As The Raven Dreams Podcast - Scary Stories For Dark Dreams - Vol 36 | ATRD Podcast

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Today we have about 2 hours of true scary stories with a late night ambience. Scary Stories For Dark Dreams is a collection of older stories, remastered and put together in a long form episode. This Collection includes the following stories; Demonic encounters (July 2022) And Paranormal & Swimming Pool stories (Aug 2022) So, turn down the lights, tune in, and let the haunting tales of everyday people take you down that dark and creepy road. Remember, these aren't just stories... these are true experiences that remind us that our world can truly be scarier than fiction. Support the channel for Early Access AND more! Patreon ➤ https://patreon.com/AsTheRavenDreams Check out the Merch Store! ➤ https://teechip.com/stores/astheravendreams Much Love, and Sleep Well... ----- #TrueScaryStories #AsTheRavenDreams #RedditStories ➤ Stories include a content warning for language and sensitive/disturbing content. Viewer discretion is always advised. ➤ ALL Audio of this Podcast are copyright of AS THE RAVEN DREAMS / RAVEN ADAMS and may not be duplicated, in any format, without explicit permission ➤ If you like any of the following stories, consider subscribing! - Dark Web horror stories, creepy lets not meet stories, stalker stories, Glitch In The Matrix Stories, Unexplained Horror stories, Paranormal stories, cryptid encounter stories, Crazy ex lover stories, creepy neighbor stories, quantum immortality, true scary stories from reddit, or any other True horror Stories! ➤ And Remember; You are loved, you are important, and you are valid. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. [TimeStamps] (Ad after the first story) Story 1: 0:24 Story 2: 11:36 Story 3: 23:57 Story 4: 31:04 Story 5: 35:50 Story 6: 48:33 Story 7: 59:52 Story 8: 1:08:13 Story 9: 1:15:55 Story 10: 1:20:46 Story 11: 1:28:23 Story 12: 1:32:25 Story 13: 1:37:32 Story 14: 1:47:45 Story 15: 1:51:10 Story 16: 1:53:45 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you were little, you had braced in the course of recreat, always in trying to negotiate, to exchange these cards of hockey, the bonhom, these bracelets,

even of the collation. You know that each thing has a value, well, to have been to have been the things have not

really changed. Negoti T-D you can't to renew with your instinct of negotiation. With, without operation

gratuit, no amount of minimum and any money and you're made for negotiate, and the appellee

T T T-D is made for you aid. Telecharge it right now. If you're aboard via Raii, embarked and profite, embarked and celebrate, wriggolet, public, savouring, admiring, and admire, and profite.

Via Rai, the voice that we love. If you have a true scary story you'd like to share with the podcast, go to as the ravendreams.com and click the button to send it my way. Also, if the platform you're on has the option to rate the podcast or leave a comment, please consider doing so. And as always, thank you. I have a weird situation that I wanted to tell about my life from when I was younger. I'm female, currently 33 years old, and I have a brother that is two years older than me.

When we were children, I always felt like my brother hated me with a passion. Like for some reason he was hell-bent on ruining my life and making me feel like a terrible person. However, the more I've been reading stories about demons and possessive entities that attach to not just people, but bloodlines, I'm starting to wonder if everything he did was by his own doing, or if something out there was guiding his hand. For the story, we're just going to call my brother Kay. Growing up, Kay was horribly aggressive and abusive towards me, but he wasn't always like. that. For the first few years of my life that I can remember, Kay was actually the most loving brother that ever existed. My mother had photos and videos of him holding me as a baby, of him telling her how beautiful I was, and the video that I hold closest to my heart is one from the day that

I was born. Mom was still in the hospital after giving birth to me, and my dad had brought Kay into the room a while after everything was settled, and he looked at me, and then to the camera that my dad was holding and said, that's my little sister. My dad said that I was, and he just smiled, turned to me and said, oh my gosh, I love her. It's the cutest thing in the world to me, and it honestly makes it even more painful when I think about how things went later on. I have to add a bit more context to my family, so do bear with me. First off, my grandfather and who he was. From what I've been told, my grandfather was a very hardworking man that did everything for his family,

and he was part of the generation that worked hard manual labor day in and day out for 50 years straight. When he retired from work, he seemed to have lost all sense of purpose. and then became an aggressive and violent man. Not just to my grandmother, but also to my mother. It was like losing his job caused a switch to just flip, and he turned into a horrible man overnight. He, however, loved my little brother more than anything. Every time he saw him, he would light up and nothing else in the world would exist for those few moments.

Now, when I was born, he had the opposite reaction to me. He never wanted me around. If I was there, he would yell at my mother to shut me up or leave me outside. Yeah, he literally told her to leave a newborn child outside if she came over. Well, about three years into my life, my grandfather died. There was a small funeral, us kids weren't there, but my mom told me that my grandmother seemed like she wasn't even hurt that her husband of 55 years had died. In fact, she seemed happy,

and she actually smiled after the whole thing was over. This, however, was where things started for me. My brother didn't really understand that my grandfather had died. My mom talked to him about it, telling him about life and death, but he was five, so it wasn't really a constant. that he could grasp. Basically, it was just a situation of,

he's gone, we're sad, but life goes on. That was when things started to change with Kay. After my grandfather passed, he started to become an aggressive and violent child. He would scream at my mother any time she tried to talk to him. He would destroy things if he could get his hands on them. and his attitude towards me did a full 180. The first instance was when I was still three.

