a tattoo on his arm.
It was always a mystery because he was a pastor at a church and he never spoke of it.
Apparently when he was 19, he was a safe cracker and robbed a bank and then got arrested.
So he got the tattoo in prison.
But when he got out, he decided to never tell anyone and turned his life around.
And that's user MNiM1.
Well, that was somebody willing to stand behind it.
Yep.
This one, loser Luna Lee 212.
But my mom and aunt grew up thinking their sister Suzanne died by slipping and falling while getting out of the tub.
They were all in their 20s when it happened and it wasn't until my grandfather was on his deathbed that my mom and aunt found out how she really died.
They had been cleaning out the house when they came across Suzanne's death certificate and discovered the true cause of death.
They confronted my grandfather who convinced that Suzanne had died by suicide.
They confronted someone on their deathbed.
Wow.
Yeah.
So there's some dark deathbed confessions.
I actually took some out because it was too dark for us.
Yeah.
That's for sure.
But it continues.
Deathbed confessions are everywhere.
There's a plethora of them if that's something you're into.
This is from Ribbon.
Well, when my father died, he finally told my mom that he and my grandmother had been divorced for years.
No one in the family knew it all.
Had it in his will to still give her everything and they still live together.
When my mom was going through his thing, sure enough, she found the divorce papers dating back to 1978.
End quote.
What a weird one.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I'm sure there was something like tax implication wise they did it for something.
No kidding.
But still live together and still give her everything.
This one's BESK 89.
My mom never knew her dad.
She was a result of a one night stand back in the early 60s.
My nan came from a conservative family, so it was a bit of a scandal.
She was going to give my mom up, but her own mother, a great nan, said no way and raised her by herself.
My nan always lied about who my mom's dad was saying he was a horrible person and going as far as to give him a cartoon character's name.
Thinking it would make it hard to ever look him up.
On her deathbed, she confessed she actually didn't know who he was and that he was one of the few sailors who were at the port when my mom was conceived.
She had no name and no details about him at all.
What cartoon character do you think she came from?
The name of my...
Yosemite.
Elmer Fudge.
Next one is anonymous.
Quote, my grandma confessed to cheating on her husband and she encouraged my mother, her daughter-in-law, to do the same.
Nice.
Next one.
That is a on the deathbed.
Yeah.
You should probably cheat.
Do you take it seriously or do you not?
That's the whole theme of this episode, I think.
Yeah, and that is one thing too.
I'm wondering how many of these don't get reported because the person had dementia or some other cognitive issue near the end and they're just like, yeah, sure, crazy old man.
So there was a whole thread of deathbed confessions that were just people with dementia who were confessing all these random things that they were either like seeing delusionally.
Like there was someone that was confessing all these murders and stuff but it was just they couldn't tell reality from the news that they were watching.
Oh yeah, no, like they're confessing the Lincoln.
Yeah, they were watching the news and every day they would come in, they would confess to a different murder but it was because they couldn't...
That's what was on the news, yeah.
They couldn't tell that that was the news and they thought it was realities.
So they are confessing that every day and so it was kind of a tell of dementia patients as well.
Was deathbed confessions being lies?
Next one from KMLW71.
Quote, before my grandma passed, she told us she hated being married and raising kids.
Oh no, there's the theme now.
She said she wanted to do stupid things.
You should probably cheat.
She could never do, but that she still loved everyone more than anything.
My mom later passed away with the same type of regrets.
Ah.
Another anonymous quote.
My dad grew up thinking my mom committed suicide when he was 10, when my grandfather passed away about a decade ago.
He confessed to my dad on his deathbed that he had actually killed my grandmother.
Oh wow, that's a heavy one.
Ah.
Yeah, thought I'd go out all the heavy ones, but that's pretty crazy.
Quote, my grandmother was born in Cuba.
When she came to the US, she would cash her social security checks and keep them in a pot under her bed.
When she died, we decided to go through every inch of her apartment to see if we could find the money she would hide.
My uncle told us that the final week she was in the hospital, she kept telling him to check in the oven,
but gave no context as to why.
Well, when my mom and I opened the oven door, we found a trash bag taped under one of the racks.
We opened it up and found two Tupperware containers with a total of $12,000 in them.
Huh.
That's a good deathbed confession.
Also, a tip that everybody should know if you're dealing with something like this,
somebody who's dying and you're looking for documents.
Apparently a lot of old people keep documents in the freezer, so don't forget to check there.
Yeah.
It's a great place.
Yes.
I guess.
That's why I'll keep my documents now that you told that.
Don't keep them there, please.
That's a terrible place.
Quote, my grandmother told all of the kids, me and my grown cousins, that she had a tattoo of the outline of Texas on her ass.
The nurse in the room burst out laughing and confirmed that it was true.
That's another good one.
Okay.
Last ditch effort, I'm going to get a tattoo that no one knows about in an inappropriate place.
And when I'm old, I'll confess that.
Next one is Orange Star 17.
My grandpa, a Sicilian man with blessed cooking skills, told us on his deathbed that his meatballs were actually frozen
meatballs from the grocery store.
I thought you would like that one.
Earless Leader 85.
I have an amazing one.
My great grandmother lived a very long and interesting life.
She was in her 20s in the Great Depression.
She had a wild streak from those days.
