As The Raven Dreams Podcast - ATRD Ep. 234 - 18 True Scary Stories (Paranormal & Past life)

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

Today, on the 234th episode of the As The Raven Dreams podcast, we have 18 True Chilling stories. These stories come from the shadowy corners of reality, where everyday life takes an eerie twist & ordinary people experience the extraordinary. Today we will be diving into Paranormal Horror Stories & Chilling Past Life Stories. Would you like to participate in the postcard exchange? It comes with a free ATRD Sticker! Just Send a post card to the following... Lucas PO BOX 8198 Rochester, MN 55903 If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like or rate the podcast, and leave me a comment with your thoughts if the platform your on supports it! I upload episodes every 3 days, so there are 2 days between new uploads. The podcast consists of new scary story collections, Glitch in the matrix collections, and also what I call the "Dark Dreams" collections (which are older stories, remastered and layered with rain sounds). If you have a story to submit, would like to find where to listen to the podcast, or want to find me on social media platforms, all of that info can be found at https://www.astheravendreams.com You can also send stories into my subreddit (r/theravensdream) or email them to me at [e-mail] Want to check out some ATRD Podcast Merch? ➤ https://teechip.com/stores/astheravendreams Or for signed merch ➤ https://ko-fi.com/AsTheRavenDreams I wrote a novel, "The Insomniac's Experiment" by Raven Adams! Check it out on amazon (Or you can email me for a signed copy!) Join Patreon to get early access and support the Podcast! ➤ https://www.patreon.com/AsTheRavenDreams Check out my gaming channel with my pal Ghost_Ink ➤ @superNefariousBros On YouTube Thank you to all of the authors that have stories in todays episode... 4thDegree, Ashlea P., Old Dad , Megan, Monrick, Vilde, Dock, LevisMomma, Conrad W., Jay/jupiter_sixth, Angel, Corbeau, Rads, MrDaveCrozier, Reenie Amanza, Marissa As Well As Any Author That Has Requested Anonymity. TimeStamps… Ad breaks after Story 1 & Story 7 1 ➤ 1:49 2 ➤ 9:32 3 ➤ 20:36 4 ➤ 25:59 5 ➤ 38:59 6 ➤ 42:52 7 ➤ 49:42 8 ➤ 56:32 9 ➤ 1:24:26 10 ➤ 1:28:11 11 ➤ 1:32:23 12 ➤ 1:39:12 13 ➤ 1:43:35 14 ➤ 1:59:43 15 ➤ 2:22:49 16 ➤ 2:24:50 17 ➤ 2:26:28 18 ➤ 2:29:09 ----- Disclaimer ➤ Episodes include a content warning for language and sensitive/disturbing content. Listener discretion is always advised. ALL Audio and visuals on this podcast are copyright of AS THE RAVEN DREAMS / RAVEN ADAMS and may not be duplicated, in any format. Bless This Mess. None of my audio is AI Generated, I am a real person reading real stories into a real microphone. Note: The podcast nor the host endorses any advertisements played during the podcast, ads are not chosen by ATRD or Raven Adams, they are chosen automatically by the advertisement systems by the platforms that host the podcast. I do not endorse, support, or promote any opinions or statements made in any adverts played during the show. #ScaryStories #UnexplainedMysteries #GlitchInTheMatrix Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Streaming October 14. Only on Disney Plus. Hey there, friends. Hope you are doing well. Today we are going to start the month off, um, late, sorry, on the 4th with some paranormal and past life stories, some stories about the, um, well, paranormal. I already said that. I don't know why I was reiterating what I already said. Anyway, paranormal and past life stories. Stories about the supernatural. some strange, some scary, so I was trying to say there. And all of them definitely intriguing, at least in my opinion. So hopefully you enjoy them, if you do, awesome.

You can let me know in the comments down below if you're on Spotify. Or if you're on like Apple or something, leave a rating for the podcast if you enjoy my work. If not, that's totally fine too. Please do be honest, though. Like always honesty is more important than a five-star. If I'm a three-star, I'm a three-star. That's totally fine by me. I do also have a merch store, ATRD.shop, and go to the website, send your story in,

azravendreams.com. And if you go to asravendreams.com slash candles, you'll find information on the Asraven Dreams and Lafwick's collaboration. It's collaboration, not sponsorship. He and I worked together to get some candles, ideas going for candles to kind of match with the show. Like the spirit, the feeling of the show? I don't know. They smell great. I have them. and I love them and they're awesome so give them a shot if you're interested

if you're interested in K& or want to I know it's not it's a money money things right that's all I'm gonna say anyways love and appreciate y'all hope you have a great day

enjoy the stories and until next time my friends sleep well hey Raven this isn't really a scary story it's sad and more heartwarming to me with maybe just a touch of the paranormal. I love crows and ravens, the birds, I mean. I think it started years ago when my husband and I visited London.

We went to the Tower of London and saw the Ravens that have their home there by royal decree and learned the lore surrounding them. Legend dictates that if the Ravens ever leave the grounds, the Tower and the Kingdom will fall. They're such a gorgeous, intelligent creature. I've been obsessed ever since. We see occasional pairs of ravens near our home, but mostly we have their smaller cousins, crows. My office at work is decorated with ravens and crows, black, gray, and purple, and just a touch

of spooky vibes. My good friend Lenore shared my love of spookiness, but she loved bats best. Her office, right next to mine, had bats galore, classic horror movie posters, and a spooky Victorian aesthetic, a goth girl's dream. My husband Rob worked for the same university that we did, although in a different department, and he had actually known Lenore longer than I had. I moved to this department from another one on campus. But when I did, Lenore and I bonded over our love of all things spooky,

goth, music, horror movies, and Halloween. Every time I saw a cute little bat decoration, I just had to get it for her. And she would do the same for me with Ravens and Crows. I think about half of the Corvids in my office were gifted from Lenore. And yes, her name delighted me to no end. I think she may have gotten a little tired of me quoting lines from Poe's the Raven at her, or greeting her with, How is the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore today?

Lenore was already a cancer survivor when I came to work in her department, and such a fighter. She was the bravest woman I have ever known, and the most helpful and supportive of anyone else fighting their own health battle, cancer or anything else, so. It seemed so tragically unfair when she learned a few years ago that her cancer had returned. More rounds of chemo and radiation, more medications that made her sick. She had to work exclusively from home for several months while endearing all this treatment, because her immune system was so compromised, and she couldn't risk getting sick from someone who had a cold or a virus.

but she didn't stay home from work. Through it all, she kept such a positive outlook, always trying to minimize her pain and always more concerned about how everyone else was doing. She came back to work when her tests showed that she was beating it again, and her numbers were better. Then, earlier this year, she was getting sick again. Once again, she had to work from home, and then it got to the point that she couldn't work at all.

And she had to take leave of absence. I would send her texts check on her, ask how she was doing, and tell her that I missed her, or send her little jokes and memes. And she would respond that she was okay, that she would be back as soon as she could be. Some days I just texted her the bad emoji, and she would respond with the little raven one. Our own little code that just meant hi. In May, we learned that it was so much worse than her positive attitude had led us to believe. Lenore had been hospitalized after battling a flu virus and her body was not recovering.

Her systems were shutting down. There was nothing more that the doctors could do for her and she was going home on hospice care. My husband Rob and I made arrangements to visit her at her home. But the morning that we were to go, we heard from Lenore's husband that the visit would have to be canceled. She wasn't doing well and she was not able to have visitors that day. Later that afternoon, we learned that she had passed away with her family by her side. I was devastated. My co-worker and my good friend was gone.

This world was definitely a better place with Lenore here and she was gone. And I didn't even get to say goodbye. That morning, Rob and I sat in our living room listening to music, talking about Lenore and sometimes even laughing through tears. It was a warm evening and we had the door to our backyard open, enjoying the slight cooling breeze. And soon we became aware of cawing outside, lots of cawing. Rob went to the door and looked out at our yard and then said, Corey, you've got to see this. Your friends are all over the yard. I went to stand beside him at the door and I saw crows everywhere.

You know that scene in Hitchcock's The Browpery. birds, where crows covered every surface at the schoolyard. Yeah, that was my backyard, minus the jungle gym and swing set. Crows were perched atop our shed, on the fence, and even just standing on the ground. Rob turned and said, I'm going to get my phone, to take a picture, I guess, and I opened the door and went outside. All of the crows took to the air flying up above our house, while they circled high above me. I stood there looking up at them in awe and knew that it was Lenore. She had somehow sent the crows to say goodbye.

As soon as that realization washed over me, they all flew away. Rob came back, too late to take a picture, and found me standing outside crying. I told him that it had been Lenore, that she sent the crows. He nodded and said, I hadn't thought of that. You're right, that is so her. Now, this behavior isn't unheard of, and it is something that crows and ravens do before they roost for the evening. They have their own little good night party before they fly off to their favorite trees to sleep. Lenore even sent me photos of the ravens near her house circling and doing this very evening ritual.

She saw more ravens in her more rural area, and they did this regularly. She said they made her think of me. However, they're creatures of habit. and they typically gather at the same place every night. We had never seen this before, not once in the ten years we've lived in our house, and it hasn't happened again since that evening. So if the local murder of Crows was looking for a new gathering place, I guess they just didn't like this one.

But could it have all been just a coincidence? Sure. The local crows could have been trying out a new gathering spot just that one evening and it didn't work out, so we haven't seen him since. But no. You will never be able to convince me. I firmly believe that on the evening of her death, my friend Lenore sent Crows to fill me with awe and to tell me goodbye.

Thank you for reading this, Raven, sending much love. If this does make it onto your channel, I just want everyone to know that our time here is too short. Tell those you care for that you love them and that they matter to you. We always think that there will be more. time, but a day will come that steals that time away from you. And believe me, it has a tendency to sneak up on you. Back in 2014, I gave birth to my first kid, which we named Levi. I was lucky to have a pretty easy-going pregnancy the entire way through up until the last month. But I think at that

point, I was just tired and ready to get it over with. But Levi was, born a happy and healthy eight-pound baby, and for years after, he continued on as such. We watched him play with his toys, and as he began holding his little snacks, we noticed that he used his left-hand. My husband's grandmother was left-handed, and she's been the only person on either side of the family that we can pinpoint that was left-handed, so we thought that that was pretty cool. As time went on, it seemed that Levi would turn out to be as well. and he tried to hold his cup or spoon with his left hand just the same. Then came time for us to start looking into schools.

At this point, he wanted to doodle on everything, so we had to get him the special markers and stuff, so that he didn't scribble all over the walls. We were renting at the time. And so the more he colored and scribbled, he used his left hand. And that's how he went about it at school, too. Then, when Levi was seven, he fell ill. What we thought was just that back-to-school illness that kids tend to bring home

quickly turned into something much worse. He had a high fever that lasted almost a week. We took him to the YAR where we basically stayed in a room overnight because he hit 104 and we could not get it down. I was so afraid and I felt so helpless. He couldn't sleep, he couldn't eat. The poor boy couldn't even cry because he was too dehydrated, so they had to give him fluids intravenously.

The doctors ran tests and never found anything more specific than some sort of virus. Eventually, we got the fever to break and could bring him back home. If he wasn't drinking pediolite or broth, he was sleeping. But nevertheless, we got him back to being his old self, and we were just incredibly relieved that it was over without any permanent damage. Once he was back to 100%, we were able to let him get back to school. Levi always loved school, so he was pretty excited to go back too. But that's when I noticed something.

When he would come home and start on his writing exercises, I noticed he was using his right hand. I was curious because he'd been using his left hand prior and it was the first time that I'd seen him favor his right. My first thought was that he was just a kid and maybe he was still trying to figure out which hand worked best for him, so I never said anything about it to him or my husband. It was that following weekend, however, that I noticed something peculiar again. He'd brought his coloring stuff into the kitchen and was doodling on some blank paper. I saw him not only using his left, but also his right hand as well.

And then, he even had a marker in each hand as he colored in the picture that he had drawn. But there was no difference on either side. Both sides of the picture looked like something a seven-year-old might have done, including those shaky lines, and scribbles in attempt to color inside the line. He even held the markers in both hands correctly. It clearly wasn't a struggle for either one. That was the day that I learned that my son might be able to use both hands. Impressed, I remember asking him about it.

I remember saying something about how it was interesting to see him use both hands, and then asking him why he was doing it like that. I didn't want him to feel put on the spot, or like it was a bad thing. I was just honestly curious. It was someone trying to get him to use his right hand instead, maybe at school, or it Was it just a kid playing around and using both hands? I was expecting a seven-year-old's kind of answer. Certainly, not the answer that I actually got.

He said that he wants to use both hands in case something happens to one of them. That way, he would have a backup, and he would know how to use it. Now, I laughed at first, thinking it was a strange thing for a kid to be worried about, right? but I just dismissed it and continued with what I was doing. When my husband got home from work that night, he came into the kitchen and saw Levi using both hands too. And he gave me a look like, hey, are you seeing this? I told Levi to tell his dad what he said about it, and he repeated it all to him. Again, my husband looked at me confused and all I could do was shrug.

