As The Raven Dreams Podcast - ATRD Ep. 154 - True Scary Parent Stories, Paranormal Stories, and a LOT more!

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

Today, on the 154th episode of the As The Raven Dreams podcast, we have almost 3 hours of True Chilling stories. This is a collection of scary Parent Stories, Scary paranormal encounters, and a lot more from listeners like yourself! There are TWO Ad breaks in this episode: around 20 minutes, and around 86 minutes. 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... Ashlea, Layne Wallace, Marc Gillihan, Shy, Kameron, Jansen via, JJ, Hailey Sherman, Kacey, Mary Timmons, Jay, Chloe, Olive Barragan, Mark Grano, Emma Shearer, Angela, Sarah, Brandy Boston, Shane 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

If you're aboard Via Raille. Embarked and profite. Embarked and relaxes. Syrotay. Bookine. Oh, that also. And profite.

Via Rae. The voice that we love that we love that am. If you have a true scary story you'd like to share with the podcast, go to as the ravendreams.com and click the button to send it my way. Also, if the platform you're on has the option to rate the podcast or leave a comment, please consider doing so. And as always, thank you. To start this story, I need to mention that it should probably have a content warning.

What happened was tragic, and certainly traumatizing for myself and everyone else involved. And if your listeners have trouble listening to violent situations, I highly recommend that they not listen to this story. I grew up in a very quiet neighborhood. There was rarely anything that happened in the area, and the only time I remember the cops being out there, besides this instance, was when one of the kids from a nearby area

decided to break into a house that was for sale. Nothing violent ever happened on the block, and there was never any reason for anyone to think anything would. Every year, around Halloween, the houses would decorate with some subtle decorations and lights, nothing too creepy. The kids from the neighborhood would walk around and trick or treat,

and even the social holidays like this were pleasant. My parents were the picture of suburban life. My dad was a financial advisor, always dressing nicely, and my mom stayed home, but she was pretty involved with the local library and ran the local book club. There was a point in my childhood where my dad started changing.

He was always a social person, always friendly and talkative, but at some point he started listening to a certain radio show and then reading some things online. This was 03, so the internet was a bit more of the Wild West. And he started on this streak of paranoia that became borderline obsessive. It started subtle enough. He had changed the locks on the front door and then added a chain lock, the kind where you can look out but not open the door all the way.

Our front door didn't have a window, so you had to either look out the window that was close by or open the door to see who was there. Then, he added these motion-activated floodlights that would light up the neighborhood like a stadium, any time one of the neighbor cats would cross our yard. My mom would joke that he was preparing for the apocalypse, with how much he was securing the house, but... I could tell by the look on her face that she was concerned. Our front door had a motion sensor on it.

It ended up with four locks. All of our windows were all but bolted shut, and he was starting to hoard canned goods in the basement. He was pretty much a bunker away from being a full-on prepper. That year, on the day before Halloween, actually. I had come home after a long day of school and then soccer practice. to find my dad at the kitchen table, surrounded by tools and a stack of new security cameras. This was early 2000s, so they weren't the kind that you can get today.

They were all fully wired and required to have that central box connecting all the units. When I asked what he was doing, he responded with, I'm going to put up cameras. This way, I'll be able to watch all directions around the house. With these bad boys, no one is going to sneak up on us. I wanted to ask him who exactly it was that he was expecting to sneak up on us. But by this point, talking to him was almost feeling like a chore. Everything was about security.

Everything was about, quote, keeping us safe. Which I understand to a point, but at the same time, safe from what? We lived in a suburb where everyone else knew everyone else. And while I understand not getting complacent, we really weren't in much danger. My dad spent that entire night putting up the cameras. He didn't even make dinner for me, so when my mom got home at 8 from the book club and I hadn't eaten,

she was pretty upset with him. There was definitely some yelling at that point. I think my mom had had enough as well. That night, I was left. lying in bed just thinking about life, as preteens often do, and I was watching the clouds pass in front of the moon when I heard someone talking. I could hear my dad's voice, angry, and demanding, and then I heard what sounded like desperate yells from someone else. I was curious. I was a kid, so I wanted to know what was going on. I crept out of bed and down the hallway into the living room,

and what I saw made my blood run cold. I saw my dad standing in the middle of the living room. His face flushed with a mix of fear and rage. His shoulders hunched. I saw my mom standing in the door to the kitchen. One hand pressed to her mouth, and I could tell that she was panicking. Then I saw something confusing. The front door was open, and there was a man that I had never seen standing there in the doorway,

with his hands up trying to say something. But it was like he couldn't speak out of sheer terror. And then I saw why he was terrified. My dad was holding a handgun trained right on him. Now, I want to say that I completely understand the need for defense and security. I want that to be clear. And I do personally appreciate the Second Amendment, but this situation, it wasn't it. I want to point out that the front door was open.

There were four locks. on that door, which I now know to mean that my dad had opened it. I don't know if he knew the guy was out there. I don't know if it was just a random run-in of the two men, but the fact that my dad had a gun on him, a gun that neither my mom nor I even knew that he had, and that he had just installed the security cameras that watched every square inch of the yard,

makes me think that my dad knew this man was at our door, and that he had basically created this scenario. I don't know if it was because he wanted it to happen, or if his paranoia had gotten so bad that he felt like he needed to take it head on, but it is what it is. My dad kept screaming at this man to not move, but then also screamed at him to get on his knees, conflicting instructions that I could tell were causing a panic in this man.

When I got into the living room from the hallway, I did something that I will always regret, because I feel like it made the situation worse. I asked what was going on. The man looked at me, and I could tell that he was crying. My dad shot me a look over the shoulder and yelled, Get back in your room! I just stood there in confused silence, watching this scenario not move for several seconds, until the man lowered his arms and started trying to talk.

I'm sure he just wanted to explain why he was there, but my dad didn't give him the chance. The second the man dropped his arms, my dad pulled the trigger. I stood there and watched my dad squeeze off five shots, all of them hitting the man, who stumbled back and then fell to the ground. The silence that followed that moment was so deep and all-consuming that for a second, I thought I had gone deaf. My dad's face was frozen, his mouth slightly open, and his guns still aiming at where the man had been standing. My mom broke the silence when she started sobbing and screaming at my dad asking what he had done.

I swear it was mere seconds before I heard the sound of police sirens and saw the lights in front of our house. The cops ran up with their weapons drawn, yelling at my dad to drop his gun as they tried to figure all of this out. I think that was when my dad realized that he was still holding it, because he actually looked confused and scared when he put it on the ground. They did pull him out of the house to talk to him, and they then talked to my mom and I as they tried to figure out the bloody scene on our front porch. To kind of wrap this up as quickly as I can, the man was a neighbor.

He lived on the street behind ours. I had never seen him before, but he apparently lived one road over in a house that kind of looked similar to ours. Come to find out, he had actually been drinking at a bar down the way. He'd had way too many, and he had walked home, but at some point he must have gotten confused and turned down our road and got to our house. Now, I don't know if he tried to open the door, or if he had just knocked or something, but I'm guessing that my dad saw him and opened the door to confront him, which was the wrong way to handle this situation.

The end of the investigation determined that it was a tragic accident, but that my father was defending himself in his family, so it was considered justified. I don't think the tragic is a strong enough word for what happened, but I don't have the vocabulary to say what it really was. This man was drunk and confused, and did nothing more than stumble up to the wrong house. He wasn't armed. He didn't break in.

And my dad created the scenario where his life was in danger more than he had. It got worse when I found out that this guy was actually the father to a girl in my class. She was out of school for a while, but when she came back, I couldn't ever get the nerve to talk to her. What was I supposed to say? Hey, sorry my dad killed yours. It may not sound related, but my family never celebrated Halloween after that. My dad never put out the decorations, and we never carved pumpkins again. I think this took a toll on my dad,

and he never wanted anyone to come up to our front porch at night ever again. I will say that my dad was also never the same after that night. He kept up his paranoia, but he became less social, less talkative, and less involved in my life, until he eventually died of a massive heart attack at 48. I'm not sure that there's a lesson to this story, other than to say that security is important, but it's also important to never will a scenario where you shoot a man for protection into existence. There's a certain point where, in his pursuit for security, my father became a hammer, and when you're a hammer, you do everything you can to find a nail. This happened about 15 years back when my now husband and I were in the first few years of dating.

He lived at his parents' place on a two-acre property at Camden and New South Wales, Australia. When you drove into the driveway, you were facing the front door of the main house, where his parents lived. The driveway then curved to the left, had a slight decline to a dip, and then back up slightly until you reached one of the four garage doors at the carport. Due to the height of the top of the driveway, at night, when a car would come in and turn to the left, the headlights would light up the garage and through the windows of the studio flat, that sat above it. The studio flat was where my husband and his brother lived. It had a closed-off bathroom at the back, with an open-plan living in kitchen area.

And all the windows were on the carport-slash-driveway side of the flat. My husband and I slept in his bed at the back of the flat, then moving towards the door-slash-front of the flat was his brother's bed, then the couch, and then the open floor area in front of the TV, and a kitchen off to the side of that. Then there was a tiled area at the front door. Walking out of the front door, there was a main internal timber door, a screen door, and then you would step on to a piece of checker plate

at the top of the external stairs, which would always make a distinctive dong, hollow, metal-like sound. And then that led you to a set of cement stairs, that would take you down to the carport. There was a storage area under the stairs, which caused the cement steps to also have a kind of hollow sound. Because of this, it was obvious to hear when someone was walking up or down the stairs.

Because it was away from the main house and parents, it was the go-to place to hang out for all of us during our 20s, which sometimes meant visitors at all hours of the nights and morning. This sucked for me as I'm a very light sleeper. So if someone came over once I had gone to bed, because of the open plan living of the flats and nowhere to go to close a door except the bathroom, it meant that I was up again until they left.

One Saturday night, it was my husband and I, his brother, one of his mates and his girlfriend staying in the flat. We had a couple of drinks, but nothing too crazy, and all decided to head to bed fairly early for once. I was in the bed at the back of the flat with my husband. His brother was in his bed, and his mate and girlfriend were on a mattress in the open floor space in front of the TV. We had been asleep for a few hours

when I was awakened to the sound of a car door being closed. It sounded quite loud, like it was under the carport. I thought that's weird. I didn't see any light shine through the flat from the headlights as they drove down the top of the driveway. This is normally quite bright and fills the flat with light, waking me up. This was about 3 a.m., which wasn't unheard of happening, but was a bit of an odd hour of the night for someone to be showing up and still proceed to come up the stairs to the door, when they could see that all the lights were out, and we had clearly gone to bed.

I shoved my husband to wake him up, but he was in a deep sleep and barely moved. I got out of bed and walked over to the bathroom window to look to see if I could see a car or anyone. The moon was bright enough that I could make out if there was a person or car in view, but they were most likely under the carport anyway. When I couldn't see anything, I hopped back into the bed, remaining sitting upward to listen out for anything else. Then, I heard a second car door close. Then I heard the sound of heavy feet, like someone wearing big boots,

walking up the hollow cement steps, and then reaching the checker plate at the top. I heard the dong dong as I heard the boots hit the metal plate. I then saw my husband's mate sit up in front of the TV where he was sleeping with his girlfriend. Hey, I whispered loudly to him, Are you hearing this? Yeah, he responded in an alert and confused tone. I shoved my husband again hard. As he woke up with an annoyed tone on his voice,

What? he said to me. I responded with, Someone is at the door. He sat straight up to see his mate sitting up also. As I said, the moon was fairly bright that night, so we could see each other's silhouettes. My husband got up and walked towards where his mate was sitting up in the lounge room. As he neared him, we heard the screen door handled jostle, like someone was pushing on it to unlatch the door.

We then heard the distinct creak of the screen door hinge as it was being pulled wide open. My heart was pounding. Although it wasn't completely unusual to have a guest drop past, something about this whole situation had me creeped out. The next logical sound to come after that would have been the timber door handle turning, or, for a guest, a knock on the timber door. But the next thing we heard was the car doors closing again,

not opening, only closing. Two doors, one after the next. Now, I was thinking, more people must be getting out of the car. How many people are here? My husband grabbed a cricket bat and his friend grabbed another weapon. I can't remember exactly what it was. They both stood at the door and counted to three as they braced themselves for whoever was out there.

As soon as they swung the timber door open, they found the screen door closed and latched, which was odd, as we heard it being opened but not closed. They then opened the screen door and proceeded outside to the checker plate landing at the the top of the stairs, where there was no one to be seen. They ran down the stairs and both went separate ways around the flat, and then met back up on the other side. No people in sight, no cars in sight, nothing. They came back up to tell me that there was no one out there and no cars anywhere other than our own, which were all locked. What? I exclaimed. I asked my husband's mate what he had heard.

heard, and he relayed to me exactly what I had experienced. Car door's shutting, heavy footsteps up the stairs, landing on the checker plate, the screen door opening and then the car doors closing again. No sound of the door closing and no footsteps back down the stairs. Even if there was someone at the top of the stairs holding the screen door open, he would not have had time to run back down the stairs between the time we heard the screen door to my husband and his friend opened the door to chase whoever it was. This was a flight of about 20 steps, and at its peak it was about 12 to 15 feet tall.

If someone jumped off, they would have hurt themselves, or, at the very least, hit the ground hard enough to make a sound. It had me baffled, and I still think about it to this day, trying to come up with some rational explanation. I will let you know if I ever think of one. Lazzang sur-gillet, Pucance-Moyerned for 15 minutes. We'd say that's the lojo. Pre-to-Jew? Vive the pleasure with Leo Jo.

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With the support 24-hour-pard-per-year, no amount of minimum, nor fray-mensual. You're made for negotiate. And the apply negotiator T-D is made for you help. Telecharge it right now. When I was about 13 years old, I had a weird dream. In the dream, I was in a strange house.

Everything was hazy and brownish. Like a dark space with wood paneling. I was walking from room to room. Each room's detail was hazy and indistinct. It also felt like I was looking through someone else's eyes. It was so weird to me. As I walked through the room, I would see various strange people. In one room, there was a wolfman in a long coat, like a pea coat, just standing there holding a bag.

