As The Raven Dreams Podcast - ATRD Ep. 129 - Scary Summer Vacation, Paranormal, and Other True Scary Stories - 22 True Scary Stories
Episode Date: June 28, 2024Welcome to the chilling 129th episode of The ATRD Podcast! Today, we will step into the shadowy corners of reality, where everyday life takes an eerie twist & ordinary people experience the extraordin...ary. Today we will be diving into stories about The horrors that can occur on Summer Vacation, True Paranormal horrors, and other true scary stories from Subscribers. So, turn down the lights, tune in, and let the haunting tales of everyday people take you down that dark and creepy road. Remember, these aren't just stories... these are true experiences that remind us that our world can truly be scarier than fiction. Have a Story To Submit? ➤ https://www.astheravendreams.com Or Post to the Subreddit ➤ https://reddit.com/r/TheRavensDream Support the channel for Early Access AND more! Patreon ➤ https://patreon.com/AsTheRavenDreams Join ➤ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkW0ihdMHfBUjQrMKjRto6g/join Or Check out the Merch Store! ➤ https://teechip.com/stores/astheravendreams Thank you to all of the authors that have stories in today's Video... Spyro1993, Carla Base, Crista Thompson, Kat, MacnCheese-95, Luna, Christina, blondebomber91, Jason White, Greymane, Swamptype, Chelsea, Kayl33, BullsEyeMarcus, Jackson... As Well As Any Author That Has Requested Anonymity. 'As The Raven Dreams' is a community where we explore the darker parts of human existence through true and harrowing stories. From sinister encounters with strangers and stalkers, to terrifying experiences that defy explanation and unsettling mysteries that linger in the shadows, I am here to tell you the most haunting narratives ever whispered. Much Love, and Sleep Well... ----- #TrueScaryStories #AsTheRavenDreams #RedditStories ➤ Stories include a content warning for language and sensitive/disturbing content. Viewer discretion is always advised. ➤ ALL Audio of this Podcast are copyright of AS THE RAVEN DREAMS / RAVEN ADAMS and may not be duplicated, in any format, without explicit permission ➤ If you like any of the following stories, consider subscribing! - Dark Web horror stories, creepy lets not meet stories, stalker stories, Glitch In The Matrix Stories, Unexplained Horror stories, Paranormal stories, cryptid encounter stories, Crazy ex lover stories, creepy neighbor stories, quantum immortality, true scary stories from reddit, or any other True horror Stories! ➤ And Remember; You are loved, you are important, and you are valid. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Lazang sur-gillet,
Puisance-Moyerned
15 minutes.
Oh, you're
like it's the hour
Dojo?
Prere to play.
Vive the pleasure
with Leo Jo.
The casino in-line
that proposes
the most recent
machine-a-sou
and the
games to
on Big Bas-Banza
without
exiganceance
of misgantane.
Hey, I've
gained!
Woo-hoo!
Sentire the pleasure
Play-Ojo
18-D-M-E
18-N-LIN
20-tours
on Toursesu
$5BBas Bonanza
Depos Minimimimimum
of 10 dollars.
Vososososos
$1 million to pay
responsible. The conditions
apply.
We're saying, in the
phone, all the
world can be a guy of the finance.
Not a good
to have a gross
monger in art,
to play on the golf
or to be to be
a pro of the crypto.
Not even
no need to be.
You have
always made
these affairs, and
the apply
negotiates-tit-t
-tit-tete-t
you add to
renewing with
your instinct
of negotiation.
With the
support 24-hour
per-jour-
any amount of
minimum,
and free-mensue
money, you
are made to be
for negotiate,
and the apply
the appellee-tit-tit-tit-t
is made
to you help
If you have a story you would like to hear featured on this podcast, please go to ashtheravendreams.com and click the button to submit your story.
Also, if the platform you're listening on has the option to rate this podcast, please consider doing so.
And thank you.
When I was a lot younger, my family decided to take a vacation to North Carolina.
They always tried to plan some kind of vacation out of sea.
state once a year during the summer, and this year it was to the beach and a national park.
The theme was apparently nature, and to be more educational.
My parents were always big on learning outside of school, too, but they always made it fun,
which I appreciated.
Anyways, there were five of us total.
My mom and dad, my younger sister, myself, the middle child, and my older brother.
With five of us, they found it easier to get a hotel rather than camping, so that's where we stayed.
It was a nice hotel, though.
It had free breakfast where sometimes my older brother and I were allowed to walk down there together while they finished getting ready.
Where other days, we just waited with them, depending on how long my brother wanted to sleep.
The hotel also offered a few free snack vouchers a day, which was great.
We were allowed to go and exchange them for something of our choice once daily.
Being a young adult now, I can tell the hotel was very family-friendly.
It had an indoor pool with a small one to the side for kids.
The vouchers and free breakfast, of course,
helped reduce the cost of meals and food you may have to pack too,
so I can see why my parents chose it.
What I didn't understand was why people went there and would get upset about
seeing kids running around.
I don't expect everyone
to be patient or accepting of kids.
I had siblings and now
a couple nieces and nephews, but
I don't want any kids myself.
However, I can't
imagine being angry at just seeing
a kid around me,
especially in public.
However, there seemed to be one guy
probably about middle-aged
at the hotel where
no matter where he was or what
he was doing, he seemed to have
permanent scowl on his face.
I remembered him because he almost looked scary.
I saw him in the pool, in the breakfast area, and even at the ice machine.
He would look around, especially at me and just look annoyed.
I just did my best to avoid him.
My first personal interaction that I'd had with him was in the pool.
On this day, we got hit with a hellacious thunderstorm, so we stayed indoors.
but we still wanted to have some fun, so the pool it was.
He was in the hot tub alone when my family walked in.
There were already a lot of people, adults and kids, in the swimming pool,
and they were all playing, laughing, and screaming.
My brother asked about going to the hot tub,
which is when I looked over at it and noticed him there.
My parents told my brother no,
most likely because they saw the man in it and told him maybe he could live.
later. So, we all got in the pool and enjoyed ourselves. The hot tub was closer to the entrance
of the pool, so the guy was pretty close. After some time, I approached my mom who was sitting
near the entrance, playing with my little sister, and I was telling her about something. I don't
remember what happened, but something caused me to laugh. As I was laughing, the man in the hot tub
got up, said something that I couldn't make out, and then left.
But he looked angry.
I remember asking my mom if he was okay, and she looked over at him and just shrugged,
saying something about just being in a bad mood or something.
The rest of the time in the pool went fine.
But the worst of it was the next morning when we went to have breakfast.
My brother wanted to sleep in some, so I had to wait for my parents to get ready so we could all walk.
down together. Once we got down there, I once again noticed the man from the pool sitting at the
table in the back, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. He didn't even have a plate in front of him.
There were two other families sitting down there at the time. One of them had four kids with them,
all close to our ages, and the other couple had a kid probably close to my age, and then an infant.
The baby was starting to cry as they comforted them,
and one of the kids from the other families was starting to whine about something else.
We picked out a table, and my mom sat with my little sister,
while my dad took me and my brother up to the buffet to get our breakfast.
When we returned, my mom went to get her and my sister's plate.
I looked around the room as I do while I eat, and I noticed the man again.
He was still sitting at the table with her.
no food, but he had laid his newspaper down and was just staring at the family's table in anger.
I looked away and tried not to think about it because he was pretty scary looking to my young
self. As my family talked about our plans for the day, the man was a forgotten memory for the time
being, and I asked to get seconds. My parents said that I could as they could see the buffet line
from where we sat, so I got up to get more. As I walked up, I had. As I walked up, I had to have to
I noticed the angry man was also approaching, so I slowed my pace some to let him go ahead.
However, he went past me, so I assumed he wasn't going to the food, so I went forward.
But then right as I walked toward the first container, the man shoved past me, nearly knocking into me, slammed open the container lid,
used his hands to crab a biscuit, and then slammed it closed.
I was a kid, and I at least knew better than to use my hands for the food.
You were supposed to use the tongs to get the food.
I was also standing in front of the same container.
It was pretty obvious that I was trying to use it, so he could have left it open,
but he was rude and he shuddered on me.
But, again, I was a kid, and I certainly wasn't going to say anything,
so I slowly opened the lid again and got my food.
The man was now towards the other end getting more coffee.
I finished making my plate when I heard my brother call my name.
He asked me to grab him a biscuit too, so I went back to grab another one.
As I turned around to head back to the table,
the man once again cut me off, but this time he was too close,
causing us to collide and spilling my biscuits and gravy all over both of us.
A majority of it got on his shirt and pants,
but some of it got on my hand and arm and burned me a little.
The entrance wasn't that big.
I was in the center, sure, but I was also trying to be very careful while carrying my plate.
The man was not close enough to the entrance.
He was still making his coffee and getting whatever else he had,
so he should have waited for me to pass.
However, much like the lid thing with him cutting me off,
it seemed like he was just trying to be an ass and cut some long.
little kid off, taking advantage of his authority. However, that did not work in his favor as he was
now wearing my food. I immediately gasped and my eyes started to water. This man scared me as is,
but when I looked up and saw that he was red in the face, I tried to hold back and apologize
to him, but he immediately started yelling at me and pushed me back. He made a comment about me
being stupid and not paying attention, which, of course, got my parents to take action.
My dad immediately went into protector mode and got up to come over to me.
He asked me if I was okay or hurt, and I said that I wasn't, so he told me to go back to the
table, and I did, now full on bawling.
The whole time, this man was yelling at my dad, saying some pretty hurtful things about
us being stupid, about being not well-behaved and that I even needed an ass-wipping for
smelling my food. My dad put his hand out trying to reason with the guy and apologize, but the guy
wasn't having it. He continued to get louder until my dad eventually said something to him about
needing to calm down. Apparently the guy didn't want to hear this because, as my dad turned
around to just leave the situation, the guy punched my dad, knocking him to the ground.
I screamed and called for him, and I watched as my dad tried to get up, but this guy was nearly on top of him whaling on him.
The other family's kids were screaming, we were screaming and crying, and I didn't know what to do.
I was still very young.
I was terrified that he was going to kill my dad, and that it was going to be all my fault.
Thankfully, there are good people out there, and two men interjected to pull the angry guy.
off of my dad. They held him down and yelled for someone to get help, but the hotel staff had
already come over after hearing the commotions. They called the cops. The guy was arrested and kicked
out, and they almost kicked us out, but the other families were great witnesses and explained to the
staff what had happened, convincing them that we did not provoke this guy, and that my dad didn't
even lay a finger on him. After everything calmed down, we went back to our room, with the
with the day and mood practically ruined.