He then sat next to Levi and asked him what he meant by him. that. He explained it like this. Last time I was a grown-up, I only did stuff with this hand. He held up his right. Then I got hurt and didn't have it anymore, and I got really sad, so this time I'm making sure both hands know how to do everything, just in case. I took the bait, and I asked what he meant by being a grown-up, explaining he's not been a a grown-up yet. My husband added to it and asked if someone told him that story and he shook his head. He explained he was a grown-up a long, long time ago when we were both still babies. He said that he lived in a bigger house, but it wasn't here outside. He never did specify what he

meant by that. He said that he used to write music on lines and people would listen to his music or ask to keep it, and he would get money for it. Then he said that he got really hurt, and really sick from it, and his hand fell off because of it. When that happened, he couldn't write his music anymore because his writing hand was gone. He said that he tried the other hand, but it was really hard, and people were getting mad at him for taking too long and none of it looking good, so he got really sad. Then he said he wasn't done with his last one and didn't know what happened to it.

He actually asked if we knew. And we both just shrugged, not really having a clue what he was talking about. My husband again asked him if he'd heard this story somewhere from someone, and he confidently said no, that it was him as a grown-up. I did ask if he remembered his music, and he looked up with his eyes closed for a good while. He picked up his right hand, and I watched him as it looked like he was tapping the air. He softly hummed, but I couldn't make out what it was. He stopped after a short string of notes, and would repeat it a few times.

Afterwards, his shoulders dropped, and he told us that he couldn't remember a lot of them. We both just kind of nodded and said okay, and he went back to his drawing. We didn't do anything with his information that we had learned for the longest time. In fact, we just kind of kept it to ourselves as just one of those. strange things and left it as that. But I couldn't get over the idea of my son not only being ambidextrious, but also being so by choice, because he wanted to avoid something that may have happened in a past life. It seemed really crazy, but I wondered what would happen if I did encourage the potential

composer's side of him. After talking it over with my husband, we talked to Levi and I asked him if he remembered what instrument he played, and he said that he could play a lot of things. So, I got this little kid's keyboard as well as a music book, and when I brought it home, he was reading that book like it was telling a story. He seemed to understand the notes, and that all looked like another language to me. My husband, who at least took band in high school, so he was familiar with some of it, but not me, and we watched as Levi flipped through the book, started doing the floating hand thing again,

and humming, and then he went to the keyboard. He had a few troubles reaching, because he had small hands. But he started playing what seemed like full songs. Even if they weren't perfect, he seemed to understand. It was a crazy experience that left me with goosebumps. After that, I felt like there had to be some truth to it.

We did the normal, routine, looking into people we knew, seeing if they'd mentioned or heard a similar story, but we couldn't even find a show or anything that he could have stumbled across on TV. Beyond that, I didn't feel right looking for his past life. It's hard to explain, but I feel like it wasn't part of our lives, that it was a completely different person in time, and that we really shouldn't dig into it more than what Levi was willing or able to share. Maybe, I guess, that was my way of letting the person pass on their own terms.

Ever since, and even to this day, Levi is still ambidextrous. He switches his hands back and forth depending on what he's doing, and he loves to use both hands to draw to amuse his friends and family. He does still know how to play piano and guitar, but he only plays them casually. he didn't even want to take band class in school, and we weren't going to force him. We just let him live his life as he wanted. If he wanted to share anything more from his other life, we let it happen naturally, but eventually, as happens, he stopped bringing it up altogether.

There was one other thing that always did tickle me, though. Since he was very young, anytime something happened to that one hand, a paper, or when he slammed the door on his finger, we would get him fixed up and he would always respond the same. Good thing I have the other one, and then he would smile as if relieved. And so any time something happens to me or my husband, to something that we have two of, we always respond the same. And he still thinks that it's funny too. When I was a kid, we lived in the house that I was born in. The home was built during World War II to house war workers, and my parents bonded around 1975, so we were not the first owners of the home.

I had heard stories when I was younger, and just before we moved from there, that the homes in that tract were built at a trash dump. Not an official landfill, but it was in the part of town where in the 1920s, 30s, and up to the 40s, that was just a site where people in the town would dump their trash. I used to dig in our backyard as a kid and find really odd things, sometimes glass bottles, but for some reason also a lot of pottery. Like I remember one time I found a little pottery animal. I think it was a horse or an elephant, but I couldn't tell what it was. My mom would always make me throw it away and said don't dig anymore, but me being a kid, I always did. I was looking for treasure.

There was also a story about how somewhere near there, back in the 1800s, there might have been an unregulated cemetery. Not that any of this has a real bearing on what happened to me or not. Our house looked very much like a 1970s house. I guess back then mirrors were in style, and our house had an entryway that was covered in mirror tiles that looked like they were cracked from floor to ceiling. Our hallway bathroom was the same. We had one whole wall from the vanity up mirrored, and we had a split bathtub with separate shower stall covered in mirrors. What happened started when, I guess, I was about six or maybe seven years old.

I swear that I caught another family in the mirror of the bathroom. Like, from sitting on the floor with my back toward the toilet, and my head looking somewhat sideways into the mirror over the bathtub, I could see an almost double reflection into and down the hallway. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I used to sit there and try to look for the other family. My mom would sometimes walk by and ask what I was doing, and I would just say that I was looking at the mirror to see if I could see down the hallway. My siblings didn't have any interest in what I was looking at. I don't know if it was my imagination or what, but I would look and look, and look,

and just wait for changes. Sometimes, slowly the hallway would change. Sometimes I could see down into our living room, and sometimes I would just start seeing other parts of the house that there was no way I could have seen from the reflection. I should also mention that there was another thing inside that house. It was a painting that had always been up in the hallway. It was like an old Greek scene

that was like a huge pantheon place with people, inside and some were walking, some talking, and some were lying down eating. I used to stare into that painting for a long time, too, until the people started moving. I would ask my siblings if they ever saw the same. But going back to the mirror in the bathroom, one time my mom saw me staring at the mirror and called my name. I didn't answer. I was so deep into looking at the mirror that I didn't even see my mom's reflection or see her or hear. her. I had a feeling like if I let myself go, I could enter the other house in the mirror and go inside.

My mom grabbed me and pulled me out of the bathroom and was screaming. I finally came out of whatever trance I was in and was just like, what? What's wrong? She said that I was staring and not blinking, not breathing and not moving. I didn't know what she was talking about, but I started to tell her I was looking for the other family. My mom freaked out. You see, my parents were in a very strict Christian sect that believed in evil spirits and all, so from that point on I was forbidden to look in the mirrors like that. I remember she made my dad take the large mirror from over the tub out, and my parents ended up selling the house a few years after that. I had told this story to a few of my friends later in high school, and one friend suggests that I must have had some kind of brain issue.

but I never had any issues mentally or otherwise. Lastly, when my dad passed away back around 2000, I was talking with my older siblings and mentioned the oil painting that we had of the Greek scene. None of them remembered it. I went over and asked my mom if she remembered the painting we had in the hallway. She claims we never had that painting. She said we had one of those Sears portraits of our family there. I was getting annoyed because no one remembered.

that painting. My mom, my sisters, and my brothers all said they had no clue what I was talking about. Maybe something in that house was trying to draw me, the youngest and maybe the most vulnerable member of the home, into another world. Before I begin, just hang with me if some of the details I include don't seem relevant right away. I'm dividing this story into multiple parts because there are a lot of pieces to it. And I've included each of the details. detail for a reason. Some things won't come full circle in this first part, but they'll become relevant as the story unfolds. I don't want to rush through it or leave out details that have been meaningful to me. I also want to be clear that I'm not sharing these experiences as proof of anything.

People are free to draw their own conclusions. This is simply my experience, and the things that have stayed with me throughout my life. I don't have one dramatic childhood. I don't have one dramatic child memory where I can say, this is what made me believe in reincarnation. Instead, I have a collection of experiences that, taken together, gradually changed the way I understood my own life. If this story resonates with you, I would genuinely love to hear your experiences. One of the reasons I'm sharing this is because there aren't many places where conversations like this can happen openly, so thank you Raven for creating one.

It's my pleasure. So, as stated, there's not one dramatic childhood memory where I can say this is what specifically made me believe in reincarnation. Instead, I have a collection of small experiences that always felt unusual to me. My family wasn't Catholic. There really wasn't much of a Catholic presence in my hometown, and even now, I've had very little exposure to Catholicism. But as a very young child, I remember thinking about nuns. Maybe I'd seen them on television or around the Catholic hospital near my town. It wasn't that I'd never encountered the idea of them.

What stood out was the feelings I associated with them. They seemed peaceful and kind. I even once had an imaginary friend who was a nun. Her name was Mother Constance. That detail has always stood out to me because, as far as I know, nobody in my family knew anyone named Constance. and I had no reason to know that Mother was a title associated with some Catholic nuns. When I was very young, my family couldn't understand what I was saying.

They only knew that I was talking about someone whose names sounded like Mother, something. As I got older and my speech became clearer, I was finally able to tell them. Her name was Mother Constance. I also remember that she was a source of comfort for me. I didn't have the easiest home life, and I would often sit on the steps outside and imagine talking with her. She would say kind, encouraging things to me. She was a peaceful presence in my mind, someone who made me feel supported and reminded me to keep going. There were other things, looking back, that also felt unusual.

I remember being three or four years old and lying on the floor pretending that I was a soldier. I remember thinking something like, I'm tough, I don't need a bed. I liked sleeping on the floor. Another memory that has always stayed with me was my reaction to cigarettes. My grandmother smoked, like many people did at that time, but I don't remember being around cigarettes smoke constantly, or in a way that explains how strongly I was drawn to it. I remember being a small child and thinking to myself,

I would do anything for a cigarette. I craved the smell. There's even a photograph of me crying at an amusement park. Everyone assumed I was upset because I wanted my grandmother's corn dog. But that's not what I remember. I wanted her cigarette. Looking back, I know how strange that sounds. A toddler at an amusement park who everyone assumes wants a corn dog when what he really wants is a cigarette.

Well, long before I could explain it, I was also deep. deeply drawn to the first half of the 20th century. As a small child, while other kids watched cartoons, I wanted to watch old black and white films. I loved The Three Stoge's, Harold Lloyd, and Abbott and Costello, long before I was old enough to understand why those words felt so familiar. As I grew older, the interest expanded into classic Hollywood, the film noir and the history of World War II. By the time I reached high school, I had exhausted nearly every Holocaust memoir and history my local

book library could find, often requesting books through inter-library loans simply so I could have more to read. One experience has stayed with me more than any other. It was a dream that I had as a child. At the time, I didn't interpret it as anything supernatural or as a past-life memory. It was simply a vivid, disturbing dream that I never forgot. I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I believe I had it before learning about the Holocaust and middle school. When we eventually studied the Holocaust, I remember this unsettling realization that parts of what we were learning already felt familiar because of the dream.

In the dream, I remember a huge open area, almost like a dirt lot surrounded by fences or gates. There were a large crowd of people rushing in. There was an elderly man and what I understood to be his daughter. I don't remember what language was being spoken, but it wasn't English, or at least I remember feeling there was a language barrier. Someone was shouting instructions, telling everyone to undress and where to put their belongings. The elderly man didn't understand what was happening. His daughter was trying to explain the instructions and guide him through them, but while she was helping him, a man carrying a rifle approached. He struck the elderly man across the back with a butt of the rifle.

I remember the violence and fear of that moment vividly. He fell, and the beating continued. Through the screams, he was struck again and again until he stopped moving, and I still have a hard time talking about this dream. For whatever reason, it remains one of the most heartbreaking and disturbing dreams I have ever experienced. Even writing about it now is emotional. I believe I only had the dream a couple of times, but it was the kind that you never forget. I was raised in a home where believing in past lives

would have been considered wrong and incompatible with our faith. My mind didn't immediately go to reincarnation. It wasn't until high school that I encountered the idea. I was a big reader, and as I became more independent, I began exploring ideas outside the beliefs that I'd been raised with. At the same time, I was actually struggling with anorexia. There came a point where it became frightening because I realized I wasn't fully in control of it anymore. I couldn't simply decide to stop. I was trying to understand myself and why I was struggling in the ways that I was. Reincarnation was the first framework that I'd encountered that gave me a way to wonder about some of these experiences.

I'd wondered whether there could be some connection between them in a past life, or whether some of my struggles reflected grief or pain that I didn't yet understand, but it was only a possibility. I wasn't certain then, and I still don't claim to know. Around that same time, my family moved into an older house built in the 1920s. I loved the attic, and I want to be clear, I don't believe that I was drawn to the attic because of some specific, a specific past life connection. I simply loved the space.

There were two rooms with slanted ceilings and unfinished walls. It needed a lot of work, but I felt drawn to it immediately. I decided one of those attic rooms would become my bedroom. While my mom and I were cleaning and fixing up the room, we found something hidden in one of the unfinished spaces. There were crumbled pages containing photographs from the Holocaust. starving children, bodies, and victims from the day that the camps were liberated. There were also pages written in Latin.

I remember feeling shocked and disturbed. My mom saw them too. She's always held a very traditional religious worldview, but even she reacted in a way that surprised me. She looked at me and said, I don't know what this is, honey, but it's for you. This is your room, so this is here. for you. Although Mother Constance was one of my earliest and most vivid parts of my childhood, I never felt that personal connection to Catholicism itself. I was fascinated by her, and I sometimes

seemed to have a familiarity with Catholic ideas that I couldn't explain, but I never felt drawn to practice the faith or explore it as my own. What was different was my lifelong pull towards Judaism. My family was Christian, but Judaism continued to capture my attention. I wanted to learn more about it, understand its history, and be around its people and traditions. By high school, I was attending synagogue regularly, observing the high holidays and identifying as Jewish. That's part of why my mother's reaction was so striking. When she found the pages and the Holocaust photographs, she didn't see them as forgotten pieces of history.