In another, there were two little, well, I don't know what to call them, just monstrous little figures. These two were laughing and giggling. They ran up to me and said something. whoever I was looking through through their head back and a distorted laugh came out. It was deep and slow, I think the Freddy Fasbear kind of chuckle. In the next room there was a soldier of some type. He was bundled up in cold weather gear, complete with a face mask. He was checking his gear in the mirror.

He looked over at me and said something, and I responded. I have no idea what was saying. said, but I shook my head no and moved on. In the last room there was a medical table-like thing, and on it was a Frankenstein-like monster. At the head end of the table was a doctor who was working on the monster. This was where the dream ended. That morning, I woke up and told both my mom and sister about the weird dream. We all tried to figure it out, but that came to nothing.

We had a habit of trying to figure out what is. influenced our dreams. Like, what events could cause the strange imagery? The only conclusion we could come to was that we might be moving again, and somehow this was a stress dream from that. Well, weeks later, it was Halloween. My parents and sister had left to go on a trip to where my dad was looking at getting a new job, Detroit, Oregon, if I remember right.

I stayed with my buddy, because it might be the last Halloween we got to spend together, in fact this was an event. His parents had an RV that was hooked up to power, and not just me, but all of our friends were staying the night. That night, about an hour before we were going out, was when the dream became real. I was walking through the house. My costume was a modern take on the Grim Reaper.

I had a skull mask that came in two parts that was glued to my face. You just used black makeup on the parts it did. cover. It was an easy costume. A black hoodie and skeleton gloves for the look. And I had a practice comma to complete the costume. A comma is a small scythe-like weapon from Asia. Mine was wood, not metal. To add to the costume, I had put small yellow-orange LEDs by the eye holes, and it made my eyes light up. I could still see, but it was blurry and hazy. My buddy C was going as the classic wolfman. We lived in northern Nevada,

hence it was cold on Halloween. We even had snow before on Halloween. That was why he was also in a long coat. My buddy A had two little twin brothers. They were made up as little deformed monsters. For some reason, we named the two monsters Eag and Gore, like Eagor but split into two parts. They made a joke about bringing me plenty of people that night,

and I laughed. My buddy A was in the next room dressing up as a cold weather soldier. Snow pants, ski mask, the whole thing. Finally, my buddy E was lying on the kitchen table while A's dad finished putting the makeup

on to make him look like Frankenstein. If you're wondering about why he was lying down, well, if you've ever tried to put makeup on a person while standing, it can be ton. However, Roll it. towel, putting it under the neck and having them lay down on a table to put the makeup on,

also helps with the lighting. This was in the days before ring lights and chairs that would tilt back properly were affordable. So my dream seemed to be a prophetic one. The last time my friends and I ever got together like that. This was all the way back in the early 90s. I think we moved up to Centrilla, Washington sometime after the new year. The Oregon job wasn't something my dad wanted, but he did find one in Washington. Anyway, we had a great night trick-or-treating, even playing poker with the candy.

Don't worry, whoever won. We just split it evenly with everyone at the end. That way, we all got the same amount of candy and got to have fun with it. I hope you like this story. It's a memory that comes back around Halloween every year. I've been doing a lot of soul. soul-searching in my adult life. A lot of thinking about how things were when I was young. I don't talk about my childhood at all to anyone,

because every time I think about it, I want to curl up into a ball and cry for hours on end. That's not a healthy way to live, though. So, I've been working on getting things off my chest and putting them out into the world to try to get closure. I know that things were trying for me when I was young. I know that I was raised in a household that wasn't loving. In fact, quite the opposite.

And I know that none of it was my fault. I have to keep telling myself this as I work through my issues, something my therapist told me. I have to continue to tell myself that it wasn't my fault while I try to put things into perspective. So, I decided today that I was, would write this out and submit it to try to work through some things. The story isn't necessarily scary.

It's more sad than anything, but I want to write it out and hopefully you can use it. And if not, that's fine too. I'm only going to write about one specific event in this story, and maybe I'll write about a few of the other things from before and after it eventually, but this was probably when things were the absolute worst for me as a child. I guess I should start by explaining a few things about my parents. My mother and father did not love me. They probably didn't even like me.

They told me as much a few times that they didn't love me, and after the first few times I would cry, but the words started to mean less and less each time they said them. If my parents could have found the right buyer, they would have probably sold me for a baggie of some sort of, sort of illicit substance and a heartbeat. They were druggies, pretty much getting high anytime I wasn't in the house. I guess they respected me enough to not do it while I was there.

But they were usually too far gone to even talk to by the time I got home from school. Our house was always a mess. My parents never had money to buy me new clothes, so growing up, I would have to wear things that were a size too small for me. Or sometimes my aunt would drop off my older cousin's stuff that was a size too big. I always looked like such a clown, and I knew it, but thankfully some people could see through the situation and not judge me for it. They could judge my parents all they wanted. I didn't care. I had one friend, Matt, whose parents were really nice people.

A bit strict, but they were friendly enough. I always felt safe at Matt's house. like nothing would happen to me. And I think that's why I grew so attached to them. So when they offered to pay for me to go to camp with Mark I's summer, the summer I turned nine, it was a no-brainer. I didn't even bother asking my parents. I figured what's the point?

I just told them that I was staying with Matt for a few days. Neither of them acknowledged me as expected, and that was it. The camp was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by church. trees and mountains, with a huge lake in the middle. This is probably my fondest memory growing up, those days where I got to feel normal around boys my age. I made a few new friends, and spent time being a kid. We hiked, roasted marshmallows, stayed up late and told scary stories in the cabin.

I didn't participate in the scary stories, though. I could have. I could have told him a few interesting ones, but I didn't. Matt and I even snuck out one night and went down to the lake, just watching the stars and talking about what we wanted to do when we grew up. Yes, I'm being nostalgic, because it's what I wanted to hold on to more than my home life back then. But, of course, the camp was only for a week.

On the drive back, I remember feeling this tight knot in my stomach. Would my parents yell at me from being gone so long? I never told them where I was actually going, but would they really care? Also, could I do anything to make this last longer? When they pulled up to my house, it looked the same as always. Run down, unkempt and dark. Matt's parents asked if my folks were home or if they needed to stick around and wait for them, but I lied and said that they were probably home.

I told them that my dad worked nights, so they might have just been asleep. because it was the only thing I could think to use as a good excuse at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon for why my house looked like it had sat vacant for months. I waved goodbye to them as they pulled off, pulled my backpack tighter, and headed up the front steps. I didn't look back. I didn't want Matt's parents to see me hesitate. I fumbled with my key, and when I stepped inside, the silence hit me like a wall. The house was empty, completely empty. I remember standing in the entryway, just staring into the dark living room, hoping I would hear a TV on in the background, or the sound of my mom yelling at me for letting the flies in.

But it was dead quiet. I don't know how long I stood there waiting for anything to happen, but eventually, I just tossed my bag and wandered into the kitchen to get something to eat. for some reason I remember the fridge being full with a couple takeout containers and an empty bottle of ketchup I don't know why I remember the damn ketchup bottle but

I remember it's sitting there on the center of the top shelf with no ketchup in it I didn't panic though I was sort of used to my parents not really being there even when they were I figured they would show up sooner or later and yell at me for being home alone

which is something they had done before. Yes, they actually yelled at me and punished me for being home when they weren't there one time, even though they left me there. When I woke up the next morning, they still weren't home. The house was still empty. I ate some old cereal, no milk though, so I ended up eating it with water from the sink. I tried to keep myself busy with cleaning my room, drawing in my sketchbook and just doing nothing. At least it being a Saturday, I did get to watch some cartoons, which I never got to do, so I had that going for me. That night was actually where things went, I guess, awry. I'm not really sure how to put it, but I'll explain. It was around 9 p.m. I was sitting in my

bedroom with my lamp on, and I think I was drawing one of the Power Rangers mecks when I heard the sound of glass breaking. I panicked for a moment, as any nine-year-old would, but it occurred to me that it was probably just my parents coming home and breaking something as they stumbled through the living room. I let out a sigh and headed down the stairs to greet them for whatever reason. When I got to the bottom, a man yelled at me to not move and pointed a gun at me. At that moment, I thought I was going to die. I remember immediately losing the air from my lungs and feeling like I was going to throw up.

After a moment or two, it must have clicked for the guy that I was just a little kid. And he lowered the gun, but kept staring at me. After a few seconds, he said something like, Hey there, I'm not going to hurt you, just don't scream, okay? I wanted to be brave, so I just responded with, I'm not going to scream, trying to, sound tough, I guess. He stepped up to where I was standing and asked if my parents were upstairs.

I told him no, that they weren't home. He stood there for a moment. I think he was trying to gauge whether or not I was lying. He told me to stay put and that he'd be right back. Then he went upstairs and searched from room to room. After he came back down, he asked me when they left. And I had to tell him that I honestly didn't. No. He asked me a few questions about them, where they went, when I last saw them, etc.

I think the more that I answered, the more this guy started to feel bad for me, because I could see in his eyes that he knew I was being honest. I had no idea where they were, when they left, all that. I told him that I went to summer camp for a week, and when I got home, they were gone, and I hadn't seen them since. He asked me how old I was, and, I told him honesty that I was nine. It was at this point that this guy pulled his mask off, and he just looked at me like I was the most pathetic thing he had ever seen. He looked like a pretty normal guy, nothing special,

just long, blonde hair, a little rough, and he seemed okay, despite the breaking and entering. This guy actually sat on the couch with me for a few moments, watching TV with me, and asking me about myself. At one point, I told him that I hadn't eaten anything but cereal since I got home,

and he actually seemed shocked. He got up and went into the kitchen. I could hear him opening and closing the cabinets. When he came back into the living room, he looked like he was beyond upset with the situation, and actually asked me if I liked McDonald's. I told him that I loved McDonald's, and this was when the two of them,

us, myself, and the man that broke into my parents' house with a gun, looking for my deadbeat parents, took a short drive to the local McDonald's for chicken nuggets. We got back to my house, and he came in, this time through the door since I had a key, and we sat there eating McDonald's and watching whatever was on TV. It's a sad fact that this man that was probably looking to kill or rob my parents, had acted more like a father in the couple hours I knew him than my real father. When we got done eating, he said that he had to get going and, I kid you not, I asked him if I could go with him. I think he would have said yes, if not, for the whole criminal aspect of it. He said that I had to stay there, but that he would make sure I was okay,

that nothing would happen to me. He then apologized to me for everything. I thanked him for the Nuggets, and then he left. Surprisingly enough, he actually kept his promise, and he did make sure I was okay. I found out, about 45 minutes later, that he had called in an anonymous tip to the cops about a child being left alone for days.

The cops showed up at the house, noticed the broken window, and when I answered, and told them that my parents weren't home, and that the window was broken because some man with a gun broke it, well, they took the whole thing pretty seriously. This was especially true when they found the drug paraphernalia in my parents' room. I've written a lot here, and I won't bore you with the legal aspect of all of what happened,

but I do want to at least wrap this up by telling you why things went down this way. That man was, apparently, an enforcer for a big morgue. named drug dealer in my town. My parents owed this drug dealer a lot of money, and he wanted to get paid. So he sent that man to get the money by any means necessary. Apparently, my parents somehow caught wind that they were going to get a visit from the dealer, so they took off.

They packed up two bags, got in their car, and they headed west. At no point in time did they realize they were leaving me. behind. I guess because I hadn't been there for a couple of days, though I'm not certain they would have taken me with them if I were even there. My parents were eventually located. They were in a drug house, both completely out of their minds on heroin. Apparently my mother was, in simpler words, inches from death with how much she had injected. I was taken into custody by the state, while they tried to figure out what to do with me. I will say that I never saw my father again after this event.

He died in prison. I don't know, nor do I care how. I did see my mother after a few years, but it was only to tell her that I hated her for how she ruined my childhood. I ended up in the foster system, and thankfully, I did have a decent run there, better than most. I was put into an adoptive family that at least seemed like they cared, certainly more than my real parents.

I know that this was long-winded and, like I said, not scary, but it's my story, and I wanted to share it. If nothing else, it helps get it off my chest. So thank you, Raven, for allowing me to do so. And if you use this story, thank you for that as well. This happened to me a long time ago when I was still in college back in the 70s. I recently started listening to your podcast, and the memory of this inexplicable event came rushing back to me. I was a junior in college at the time, living on the fifth floor of my dorm, which was also the top floor.

The wing I lived on was the shortest wing, with only four rooms, two rooms with an attached bathroom between them on each side of the hallway. I didn't have a roommate this particular semester, and I lived alone in my room. My sweetmates were very good friends. Each room had access to the bathroom, which was between the two rooms. Each room had a door to the shared bathroom that could be locked with a deadbolt for privacy and security. On this particular day that I'm writing about, my sweetmates had already gone to class. I had slept in a little later than normal and got up to go to class around 10 a.m. I want to add that I was alone in my room that morning.

I was not then and am not now a smoker, and I didn't have a lighter or matches in my room. No one was in my room when I left for class, and as was my habit, I made sure the bathroom door was deadbolted and my dorm room was locked when I left. I also recall not making my bed that morning, as I awoke late and had to hurry to dress and get to class. When I returned an hour later, I unlocked my room and went in. I immediately noticed the faint smell of smoke. It was odd, and not being a smoker, I couldn't understand why my room smelled of smoke. My friend who lived across the hall were smokers, but they hadn't been in my room.

I started to look around for something that might be smoldering. I first went to the electric univant by the window. The univant functioned as a heater, fan, and air conditioner. I thought perhaps it was malfunctioning, but it wasn't even on. Then I checked my desk lamp cord, which was also fine. Finally, I examined my stereo system. It was the 70s, remember, in the attached speakers. Everything was fine.