Not to mention me, a young child, thinking that it was my fault, too.
I felt like if I was just a little more careful, I could have avoided all of this.
But over time, especially, replaying it all in my head and comparing it to what my brother saw as he witnessed it,
it wasn't my fault.
The guy had been off to the side, looking at the containers of soft,
and jelly. My brother said that he watched him look up at me, drop the jelly he had in his hand,
and then walk towards me. We both saw him turn sideways, making a conscious effort to squeeze past
me, but the space that he had was not big enough for him. He turned too quickly, and he caught
my plate, causing the whole thing to spill. This was a grown man doing this, and then he tried
to blame it on a child? Who does that?
What grown man enjoys going off on a child like that?
Not to mention he was violent with a complete stranger.
I kind of understand being annoyed maybe about kids screaming and crying,
but my family wasn't even doing any of that.
We were taught to have very good manners,
especially in public, inside voices and so forth.
So why get mad at a random uninvolved family?
I feel like he was just fishing for a reason to go off.
Sorry, I'm rambling a bit at this point, but the bottom line,
this man gave me nightmares,
and everywhere we went for that trip and the rest of that summer,
I was traumatized.
I didn't want to go anywhere without my dad,
and I didn't want him to go anywhere alone,
feeling like I needed to protect him.
I still have a slight phobia of being alone with strangers,
but I have gotten better.
Just a few words to that man.
I hope that you got some help,
because that reaction was not normal.
Oh, and I hope that we never meet again.
Like the title suggests,
which is paranormal experiences working at a funeral home
and cemetery combo location,
I work in death care at a combo location funeral home,
meaning that we have a funeral home,
cemetery, and crematory on site.
I know people like to debunk stuff on this sub for good reasons, in a lot of circumstances,
so I wanted to see the response to some of the stories from my co-workers and I.
I'll start off with the typical light stuff.
One of my co-workers tends to come in very early every morning to start at her work,
while I like to stay late.
We both spend a good amount of time alone in the funeral homes.
we both have had experiences of hearing footsteps down the halls,
wood floors and long hallways that echo,
seeing things out of the corner of our eyes and hearing faint voices.
Not too surprising, considering there are an abundance of loved ones in our care at any given time,
some having more traumatic passings than others.
I will admit, though, that the funeral home itself is pretty tame.
There have been many strange occurrences in the cemetery experienced by the grounds crew,
cemetery staff, and funeral home staff.
One day I was attending a service early morning,
and I turned and saw a man under a tree not too far away from me.
He looked out of place, and I saw no cars around besides the few the family drove.
I turned to look at him once more, and then for a third time, a minute or so later,
and he had vanished.
This has happened to multiple people.
Mind you, we have 17 gardens.
I would have seen him walking away or would have seen the car he was in.
A co-worker of mine, on the cemetery side,
worked with a man for a while after his wife passed.
He wanted a granite pedestal,
a stand that holds an urn with customizable toppers,
with a bird bath on top.
For about a year, he would have.
hound my coworker wanting to know when it would arrive, when that is, unfortunately, the expected
waiting period for custom granite memorials. When it finally arrived, we placed his wife inside and
had a service. A few months after, my co-worker who worked with him woke up from her sleep
because she kept hearing birdbath, bird bath, bird bath, being yelled in her ear. She actually came in the
next morning and said that he died before we had even received the first call, the notification
of death.
Lastly, to avoid this being too long is two stories about our chapel mausoleum.
It is the only mausoleum on site with an interior and has large stained glass windows and
rows of chairs to sit and visit loved ones, or for when services are held inside.
The mausoleum is locked every day at four, when the ground's
team leaves, and is unlocked around 6 or 7 a.m.
One morning, one of the guys walked into the mausoleum after unlocking it to turn on the lights,
and he saw a woman sitting in one of the chairs by the windows facing away from him.
He freaked out and walked out to call the superintendent.
When he walked back inside, the lady was gone.
There was only one entrance to that mausoleum that he was standing right in front of.
We hear knocking and shifting noises all the time in the mausoleum.
It's so prevalent.
I actually address everyone in there and when I enter and exits to avoid any bad juju.
We had a maintenance crew working on the mausoleum for a while
that would come in every morning to find their tools moved around the room.
They would set them on one side of the chapel and come back to them on the other side of the room.
One of the workers said that he would never come back.
Well, this post isn't very short.
It's the shortest I could make.
The cemetery is spookier than the funeral home.
But I would love to hear what you all think of these stories.
Bejneu aboard via Rai.
Embarked and profite.
Embarked and celebrate.
Rigolet.
Publié.
Savouring.
Admire.
And profite.
profite.
Via Raille,
the voice that we
love that we're
able to assist
at a moment
historic.
You could
gain the
for the final
of the Cup
of the
World of the
FIFA
with Visa.
It's just
to have a
credit Visa
BMO for
participate.
Incribe
you at
BMO.com
bar-oblic
concour.
The
regulations
of the
concour's
apply.
I was an
English
major at my
university.
I secured
an internship
with a
magazine that
was locally
produced
and was
said to be the fastest-growing magazine in the country.
It was called Today's Woman.
On one of my assignments, I went to a local old area that's quaint and cute, but also has
plenty of every kind of modern convenience, but also a very rich history.
I was supposed to write about the woman owner and her shop, which was located in a two-story
white brick house that was quite old.
I would interview the owner and take some photographs of her in the old house.
house.
She told me that it was haunted and related that, when she purchased the house, intending
on offering large and small antique items that included furniture, all the way to small items,
it was beautifully decorated.
Almost anyone could afford to buy something very cool in there, like an ornate notebook
or pen, or an antique secretary desk with the bookshelves behind locking doors.
I had a video camera as well as a standard 35-mills.
millimeter camera at the time, since the digital camera's pixels and Lux, light sensitivity,
was rather poor at that time.
I walked throughout and had interviewed the owner and had taken many photographs.
She pointed out a nasty doll.
Growing up, my mother had a plaster baby doll that I despised.
That damn thing was possessed or something.
My sister and I kept begging her to give it to goodwill or to throw it out as kids.
kids.
This doll could be her evil sister.
The eyes rolled, batting the eyelashes with some little weight mechanisms in it.
The paint was off its light pinkish, white face, and she told me the story then.
The place was sold to her, and they closed on the deal, and she had the keys.
She and her partner cleaned every door, window, and wall, or wall on both floors and the basement.
They had its paint all refreshed everywhere.
Nothing remained of whatever it had previously been.
When she had stocked her cash register for that day,
she saw that doll right at that spot.
She would ask her partner about why they had that doll.
In a few moments she came in and asked her,
and she said that she had never seen it before.
She had only supervised new merchandise,
like pens and Victorian-style notepaper and the antique furniture, vases, and mirrors.
No dolls.
She looked at over asking where she found it.
Right here, in this little corner by the cash register.
Where it is right now?
She pointed.
No, she did not.
She kept it there as it was strange.
I would have burnt it, but I digress.
Another thing is that a well-meaning neighboring person,
business, had called her to tell her they'd left on at upstairs light, and that it was clear
some woman was in there, and she had just met her and her partner, and they had just left her store
to go home for the night, and saw the light come on. Off and on, this seemed to occur. So I ascended
the staircase, and everything was glass and on glass shelving. I was taking a photo, being
perfectly still. The owners were downstairs.
all of a sudden the weirdest vibration sort of like high-pitched rumble began.
At first I thought it was just glassware singing as Crystal Will as a big truck went by, maybe.
I was still, but the rumble increased threefold, and then kept at that pitch of constant vibration.
I videotaped it then.
When I went downstairs, I mentioned the vibrations, and they looked at one another and told me that it happens,
and they wondered if it would do it for me,
saying that it wasn't a truck going by in the street
or any other explanation.
People in Middletown, Kentucky,
have seen the woman at that window up there many times with lights.
If you look it up, it's called the headhouse.
Because a doctor named Head had that building as his family's home,
and I bet you could find it online.
I wanted to tell you about the dream that I had last week.
Or maybe it was a hallucination, or paralysis.
Whatever it was, it left me feeling uneasy when sleeping in my apartment.
The night leading up was extremely typical.
I had come home at 11.30 p.m. for my boring second shift job.
I changed into my athletic clothes and waited for my boyfriend to get to my place so that we could head to the gym.
We like going late at night when it's fairly empty, so we normally don't get back to my
place until 2 a.m. We shower and do our normal night routine of having a snack, brushing our teeth,
and quick skin care. It would have been anywhere between 2.30 to 3 a.m. by the time we finally
lay down to go to sleep. He's the type who falls asleep instantly and sleeps on his back,
causing him to snore so loud that I'm genuinely surprised I haven't received a noise complaint
from any of my neighbors. I, on the other hand,
have a mind that wanders and keeps me up longer than I'd like.
However, I do eventually drift off to sleep, I'd guess, around 4 a.m.
It couldn't have been much longer after when I had woken up,
because it was still eerily dark and quiet outside.
My boyfriend is still passed out beside me and abnormally quiet himself.
He's no longer snoring, as I lay facing away from him.
My eyes are indeed open, and I find myself staring at my closet door, which is cracked open,
and the light is on.
Weird.
I would never leave the door open, as I have a naughty cat who would destroy the contents of my closet,
in a matter of minutes.
I would also never leave the light on, as I'm one of the weirdos who can't fall asleep
unless it's pitch black and completely silent.
But for whatever reason, my closet door is open, and the light.
is on.
However, I find myself unable to move in order to fix it.
Then, suddenly, I get the feeling of impending doom, and I, in my awoken-slash-dreaming state,
can tell that beyond that door are two sets of stairs.
One set leads up, and the other set leading down.
Coming from the downside of the stairs, I can hear heavy footsteps ascending on the creaking
steps. I know the person coming has ill intentions. I'm panicking, unable to move, thinking to myself
that this person is coming to attack me. I'm the target, but whoever this is will likely attack
my sleeping boyfriend first since he's sleeping closest to the door. I feel remorse knowing my
boyfriend will be hurt as a result of simply being there, while whoever this is wants to hurt me.
Then, suddenly, the steps had reached the top of the stairs and stopped.
I could see the light from the cracked door being cut through with the darkness of a body blocking it.
