Once upon a time, there was a Wollaston guy who evolved from Navy SEAL to YouTube story-telling sensation.
Jonathan B. Allen, better known online as MrBallen, shares his “strange, dark and mysterious” tales with 4.7 million followers two or three times a week. Hat on backward and sporting his regular flannel shirt, Allen appears before footage of a creepy cottage as spooky music plays. The teaser for today’s story is: “You’ll never guess what was hidden in this home.”
And you won’t.
Allen spends the next 15 minutes spinning a disturbing yarn about a 36-year-old loner building a guillotine in his bedroom, then killing himself as he sleeps.
Sound effects – hammering, sawing, knocking and crashing – add to the macabre mood. He illustrates details with wide-eyed facial expressions, arms waving. His cadence picks up at the climactic moment. Even his own jaw drops.
“As a storyteller, you must be fully committed,” he said. “A lot of the stuff I do on camera, I naturally do.”
Be it cults, conspiracies or cold cases, true crime is a gold mine. Millions of fans devour shows such as “Making a Murderer” and “Tiger King” on streaming services, TV networks, podcasts and in books. Stories about the darker side of human nature are more popular than ever and we’re flat-out obsessed. Thriller/crime/mystery is the second most-watched genre on YouTube, with 60% of the company’s 2.3 billion users hitting play, reports Omnicore Agency, a digital marketing company that tracks social media trends.
Allen, 33, a 2006 graduate of North Quincy High School, started telling scary tales in June 2020, uploading about 350 videos since. Each racks up millions of views – the guillotine story got 2.2 million. Never does Allen worry about running out of content, he said.
“The stories I cover usually deal with people getting killed or some other horrible thing, and there’s really no shortage of that. It’s good for my career but it’s a sad reality.”
Like any story worth hearing, Allen aims to bring listeners on a journey that ends with some kind of discovery. An engaging story, he said, has a “really good twist.”
“Whether it’s a revelation at the end or a redirect like ‘No, it wasn’t this person who did it, it was that person,’ the twist is the most satisfying part of telling a story.”
Be warned: Before you click play, you ought to turn on the lights. Allen’s stories might make your skin crawl. One video tells the tale of how a former child actor tied a couple to the anchor of their boat and threw them overboard. Others are stories of a cannibal frat boy, a serial killer in Alaska, or a buried mine from World War I exploding on a family at a Ukrainian campsite.
It’s hard to believe Allen doesn’t give himself nightmares. Then again, it’ll take more than a scary story to top his personal real-life tale of terror. During his deployment to Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL in 2014, a grenade bounced off his shoulder during a firefight and exploded, the blast sending shrapnel flying into his hips and legs. “I was bleeding to death,” Allen said. “I went deaf and blind and thought I was going to die.” The unit’s medic jumped into action and, eventually, a helicopter came to the rescue. Nine of the 25 members in his platoon received Purple Hearts.
So, no, scary stories don’t keep him up at night.
Deep Quincy, Massachusetts roots
Allen was raised with blue-collar values by his parents, Jessie Thuma and Scott Allen, in the Wollaston section of Quincy. They first lived on Franklin Street then East Elm Avenue, “near the Clam Box,” he said.
Growing up, Allen played Little League and Babe Ruth baseball. As a teenager, he worked for the Quincy Recreation Department. He learned to snowboard at Blue Hills Ski Area.
After graduating high school, he left UMass-Amherst during his freshman year because of “bad behavior.” He spent the next three semesters living in his mother’s basement while taking classes at UMass-Boston.
“I was lost. I couldn’t figure out what to do,” Allen said.
He returned to the Amherst campus after “getting his act together” and graduated in 2010 with a degree in philosophy and a minor in English. A few months later, he went to the recruiting office in Quincy Center to enlist.
By December 2010, he was in boot camp. Allen was a member of SEAL Team 2 stationed in Virginia Beach for five years, deploying to Afghanistan and South America. He medically retired from the Navy in 2017.
Upon return to civilian life, Allen worked for a stretch at a nonprofit helping veterans find jobs and training Navy SEAL candidates. During that time, Allen said he began leveraging social media to share military stories to raise money for the charity.
“I was mostly documenting my own experience, telling stories about my time in service,” Allen said.
In 2018, Allen built a following of about 40,000 fans around the “John the Navy Seal” brand, but “the fallout was pretty significant.”
“My former SEAL teammates were unhappy that I was parading around like I was so cool, like I’m Mr. Navy SEAL. People were upset with me,” Allen said.
He stopped doing those videos and instead jumped on the fledgling TikTok platform. He posted a quick take on the bizarre deaths of nine Russian hikers at Dyatlov Pass. Then he went to an indoor water park with his wife, Amanda, and their three children, Ella, 5, Cora, 4, and 1-year-old Henry. Five hours later, the post had tallied 5 million views.
“I didn’t see it as a career, but I wanted to do another one. I kid you not, all of them went viral. Everything had 2, 3, 5, 10, 20 million views. I didn’t really know what I was doing but it worked,” Allen said.
Allen films in front of a green screen in his home in New Hope, Pennsylvania. It takes about 15 to 20 hours to produce.
“My biggest issue is choosing a topic, not because I can’t find material, I’m just picky. There are thousands of subjects. I have them all listed and organized on my computer. Sometimes I find a great story and know it’s the one. But there are days I spend 12 hours on the computer and have nothing to show for it because I’ve just been reading through topics and not liking any.”
The competition for clicks, subscribers and “likes” between the 37 million channels on YouTube is intense. Every video Allen uploads includes a “like” button gag, where Allen urges viewers to “gently perform a lobotomy on the like button” or “gently take the like button out for a nice seafood dinner and never call it again.” That kind of light humor offsets the dark themes. Allen also said what sets him apart from other true-crime storytellers is making the victim the center of the story.
“Others in the genre focus on the killer or the perpetrator. I do the opposite to make it feel like the audience is in the footsteps of the victim. Instead of saying ‘Sally was in a horrible situation,’ I say ‘She would have been in total darkness and heard something behind her’ and in my mind that’s much more terrifying.”
Family of storytellers
Allen’s path from Quincy to Navy SEALs to internet fame might seem unconventional, but he comes from a family of storytellers. Mom is a freelance writer and head of circulation at Thomas Crane Library. Dad, a former Patriot Ledger reporter, is the assistant managing editor for projects at The Boston Globe, overseeing the Spotlight Team. His older sister, Evan Allen, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Globe, and his younger sister, Jessie Allen, is a Ph.D. candidate in biology at Tufts University.
“They are smart and really talented writers. I always thought I was the worst writer of the group,” Allen said. “The way I communicated stories was not through writing but by speaking. Compared to them, I always felt I had a leg up when it came to describing stories and talking about stories. But, they got me beat on the writing.”
Yet, with close to 5 million subscribers and counting, Allen has his happily ever after.
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