She immediately thought of me. She felt that there was a reason these particular things had ended up in my room because she had watched these interests develop for years. She knew the questions I carried, the history that drew me in, and that connection that I had always felt toward Jewish life. Later, I looked into the Latin. This was before searching online was as easy as it is today, so I never found a definitive answer, but what I did find suggested that, that it was some kind of prayer or healing text, depending on how it was interpreted. I don't know why those pages were there, and I don't know why I found them. I don't know what any of it means, but those details have stayed with me.

Around that same time, my life began changing in other ways. My eating disorder slowly improved. I don't exactly know why. Maybe it was simply time. Maybe it was changes happening in my life. or maybe the experiences of that period gave me a sense of comfort and hope. I just remember feeling that something had shifted. I became healthier.

I became athletic. After graduating high school, there was a period where my life felt uncertain. Eventually I made a decision that changed everything. I enlisted in the military. I was in the best physical shape in my life and easily passed the physical requirements, before being shipped to training. Around that time, either the night before or within a day of what happened next, I had the dream again.

The elderly man, his daughter, the concentration camp, he couldn't turn away and he couldn't protect himself. He was simply there trapped in that moment as the rifle struck his back again and again. The blows never stopped. The sound of them, the screams, the confusion on his face, it all repeated endlessly. He didn't understand why it was happening. He couldn't escape it.

He could only endure it. The meeting continued until there was almost nothing left but the sound of his suffering. Roughly 12 to 24 hours later, I fell about 20 feet, and I broke my back. I remember lying on the ground after the fall while my training instructor yelled at me to get up. I remember saying, I can't. Within moments, I was being carried toward an ambulance. The world around me moving quickly, voices calling out and people trying to understand what had happened.

But I remember looking up at the sky completely still, and my mind went back to that dream. With the old man who couldn't move, the rifle striking his back, and the beating that would not end. Hi, Raven. I enjoy listening to your stories, and I gather the courage today to share mine. I was about 17 years old. I'm from South India, pretty conventional family, and I don't smoke or do drugs or alcohol, as in 1980s India it was a big taboo. I was a straightforward college student with a normal life. All I did was focus on studies, hang out with friends, watch movies, and go window shopping with my sister.

So, one day early in the morning, we got a phone call saying that my grandpa's brother had passed. He was in a bike accident. My grandpa was with us at that time, and so my grandpa and mom immediately rushed to their hometown, which was in the neighboring state. I was close to my grandpa, but I was not that close to his brother or their family. So that day after my mom and grandpa left home, I went to college. And since I did not have classes in the afternoon, I decided to go back home early. I made myself a cup of coffee. and came to the balcony. We were living in a two-story building on the upper floor that had a beautiful circular balcony

from where we could see the entire neighborhood, as ours was the only two-storied building, and all the others were independent houses. Our balcony faced this long straight road that led to another avenue, with a bunch of independent houses, and usually there were not many people walking that road, especially on a hot summer afternoon. Maybe there are some occasional cars or bikes. As I sipped my coffee, I looked straight into the road, and I saw my grandpa walking on that road, towards the avenue, away from our house. Though I thought it was my grandpa, I know my grandpa's a bit taller and has a fairer complexion than his brother who passed away, so...

I was very confused as to if I saw my grandpa or his brother who had passed away, but I was darn sure that it was one of them. I ran inside my house to drag my sister to the balcony to show her this. My sister came out, but unfortunately we did not see any grandpa or anyone else walking. It was very eerie because it's quite a long straight road, and there were no houses that he could have gone in, and it was hardly a few seconds when I ran in to fetch my sister. My sister convinced me that I was probably just tired,

and affected by the news of the death in the family. This is when another strange incident occurred. In India, it's very common to have house help, and our house help had a daughter who was about 12 to 13 years old. This girl mostly spent her free time in our house, hanging out with me and my sister, and my grandpa used to help her with her math and English. This little girl came running into our house screaming.

I thought this morning my grandpa had left for his hometown, but I had just seen him just now in the road. She was surprised that my grandpa came back and was wondering why he was walking outside in this hot sun. All three of us just sat there wondering what had just happened. So, was it my grandpa? Or was it an apparition of my grandpa's brother? One thing I could say for sure is, despite all of this, all three of us did not even feel any, bit of fear. We rather felt some kind of warmth and peace. After a few weeks, my grandpa and mom came back from my hometown, and we told the story to them, and they were just as stunned as we were.

Hi, Raven. I'm female, 38. My husband is male 40, and my boys are 3 and 5. These stories hail from my country hometown of Windellima, in the country of N.SW in Australia. Don't worry if you mispronounce it, most people do, including me when I first moved here. This is a bit of a compilation of a few stories, but they all revolve around the same type of occurrences. The closest category that I would liken them to would have to be possibly a mimic. My husband, two boys and I live on 40 acres, with our neighbors being at least a couple hundred meters away on either side, and both are out of a direct line of sight. We have a narrow, long ranch-style house, which leads to a wooden ramp that takes you up to the timber deck, and that is attached to the garage.

The first occurrence happened when I was out in the garage one day. I was in the back section room of the garage. It has a main section where you would park two cars, and then a cement ramp up into a second section. And then there's an open doorway into a third section at the back. Then I heard my youngest son say, Mum. It was said softly and sounded like he was just through the doorway in the second section of the garage. I replied as I usually do.

Yes, but no response. I figured I heard wrong and just carried on. Then a few seconds later I heard it again. Mum. My first thought was, oh, he is in here. I knew I heard him. And I answer again. Yeah, baby?

But again, nothing. By now I was thinking, what the... I walked into the second section of the garage. Nothing. No one. Then, I moved further into the first main section where we parked the cars, and again, no one. By now I was getting very confused. It was definitely my younger son's voice, it was low and distinctly saying, mum. He couldn't have been more than a couple of meters from me with how softly it was being said,

let alone more than in adjoining room away. I continued out of the garage across the deck, and as I reached the back door, my older son was coming outside. I asked if he called out to me at all, and he said no. I asked where he had been, and he said inside watching TV. I then asked where his younger brother was, and he said that he was asleep inside. I walked inside to see him sound asleep on the couch. To say that it freaked me out as an understatement, I still can't explain it to this day. The second instance happened to my husband.

He was at home by himself and doing some chores outside around the house. He went to sit down and take a break. He sat down on a bench seat on one end of the house. He wasn't there for long when he heard three well-timed and distinct knocks on the side of the house. house behind him. Thinking that was a little weird, but being freaked out enough, he moved further down the length of the house toward the deck to sit on an Eski, a cooler, that we had sitting near the back door. As soon as he sat down, he said he then heard five distinct knocks that sounded louder. Now convinced that something was trying to get his attention or simply mess with him,

he got up and moved completely away from the house. He has a little bit of his I haven't heard anything similar since, and is happy about that. The last time something strange happened was when we were packing to go to our holiday van. My husband and I were in the garage with the back of my U-T-ray down, strategically packing everything in to fit. The kids were both inside the house. The side of the garage that I parked my car in has a small window cut out on the wall that the garage and the deck share. From here we can look out onto the deck from the garage clearly.

We were talking about trying to get as much packed before the kids came out, and as we said this we heard the distinct sound of the thump-thump-thump-thump-thump, of one of the kids running up the back hollow, sounding timer ramp from the house up onto the deck. They do this a lot, and it's a sound that we've grown to become very familiar with. I was standing right in front of the window cutout, and my husband was slightly off the side. His view of the deck was blocked, but he was still able to hear the thumping of our kids' feet. He looked at me with this defeated look of, here they come, this is now going to take ten times longer.

We heard the change of the sound when they hit the end of the ramp and began running across the actual decking, waiting to see them pop into the garage, but nothing. My husband and I both looked at each other confused. I popped my head out of the window and looked around the deck, and my husband and my husband The husband walked out the garage door to have a look as well. We were stunned to see no one. There's no way that they could have been anywhere other than on the deck. The direction that the sound made,

that distinct sound of little feet thudding on that hollow timer ramp, and then reaching the more solid sounding deck was unmistakable. If they weren't on the deck, we would have heard it all back in reverse as they went back down. Not to mention that I looked through the small window out onto the deck, deck when I heard the footsteps on top of the deck. As I stuck my head out, I heard them stop, which would normally mean they have reached the cement flooring of the garage.

While we were sitting there gobsmacked and perplexed, I said to my husband, what is going on lately? That's when he suggested the theory of a mimic. The conversation stopped abruptly, as we didn't want to risk discussing it and bringing any more of these occurrences our way. We haven't had anything happen for quite a while now. I would say that it's been a good six months to a year since the deck event. Fingers crossed, whatever it is, stops for good and leaves us alone.

The idea of something mimicking our family is truly terrifying. I also want to mention that I do like to listen to your podcast daily, when the kids aren't in the car, and I love your voice as it's so calming. So, keep up the good work. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Hi, Raven. So, I wanted to start this by saying that I've been watching or listening to your channel for about a few years now, and you're the only bedtime, crazy, Glitch in the Matrix story channel that I've consistently listened to.

That's ever held my attention with the stories that I've heard, as well as your storytelling abilities and voice that I've always come back to. So thank you for your work and commitment to storytelling and your God-given voice that's very soothing to listen to. Well, sincerely, thank you, and I'm very happy that I can be here for you in that way. Anyway, on to the story. I'm not sure where this lies, whether it's paranormal or reincarnation or what have you, but my grandmother passed in 2012. And to describe her from memory wouldn't do her justice. She was quite the character in her life, and she was intimidating even at only 4'10.

She was fierce in her rules, but loving and understanding in a way that all of my memories of her are either a lesson I learned, or a sentimental moment in time where we were cooking or baking together. In other words, a grandma, to its own definition. I was only 14 when she passed, so half of my life ago. She's been gone for the more vital parts of me navigating teenagehood and early adulthood, but never forgotten by me in the last. lessons that she taught or the love she gave. On to the story that I have, I had a daughter about three and a half years ago, so 11 years after my grandmother passed. In other words, my daughter never met my grandmother and vice versa. I've always heard stories of young children talking about their past lives in such detail that it can't just be chopped up to adolescent imagination. And it's

always been part of the reason I believe in reincarnation, but have never had a personal experience until now. My daughter is far smarter for her age, three and a half, than sometimes even I'd like to admit, but not old enough for her to know about death or reincarnation or anything of the sort. So when she was about one and a half years old, after she had learned to stand and walk on her own, she would hold both of her hands behind her back and stand while she watched whatever was on TV, or whatever was holding her attention at the time. And the one thing about my grandmother that I remember is that she would hold her hands behind her back while she was observing whatever it was at the time. And I know that can be added up to coincidence, but it wasn't the first incidents

where I pointed out to my partner at the time. Hey, my grandma would stand just like that. So, fast forward about a year or so. My daughter's two and a half at this point, and beginning to develop her own personality. I have this dream about my grandma when she was sick and saying goodbye to her and just a lot of repeating themes of this isn't over and I'll see you again. Specifically, what I can remember is that my grandma would always tell me growing up, I will always love you and be with you after I'm gone. I'll always be your grandma.

dream was basically her showing me, hey, I'm still here. So I wake from the stream, feeling emotional, and the first thing my daughter says that morning is, Mama, I see you again. Which I, at the time, equated to her saying that I'm awake and she sees me again. But after having that dream, it was another coincidence. I didn't think too much of it until recently. My daughter's almost three and a half and her father and I aren't together anymore and live separately. She's staying with me for visitation time and usually wakes me up at about eight in the morning. But this morning, she doesn't wake me up until almost 9.30 a.m. It's not unusual, but later than what we'd been used to. The first thing she asks me is, Mama, can I have raisins cereal?

Mind you, she's never had raisins at this point. And the only raisins, Reison cereal I can think of is Raisin Bran, which was my grandmother's favorite. I didn't have any, and figured there must be some kind of raisin cereal that she must be talking about, so I ask her father if she's had any kind of raisin cereal at his house, and he tells me that he doesn't know what she's asking for, because he's never bought anything cereal-related that has raisins. So, I pull up a picture of Raisin-Brand, and I ask her, this? And she says, yes, raisin cereal, and nannas. Nannas is bananas to her. And my grandmother used to

eat raisin bran with sliced up bananas in it. Again, there is no way that she would know about that, and she's never had Raisin brand cereal before. I know up to this point it could all be coincidence or just my imagination missing my grandmother and wishing she could experience my daughter growing up, But the last thing is that other than calling me Mama her whole life, there's been one time where my daughter had been doing her own thing, just playing with her toys and watching her shows, where she came up to me and said, Jojo, look, I got a pink butterfly,

showing me her butterfly toy. The only person in my life to ever call me Jojo was my grandmother. It's a combination of my first and middle name, and when I asked her what she just said, she just responded with Butterfly. I'm sure everything to this point just sounds like a coincidental connection, but to me, there's nothing more to believe than my daughter being my grandmother reborn. There's more smaller things that have happened, but I truly believe that my daughter is my grandma reincarnated.

