# Fan Favorite - "The Knot"

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/mrballen-podcast-strange-dark-mysterious-stories-6133468/fan-favorite-the-knot
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/mrballen-podcast-strange-dark-mysterious-stories-6133468/fan-favorite-the-knot.md
Podcast: [MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories](https://stenobird.com/podcast/mrballen-podcast-strange-dark-mysterious-stories-6133468)
Published: 2026-04-17T07:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/fan-favorite-the-knot--71398614
Audio file: https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/71398614/default.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/mrballen-podcast-strange-dark-mysterious-stories-6133468/episodes/fan-favorite-the-knot
Duration seconds: 2320

## Resource

Today's story is a fan favorite that was previously published as Episode 388. On a September afternoon in 2000, an FBI forensics analyst stood in her lab in Quantico, Virginia, staring into a microscope in confusion. She was looking at two strands of hair that were evidence in a murder investigation. And something wasn’t right. She checked the label on the evidence bag the sample came from, then looked back into the microscope. She definitely wasn’t imagining it. The label was wrong, which meant that the detective who had packaged the hairs and sent them over for analysis – had not understood what he was looking at. And this wasn’t a small mistake. Because if the analyst was right about what the hairs really were – then the whole investigation she was working on was about to change. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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## Transcript

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