I couldn't find the source of the smoke anywhere. Finally, in desperation, I banged on the door of my friends across the hall. Something's burning in my room and I can't find it, I said. They jumped up and came across the hall to my room to help me look for the source of the smell of smoke. We all searched the room together, with no results. I have a really keen sense of smell and began to realize the smell seemed strong. stronger near my bed. My bed was still unmade.

My pillow was lying in the middle of the mattress where I had tossed at an hour earlier. The sheets and comforter were kicked off and lying rumpled at the foot of the bed. I reached down and picked up my pillow, and there in the middle of the bed where I had been sleeping an hour earlier was a smoldering fire. My pillow had been covering the charred and burning mattress, and the fire had started to burn into my pillow as well. My friend and I stared incredulously at the hole burning in the middle of my mattress. What the... How could that happen? The mattress was ruined, as was my pillow. The down feathers gave off a putrid, acrid smell.

That's what had caught my attention upon entering the room. I was flabbergasted. I had no explanation for how this could have happened. I examined both the mattress and the pillow for any cause, perhaps a match or a cigarette butt, but there was nothing. No explanation to what had caused the spontaneous combustion in the place where I had just been sleeping an hour before. My friends and I scratched our heads and just chalked it up to being one of those things that

can't be explained. And that was that for a few days. It bothered me a lot, as it seemed personal and very creepy. How could something like that happen? I had no enemies, no reason for anyone to be upset or angry with me. I certainly hadn't done anything that would warrant my bed and pillow burning. It bugged me for days to say the least. A few days had passed when one of my friends knocked on my door.

I'll call him John. He came in shutting the door behind him and said, I heard your bed burned. Is that true? I told him, yes, it was true. And then he asked me if there was anyone on campus who didn't like me. I told him that the only person who seemed to dislike me was a girl who was currently dating a boy that I had dated two years earlier.

What's her name? he asked. Things were getting weird. I didn't like the way he was acting. I told him the girl's name and he jumped up and locked the door so no one else would come in. Listen, he said, I'm involved with some witchcraft stuff. I'm a warlock, and the girl that you mentioned is a powerful witch. I had never heard anything so bizarre in my life. I was incredulous, and I simply didn't believe him or what he was telling me,

but he was dead serious. He said that she had cast some kind of weird energy spell that could light spontaneous fires. To this day, I don't know if that is truly what caused the fire or not, but I have no other explanation for it. And the fact that it was my bed and my pillow strikes me as very weird, personal, and aimed directly at me. I don't know who, what, why, or how this happened. It still haunts me to this day because I cannot rationally explain it. The only thing that makes any sense is the crazy explanation that my friend John gave me, but really?

Is that even possible? A long time has passed since then. I still think of this story every once in a while, but I don't speak about it because it creeps me out. But if it was something the girl who dated my old boyfriend did, well, I certainly hope that we never meet again. Hi, Raven. Listening to you read so many amazing stories that people have submitted about their paranormal or glitch experiences has motivated me to submit another one of my experiences.

The two stories I've submitted so far have been glitch or paranormal stories. The other was a visitation. And this one is a dream-like, out-of-body experience or astral projection story. All stories submitted are true, but definitely bizarre. I wonder if any of your viewers have ever encountered an astral projection kind of dream-like experience. If so, I would love to hear about them. This happened on July 29th, 28th. I believe this started off as a dream but evolved into something else entirely.

I went to bed on Saturday night and woke up on the following Sunday morning very late. It was almost 10 in the morning. I have never slept that late before. When I came downstairs into the kitchen, I was still in a very groggy sleep state. My husband was unloading the dishwasher and remarked how surprised he was that I slept so late. This is when he told me what time it was. I was shocked that I still felt completely exhausted, even though I slept this late.

Another part of me couldn't believe that I slept so late and was wasting the day away. The night before, we had planned to take a ride to Beavertail in Jamestown, to enjoy the beautiful weather. After a few sips of coffee, I began to help my husband with the rest of the dishes in the sink. We were chatting about the kids, laughing about various things,

and at one point he brought up my deceased aunt. We began to laugh about her broken English, in the way in which she pronounced his name. Mid-laugh, I immediately stopped in my tracks and remembered that I had a dream about her just last night. Slowly bits and pieces of the dream came back to me, and I started to tell my husband about it. In this dream-like state,

I went on a riverboat in the Danube River. I was with other people that I didn't know in a riverboat captain. I was not with friends or family, just other strangers. We were traveling along, and at one point, I couldn't wait to get off the boat because I had to use the bathroom. As the riverboat docked, the captain gave some information, or instructions, but I can't remember what he said. I got off the boat and looked around me.

It was daytime. The sky was blue, the temperature was warm, but not hot. There were no clouds in the pale blue sky that stretched out as far as I could see. I'm not sure what time it was, but it seemed to be very early in the afternoon. People were shopping, walking all around and enjoying the day. The ground under my feet was old cobblestone. There were shops all around. around this area where the riverboat was docked.

I really had to go to the bathroom, and that's all I could think about as I stepped off the riverboat. My eyes scanned the area as I was looking around for a place I could use the restroom. As an aside, I do find it a bit odd to dream of having to go to the bathroom in this much detail. In any event, from where I was standing, to the right, I spotted an establishment not far from where the riverboat was docked. I thought it was a bar of some sort. I saw that it had both a front door and a side door.

I went around to the front door as I thought the side door might be used as an exit. These doors were large. They were somewhat ornate, wooden doors with large handles. I opened the door to what I thought was a bar and walked in hoping they would let me use their bathroom. To my utter shock and disbelief, when walking in, right near where I was about to turn down a small hallway or corner, standing there was my aunt. This is the aunt that died in March of 2015. I was absolutely floored to be bumping into her. What are you doing here?

I asked in an audibly loud and shocked voice. She telepathically asked me to hush my voice because she was there working. when she said that she was working, it didn't register what she really meant. It wasn't like she had a job in that place, nor was she dressed for work in this sort of establishment. I told her that I had to use the bathroom and that it was a pressing emergency as my bladder felt like it was going to burst. I promised her I'd be right out and that we could continue our conversation. In my dream or astral projection or whatever you want to call it, she was very much real.

She looked as real as any living person. I had no reason to believe she would vanish while I was in the bathroom. I knew when I was finished using the ladies' room that she'd be right where I left her at the end of the bar, standing right next to the grey-haired, sullen, middle-aged man. And she was. Upon my swift return, I became more aware of what she was wearing.

She had on a bright plum-slash-purple-colored blazer and matching skirt business suit. I also noticed the blazer and skirt was too large for her tiny frame. She also had on the same color of nail polish. I found the suit color and nail polish choice totally out of character for her. This was not a color that she would ever wear, nor had I ever remembered seeing her in this color. Also, in life, she always wore a very light colored nail polish, if any polish at all.

As I examined her more closely, she appeared to be wearing fake nails, and the manicure didn't seem professional. The polish seemed to be thick, and melting or smudged. Her clothing choice was very out of character for a woman who was very fashion-forward in life. As I moved beyond the superficial details of her manicure and attire, I noticed that her face was simply perfect. She had no wrinkles. Her skin was flawless and it radiated a soft glowing light. She still looked like the 88-year-old woman that I knew,

but something about her seemed far more evolved. We had more telepathic conversations as we stood at the end of the bar. I asked her about what she had been doing since she died. I was fully aware in the moment during my dream that she was not alive, and she had been dead since 2015. My aunt told me about what she'd been up to since her death. I knew that when I returned or woke up,

I wouldn't be able to remember this part of what she said with complete clarity. She let me know that, even though she was telling me about what happens after you die, it wasn't meant for me to completely remember. I do, however, remember that she explained that, after you die, you go through this big white building with huge pillars, and you go through some sort of debriefing process. There's some sort of cleansing process that everyone goes through,

like removing the negative aspects of human existence and negative experiences off of you. Then you have a choice of what you can do, based on your life review. I guess she chose to do work on the other side as an angel or spirit guide. I think she was helping the gray-haired middle-aged man that was sitting at the bar, but he couldn't see her. Then, our telepathic conversation took a turn into various aspects of my life.

I seemed a bit frustrated with the direction of my life. Here I was. Happily married, three kids, accomplished in my profession and using my education in different ways, but still, somehow I felt lost. I believe a lot had to do with the fact that I was still grieving her death, and nothing seemed to matter much to me. I just felt stuck. I asked her what my life's purpose was. I clearly remember her telling me to stop trying to look for my purpose outside of myself, that my purpose would find me.

I started to cry, but I'm not really sure why. We were in a public area, and she told me to stop crying because the people could see me crying and getting upset, but they couldn't see her. That statement alone I found unnerving. People could see me, but they couldn't see her. Even in that moment, I felt that was a strange thing to hear her say. I knew that I had to pull myself together.

I also somehow knew the riverboat would be leaving soon to take us back. My aunt hugged me. She asked if I felt it. I told her that I had. What she was referring to was the angelic hug that she had just given me. It penetrated my soul and calmed my spirit. You see, when an angel hugs you, it's a feeling that permeates your whole being down to the depths of your

soul and lingers for a long while after the hug is over. It's an otherworldly sort of feeling that cannot fully be explained. After she hugged me, we continued our conversation. I asked if she has seen other relatives that have since passed on and told her that I'm thinking of her and them often. We talked telepathically until I knew it was really time for me to go. Then she just disappeared. I walked through the crowd.

pub area to the side exit. The moment I arrived at the side exit door, there she was. She was standing to the left of the door. I hugged her again and told her I loved her and kissed her cheek. I asked her to say hello to my father and names of some of the relatives that had crossed over. We said our goodbyes, smiled, and I exited the building feeling better than I had in a long time. As I walked over to where the riverboat was docked, I realized I was getting pretty hungry. I wondered if there was enough time for me to get food before the riverboat departed.

That's when I looked down at what I was wearing. I realized I was wearing a white lab coat. I reached into the right front pocket, and inside there was food. I was planning on buying a spinach wrap, but there was already a pre-packaged flatbread tuna and spruce. and a trap in my pocket. I'm not sure where or how I got it, as it wasn't there before. In fact,

I wasn't even wearing the white lab coat before. It was possible my aunt was behind this. She knows I'm a vegetarian. In life, she always brought food for me when we went to certain places. Once, she even brought food for me to a repass. It was the repass after her older sister's funeral. My aunt was always concerned that people would forget that I was vegetarian

and I wouldn't have anything to eat at gatherings. So it wouldn't be a stretch to think my aunt was behind the flatbread spinach wrap. As I unwrapped the flatbread sandwich, I removed the moisture barrier paper, rolled it up, and I ate it. It was incredibly satisfying, like far more satisfying than anything I ever remembered eating. I finished the sandwich and continued walking towards the boat. I took another look around, and I noticed my aunt was completely gone. I stepped into the boat, looked around one last time, and noticed the people were still talking and walking and shopping in the area near the bar,

from which I came. The boat was filled up as the other passengers were seated on the riverboat and prepared to head back from where we came from. The riverboat captain was ready to go, and he made an announcement. Moments after, we were on our way back. Although this was an extremely vivid experience, I don't know why I never questioned where the other riverboat passengers came from, who they were visiting, and I never asked the captain any questions.

After slowly piecing together the stream the next morning, and recalling as many details to my husband as, I had remembered, I went upstairs to shower, dress, and get ready to go to James Town for the day. I still had this nagging feeling that wouldn't leave me. That experience had me obsessed in trying to figure out where I had been. So I grabbed my phone and started Googling bars or lounges on the water near the Donnebe River. When I googled it, I was shocked to see images of a place in Vienna, Austria, that I literally visited in my dream.

I never even knew how long the Donnebay River was. What's more is that I never knew that the Donne Bay River went all the way into Austria. I thought it didn't go any further than Hungary. I've never been to Austria before in my life, and I'm certainly quite ignorant to the geography of this part of the world. What I came across in my Google search

was a place called Heaven's Pub in Vienna, Austria. The Google images were exactly, what I saw in my dreams. Both wood doors in the front and side. The area where the bathrooms were located, everything was exactly as it was in my dream. And to make matters even more unusual, there is one of the Google images that was a barrel.

On top of the barrel was a purple-colored candle with a flame with melted wax. This was the same color of the oversized business suit that my aunt was wearing. It was also the same color as the melted-looking nail polish she had on. So, earlier in recounting this dream slash astral projection, I stated that my aunt said that my purpose would find me, and that I didn't have to worry about anything.

Two days after this experience, I got a phone call from a cohort member for my doctoral program. I was surprised, as this is not a person I was in regular contact with. She asked me if I would be interested in teaching a graduate science course at the university. I was like, yeah, whatever, as long as it didn't interfere with my regular work. I didn't think twice about it, as I had already had so much going on. Well, certain tenure-track professors' positions are extremely difficult to get, as there are unions involved. The cohort member's boss ended up contacting me the next.

day and told me that she saw some of my work. She's been working behind the scenes and has been trying to get me hired for this position for two years. The interview was a mere formality, and I was hired instantly. It all seemed surreal. What makes things even more strange is that the school's color is the exact color that my aunt was wearing. I guess she was right.

She told me that my purpose would come to me. sure enough, it did. I never even looked for this position. It just fell into my lap and believe me, this is not typical in getting these kinds of professor positions. This was a mind-boggling experience for me. After some thoughtful reflection, I began to come to the conclusion

that our relatives that have moved on to the next realm have ways of crossing the veil back into this realm of existence, if and when we need them. They also provide us with plenty of signs, use dreams, or allow us to experience things like astral projection to reach out to us when we need their spiritual guidance the most. We just have to be open to them.

Someday, I hope to visit Austria, and when I do, I'll be sure to visit Heaven's Pub. I'm sure I'll feel her presence there no matter how much time has passed. From the summer of 2021 to 2022, I was a lifeguard at a small beach called Adams Point Beach, which is located in Quishi Lake, New York. I didn't really enjoy my job, to be honest. Besides making friends with the other lifeguards, I wasn't getting paid enough money,

and my final paycheck for the summer of 2021, it was $350. To make matters even more difficult, I come from a family with no money. I live on a farm and my parents fight with each other a lot. I never went to college because my family can't afford it, so I have to work two jobs every day. One from 9 to 5 and the other from 6 to 11, where I only get paid $15 an hour. In the summer of 2022, my boss, for whatever, reason had demoted me to a sub-lifeguard. This really pissed me off because I couldn't see my friends.