My heart was racing thinking this was it.
We'd be attacked, tortured, and killed.
I couldn't move and my boyfriend was sleeping, blissfully unaware of what was taking place.
There was nothing we could do to stop it.
Then, just when I think our attack,
is about to make his move, the lights turned off.
I see the door close ever so slowly, and I feel relief rush over my body as I hear the click
of the door latching.
I listen as I hear the steps starting again, but going up this time, and slowly fading into
nothingness.
My body abruptly shoots up into a sitting position, once again, able to move.
My eyes dart across the room as of searching.
for confirmation that what I just witnessed actually happened when they land on the closed closet door with no light seeping through its cracks.
I sighed in relief and disbelief.
I look over to my still-sleeping boyfriend, whose snores are now filling my apartment, too scared to get up and check my closet.
I laid back down, scooting closer to him, and pulling the blankets over my head, forcing myself back to sleep.
The next warning I wake up to my boyfriend scrolling his phone next to me, and I regale him with my horrific nightmare, and even he is too scared for me to finish the story.
I have him get up to check the closets, and to my comfort, the only thing behind the door is my pile of unfolded laundry.
I still don't know what this was, why it happened, or why my brain was insisting that I was about to become a homicide victim, but I hope that I never was.
experience anything like this again once upon a time I rolled my eyes at UFO stories
saying that it would take aliens thousands of years to get here and they couldn't
survive in our atmosphere well I was in for one hell of a reality check I don't
like to tell this story to people in real life I've tried many times before but it
always had undesirable results even if people say they believe it it's not very
satisfying because they don't actually know, so it feels like a waste of time.
If I tell the story anonymously, maybe it can give someone else some added piece of mind that there are other people who know about these things.
At least in my case, I wasn't the only one who witnessed these things.
It started around August 17th of 1996.
There were two elderly gentlemen on the local CTV news who said that they'd seen a solid bright ball of light in the sky,
that was too fast to be a jet and too slow to be a meteor,
and it didn't move like either of those things.
The news dismissed it as a likely meteor
since there were meteor showers and many bright meteors during that time.
Don't let that fact mislead you to the wrong conclusions, though,
because there was a lot more going on than just some bright lights streaking across the sky.
A little while later, my sister said that she had seen a huge,
glowing thing that looked like a flying fire over the field to the west.
She tried to get her cousin, Dawn, to come look at what she'd seen, but she was afraid and ducked
away into my grandmother's house.
Learning of this coincidence alerted me for two reasons.
I didn't tell her what I had seen on the news while she was outside, and while she said it
looked like fire, it sounded like something my grandpa said he had seen back in 1975, and some
people thought he was crazy after that.
On August 19th of 1996,
me and my cousin Dennis went out for a late-night walk.
I didn't mention anything about the coincidental
sighting my sister mentioned, but it was a bit in the back of my
mind, so I was keeping an eye on stars and the horizon.
It occurred to me that it was a bit silly because
the chances of me actually seeing something as well was slim to none.
As we came around the trees along the curving road back into the farmyard,
I noticed a bright white orb with a slight blue tint around it.
It was about a quarter of the size of the moon, and it didn't move at first.
I was stunned, trying to identify what it might actually be.
It started smoothly moving away towards a nearby town, and as it did this,
I suddenly knew that I was not looking at something,
Normal. Not normal at all. I pointed and shouted multiple times. Look at that. Look at that.
My cousin was looking into the dark trees acting spooked. I don't know if he thought that I was just fooling around or what he thought, so I yelled, no, that way. Up there. What is that?
Oh, crap, it's gone. It didn't flicker. It was a solid, stable color, and it changed directions quite.
suddenly as it passed over the nearby town of Waldek.
And so I thought that that would be the peak of any excitement that I would see that summer.
But I was wrong.
Wrong again.
On August 20th, I went out looking to see if there was anything in the sky.
During the day, nothing.
During the night, nothing but a couple meteors and a few common satellites.
On August 21st of 1996, around 11.30 p.m., my brother, my cousin Dennis, and his other friend decided to take a trip up to an old party site.
It was an interesting place with a couple of abandoned, spooky old houses, and lots of weird trees and fireflies and such.
I was hanging out with my cousin Brian and suggested that we go for a walk to where the others were and prank them for fun.
My other motive, though, was that I wanted someone with me in case we did see something again.
The chances of us actually seeing something yet again seemed incredibly slim.
During the walk, I did mention it to him and mentioned how ironic and impossible it would be
that we'd just happen to see one after talking about it.
Well, as I was fixated on the eastern horizon where I saw the first one with the white blue glow,
my cousin started tugging hard on my jacket.
I swung my head towards him as he said in an uneasy voice,
What in the hell is that?
And in the corner of my eye, I saw what looked like a fire.
But as I turned my head to face it,
I realized I was looking at something the size of a football stadium,
with which was bright yellow in the middle and surrounded by an orange plasma,
with red on the outer end.
edge of it. It looked like the orange haze was sticking to it magnetically, and it moved with it,
as it gracefully slowly moved across the ground, staying at exactly the same height from the ground,
even as it moved over the small hills. It looked like a completely stereotypical UFO.
It was oval-shaped from the side, a bit like a football, and was totally silent.
After a bit it moved into an angled position, maybe about 45 degrees to the ground.
It couldn't have been more than 50 feet from the ground.
I said, let's get closer to it.
He said, what if they have guns or something?
To which I said, I don't think they would fly thousands of light years to waste their time shooting at us.
I'm not sure if that's exactly what I said, but it was something like that.
Anyhow, I convinced him that we should run closer to it, and maybe we could even get a close encounter.
So we dashed through the wheat field.
However, as we were running, he reminded me that he has asthma.
So I slowed down and began to flash the blue light on my watch at it.
My cousin said, did you see that?
Apparently it shined a blue-green light back at us.
but I didn't notice it because I was busy trying to take it off so I could hold it in my hand.
As we tried to get closer, it just kept moving away from us, preventing us from actually getting any closer.
It finally took off.
It was so quick that I barely realized what had happened until it was gone.
There was no sonic boom or anything, which I reason.
This really doesn't seem like something humankind could ever make.
If it was human-made, well, that's still pretty crazy.
And trying to explain away one craft still doesn't explain the other different-looking ones that we had seen before that.
But truly, I don't honestly believe it's possible that it was humans who made those things.
This happened about a decade ago when I was in my early 20s, but the memory of it still kind of gives me the creeps.
At the time, my college friends and I had put our money together to rent a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere,
in Kentucky during our summer break.
We were looking forward to escaping the city,
throwing back some beers and just getting to party without neighbors,
or the authorities putting a stop to it.
Once we got there, we knew the seclusion part was accurate.
The closest town almost an hour away, and we were surrounded by a dense forest.
Don't get me wrong, none of this was a negative either.
It was exactly what we wanted.
The six of us got in and started calling dibs on the sleeping arrangements immediately.
The first few days passed without incident, or at least without ones that we didn't cause.
Clayton got a little banged up trying to climb a tree, but otherwise we were good.
On the third night, though, things started to change.
It was between three and four in the morning.
We had all had our share of drinks and were passed out all over the place.
I was sleeping in a small and uncomfortable, I should add,
fold out caught in the living room.
Because of this, I was in that hazy space between wakefulness and sleep,
when I heard the distinct sound of footsteps.
It was a patterned thud, thud, thud,
that told me that it had to be somebody walking.
The floors in the cabin were all wooden,
or maybe the fake vinyl stuff,
so you could tell when someone was walking around versus on carpet.
But when I didn't hear the water running or toilet flushing,
or even see the light from the fridge kick on,
I started to look around to see where it was coming from.
To my surprise, it seemed like it was coming from outside.
Like I said, I wasn't.
wasn't fully awake, so I started questioning myself. Did someone go outside when I wasn't
looking? Clayton and JP both smoked, but they went outside to do it, so maybe that's who it was.
I was too tired to give it any more attention, so I just tried to fall back asleep. But shortly after,
I heard what sounded like someone jiggling the doorknob, as well as a weird, metallic scraping sound.
I admit, becoming a little annoyed, I thought that one of them had locked themselves out, so I got up to open the door for them.
I unlocked the door and went to swing it open, but nobody was there.
I looked down both sides of the porch and saw nothing.
I went back in, locked the door, and saw that JP was actually passed out on the couch, and Slim was on the floor.
Clayton, Xavier, and Liam were in the bedrooms and the doors were all closed, so I assumed that they were in their rooms.
The bathrooms were even open and the lights were off, so from my perspective, it looked like everyone was asleep.
Confused and tired, I just went back to my cot and passed out.
The next morning, we were all groggy, and just talking about the previous night and that day's plans.
something reminded me of my experience, so I asked the group who was messing around outside.
They all started me confused.
I explained what I had heard and none of them had admitted to it.
The three in the room said that they were in there all night.
Slim said that he hadn't heard anything, which I could believe because he was out pretty hard,
not even budging when I shut the door.
J.P. said that he thought he heard something, but he also thought that it was just an
his head, or that he was having a dream.
I'm pretty sure he heard what I had heard, but was also too asleep to be bothered by it.
So it really was just me that heard it, but yet everyone was in their place.
So who could have been out there?
Ultimately, I just had to let it go.
I wanted to enjoy my trip and not get wrapped up in something that wasn't important.
For all I knew, it could have been an animal that I had spooked when I was unlocking the door.
We enjoyed the rest of the day, however.
We hiked.
We went into the town to refill our food and drinks and found some other entertainment.
Later that night, we made a fire in the pit out back and tested what we could all cook under the fire to eat.
It was entertaining, to say the least.
We were already a few drinks deep and having a good time when I started getting this weird feeling.
I felt like I was being watched, like I was being preyed on.
on. I looked around the tree line but didn't see anything, and all my friends were still in their
spots by the fire. I didn't know how to explain this to my friends, so I just kept it to myself,
keeping an eye on my surroundings. I thought maybe I was just being paranoid from the alcohol
and the memories of the prior night. We finished up at the fire, put it out, and then went inside
to go to bed. We all got into our designated spots.
This time Slim slept on the lazy boy instead of the floor, though.
I once again had troubles, drifting in and out of consciousness, so I thought I would just go take a hot shower to clear my head and help me sleep.
I grabbed some things from my bag when I once again started hearing the footsteps.
I stood straight up and remained in place, trying to pinpoint where it was coming from.