My mother said that she heard me doing my best to have a conversation with him while we were in our room. He was laughing and talking to me as well. Then she said that he went quiet, and I kept saying his name in a way that was like I was asking for him, and then about five or ten minutes later, I started screaming. She ran into the room and saw what had happened. Kay was sitting on my bed with me. My hands were covered in blood, and there was a very large, very sharp knife sitting in front of me.

My mom was obviously panicked and screamed for my dad, who came in and grabbed Kay while my mom helped me. I had a cut across both my hands, and I was bleeding pretty bad for a small kid. My dad asked Kay what happened, and how I got the knife, and he said that Kay told him that he got the knife for me. He said that I needed it, that I needed to bleed.

He then said that Grandpa told him to give me the knife to play with because it was what I deserved. This obviously freaked my dad out, and after this we weren't allowed to play in my room unsupervised anymore. A few months after this in the middle of the night, my mom said that she heard me screaming and crying, and she got up to check on me when she saw Kay standing over me, holding a stuffed animal over my face,

and saying something like, it's okay, it won't hurt, over and over. Once again, my dad tried to figure out what was going on with him, and he just told him that grandpa wanted me to stop breathing because I was being too loud. Things like this happened a few times when I was young, but as the two of us got older, he stopped physically hurting me and started emotionally lashing out at me.

I remember very vividly on my 12th birthday, making K-14 at the time. He had actually walked into the room where my friends were with my dad's handgun. He then placed it on the table in front of us, and he said it directly in front of me, me and then looked me straight in the face and said, You should end your life.

No one here likes you, and no one here wants you around. You're nothing but a burden on everyone here, and we would all be very much better off without you. I can't even begin to explain the emotional pain that that situation caused. Not only had he hurt me personally, but to do this in front of my few friends and on my birthday. Agony is the only word that comes close to how I felt. When my dad came back in with the cake and saw the look on my face, his face, and then noticed the shock on the other girl's faces, and then finally saw the gun, he went off on Kay.

He placed the cake down, grabbed the gun, and I remember him screaming at Kay about the situation. He asked him how he got the gun from the safe, and Kay just said that Grandpa told him, him the combination because he wanted him to give me the gun. I remember my dad yelling non-stop in the other room while I just stared at my cake and cried. My mom did her best to try and steer us back on track, but the party was effectively ruined, and my friends were pretty freaked out. Rightfully so. There were a few more things that happened between Kay and I, a few events where he hit me,

and he did everything he could to make me feel pain, mentally, physically, emotionally. He made my life hell for so many years, and I'll never forgive him for all that he did to me. But part of me does kind of think that it wasn't all him, that there was something else that pushed him to do this, and that's based on what occurred a bit later. The last time that I saw Kay was when I was 17.

And while I don't want anything to do with him, that actually wasn't by my choice. He was 19 and still living at the house, but he had managed to get a job and save up money to get a car. Then he packed up his stuff, and he left. As in he packed his clothes, got in his car, and no one has seen him since then. Like I said, I'm 33 now, so you can do the math on my own. when that was, but it has been a very long time. And my guess is that he's either no longer alive or living under a different name or whatever. The reason I feel like he may not have been in control the entire time was because of the

note that he left behind. He actually wrote that he was sorry for hurting me. I actually still have the note somewhere, but a good summary of it was that he loved me. and that he never wanted to cause me pain, but he always felt like he had to. He mentioned in it that something in him wanted me to hurt, but that the other part of him wanted to protect me, and he never seemed to win when the two sides would clash. It hurts me to think that there was a part of him that did love me,

that wanted what was best for me, but then the other part felt compelled to cause me so much harm. I also hate to think that he was being controlled by a demon or my grandfather or something, and that because of that evil entity, I never had the life with my brother than I should have. I will never forgive him for all that he did. It really affected me well into my adult life, but I feel like I understand it a little bit more. If he's still out there, I hope he got away from whatever evil thing had its grip over him. And I want him to know that I do have a happy life.

And if the trauma he caused me ever weighs heavy on him, he can be sure that I'm no longer held back by the agony that he caused me throughout my childhood. Lasagne sur-gillet, puissance-molyne for 15 minutes. We're like that's their dojo. Pre-to-joo? Vive the pleasure with Leojo. The casino in-line that proposes the more recent machine-assed-as-sou and the games of casino in direct. Profite of 50 tours gratu on Big Bas Bonanza.

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in the early 2000s. Prior, we rented a place from a family member, but we knew they were wanting to just sell it. They were the type that thought they would be able to get a lot for it, and a lot more than we would have been willing to pay for it. It was a really old house, and instead of fixing or replacing things that were broken, they liked to throw temp fix over temp fix to deal with it. So we worked really hard, but we finally got a place to call our own.

We had our daughter, Emma, who was seven at the time, and we were expecting our second child, so we wanted to get a bigger place. It was a cozy little three-bedroom home with a decent little yard in the back. The previous owners even had an above-ground pool put in. It was about three feet deep and had a small patio built around one side of it. It did look a bit weird, but I thought we could work on it and make it better. Everything was finalized, and we moved in late October and early November. Since it was so late in the year, my priorities weren't on the pool at the time.

