The Mechanic and Mr. Machine

**John Bolton** (0:07)
The views and opinions expressed by hosts and listeners on The Astonishing Deadletter Office are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Astonishing Legends Productions, The Astonishing Legends Network or any affiliated entities or guests.

**Forrest Burgess** (0:37)
When something unexplainable happens to you, it can make you feel isolated or alone, but trust us, you're not. For over a decade, you've been sending your strange stories to Astonishing Legends, and now it's time for our fellow legenders to hear them too.
Join us weekly in Blanket Forteana as we dig through your intriguing messages to the Astonishing Dead Letter Office.

**John Bolton** (1:11)
Tonight's episode, The Mechanic and Mr. Machine.

**Forrest Burgess** (1:17)
Last week, we were in the neck of the woods, familiar to me from my childhood, and tonight, we're headed down to Scott's stomping grounds in the Carolinas, the Cackalackies, to one of those old family houses that everybody related to it has a story about, and nobody fully agrees on. You know the kind, deep front porch, slate roof, the paint's so thick, you can't see the joints of the wood anymore. And are we talking about a screened-in porch, Scott?

**Scott Philbrook** (1:44)
Well, and it certainly could be, but not necessarily in this story, but certainly in plenty of houses in my life, in history, in my family's history.

**Forrest Burgess** (1:52)
Well, you need to, right, if you want to sleep on the porch and not get devoured by mosquitoes.

**Scott Philbrook** (1:56)
Yeah, it just depends on where you are. Especially the low country or near it, which is where tonight's story is actually taking us.
I'll step in here for people who don't know my home state of North Carolina. Picture it geographically as three kind of long bands running from the southwest to the northeast in a way that we have the mountains in the west, one of the oldest ranges in the country and I think possibly the world, the Appalachians, which is why they're so much smaller than the Rockies. The Rockies are much more prominent, but that's because they're just kids compared to the Appalachians.

**Forrest Burgess** (2:26)
That's right. They're worn down. That's one thing I remembered in my college geology class is that you can tell the age because it's kind of worn down.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:35)
That's right.

**Forrest Burgess** (2:35)
The Rockies are more rounded and the newer mountain formations will be jagged. Think about that waterfall that's in Prometheus, the film.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:44)
Oh, yes.

**Forrest Burgess** (2:46)
Is that AI? What is that? Is that CG? It looks so rugged. It doesn't look real. Apparently, that's in Iceland.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:53)
I think it's Norway or Iceland. Yeah.

**Forrest Burgess** (2:55)
It looks like that because it's new relatively, you know, as the earth, so it's not worn down yet. But yeah, beautiful country there. So you're okay. So we have the Piedmont area, which have you been too much in the stomping around up there?

**Scott Philbrook** (3:08)
Well, the Piedmont, yes, I've been to it quite frequently, and I'm sitting in it right now. The Piedmont is the middle part of the state. So that's like, so you got the mountains on the far west, and the Piedmont is the middle part. And then there's the coastal plain, which is where you get to when you start maybe driving down towards the beach, that's flat, sandy, low country that runs all the way out to the ocean.
But where the Piedmont and the plain meet, the coastal plain, there's a seam, which geologists call the fall line. That's where all the rivers going down, the Haw River, all these amazing, beautiful rivers, they drop off of hard rock and onto soft sand as you get to this sort of in-between country or the sandhills. Not the coast, not the hills, a little of both and fully neither.

**Forrest Burgess** (3:52)
A sandy hill crane threshold kind of, right?

**Scott Philbrook** (3:55)
That's right, a little bit of a shout out there. But that's the word for it. And these are old families and old houses. A lot of them a century or more ago, when the rail and the mills came through, clapboard hand-built, added onto generation after generation, held together with a lot of duct tape and other-

**Forrest Burgess** (4:12)
Chicken wire, yeah.

**Scott Philbrook** (4:13)
Fire hazards, yes.
But it's the kind of place where four or five lifetimes have stacked up under one roof. You're far enough inland that you know the beach isn't too far away, but it still feels distant. Right up until the season turns and the storms start coming in off the ocean. They can make their way pretty far inland and be pretty deadly, the hurricanes anyway. My own family actually once lived in a house in this part of the state, famously known as the House in the Horseshoe.