And once again, it had to be coming from the porch.
I slowly approached the door again, hoping to open it before they would have time to react and catch them in the act.
But the only problem with that was that the deadbolt made a significant click when locking and unlocking it.
By the time I reached the door, the metallic scraping noise had started again.
I slowly turned the dead bolt, balancing it as much as I could to avoid the clicking,
and I thought I must have done pretty well because the scraping noise hadn't stopped.
As it continued to speed up, I grabbed the doorknob and quickly swung it open.
There was a rush of cool air that forced its way inside the door, but otherwise, there was nothing on the other side.
No person, no creature, nothing.
That time I ran out the door and walked all the way around the cabin, looking around the trees too.
But I found nothing.
There was no way they could have gotten away fast.
enough for me to not spot who or what it was.
It didn't make any sense in my head.
By the time I got back to the cabin,
JP was standing in the doorway and asked me what I was doing.
I explained again what I had heard,
but that whatever it was took off.
He mentioned that he had actually woken up
to the scraping sound as well.
However, when he heard it and woke up,
the door was already standing open,
and he didn't know what was going on.
That meant that he heard the sound while I was outside.
So how could whatever it was get away fast enough for me to not see them,
but then hide and come back to do it again?
And how did J.P. not see them with the door open?
We just went back inside, confused, but trying to rationalize what it could be,
until he finally fell asleep and I continued with my shower plans.
The next day was our last one there,
and we were going to be packing up and taking our stuff with us to whatever it was we decided to do that day.
As we started leaving, I was the last one out,
and as I stood by the cabin door resting my hand on the knob,
it occurred to me that it felt rough.
Door knobs typically have smooth metal.
I looked down at the knob, and to my surprise, it was scratched to hell.
There were huge gashes all across the knob and the deadbolt.
something was obviously scratching at it.
That's what made me realize what the sound was that I had heard the previous night,
but then that started spiraling into more questions.
If this was a person, then they were trying to break in.
But why go to this cabin of all places?
As mentioned, it was in the middle of nowhere.
It's not like it was a row of houses to choose from,
but then I thought if this was a person,
What could they have been using?
Because the marks appeared to be evenly spaced,
not like a single line from a screwdriver or a knife,
or maybe even a crowbar.
There were four parallel lines scratched all over it,
like fingers or claws.
So then, was it not a human?
Was it something in the woods that was trying to get into the cabin?
I nearly lost it,
finally having proof of what I had been hearing
and called all my friends over.
They all looked it over, and JP was the first to agree with me,
confirming he woke up to the sound as well.
We all agreed that it must have been something in the woods, but what?
And why?
I couldn't think of anything that could leave claw marks like that.
Not to mention something that was fast enough to get away in the time it took me to open the door,
but was also willing enough to go back to the door to do it again.
with the door open right in front of the view of others.
And if JP was being honest about hearing it,
which I don't know why he would lie about it,
then how could he have not seen it?
This obviously disturbed me,
thinking I had left the door wide open,
and if the thing didn't run away,
then there was a chance that it could have tried to attack my friends.
And I couldn't live with the thought of putting my friends in that situation.
Everyone else just shrugged it off, but it was something that I found myself thinking about a lot.
I wanted to know what it was, why they did it, and what was it capable of.
It's still something that lives rent-free in my mind, wondering how close to danger we may have actually been.
Because, ultimately, the fear of the unknown is absolutely real.
If my siblings or cousins listened to your video,
they'll recognize this story.
My grandma used to tell us two horror stories
every year for Halloween pizza parties.
I always thought they were fake.
One was about a Ouija board
and another about her grandfather.
The stories never changed or faltered in description
and she never told us any other horror stories.
Only those two.
My mother told me a few years later
that my grandma, Luna,
only tells these two horror stories
because they really happened to her.
So here's the grandfather one.
When Luna was little, in the range of like five to seven years old, she loved to be around her grandpa.
He would visit Luna a few times a week.
Every visit he would put Luna on his lap and read her a book of her choice.
This was her favorite activity that they did together.
Her grandpa died not long after.
Her parents knew how much Luna loved her grandpa, so they didn't tell her that her grandpa
passed away. Not knowing that Grandpa died, Luna continued to see him a few times a week,
and would sit on his lap and he would read her a book. One of the evenings, Grandpa was visiting
Luna, her mom was making dinner in the other room. Who are you talking to, Luna? Her mother asked.
I'm talking to Grandpa, Luna replied. Grandpa's not with us anymore, sweetie. He passed away.
When Luna went to the kitchen to confirm with her mom that her grandpa was dead,
she couldn't find him after that.
He never returned to read her a story.
The Ouija board story is a little bit more out there.
The story was the reason I thought my grandma made these stories up.
While I think this could have happened to her,
I think some of the story is exaggerated.
My grandma Luna was never super religious, until she got older.
One thing she did know when she was young was that Ouija boards were evil.
Her mother banned Luna and her brother, Sol, from ever bringing a Ouija board into their home.
Well, when you're a kid and told you can't do something, you're going to do that very thing.
Soul brought home a Ouija board.
Luna and Sol tried out the board, and when they asked, is anyone here with us, they received an answer.
G-O-A-W-A-Y.
go away.
Sol and Luna didn't listen.
Who were we speaking to?
L-E-A-V-E-D-O-N-T-U-S-C-T-H-E-B-O-A-R-D.
Leave. Don't use the board.
They were creeped out and decided to bury the Ouija board in the back of the closet,
where their mother couldn't see it.
So-N-Luna forgot about the Ou-J-Boat for a few months,
until Sol suggested they should use.
used the Ouija board again.
Okay, replied Luna.
A few minutes later, while Luna was busy doing something else, she heard a scream from the hallway.
Saul?
Saul came out to running down the hallway.
Don't go in the study, he screamed.
Why?
When I pulled out the Ouija board, there was a ghostly white woman in a dress with a broken jaw.
She was hanging from the ceiling by a noose and said to leave.
I threw the Ouija board into the wichaboard into the room.
the study and slammed the door. I will never go back in there. And while my grandmother never
saw the ghost, she swears that her brother never stepped foot in the study again. And they did get
in trouble for the Ouija board. I know these stories aren't long, but I truly believe that my
grandma did sit on her grandpa's lap multiple times after he passed away. Her stories never changed
like a made-up one would. They never evolved or got more detail.
They always stayed the same.
Hi, Raven.
I hope that you share my story.
Everyone thinks it was just a dream, but I was awake at the time.
My parents were renting an old house from the 50s.
I had my first room upstairs next to my parents.
Unfortunately, I moved later to the basement, which was also an active place, of course.
I'm 19 years old in my room, on my airbed reading R.L. Steinbe.
book called The Room. I even remember the cover's picture. It was about a ghost trapped in an upstairs
attic room, which was sealed shut tight. The spirit wanted out of the room and would act friendly
to the main character in the hopes of coaxing them to open the sealed door. Eventually the ghost
in the story got her way and was released. The ghost ended up evil and tried to kill the main
character in the book. I finished the book that night. I looked at the clock, and it was three in the
morning. Yikes, I'd best get to sleep. My parents hated it when I would stay up super late and would
hassle me, so I put my head down instantly. I was still awake and feeling like I was going to fall
asleep soon, but my skin tingled, and the hair on the back of my neck went straight up,
and I shot up right from my airbed.
Something wasn't right.
My vision was fuzzy from it being dark in my room,
but I saw distinctively a swirling black smoke
enter my room from the ajar door.
It was seconds of seeing it,
and I put my head down again on my pillow
trying to pretend I was asleep.
I did that a lot during my childhood years.
I have many stories, but this one was the worst yet.
This was different, and I knew it instantly.
I never felt such a presence of pure evil before, and it's the most terrifying thing I ever felt.
It was ancient.
I can't describe it with words.
The swirling smoke was the darkest and blackest thing I have ever seen.
It reminded me of something as black and dark from the black sky, at night, but blacker still.
The smoke was something truly evil.
When people speak about evil, it's superficial.
However, this thing was a real source of evil.
The fear was pure, and the ice-cold feeling went up and down my spine.
I never felt such powerful evil and terror.
This thing I knew was here because I allowed it somehow.
Maybe it was the book that I had finished reading.
I opened a portal of something that shouldn't exist in this world.
This thing swirled around me entirely while I laid on my airbed.
Instantly, I couldn't breathe.
My breath was no more.
I could not breathe, but I dared not move.
I'm not kidding when I said I felt pure evil and terror.
This thing was evil.
It exists.
So I wouldn't move.
I was terrified beyond comprehension.
However, it was trying to kill me.
I felt the airbed shift from my weight, and I felt myself slowly raising from my airbed.
I was levitating longitude-slash-horisontal.
I remember feeling frozen in place.
I only had my thoughts.
I couldn't fight back with movement.
I could not speak or make any sound to alarm my parents.
I called in my thoughts to my mother.
Mom, but nothing.
Couldn't breathe, couldn't move.
An evil surrounded me as thick as oil.
Then I knew who to call next.
It's a power that is purely good, true light and pure light.
I put all my love and trust into the universe and screamed in my head, God.
I felt a protective shield wash over me,
and I felt myself being slowly lowered back onto my airbed.
It squeaked and shifted from my weight, and I could breathe again.
It was gone.
the evil had left.
I found myself between jobs for the only time of my life.
I absolutely always had a job all lined up and gave a written two-week notice,
but things on my job got weird, so I looked for something totally different.
I had a dental and medical background as a dental assistant, and then phlebotomist.
But I just wanted to work outside of health care after finishing college.
I'd worked in business for eight years at this point, so I've worked in many fields, including retail, for example,
staying in each profession for about seven years.
I have a solid work ethic and am no stranger to cold, hard reality.
I've always been a worker and never took drugs.
I'd felt it necessary to quit my business job.
I lay thinking about how I needed to check the website of the university I had attended,
Maybe by chance there may be a job online there.
Any job.
Then, if I could work, they would have options to take classes.
I could get my master's degree, I thought.
But alas, due to the swing shift, that was impossible.
I located a job on the campus in security.
I would need to go to a week's training at another college several hours away,
pass a written exam and physical training.
I'm a female and most of the other candidates were male, making for odd rivalry.
So, I had taken an online detective training, and when I applied and got the job,
I felt it was an interesting comment in my book that if one wanted to become a detective,
one should work a security job of any type for one year.
So I did.