There were some repairs that the house needed like a new window, better seals on others, things to get us prepared for the winter first. But my daughter was really excited to go swimming in it, so I knew I wanted to get it all set up for the next summer. One thing I did do, though, was at least look it over. I mean, it was mine now, so whenever I was just out back, I liked to imagine what I wanted the backyard to look like. When we were checking out the house before we got it, we were shown the backyard in the pool,

and I looked it over to see if it was damaged or what kind of condition it was in. At the time, it was empty, but it looked pretty dirty, like it hadn't been used for a while. The realtor did tell us that it was an older couple that lived, lived there, and since their grandkids, nieces, and nephews stopped coming over, they didn't feel it was worth it to keep up the maintenance on it. But they did claim that there was nothing wrong with it, no leaks, cracks, or damage. They even left all of their supplies and chemicals in the shed for us.

Anyways, I went over to check it out again, and as I pulled back the tarp, I saw a bunch of stuff in the pool. There were several trash bags, a backpack, and a crate or tub. It was later at night, so I was losing light, but I walked over to the backside where the stuff was and tried picking up one of the bags. It was heavy, but when I let go of it, it fell softly, like it was clothes or something else soft like that. I covered the pool back up

and went in to ask my wife if we were storing stuff in the pool. I had a feeling that I knew the answer because, one, it would have been a weird place to store things. We would have had to have lugged it through the house or the side gate,

and then walk it up the stairs to get to the top, unless you chucked it over the side. The house was a single floor plus a basement, so why would anyone and go through that much trouble. It's not like we had so much stuff that had cluttered the place. And then, too,

I didn't recognize any of it. All of our baskets matched because my wife did a nautical theme, so they were either a cream or a navy color. This one was brown and made of plastic. Plus, we didn't have any

clothes and trash bags. So, as expected, she said no, I took her out back to show her, and she agreed that it wasn't ours. We had no idea who it belonged to, and admittedly, I didn't check the pool again when we had moved in. I didn't feel the need to. I decided I would call the realtor the next day, thinking maybe the last owners did it, and they forgot about it. They said they would check with them, and if I didn't hear back from them, then I could either keep any of it or just toss it out.

saying that they should have moved everything out, and they shouldn't have inconvenienced to the new owners. About as blunt as I would expect from a realtor, I guess, but I wasn't mad. I was just curious if it was their stuff. After about a week and no response from the realtor, I called them and they said they never heard back from the other people, so he said it was basically hours to deal with.

I made a mental note, and I told my wife I would take it all out the next weekend that I was free. That ended up being a few weeks later, though, due to other things coming up, including my wife having some complications, so I was doing a lot around the house while she rested. When I finally got to cleaning out the pool, I was surprised because it looked like the stuff had been almost disturbed. I had just picked up one of the bags, but it looked like something. some of the bags were opened. I thought it was weird, but again,

thought maybe I was just mistaken, or my wife went through it too. Regardless, I emptied the pool and sat the items out by our trash cans. I did go through the backpack and noticed it had a lot of those small sample or travel bottles of shampoo. Again, a little odd,

but it wasn't my stuff, so I let it go. Over the winter, I thought nothing of the pool, and then my wife had our baby in spring. Needless to say, I wasn't even thinking of the pool. Then, in early summer, life finally began to slow back down and normalize some, and I wanted to get the pool set up. My wife was going to take our girls to her moms for a few days, which was about an hour away, so I thought it would be a good time to get it ready for them as a surprise. I pulled off the tarp, and there was more stuff in it. The confusion and curiosity was now turning into a bit of frustration,

because not only do I not know where the stuff was coming from, I also had to devote more time to emptying it again. I did so, finding similar stuff that I did last time, a single bag of clothes, another backpack with a few toiletry items, and a small box with a few trinkets in it. I threw it all out, and I finally started the actual cleaning process. I guess my frustration got the best of me because I made it a priority to finish it. I even left work early one day and skipped on doing something else in the house that I needed to do just to get this done first. but finally I got it done.

I even rewarded myself with a quick dip by myself. When my wife and kids came home that Sunday, I showed them and I got the reaction that I was wanting. Wife was proud and happy to have a place to relax, and my little Emma was ecstatic. We agreed to go swimming the next day, since it was already supper time and she still needed to eat and everything like that.

It was about noon when we finally got around to going swimming, so we all changed and went out back. I still had the tarp on the pool, though, hoping it would help keep it free from any falling leaves or animals. What I didn't expect to find under the tarp was another bag, and a body. The screams from my daughter and wife were awful, and I hope they never have to scream like that again. but we saw a man floating face down in our pool. I told my wife to call 911, and I jumped in to get this guy out. I don't know how he ended up there, but I prayed that he was not dead for everyone's sake. I was finally able to pull him out on the patio and started doing CPR.

He started groaning, so I was hopeful that he was still alive. It seemed like hours before the paramedics arrived, but in reality, wasn't that long. They did say that he was still alive, and they took him to the hospital while the police took our statements. The guy did live, thankfully, but we had to go down to the police station. Since he had a backpack on him, they wanted to make sure that he hadn't stolen anything from us. Looking at his belongings, I knew it wasn't our stuff, but it made me think of all the stuff

that was in the pool. He had some small soap bottles and a few pairs of pants. So, I asked about his story, and they explained that he admitted he had been sneaking in the back, and not only storing his stuff in there, but also sleeping in the pool. He was homeless. He'd been calling that his home for probably years at that point. Then, I threw out all of his stuff, and he had to start over. He had a run in and was not able to get home on the night that I cleaned house the first time,