Either way, it makes me feel better to see signs that my grandma's still here, whether it's my daughter being reincarnated as her or just a way in which I've been given individual signs that my grandma's still around and watching over me. And thank you for reading, and I hope you still continue to do what you do, regardless of my story making it in 20 or videos. I'm just glad that I got to write this story down and share it with at least one person. This is part two of Conrad's story. If you followed my story so far, thank you. Before I continue, I want to say something about how I'm telling this story. Everything you're about to hear reflects my own understanding of experiences that have profoundly shaped my life.

These are my beliefs. I don't expect everyone listening to interpret them the same way, nor am I trying to convince anyone that they should. I've realized that constantly stopping to qualify every thought only distracts from the story itself, so rather than repeatedly explaining what I do or don't believe, I'm simply going to tell this story as honestly as I can, from the perspective that I genuinely hold today. You're welcome to agree with me, disagree with me, or arrive somewhere else entirely. My hope is simply that you'll listen with an open mind, just as I hope to continue approaching these questions with one myself. To protect the privacy of everyone involved, all names throughout

the story have been changed. I've also intentionally kept locations as general as possible. Also, a content warning. This installment includes a brief mention of sexual violence. It didn't take long after I reached the hospital before I learned that I had significantly fractured my back. The diagnosis was surreal. Only a Only an hour earlier I'd been at the top of my game in basic training. My life had changed in an instant. I don't remember much about those first hours. I remember pain, morphine, voices, fluorescent lights,

and a sinking feeling that nothing would ever be the same again. The dream lingered on. It surfaced again and again during those early days after my injury, not as an answer but as a question. I felt there was something tying the two experiences together, something just beyond my understanding. In the dream, the old man's back absorbed blow after blow until he finally collapsed. Laying on my hospital bed, I realized that something essential had been taken for me. I was bracing for whatever came next, waiting to learn

how completely this injury would reshape my life. The surgery was extensive. Today, the scar stretches nearly a foot down my back. Years later, neurosurgeons would tell me that I have an unusually wide spinal canal, and that, considering the severity of the injury, I had been extremely fortunate. Many people with similar injuries never walk again. Recovery was measured in things I had never imagined needing to relearn. I spent over three months in the hospital. Before the injury, I could run three miles without a thought. afterward getting out of bed required another person in the room. Occupational therapy wasn't about returning to sports, it was about learning how to put on my own clothes.

I needed help bathing. At 19 years old, I was given an enema because I couldn't get out of bed to use the bathroom. It was humbling in ways that I still struggle to describe. Every small piece of independence had to be earned back. Over the years, I kept returning to them. dream. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was somehow connected to my injury, though I had no idea how. At times, I wondered whether it reflected some kind of unresolved trauma. Other times I wondered whether the old man in the dream had somehow been me. I never arrived at any satisfying answers. All I knew

for certain was that the injury had changed my life. I could still walk. I was lucky, but luck in suffering are not opposites. Every ordinary movement now carried pain. I had entered the military believing my future was opening in front of me. Instead, I found myself trying to imagine a life that looked nothing like the one I had planned. The years that followed were difficult. I was living with chronic pain while trying to make sense of a future I hadn't expected. If you've never lived with chronic pain, it's difficult to appreciate how far its effects reach. It doesn't just hurt, it can actually strain relationships, limit career opportunities, affect your physical and mental health, and gradually reshape the way you move through the world.

It changed much more than my body. It changed the way that I looked at the world. I became deeply distrustful of religion and spirituality. my upbringing had left me with complicated feelings about both, and after my injury, I wanted even less to do with either of them. I pushed the dream about the man and the rifle aside, and got on with my life. Even today, I remain cautious when it comes to religion and spirituality. I'm simply not as closed to those questions as I once was. That wasn't the only thing I tried to leave behind. You might remember that I mentioned being strangely drawn to the smell of cigarettes as a child,

It was never something I picked up from the people around me. My grandmother quit smoking when I was very young and she only smoked outside. No one else in my family smoked, and drinking wasn't part of our home either. When I finally was old enough to smoke and drink, I didn't feel like I was discovering either one for the first time. I had craved both long before I ever experienced them. Chronic pain had already turned alcohol into a form of escape. Looking back now, I also believe that using alcohol to medicate myself was part of a pattern that had begun long before this lifetime.

Mostly, I wanted relief. Then I met the man who had become my husband. We fell in love quickly and moved in together almost immediately. Looking back, I can see that I became more dependent on him than was healthy, but he was nevertheless an incredibly positive influence in my life. For the first time, I felt genuinely supported. Together, we moved hundreds of miles away from the dysfunction I'd grown up with, and that distance gave me room to breathe in a way that I never had before.

Not long afterward, we decided to have a child together. The years surrounding my daughter's birth were among the healthiest I had experienced emotionally. My spinal injury still impacted my day-to-day life, but emotionally, my life had become far more stable. I wasn't drinking heavily. I had a home. I had a family. For the first time in my life, I had a real support system.

I was determined to build a different kind of life than the one I had known as a child. I had made a conscious decision not to look any deeper into the dream. I told myself that I was reading too much into a vivid memory and that there had to be a perfectly ordinary explanation for why it had stayed with me so. intensely. It never completely went away. It lingered quietly in the background while I became better at ignoring it. But life has a way of reminding us that even our most carefully constructed certainties can begin to crack. My marriage was still intact, and we had recently welcomed our daughter into the world, but the first sign of strains were beginning. After an argument with my husband one night, I grabbed my keys and left. I couldn't

stand being in the house any longer. I drove to the gym hoping to clear my head. The gym was almost empty except for the employee working the front desk. Because of my back injury, I couldn't run anymore, so I climbed onto an elliptical machine instead. I turned on a classical music station on Spotify, and one particular piece began to play. I've never understood why it affected me so deeply, and I don't think I've listened to it since. For reasons I still can't explain, it brought back the long-standing feeling that I had lived another life before this one. I kept exercising, and curious about why the piece affected me in this way. My skin broke out in goosebumps, a wave of nausea hit me, so suddenly that I wondered whether I was about to throw up.

Even now, I can't honestly say whether it was an emotion or simply the physical strain of exercising. I stopped exercising and sat down. I couldn't stop thinking about the dream of the old man and the rifle. Maybe I was the old man, maybe I was his daughter, or maybe I had witnessed something terrible. Every possibility I'd ever considered placed me among those who suffered. Then for the first time, a different question entered my mind. Why was I seeing the scene from where I was standing? The answer came almost immediately.

I remembered the rifle, not the rifle pointed at me, the rifle in my hands. I remembered looking down and seeing hands gripping the stalk, my hands. For years, I had assumed that if the dream meant anything at all, I was one of its victims. Part of that assumption came from who I had always been in this life. Even though I grew up in a household where prejudice and intolerance were common, I pushed back against them from a young age. Because of that, I never questioned which side of those dreams I belonged on. I instinctively identified with the victims rather than with the person who had harmed them. Violence has always unsettled me deeply, and my instinct has almost always been to protect rather than to dominate.

By that point, I was openly gay, had practiced Judaism for over. a decade and had built a remarkably diverse circle of friends. It had never occurred to me that I might be seeing the scene from the perspective of the person holding the rifle. At that moment, I realized whose hands I had been looking at all along. There was another dream that had stayed with me for years, and it seemed to take place somewhere in Europe during the 1930s, as fascism was beginning to rise. I remember a retail store. The central image wasn't the merchandise or the city outside. It was a woman being gang assaulted inside the shop while several men laughed.

Just as with the concentration camp dream, I had always assumed I was witnessing someone else's suffering. It never occurred to me that I could have occupied any other role, but it was me who had taken part in that attack. I eventually made my way back to the car. I don't remember the drive home. I remember feeling emotionally exhausted as though some invisible foundation beneath my life had shifted. Nothing around me had changed, yet I couldn't look at the dream in the same way anymore. The next day, I told my husband what had happened. I don't remember every detail of that conversation.

I only remember how difficult it was to put the experience into words. How do you explain something that sounds impossible even to yourself? He listened politely, but reincarnation wasn't anything he had any interest in exploring. I could tell the story landed somewhere between odd and unsettling for him. Afterward, I sat with the experience feeling almost as though I might combust if I think it through. As unsettling as it had been, it was almost strangely electrifying. For years, there had been a hole at the center of my life that so many experiences, seemed to fall into without ever making sense.

My childhood dream, the injury that had permanently changed my life, my lifelong attraction to a particular period of history. For the first time, I could almost imagine that they belonged to the same puzzle. I wanted someone I could think out loud with, someone willing to sit with the possibility and examine it from every angle. I didn't have that person. I didn't suddenly become convinced that I'd lived another life. Instead, the things that I had loved for as long as I could remember no longer felt

uncomplicated. For years, I'd been drawn to the culture of the 1930s and 40s, the architecture, literature, films, music, clothing. I had never been able to explain why those decades felt so emotionally familiar to me. They just simply did. Swing music always filled me with a quiet sadness that I couldn't explain. It was a feeling that I had come to appreciate. Watching old black and white films or spending time in places that still carried the atmosphere of another era always stirred something in me. I never stopped loving that world, but it no longer felt simple. Since realizing that I might have been the man holding the rifle in my dream, my attraction to those decades had become tangled with questions I couldn't answer. Did my fascination with that period somehow reflect a lack of remorse?

I didn't believe that it did, but I couldn't silence that question. So, I reached for something entirely different. Whether I was trying to reinvent myself or outrun those questions, I still can't say with certainty. Looking back, there was never just a single reason that I drifted so far from the person I'd been. My childhood trauma, a marriage that was slowly unraveling, chronic pain, loneliness, just cycling on and off antidepressants and growing dependence on alcohol were all converging. The experience at the gym didn't change the course of my life on its own. It became one part of a much larger story that was already unfolding.

Throughout my life, I had dressed in vintage clothing because it felt like a natural extension of who I was. I also enjoyed restoring old furniture, spending time in Europe, and surrounding myself with objects that had carried a sense of history. None of it had ever been an attempt to perform an identity. Those things had simply brought me joy. The interests themselves never disappeared. I still watched black and white films from time to time, still found myself dreaming about restoring old houses. What disappeared was the ease with which I had once loved those things.

They no longer brought uncomplicated comfort. They had become tangled together with questions I couldn't answer. Gradually, I walked away from all of it. I became obsessed with fitness, spent hours in the gym, vintage clothes disappeared from my closet, all replaced by athletic wear and whatever happened to be trending at the time. I filled my calendar with social events, so I wouldn't have to be alone with my thoughts. From the outside, it probably looked as though I had finally figured myself out. In reality, I had never felt less certain of who I was.

The physical transformation fed my ego, and, ways that I hadn't expected. Prior to rebranding myself as fitness guy, I had often been the one left out of conversation and social events. For the first time in my life, I felt genuinely attractive. People noticed me and approached me. For someone who had spent much of his life feeling insecure, the attention was gratifying. Behind the confidence, though, my life was quietly falling apart. I was drinking heavily. I struggled with bulimia. I chased an aesthetic rather than the health, and I pushed through chronic pain, ignoring the limits of my injured spine, and treated my body as something to be sculpted rather than cared for.

The pain wasn't something I left at the gym. It followed me everywhere, leaving me exhausted, short-tempered, and constantly pushing through far more than I should have. Looking back, it's remarkable that I managed to look as healthy as I did while treating myself so poorly. Most people probably saw discipline and confidence and success. I saw those things too. I simply failed to notice everything else collapsing around them. Dating apps became another source of validation. Sometimes I scheduled more than one date in a single day.

There's nothing inherently unhealthy about a casual date or casual sex. Plenty of people approach both from a place of honesty and confidence. That wasn't where I was coming from. I wasn't searching for love, and I wasn't searching to satisfy a physical need. That was rarely the outcome anyway. I was searching for reassurance that somebody wanted me. Every match and compliment and every stranger made me feel desirable, briefly quieted a part of myself that never stayed quiet for long.

The search made me reckless. I met people after exchanging only a message. or two and rarely stopped to ask whether I was putting myself in danger. At the time, though, none of those risks felt particularly real. The darker my life became, the less capable I seemed of recognizing it. One man stalked me so relentlessly that I eventually left my job. Another assaulted me. The morning after the assault, I opened the same dating app and went out with someone else, as though nothing had happened. At the time, I never stopped to ask myself, Why? I just kept moving. Convinced that if enough people wanted me, then somehow I must still

be doing all right. There were mornings when I showed up to work still drunk from the night before. I threw up in trash cans, blacked out on a curbside futon in the small bedroom that I was renting. It was a miserable place to sleep with a permanently injured back, but most nights I was too intoxicated to notice. Looking back, it's astonishing how ordinary all of it felt. I could stand in front of a mirror and see someone who appeared disciplined, healthy, and successful, while every other part of my life was quietly collapsing. By that point, I had essentially no family support. From my mid-20s onward, I was navigating life almost entirely on my own. There was, however, one thing I never knew how to explain. Whenever life became especially dark, if I became genuinely

still, I could almost always see an incredibly gentle, feminine presence. It felt like the sweetest version of a mother I could imagine. Endlessly patient, comforting, and full of unconditional love. I never heard the words or saw a face. It was simply the unmistakable feeling that someone loved me deeply and was quietly looking after me. I should make one distinction here. I have at times felt what I believed to be the presence of loved ones who have passed away

in this lifetime. And those experiences have been deeply meaningful to me, but what I'm describing here, always felt different. In fact, I experienced this presence long before any of those losses. It carried a kind of unconditional love and reassurance, unlike the relationships I had experienced in this life. I never knew who or what the presence was. For now, I'll leave those experiences where they belong in the story. I'll return to them in Part 3 because they eventually became impossible for me to ignore. As the downward spiral continued, I often blamed other people for my unhappiness. Although my ex-husband and I were genuinely incompatible, and I believe we would still reach the same conclusion today even as healthier people, I used to tell friends that he'd dimmed my fire.