I was between jobs, so I seized that chance to do so.
It challenged me physically, but I'd already had pretty advanced CPR
and could write a hell of a comprehensive security report as an English major in college.
What I needed was experience.
Well, I got lots of that.
The job exposed me to the understandable types of challenges,
but also I experienced paranormal and strange phenomena.
So I may post a few creepy stories later in my year and a half in the campus security.
One black night it was chilly outside.
The dorms at the bottom of the hill seemed quiet, which was unusual.
But it was early in the week, I reasoned.
I'd walked through all the dorms and the main building on campus and locked them on time.
Things were going well.
I was glad since I was working alone until relief came at 11 p.m.
I ascended the hill further to the library, and I gazed up at it.
It was very pretty with a clear sky.
and a million stars, I thought. I was caught up and all was well. Then, a swooshing, burning,
or sizzling sound came right past my left near my head. Turning, I saw this grapefruit-sized ball of
orangeish-yellow light. It sizzled and seemed to stand still just in front of me, and then zip way up
as if to avoid features in the library's architecture. It was as if it was as if, you know, it was as if,
it wasn't just shot out of a possible flare gun from the direction of the dorms at the foothill,
but moved with intelligence.
At first I thought, fireball?
Flair guns?
But not when it could put on breaks near me and let me gaze on it,
and then zip up super high over that more distant library.
So, wow, I'd written my report line by line according to times as normal.
Now my night was nearing being over.
As I waited for the next shift for this one guy, I thought how a fellow worker had told me how he'd been behind an athletic building that backed on to the golf course and sat in the vehicle assigned to him and had gone to sleep.
One night he saw something he adamantly refused to talk about.
He never used that area again to nap.
Then, I really began to ponder what he had seen.
But again, he never dared say anything.
and would just clam up.
So, fiery orb?
You are very cool.
I wonder sometimes about the things that we know precious little about.
I was a female of 21, and our family friend was in his very late 70s.
He decided that some rooms needed painting, and I agreed.
I'd recently helped my sister rehab her old 1920's house.
We did many things to it.
So I told him I would definitely help him.
His house was built in the late 1940s, and he'd been there since the middle 50s, maybe.
His daughter had grown up there and married after college.
His wife had died of a brain tumor in the early 1970s, and now it was about 1980.
We'd picked out a light celery green, it was called.
It was light and fresh-looking.
The walls looked a dingy,
something, just dark and dirty now.
I just love that first coat.
We had one can of paint,
and I was doing this after my nearby work in a dental office.
I really made progress quickly, and he was really going as well.
It was a really large living room.
Before the hardware store closed,
I told him that he should run up to that store and get another can of that paint.
I had the screen wooden door latched,
and inner front door open to get air that sun.
summer night. I saw his elongated 1960s car back out, and he waved and pulled off to the short
distance to nab the paint before closing. As I watched him leave and stood there assessing my work,
I figured I would sit down on his couch, an old 1920s huge silver-gray one with curls at each end.
We had thrown a tarp on it to keep it clean. As soon as my butt hit the couch to wait for him,
and as I could still see his wave, a faint-a-fing.
Poked my right ribcage.
I jumped up quickly, hollering his name, though I had seen him pull away to the store.
And it was so creepy.
Other things also happened there.
Nightly as he read, he would get major knocks on his ceiling.
Three of them.
He figured that it was his wife saying get to bed.
And maybe it was.
Also, he had an old reddish-brown desk with a bookshelf behind full wooden door.
that he had crammed with books and papers with drawers beneath.
Many a time that damned desk would knock.
Also, often as we would talk,
we would hear something to send the steps to the attic,
and then stand on the landing and shift its weight creaking the wood.
It never turned, and then went down the last two.
Like, it was listening to us talk, or was waiting.
And it happened.
all the time.
Hi, Raven.
I recently discovered your podcast and have been enjoying listening to all the stories.
I've always believed in the paranormal, but after my mom passed away ten years ago,
I felt frustrated that I never saw her in a ghostly presence.
Instead of visiting me this way, I'd often have encounters with her moving things for me,
specifically things that I thought I had misplaced.
It wasn't until two years ago.
When I had my most vivid dream of her, and I later realized that she came to me to warn me of a betrayal.
My mom and I had a great relationship, and I was devastated when she passed away when I was only 21 years old.
My dad had not handled her illness and passing well, and he was cheating on her while she was sick,
and continued to make poor decisions as soon as she was gone.
This resulted in me having a very strained relationship with him.
At this point, my mom had been passed for eight years, and at the time my relationship with my dad was great.
He had remarried a few years ago and had two stepdaughters that just finished high school.
I remember thinking that my dad was being so nice to me at the time and that he wanted to spend a lot of time with me,
and even gave me my mom's jewelry after I had asked for years.
Everything was peachy, right?
so I was extremely disturbed when I had a dream on a Tuesday night
that left me waking up in tears.
In my dream, my mom was angry with me,
like very angry with me,
but she wasn't saying anything.
I could tell by just looking at her.
She then began stabbing me in the back repeatedly while staying silent.
I was so upset when I woke up.
Had I upset her?
Was she mad at me?
A week later, exactly, my dad facetimed me, despite living five minutes from me, to tell me he was expecting a baby with his new wife.
My dad is 63 years old, had just had his first grandchild.
I was extremely distraught, angry, and disturbed.
That's when I connected the dots with the dream, and I reached out to my child.
friend who was well-versed in assessing dreams. She directed me to a book and told me that Wednesday
is a common day for the dead to visit us, and that my dream was probably into the early hours of Wednesday.
I 100% believe that my mom was warning me of this serious betrayal. There's more to the story of my
dad's lies, but he just wasn't a good dad in many ways. The anger, the backstabbing, the sight of
silence, it was all a warning of the big bomb that he would soon drop on me.
And thanks for listening.
So, me and my family bought our house back in 2000.
We were the first to live there and moved in after the house was built.
The only explanations we have is that the clothing these ghosts seem to wear are like early
1900s, late 1800s, and you'll know why.
The first ghost made herself known when I was a little.
12 to 14. I always had trouble sleeping at night and couldn't walk around my house at night,
as I felt like someone was always watching. But I always just thought that that was a rational kid
thinking, or so I thought. One night I was lying on my bed, not to sleep, but on top of my comforter
and all. I was just staring out my bedroom door into the hallway. The hallway light and the
bedroom light was on and being on the second floor, I think I also had on the main entrance
light. Think of a chandelier, where the entrance is where you can see the stairs right away,
and you can see a bit upstairs as well. I had no music or anything playing, when I hear little
girls laugh just as the lights turn off, and my door closes shut. I freaked out and started
screaming when my mom came out of her room on the first floor, thinking I was playing.
with the lights. She didn't believe my explanation that night, but I'll come back to this.
The second ghost made himself known in a more creepier way. One night when I was 15 to 16,
I woke up at exactly 3.14. I felt something tap on my shoulder, and as I turned to see what it was,
a man stood next to my bed. He appeared to be in his late 40s, early 50s, judging from his white hair
and white mustache and beard, in what I could only describe as a civil war uniform from the Confederacy.
The only thing was his skin was very pale, his eyes had no pupils.
I wanted to scream, but he only moved his finger over his lips to signify being quiet.
I laid in my bed frozen with fear as he walked out of my room and closed the door quietly.
From that night, I kept hearing him march in my life.
upstairs hallway.
Now, being that I was the only one that could account these spirits, I was always told
that I was crazy, until my brother and mom told me they noticed the girl.
She never did anything harmful, except she loves to play with us by hiding things somewhere,
where we know we didn't leave them, as well as returning them to where they were originally
after we look everywhere.
main things are keys, remotes, and small objects like nail polish or makeup.
It's gotten to the point where if we lose something, and we know it's not where we left it,
we just say, little girl, we need this back, or little girl, we're in a rush and can't play.
She'll normally put it back in its place a bit quicker.
The older man was seen by my grandfather and my mom as well.
My grandfather just saw him walk in the front door and directly to my parents' room.
My mom would see him at night, but all he does is tip his hats to her and walk away.
One night, where she was crying a lot, I believe it was over losing her grandparents or her brother.
He sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder.
She said that he felt very cold, but that she felt safe.
I'm not sure if this means anything,
but I thought it would be cool to share this with you all.
A few summers ago, my girlfriend and I took a road trip along the coast.
We wanted to see the Atlantic Ocean,
and I wanted to take her to see the lighthouses as she was obsessed with them.
She lived in mass as a kid and remembered going to one with her dad,
but they moved to the Midwest when she was young and had never been back.
I had never been to the East Coast, so I thought it would be fun for both of us.
We made a whole road trip out of it, driving all the way up.
Nothing but the trip itself was planned.
Once we got there, we found a good hotel and booked it for a few nights.
We went sightseeing around town that day.
We explored some local stores and diners.
We went to a museum and just had a leisurely day.
The next day, we went to the beach and looked around,
for lighthouses.
With some online maps and a site dedicated to lighthouses you can enter, or explore,
we narrowed down a few that we wanted to check out, hoping to find the one that she would
remember from her childhood as well.
We actually did get to see the lighthouses, and one of them was the correct one, too.
The beach was wonderful.
The lighthouses were better than I expected.
The view from them was outstanding, and I could understand her obsession with them now.
The trip was going smoothly, and we both were having a wonderful time.
We checked out of the hotel, and before heading home, we circled around a little further north, wanting to stop at another place on our list.
As we headed in that direction, we spotted another lighthouse, but this one looked old and possibly abandoned.
We also enjoyed a little bit of urban exploration, so we agreed that we should check it out, too.
We stopped in the parking lot at a nearby beach, and we walked to it.
We walked through the sand, seeing it was clearly not as popular as the others we had seen.
There was some trash scattered around, some items like beach toys left behind, and some other random detritus.
It certainly piqued my interest.
What could cause a whole beach to be abandoned or go unused?
But pushing that thought aside, we finally reached the lighthouse and we finally reached the lighthouse,
and we could really tell that it was not in use.
The entrance merely had a piece of plywood, barely covering it,
but it wasn't bolted or screwed down.
You could easily pick it up and place it right back down.
After not seeing any trespassing signs, we went in and checked it out.
It was definitely neglected.
The walls seemed to be peeling in some places,
crumbling or cracked in others.
The stairs to the top even looked kind of rickety,
but stable enough to climb.
At least stable enough for us to try.