so he didn't catch the trash. The problem was, he moved around when it was dark, so I guess he didn't realize the last people had moved out. Or maybe he thought we wouldn't mess with the pool since it hadn't been touched for so long. He definitely did not expect the pool to be full when he came home one night and jumped over the side as he normally did. Not only was there the shock of the water, but he went under the tarp. And for someone who was afraid of water, claustrophobic, and possibly had some other underlying issues,

he freaked out and pretty much drowned. I don't know how he survived being in the water that long, but I guess he just had a strong will to live. I know that there was a decent homeless population in the city over, and my wife had even mentioned thinking that she saw someone at night walking by the side of the house, but we never really pursued anything or thought anymore on it. It happened a lot while she was pregnant, so we would check the window or back door, but when we saw nothing, we chalked it up to her imagination,

and we teased her that her senses were on high alert, from her hormones. She also made the jokes. I wasn't just being mean, I promise. We just never would have thought that this was the reason for it. I know he was technically trespassing, but I genuinely felt bad for the guy. My wife agreed, and we didn't press charges. And in fact, we got him a gift card so he could replace some of the stuff that I had discarded.

I got a better pool cover that was actually fitted, and, couldn't be removed easily. It's better since I had children anyways, and I try to be a little more aware of my surroundings. I do hope that that man is doing better these days, and not scaring people that just want to use their pools. I have a paranormal story that I had kind of kicked from my memory for a couple of decades, but that recently came flooding back to me. My parents recently retired and decided that they wanted to sell their home and move into a smaller house closer to where myself and their grandkids are.

And this meant that they needed to go through all the random things that they had saved from my childhood. I was going through one of the boxes, and I found a journal that I used to write in. I remembered that I would write my paranormal experiences in this journal when I was like, ten years old. I know that sounds weird, but as a little girl, I didn't know a lot about the paranormal, and I was apparently an aspiring author, so I just wanted to write things that were happening to me in my life. I actually wrote a lot in this journal, and looking back, it actually is kind of terrifying. I'm not going to rewrite the entire thing here, I'm just going to reiterate some of the highlights and weird parts.

Also, as a bit of a for the record, I did not make up any of these events. I 100% remember them happening now and in very vivid details. I know a lot of people may think, oh, you were a child, so there's no way you didn't add fictional details, but this was basically my diary, and I was writing it for myself. so I had no reason to add anything extra or fictional to the entries. In one of the entries, I wrote a very detailed experience about the first terrifying night that I had with a paranormal entity. The beginning of the entry was about what I saw when I went to bed.

There was this weird thing that kept hovering in the corner of my room, and I wrote that exactly, hovering. It was the shape of a young boy, but something about it was creepier than anything that I had ever seen. Like it wasn't quite human, but was shaped like one. My description was this exactly. I saw a little boy floating in the corner of my room. He was seethru, but darker than the shadows. I feel like he kept staring at me, and it was making me feel cold.

I tried to ignore him, but... I keep feeling like he is watching me do everything in my room. The next time I wrote, which was literally the next day, I wrote several notes about being touched by this shadow child. I wrote about how I was sitting and doing my homework, and that this thing had grabbed my hair. I actually remember this in detail. I was sitting there at my desk doing my math homework,

and I felt what felt like a hand grabbed my ponytail and pull my hair hard. Like, my head went backwards hard. This actually happened more than once. It was a few times, but I only wrote about it the one time. I can remember that I actually stopped wearing a ponytail in my bedroom to get this thing to stop pulling my hair. Another one that I wrote was about one. one of the most intense nights that I had with this entity,

which was the first and only time that I'd had sleep paralysis. I know that a lot of people don't believe in paranormal happenings during sleep paralysis, but this was absolutely paranormal, and it was terrifying. I wrote about how I was lying in bed that night, and I woke up suddenly. I was staring at the ceiling, and I could see the first. floating boy basically form out of the darkness in my room, and he slowly descended from the top of my room and stopped right in front of my face. The whole time he was staring at me, I was feeling like the room was spinning, and I thought

that I was going to get sick, but in my own written words, I couldn't even turn my head to throw up. The entire time that this thing was staring at me, face to face in the dark, I could feel how cold the room was, and I could feel how angry and violent the spirit wanted to be. I wrote that in detail, too. The whole time this boy was staring at me, I knew that he wanted to hurt me. He wanted to kill me because he was angry that I was alive and that he was not. There were a few other events that I wrote about, though these were the more interesting ones.

In multiple entries I wrote about how cold my room was. I wrote about how just sitting in my room made me feel scared and nauseous, which was definitely this entity's fault. There were several instances where I would come home from school and find that my bed was a mess, more so than I left it, like the blankets and pillows were all over the floor. And several times were all the stuff that I had on my vanity, was knocked all over the floor.

Then, in one of the entries when I was 11 years old, so around a year after the first entry, I wrote that he was gone. The entire page is me talking about how he had left me, and how much of a relief it was that he was finally able to cross over. Just like that, he was apparently gone from my life, and I actually recall how weird it was. It was to me that he would torment me and scare me so much, just to leave me alone one random day.

I have no idea what kind of spirit he was, but he definitely seemed malicious. It started out fairly benign with the hair thing and the staring, but that night with the paralysis almost felt like he was putting me in my place, showing me how dark he truly was. Reading my old journal really brought back the flood of memories about how scared I was as a child and how haunting this thing really happened to be. I'm just glad that it did eventually leave me alone and that I was able to move on, and mostly forget about it, even if finding this journal did bring it all back to my mind. I work a really weird shift at a big corporate warehouse that is open all around the clock.