One day in August of 2022, I was called in to substitute for a lifeguard as this lifeguard was busy that day, and only one other lifeguard was available. Usually there are three, but that day was a shortage of staff. The start of that day was like how a day would usually start. Unfortunately, that changed in the afternoon. My 30-minute shift on this lifeguard chair was done, and the other lifeguard swapped with me. I walked back to the shed and went inside of it.

About 10 minutes later, while I was on my phone, I heard a bunch of screaming and crying outside of the shed with the door closed. I didn't know what was going on, so I walked outside, and what I saw next is an image that I will never unsee for the rest of the rest of it. of my life. What I saw was the lifeguard along with four other people, sitting with a woman on a surf rescue board with both of her legs severed off. I felt petrified,

but I had to help the other lifeguard as it was my job to save people. I helped carry the surfboard, but I looked behind me as it was so brutal to look at what was in front of me. I helped everyone place the board on a table with the woman lying on it right next to the shed. Thankfully, the police and medics were already called. I asked what had happened. One guy said that a guy by himself in a speedboat wasn't looking where he was driving the boat.

And people told him to stop and slow down, but he was in his own world. He then ran over the woman and then would come to a stop like three seconds later. He apparently took off like a coward would do. I could not believe what I was hearing. I then told the man to describe what the speedboat looked like. I asked him because this was a very small lake, and I pretty much knew everyone who comes to this lake and lives right next to it.

He said that it was a blue jetboat. When the man told me this, I felt as if my whole world was coming to an end. That was my dad's boat. He's the only one who owns a jetboat on this lake. I then saw everything turn blue. blurry and then it all went to black. I woke up with two EMTs side by side next to me.

They asked if I was all right. I told them I was fine, and I went to go grab my water bottle and then drank the water as if I had never drank water before in my life. I then exited the beach area as my boss told everyone to go home because of what had happened today. I got in my car and drove home, which was about three to four minutes away. As I got home, I turned off my car and stepped out to see my dad pacing back and forth

nervously through the kitchen window. I then rushed inside of the house, and I went on a full-on rampage on my father. I confronted him and then called him a coward for leaving the scene of the accident. He was breathing so hard. I had never seen him breathing like this before. As I was still yelling at him

and my adrenaline was kicking in more than ever, I shoved him and then started hitting him. He told me to calm the F down. After about ten hits, I finally pushed him to his full limits, and he punched me so hard that I fell to the ground, and my ears were ringing. He then yelled at me to stay the F down, you little B, before running out of the house and speeding off somewhere.

I continued to pall my eyes out. I was never close with my dad. I never came to him for help when needed, but never in a million years would I thought that he would end up doing something so horrific. About an hour and a half later, my mom finally came home after going to the hospital to check on the woman, whom my father had injured. As my mother walked through the door,

she hugged me for what felt like an eternity and we cried together. We sat down together at the dinner table, and she told me some good news, and bad news. The good news was that the woman was alive and okay. The bad news was that both of her legs were amputated off and that they would have to be refitted with bionic legs. I felt so relieved that she had survived,

but I was still so devastated that my father took off, never even apologized and never came to see the woman in the hospital. My mother asked me where her husband went. I told my mom that he took off. We tried calling him, but it went straight to voicemail. The police were called again, and we filed a missing person's report on my dad. The next few weeks, the police tried searching everywhere for him and came up empty-handed. It was the worst three weeks of my life.

I quit my job straight after due to the traumatic sight I had seen on that very day. I've been seeing a psychologist three times a week now. each day I was very slowly starting to get better and better, but I still have a long way to go. I also only work one job now, and have been promoted at my job, which now I get paid 25 an hour. This makes me happier, as I still have some luck in this world. I have not seen my father since. I don't really miss him that much after he attacked me and calling me a B. I wish I could tell you that that's where the story ends.

but sadly it isn't. And the next part gets even worse. Fast forwarding to sometime in mid-July during this past summer of 2024, I decided to go kayaking at 7 o'clock at night. I wanted to exercise my brain and needed some free time for myself. I took off in my kayak. I kayaked in the area of around 30 feet deep, then kayaking to the shallower area.

My destination was to stop at a land area to walk on it and to take a break from kayaking as my arms were getting sore. During this whole time kayaking, I was looking at the water beneath me. As I got to around 15 feet deep, what I saw on the bottom of the ground underneath the water was textbook horror. I saw a dead body of an old woman. I paddled out there so fast and then reached my destination that I originally planned. to go, and after pulling my kayak to shore, I ran to the grass area and threw up around five times. Luckily, I had my phone on me, so I called 911. The police came 10 minutes later, about seven cop cars showed up, along with the SWAT team. I gave them my story, and they told me to evacuate

the area as it will be going under investigation. About two weeks later, we got some of the worst news ever. More so than anyone who lived in my town had ever gotten before. The detective told us that this person was murdered. They also traced DNA and fingerprints to try to find out who the perpetrator was, and it worked. When they revealed who the killer was, I was nowhere near prepared to find out who it would be. It was my estranged father. Why the hell would he come back to this town if his main goal was to try to escape? I couldn't think of any motive of why he would even kill this person. This was so devastating that the next day,

I packed most of my clothes and drove off all the way downstate New York City. I needed a break from this so-called curse that was going on in upstate in my hometown. I stayed in New York City for about three weeks in a cheap hotel and then came back. The police, this time along with the FBI, searched again for my father, and he had again nothing. I quit my job after this, and I'm currently unemployed. Luckily, I have my little sister

who had just graduated high school take over for me. As you were hearing this story, as of now, there is still no updates on where my father could possibly be. He could be living in another state far away, or he could have fled the country. I never wants to see my father ever again, after hearing that he murdered another human being. If there's more news revolving around this case,

I will keep you posted. Hello, Raven. I've been trying to submit this story for a while now, but never have been able to put into words, and I'm sorry in advance that it's so long. I'm almost 21 years old, female, and have always been sensitive to the paranormal. The reason why I have never been able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to,

to put this story into a story format is because it has left me so scarred that every waking moment, I beg to whatever gods exist that it never happens to me again. I know to some people that this may not seem like it's a lot. For some background, I am Mexican and Native American mixed with European, and I grew up believing in Native American and Hispanic folklore, and I knew what to not mess with, to not activate any of these creatures. I know this already sounds like I'm a madman, but just hear me out. I'm going to keep all names confidential, but you will need to know the name of the town I grew up in, San Juan Batista.

This town was primarily Native Americans and Hispanic population before it was colonized and became part of the El Camino Real. which was where the Catholic churches went along the entirety of California and built missions to convert these people to Catholicism. If you're a Californian and see those bells on the side of the highway, you know what I mean. Anyways, the earliest paranormal experience I had that I can remember was when I was in first grade or kindergarten. I don't remember the exact age. I attended an after-school catechism at the San Juan Mission. I used to always hear whispers whenever I would step foot in the little small graveyard in the back of the church.

It was so eerie. It was covered from the sun by tall oak trees, and these graves were at least 200 to 100 years old. Old wooden graves with a giant white wooden cross that stood directly in the middle of all this. We were always allowed to play here for some reason. I always hated it. I always got this weird feeling. of never being alone, even if my classmates were far gone. It wasn't until I was older that the graveyard was no longer accessible.

I then found out that they discovered many, many Native American bodies stacked onto each other buried in this yard. Because of this occurrence, I always wondered if that is the reason why I began experiencing what I did. Maybe I accidentally stepped on a grave. maybe I picked something up that I shouldn't have. I don't know. I was too young to remember.

After this, I began experiencing what I now know as shadow people, and some I still cannot identify. Whenever I would go to my great-grandmother's house, I slept in the second-story bedroom that faced directly at the town's cemetery, still in San Juan. To keep it short, I always experienced shadow people, people, but this particular night in 2020 led to a whirlpool of a crap show.

I always knew her house was haunted. She always said it was too. The first was me walking into her bedroom. The lights were off. Her cat was waiting for me at the edge of the bed, and all of a bottle cap goes flying off of her dresser and hits the cat directly in the head. The cat starts hissing and running around. and I had the worst gut feeling. I dropped all of my bags and ran and told her. No, I didn't bump the dresser. It was on the other side of the room.

And it flew further than it should have. And no windows were open either, so there was no air draft. The next time I spent the night, I went straight upstairs to drop my bags off so I could eat dinner with my sister and my grandmother. Before I could even turn the lights on, I felt uneasy. It doesn't help that my grandmother has a collection of porcelain baby dolls, like in the horror movies.

It once again felt like someone was watching me. As soon as I turned on the lights, I saw a horrible face in the only window in the room, but it was blacked out. I only saw a grin on the face, and its neck was so elongated. As soon as it saw me, it flew down the window and disappeared. I nearly had to change my underwear. I ran downstairs and told them, which caused us to sage the house. I cannot figure out what the entity was to this day. This is a second-story window.

Its neck must have been extremely long, and that's just disturbing to think about. Of course, here and there I would experience other little things, but about a month or so after that, it was already the beginning of 2021. I finally was able to move back into my mom's house. She's a nurse and was dealing with COVID patients and didn't want us exposed. Mind you, my mother's house is brand new. But it's built on top of land that I have no clue if there's any significance.

This is where the bad, bad stuff began. I very much so believed I dragged in bad spirits. These occurrences happened to me one week after another. The first week began with me babysitting, my little brother. He was around three or four years old. Anytime he would wake up from a nap, and I would immediately take him to my room from my mother's, so I could continue playing Red Dead Red Dead Redemption probably.

He would begin the look up at the corner of my ceiling and scream at the top of his lungs, and point. And I mean scream crying, to where he couldn't have even gotten a breath in. Of course, being like 16 at the time, I didn't know what to do. So, I began to panic while also trying to shush him, because it was so abrupt. I would leave the room and he would be fine.

But the second I stepped back in, he would point at that same spot and cry. I would have to call my then stepfather or mom to rush home because I was so terrified. The following week, I invited my friend over. Let's call her Tessa. Tessa was also into the paranormal and wanted to do a Ouija board

to see if we could talk to whatever spirit it was that was clearly following me because I was non-stop hearing things and seeing these shadow people. I think that was the stupidest thing we could have done. We had no clue how those boards worked. I knew. how to cleanse my own space and ward off spirits, but I didn't know about the whole closing of

portals situation. Anyways, we waited until the prime hour, 3 a.m. We got all of our candles, our boards, and some snacks to hold us off. We began to use the board, and unfortunately, nothing really happened. It may be moved on its own a few times, but it never spelled anything out. out of frustration I guess we just tossed the board in the closets and went to bed. I was having a very hard time sleeping. Tessa passed out immediately, and I began to hear a very, very loud scratching noise against my garage door. My window was above the garage door, so I can see the door and if there's anything outside. But there wasn't.

It kept getting louder and louder, to the point where, by the time I got the courage to look at my phone, it was already like 7 a.m. The second I heard my mom wake up, I ran downstairs and asked her to please let me see her phone so I could watch the security cameras that we had. Absolutely nothing. There was a bush outside the garage door, and the bush wasn't moving at all, so that rolls out the wind pushing the door. And the audio didn't pick anything up either.

I legit thought I was going crazy. Another week passed, and I really thought I was in the clear for not being crazy, but, of course, it happened again. I was playing video games with friends late at night, prime COVID activities, when we decided to hop off because we had Zoom classes in the morning. I went to the bathroom to wash my face,

doing nightly routines, etc. Now, I've worked some layout. My bedroom and my little sister's bedroom were directly next to each other, but the bathroom was on the left side of both of our rooms. Our room was closest to the bathroom. Anyways, as I'm on the toilet just kind of zoning out, I noticed shadows of footsteps outside of my door. We always kept the lights dimmed to a low,

but enough to see so that the little ones won't trip if they got up in the night. I assumed it was my brother or sister, but the footsteps started to get louder, like running, and it was going back and forth, and back and forth past the door. That's when I began to freak out because, what the hell? That's when I noticed the time was around 3 a.m. After waiting for the footsteps to stop,

I ran out of the bathroom, and as I ran out, I could see clear as day my little sister and little brother sleeping in their room. I got the courage to check my mom's room, and she and my stepdad were asleep as well. I was so terrified that there was some demon or something running around my house. I got straight under the covers and hid my face. Now, remember how my little brother was scared at the corners of my room for some reason? Well, I guess I had a nightmare after my face. after finally dozing off about the corners of my room.

I was walking around my room, and it seemed like darkness was just oozing out of the seams of the walls. And I ran further down my house, and it kept getting darker and darker. And when I ran back up the stairs from my room, a small dark figure came out of the corners and chased me into the room. I then woke up for my sleep, and I saw the dark figure was sitting on my chest.

and I couldn't breathe. It came extremely close to my face and opened its mouth and lunged at me at extreme speeds, and everything turned black. I was able to breathe again after opening my eyes, I guess, but I couldn't sleep for the rest of the night. I chalked it up to sleep paralysis, but it felt so real.

I haven't even heard of stories of people's sleep demons moving or getting near to them like that, but I could be wrong. I saged my room and began to read some Bible verses that I knew would help. Shortly after, I was gifted a beautiful rosary by my grandparents, from Italy, and all things seemed to be okay. But I was still so petrified. What was that thing? I couldn't be alone in my own home anymore without getting scared of the slightest noise.

I did sage every room that I went into after, weekly, and always kept that rosary with me at all times. I haven't experienced anything paranormal in a while, and I thank God for that. I think I'm too curious to know what I was experiencing. I will always have a deep connection to the undead for some reason, and that sensitivity will never go away. Okay, how do I even start with this one? Well, it happened probably back in 2013. True to form, I was already running a little late to work. I was a manager at a local restaurant here in town.