We got to the top, and it was just as worn down as we saw from below.
The sight was still nice, however.
We could see the ocean and the reflection of the sun on the water.
There was even a slight chill that afternoon, which just made the day perfect.
But then I noticed something that caught my attention.
In the back behind the staircase, there was a sleeping bag and a large
backpack. We didn't notice it when we first came up because the staircase spiraled and the items
were behind us. So it was obvious that someone had been sleeping there and that wouldn't normally
bother me. But what did cause worry was seeing that there was a plastic cup and a bottle of
alcohol sitting next to it, and the cup still had liquid in it. Someone was there recently.
Whether it's a house or just someone finding shelter wherever they could, it was natural
for someone to become defensive over their stuff.
I didn't want to risk running in to whomever this belonged to and causing problems.
So I told my girlfriend, Maria, that we needed to go and she agreed.
We quickly and cautiously walked down the stairs, but were startled by a man standing right outside the lighthouse.
Maria gasped, and he gave us a toothless smile and said in a gravelly voice,
It's a nice view up there, ain't it?
We both gave nervous smiles and agreed with him, and I apologized for going in without asking.
He started shaking his head in a dismissive way.
The way you do when you're telling someone, it's not a problem.
But then he stopped and he looked us up and down.
Tell you what, he said to us,
I'll let you all go if you do something for me.
He pulled out a wad of cash and held it up to me.
I'll give you this money if you let me have some alone time with your pretty little
friend there. He looked right at Maria with a creepy grin. I was horrified by what he had just
suggested and said. He would let us go, as if he was keeping us there. I stepped further in
front of her and told him, no effing way, dude, holding my hand out to keep him back. But before I could
turn back to Maria and tell her to start walking back, the man pulled out a knife and said,
well, I wasn't really asking, and started walking towards us.
I wasn't much of a fighter, but I have learned some things over the years.
I went in motioning like I was going to punch him, and since he was focused on my arm,
I was able to kick him in the shin, knocking him off guard, but not before he brought the knife down and cut my arm open.
I then pushed him backwards, causing him to fall on his back,
and of all things to do in that situation,
and the guy started laughing.
But not even his laugh sounded normal.
It was almost like a sinister or evil laugh.
Maria tugged at my arm, so we left him there and took off back to our car.
When we got to the car, we started cleaning up my arm and realized that it wasn't that deep at all.
I kept a first aid kit in the trunk for emergencies such as this,
you know, being stabbed by a homeless guy.
We pulled it out and just put some gauze on it, which was fine.
I mentioned reporting it to the police because not only was he violent, but who knows what he would have tried to do to me, or worse, Maria, if I hadn't fought back.
However, Maria said that we should just let it go, mentioning we may have been trespassing, too.
I wanted to respect her wishes, though, so we never reported it.
We left there thankful to be in one piece, but still made some great memories and took some wonderful pictures as well.
I just won't be going to any more abandoned lighthouses, if we ever go back.
The following account is based on real events, which occurred in the late summer of 1991,
experienced by my late wife and myself in my father's home while he was away.
He would not speak of the matter when he returned, but,
indicated that he had experiences with the same entity.
Awakened from her dreams and startled,
she found her movements heavy and labored.
Her foggy eyes slowly focused in the dimly lit room upon a large dark figure.
It stood over us on the opposite side of the bed,
looking down on me, her husband, as I lay sleeping beside her,
a shadow of a form.
It was sinister and foreboding, undefined and yet solid.
She felt its overpowering gaze but could see no discernible face, just blackness, deep and bottomless.
It had no features save a form suggestive of a tall man in a long trench coat wearing what appeared to be a fedora on his head.
At that moment, the thing realized that she was awake and its attention immediately fell upon her.
She remembered the gun in the nightstand beside her but was unable to move to roll over and grab it.
Frozen, not by fear, but by some force she sensed was coming from the shadow.
It then moved, silence to the foot of the bed, just beyond her feet.
It did not appear to walk, but floated across the floor with no perceptible movement.
It stared faceless directly at her for endless moments,
and then turned and glided through the bedroom door and down the hall, and out of sight.
in the instant that she no longer saw the shadowy figure, she was able to move.
I then awoke, oblivious to what had just occurred,
to discover her wandering through the house with our small derringer.
When I confronted her, she fell into my arms trembling and breathlessly told me what she had just experienced.
I was quite skeptical of it all, and ushered her back to the bed,
putting the gun away but leaving a light on.
As we sat on the bed, the dog who had remained asleep throughout the incident, awoke and became extremely agitated.
He jumped off of the bed and barked, frightened and angry, into the empty dark corner of the bedroom.
With much coaxing and reassurance, eventually he was made to return to the foot of the bed and laid down whimpering.
We attempted to lie back down and turned the lamp off, leaving the room still dimly lit by the light in the hallway.
The dog then slid off of the foot of the bed and slammed down on the floor as if he was thrown down,
like someone had spiked a football.
He ran yelping out of the room and hid under the coffee table in the living room.
He would not come out until the next morning and then for only moments at a time.
We moved out into the living room for the rest of the night.
Her now very frightened and confused,
and myself now believing her account of what had occurred while I slept.
she was convinced that what she had seen was a demon or a malevolent spirit of some kind.
We didn't sleep that night, of course, as we spent the time recounting what had happened and praying.
We wondered if there was a connection to the odd occurrences in the house that we now recalled,
such as lights going on and off by themselves, cupboards slamming in the middle of the night, strange noises,
the odd sign that someone had carved into the step outside the garage when the cement had been wet,
many years before my father had moved in,
in a strange rust-tinged spot on the ceiling of the laundry room
that would always bleed back through, despite being painted over many times.
The next morning we told my mother what had occurred,
and she contacted a friend of hers who then came and anointed and blessed the house and all the portals.
We all preyed together and experienced no further incident for several days.
Some nights later, I was awakened once again by my wife, frantically shaking me.
She whispered to me, it's here again in the room, there, in the shadow.
I looked at the spot that she was pointing on the wall and thought that I saw movement in the shadow cast by the plant.
Not being sure of what I was seeing, I looked about the room to see if there was a breeze, maybe moving.
the plant. There was none. We both saw it then. The shadowed form of what appeared to be a man,
dashed across the wall from one shadow to another, as if attempting to hide within them.
We didn't sleep any further that night and spent the rest of the dark hours with every light on
in the house and consuming many cups of coffee, while she recounted to me how she was again
made aware of the presence of the shadow man. It had laid upon her this time. It had laid upon her this
time. She was awakened by the pressure of a heavy body on hers. She had at first thought that it
had been me, but when she opened her eyes and saw nothing yet was still being pinned down,
she tried to fight back. She wasn't sure if what she heard next had been heard out loud with her
ears or was something inside of her head. It growled, a guttural, vicious growl from somewhere
dark and angry, and whispered in her ear. Thanks for the
job, babe.
The weight on top of her then left, and she saw its shadowy form dash into the shadows on the
wall.
It was then that she was able to wake me.
We gathered our nerves in the light of day as that had brought a calming to the strange
occurrences in the past.
Exhausted and confused, I grabbed her and held her tightly in the hallway.
Something in my peripheral vision caught my attention over her shoulder, and I turned to
look at the bedroom window where I noticed something.
seemed to be written in the dust on the glass,
where I was certain there had been nothing just moments before.
We went closer and saw that, from the outside,
there was written in the window dust, a strange sign,
a sigil that looked both arcane and ominous.
There were two side by side, a small one and a larger one.
The sight of them filled us both with dread
and a sick empty feeling settled throughout our bodies.
Not knowing what to do at this point, I took her outside and we confirmed that the gates to the backyard remained locked,
as did the yard of the woman next door, which had to be passed through to get to our yard, as this place was a duplex.
Further, the window that showed the strange markings was over seven feet high off the ground.
I held her up and told her to rub out the small symbols and draw a small heart next to where it had been.
I then stretched up and did the same with the larger symbol, leaving a larger heart next to the spot where it had been.
We felt a little better after this and went back inside.
We went into the bedroom and embraced, drained, and bewildered.
Both of us finally feeling relief and taking comfort in the safety of each other's arms.
She wept softly and we could hear our hearts beating against one another.
Then she saw it.
and let loose an anguished wales so chilling that the reason for it still haunts me to this day.
On the window behind me there was now one large broken heart,
and the ones that we had drawn moments ago were rubbed out.
At that point we knew for sure that this was something far beyond our understanding.
We gathered a select group, blessed the house,
anointed the portals, and desperately prayed together once more.
There were no further major events after that day.
except the usual door slamming and cupboards found open,
lights turning on and off and odd noises in the night.
From that point on, until we moved away, soon after,
we would not sleep or remain in a room without at least one light on.
We tried to reason why something so extreme had just stopped as suddenly as it had started.
We felt watched until the day we left that place.
The Shadow Man was never seen again by either of the moment.
one of us, but we never believed that it had left. The fear was now a part of us forever, no matter
how deep we tried to bury it. This is a story from when I was in campus security, which is a
career that I had for a couple of years. I am a female, five foot five inches tall. When I was
interviewed for the job, I had no prior experience, but had a very eclectic resume. I had graduated
from that university, I could write a timed report of my completion of assigned duties easily,
and happened to be a person who was observant.
When I was six, they realized I sat in the front of the class so I could see well, but I still couldn't see.
I sat nearby a girl with thick little glasses who also had issues with chalkboards and overhead
projectors.
I could always see the smallest details on a butterfly's wings, but not past my arm's length,
but nobody really knew it.
Now, I rode my bicycle with the banana seat and stingray handlebars, and I mean all over.
When I look back on what I could not see, it was downright scary.
I learned details all around me, but the world beyond a few feet coalesced into a soft, impressionistic blur.
I had to know a friend by the way that they walked, and it seemed to sharpen my ears to music and voices more.
One grade school day, our teacher took us into the school library to learn how to find a book with the godforsaken Dewey Decimal System.
I understood the concept, but never wore the ugly little glasses that I'd finally gotten.
They embarrassed me.
The teacher gave each student a book to go find, and I literally prayed for help because I could not read the huge letters over the shelves, directing us to be able to find the right book.
That was the problem.
It was now or never.
I slapped out my right hand and, boom, it was the right book.
I was praised for such stunning speed.
I knew that I didn't know crap about what I was doing.
My hand just went there and has sense.
Later years, I heard of blind people who could literally read with their fingertips,
and not braille either, but a normal book.