It was a comforting version of events because it meant I didn't have to confront that something within me had gone out on its own. No single person had ruined my life. I was making choices every day that carried me farther from the person I wanted to become. Thankfully, my daughter had another parent. Her other father stepped in whenever I wasn't at my best, and I will always be grateful she had someone who could provide the stability that I wasn't always capable of providing through that period of my life.

I don't say that with shame anymore, but with hard clarity and gratitude for the ability other people provided my daughter when I couldn't. Recovery began much more quietly than collapse. There wasn't one dramatic moment where everything suddenly became clear. There was a moment when I finally reached bottom, but I've chosen not to describe it here. Not because it isn't important, but because this recollection isn't about collecting dramatic stories, it was simply the moment I could no longer convince myself that my life was manageable. Soon after, I woke with a thought that I had never seriously allowed myself to consider.

I'd begun relying on alcohol for more than I wanted to. I remembered reading a simple suggestion somewhere. If you think you might have a drinking problem, try going a week without alcohol. I honestly believed it would be easy. Instead, I found myself thinking about alcohol almost constantly. That frightened me. Not long afterwards, I walked into my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I was shaking from withdrawal, exhaustion, and nerves, and someone handed me a fun-sized candy bar.

People I had never met hugged me as though they'd been expecting me all along. I was too shy to say much of anything. I mostly sat in the back and listened. Recovery didn't answer the questions I'd carried since childhood, especially the questions surrounding my past life. What it gave me was something I had been made. missing for years, enough stability to begin rebuilding. Over the next several years, my life slowly began to change. I finished my bachelor's degree, found a neurosurgeon I trusted, and although I will always live with chronic pain, another surgery gave me a quality of life I hadn't believed possible.

Money was still tight, but for the first time in years I felt stable. I bought my first home, more importantly, I became the kind of father I had always wanted to be. After rebuilding my life and finally reaching a place of stability, the dreams never completely stopped. They were never frequent, but every so often one would return carrying nothing more than a small fragment of another life. There was one impression I carried for years that didn't seem tied to any single dream. It was more like an intuition or a recollection. I simply had the persistent feeling that I had been gay or maybe bisexual in that life as well and that I had had had had.

hidden it. Of course, there was no other choice. I can't point to a specific memory that led me to that conclusion. More than anything, I remember being a child sometime in the early 1900s. I remember walking with my sister through tall yellow grass in the fading warmth of a late summer beneath an impossibly blue sky. I remember an olive green living room. I remember my mother being so petite that I was taller than her at a surprisingly young age. Not all of those memories were peaceful. I remember the feeling of my blood running cold, whenever my father had been drinking because I knew what might come next.

He was a mean drunk who assaulted my mother, and I remember running to hide from him. I also remember the guilt that came with hiding, knowing I had left my mother alone with him. Even as a child, I remember wishing there had been something I could have done. I've always felt an inexplicable connection to Victorian illustrations of the man in the moon. Years after those childhood dreams began, I dreamt that my mother kept a small calendar, or maybe a print, with one of those whimsical moon illustrations. I can't explain why that image affects me, but it does.

Since then, I found myself collecting little Victorian moon pieces because, for reasons I still can't fully explain, they remind me of her. The moonprints also leave me with a quiet sadness. Whenever I see one, I find myself wondering if that little picture on a kitchen wall was one of the few things besides her children that brought her moments of happiness. None of those moments would ever mean much to anyone else. They aren't remarkable. Their quietness is exactly what makes them feel so deeply human to me.

There's something both beautiful and heartbreaking about, the thought that if anything of us survives, it isn't the grand events of our lives. It's the little moments that wouldn't mean much to anyone else. Maybe that's all a life ever really is. And when it's over, those are the only things we carry with us. As my current life became a safe space, I found I could engage with my dreams and memories from a healthy and reflective distance. I found myself gravitating back, Back to the world of the early 1900s to the 1940s. I realized it had never left me.

I had only distanced myself from them while I tried to make sense of questions and had frightened me. The dreams never disappeared, nor did the questions. Throughout my life, though, I kept telling myself that my so-called reincarnation was ridiculous. I felt stupid and embarrassed that something this weird was part of my life, even though it still felt real. one ordinary day I met a man named Ben through Facebook. We had exchanged only a handful of messages, nothing particularly deep, just the kind of conversation that usually fades away.

Then he asked if I would like to talk on the phone. Ordinarily I would have declined without a second thought. I've never enjoyed talking to people on the phone, even with people I know well. The idea of spending an hour speaking with someone I barely know, should have made me immediately say no. Instead, my reaction surprised me. I felt completely at ease with the idea. Without hesitation, I agreed, and looking back, I still can't explain why. There was nothing in our brief exchanges that should have made me feel so comfortable, yet from the very

beginning, talking to him felt strangely natural, as though we had skipped over the awkwardness that usually comes with meeting someone new. Within 15 or 20 minutes, the conversation drifted towards spirituality. Ben spoke quietly, almost casually, and then he said, well, in my past life, I worked at a concentration camp.

My mind immediately began searching for an explanation, and for a moment I couldn't speak. Hi, Raven. I so enjoy listening to all the strange accounts, but not so strange since it does happen to me, so yeah. Anyway, I was listening to your past life stories tonight, and it brought back memories of what I experienced with both of my grandsons. My grandsons were both young kids when they brought this thing up. Okay, so one of my grandsons is now 19 years old, and this happened when he was about 4 or 5 years old. So it would have been the early 2000s.

I lived in an apartment. I was just sitting on the couch talking to someone, and he comes up out of the blue and starts talking about how he knew me when I was a kid. He says that I was there, and me and this other person just stopped talking. So I say, how were you there when I was a girl? He proceeded to tell me about the house that my family and I lived in. He described it so well, and he even says that he knew what my dad looked like. So I began to ask if he knew all this, then to tell me about the house.

He says you lived in this house. It was three rooms that go straight back. My mouth drops. I say okay because we lived in what they call a three-room shack. It was the 70s. And then I asked him, so what does my dad look like? He says he had this bald spun on the front of his head. I say, okay.

So he was bald in front with a little hair in back. Then he says that he was short. Okay, yes, he was. It was all shocking stuff, but since he's gotten older, he's actually forgotten all this. That's part one. This next one is about my youngest grandson. He's about nine years old now, and out of the blue, he started talking to me about this guy named Steve. He was much younger at that time.

Of course, my family didn't know what to do. make of it, because he often said that he was Steve, and that he had kids. Everyone thought it was funny, but he was very serious. He talked about this for quite some time, and as he got older, he slowed down on talking about it, but he kept talking about a wife and children, and he even gave names for his family. But, again, years later, as he's gotten older, he got into these strange moods where he would start bringing up other stuff. He always seems to bring it to me.

One day, I'm in my bedroom and my head's down working on something, and he was on the floor. He gets up, and he just starts talking about random stuff. I was really paying attention, but I noticed that he was talking about stuff he shouldn't know, so I stopped. I say, how do you know all that? And he says, I just do. It was stuff about dinosaurs, aliens, other planets. He was actually freaking me out since he was younger than eight at this point. I know they're not studying this stuff and he's actually not reading very well.

His sense of knowing things like this is just strange to me. He's done this on several different occasions, and my family thinks that he's something special. I love the way that he just knows things, and he's much smarter than he lets him. When it comes to math and numbers, he can add and do division, but he doesn't know how he gets the answers right. He's a very strange kid, but I love him for his abilities. I wrote a story to you that you recently read, and I said that I had more, so let's go. A quick recap of my last story. I thought that I was being burgled, and nobody was there.

Because I cleaned up my parents didn't believe a thing, only my friend Chris. did. Well, before long, the story was spread around, mostly by Chris and most of my year in high school knew of it. But like my parents, they didn't believe me, and just made jokes expected of 17-ish-year-olds, of, was the ghost about last night, I saw your house floating. What added to my annoyance is that in certain classes, you could see my house from my high school. Chris was actually asked in his English class to write something true and be able to talk about it. it for five minutes. He decided to talk about our experience, and he was given an F because the teacher said that it was a fabrication. I think that just added fuel to the fire, honestly.

Eventually, my parents were a way out, and they wouldn't be back until the early hours of the morning, so I asked if I could have friends around and my parents agreed, although I never said that there were about seven of us. My only rule, no Egypt boards. Well, one of my friends, Frazier, decided to do one with the aforementioned Chris. Now, I love him, but he loves to pull a prank. So I open the door to the next room next to me as Chris rolls his eyes back in his head, saying, You're all going to die in here. Then Frazier screams, Chris, come back, come back to us.

Now, I know Chris is having a laugh, so I tell Frazier as much, and I tell them that if they do another Ouija board again, I would chuck them out. Nothing really happened, which was both relieving but also annoying. I just wanted to prove the ghost, which we had nicknamed Brian, was real. So, we were all in my room, and it was about 1 a.m. All the house lights were out, including those in my room where we were all sharing beds or in sleeping bags, and we were all just chatting. Then I heard it.

Pad. I had to tell everyone to be quiet. I spoke loudly. That's the noise of someone stepping on the carpet at stairs, I shout. We all listen as quiet as possible. Pad, pad, pad, pad. We all froze and then heard a thump. It was the noise as if someone was on the steps out in the wooden hall, where my room is.

All of us had no idea what to do, as it sped up coming along to my room. I was fast. I looked in the dim moonlight and no one else was moving. I scrambled out of bed and ran to my doorway. I slammed on the lights from my room. The thing, or Brian, I guess ran along the hall, but when I hit the light, I swear I heard feet screeching to a halt. It was only a door separating us. I can tell you for sure that I had around six new believers that night.

Not that many of them admitted it in school, but we all slept with the lights on that night. Brian and or his friends didn't leave me just yet. I was around 17 then. I'm 40 now. I do have epilepsy, but to be clear, none of my medications would make me interfere with feeling, hearing, or seeing things like this. And now I had witnesses. I also didn't drink until university, which I had yet to attend. I'll intend. Thanks for reading this, and thanks to everyone else for listening.

I have at least a few more stories on this topic, so just let me know if you want them. Sure, send them on in. Stay classy, Raven, and sleep well. It's my line. Don't steal my lines. Hey, Raven. I've previously written stories about my time in the crime scene cleaning field back in the early 1990s. I know you'll get around to reading some of them at some point.

and I hope I'm not bothering you with my stories. You're not bothering me, and I will get around to them. It's not as easy as just send and read. I have to organize things properly, and there's spreadsheet logistics that go into this. If you send a story, I will read it most likely. Just email me if you have any questions. That's my one aside for the story.

Friends and coworkers have often told me that I should write a book or start a podcast, but I'm not really that type. When it comes to events in my life, I don't mind sharing with people I know, but I want to keep my identity private. The following story is not about crime scene cleaning, but about an organization that I joined in my late 20s. I was one of the youngest members to join then, when I did, and the average age is about 65, so they always called me kiddo or youngster. I will not mention the organization by name or location, but it's an all-male fraternity and most people would probably have old grandpas or funny hats come to mind if they're told which fraternity it is. This happened about 19 years ago. I was more active in the, what some would call,

rituals and ceremonies, so we would have planning meetings at the very old fraternity building in another city that isn't too far away. More than one time, myself and another guy would be the first ones there, and last leave. Since I was one of the youngest, I kind of helped out more than some of the old guys who would fall asleep in the corner. This building had a lot of history. There was a hallway that had leaders dating back to before World War I. The building had hosted its fair share of funerals, probably more than the new funeral home in my city. My wife always said the building gave her a cold feeling, as if the old members never left. During the During one such evening, I was there with another guy named John.

At this time, John was about 50, and I was maybe 37. We were seated in the main hall, and next to the main hall was the bar and then a hangout area with pool table, and the hallway, off that, led to a storage room. There were men's restrooms and ladies' room down there, too. John and I heard the door open and closed over by the restrooms. We yelled out, Hello? No answer. Since the hall is in a not-so-great area of town, but we're behind a gated parking lot and we always close the gate when we're inside, we thought that a member came in and went straight to the pot.

After a few minutes, I got a really weird feeling, so I told John, let's check the restrooms. We checked the men's, nothing. We checked the storage room, and it was locked. We looked over at the bar and no one was there. We looked at each other and said, Maybe the lady's room? So we opened the door, and the light was on. We closed it right away, thinking one of the wives came in to use the restroom. But no, we called out several times and opened the ladies' room door,

and there was nobody in there. So we turned off the light. The thing is, the last time a lady had been inside was probably weeks prior for a rental event. Had the light been on, we would have seen it from outside, when we arrived. Another time, we had just completed an event where it was only our members. I was one of the last to leave since I helped clean up and put stuff away. All the guys were over by the bar, and I was in our ceremonial room, that's for members only. I was putting stuff in the closet, and the closet's just off a very small hallway from the room.