It was about 4 p.m. in a gorgeous clear day in Florida. So I finally get in my car and start heading down the dirt roads to work. I had gotten about 10 minutes from my house when I had to stop and turn left onto the first major road. As I get to the end of the last dirt road and come up to the paved road, I look across the paved road and see something that appears to be hanging in the sky, over the dirt road that continued on the other side of the paved one. Even though I was already running behind, I had to check it out.

It was just too weird. I had lived here since I was a kid, so I knew that shouldn't be there. So, cautiously, I crossed the pierced. paved road and drive down the dirt road on the other side. As I get further down, I realize this thing isn't hovering over the dirt road. It was actually next to it, hanging over a cowfield. I still, to this day, do not know what possessed me to get out of my car, climb the fence, and walk out to see what it was, but I did.

I get past the tree line and turn right only to come face to face with a silver, metalic spaceship. It was just hovering at tree level about 30 feet away from me. Nothing but clear midday air between me and it. I was instantly frozen in place. This thing was about 40 to 50 feet long, silver, and had no apparent doors or windows, or even rivets. Just smooth metallic glinting in the sun as it sat there bobbing back and forth.

Not forward and backwards bobbing, but kind of side to side. I will never forget watching the sun glint off of this thing. I stood there just dumbfounded thinking, what the hell are my eyes looking at right now? I remember thinking, what do I do? I hadn't brought my phone with, because until I really got a good look at it, I wasn't sure what it was.

I only had a small flip phone at the time, so it probably wouldn't have taken a good, picture of it anyways. I remember thinking, should I go get my friend's mom as she lived down that road? I knew it would probably be gone by the time we got back,

and she would think I was insane. I stood there for what seemed like forever, trying to figure out what's to do. It just sat there silently and never even tried to leave. It was as if it wanted me to see it.

Now, even though there were no doors or windows, like I said earlier, I could feel someone staring back at me. It was the strongest feeling I have ever had. It started at my feet and went all the way up my body. This feeling that I needed to get the heck out of there. It was as if someone on that ship was sending me that message. I remember standing there facing the road again and thinking, what do you do?

You get the hell out of here. That is what you do. The next thing I remember clearly is waking up in my car at the end of the dirt road, right in front of the paved road. I remember thinking, where am I? And which way do I go? Now, like I said, I've lived here most of my life, so why would I feel like I needed to ask which way do I go?

I remember feeling very confused. I snapped out of it a little and turned right and headed to work. work. I was so freaked out that it didn't even dawn on me not to tell anyone. I get to work and the outgoing manager is livid. She asks, why are you so late? I just blurt out. I saw a UFO. She looks at me for a moment and then laughs and says, well, there's one I haven't heard before. Then and only then did it hit me that I shouldn't have said that. We both laughed and went about our business. Somehow I managed to manage that place that night. Luckily, I had our best cook, or I probably would have never have gotten out of there. So, for many years after that,

I thought that I had only gone a little ways down that dirt road. But recently I went back there and realized that the open field was halfway down that road. Now I question how I could have gotten over that fence, got in the car, turned the car on, and turned it. around and drove halfway down that road and not remember any of it. I think someone was warning me to get out of there, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get out of there in time. I'm pretty sure I was abducted that day. I don't remember anything like that, but it's the only thing that explains why I don't remember it at all. If I remember all the other parts, why can't I remember that part as well? Many years later, I saw that a other, I saw that

other manager out in the parking lot, so I went up and asked her if she remembered that happening. I wanted to know how late I was that day. I didn't realize it until later, but I probably freaked her out. It was one thing to say that to get out of being late, but to still be thinking about it years later, probably told her that I wasn't, in fact, lying after all. She said she didn't even remember it.

I wish that I could forget it so easily. Unfortunately, it's been etched into my memory forever. Hey, Raven. Hopefully my story will serve as a fitting addition to the impressive collection thus far. I listen to these stories very often now, but this will be my first submission. I love your channel, keep up the great work. Thank you. My anecdote requires a bit of exposition, so bear with me, if you please.

Back in the early 2000s, my dear maternal grandmother passed away quietly in her home. Since I can remember, my family and I had lived across the street from her. It was a treat for the entire family, really. Grandma could sneak across the street to pilfer garden-grown vegetables from us. My parents could send us to her place, whenever, practically, and we kids really loved her quite a lot. She was a brusque, fiery woman. But she knew how to love us, too.

It stern as she could be. When I was about ten, my mother suddenly went over to Grandma's house one morning to check in on her. I remember my mom looked a little panicked. She and Grandma used to speak on the phone every morning first thing. This morning, however, my mom did not get a call. I remember trying to go into Grandma's house after. after my mother. I remember just blindly following her because I could feel it in my bones that something was wrong. I could hear her screaming and sobbing from outside. She yelled at me to not

enter the house, whatever I did. I'm not sure what I did next really, but I remember being in quite a shock and pretty frightened. I think I just stood there and waited, if memory serves. Following the loss, my mother was hurting in a pretty bad way. I feel like anyone would be if you had your mom so close all the time, and suddenly found her gone. It's a tough thing. In the months following Grandma's passing, a couple of interesting incidents took place. One foggy morning, a few weeks after the funeral, my mom abruptly left her house while making breakfast in the kitchen. She looked absolutely entranced by something outside.

I was too small to see out the kitchen window above the sink, but I did scoot over to the door and followed my mom out, curious as to where she was going in such a hurried way. I followed her up the block a bit, into the middle of the street where she was standing still now, pointing ahead of her into the fog of the morning and saying, Mom? I looked on and didn't see anything or anyone in the road.

Mom, is that you? My mother yelled. She was crying now. I still didn't see anyone or anything, but my mom did eventually turn around. She noticed me standing there in a state of childlike awe and confusion and told me that she was 100% certain she had just seen her mother wandering slowly about the street.

She even recognized the outfit grandma had on. Pale green linen. shorts and a long denim tunic top with a pink butterfly embroidered on the front. The final occurrence happened when my parents began settling grandma's affairs. Eventually, an estate cell was held at my grandma's house, and before it took place, my mom let my siblings and I look around and pick out anything of grandmas that we wanted to keep to remember her by. We started off in the kitchen, and my mom exclaimed,

She pointed to the large bay window in the center of the room. Grandma always had beautiful crystal figures hanging in that window. When I looked up at it, I saw one butterfly crystal dancing and spinning wildly. It looked like it was being blown about by a terrible wind. Its movement was casting all kinds of beautiful rays of rainbows all around the room. It really was a sight, especially since. the air in that room was otherwise completely still. There was no breeze to make that thing fling about the way that it was.

I noticed my mom watching the spectacle with a smile, like she knew a secret that none of us were privy to. Finally, we had finished our last tour of Grandma's house without any other events. We made our way back through the kitchen and into the entryway, each of us with hands full of different treasures that would help us keep Grandma in close remembrance. I remember feeling so sad in that moment. Right when we opened the front door, music began to play. Mom? My mother softly asked.

She splayed her arm in front of us kids protectively and gestured for us to stay put. I watched her make her way back into the kitchen. She leaned onto the kitchen table and smirked. We watched her too from the doorway. She was smiling at a hand-crafted jewelry box that, sat atop the table, one of those old-school ones that plays the dainty classical music. It was a nostalgic sound. Even then.

My mom said finally, I knew it was you, Mom, and smiled once more at the box. All right, kids, back to our place. I remember then we all went home. I remember feeling a little better after that. Seeing my mom smile like that. and I remember wondering, was that really you, grandma? Hey, Raven, I hope you are doing well.

So, I have a scary story for you. Back in April, I was taking a nap in my dorm room, and I woke up from my nap, but, as it turns out, I must have still been dreaming. Because I saw ghostly students and staff that I met before, but they were out of place, dressed like World War II soldiers with bloody uniforms, and the staff of nurses and one student walked by.

And I said, You all aren't supposed to be in my room. What are you doing in my room? One soldier and a nurse turned around to stare at me blindly for a minute that felt like forever, and then they turned back around to walk through my mirror and disappeared. Now, keep in mind this was a military hospital during the time. the World War II era in Fisherville, Virginia.

My campus is called Woodrow Wilson Workforce Center. I actually have a part two to this, so I was taking a nap once again several months later, and I heard the door to my dorm, my closet, and my bathroom all shake loudly. I got up in a panic, and then I heard footsteps outside of my room into the suite. I walked closer to my closet,

and I then heard a deep male voice say, Shut up and get out. Then I opened my door and no one was in the hall. So I shut my door and locked it. Fast forward to now, I actually have a new dorm room in a modern, newer dorm area, and I haven't witnessed any more haunting since. A few years ago, I worked for a private security company.

My husband worked there for years, and he encouraged me to join him as a security officer for seasonal work. His mother also worked at this company, so it was almost natural for me to hop on as well. I was hired on the spot based on my family's good standing with them, which concerned me, but I can at least say that I was a good fit for them in the end regardless.

If you showed up and did your job, which included walking around, maintaining the peace, documenting any safety concerns, staying awake on shift, the boss was happy. Security was not my normal job. I'm a school bus driver, so as a 31-year-old adult, I follow a student's schedule, which is awesome.

That means that I get weekends, paid holiday breaks, and summer vacation. My occupation keeps stress levels to a minimum, and it feels nice to have the option to work or stay home between June and July. So, this year in particular, just after the 4th of July, a head supervisor encouraged me to take on the role of security dispatch. The previous summer I spent guarding a seasonal spot, a gated marina. I'm not entirely sure why they felt so confident in my ability. Was it how I carried myself, my attention to detail, or how I once worked alongside Park Rangers when a storm caused a boat to drift away? This was somewhat of a big deal, given this was a major role.

As dispatch, I would be responsible for deploying officers, answering phone calls, monitoring CCTVs from an apartment complex that we were contracted with, and most importantly responding to emergencies, including cooperating with police. I was also expected to document everything in a nightly log. competency and the ability to work under stress was a must. This was certainly not like the previous year overlooking a beautiful lake, checking IDs and making sure drunk patrons didn't fall into the water. I can happily report, with only three nerve-wracking nights training under someone,

I did my job as dispatch well. I was finally showing customer service and computer skills at a job that didn't require a college degree. There were times where I needed to help a supervisor by calling the police for an emergency. I'm fairly sure I was involved in helping save a woman from getting attacked in a park at 3 a.m. But that wasn't the night that utterly shook me. We had a new hire at the same marina that I worked the previous year. Let's call him Ben. As dispatch, one of my other duties was to call in and check on every officer

at every location once an hour. Normally this involved radios, but the man at the marina didn't have one. Instead, I had to call him. He seemed nice, and with it, he was already doing great as so many new hires quit after Tay 1, so he had that going for him.

During one routine hourly check, I told him my personal experience at the marina. I told him how beautiful the sunrises, were, not to mention how spiders and raccoons dominated that place, so carrying a broom was a must. He laughed and agreed with me, thanking me for the advice using a broom, and we hung up. And about half an hour later, around 1.30 a.m., Ben called me sounding panicked, and was unsure of how to tell me what had just happened. He seemed nervous that I was going to laugh and not believe what he was going to say. say. After a few

gentle words of encouragement, he finally got it out. I saw a woman in the water between the boat and the dock. She's wearing all white, and her head was under water, and she reached out to me but I couldn't help.

I was fully awake by that point, and tried pressing him for more details. Ben explained to me how she didn't say anything or make a sound, but that it seemed like she was drowning. One misconception about drowning is that someone is crying out for help, but it can be quiet and subtle. That's why lifeguards keep their eyes on everyone in the pool, not just keep an ear

out. I'm talking about the sound water makes when someone's splashing in it, with their hands all over the place. By the time he knelt down to take her hand, she was already gone in the dark water below, never to be seen again. On the phone, he sounded confused and shocked, and so was I. It was possible for drunk girls falling off their boats and into the water there, but Ben didn't report anything about hearing a scream or splash of any kind.

He was very upset by what he saw, but he seemed to calm down when I didn't dismiss his claim. I called the park rangers, and I believe he called the police. It was all we could do. And I reported it in my logs and emailed my supervisor about it so they could investigate further. A few hours passed, and Ben called me again. I asked him some follow-up questions, and he stated the police came, but there were no reports about anyone going missing.

One of Ben's jobs at the marina was to make sure patrons signed their name, signifying they were there after hours. but nobody had come around that night. It was like this woman he saw didn't exist. The strangest part was when Ben told me, after the police left, he claimed he saw a woman in white standing above the lake water, and that she stood there for a long while before sinking back down into the water and vanishing again without a trace. I wasn't sure what to tell him when he shared his experience with me,

other than telling him to stay safe, and that he was going to be okay. He told me he was scared, and I honestly probably would have been too. He also quit shortly after this, so there's that. When I shared his story with my husband, he told me Ben was likely on some sort of substance, but given how I've had my own personal encounters with the paranormal,

I can't dismiss Ben's story that fast. That was also my last year working security, but that was for entirely other reasons. They went belly up. Thanks for reading my story, Raven, and happy almost holidays. Hi, Raven. Greetings from the UK. I've been humming and awing about submitting this, but I was talking to a friend about it when it happened recently, and they said that I should share the full thing, so here we go. for pretty much all of my life.

I've been able to hear things that aren't there, and sort of modify things that have happened. Nothing on a huge scale, just tiny things like I cracked my husband's favorite glass, didn't want to admit it, so I just popped it back into the cupboard and imagined it being used and unbroken. And then he used it the next day, and there was no crack. It was fine. I had a set of work keys in my pocket, and as I pulled my phone out of my pocket, what sounded like and felt like the keys came to, and I heard them and saw them just as they slipped down the drain in the street.

I imagined them in the center console of my car. I hadn't even been in my car since having the keys on me, and then later that day, when I got in my car, in the center console, where the keys. These are just a couple of examples, and when I lost the keys, I had a work friend with me, who, when I showed her that I had found the keys in my car, was obviously super confused. I explained how these things happened fairly regularly, and she suggested I tell my story to you. As I say, this does happen fairly regularly, and is unintentional, so if I try to actively imagine a scenario, it doesn't come to pass. but when the image sort of pops into my head, then generally it does. Now, I'm not sure if this is connected, but I also hear a voice sometimes.