I had to believe that.
But by the time I'd moved forward in time, I'd now had LASIC,
which was like being reborn with perfect vision.
I say all this because I had honed my senses from early on in life
until about 17, by not being able to see properly.
Now I had 2020 vision and I became extremely observant with my hearing, sight,
and so it served me well in security for sure.
I had always noticed a crucial detail that nobody paid any attention to.
One day I realized when someone had committed a crime on campus,
I could touch the thing and see something or feel something.
Know something.
I didn't mention it because people always think somethings are weird,
so to me they're just natural, so I don't mention it.
I even learned how to sense when some people were trustworthy
to even mention something paranormal,
and I really don't like that term.
I did have a good two years in security due to enhanced observation,
maybe we should call it,
making officer of the month three times, and it wasn't given out lightly.
When I later opened my own security systems business,
I would already know where the person had broken in before, to the customer's amazement.
So trust your instincts and the non-voice in your head, and just go with it.
If it feels dangerous, then it is.
This happened in the late spring, early summer, when I was in the fourth or fifth grade.
I grew up about 20 minutes from my teeny village, and in some pretty large woods.
We had a few neighbors on our streets, I think seven total.
Otherwise, it was a pretty empty long stretch of dirt road, with large patches of wooded areas separating the properties,
and a creek that ran for miles, and created deep slopes from the properties the houses were on to the creek itself.
Anyway, that's just to paint a picture of how empty the woods are and some geography.
that will become relevant.
I was at my neighbor's house.
It was around 6 p.m.
These neighbors had three kids that I often played with.
Joe was my age, Taylor was a year or two younger,
and Susie was the youngest.
Their parents worked a night shift cleaning out an office building
about an hour away from home, so they always brought Susie and Taylor,
but thought that at around 10 years old, Joe was okay to be home alone.
Joe and I were hanging out on their swing set just chatting when his parents loaded up the little ones and went on their way to the cleaning job.
I remember this vividly from the way the sky looked to exactly what I was wearing in all its Y2K splendor.
It feels like it happened only yesterday.
About a half hour or so had passed.
Joe and I were still chatting away and playing on the swing set,
probably trying to go as high as possible without flipping it.
But oh well if we did.
when we heard a noise coming from the woods.
More specifically, we heard a voice, calling our names.
It sounded distressed.
We looked at each other to confirm that we were both hearing it when I spoke up.
That sounds like...
And then Joe cut me off.
Taylor?
Keep in mind, Taylor left about half an hour ago with his parents
who were well on their commute to the office that they clean.
Plus, their driveway cuts in front.
front of the swing set.
We wouldn't have missed them if they came back for some reason.
The voice continued to call out to us and then started following our names with one word.
Help.
It wasn't a yell or a scream.
It was a call out.
And looking back on it now, I think it sounded a little more sinister than our 10-year-old brains could comprehend.
All we knew was that Taylor was in trouble, and we had to find him.
We darted into the woods, following his eyes.
voice, and the voice continued to grow louder and closer.
We finally reached a spot where, by the volume of his voice, he logically should have been.
We looked around, there was nothing.
We looked above us.
Maybe he was playing a prank and was in a tree, but nothing.
As soon as my gaze broke from looking in the trees, I looked directly across the creek
at the other side of the steep hills the creek cut through, only to see and hear of the
very faint figure dart quickly through the trees.
These hills that led down to the creek are so steep down and up,
we would spend summers using trees and small branches in our way down to get down safely.
Sometimes we just gave up and let graffiti do its thing.
If this had been a prank, there was no way that Taylor could have made it over there that
quickly, or even quietly.
Needless to say, I went home before dark.
that night.
I've been listening to your stories for a couple of months now,
and I'm really enjoying the experience.
So much so that I feel comfortable finally talking about this.
I've never talked about what I saw late one night.
I think mostly because I didn't want to sound crazy.
Well, here it goes.
I was up late one night.
It was about 1.30 a.m.
I don't usually stay up that late, but the next day was my day off.
and I didn't have anywhere to be, and I'd gotten sucked into watching TV.
I was just sitting on the couch, not laying down or slouched over.
I only had water and soda to drink.
I was not under the influence of any drugs.
I wasn't tired yet, and I was still really into watching TV.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something in the corner of the ceiling.
When I turned my head and looked up, I saw a dark gray cloud,
start to manifest in the corner of the ceiling.
I couldn't help but just stare.
I was confused and curious, but not afraid.
It took about 30 seconds or so to get as big as it was going to get.
It was about two feet across, if I had to guess.
It started out as a small, dark, gray cloud about six inches across or so.
The whole time, I watched it grow in size.
It was opaque and stayed in the same color.
Then it took off from the corner straight for me.
I ducked while letting out a yelp.
It darted very fast, and it took me by surprise, and that is when I felt the first sense of fear.
I did not look behind me.
I was too afraid of what I might see.
I don't know where it went.
I do not know if it went into another corner or if it was still in the house.
I just shut the TV off and got up off the couch and went straight to bed.
My husband was already in bed asleep, so a quick cuddle, and I felt safe enough to fall asleep.
Until now, I haven't told my husband or anyone else.
We no longer live there, not because of that, it's just that location was never meant to be permanent.
It never happened again in either the old or the new place.
I still, to this day, think about it and wonder just exactly what I saw.
all that night.
Hi, Raven, and everyone.
Just a true, quick story for you.
My uncle, my mother's brother, was an electrician.
He learned the trade in high school, passed a rigorous exam, and entered the military where he
used his expertise on airplanes to keep them airborne.
When he got out of the service, he worked for a couple of companies, doing work as an
electrician, and then opened his own security systems company.
My mom and I always followed crimes, so when the family assembled often at grandma's house,
he would talk about commercial break-ins and residential terrors all the time, since my earliest memory.
He realized I had an aptitude for helping him evaluate premises for security and how someone could
attempt to break into the place.
I would help him throw wire into attics and things great.
growing up, even though I worked in the medical field when I got out of high school.
I did eventually attempt to buy his business when he was quite old, but though he wanted it,
it never worked out. But I went ahead and did open my own security systems at an opportune time
when the panels and contacts all went wireless routinely, about 2000.
I had a customer and quickly placed all door and window contacts, a garage door opener that alerted the ownership.
phone so she could control it and cameras.
Some indoor features were new that year, motion sensors capable of snapping three photos
of what set it off.
I carefully placed them diagonally across an expanse of kitchen and it covered the back door.
Not long after she had it, she wanted me to check something that set it off a couple of times.
Reviewing placements and reports, I checked the images.
There was a see-through man's ghost.
right by her kitchen table.
I showed her, creeped out.
Then she said like she was annoyed with her kids.
I told them not to play with that Ouija board.
My sister and I are partners in our security business.
We know what the sensor was doing, and it freaked us out.
The first second is at the second of the motion,
and there was no image.
The second image shows the ethereal man.
The third image?
He was disappearing, kind of like a shadow.
We've seen other creepy properties, but that's for another time.
And definitely, leave those portals alone.
When a loved one dies, it's deeply disturbing.
When your mother dies, it's a whole different experience.
First, I'll tell you the story of my longtime friend Connie.
When Connie was a sophomore in high school, she lost her mother.
Of course, it was sad.
and traumatic, and a tender time you really need her.
Family and close friends crowded the small home as they supported one another and each brought a dish,
so no one had to do a lot of cooking after the wake.
Connie excused herself from the others to grab the phone in the kitchen.
Hello?
Connie, and then static.
And then once again, Connie?
And more static.
Mother?
She said incredulously.
mother?
She demanded, but there was more bad static.
Then the call disconnected.
By now, three family members were by her side,
thinking she was just having a meltdown or something,
but had to admit that the phone had definitely rang.
Now Connie is 75 and still insists that that call was her mother,
and that their phone never had static,
even one other time except that day.
When my mother died,
died, it was quite sudden, which is like a fatal earthquake to your life.
Her bedroom was across the hallway from my own, and after she died, I closed the door to it,
and everything was perfect inside.
The light was out, and I went into my bedroom to bed.
It was a physically exhausting day as well as being emotionally exhausting.
The routines imposed on my life of full-time work and responsibilities were mangled, rerouted.
I lay down and drifted asleep, a welcome escape from the new emerging realities.
Suddenly, I was awoken by a short, definite command.
Carla.
I never awoke in the night, but though I did not believe I was dreaming, I tested it with my eyes open.
Otherwise, I was too scared to move.
Carla, she repeated.
I raced to her door and threw it open now.
I flipped on the light switch, but...
Just the empty room met me.
And later months down the road, I was in my bedroom and still had the L-shaped hallway that connected all three bedrooms.
And the bathroom had a main light and a light switch that clicked definitely when you put it on or off.
A loud distinctive slap sound because you had to hit it with your hand.
It was not a newer mercury switch that is silent and velvety smooth, turning it off and on.
Mother always would tell everyone
Turn off this hallway light
And so now I had that on as well as my overhead bedroom light
Suddenly, I heard that light switch slap off
Which is impossible
And I can't forget that
This happened about 15 years ago
I was a teenager at the time
I had a dog who was Doberman mixed breed
We lived in the countryside on about 50s
15 acres of land. My neighbors were known to shoot dogs if they entered their properties, so I rarely let my dog run freely unless he was carefully supervised.
He had a red collar and red leash that I'd walk him with. I had just taken him on a walk, and once we were done, I put him in the house, and then went back outside to do a few chores.
As I was in the backyard, I saw that my dog had somehow already gotten out of the house.
I was confused as to how he had escaped,
but I figured my mom had maybe accidentally let him out.
He was running towards the neighbor's house,
his red leash flapping around behind him.
My heart jumped and I began to chase after him
through a field behind our house.
All of a sudden, he stops and turns around.
This was not my dog.
This was not my dog at all.
This dog was a Doberman,
but as he turned around, he bared his teeth and had glowing red eyes.
These eyes were piercing an evil, almost as if there was fire within them.
My jaw dropped, and before I could even react, a portal opened up and the dog jumped inside the portal, and then it closed.
I screamed out loud in horror and confusion as I started to run back home.
I ran faster than I ever had.
This was a type of fear that I had never felt before.
I actually felt like I was running for my life.
My heart was beating out of my chest,
and I knew that I had to check on my dog.
I ran into the house, locking the door behind me,
and there was my Doberman,
laying down in the living room with his red collar.
He had never escaped.
