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The Truth About Shock, PHTA, Horror Pick & Empty Pools
Season 5 Episode 873
In this bone-chilling Halloween episode, host Rudy Stankowitz dives headfirst into the haunted side of the pool world—where the ripples in the water might not be from your circulation pump. Beneath the calm shimmer of moonlit pools lies a darker current: ghost stories soaked in chlorine and mystery.
Rudy takes listeners on a guided ghost tour through some of the most notoriously haunted swimming pools on Earth—the Queen Mary’s first-class plunge, McCarren Park Pool’s eerie echoes, The Rave’s waterlogged concert hall in Milwaukee, and the Baker Hotel’s decaying spa in Mineral Wells, Texas. Each haunted tale blends the supernatural with the mechanical—the hiss of an old centrifugal pump, the slow groan of a corroded valve, and the whisper of gravity-fed drains that might still be pulling something from the other side.
But before the goosebumps get too deep, Rudy grounds the chills in cold, hard chemistry. He pulls back the cover on one of the pool world’s biggest myths—the “10x rule” for breakpoint chlorination—and exposes why the dosing instructions printed on your calcium hypochlorite bucket might be dead wrong. You’ll learn the truth about shocking a pool: when it’s needed, when it’s not, and how misreading combined chlorine levels can turn your wallet into the real victim.
Then, things get even stranger. A listener calls in with a question about Jack’s Magic products that takes an unexpected turn. Rudy shares his latest paranormal investigation findings—because of course he’s the only guy who can go from breakpoint chlorination to EVP recordings without missing a beat. Add in the PHTA’s latest initiative to help member businesses, and wrap it all up with a ghost story that’ll have every pool pro double-checking their filter room after dark.
From haunted hydraulics to myth-busting chemistry, this episode proves one thing: in the pool world, even the dead don’t always rest at the bottom.
Highlights:
- 🧙♂️ “Do you ever notice how every swimming pool has its own kind of hum?” Rudy opens with a haunting reflection on water’s memory.
- 🧴 The real reason you don’t need to shock your pool every 7–10 days (and how to test before you dose).
- 💀 The ghostly pool at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville — long buried, but locals still hear splashing.
- 🚢 Inside the Queen Mary’s art deco pool: a masterpiece of copper piping and Atlantic crossings… now echoing with phantom laughter.
- 🧰 Haunted Equipment Porn: centrifugal pumps, sand separators, gravity-fed loops, and the eerie silence they left behind.
- 🏚️ Rudy’s firsthand paranormal investigation at the Old Newberry Jail — site of the tragic “Newberry Six” lynching of 1916. He records overnight EVPs, interacts with EMF spikes, and captures strange responses through a spirit box.
- 💡 Listener Q&A: “Greasy Ass Bathtub Ring” from Rockville, MD asks about scum lines and Jack’s Magic enzyme packs (yes, they work).
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Published on 2 days, 16 hours ago