I know this is why maybe I'm just balmy. The voice is like a hoarse whisper, and it really creeps me out. I was hoovering the stairs once, and I clearly heard the voice in my ear say my name. It scared me, so I turned off the hoover. and all was silent for a couple of seconds until my phone started ringing downstairs, which I wouldn't have heard had the Hoover been on. It was a phone call for my husband who had been on a tour, military, and had no access to a phone regularly. He could only call me from a satellite phone at random times.

This was the first time I had spoken to him in over a week. The other week, I heard it say, Rainbow, like. a murmur. Later on I went to check on the kids and their fairy lights in their rooms were flashing multicolored. We only ever keep them on a timer and on static warm white. The kids are scared of the dark. I logically thought the kids must have been playing with the lights, not that they ever have before, but it's the only logical explanation. But when I tried to change the lights back to white, there were no batteries in the remote. We had to had taken them out to use in one of the kids' toys a week before.

The most memorable time I heard the voice was the 7th of July of 2005. I was at Altgate Station, going to surprise my husband at his barracks. This was before we were married. It was around 8.30 in the morning when I heard the voice say, boo, in a creepy whisper. It scared me, but I thought maybe it was just the sounds of the station. I decided I needed to call my husband to let him know I was coming, so I went out to call him. He turned out not to be at the barracks and was at my flat.

I walked home. Just look up the date and the station. Maybe if the voice didn't say boo, I would have been either on a train or at the station when the London bombings took place. I was very, very lucky. A few years ago, we went on a walk around some castle grounds, and my daughter wanted to chase the geese. I was telling her not to because they might fly at my son who was in a push chair, and as I was telling her not to, I heard the voice say,

Go on then. I ignored it, but within 15 minutes a goose flew at me whilst I was pushing the pram, and cut my cheek. I managed to catch the voice on video whilst I was telling my daughter to not chase them, I could send the video if you would like to hear it. I forgot to mention that because of the goose flying at me. Both of my children were screaming fits, and I decided it was time to go home.

Not stop and stay another hour for lunch. Just after lunchtime, when we would have been driving home, there was a huge car crash, and a traffic jam that lasted for hours, which we would have ended up in had we not left early. I also often hear boots walking about upstairs. We live in a 300-year-old coach house which is detached, but there's no one home. Constance clicking noises, which sound like the light switch is being turned on or off.

Never any changes to the lights, though. And it often sounds like someone is walking up and down our hallway. It always gives me an uneasy, uncomfortable feeling. So, am I haunted? Do I have a guardian angel? Some kind of superpowers? I don't know. I know that what I hear scares me and doesn't give me a good vibe,

but the things that happen are usually to my benefit in some way. I would love to hear your thoughts, and thanks for reading. The story is the absolute truth. I was about five when I saw it for the first time. The first neighborhood I lived in had a small ditch to it. they were digging it up for God knows what, but it was fun to play in. One night, it was a little darker than usual. I was getting ready to head home when I came across a human bone.

The innocent five-year-old me thought that it was a dinosaur bone, because it had been sticking out of the ground. Thinking back to later on, I realized that I almost touched a human femur. I think I mentioned this because it just didn't seem to, right. But anyway, that night I had a nightmare of something running by the edge of the highway in our canyon. It was keeping up with the car I was in, and then eventually stopped and looked at me and smiled. It was almost human, but it was paler and seemed iridescent. The image of this person scared me so bad that I woke up in a cold sweat. I looked outside thinking I would see her,

but I didn't, luckily. Oh yes, this figure did look female. There was just something about her that extremely put me off. But as a five-year-old, I moved on pretty quickly. And then the next time I saw her wasn't until I was ten. I was going through the canyon with my friends on the way back, when one of the girls tells me to look out the window. I think I started tearing up when I saw it, this thing.

Whatever it was could harm me so easily. And then it played the same dream sequence. It stopped right before a bridge, and this time I saw her full face. Her smile was wicked and full of anger. Her eyes were black, teeth were crooked. She looked almost as if she had been a pioneer woman that had been wronged. I couldn't bear it much longer, and then she vanished. She showed up again when my mom opened her shop.

For a bit of background, our town was big on smuggling in its early development, so they created a tunnel system from the train station to my high school. My mom's bakery was formerly a hotel, where three kids went missing, a man was murdered and a couple other things, but it was just a place where ghosts felt welcome. My parents were very ignorant to them, but I felt them every time I went in the basement. I spent most of my time in the basement because it was so interesting for me.

Of course, a 13-year-old me was trying to understand the other side. I never felt unsafe or in danger until one day when I was messing around with my brother's friend. We had turned off all the lights and used just my flashlight on my phone. Each room in the basement had a different vibe, the back room being the most confusing. When we had reached the back room, I turned my flashlight to him. Behind his shadow there was a woman's figure, dark, but you could tell it was there. He saw the fear in my eyes, and we both darted for the stairs.

For some reason, I could tell that it was her. I know it wanted to hurt me. If I had stayed any longer, it would have grabbed both of us. Flash forward to last year, I'm 14, turning 15. and me, my boyfriend and his parents had gone out to the countryside to go stargazing. There was this parking lot, surrounded by trees, and that was where we stopped.

When it became dark, I looked out into the woods. I felt her presence again. She wasn't coming for me, but I knew that she was there and she was frustrated. I don't know how I knew, but I knew. I shrugged it off, but this feeling. feeling became stronger, like she was closer. Just as it was time to leave, I looked in a direction that I hadn't seen before and felt like I saw her, just on the edge of the trees.

I wasn't sure of this last time, because she didn't form the way she usually did. I know this isn't the last of her, but that's all that I can share for now, so thanks, Raven. I have been hesitant to share this story outside of close friends and family for a long time. I guess I've now had enough time to process through these events, because I'm finally ready to share with the world. Back in 2009 to 2010, I had just been married and was living in Korea with my new wife and our dog, Eugene. For the sake of privacy, I will refer to myself as G and my wife as you.

My dog has since passed, and he's an important part of the story. May this account of those events be a tribute to him. Rest in peace, Eugene, the paranormal alarm system, and my furry friend. We lived outside of a large U.S. military installation in a rural backroats area of one of the small local villages of South Korea. The road in and out of where our villa was located was nothing more than a crude concrete and gravel path that wound its way through farms, woods, and rice fields.

There were also a few other nearby buildings, and one of them at the top of the hill were the main road crests would sometimes host activities that were probably not of legal persuasion. Late one night, you and I would occasionally see cars or hear people in the vicinity of this building. People would sometimes walk through our villa parking lot late, and my dog Eugene would bark aggressively until the persons had left the area.

We usually chalked these rare occasions up to criminal activity, but perpetrated by criminals more interested in illegal gambling than robbing villas. However, one night, things would take a very dark and terrifying turn. as we often did, you and I were up this particular late night, laying in bed playing games in our electronic devices. I think I was rocking a Nintendo 3DS before you decided to accidentally wash it. They're definitely not waterproof. I eventually fell asleep, only to be abruptly shaken awake by my wife.

I looked at the clock. I remember it being past midnight and then hearing my dog barking, in the bedroom doorway like he was defending us to the death. As I looked down and saw the hairs standing up on the back of my dog's neck, you began speaking rapidly at me in a very concerned voice. There are people right outside in the parking lot, she said. She pulled me over to the bedroom window and pulled the curtains back ever so slightly. But there was no one outside.

The thing is, these people were floating, drifting. and I caught glimpses of their silhouettes as they passed back and forth in front of the windows, she stated emphatically. Most of what she described sounded plausible, except for the drifting part. I have to admit it was a bit off-putting, considering she was very concerned enough to wake me up. We mused over it for a while, but I convinced her that, whatever it was, everything seemed okay now. I was so exhausted, even though it did strike me as odd what she saw, and also how Eugene was freaking out. But I just wanted to get some sleep as we both had work coming early in the morning. I told her to let me know if anything else happened, but to try and not worry about it.

Eugene had finally calmed down at this point, and I slowly started drifting off back into sleep. It seemed like only a split second went by. and I was abruptly shaken awake again. This time, you whispered nervously. Someone is knocking. Do you hear that? I noticed Eugene was growling in the doorway again, but he still didn't seem to want to leave the room. Briefly glancing at the clock, it was now 1 a.m.

Even though I was highly irritated and somewhat alarmed, I tried to entertain her. I began listening intently for the knock, but I couldn't hear anything. I thought to myself, this is crazy. Babe, I said, it's got to be a tree branch or something.

She seemed insulted and snapped back. It was a knocking sound, a pattern. As I looked at her and felt her sincerity, I literally got chills. Eugene was alert, but so far more calm. I decided to try and get back to sleep. I told you,

you to try to do the same, even though she admitted she was a bit weirded out, and couldn't fall asleep. But I was beyond tired, and it didn't take long for me to drift off again, only this time to be awakened to my frantic wife pleading with me to listen to the knocking sound. Through the fog of waking up, and through the concern that I had for my wife who was clearly stressing the F out, I could in fact hear a knocking noise, more of a, a, ting than a thud. There were a few, then a short pause, then a few more, than a long pause, than one or two. I felt the chills again as I tried to pinpoint the source of the knocking sound.

It was a short pattern and repeated several more times. Right before I could exactly pinpoint where the tings were coming from, it stopped. I went to the back of the villa where the wind would sometimes knock the tree branches again, the windows. There was no wind. There was nothing. I then went to the bathroom and listened for the knocking, but there was nothing. Suddenly, you and Eugene began both showing signs of panic. You said she heard the knocking again, and Eugene started growling and pacing about. I thought, this is starting to get weird. Am I still asleep? I mold things over for a minute or two in my mind, as you demanded that I'd something, like figure out what was happening. A tall order in that moment. But then, it was like a switch was thrown. I knew what I had to do.

I had searched inside, or so I thought, at that time. And it logically followed that I needed to go outside and catch the culprit in the act. I grabbed the bat by the couch and a knife from the kitchen. I didn't even get a shirt or shoes on before I was out the front door, through the vestibule and into the parking lot. I was ready to trade blows with anyone or anything. The only visible light was coming from the few streetlights. I didn't see anyone, but I felt honestly as if someone or something was out there with me.

Am I way too tired? Am I losing it? What am I even doing? I started feeling a bit silly as I walked around our villa. There was no one out there, or... any sign of what could have caused the knocking. This is all probably in our heads, I thought. When I went back inside, I was met immediately by you who wanted me to report my findings. There's literally no one out there, I blurted out.

That knocking was too weird, though, and it was probably something we can readily explain later. I could tell that suggestion wasn't good enough for her by her facial expression. Gee, you know me, she defended, stating, I can pick up these sorts of things. I responded that, of course, I knew that, but I was hoping not to have to go down that sort of path. You had seen a series of other, out-of-the-ordinary occurrences in her life,

and little did we know then that we would experience more of these occurrences before we moved out of that place. That's a story, or two, for another time. time. Then, it dawned on me. I had forgotten to check the laundry room for the source of the knocking. The villa was elevated above the ground several feet, and there was a fairly large crawl space under the three-story structure. As we lived on the first floor, looking out of the laundry room sliding glass windows gave us a view of the ground and trees a few feet below.

I had walked past these windows on my outside armed search. I had noticed that the blinds were drawn so I could clearly see up into the laundry room. As I was back inside, I convinced myself to go ahead and check the laundry room, for one, to show my wife that I believed her, and also because I had an almost eerie sense that the knock could have been in one of the laundry room windows. Still on edge, and with my wife and dog huddled curiously behind me, I flung open the laundry room door and flicked on the light switch. I scanned the small cluttered room for anything out of the ordinary.

Nothing. So I looked out the windows, but I could only see the glare caused by the laundry room light. I don't see anything, babe, can we go back to sleep now? I nervously murmured as I flipped off the light and went to shut the door. As I turned to leave this whole strange night in the past, my eyes caught a glimpse outside through the now transparent glass. As sure as the sun rose the next day, the silhouette of a tall figure stood just outside, partially blocking the light from the distant streetlight. I let out a shriek, literally, and then jumped backwards, flinging myself out of the room. My dog was already going insane, and now you was yelling,

What's wrong? What's wrong? It took me a couple of minutes to gain back my ability to speak. I had an in-rush of thoughts. Did I actually just witness that, or am I tripping with no sleep? As I was rebooting, I started seeing images of the silhouette when I closed my eyes, like it was trying to gain entry into the villa through my mind. I know that sounds highly stupid and off the wall, but I had lingering effects like these for days after.

I prepared to tell you and also ask you, what the hell is going on? She simply said, What's going on is they're messing with us? I then replied quietly. Not exactly. I think they want us to give them permission to come inside. Hey, Raven.

and this happened to me when I was a kid, about seven years old. In 1983, around the first week of school in early September, I had been outside playing with a baseball and throwing it around when it went into the road and started rolling down the street in between cars. I chased it for a bit before running in front of a car and having the car lock the brakes up, almost hitting me. I'm scared. I gave up chasing it and ran back to my house as quickly.

as possible. As I arrived back to the house, I hear a voice calling my name from behind me, and there stood the mom of a friend who lived up the road holding my ball. I remember grabbing the ball from her and going inside the house to tell my mom what just happened. This is where it gets strange. This was 1983, and the mom who had just handed me the ball had been out of the country and on a flight. My mom knew this because my friend up the street was being watched by the grandparents while his mom was away. That night on the news, we find out that a plane, Korean Airlines Flight, 007, was shot down, and all the passengers on the plane were killed.