That was absolutely not him out in the field.
If it wasn't him, then what the hell was that?
I know the story sounds outrageous and unbelievable, but this happened.
This Doberman was clear as day, so clear than I chased after him, truly believing that this was my dog.
I've told the story to a couple of friends in the past, and they insisted that I saw a hellhound.
If this is the case, I know that hellhounds are said to be very bad omens.
They're known as messengers of death.
My grandfather had recently passed around this time, and we had held a funeral for him and buried him on the property.
I'm not sure if there is a connection, and I've never necessarily believed in them, though.
I've always thought them to be merely creatures of folklore, but the story has always haunted me, and I think about it often.
If anyone has had any similar experiences, I would love to know, and thank you.
As a disclaimer, please do not try this, ever.
Knowing what I know now, this is probably one of the most idiotic things I have ever done.
I not only put myself in danger, but also my family and friends.
Also, this happened about 15 years ago, so I will relay all that my memory serves me.
I'm no longer in contact with the friend that the story involves, so forgive me if I forget any details.
I will be happy to answer any questions I can, and will try my best to write everything that I can remember, in the order in which it happened.
That being said, when I was a teenager, I was obsessed with the paranormal.
My high school buddies and I thought it would be a great idea to get stoned in my parents' garage and construct a Ouija board.
It was after school one afternoon when we implemented our plan.
We arrived at my parents' house and got right to work finding supplies to make the board,
and if I remember correctly, found an old shotglass to use as the planchette.
We decided to ask the most provoking questions you could think of.
Everything the internet told us never to ask whatever was on the other side.
But we wanted a big response.
We wanted something crazy to happen.
We got a response almost instantly.
instantly, and we each thought the others were moving the planchette to mess with us.
But we were soon to find out that it was real.
I believe I was the one asking most of the questions.
I remember asking, when did you die?
The planchette moved to the numbers that we scrawled on the board.
The exact year escapes me, but it was something in the late 1980s.
I know I asked the spirit's name.
I cannot remember the name, so we'll just remember.
call the spirit, or rather
demon, as we would soon discover,
Robert.
Robert would not disclose how he died,
although he did say that his favorite band was Nirvana.
This will be relevant later.
We had a classic rock mix playing in the background,
and he seemed to enjoy this.
Unfortunately, I do not remember most of the conversation,
but I do remember we didn't say goodbye when the session concluded.
That night my friends left, except for one who stayed the night.
We'll call her Jane.
For this part, I'll need to describe the layout of the house.
It was an old house with a weird setup.
When you would enter through the front door, there was a medium-sized living room with a huge bay window facing the street.
Going further into the house, on the left was the kitchen.
Beyond that was a glass door, behind which was a sort of family room.
and then the backyard which led to the garage.
Jane and I were chilling in the kitchen later that night,
and we were seated at the kitchen table.
Jane was sitting with her back towards the glass door that leads to the family room,
and I was facing her and the door.
We were chatting quietly as my family was sleeping.
She was talking, and as I was looking at her,
something behind her caught my eye.
The glass door was cracked open,
but it was slowly opening wider and wider.
As soon as I pointed at the door and she turned to look,
it slammed shut very forcefully.
It was so damn loud that I was sure my parents would wake up and we would be in trouble.
But no one woke up or yelled at us to be quiet.
We got so freaked out.
We quickly retreated to my room, past the front living room.
We talked in my room for quite some time,
and nothing else weird happened until we went to sleep.
I woke up in the middle of the night to a strange, slow scratching noise.
At first I couldn't figure out where it was coming from.
I don't think Jane woke up, so I got up and tried to decipher where the sound was coming from.
Finally, I realized it was coming from my closet.
The door was closed, and I knew that there was nothing in there that should be making that noise.
The only pet that we had in the house was an old border collie, and he slept in my parents' room at the end of the hall.
I jumped back into bed and threw the covers over my head and tried to ignore the sounds coming from the closet.
I don't know how long it took for me to get back to sleep, or if I even did, but the next thing I knew, it was morning, and Jane had to go back home later that day.
We decided to go to the garage to smoke, and the air felt so heavy as soon as we stepped inside.
Like we shouldn't be in there even though we chilled in that garage countless times before.
We went back in the house and sat on the couch in the living room.
We were either talking or watching TV, but I think at that point I went into some sort of trance.
Jane later told me that I suddenly stopped responding to her and I wasn't moving,
even though my eyes were open.
The only thing I remember before, coming to,
was the feeling of the back of the couch sinking in.
I felt as though I was being slowly sucked into the couch,
and my back felt so hot.
It was like there was fire getting closer and closer to my back.
Then right before I snapped out of it,
I felt hands on me,
like they were trying to grab and pull me even to,
further into the couch.
I know it sounds dumb, but I thought I was being pulled into hell.
I'm aware that there's no demonic portal in my parents' couch that leads to hell,
but I swear to you that this is what it felt like.
When I finally snapped out of it, Jane was looking at me with a look of concern on her face,
and I felt like I was having a panic attack.
I can't remember much after that, but her parents arrived to pick her up a short time later,
she left. That night I was absolutely terrified to sleep in my room. So, being the dumb ass that I am,
I decided I would crash on the hell couch with the TV on all night. I didn't think that I would
sleep, but at some point, I must have fallen asleep. I don't know what time it was when I suddenly
woke up with a jolt. The TV I know for a fact I left on was now turned off. In its reflection,
I could see the bay window slightly illuminated by the streetlight outside.
Then, I noticed it, a figure standing behind me so tall that it touched the ceiling.
Its head and neck craned down to stare at me.
It was so black that it was darker than everything else in the room, and it was motionless.
I was too scared to move.
I just feigned to still be asleep.
I don't remember slipping back in,
to slumber, but just like the previous night, before I knew it, it was morning again.
I decided to take a shower.
Upon undressing, I noticed that my side was sore and hurting pretty bad when I took off my shirt.
I looked, and there were deep scratches, in the shape of the Nirvana logo, that wonky-looking
smiley face.
At that point, I knew that this wasn't just a spirit that I was dealing with.
I don't know why I never told my parents what was going on,
but one day my dad, who didn't even believe in the paranormal,
told me he was taking a shower,
when all of the sudden the faucet turned on on its own,
and the water got hot so suddenly that it scald at him.
Now I was pissed.
I had allowed a demon to mess with my family.
I promised myself I would never mess with a Ouija board
or even be around one ever again.
I begged a Catholic friend of mine to come over and bless the house and garage, and she agreed.
She brought a bunch of supplies for the blessing.
Afterwards, we disposed to the board and we prayed.
Nothing happened in that house ever again, and we ended up moving a couple of years later.
As an adult, I became a Christian.
I've still had experiences with the paranormal after this story, but now I know that I'm protected and how to rid
demonic energy from my life.
I'm sorry if this ending is anticlimatic, and also for the length of the story, but
thank you for listening.
Hi everyone.
I live in Louisville, Kentucky, home of the Kentucky Derby.
About a 45-minute drive is a very old quaint town called Barts Town.
In the early days, the sheriff was the first cousin of Jesse James.
Because of this, the gunslinger would get into trouble, and make a very old, and make
it to Bardstown to hide in the cave system. There also was an inn called the Talbot.
It's still there and they call it the Talbot's Tavern. It's on a national register of being one
of the most haunted places in America, as is Waverly Hills in Louisville. When you go to Talbot Tavern,
you see a bar as well as a dining table and former slave quarters with dining and bar,
and then upstairs are rentable rooms. One has on it, Jesse James is.
room. My sister had kept up with her first grade teacher that she loved dearly. She was a Catholic
sister of charity of the Nazareth. Their convent's territory is right in Bardstown and housed a large
university. Since she wanted to pay her a visit and go to lunch, we picked the Talbot. After eating,
we ascended the steps and looked around, and I said I wanted to take their photo in front of that
door. Only three others were up there looking around at the other end from us. I've taken photos
with my dad for years. I know when someone blinks a lot and we'll know if something passes my camera
the second I shoot. I grew up with 35mm film, and I got good at catching these problems,
so my pictures weren't ruined as you paid by the frame. But this was a new digital camera.
Still, as someone, a man, walking around, walked in front of my lens and my picture was ruined,
I told them and they both said, no, no one walked between us and you.
I then said, well, anyway, let's redo that.
So I got home and, on my desktop computer, was the black figure of a man,
and the edge of his lower body looked like someone had chopped his image off with painting shears,
like a faky ghost costume.
I will tell you some more Barts Town stories soon.
I want to say that digital captures ghosts and orbs best for some reason,
and I believe it's because it picks up on electricity or energy.
I was photographing something on my roof in the winter,
and it was of the main electric line going to my house.
I used a digital camera in the cold weather.
All around that bundle of wires was a little bit of the wind.
an aura of electricity.
That's why I think it captures them so well.
Also, if you snap a stun gun any season, it cracks, flashes a bit, but in the cold weather,
that electricity goes way further, out like a ball of fire.
Souls are electricity minus the matter of the body, and electricity is fascinating.
It's invisible mostly, but not always.
It can cook, light, protect, or kill.
It always was, is now, and always will be.
It can shock a person's heart back to life or fry them on a live wire.
It lights our way and enervates almost anything we can harness it for.
Yet it can overpower us quickly.
And it has definite laws of all of its actions.
Hi there, friends.
I hope that you enjoyed this collection of scary stories on this episode of
the As the Raven Dreams podcast.
If you did, make sure that you follow the podcast on whatever platform that you're utilizing.
And if the platform you are on has a rate the podcast option, please consider doing so.
Those ratings push the podcast into the algorithm, and we all know how the algorithm controls everything, so yeah.
I also do have a Patreon if you go to patreon.com slash as the Raven Dreams.
You can support the channel further.
For as little as a dollar a month, you can get early access to all of my content in audio format.
The content's a little different as it's based on what I upload to my YouTube side, but it's the same stories.
Just in different collections of stories than how they're presented here.
Speaking of stories, if you have one you would like to submit to me, please go to as the ravendreams.com
and click the button in the middle of the screen that says submit your story.
These stories are mostly sourced by listeners, so let's keep the podcast alive.
If you've got one, I'd love to read it.
Anyways, friends, I hope you're all having a beautiful day and a lovely week.
And I hope I see you again very soon.
But until then, remember you're loved, you're valid, you're important.
You're the best you that you can be, never forget it.
And until next time, much love and sleep well.
