Former Navy SEAL from Quincy turns true crime stories into gold with MrBallen
John Allen thinks escapism may be the reason so many people watch and/ or listen to the “strange, dark, and mysterious stories” he tells each week on his MrBallen YouTube channel and podcast.
“A lot of people will say they find these stories relaxing,” says the Quincy native whose storytelling brand has become something of a phenomenon. “Even though they understand that’s paradoxical because the content of the stories can be gruesome.”
Allen began telling strange-but-true tales on YouTube as an experiment in 2020 and very quickly discovered there’s an audience eager to hear about “The Valley of Headless Men” or “The world’s WORST babysitter.” His YouTube channel now has tens of millions of monthly views, while his “MrBallen” podcast, available exclusively on Amazon Music, has more than 7 million monthly downloads.
The popularity of MrBallen has led Allen, a former Navy SEAL, to create two new ventures: a media company, Ballen Studios, that will seek to turn Allen’s storytelling into TV and film opportunities; and Ballen Management, which has begun assembling a stable of digital storytellers whose work also can be leveraged for TV, film, publishing, and live performance. (The first raconteurs to sign with the company are Ryan “Nexpo” Cantu and Nick Crowley, whose YouTube channels, like Allen’s, emphasize stories of odd or unexplained occurrences.)
In an interview, Allen, who lives in Austin, Texas, acknowledged that the remarkable success of MrBallen has been a bit unexpected.
“It started as more of a hobby,” he says. “People post stuff on the Internet and somehow, someway, some things go viral, and some things don’t. This was never, like, what can I do to build a career. It was just out of interest.”
After graduating from North Quincy High School in 2006, Allen attended UMass-Amherst. He had a vague plan to go to law school after that, but in his senior year of college, Allen says, he resolved to join the military, with the goal of becoming a Navy SEAL.
“When I graduated high school, a lot of my friends immediately enlisted in the Marines and went to Iraq, and that always kind of weighed on me, that people I knew were overseas fighting in a war,” he says. “I loved the idea that if you can get through the famous training, which a lot of people try out for but obviously few make it, you’re almost reborn.”
Allen did make it through training and served as a Navy SEAL from 2012 until his medical retirement in 2017, the result of severe injuries suffered in an ambush in Afghanistan in 2014. Allen then co-founded a charity, Elite Meet, to help special-forces veterans find work, and used social media to share his experience as a Navy SEAL to raise money for the charity.
“I wound up getting a lot of flak from active duty SEAL teams,” Allen says. “People didn’t like that I was talking about being a Navy SEAL, like, ‘Look at me, I’m this cool Navy SEAL.’ It was actually an intense amount of blowback.”
He decided to explore other ways he might be able to use the Internet to create a platform for himself. Eventually, Allen, who says he’s always been interested
‘It’s not just strange, dark, and mysterious, it’s strange, dark, and mysterious where the story turns on a dime. If it doesn’t have the ability to do that, it doesn’t really matter.’ JOHN ALLEN (above) on selecting material for his MrBallen brand
in “spooky and mysterious” stories, posted a TikTok about the real-life disappearance in 1959 of a group of Russian hikers in the Ural Mountains – known as the Dyatlov Pass incident – and it quickly went viral. Allen knew then he was on his way.
Allen posts a new story on YouTube once a week and two new podcast episodes per week. He looks for stories that aren’t only true, but include a twist, something unexpected, that can be revealed at the end of the narrative. That’s been the template from the beginning.
“It’s not just strange, dark, and mysterious, it’s strange, dark, and mysterious where the story turns on a dime,” he says. “If it doesn’t have the ability to do that, it doesn’t really matter if it’s strange, dark, or mysterious.”
Allen’s YouTube videos, normally about 25 minutes long, are notable for their minimal audiovisual production; they have a homemade quality. Dressed in a plaid shirt and wearing a backwards ballcap, Allen isn’t grandiose. Even while talking about “Passenger sucked out of plane window” or “The Texas Cat Lady’s HOUSE OF HORRORS,” he tells stories more or less straightforwardly, gesturing with his hands as relevant images or video occasionally flash on a green screen behind him.
“There are events and crimes that happen, and we don’t necessarily get the full story,” says Rita Williams, a subscriber to MrBallen’s YouTube channel who lives in Michigan and works as a mitigation specialist for criminal defense attorneys. “It seems like MrBallen has a commitment to try to get to the heart of the story, and to do it in a way that’s not offensive. If my kids walk into the room for a minute while I’m listening, it’s not a big deal.”
Williams, who comments occasionally on MrBallen’s Twitter posts, says part of Allen’s appeal is his ordinariness.
“He looks, like, hey, this is my neighbor. This is somebody I can talk to who’s interested in the same things I am,” she says. “He’s unassuming and I think that works well for him.”
Last year, the popularity of Allen’s YouTube videos led him to start the podcast, called “MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark and Mysterious Stories,” which quickly caught the ear of the folks at Amazon Music. Like Spotify and other streaming platforms, Amazon Music has been building its podcast portfolio, and the company signed a three-year, multimillion-dollar deal with Allen, giving it first-look rights to Ballen Studios’ new ventures.
In a recent interview with “The Storytelling Lab,” Nick Witters, Allen’s business partner and Ballen Studios’ CEO, called Allen a “brilliant creator and artist” who comes from a family of storytellers. (Allen’s sister, Evan Allen, is a reporter at The Boston Globe and his father, Scott Allen, is a longtime Globe editor who recently left the newspaper to work at MrBallen.) A publicist for Ballen Studios said the company now has 24 employees, some of whom help Allen research and write the stories.
Allen, who’s about to launch another podcast on Amazon Music, called “MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries,” says his audience, whether YouTube subscribers or podcast listeners, are drawn to the bizarre stories he tells, and the way he tells them.
“People get comfort from a friend telling them a story that’s compelling,” he says. “And when you incorporate fear, when the person listening is not in any sort of danger, it draws them closer to the storyteller.”