My friend up the street, his mom was on that plane. I'm trying to make sense of this even years later, as I know that it was my mom's friend who handed me that ball after I ran out in front of a car. I still remember the image of her standing at the end of my driveway and calling my name, holding my ball, but how could it have been her if she had died in a plane crash that day? I'm 48 years old now, and I still remember all this like it was yesterday. Hey, Raven, thanks for putting me to sleep. I mean that in the best possible way. My day is made every time I see a new upload, and I try to save them for bedtime, but sometimes the end. instant gratification monkey in my brain won't allow it, and I devour the episode immediately

upon noticing it. Thank you. Addict tendencies aside, here's my story. I grew up in a not-so-functional family. My parents both struggled with addiction, and our family dynamics were strange, although I wouldn't recognize that they weren't normal until I was older. My dad lost his ability to work due to a disabling injury when I was pretty young. So he and my mom ended up staying home rather than working. My mom had always been a better homes and gardens type of mom up until the time of my dad's accident, but lost her ability to keep that whenever he began staying home full time. He wouldn't allow her to work or even leave the house that often.

So, aside from us going to school, we were a fairly reclusive family. The house that we lived in was large and old with its fair share of problems. My parents spotted while my dad was still working and got it at a great price, since the cosmetic facelift didn't fix any of the major issues with the place. Weird things would occasionally happen, like seeing shadow figures or hearing odd noises, some of which we contributed to the rat infestation that had taken over most of the homes in the area.

However, some things we couldn't overlook. It always felt like you were being watched, like something dark was looming. I was terrified to get up in the middle of the night and would often run to and from the bathroom only to return to my room and hide under the covers. As time went on, both parents fell deeper into addiction. There was more fighting, more strange occurrences,

in the constant presence of overwhelming tension. My dad attempted to take his own life on multiple occasions, something I didn't know until later on. He was in a lot of physical pain, paired with mental instability and a struggle with drug use. One evening, we were all home when he chose to end his life in front of us. I was devastated at first. Of course I was.

I was a kid in the uncertainty of life without one of my parents was more than I could process. Although, as days went on, there was a tremendous reduction in the heavy pressure of our home. As cold-hearted as it may sound, we were experiencing relief for the first time in a long time. My father had been an abusive man. He often spoke of situations that would lead him to become a family annihilator. By his logic, he would rather us die by his doing than by chance. With him gone, the only fear was the fear of uncertainty. While this was an improvement, the paranormal activity reached an all-time high.

My mom heard my dad talking to her one night when no one was in the room with her. One morning we woke up to find a large rectangle cut into the carpet. This was a perfect rectangle. It looked like someone had used a sharp razor to do this. No one had been in our home but my younger sibling, myself, and my mom. One more incident during the same string of events that stands out is the warning. My mom had gone into a room that was rarely opened to do something. Inside, she discovered something that made us all sick to our stomachs.

Remember those silicone bracelets with the messages on them that you, you would get at a school or events. One of us had brought one home after a fire safety presentation and put it in a toy box somewhere because we thought it was too cool to lose. It was a glow-in-the-dark bracelet that said something along the lines of when fire strikes get out and stay out. Well, this bracelet had been stored away for most likely a couple of years at this point, and it had a section cleanly cut from it.

and left in the middle of the floor in the room. The section of the bracelet that was setting face up for my mom to find said, get out. We never found the rest of the bracelet, or found out how this got here. Was this a warning? A threat? A coincidence?

If this alone had happened, maybe we could consider it a weird fluke. Unfortunately, paranormal events had become a daily ordeal. We had the house cleansed by several, religious figures on different occasions. Things would get a little less active for a bit before picking up again. There was one room you would go in and you would feel like someone was watching you, regardless of the time of day or whether you were alone or not.

We frequently experienced a burning sensation in our skin while in this room. We went from seeing shadow figures to decently formed apparitions. A couple of times these apparitions didn't see. to have ill intent. 95% of the time, whatever these things were seemed to be there to scare us. This house and these events are

well behind us now, but we still wonder about the cause of the things that we experienced there. The house is long gone as we knew it. So, hopefully no families will experience what we went through there. This is my first time submitting a story, so thank you for reading,

and maybe someone else has gone through something similar. So, of the many things in my life that I will do, claim to be a saint is not one of them. Between the ages of six and 23, I lived in rural Nebraska. It was the kind of place where the most interesting thing that happened was the neighbor getting a new truck or the looming threat of a possible tornado coming through the area.

There was no in-between, zero to 60 at a moment's notice, so to speak. During those downtimes, boredom was ever present, and a good portion of teenagers would fall back on anything from video games and whatever cheesy movie cable TV had on at the time to once in a while crank calls and occasional light shoplifting. Contrary to popular belief, not everybody in these areas tends to the fields. My dad was a long-haul trucker, and my mom was a substitute teacher.

This usually meant my mom was hard at work the night before having to teach a class, trying to get the curriculum for the day down, and my dad was usually gone for two to four days at a time on average. I wouldn't go as far as to say I was a troublemaker, but I wasn't a good kid. As mentioned before, light shoplifting was a thing, and my five-finger freebies of choice were usually bottles of steel reserve or MD 2020. Mad Dog, for those of you not in the know.

At the time, I was friends with this kid that we all knew as Wally. He was a tag-along, for lack of a better term, and usually went along with anything suggested to him due to a desperate need to fit in. Honestly, I wasn't one of those guys that pressured him into doing too many stupid things. But he usually went with me on those shoplifting excursions in order to provide a distraction, and I usually grabbed enough for the two of us. One night, I want to say late April of 1999, it was going like any other.

There was squat on TV, mom was prepping for an algebra class she had to teach the following morning, and dad was off hauling produce to some town in New Jersey. I had just gotten my driver's license at the time, and so I got in my beater of a Ford Taurus and picked up Wally so we could do what we usually did, get absolutely plastered in this abandoned farmhouse, where a good portion of teenagers would hang out and do whatever. It was kind of like an unofficial party spot,

and the fact that it hadn't been leveled by a tornado, considering it was in an open field with little to no coverage, was astounding. But there it stood and there we partied. Thinking back on it, the fact that my parents, or even the shopkeepers in the area, never caught on to what was happening, right under their own noses, is a little bit more concerning these days. Hindsight is 2020, after all, and I now know had my parents realized to what degree I was screwing up.

Well, I'm pretty sure I would have needed a pillow grafted to my hindquarters in order to sit. But I digress. Wally and I hit up the one convenience store in the area, where we knew that the shopkeeper was so cheap that he only had one security camera, and it was facing towards the register. Wally was a year older than me, so 18 at the time, and he distracted the shopkeeper by attempting to buy a pack of black and milds,

and acting as if they carried a specific flavor that we knew for a fact never existed. So, as this 20-something employee is looking for kiwi strawberry black and milds, I do my thing in pocket two bottles of blue raspberry-flavored Mad Dog 2020. I clear my throat as I grab a Zagnet bar off the candy rack. Wally says, never mind, I'll just take the vanilla flavored, and makes his purchase before going back out to the car in order to wait for me. I buy the candy bar until the shopkeep to have a nice night, while playing it cool.

The whole time, they're none the wiser. It was a system that worked, and had worked, since I started drinking two years prior, like a charm, every single time. So he and I get out to this farmhouse, and we're having a great time. All the while, we're demolishing those two bottles of cheap booze, and a few people brought some other refreshments,

most of which had varying degrees of legality, and though we stayed away, from anything medicinal, we didn't turn down the occasional bottle or can of beer that was offered to us. I start having a drunken conversation about punk rock with a friend of mine from music class, and Wally disappears for a while he disappears for a while with this girl he had a crush on. He comes back about an hour and some change later,

with an ear-to-ear grin on his face, bragging to me about how he disproved a little theory about how alcohol affects performance. He tells me the girl's name, and I realized that she has a boyfriend. Before I go any further into the story, let me preface the remainder of the tale by telling you, according to Wally,

she told him that the two of them were on break, and the boyfriend's never actually comes into play. What happens is far worse. The farmhouse was almost a good half an hour away from where I lived, and after we sobered up a bit, we realized it was getting late. and we started to head home.

I'd say we were about 15 to 20 minutes away from Wally's house, which was right at the end of the street from me, when he tells me he feels like his bladder is going to burst. Realizing that there's not really anywhere to stop for us because we hit this point where it's really nothing but a couple of dairy farms and sprawling fields, I tell him I'm going to pull over to the side of the road so he can take a leak. But he needs to be as covert about it as possible. The last thing we need was for somebody to drive by and see him in public, only to report

into the cops, resulting in us being busted for underage drinking, because the smell of liquor on our breath was quite palpable. So I'm sitting behind the wheel of my car, keeping watch so I can honk the horn just in case anything suspect happens. And in a moment that still causes me nightmares, it happens. I still remember him wearing that San Francisco 49er starter jacket and khaki cargo pants. He's standing there, wiggling his hips, and doing his business and nothing weird is happening. But suddenly, I see him go rigid for a couple of seconds, and he just collapses to the ground.

At first I thought he was just screwing with me. I honked the horn a couple of times and screamed out, Real funny, man. Come on, let's cut going. No response. He didn't move an inch. I started freaking out and immediately started sobering up. Remembering I had a flashlight in my glove box, I grabbed it in order to have a better look at what was going on.

I walk up to Wally and I'm immediately hit with the smell of burning hair. I look down at my friend with the flashlight on him and I can see that he's pale as a ghost. I get down on my knees, and I start slapping him in the face. Five or six slaps in. He starts coming, too, but he's not with it. I don't think whatever had just happened completely registered at the time, but as I'm trying to make sense of it, I hear this low buzz. I shine my flashlight over to the direction of it, and that's when I see it.

In the spot where Wally was relieving himself, I saw liquid dripping off of a wire between a couple of fence posts. I really had to take a look to see it because that spot was also overgrown with weeds, Wally had urinated on a semi-concealed electric fence. Now, the thing that didn't make sense is that both of us had been dared to take a whiz on an electric fence before, and it's pretty common knowledge that they don't really have enough output to do any real damage. Sure, you might get shocked and it might hurt, but you're not putting your life in your hands despite popular belief. So this didn't make sense to me.

Something else was present and it caused my friend to lose consciousness, long enough for me to have to literally slap him awake. And now, here I am attempting to help him pull up his pants so I can get him in the car. And all I smell is burnt hair. I'm not ashamed to say I shined the flashlight on his groin And I immediately knew that I had to get him to the hospital He's God at the very least Second degree burns on his inner thighs

And well do I really have to tell you where else By now I'm as sober as a judge And I'm heading towards the county general By the grace of God it wasn't too far away from us I was cooking up a story in my head in order to tell the doctors literally anything other than my friend was taking a drunk piss on an electric fence but I couldn't think of anything

I knew we were in deep water once our parents found out but that was the least of my concerns Wally starts fading in and out of consciousness and in the moments where he's lucid he's crying his eyes out the pain is starting to hit him and I don't know what to do In my mind, I'm doing the right thing by heading to the hospital, and I'm counting the seconds until we arrive. In what seemed like an eternity, we finally pull into the parking lot.

I speed up to the emergency room entrance and run inside screaming for a nurse and a wheelchair. I explained that my friend has been electrocuted, and before I knew it, one of the attending physicians and a nurse take off like a shot towards my car with a wheelchair in hand. They get him to the back, and I explain the situation. Even the doctor looked perplexed, when I mentioned that I suspected an electric fence did this. But lo and behold, once they got him to the back,

a few of my suspicions were confirmed. He was pretty badly burned on his inner thighs. Everything else connected had its fair share of burns, but was nowhere near as bad, thankfully for him. The doctor asked me my age, and when I told him I was 17, he told me that I would have to either get my parents or Wally's down to the emergency room.

I made what was possibly the hardest phone call of my teenage life. Wally's mom answered, and I told her she needed to get down to the ER because her son had an accident. She started freaking out, as you would expect. What parent wants to hear that? She told me to stay put and to call my parents and tell them what was going on. That's exactly what I did. Wally had to be hospitalized for over a week.

The doctors needed to make sure the burns didn't get infected, and they also wanted to monitor his vitals. This is when Wally's mom would tell me that he had a heart arrhythmia. I never knew about this. That would explain him passing out and all, but it didn't explain the burns. his mom finally asked me if I could narrow down where we were when all of this happened and despite my semi-sober state at the time I was able to recollect almost exactly where we were due to the tacky mailbox

that stood out right by the field I came home after school one day and my mom was hanging up the phone and she told me to sit down and I honestly expected the worst possible news Thankfully, she wasn't about to tell me that my friend had passed away, but she was about to tell me something that helped the entire situation make far more sense. When Wally was relieving himself, he did, in fact, pee on that fence. But neither of us realized, though, was that there was a bit of exposed underground cable in those weeds.

The wiring had been chewed away by mice or whatever was living in the field, at the time, and the owner has complained to the electric company about occasional brownouts on his property. Wally's mom and dad would attempt to pursue legal action against the electric company due to poor maintenance, but nothing came of it. As far as the company and the courts were concerned, this was a freak thing, and they had no way of knowing about it, despite the neighbor's protests. Life went on as usual, and Wally took his time healing.

