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From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Emmanuel Jochi.

So today, we're re-airing a story that we first ran almost two years ago. In fact, when I first

started reporting this story in April of 2020, COVID was just starting to hit the US.

And back then, I got a tip from a reporter friend of mine down in Mississippi.

She told me about this one really weird event that took place that she just hadn't been able to stop thinking about.

So say your full name for me and what you do.

I'm Alisa Zool and I'm a reporter for the Clarion Ledger. It's the

newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. At the time, Alisa was a pretty big investigative reporter.

Like, she did stories on political stuff that happened down there, but also did stuff on Mississippi's

prisons. But one day, her editor was just kind of like, hey, you know, it's a weekend

shift. There's a couple of like sort of feel-goody news stories buzzing around today.

Why don't you just sort of like write one of those fluffy news pieces up?

...