I was in the closet putting up the boxes, and I heard someone say, hey, so I answered back. Yeah? And I turned around expecting to see one of our guys there. But no one was there. I looked out into the room, and nobody was there. These guys are not fast enough to get away from me that fast. The gentleman that I mentioned earlier, John, he had died suddenly from a heart attack back around 2015. We held his funeral reception at our hall, minus the casket.

John and I had become buddies because we were kind of closer in age than most of the other guys. I was feeling pretty down that he had died so suddenly, and at the funeral I stayed behind to help clean up, and put the chairs and tables away. This might sound weird, but this would have been his type of humor when he was still alive. There were about four to five guys still around cleaning up. We also had a galley-type kitchen in the building, and most of them were over and there cleaning up the food and washing pans. I had to use the restroom, and I went to the men's room off of the main hall. I was standing at the urinal, and I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I was like, what the hell? I turned, and no one was there. I just said out loud, okay, John, you got me. Right about 2023, I stopped going to that building, not because I was separated from the fraternity, but I moved to a different city and now go to another hall for these types of events. And wouldn't you know it, this one's even older than the previous one. But, so far, even though it looks even more haunted,

I haven't had anything weird happened to me there. Well, except for the one time a drunk lady from the streets tried to crash our Christmas party, We gave her a plate of ham and all the fixings, but she threw it in the parking lot. I will end on one note. When I first started going to the haunted hall, John was the first to tell me that the place was haunted. He told me stories that happened to him, like the time he saw one of our guys standing behind the bar from Amir's reflection, and that member had died way before that. Another story he told me was about a lady who saw something coming out of the ladies' room in the front,

screamed and ran outside. He also told me about two members who died at the hall, one from a heart attack, he was maybe in his late 50s at the time, and another one who passed away quietly in the corner in his wheelchair. He was quite old. Hi, Raven. I have a story that I've maybe told three people in my 44 years of life. The only request I have is if he do choose to share this, could you possibly send me a copy, which, I'll explain why.

As much as I love listening to your stories, I've had to stay clear from all paranormal shows and such for many years, because I'm a psychic slash medium. I can and have had attachments in the past from indulging and watching, and even listening to the stories. So, unfortunately, I can't engage in the paranormal genre, which is what I think this would be classified under. I do, however, love your glitch stories and think you do a great job at telling them. Thank you. That's why I'm willing to share this with you. So, here we go.

This takes place here in my home state of Ohio in the early 90s. Our family was very active in our church. If it wasn't Wednesday youth group or Bible study and service on Sundays, we were still there daily since my mom worked in the office daily, and had no one to babysit my brother and I. We knew this big, three-story church like the back of our hands. After they did some new renovations on the church, some strange things started happening. They installed an elevator, which would randomly start going up and down on its own a lot. The foal lines would all light up, prompting my mom to continuously yell at my brother and I,

as if we were causing it, when we were just as in awe of the activities. So much activity that they ended up naming this entity, Kawabunga. Mind you, it was the 90s. later finding out that it was built on top of a Native American burial ground. One day, my brother and I were playing our favorite game to play there, hide and seek. Even though we knew every place in this church, it was still huge enough to have fun playing that in. It was my turn to hide, and as I was running down the staircases between floors to figure out where I was going to hide, I saw a bright, glimmering golden light coming out of one of the rooms.

This was odd, because it was very dark, and there were very few windows facing out. I go to the room, which was the nursery, but stopped at the door, because this wasn't the nursery that had been here in this exact same place for all of the years it existed. And this wasn't part of the renovations either. That was just for a new entrance and elevator. I was shocked and super excited because it looked amazing. I remember standing at the door looking in at all the awesome new things. I remember the carpet itself had hopscotch on it, as well as the character goofy,

and that warm, bright, almost glittery golden glow felt so inviting. But something told me not to enter. I ran to find my brother to show him this, knowing that he would be as excited as me. Plus, he was older, and I felt that if he went in first, it would be okay. I ran up to where he was counting at, all out of breath, and yelling for him to come with me. Getting a few words of what was going on between breaths, we got down to the floor of the nursery, and it was the same old nursery it had previously been. Him, not believing me, I started crying and pleading with him to follow me thinking,

maybe I had the wrong floor. I knew I hadn't, though. But I was desperate to show him I was telling him the truth. I searched and searched tirelessly while he stayed behind thinking I had gotten one over on him at that point. Still, to this day, 30-some years later, I cannot find that room. I saw it. I mean, so vividly saw it and felt it. I can't help wondering what would have happened if I had actually gone against my instincts and gone into that room.

Would I even be here now to tell this story? Hello, Raven. I am a longtime listener, first-time submitter. I have several stories for you, but here is one story with several sightings of the same thing on different days. If you find it interesting enough, feel free to share it. Thank you for being there and telling strange, scary, and glitch in the Matrix stories. The first time. As a kid, I have had many different experiences when I lived in the projects on 19th Avenue in Hadley in Phoenix, Arizona.

That house was a small two-bedroom one bathroom that housed eight people. My mom, my dad, three brothers, two sisters, and me. My sisters and I shared a room, which was the dining room with a curtain as a door, and direct access to the bathroom. The bunk bed was up against the wall where the foot of the bed faced the curtain, and the door to the bathroom was almost center to the bunk bed. My baby's sister's bed was along the far wall where the foot of her bed faced the bathroom door, so it was an L-shaped setup with a dresser for our clothes against the other wall, leaving an easy but tight path from the curtain to the bathroom door.

There was an outlet that we used for our nightlight, as little girls we were afraid of the dark and for good reason. This day started like any other. I woke up, eight, got picked on by my siblings since I was so small for my age, and got ready for bed. My older sister was on the bottom bunk getting ready for back to school shopping the next day. She was making sure that all the class supply lists were in easy access for the morning rush, so we could get to the Salvation Army event on time. I fell asleep fast knowing the nightlight was on and the bathroom door was closed.

I was stirred awake by an uncomfortable sensation, as if there was a very large hand on my chest. At first I thought it was my asthma, and I tried to move my arm toward the headboard where I had my inhaler, but my arm would not move no matter how much I tried to move it. I was able to slowly open my eyes, but I noticed the room was pitch black. I realized I was facing away from the wall toward the bathroom door. I was getting scared because if I couldn't move and it was my asthma, I could end up in the hospital again, and that was a scary place to be. As I tried again, I looked out toward the bathroom door where a red glow could be seen shining underneath it. The room started to take on a light red glow, and not the yellow glow of the nightlight.

I stayed as still as I could, no longer interested in my inhaler. I heard my older sister wake up and I saw her moving just fine as she sat up and stared at the bathroom door. As I looked again towards the door and tried to keep my eyes partially closed, I saw it opening. The fear I felt at that moment was so intense. I wanted to run but instinctively knew that I couldn't. I looked back down and saw my baby sister was not in her bed. and I thought maybe she was with mom and dad in their room. She did that sometimes since she was still really small and only had her big girl slash toddler

bed for a couple of months. I was actually glad that she was not in the room for whatever was happening at that moment. I went back to watching the door to the bathroom open as a black bipedal figure stepped out and stood in the middle of the room. It had long arms and legs with a short middle section and a weird little bit of the room. a weirdly shaped head. It was tall and looked like it was crouching with a hunch in its back. Where I'm assuming its eyes were at, it turned toward my little sister's bed, then to mine where I closed my eyes and tried not to make eye contact. I heard a small voice tell me to keep

my eyes closed. I could feel a coldness digging into my legs, almost like being in shorts while it's snowing. I felt that pressure on my chest getting heavier and heavier. Refusing to open my eyes, that's when I heard my older sister scream like she was being murdered. I started to cry silent tears as my parents rushed in turning on the main light and going to my sister and asking what happened. She was so hysterical that she could not form words. I was able to move again and I had sprung up. That heavy feeling was no longer there and I was able to breathe normally. My mom noticed my tear-stained face and asked if I was okay. I reached for my inhaler anyway and I used it. Better to be safe than sorry. I got off the bed and I went to the kitchen where I saw

that the time was 3.33 a.m. The time is important for the next story. I grabbed a glass of water and I went back into the room. My older sister had calmed down enough and started telling my mom what had happened. My dad had already went back to bed so he could get some more rest before starting his day going to work. I felt safe with my mom in the room watching over us, and I gathered my courage to go into the bathroom. I turned on the light, and I noted a pair of eyes in the mirror as the light blinked on. I left the door partially open just in case I fell in again. When I walked out, I closed the bathroom door and saw my mom was holding my sister and telling her it was okay, as she stroked her hair saying a prayer.

I walked up to both of them. My mom grabbed my hand as she continued the prayer. I closed my eyes and I waited for her to be done. Mom stood up and tucked my sister back into bed, waiting for me to climb back up and. and then proceeded to tuck me in also. Here's the second time. It had been a few weeks, and my older sisters seemed to be in denial about what happened that night. I'm okay with that. I didn't want to remember it either, but even as an adult,

these memories are burned into my brain like a song playing on repeat. I remember playing with my little sister and her dolls. The bathroom door stays closed even during the day. I got that same strange feeling in my chest as we played. The heavy feeling on my chest, it was like I was being crushed. I looked at my sister and I could tell that she was feeling it too. I stood up so fast, I reached my hand down and said to my sister, we should go play outside until dinner. She reached up, and I, as calmly as I could,

walked out of the room to the kitchen and out the back door where my brothers were playing basketball. I noticed the plastic orange chair was upright. I maneuvered it so that it was a slide again. I watched her as she played. My mom poked her head out the back door after about 40 minutes and yelled for us to wash up. I waited until all the boys were inside before me and my sister went inside to get cleaned up. I was the last one inside.

Before I closed the door, I heard a noise coming from the empty chicken coop. I told myself that it was just the wind. Yeah, it was just the wind. I didn't even look back. I was too scared to. After dinner, it was the parade of getting ready for bath time. My older siblings went first, followed by my little brother and then little sister, and then it was my turn.

My mom made sure that I washed my hair correctly, and while I was washing, she said that she was going to get some towels from the basket she had left in her room. I heard her open the door, but she didn't close it. She told my older sister to keep an eye on me while she got the clean towels. I heard my older sister say okay, and she stayed on her bed. I rinsed off and was just about to turn off the water when I heard the toilet flush. But there was no one else in the bathroom.

The shower door was a sliding frosted glass door, so if you looked out, you could see shapes and shadows. I turned off the water and waited for my mom. She came back about five minutes later, opening the door and handing me the fresh towel. I had wrung out my hair and started to dry myself. My mother helped me get out of the bathtub since the sliding door track hurt to step on, and I was too small to throw my leg out and step out on my own. I looked at the sink mirror which was fogged from the shower,

and there were four lines running from the top corner to the bottom corner. My mom used a smaller towel to wipe the mirror and told me to brush my hair and teeth and to get ready for bed. I finished getting ready for bed, climbed in the top bunk, and got under the covers. I started looking at the ceiling, waiting for my mother to come back in to finish tucking us in. She went to make sure that the boys got into bed, and when she came back to the girls' room, she tucked in my older sister and kissed my cheeks saying good night. Then she sat on my little sister's bed and read her a story. I fell asleep to the story also.

I remember hearing her close the book and walk out of the room as her footsteps faded to her room. As per usual, the nightlight was on and the bathroom door was closed. I turned over, waking just a little to notice that the room was pitch black again. I started getting scared, and the tightness gripped me in the chest again. As I could feel a coldness gripping me like I was being dipped in ice water, I wanted to shiver, but I couldn't. I was able to pull the covers over my face as I heard the bathroom door start to open. I peeked out and I saw that same figure, but the bathroom had a red glow in our room was still so dark. It almost looked black and gray.

I saw my little sister was in her bed. I'm not sure if she was awake at this point. I knew my older sister was because her breathing was shaky and ragged. She did not sit up this time. She covered her face with her blanket. I watched as this entity looked at her with great interest, as a crooked smile crept on its face. I closed my eyes for a second, and I started to hear a strange scratching noise.

I took in a calming breath trying not to catch its attention. I looked down, and I swear I saw thousands of cockroaches. crawling on my older sister. Some started to fly as others were adjusting and scurrying all over her. Before I could scream, my older sister started screaming and crying while under the blanket. I heard my mom and dad run into the room. As the light turned on to the room, it was like there were no cockroaches at all. My mom asked her what was wrong, and I kept the cover over my face and calmed myself down before I got down to get water while my dad was in the doorway. I looked at the time and again it said 333.

I got back into bed and I tried to go back to sleep. Then there's the third time. This is the most terrifying time, because my little sister still has the scar but insists that she does not know where it came from. It was a Sunday night. Mom had just finished tucking us in and I could hear my dad in the living room watching married with children. The theme song is very catchy even for a young mind like mine, and I don't do well with music. The nightlights on, and the bathroom door is closed.

