Hey, I'm Joel Stein. I want you to close your eyes and imagine a pocket watch.

It's moving from side to side. You're getting very sleepy.

Great. Now that I've hypnotized you against your will, you're going to start liking long-form journalism.

Like so much. You're going to listen to a podcast where the host interviews a writer about their long-form story every week.

I'm that host.

Listen to Story of the Week on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lam and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

Sift around through urban legends and hauntings websites enough and you'll come across talk

of the Mud Man of Nets, said to Haunt Nets Bridge in Nets Iowa. Websites such as Haunted Places

mention tales of a mud monster in the depths beneath the bridge, perhaps a ghost or

revenant of a man who died in a fatal car accident at the site. Some accounts raise the possibility that this

individual died while fleeing a crime scene and that their bloody crimes doomed them to this horrible

existence in Central Iowa. Haunting men of mud can be found elsewhere in the world as well.

Specifically, there is the Do-Ratabo of Japan. The name means either Mud Man or Rice Patty Man.

This Yokai is generally described and depicted as a humanoid of mud or at least a torso of mud

emerging from the mud of a rice patty, grasping about with its arms and staring out of a single

wide eye in its head as it wails in the night. According to Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt in their

excellent book Yokai Attack, the Do-Rotabo is not generally believed to be dangerous. It cries,

it frightens those who encounter it. Some traditions say it originated in the spirit of a man who

lost his hard-earned farmland and now haunting those very rice patties cries for its return in the

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