And, as such, I usually work until around two in the morning. Obviously, this really screws up your sleep schedule and can be incredibly stressful in the long run. The job doesn't matter. What does matter is when I would get home, that being two to three in the morning. At the time that I was working this shift pretty regularly, I was renting a really small house from my aunt that was actually owned by my grandmother when she passed away. It was the smallest house that I had ever seen. Literally one bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and then a tiny dining area with a living room in one.

It then also had a basement that was a single room with the washer and dryer hookups. That was it. I've had friends that lived in apartments that had more square feet than this house did, but that's neither here nor there. So, as mentioned, my grandmother lived in this house at the end of her life, and I'm pretty sure that she was there even after she passed away. For the years that I knew her, my grandmother was a bit of a joker. She liked to play little pranks on people or poke fun at people,

and she knew how to hate you with insults that left you in tears because of how funny her delivery was and how much it hurt you inside. She could have been a stand-up comic had that been a major thing when she was young, but instead she just cracked her jokes at us that loved her. Hell, I'm pretty sure that her dying words were, it's about damn time, I was ready 20 years ago. That's the kind of person that she was. It's because of this attitude that I'm pretty certain she still resides in her house. The first time that I noticed something was up was one night when I had come home from work around two in the morning. I got home, and I was seriously hungry, so I decided that I wanted to make myself an egg sandwich. I remember that specifically, because it was something my grandma always made when I was little.

Obviously, egg sandwiches are basic and there's nothing special about them, but as I was making it, I started talking out loud about how much I missed being little and how much I missed my grandma making them for me. No sooner than me making this comment, I hear a smash on the floor next to me, and one of the eggs from the carton had somehow managed to jump out of its case and onto the floor. I remember that happening, and me just looking at it and then screaming, Dang it, Grandma, now I have to clean that up. And, again, as soon as I mentioned that, the roll of paper towels fell onto the floor from the counter. It was at that point that I was certain that it was her messing with me,

mostly because I know exactly what joke she was making. When I was a kid, I had accidentally dropped an egg on the floor, floor, and I remember her yelling at me about how she now had to clean it up. It was just too perfect, honestly. I was saying that I missed her making me food as a kid, and she decided to mock me by doing to me what I did to her when I was young. I cleaned it up, and the whole time I was just laughing, thinking about her, and telling her that I missed her humor and whatnot.

I'm going to be completely open about this. it really felt like she was sitting at my table and laughing at me. Like, ha ha, now you have to clean up the messes that I make. And I loved it. I have a few more stories about my trickster of a grandmob, but honestly this was my favorite that I felt I should share.

She's done some other things to me, like opening my fridge overnight, opening cabinets, dumping my laundry onto the floor, but honestly, it's never been any, anything terribly malicious. Just my grandma being herself in the afterlife.

It's actually kind of nice to be reminded frequently that she is still around me, even if it means I have to constantly be cleaning and picking things up. Way back when I was a kid, between the ages of six, all the way to the time I was 12, I lived with my grandparents at their house in the suburbs of Missouri. This house was more or less ancient. I have no idea when it was built, but thinking back on it now, the structures were definitely dated, and the overall setup for the house was definitely old-fashioned.

For those six years, it was myself, my mother, and then my younger brother that all lived there, with him coming into the picture a year or so before we moved out into our own place. My father was an incredibly drunk and abusive man, and we ended up having to move into my grandparents' house after he attacked my mother, and I tried to intervene. Like I said, I was sick, so there was no way I was going to be able to stop him, or even slow him down. But he decided that he needed to treat me like a threat and defend himself. Thankfully, that was the end of it for my mom, and she took the proper legal actions to get him out of our life, and we got out of that house.

Of course, living with my grandparents, it wasn't really ideal. Their house wasn't huge by any definition of the word, and my mom was sleeping in an unfinished basement while they set up my bed in what they called the guest room. I'm not sure what guest would have wanted to stay in the room. room because it had just enough space for my child-sized bed, a single dresser, and my tiny toy chest, and that was about it. But it was where I called home for a significant portion of my

childhood, and I'm thankful that we had a place to sleep at night. Though that's where things kind of got sketchy, sleeping, that is. When we first moved into the house, I had a lot of trouble sleeping in my room. It was a long time ago, so a lot of what happened in the beginning were things that I was told by my mother. She told me that, for the first couple of

months of us living there, I would sleepwalk. The first time it happened, I had seemingly just gotten up out of bed, left the guest room and walked down to her bedroom, and just stood there in the doorway staring at her.

She said that when she asked me if I was okay, I just stared and said that I needed to make sure nothing happened to her. Now, this was right after we had moved in, so not long after the event with my father took place, and she assumed it was just some kind of traumatic response to the event. She let me sleep in her bed with her. Then, the next time that had happened, she told me that she actually found me outside of the house, in the backyard, just staring out into the yard. I wasn't saying anything.

I didn't seem scared or angry. I was literally just standing there and staring out into the night. And, once again, when she came out and asked what I was doing, I just said that I was watching. I wouldn't say what I was watching, though. After this, my grandparents installed a lock on the exterior, door that was too high for me to reach, so I never went back outside. But I did sleepwalk a few more times after this.