My sisters are fast asleep, and I'm counting sheep and telling myself stories to try to put myself to sleep. I heard my parents start turning things off to go to bed themselves, so they could be ready to get us to school in the morning. It was almost December, and I was looking forward to winter break. I had several books that I wanted to read during the break, but knew that if I started on chapter books, it could take me the whole week to finish one. I was a slow reader, but as a five-year-old in first grade, I could read a fifth grade level, and those books were my older siblings' books. As I lie awake, I covered myself all the way up from head to toe, tucking in all the corners and edges underneath me. I refused to have those cockroaches get under the blanket with me. I started to drift off to sleep when I heard the bathroom door slam open, hitting the dresser so hard that it sounded like the door had splintered.

I was startled by the loud noise. I wondered if it was one of my brothers. I turned carefully under the covers trying not to make obvious movements. I peeked through my covers and saw that thing again. I swear it was holding my little sister in the air. and she was fussing but asleep. I started repeating the prayer in my head, and I saw it throw her down on the bed. My little sister woke up as she got tossed onto the bed.

Her bed was close enough that she could climb into my older sister's bed, which she did, waking up my older sister, who then screamed. But my parents didn't come. I continued to say the prayer that my mom had said. I sat up and was pulled out of the last. bed and thrown onto the floor which knocked the wind out of me. I started the prayer from the beginning whispering the words out since it hurt to speak. Rather than saying it to myself, I could feel warmth envelope my cold body. I hadn't realized I was cold until I started to feel

that warmth. The more I prayed, the warmer it got, and the nightlight's light started to shine again. The creature retreated into the dark bathroom and the door closed. It didn't look like it was broken or splintered or anything. I got up off the floor, and I looked at my sisters who were both crying, and then my mom came into the room and turned on the light. I walked out to get water and see the clock once again saying 3.33 a.m. My mom told my sister it was okay, and to go back to sleep, saying the prayer again, tucking us all in, and turning the light off. I remember the next morning helping my little sister get dressed when I noticed that she had a raised scratch mark on her back,

that looked more like a sunburn. I grabbed the aloe from the bathroom cabinet and I put it on her. When she's asked about the scar that was left, she says that she doesn't know if it's a scar or a birth mark since it's been there as long as she can remember. In a way, I'm glad that she doesn't remember that night. I also asked my older sister if she remembers, then she says that she says that she's she doesn't remember it either. I guess that's for the best.

There are other instances where I have seen that creature, but the three above are the ones that terrified me the most as a kid. One of my longtime friends lives in the area, not on the same street, but a couple of streets away, and we drive by that old house, which has since been renovated. But I still get that same tightness in my chest when we go by it. Thank you again. Raven, I hope your listeners feel encouraged after hearing this story to share their own.

I have so many other strange and spooky stories from this house alone that it could probably fill a couple of segments, but for now, I just hope that you have a good morning, evening, and night. Before I continue, I just want to say thank you. I'm genuinely humbled that anyone would take the time to listen to or read my story. It means more to me than I can adequately express. In many ways, I'm writing this as much for myself as anyone else. I've wanted to put these experiences into words for years, but I could never find the right way to tell them. For whatever reason, this finally feels like the form that fits, and there's something

deeply rewarding about finally giving these memories a place to exist outside of my own head. I also want to mention that my friend, Ben, whom I'll be discussing throughout this chapter, is a fellow fan of As the Raven Dreams. He's considering sharing his own experiences as well, so if he decides to do that, our stories will eventually cross paths here. As I've noted through the series,

I've intentionally changed or omitted names, locations, and identifying details. In this chapter especially, I've chosen not to name the concentration camp or include information that could identify the family connected to the life I'll be discussing. Whatever these experiences ultimately represent, those people deserve their privacy and their peace. As I've said from the beginning, I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything.

I'm simply sharing these experiences as honestly as I know how with as much compassion and respect as possible. I do need to add a content warning to this one, as this installment includes discussions of a child's serious illness and parental grief. As Ben said those words, my jaw literally dropped. I had never met anyone who seemed to share my same past life. And then he gave me the name of the camp. It was the exact same one where I believe I worked. Then, almost instantly another thought hit me. My God, what the hell is going on here?

My first instinct wasn't that I had stumbled onto something extraordinary. It was that I was being scammed. By that point, I had long since started over online. I had deleted my old social media accounts because I wanted to leave some difficult years behind and build a quieter, more private life. The Facebook profile Ben knew was almost empty. A generic profile picture, no nostalgia posting and no fascination with history, no mention of dreams, reincarnation, or anything remotely connected to what we had just discussed.

These experiences had always been private. Still nothing about Ben felt manipulative or rehearsed. Every instinct I had told me he was sincere, so I kept listening. That didn't stop me from doing my homework afterward. Suffice it to say, I spent quite a while trying to figure out how he could possibly have known what he had told me. I looked for an ordinary explanation before I'd consider anything else. After I was satisfied he hadn't somehow uncovered information about me online, my curiosity about the dreams ebbed and flowed. What remained wasn't a need to gather more evidence.

It was an unmistakable feeling that Ben was someone I was meant to know. Whether you believe in fate, coincidence, or something else entirely, meeting Ben felt like a profound green light in my life. More than anything, I was grateful to have found a friend who understood experiences I'd never truly been able to share with anyone else. As our friendship deepened, Ben shared more about his own experiences and the memories he believed belonged to that life. Some of what he told me was difficult to hear. He believed we had been romantically involved, but that our relationship had begun with an act of violence committed by me. I couldn't verify his memories any more than I could verify my own, but I also couldn't ignore how closely they echoed the questions I'd already been carrying since I dreamed of the concentration camp and the assault. The overlap was becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss.

In this life, Ben and I are simply dear friends. That's more than enough. For years, I never felt much urgency to identify who I did. been. The dreams came and went. I had occasionally wonder about them, but I wasn't driven to search for answers. Then memories I hadn't thought about in years began returning with surprising clarity. Images that had once seemed isolated started connecting in ways I couldn't ignore. I found myself wondering whether there might actually have been a real person behind all of this. For a long time, I resisted trying to identify him, who exactly I'd been in my past

life. I was afraid of becoming consumed by the search or identifying too closely with someone whose life I could never truly verify. I wanted my curiosity to remain one part of my life, not become my entire identity. By then, though, I felt grounded. My life was stable, and I trusted. I trusted my own judgment enough to believe I could approach the search without losing perspective. I was simply ready to see what, if anything, I may find. To my surprise, it didn't take long. There were a handful of details I'd carried for years, including the persistent sense that my birthday fell around the same time of year as it does now.

I'm not presenting what I found as proof of anything. But there were moments, especially. around one particular hometown that stopped me in my tracks. I had imagined I would feel excitement, vindication, curiosity. Instead, I felt ashamed. Looking at his picture, I felt like looking at a photo of my own worst years, when I was drinking and hurting people. It was that same heavy stomach drop shame,

not the satisfaction of finally unmasking a monster. I wasn't looking at a monster. I was looking at a human whose choices caused unimaginable suffering. That realization didn't land all at once. At first it was nothing more than quiet recognition. I closed my laptop, tried to go about my day, and carrying on as though I hadn't crossed some invisible line. I wasn't chasing certainty or becoming consumed by the search.

I was just trying to understand what had gone wrong that other life that had left a mark on me. I learned that his mother was a devout Catholic. Looking back, I sometimes think about the presence I experienced as a child, the one I understood then as an imaginary friend. Years before I knew any of this, I unknowingly gave my daughter his mother's name, even matching her unusual spelling. For a while, life settled into something resembling normalcy.

Then, about two years ago, something I still can't explain, began happening. I started waking up in the middle of the night, like clockwork, somewhere between one and three in the morning. I would wake intensely nauseated as though I might vomit. More than that, I woke with the overwhelming certainty that something was terribly wrong. It felt like standing at the edge of a black hole. Nothing in my waking life explained it. My past life memories kept revealing themselves gradually over the years, but I had no idea whether these nighttime awakenings had anything to do with them.

I only knew that they were unfolding side by side. During that period, I meditated on a single intention. If these memories weren't serving my growth or my purpose, I didn't want them anymore. Whenever I would sit with that intention, I kept coming away with the same gentle impression. It wasn't a voice, and it wasn't harsh. If I had to put it into words, it was simply, I'm sorry, love, no. I didn't know it then, but the hardest year of my life was just beginning. During that same year, my oldest daughter and I began having conversations I never imagined

we would have. Before I explain those conversations or what happened next, I want you to know who my daughter is. As a little girl, Annalise never stopped moving. She loved being outside, eventually found sports, and threw herself into everything with complete enthusiasm. She had long blonde hair, striking blue eyes and cheeks that were almost always flushed from running around.

She loved music, played guitar. Those aren't the things that occupy her life anymore, but they're still the first things I think of when I think of who she is. Long before I shared much about my own experiences, she occasionally said things that caught me completely off guard. At the time, I didn't connect them to past lives or anything supernatural. They were simply moments that stayed with me. One day, she asked whether I remembered a nightmare she used to have when she was about three years old.

I did. And it happened often enough that I remembered comforting her through it. She told me she no longer believed it had been an ordinary nightmare. She believed she had been remembering something. She believed that she had been my daughter in that life as well. I listened quietly. I'd been open with Annalise about my interest and reincarnation and my belief that I'd caused harm in a past life. She knew I was fascinated with World War II, but I intentionally kept the details in my experiences private.

Those weren't conversations I wanted to place on my daughter. As she described the dream, I found myself sitting in stunned silence. Certain details overlapped with accounts I had already read from the historical family. Not perfectly, but enough to leave me deeply unsettled. Another memory surfaced. When she was about three years old, military aircrafts flew overhead. She watched them disappear into the distance and quietly said, I don't like airplanes.

I asked why. She shrugged. A long time ago, everyone got on planes to fight and nobody. came home. At the time, I didn't connect it to anything. Children sometimes say weird things. Years later, she also told me that she remembered riding a tram to school. Again, I simply listened. She had no idea what I had been researching and she had no idea what I'd been reading. As she continued describing that childhood nightmare, I felt the air relieve my lungs. It mirrored almost point for point, what had happened to the daughter connected to my past life.

I had never connected those two things before. Only now, looking back, do I remember those moments differently? Neither of us realized how quickly our lives were about to change. The nighttime awakenings continued. The feeling of doom didn't leave. There were a few small changes in Annalise that, at the time, didn't seem especially alarming. She was more tired than usual. Sometimes, she would skip sports practice, we both assumed that it was something ordinary like fatigue or burnout. There wasn't any reason to think otherwise. Then, one evening, things changed, and the doctors found a mass. Pathology took ages, but from the day we finally learned what it was, the nighttime awakening stopped. For nearly a year, I had been waking with that overwhelming certainty that

that something terrible was coming, and now I knew what it was. I stopped waking in the middle of the night. The dread hadn't disappeared. I just had a new name for it, cancer. I've often wondered whether those nights had been connected to what was coming. I felt as though some part of me had known long before my mind did. Treatment began almost immediately, and I watched my daughter lose weight faster than I thought possible. The girl who had spent every spare moment outdoors became exhausted walking across a room. When her hair began falling out, she decided to shave. I asked her if she was sad about her hair and she looked at me and said, I'm scared of dying. I couldn't care less about the hair that gross from my head. We'd spent more than a year going back and forth

to the emergency room. Most days, all I can do is sit with her, we watch movies or play board games. She uses a walker now, and some mornings I help her out of bed. Some night she can't find a position that doesn't hurt because she's become so thin. That's our life now. Everything else starts to feel secondary. Looking at her, it was hard to reconcile the person in front of me with the daughter I had known only a year before. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to take a much-needed break from caregiving. For the better part of a year, my life had revolved almost entirely around my daughter, and my ex could step in long enough for me to take me to take her.

take 10 days to myself. I decided to return to Europe for the first time in several years. There was one camp in particular that I intentionally avoided. It was the place most closely connected to the memories Ben and I shared, and it simply felt too heavy for this reprieve. I hadn't planned on visiting any of the camps, but somehow I eventually found myself on a bus headed toward a different one. It wasn't until I was already on my way that I did a little research. and realized that this was also a place where I had once worked. I returned home with a heavier heart and no answers. Nothing had been resolved.

There was no sense of closure, and I'm not comparing my daughter's experience to the suffering of people in a concentration camp, and there is no comparison. She's surrounded by people who love her, and we have access to medical care and resources that so many people throughout history never had. But I also can't deny what it has been like to watch. cancer change her body. There were times during treatment when she became so skeletal and gray that I could see every

contour of her bones. I can't sit here and pretend that photographs from the Holocaust are not what come to mind when I see how fragile she is now. I don't believe that her illness is punishment. I don't believe it's repayment for anything I may have done in another life, but I found myself wondering whether the darkness I carried forward from that life has continued to echo into this one in ways I don't yet understand. She was granted a wish to the Make a Wish Foundation, and has chosen her wish. I tried to get her excited about it, but she quietly says she couldn't care

less. She's just too tired. As I write this, Annalise is finishing chemotherapy. People naturally want to celebrate that milestone, and I understand why. I hope they're right. I hope my fear is nothing more than the residue of the past two years. But if I'm honest, I haven't been able to share the optimism. I can't explain why, but now we wait and I'm terrified. Every scan, appointment, ordinary day carries weight. At the same time, I want to be fully present for every moment we still have together. The day she was born, I remember singing La Vien Rose by Edith the Piaf Tour. It became her bed-beaut. It became her bed-becky. A bedtime song.

