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astonishing Dead Letter Office. Tonight's episode, The Mennonite Girl.

Tonight we're headed to one of the most beautiful locations in the United States, the Finger Lakes, which is a very cool area.

It's made up of 11 long, skinny lakes, many miles long, 10 or 15 long, I think in some cases, just south of

Rochester, New York. These were carved by glaciers and are renowned for gorgeous waterfalls,

wineries, and amazing scenery. And if you look at them on a map like Google Earth or Google Maps

or whatever, it almost looks like a bear claw, just scratched the earth.

Yeah, well, yeah, hence the fingers. And it's fairly well known regionally. I've certainly

heard of them, but I don't take a guess as to what people have heard or know about other regions

of the country. Yes. Well, always. It's kind of like with my dad, when my dad was, he was stationed

at Virginia in the 60s and

people would ask him where he was from. He would say, oh, Washington. And they're like, oh, D.C. He goes, no, the state. They're like, there's a Washington state. People didn't know there. Right. There was a Washington state. And so there you go. But yeah, it's a beautiful area of the country, but it's meaty or weighty in a way.

There's some gravitas there because you have that intersection of old world faith. You know, of course, the West Coast is not, you know, nearly, it has its own traditional history and natural gravitas to it. But the East Coast, as you will know, and the Northeast especially has a lot of early human development. Yes. There's also a bit of isolation. So you think about it. It's like, oh, yeah, New York, it's got to be really dense. Well, often it is. I remember being on a job and driving through, it was a little part of New Jersey. And I'm not used to this, but I was, you know, had a rental car and I'm driving from one little village, I guess you would call that. And it's like, where's the next town over? And they just drive up the road about half a mile. Really? Like, and then you get to the next, there's no break. It's not like there's a big stretch of unused land. Right. It's just that you're now in another township or whatever. It's like, that's weird. And then you drive another three or four miles and you're in another one. So that's odd. So it's absolutely packed. But there's also a lot of wilderness out there, the kind of that isolation that a farmhouse at the end of a long dirt road can provide. And there's a lot of isolation. So us Westerners, we have to get our heads around that because we're used to big, wide open spaces. And here it's like, yeah, you have that, but it's different. Well, so more precisely, the area that we're looking at tonight is the area around Pinyan, New York. And if you look at the map, This is tucked right at the north end of Kuka Lake. That's K-E-U-K-A. There is a large Mennonite community there, culturally adjacent to the Amish, but different. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But they do travel in horse-drawn buggies and kind of share a rejection of the modern world. Well, there you go. And, you know, I mean, how many people have seen witness with Harrison Ford? And that's like a lot of introduction to most folks about the Amish. Yes. They're pretty open. And then they sell their goods. And what their style is, for me, formulate some conclusions we'll have later or I'll have later at the end of the story about how this could have happened. But yeah, you're talking about farmhouses that are steeped in just human and animal history. Yeah. And building on the land and those old ways. And, you know, it's not just wooded nails. They soak up a lot of the human energy, I believe. And, you know, when a family, when they live, they die there, they're buried on the same plot of land for generations. I think those overlays don't really have any sharp edges or boundaries on them.

Yeah. And so I do wonder, well, we've talked about that before when somebody sees a ghost taking the, they just went through the wall, like they do that every time. Yeah. And then what's fascinating to me is like, okay, why are they doing that just because they can? Well, probably, but you might learn that the layout of the floor was different. It had been changed over the years and that used to. Yeah. Which is now a solid wall there. And so that's a natural path for them, maybe they

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