It was more of the same, just me saying that I was checking in on my mom, watching, staring out the window. Weird stuff for sure, but it wasn't where it all ended. This is actually where my memory comes into play, because I remember all of what happened after this very, vividly. I would randomly start having these horrifying nightmares about various things, but they would always involve my dad.

In these nightmares, it was always me at my dad's house. I would be sitting there and my father would walk into the room with an angry look on his face, but something about him didn't seem right. He was angry, but he almost looked devilishly angry. Like, he almost looked demonic. Much like I was doing when I was sleepwalking, in the dreams he would just stand in the far corner of the room watching me. And when I asked him what he was doing, he would tell me that he was waiting. These nightmares were mostly uneventful beyond this, but something about them always launched me into waking up screaming.

My mom would have to run into my room and comfort me for what seemed like. like forever to get me back to sleep. And when she would ask me what was wrong, I would always tell her that Daddy was watching me. These weird dreams apparently went on for almost a year, when things started escalating in both my life and in my nightmares. Around this time, my father decided that he was tired of playing my mother's games, and he was trying to force himself back into,

our lives. He kept playing the I want to see my son card because my mother hadn't gone through any legal custody claim and it was really difficult for her to tell him no. I hated being around him when I was that age because every single time I would see him, I would just start to feel this horrible fear that something was happening. Being seven, I didn't know what existential dread felt like, But it was kind of like that, like this horrible feeling that the situation I was in was bad and was only getting worse the longer than I was in it. During this time, the dreams with my father grew darker. He would always be staring at me, telling me that he just wanted to be closer to me in them. Thinking back, this is when I realized it wasn't my father in my dreams, but some kind of entity or demon that was one.

watching me in the form of my father. At this point, I never wanted to sleep, and being a young kid, not sleeping really isn't easy. My mother would try to talk to me as best she could about the whole thing. She would try to help me understand that they were just dreams, and that they would eventually pass. I tried to tell her that they weren't just dreams, that this thing was trying to hurt me. but she didn't want to entertain the thought. Around my eighth birthday was when everything came to a head. My father was more pushy about seeing me,

and once a week had become several times a week. He would come into the house and would try to get my mom alone in her room, and I don't want to get into what I think happened when that happened. But then he would also come sit in my room, and just sit there on the bed while I sat on my toy chest. These were the worst times, because he would not say anything. He would just stare at me and go through what looked like an entire cycle of emotions. He would look like he was mad at me.

He would start crying, laughing, and it was terrifying. The last time he came over, we went through the same cycle as always. He came in and just sat there. But I was at a point where I had had enough of this and asked him why he never wanted to talk to me. He told me to hush because he was thinking. Of course, I was eight, and I was starting to be the snappy preteen that kids so often become, and I basically said that it was creepy how he just stared at me. Then he hit me.

He smacked me across the face hard enough to leave my cheek red and then grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that I needed to never speak to him again like that. I remember that feeling, the pain on my face, the anger on his face while he shook me and said that. I remember that horrible fear as I held back from crying and he just stared at me in the eyes. I just said I was sorry and I didn't know what else to say or say. do. I remember then seeing his eyes as he stared at me, something felt

different. He felt like he used to in my dreams, like a monster. For that split second, I was more terrified than I had ever been. And then he seemed like himself again. He let go of me and he started

to leave, and that was one of the few times that he told me that he loved me. Then he was gone. Two things happened that night. The first one I'll mention is the dream that I had. It was similar to the other dreams that I would have about my father, except this time. He wasn't just standing there and staring at me.

He was sitting on the floor. The house wasn't our house, as I remembered it. It was trashed and dark. I just remember that he was sitting there on the floor holding his knees and crying. I asked him what happened. why he was so upset, and the words that I got in return have always haunted me. I let it win. For some reason, I knew what it was that he was talking about.

It was that demon that had been haunting me ever since we moved out of the house, the demon that was haunting him. I don't know why, but in the dream I felt compelled to forgive him. So I did. I told him that it was okay, that I knew that it wasn't his fault. That was pretty much the end of the dream. Nothing else really happened past that, but then the morning came, and when I got up, I found my mom crying at the kitchen table.

As I came to find out, my father had passed away that night. And as was explained to me much later in life, He had actually ended his own life. He didn't leave a note or tell anyone what was going on. He just went through with his plan and his neighbors called the cops because they heard it. At the age that I was, I knew what death was, but I wasn't at the point where it really hit me that he was gone until a bit later. That night was actually the last time that I had one of those dreams with him in it.

I never had another nightmare about him watching me, or even one like I did that night. Now, I don't know if this was demonic possession, and I'm not trying to make an excuse or rationalize what he did, but part of me feels like my father's aggression wasn't always his. He was not a good man. He drank a lot, and like I said, he attacked. both me and my mother, but part of me feels like something else was controlling him. The fact that he had hit me that day and his whole demeanor changed, followed by the weird dream with him telling me that it won, it just makes me feel like there was more to this.