Somehow it has always felt like our song. I can't listen to it now without breaking down. Over the past several days, I've been sleeping beside Inalise in the hospital. Between the hospital chair and long nights at her bedside, my back has hurt more than it has in years. More than once, I found myself lying awake in pain thinking about where this story began. The injury that changed my life all those years ago was still with me, as I sit beside beside my daughter through one of the hardest seasons of hers.

Through all of this, I keep returning to the same tender impression I felt years ago, when I asked during meditation for the memories to stop if they weren't meant to serve me. It's never felt harsh. When I sit quietly now, my prayer is no longer about the memories. It's about my daughter. Can she be okay? Can she be healed? The feeling that returns is never cold and never condemning.

just somber, almost loving or regretful. If I had to give that feeling words, they would simply be, I'm sorry, dear, but not yet. If reflecting on these experiences has taught me anything, it's been humility. I don't feel as though I've uncovered secret knowledge of anything. I've just become more aware of how little I understand. Looking back at my past life, I see someone deeply concerned with status, appearance, power, achievement. Looking back at this life, I can also see traces of those same tendencies in myself.

For years, I carried a profound sense of failure over losing the military career I had imagined for myself. Even after I built a stable life, bought a home, and found meaningful work, part of me still felt as though I hadn't become the person I was supposed to be. I wanted recognition, and I wanted to prove that I mattered. My back injury, addiction, grief, the people that I've loved have steadily chipped away at the way of measuring myself. I also want to be clear about something because discussion of reincarnation often lead people toward ideas about karma and suffering. I do not believe illness, disability, or tragedy should ever be explained away as punishments or as something that somebody deserved. I would never presume to interpret another person suffering through that lens. My daughter's cancer is only deepened that conviction.

Whatever I believe about my own life, I approach everyone else's suffering with humility, because I simply don't know. What I've wrestled with is my own life. I don't believe her illness is punishment or repayment for anything I did in another life, but I do believe I carry it an immense amount of grief, remorse, and unfinished human beings. humanity into this one. Whether that has shaped the emotional landscape of my life in ways I don't fully understand is something I continue to wrestle with. Those are questions that I ask only of myself.

They're not questions I ask if anyone else's life. Today, my values are different from the ones I carried before. I'm comfortable with who I am as a gay man. My career has gradually led me into work centered on caring for others. After decades of smoking, something that always felt like one of the strongest threads connecting both of my lives, I finally quit last year. None of those things erased the past, they simply reflect the person that I'm trying to become. I've intentionally left out many details that could have made this story seem more convincing

because protecting real people matters more to me than persuading strangers. Whether someone believes every word, none of it, or something in between doesn't really change anything for me. This is simply the truth of my life as I've experienced it. It feels as though my heart no longer lives inside of me. Every ordinary day feels like an act of trust that it won't be broken. With the end of her chemo, fast approaching, comes more waiting. I don't know what the future holds and I don't know whether we'll celebrate decades together or whether my heart will be broken. broken in ways I can't yet imagine. Both gratitude and fear live within me now. They haven't

canceled each other out, just simply learned to coexist. Those feelings have changed me. They've made me slower to judge and quicker to recognize that every person I meet is carrying burdens I know nothing about. None of us are promised tomorrow and none of us are owed an ordinary day. There's one final thing I haven't known quite where to place in this story. Throughout my life, I've carried a quiet sense that the woman I knew as my mother in that other life has never been entirely absent. I don't remember her face, and I don't hear her voice. What remains is that feeling?

Whenever she comes to mind, it's the same gentle, unconditional love I described earlier. The past two years have brought me to my knees more than once. I cry every day, and yet through all of it, that same quiet feeling remains. It doesn't make the fear disappear or make it any easier. It just reminds me that love exists alongside grief, and that even in the middle of fear, I'm not alone. Before I finish, I want to thank one more person. So Ben, if you're listening, thank you.

You've been one of the most steadfast friends I could have asked for. We've spent countless hours talking, questioning, laughing, and trying to just make sense of experiences that neither of us expected to have. You showed up for me during one of the hardest seasons of my life, and I don't think I'll ever be able to adequately express what that is meant for me. If our understanding of our shared history is correct, then I'm profoundly grateful that life gave me the opportunity to know you differently. Whatever happened before, I'm grateful that this time our story became one of friendship, honesty, and kindness. You're a genuinely lovely person, and I'm thankful our

paths crossed again. More than anything, these experiences have changed what I value. I no longer want to measure my life by status, appearance, career, or recognition. I don't need to prove that I matter anymore. I want peace. I want the people that I love close to me. And I want to leave this life gentler than I entered it. For now, that's enough. Hey Raven, hope all is well. Before I accepted that a friendly spirit lived in my bar, I went through a few awakenings that were anything but friendly. One night an employee was working alone, serving a quiet flow of guests. I was at home, completely relaxed, when my phone rang. His voice didn't sound like his own, it was shaking. He told me to come to the bar right now. No explanation, just urgency.

My stomach dropped. I grabbed my keys and sped to the bar. The moment I stepped inside, the air felt wrong, like it was heavy and charged, almost watching me. My employee stood pressed against the radio, letting the music drown out whatever fear had taken hold of him. His face said everything. He was terrified. Then he told me what happened. A woman had walked in earlier, and from the second she entered, he felt something dark trailing behind him.

her. She ordered a drink, and after a few minutes the lights began to dim on their own. Not flicker, but dim. And then the door slammed shut with no wind, movement, nothing. Everyone froze. The woman looked around slowly and said, There's a spirit living in this bar. At the time, I didn't believe her. Now I do. She paid quickly and left. But as she stepped out, my employee said that he saw a black shadow rush out behind her fast, like it was being chased. He swears the good spirit forced the bad one out, and it happened right in front of him. He still barely talks about it. This was about six years ago, but the memory has not faded.

Not for him and not for me. Hey, Raven. I've been a subscriber for a while and wanted to submit a story that my ex told me years ago. It still affirms my belief in ghosts and otherworldly beings. He went on vacation back around the late 90s or early 2000s to the Carolinas with a childhood friend at a former plantation house that the Buddy's family owned. It all seemed normal the first night of their stay. They went out and then back to the estate.

As the sun set, they started drinking beers and deciding that it would be a great idea to explore the grounds to kill boredom. especially as it was my ex's first time in such a place. All seems normal until they arrive at some part of sewer drainage pipe on the property that emptied into a small body of water. At this point, they're pretty drunk and ready to hit the hay. Suddenly, a noise interrupts their mini-adventure. There was clanging coming from inside the tunnel. They assumed it was local wildlife.

After daring each other to check it out, my ex shines his phone and is startled to see two pairs of eyes staring back at them, with no distinguishable features even with light. They immediately sobered up and booked it back to the house. Up to this day, they swear that they were either cryptids or the souls of former slaves. And my ex never went back. Hi, Raven. I've been wanting to write you for so long, but I've got too many stories to count.

Right now I figured out it's about time to challenge myself, so here we go. I was about 15, so half my lifetime ago, and living with my parents. The first floor was where we kids were sleeping. My little sister had the first bedroom, me in the middle, and my older brother was at the end of the hallway. The hallway's very narrow, so if we had our doors open, we would be very close to whomever is walking there. I was the first one to come home. I knew because nobody answered me, on top of it being dark and quiet. That day I had my door wide open to hear when they got home, so I could ask my parents something quickly.

I have no idea what it was now, though. The road up to our house is very steep, and it's made out of gravel. It makes it easier to hear when the cars would arrive. Also, our front door is heavy and noisy, like the rest of the house. I was standing in my bedroom pressing the buttons of my CD player to find the perfect song, like usual. Suddenly, my older brother came walking toward his room with his heavy and loud footsteps, while passing through and then into his room. I got so startled and scared, because I obviously was not expecting him since I didn't see or hear him come home earlier.

A millisecond after he passed my door, I thought to myself, Wait a minute, my brother's hair is blonde, not black. Also, he's a bit on the heavier side, not lanky like this dude. My brother is tall, but the sky was taller. I shouted, hello, out loud, and jumped into my brother's room to see what the heck was going on. His room was dark and totally empty. Once I realized this, I screamed while running out of the house with tears in my eyes. That experience scared the life out of me for many years later.

Thankfully, nothing like that has ever happened since, knock on wood. Thanks for being that positive constant for us and reminding us that we are loved and worthy. Building a platform and a community for lovely weirdos like us, I'm grateful for that. Hugs from Vilden, Rainey, Berg, and Norway. Thank you. I'm not someone who believes in ghosts in the traditional sense, the ghostly figure walking through walls and clanking chains and moaning. I've never seen a ghost or experienced anything dramatic,

like countless ghost-hunting shows seem to every day of the week. I do believe that there is otherworldly phenomena all around us, and certain people are more attuned to it than others. I'm turning 61 soon, and when I was a teenager many moons ago, a young man called David Moore was introduced into my small group of friends by one of the other lads. I wasn't keen on this new chap, but in a short time we became good friends, and over the next few years, we spent quite a lot of time together. We had a band that Dave and I played in together, and we wrote a few songs together as well. though I must confess our playing was nearly non-existent in the songs we wrote were full of schoolboy humor, but we had a lot of fun, and it kept us off the streets.

Dave introduced me to Simple Minds in the album New Gold Dream, which had recently been released, and like him, I became a fan. As time went by, Dave married and had a son, but unfortunately we had a falling out over something trivial, and we didn't see each other for about. three years. One day I received an invitation to another friend's stag do, and I was told that Dave was going to be there as well. I went to the stag, met Dave, and it was like we had never fallen out. It was great making up with him, and we all had a great night. Shortly after that night,

Dave and his family moved away to the coast. I married and started a family, and, as happens in life, we lost contact. I wasn't in touch with the other lads from our so-called. I wasn't in touch with the other lads from our so-called. called band either. Everyone was off living their own lives. Fast forward to around 2012, and I was on holiday, when I received a text from my brother informing me that Dave had passed away. I was in denial because I had known another Dave Moore when I was younger, and I kept telling myself it must be him. However, when I returned home a week later, I found out that I was wrong. Because nobody knew where I lived at the time, one of my old bandmates had looked in the phone book, which at the time only had three or four addresses with my surname, and delivered a note to each house asking if the

occupant used to be in a band with Dave, and informing them of his passing. I emailed Dave's wife using the information on the note, and she asked if I would write something for the funeral. I wasn't able to attend, as it was happening the next day, and I was due back at work. I wrote the eulogy and emailed it to her. Dave's passing affected me much more than I would have ever expected. As I write this, tears are in my eyes, and he was in my thoughts on a daily basis for a long time. Anyway, enough blabbering, and on to the reason for me writing to you. Around eight years after Dave passed, I was sitting alone one evening playing CDs. I had started sorting my CDs in those black wallets with a zipper. I was slowly turning over the discs in the new wall.

when, as I turned over to the new gold dream by Simple Minds, a gentle breath of cold air blew across my neck from behind me. I wasn't scared or freaked out. I turned to my head toward where the breath had come from and said, Oh, you want that one? As I pointed at the Simple Mind CD. I put it on, and I ran my hand around the frame of the window that was behind where I was sitting, but as I already knew, there was no breeze getting through from outside.

through from outside. I've always taken great comfort from that experience, and only a couple of weeks ago, something else occurred which encouraged me to write to you. I was driving to work and waiting in traffic to turn left out of a junction. I had a van waiting to turn right in front of me. Someone, somewhere in summertime, the first track on New Gold Dreams, was just coming to a close on the car CD player, as the van in front of me turned right, and I pulled up behind the van now in front of me turning left. I couldn't tell you what the company business was, because all I could see was the name on the rear of the vehicle, and it was D. Moore.

It's nice to know that he's still around. So, take care, Raven. All the best to you and yours. Hello there, friends, Raven here. Welcome to the end of this episode of Antisbury. as the Raven Dreams. I hope that you genuinely enjoyed this collection of scary stories, as I enjoyed putting them together for you. If the platform you're on has the option to follow the podcast

or leave ratings or reviews, please do consider doing so as it helps the podcast grow. Of course, if you enjoy the content, that is. If you didn't enjoy it, then feel free to also leave a rating as honesty is important, and I take all feedback seriously. Also, I do have a YouTube channel. It's a lot of the same content, but we do live streams on Saturdays around 6 p.m. Central, so if you're free one Saturday night and want to come over and say hi, I would love to have you there.

We just kind of have a good time doing whatever we want for the few hours that I'm online. You can also join the Patreon, patreon.com slash as the Raven Dreams, for early access to all this content. Check out the website, astherravendreams.com for information and where you can listen to the podcast, find all my social media links, find the merch store, and send in your own stories to keep the podcast going, as it pretty much exists on crowdsourced content at this point. All of you really do keep the show going, so a huge thank you for that. Also on the website is information about the book that I wrote, titled The Insomniacs Experiment by Raven Adams. It's a psychological thriller, and I think it's pretty good. You might actually like it. Check it out. It's available on Amazon. Or if you want a signed copy,

you can email me to see if I have any left, and I will absolutely oblige if I do. All that said, friends, I hope you have a lovely rest of your day. I hope I see you again here very soon. But until then, remember that you are loved. You are valid. You are important. And the world is a better place with you in it. Don't forget that.

Until next time, much love, and sleep well.