Eventually he came clean to his parents about everything. Well, almost. He told him that the alcohol came into play at the party and that I was his designated driver. Despite the fact that he was legally an adult, he still lived under their roof, and they forbade him from ever going out to that farmhouse and partying the way he did that night, ever again. Speaking of that party, and that night, the girl that ended up hooking up. with him that night showed up at his parents' house looking for him about three months later. She let him know that she was pregnant. She had broken up with her boyfriend for good shortly after that

night, and he had no idea. You want to talk about walking on eggshells. Wally decided to be there for her entire pregnancy, under the condition that a DNA test was done once the baby was born. Even though he was looking at serious life changes, he was relieved to find out that the little girl in his arms was in fact his daughter. Fatherhood changed him for the better. He ended up going to a trade school and getting a fairly good job doing farm equipment repair. It was enough to pay his bills and cover his child support. Though the mother of the daughter didn't want him to bear that burden, the state had other

ideas. But I was proud to learn that not only he was, had he stepped up to the plate? That little girl was his entire life. Gone were the days of partying, trying to seek out friendship wherever he could get it. His little Olivia had him wrapped around her finger. For a while, I couldn't say the same thing about myself. He and I fell out of touch after I moved out of the area, but my habits followed. I became a barely functioning alcoholic well into my late twenties. Had it not been for a couple of couple of DUIs, a health scare and a suspended license, I don't think I would have gotten my act

together. But after we had a new arrival at my AA meeting, share his story about how he'd become paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident, where alcohol was involved, it was the overall catalyst for me to start getting my crap together. Not too long ago, I actually celebrated 20 years sober. I haven't looked back since. Wally and I reconnected through social media five years back, and it was almost as if the friendship never took a pause. He has three children now, and the little girl that helped him get his life together

is now an adult working as a cosmetologist in Aberdeen, Washington. Wally and his wife settled down not too far away from that location, and after a long-awaited reunion where I went out and visited them last year, I can honestly say that Lydia is a wonderful woman. I try not to think about that night too much, but as I stated earlier, it does sneak up on me from time to time, whether it be in the form of a nightmare or any time I hear electrical buzzing. I could throw a cop out your way and say that that night is what drove me to drink, but I'd be lying. I was well on my way to being a barely functional drunk long before then. I'm just glad things worked out for the better.

well, better than they could have. I don't want to think about how badly things could have gone that night, along that desolate stretch of Nebraska Road. I've had some creepy experiences myself over the years, but nothing like this one day at my house. I figured I would share it since I've now started listening to this podcast more, and again, thanks for your time. I had bought my house almost two years ago,

from the family of one of my friends, Brian. He lived there and had told me his dad and aunt were planning to sell it. The house was built in 1950 by his grandparents and great-grandparents, and his family has been the only family to live in it. I definitely didn't want to see it bought, tore down, and rebuilt. Plus, I was currently looking to build a house on the land I had bought a few years back, but building supplies were through the roof, pun intended. Good pun.

And I knew that I couldn't just simply swing that kind of project. So I sold my land for 10K more than I bought it for. Well, none of my part, I do say. And put a good chunk of it down on getting a mortgage for Brian's house. I bought the house as is, so it's been a non-stop project, as everything is very old-school and original. No complaints on original, as I've always found things built in the early to mid-1900. or older, always hold up longer.

Today, it seems everything is built to break in a non-ending money scheme. Anyways, the house needs a lot of work. For 70 years and counting, again, I gotta say Brian's family did an impressive job with this house. But certain things needed to be replaced. The house is quiet, and the neighborhood is the same. Just a bunch of good old country folk on a hill in a small town. town, the true heart of America, if I may say. But that quiet neighborhood gets weird at night. Another one of my friends, Kevin, grew up on the opposite end of my gravel road. I've known Kevin

since we were in sixth grade and Brian for maybe five years total. But since they lived on the same road, Brian knew Kevin a long time as well. Kevin's parents still live in their house today. I've heard from him and Brian that sometimes you'll hear or feel things that might send cold chills down your spine. Another friend that comes over and watches WWRawn Smackdown with me, Andrew, has always said that, of all the places I go, walking outside at the end of the wrestling nights gives me the chills. My son lives out of state, and when he came up one time to stay with me in the house after I got it, we had to go back and set. at night to grab something before going to stay with my mom on that particular night. He was 14 at the time, and I never told him anything about weird noises or ghosts, as I didn't want to freak him out.

I followed him just in case he needed help grabbing things. Not all of the lights work. Again, constant work needs to be done on this house. So he was using his phone lights to walk through the living room to the kitchen. He didn't know that I had walked in behind him, and I saw him pause, staring into the corner of the kitchen and slowly looking around, before coming back out with what he needed. I asked him, what was that about, and he said, I don't know, I just felt weird and thought I saw something. I asked what he thought he saw, and he said nothing. There was nothing there.

It was more of a feeling, like he could feel that something was there. But his eyes saw nothing. Some nights are fine, but other nights, especially the ones where the moon isn't bright, and the darkness is sitting strong on the hill, it has a tendency to make the bravest man's hair stand up. I'm a big guy, and I've always left my doors unlocked growing up. Some nights, it really makes even me feel uneasy, especially the basement.

I don't like the basement Daytime is fine but in nights it's a no-go unless absolutely necessary. The basement floor is the actual earth as its hand dug and no cement laid down.

Seventy years of dust and dirt make it feel even more offsetting. The best way to describe nighttime is the feeling that you're being watched. Again the neighborhood is quiet. No crimes, no loud neighbors.

A lot of older couples and families that have lived their whole lives on this hill. My neighbor is coming up on 90. Everyone's nice and helpful, and at the end of the day, everyone is armed anyway. So, definitely no need to be scared. But at night, it just feels like something is present.

And it just doesn't sit right with me sometimes. I've heard about skin crawlers and all that. Kevin has mentioned shadow people chasing him as a kid before his house had plumbing, and they had an outhouse. He hated using the bathroom, because he said he would sprint all the way to the doors after he went. Waking up, occasionally seeing a shadow that he couldn't explain. Just eerie stuff, you know? Weird and unexplainable. But nothing really violent.

I preface all this, because nighttime is when all the weird feelings. and occasional noises happen. Daytime is calm and peaceful. This particular day I had called a local electrical, plumbing, HVAC company to come out to the house and give me an estimate on work that needed to be done. They separate their workers depending on jobs, so I was to expect a plumber and then 30 minutes later an electrician,

both from the same company. The plumber, Dietrich, arrived around 3 p.m. He was a big fella like me and told me to just call him D. We chatted it up while he walked through the house and inspected all the plumbing. He started upstairs and ended with the basement. I told him an electrician was coming to from his company

and that he may get blocked in the driveway. He said that it was no problem and asked if I knew which electrician. All I knew was the man's name was Rusty because the message I got said that I could expect Rusty at around 3.30 p.m. He laughed and said, Huh, good old Russell. Obviously, he knew who I was talking about.

He's a cool little guy, he said as he kept looking around. Sure enough, once he was close to being done, the electrician, Rusty, got there but pulled up in front along the road in order to not block his co-worker's van. Dee came out with me and a short Italian man hopped out, and it was like two old friends seeing each other again, chatting about the long drives in between stops that they had been and where they were going next.

They talked for a moment, and Dee had his estimate ready for me to sign. Rusty said, well, I guess it's my turn, and started looking around. Dee joined us as Rusty also started upstairs and then made his way to the basements to finish. At this point, all three of us are in the basement. I'm leaned up against the washer, listening to Rusty and Dee joke back. and forth about how ridiculous some of the runs they go on are. It sounds to me like you guys don't get paid enough for what you go through, I said. They both laugh and they say it all depends.

Other than our conversation, it's pretty quiet in the house when all of a sudden, the back screen door slams upstairs. We all pause, and I'm like, damn ghosts. Really, I was just trying to clear the weird pause. We all laugh, and the time we all laugh, and the the topic turns to weird stories, things that we've all heard before, like noises and stuff. Rusty says he's heard some things in a few old houses he's worked on, but that he pays them no mind. It's always the old houses, said Rusty. It was windy, so I said, yeah, the back screen door doesn't always close, so sometimes it stays

partially open until the wind makes it close abruptly. About five minutes go by. Rusty is examining the power box, D's in front of me, and I'm leaned against the washer still when someone with boots walks slowly from the living room upstairs to the kitchen. I say boots, because it was so clearly the sound of a sturdy heel-to-foot-step that's made with old cowboy boots.

Not the ones with spurs or nothing like that. Just a firm foot-to-floor sound. About seven, maybe eight steps. total. Dee is looking directly at me and I smile and say, Did you hear that? I had thought to myself that I was crazy, but it was so clear that it paused the conversation. Obviously, unless I'm losing my mind and hearing stuff, there's no possible way they both didn't hear that. Dee chuckled and said, uh, yeah, dude, someone's upstairs. Didn't you say you live alone? I had a roommate previously, but not anymore.

My dog was shut in my room, but it wasn't her knocking something over, or her little dog feet. Again, this was clear boots-to-floor-sounding steps. I was like, no, man, nobody else is here except my dog. It sounded like someone with boots. Honestly, I only said that because I personally just wanted confirmation. Rusty spoke up and said, Yeah, that definitely sounded like boots. Rusty speaking up meant that all three of us clearly heard someone walk right above us

from the living room to kitchen. I said, hold up, let me check. I walked upstairs and yelled pretty loudly, yo, in an attempt to see if maybe Andrew or Kevin had come by. Neither ever wore boots, both were the skater slash athletic type guys, so their shoes were either vans or Nike. But at this point, I just wondered answers and was praying that they decided to cowboy up and just show up. But once I came upstairs, there was nothing. Nobody.

I said, yo, another two separate times as I walked around and even looked outside. Not a trace of anyone. The house seemed quieter than normal. Just a slight whimper of my dog, Maui, wanting out. I went ahead, I let her out just so. so that there could be no more possible noises that were unexplainable. She may be a smaller dog, Paterdale Terrier, but she could be fierce when she wanted to be.

Letting her out made me feel a little less unnerved. I went back downstairs and laughed to the guys like, No, there's nobody here, for real. Honestly, if it was just me, I would have thought it was crazy, but both the guys heard it clear as day. One foot at a time. seven to eight steps, starting in the living room over to the kitchen. The sound even changed pitch slightly from living room rug to kitchen tile.

You could tell where the steps were as whoever or whatever it was walked. Obviously boots. Rusty joked and said, well, all I know is I just got outrun you two big boys. We all laughed and it eased the tension a bit, but especially D. I could tell that it got to him. He stayed while Rusty finished up, but this whole mood changed. He was right in front of me when it happened, and her eyes locked as it was happening. Rusty was maybe 10 feet away at the Powerbox.

Let me remind everyone that this was now around 4 p.m. in the day. Broad daylight, sun shining outside, warm late spring day. I think it was in late April, maybe early May. Three grown men. all trying to wrap our minds around what had just happened. Once they left, I called Brian. I remember him saying one time that he thought maybe his grandpa still hung around spirit-wise. I thought he was just full of crap.

I said, hey, sorry, this is random, but then I asked him if his grandpa wore boots. He was like, what? Why? I said, just answer me, man. I tried to act normal, but I'm sure he picked up on my nerves and was like, Yeah, man, all the time. Pretty much all he ever wore except for his house slippers on Sundays and rest days. I paused, and then I told him what had happened.

He wasn't in front of me, but I could just hear in his voice that he was smiling. Maybe he just said this to calm his friend down, but, in honesty, he sounded very serious and sincere. He said, no worries, man. Grandpa was probably just going to get a cup of water from the kitchen. You're in good company. He wouldn't ever harm you. This story is 100% true.

I spent the next week at my mom's, and it took me a while to get used to being at my house, especially at night. I still don't like going outside or into the basement unless I need to. Although I never felt in danger, it was just weird noises from time to time. Brian explaining to me about his grandpa made me feel less, less spooked.

At some nights, I would be up playing a game on my PS5 or watching a show, and I would hear a noise. At this point, I just chuckle and say out loud, go to sleep, grandpa, everything's all good. This happened when I was around seven years old. I'm 15 as of writing this. It was my grandma's house. The day felt normal, and I was there with my two brothers. My grandparents' house is pretty old, but they were the only people that have been living in the house, as they were the ones that planned to build it. That specific day, I felt calmer than normal. I've always been a calm and quiet kid.

I said hi to my grandparents like normal. My little brother ran upstairs to get my grandpa's tablet before me, but I didn't care. Normally I would have been annoyed, but instead I just went to the living room. I sat on the couch and turned on the TV. My older brother sat on the other couch in the living room and was on his phone. We'd been there for a bit. You could hear a lot from the living room, like my little brother running around upstairs.

Both my grandparents were up there with him, and my older brother had gotten up to go upstairs too. I was watching YouTube on the TV. I don't know why, but I started getting goosebumps on my phone. my neck, and I started feeling anxious. A little bit into the video, I accidentally turned off the TV. Then everything went quiet. It was too quiet, so I thought that my grandpa went to the 7-Eleven nearby with my brothers. As I turned the TV back on, two big white gloves slowly moved into my peripheral vision. I've never reacted so quickly in my life.

I quickly stood up and turned around. I backed up from the couch. The gloves looked like the classic cartoon white gloves. I ran through the kitchen and up the stairs. The most unsettling thing was when I looked away from the couch and ran. As I ran through the kitchen, I got chills and goosebumps on my neck again. It felt like something was behind me. Going up the stairs, I instinctively turned around,

and I saw a white glove quickly move back around the corner. Honestly, I was on the brink of tears. I got up the stairs and saw everyone was up there minding their own business. My elder brother had experiences with paranormal things, so I went to him and asked him to come downstairs with me. I don't know what made me once to go back downstairs, but going back down there, behind my brother, we walked through the kitchen and into the living room.

We didn't see anything, so he started going back upstairs. I was going to check behind the couch, but I don't know if it was instinct or paranoia. Instead of checking, I just followed my brother looking back to make sure whatever it was didn't follow me again. I told my brother all about it, and he listened, seemingly understanding, but I'm not sure if he believed me. Hey there, friends. I hope that you enjoyed this collection of scary stories on this episode of the As the Raven Dreams podcast. If the platform you're on has the option to follow podcast

and you enjoyed my work, please do consider doing so. Also, leaving ratings and reviews are super important for the algorithm to support the growth of the podcast. I'm just one guy doing this. I don't have a team. It's literally just me doing everything. So any support like, that is greatly appreciated. Never expected, though. So if you go above and beyond with that, I do appreciate it.

Some platforms also allow you to leave comments, and if you feel inclined to do so, please do. I would appreciate that. I do have a Patreon in a merch store that you can also check out if you want to support a little further. The Patreon side of things get you early access to all of my content. It is formatted differently as it goes in line with what my YouTube channel is, but it is the same stories, just different collections. There is also a website astherravendreams.com, where you can check out pretty much everything about me, my social media platforms, fiction stories I've written if you want to read those, as well as submitting your own stories, which there's a big button on the front page you

click to do so. And those stories basically keep the podcast alive, to be honest with you. So, yeah. All that said, friends, I do hope that I see you again here very soon. And until then, remember that you are loved, that you are valid, that you are important. You're the best you that you can be. Don't forget it. And until next time, much love.

And sleep well.