Regardless, I do hope that my father is able to rest, and while he may have ruined part of my childhood and part of me will always pull those bad memories to the front the other part of me does want him to know that i do forgive him back when i was a kid my dad and stepmom would take us to the community pool during the summer i was the youngest of four kids with two older sisters and an older brother at the time of this event i was around 10 years old my brother my brother being the oldest, typically didn't go with us, as he was always doing his own thing. And my sisters were twins, and about 15, so they always played together and didn't often include me. This meant that, unless my parents played with me or I found another kid my age, the pool was actually

pretty boring for me. However, one weekend, my stepmom planned for us to go swimming. So I begged them to let me take a friend so I would at least be more entertained. Thankfully they agreed, so my friend Katie came with me. Katie and I had been friends for most of my life that I can remember, and her mom was actually friends with mine, so they were both typically willing and trusted each other's parenting. So for our pool day, it was my stepmom, my sisters, myself and Katie. The pool was fairly large with a shallow play section for young kids, which got deeper. Then, there was a really deep side that you weren't allowed to enter because it was for those that dived or used the water slide.

And there was also a small water park area that you could walk through with sprinklers, arches, and the sort. As expected, my sisters took off doing their own thing. My mom found a cover table, and she sat there with our stuff and read. and Katie and I made our way through the shallow end of the pool. At first, we just walked back and forth to get used to the water and slowly got in deeper until it was about two-hour shoulders. We were doing what normal kids our age did, lap races, practicing holding our breath,

and then we would just stop and talk as we held on to the side. While this was going on, we noticed a guy stop in front of us and ask if we were okay. He looked like he was probably in his late 20s, maybe early 30s, because he looked younger than my parents, and they were about in their 40s at the time. He was wearing red swim trunks and no shirt, so at first I thought maybe he was a lifeguard, so nothing really felt off about the situation. We said we were fine, and explained that we had just stopped to talk.

That's when the guy sat down on the edge of the pool, in front of us and asked if we wanted a drink or something and we said no thanks since my mom had brought drinks and snacks for us he then started asking us what seemed like normal innocent questions how old were we who were we here with how long were we planning on being at the pool these made me think that he could still be a lifeguard since we had to be with someone 18 or older so I thought maybe he was just making sure. He even asked if we had tried the diving pool or slide yet. We were both too afraid to try the diving pool, and I think we may have even been too young, but we both enjoyed the slide and said

we planned to go later. But then, the conversation turned into something much less innocent. He mentioned that we were both really cute, and that he loved the way our swimsuits looked on us. but he asked if we had ever tried a bikini. Katie immediately said no, and I always got my sister's old swimsuit, so I didn't really get a choice on it. He went on talking about the different ones and what colors we would both look really good in,

and he even mentioned how his girlfriend looked really hot in one. We both thought the conversation got a bit awkward, so I mentioned to Katie about getting a snack. The guy again offered to buy. of something, but we declined, and without really saying much, we made our way out of the pool. And he said something like, I'll be here, as he smiled and waved. We went over to our seats and started getting something to eat when my stepmom asked how it was going. We mentioned to her about the weird guy talking about our swimsuits, and she took it as just

some boy trying to flirt with us and just to ignore him if we didn't like it. Yeah, really helpful. I also don't think she realized I was talking about a grown-ass man at first. But Katie just shrugged it off and we sat there eating our pretzels. I guess after some time we started getting a little louder, messing around with each other and laughing, so my stepmom told us we needed to go elsewhere if we kept that up. So we walked over to the water park side just to do something different.

I don't know about Katie, but I know I had pretty much pushed the thought of that guy to the back of my mind, and I was continuing to have fun. That was until we started walking back to the pool, when we saw that the guy was now in the pool, right where we had been waiting around. We decided we would just avoid the pool, or at least any area that he was in as much as possible, and hope that he would just take the hint. So, we walked towards the slides when, unfortunately, the guy noticed us.

He shouted over to us with an excited tone asking, Huh, are you guys going to try out the water slide now? We didn't respond to him and just kept walking. While we were in line, we noticed that he had made his way over to the slide as well, but he was a few people behind us. Thankfully, that kept being the case, so he wasn't close enough to go down, around the same time that we did. Katie was going to go first, and then I would go,

so I had time to fix my bathing suit as I came back up. As I mentioned, I was typically given my sister's old swimsuits, so sometimes they were a tad bit loose or too tight. Because it wasn't a perfect fit, after hitting the water, it was normal for the suit to ride up in the back. I would always have to fix it before getting out of the water. I think other girls will understand what I mean. So, after a few trips, I guess the guy was growing impatient and slowed down.

Timing went to get in line so he would end up directly in front of us. After Katie and I went, we looked around and didn't see the guy anywhere, so we thought maybe he had given up. Feeling a bit relieved, we started to have fun again going down the slide. That's when I finally spotted him again. but he was hanging around the deep end of the pool with goggles on his head. I felt like someone was watching me, so that's when I started looking around and saw him. He would be looking around in the pool and then would look over at us smiling and waving.

But he wasn't coming over to us or trying to follow. He was just floating there, I guess. So we just kept going down the slide thinking maybe that's what was keeping him away. However, I noticed something as I sat down at the top of the slide, and the lifeguard pushed my back. He was watching us, and as I slid down, he dived under the water. I hit the water, and as I sank down, I opened my eyes. Through the blur, I could tell it was the same guy diving down there staring at me as I tried swimming to the top. I tried to get to the top as quickly as possible and wipe my eyes to focus, but I also had to get out quickly since people

were diving and sliding down. But that's when the thought popped into my mind. I was adjusting my swimsuit each time I did this. As I was pulling on my suit, I heard the lifeguards whistling. I thought it may have been at me since I may have been taking longer than necessary, but when I turned around, I saw him coming out of the water too, up the ladder. He had his hands up and said something to the guards, probably apologizing or something, but the guard looked like he wasn't interested in hearing it. So, as I approached the ladder closer to the shallow side, he walked by looking right at me, smiling and then winking.

