The Nightmare Cure (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

MrBallen (0:00)

Today, I'm going to tell you three stories about people whose very stressful lives literally drove them insane.

But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark & Mysterious, Delivered in Story format, then you come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the Follow Buttons house and relace all of their shoes upside down so they tie at the toes. Okay, let's get into our first story called Yay for the Attempted Slay.

On the afternoon of January 16, 1960, a 75-year-old man named Julien Opaillé carried a bag of groceries into his apartment in Toulon, which is a city in France. He set the bag down on the counter and then he looked around at the small kitchen with a twinge of sadness because he knew he would never see it again after tonight. Then, like always, he pulled out a cutting board and a knife and he began chopping vegetables for dinner. And as he was doing that, he heard his 77-year-old wife, Marie, call out to him from the bedroom. So he went to see what she needed and he found her sitting up in bed, but propped up with some pillows, which was exactly how he had left her. So two years earlier, Marie had gotten very sick with a mysterious illness and she had been totally paralyzed ever since. Now she could talk and she could move her eyes and sometimes she could even shift her shoulders around with quite a bit of effort, but that was about it.

And so ever since this paralyzation happened, ever since this mystery illness set in, Julian had become her full-time caretaker, which was exhausting and somewhat depressing. And to make matters worse, at least from Julian's perspective, over time, his wife had really only gotten more bitter and more demanding. So taking care of her had basically taken over every waking moment of Julian's life, both physically and mentally. And so now, as he, you know, with a sigh walked over and reached the bed that his wife was in, Marie told Julian that he needed to change her diaper because she had gone to the bathroom while he was gone, and he hadn't been there to help her with the bedpan. Now, Julian could tell that sort of in this statement was quite a bit of resentment, that she was annoyed that he had left her alone while he went to the store. But he didn't argue. He just nodded and started pulling back the sheets. And as Julian did this, he actually felt a wave of calm come over him, because he knew this would be the last time. Julian had known for a while now that he simply could not keep living like this, just was not going to fly for him. He couldn't do it. But he also knew that Marie's quality of life, which was already quite poor, would be even worse without him, which is why he'd made up his mind to end it all tonight, not only for himself, but also for Marie. Later that night, after Julian had cleaned up his wife and then also made dinner and fed them both and then cleaned up after dinner, he sat in the bed next to Marie reading her a book like he did every night. And when he noticed that she was beginning to drift off, he put the book aside and he gently adjusted the pillows so his wife could lie flat and sleep comfortably.

Then after that, he switched off the lamp and then he got out of bed and he left the room. He went to a closet and he pulled out a rope. And then he took the rope to the bathroom and he spent a few minutes setting it up. After it was set up, he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and went back into the bedroom where his wife was. And for a few minutes, he just stood there, you know, with this knife in hand staring at his wife as she slept.

And you know, for a minute there, he didn't know if he could do it, but then he decided he had to and now was the time. And so after taking a few deep breaths, Julian raised the knife up and his whole body is shaking from nerves and adrenaline, like he can't believe what he's about to do. And so he ended up gripping the knife with two hands. And then he closed his eyes and plunged the knife down into Marie. At that same moment in the next apartment over, Julian's neighbor, a man named Roger Moncuso, was getting ready to go to bed. And as he was about to climb into his bed, he hears this piercing scream coming through the walls. And he could tell right away it was coming from Julian's place. So he jumped up and he ran outside, went around, and began banging on their door. But nobody was answering. But Roger could clearly still hear screaming coming from inside of Julian's place. And so Roger began slamming his shoulder into the door over and over and over again, until it burst open and then he rushed in. And as soon as he was in there, he just followed the constant screaming into the bedroom where it was coming from. And when he got to the doorway and saw what was happening in the bedroom, he just froze because he was looking at a miracle. It would turn out when Julian went to murder his wife, he was so nervous, he was shaking so badly that when he brought the knife down, he missed her chest where he was trying to stab, and he wound up stabbing her in the side of the head. Now, this didn't kill her, but it did wake her up. And it shocked her so much that she jumped to her feet and began screaming. And so Roger, the next door neighbor, barrels into the apartment. He makes it to the doorway of the bedroom. He looks in, he sees Marie screaming, but really what he sees, the miracle, is that she's standing. He knows she's paralyzed, like she hasn't moved in years, and she's standing hand on her head from the stab wound. Not that Roger knows that, but he can't believe she's just standing there. How did this happen? Later, Marie's doctors would determine that her paralysis was very real. She could not move, that was absolutely real, but the cause for it was psychological. There wasn't anything wrong with her body. It was due to this very serious mental block. But when she was stabbed in the head in her sleep, and she woke up to find her husband standing there with the bloody knife, that was such a shock to her system that it effectively reset her. It got rid of the mental block and cured her paralysis. Now, in the moment, like immediately after the stabbing, Julian had been so horrified by what he'd done, that he'd actually gone through with the second part of his plan. As his wife is screaming there holding her stab wound, he went right into the bathroom and hung himself. But thankfully, because Marie was screaming so loudly, their neighbor Roger who busted into the apartment, he was there within minutes, and he was able to cut Julian down and revive him. And so, of course, Marie and Julian lived happily ever after. There were no issues whatsoever with Julian stabbing his wife in the head because he cured her.