MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories

Touch Me and Die (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

January 5, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

🎙️ The Voices & The Context

The Format: This solo-narrated true crime podcast weaves a gripping tale of a hardworking electrician's baffling decline and death amid a cluttered college chemistry lab renovation, building unrelenting suspense through investigative twists.
The Format: A narrative story.
The Key Players:
- Host: Mr. Ballen, a master storyteller famous for delivering strange, dark, and mysterious real-life tales in immersive, podcast-exclusive audio format, captivating audiences with his dramatic pacing and cliffhanger reveals.

🗝️ Key Themes & Topics

The episode masterfully unravels a thallium poisoning mystery through Bobby Curley's ordinary life unraveling into horror, blending everyday work pranks, medical missteps, and a dogged police probe that exposes betrayal. Key discussions pivot on symptoms mimicking overwork, rare toxin detection, suspect interrogations, and forensic breakthroughs proving chronic dosing.

Topic 1: Bobby's Mysterious Illness: Electrician foreman Bobby Curley endures escalating symptoms—heavy feet, burning leg pain, numbness, vomiting, hair loss—initially dismissed as fatigue from 12-hour shifts renovating a chemistry lab cluttered with chemicals, leading to misdiagnoses like Guillain-Barré syndrome before coma and death.
Topic 2: Thallium Poisoning Revelation: Autopsy uncovers **900 times

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Investigator Discovers Suspicious Note in Chemistry Lab**
2 (01:51) **Bobby Curley's Normal Morning Routine**
3 (02:29) **Family Background and Financial Expectations**
4 (03:50) **Arrival at Wilkes University Job Site**
5 (05:02) **Challenges in the Chemistry Lab**
6 (05:56) **Crew Prank in the Lab**
7 (07:20) **Escalating Symptoms Four Days Later (Aug 23)**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

On the afternoon of September 30th, 1991, an investigator in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania walked carefully through a college chemistry lab – that was also a potential crime scene. The room was a complete mess, with construction debris all over the place and lab equipment strewn across the countertops. It was so cluttered that the investigator hardly knew where to begin. But then he noticed something laying on a nearby counter – it was a soiled rag with a handwritten note sitting next to it. And when he read the note, he gasped. Because he realized that he could be the next to die.

You can WATCH all new & exclusive MrBallen podcast episodes on my YouTube channel, just called "MrBallen" - https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallen

If you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballen

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