Wow, wild streaks in the Great Depression.
Incredible that we didn't know much about it.
I know exactly to the point that we actually don't know our great grandfather's name.
Just the husband she took later.
Over the course of her nearly a hundred year life, she had collected owls.
Literally thousands of owl figurines.
She had clocks, wall hangings, potholders, lamps, stained glass art, salt shakers,
more little figurines than you can imagine all depicting owls.
We all wondered the importance of owls.
She never talked about them.
We just all knew she loved owls.
When she was nearing death at the age of 98 or 99 and the Doc said she had days,
my grandparents went and talked to her and they asked her if she had anything she wanted to
share or ask before she goes.
She thought for a moment and said, I never understood the owls.
It turns out she didn't really give a shit about owls.
Near so we can piece together.
Sometime in the 40s or 50s perhaps, she bought either a trivet or a set of salt and pepper
shakers that were owls.
Then someone got her the other.
Those were the oldest owls anyone could remember, but from there someone got her an owl to match.
Probably a potholder, a placemat.
Then all of a sudden her kitchen was owl themed.
From there at snowball the owls flowed like wine, baffling her for some years.
Eventually taking over as the bulk of her personal belongings.
The moral is if you're not actually into something mentioned it early on.
I thought that one was a super fun one.
Next one, lies about expertise.
My time to shine.
Oh wow, this is someone's time to shine.
On their deathbed.
Yeah.
And fed stories.
Here I go.
I worked at a hospital in Garmish, a small town near Munich for the last 14 years.
My job there is not fancy at all.
I move people around, throw the trash out and occasionally is she a janitor or he?
Take care of some handy like work, fix a leaking shower head and stuff like that.
As you can imagine, I get to see a lot of patients that come and go.
Some of them pass away such as life I guess.
I remember a few instances of people confessing to me their biggest regrets.
Here are some examples.
Number one, an old Polish woman told me that she regretted not fucking Hitler when she had the chance.
Brackets, her words.
I wanted to ask her more context, but I was afraid to be honest.
Another notable example was an old truck driver that used to work for an Eastern German company.
He told me that once ran over some kids with his truck and was too afraid to stop and check
if they were okay.
Yep, there's the dark one.
I didn't delete, but it was a part of a greater one.
Once another Polish lady told me that she used to be a prostitute during the Second World War
and that she slept with very high up people in the government.
She told me that she did not regret that part in her life,
but that she could not tell anyone and that was a heavy emotional drake.
She also told me that she aborted more than five babies during that time.
There's another dark one.
Damn it.
That's not one.
Next one, cunning, cunning, cunning.
Oh, my great uncle actually confessed to having two illegitimate sons right before he kicked the
bucket in front of his own children and grandchildren.
The crazy thing was that none of his children knew this life of his,
but even my great aunt knew about it because she would have made a huge fuss if she was alive at the
time and knew about him.
What was crazier was that these two sons already passed away five and seven years ahead of him,
respectively.
He was 98 years old and his invisible sons were 65 and 69 years old.
Invisible sons.
The children found out that they had no kidding that one of his invisible sons.
I don't like that word.
Actually was a teacher at a school that his granddaughters attended when they were in high school.
Nevertheless, his children decided to reach out to the children of his invisible sons.
Oh, I don't like that.
He got connected and learned some more stuff about my granduncle.
The craziest thing was that I actually dated one of the granddaughters of one of the invisible sons.
I went past the age of 69 years old.
Those are Reddit stories.
There are further articles that I just want to throw in for an honorable mention at the end of the
episode.
Number one, from the New York Times, a lawyer's deathbed confession about a sensational 1975
kidnapping.
And the second one, on his deathbed, her father told her a secret.
He was a fugitive and had robbed a bank in Ohio, which I think are great articles to maybe
include in the follow up episode because there is tons of stuff to do with deathbed confessions.
So yeah, that's my episode.
My favorite one is about the owls.
And I think we learned some lessons.
I think we did.
And how you should be honing your deathbed confession.
I think there's some good tips in there.
Things that you probably should deal with before your deathbed as well.
Either, you know, the little things that you need to not let build up or just write it down
and have somebody read it after you die.
Also a great way.
Yeah, just I think that's the most foresight.
If there's something you really need to let out.
Does that count as a Catholic confession if you write it down and then say like,
I don't think it is.
If I die, you got to get it out before you die.
Yeah, no, you have to confess it to a priest, I think.
Your last.
Well, what if you gave it to the priest?
I think that's a part of your last.
He's the person who reads it.
But what if you don't have a priest with you like around when you want to offload it?
Well, I think that's the same problem.
You give it to a priest and he say, open us on my death.
Then you got to trust the priest is going to die after you.
Yeah, that's a fair point.
And as far as I'm concerned, priests are always going to be older than me.
That's just in my head.
They're old guys.
Yeah, and more the young guys that need protecting from the old.
Yeah.
But yeah, I guess it's the same problem for Catholics if they're in a car accident though.
No last rites.
So maybe you should just write that to your priest.
And I think we all need to just take a moment and write a letter to our priests.
But Chelsea, thank you very much for this episode.
I'm sure it's something we can build on from here.
There's already a couple episodes that it sounds like are coming from this.
Yeah.
But in the meantime, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea.
We are Journey to the Fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
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