Something about that smile looked devious, and it made me feel sick. I saw Katie already standing against the fence waiting for me, and she looked just, as worried. So we both ran over to the table and sat next to my stepmom again. She could tell that I looked upset, so she asked what was wrong, and I mentioned the guy again. I told her that I thought he was looking at my butt. I hadn't explained this to Katie yet either, so she looked kind of confused as well. She again tried to play it off like it was some kid, but then I mentioned thinking it was a lifeguard, and that's when she started to start. started paying attention. She started asking me what the guy looked like and to point him out,

but once again, he was nowhere to be seen. She decided to call for my sisters to make them sit with our stuff, and the three of us went up to the counter to explain to them what had happened. They ended up finding the guy as he was talking with another little girl, of course, and he tried to say it was just a misunderstanding, and he was just trying to make sure we were having fun. Unfortunately, because he had a pass that was legit, and he wasn't breaking any rules yet, they couldn't ask him to leave, so we did. We didn't go back to that pool that summer, and we started going to a different one,

but it was still a creepy experience. Sorry if some of the details were a little all over the place, I was just trying to remember what all happened. Maybe the guy wasn't doing something sinister, but it definitely felt like it, at least for a couple of very young girls. And why would he be diving under the water just as I was hitting the water? You weren't supposed to be on that side of the pool anyways, so I feel like the lifeguards failed to monitor that part well enough. Anyways, that was my experience, though, and that's actually why I don't like public pools anymore. At least that's one of the reasons.

When I was a junior in college, I lived in a fraternity house with 40-plus other guys. As you can imagine, getting any personal time for studying, relaxing, or just peace and quiet was beyond rare. That December before Christmas break, one of my friends suggested that we drive a few hours north. I went to school in Michigan, to their family. cottage where we could all just unwind before final exams and the much-needed winter break. As we drove up to the cottage, it was picturesque. Snow softly falling. Beautiful trees surrounding the property.

Frozen Lake illuminated by the cottage's exterior lights. It was just what we needed. Think of a Thomas Kincaid painting, as cliche as it sounds. his family had been coming up to this lake for a number of years and had only recently, within the past five years or so, purchased this place from an elderly couple that had passed and had lived there their entire lives. Throughout his childhood,

they would always pass by this house and remark that it was haunted. Since the folks that lived there were retired, they weren't as active as the other lake dwellers, and being that their home sat a little further on, the water and was canopied by trees, it always seemed to be in the shadows and never in the sun, which gave it that additional spooky look and feel. When the couple did ultimately pass, his family purchased it with the intentions of building a more modern lakehouse in its stead. But I digress.

So we pull into the driveway and trudged up the walkway through six inches of snow. soft, powdery snow. Once we got inside, we immediately started to unload our groceries and began the dinner process, of which I was in charge. The place was

cozy, warm, and something you would expect an older person's home to look and feel like. A fire was lit, warming the place, and I had just started cooking some steaks and shrimp in the kitchen. As college kids, you can imagine the excitement

and luxury we felt when we opened the freezer and saw that it was stocked with steaks, shrimp, chicken. We'd been living on macaroni and cheese, so this was something that we were even more excited about. I had just mixed a drink, the fire was warm, and the radio was on. We couldn't have been happier. To get the scene and lay out of the property, the house was sitting about 50 yards from the water and on a slight hill.

The nearest neighbor was over half a mile away, and the drive up was about 300 yards from the road. So we were nestled back in relative isolation. There had also been a steady snowfall that evening, so there was about six to eight inches of snow, surrounding the house and covering the deck. So if, let's say, a squirrel had walked up to the house, its tracks would have been easily seen as the exterior lights illuminated the entire, exterior. Even sensor lights were installed along the side walkway. We felt as safe as one could be. It was nearing 9 p.m., and we were starting to feel it and unwind. We poured another drink,

and the food was nearly done. The smell of cooked steak wafted through the house. We all had these smiles on our faces knowing we were living the life while the other guys back at school were living on top of each other and dealing with the nightly chaos that only a gaggle of college boys living under one roof could create. The juxtaposition was stark, and we couldn't have been happier. Dinner was nearing being finished, and the police's every little thing she does as magic was on the radio. This was 1994, so no iPods. We were old school, and we tuned it to a local radio station. The days when you felt that extra connection when the station played a song that you loved,

like you and the DJ were on the same page with what good music was. We were feeling it right when the song was feeling it too. We cranked the volume and started dancing around. Life couldn't get any better. A nice buzz, a great meal on the way, in a cozy tucked-away cabin, holidays right around the corner, a roaring fire. as a young man who grew up modestly, it was one of those moments, until it wasn't. As we cranked the volume up to, we'll just say pretty loud, we heard the three loudest knocks on the back door.

It stopped us, and the police probably, right in our tracks. It was so obvious that someone was at the back door that we all just stared at each other with a scared, confused look. who in their right mind was out on a winter night and at our door. Who could possibly be disturbing? A chill ran through me immediately because no matter who was at the door, it wasn't a good thing. My friend, whose family owned the place, ran to the back door and came roaring back with a look of sheer terror, and he said, someone's in the house. The back door was slightly opened and someone had apparently.

slipped in the house. I can't describe the fear that gripped me. We panicked and froze. What should we do? Grab the fireplace poker? A kitchen knife? What was this person's intentions? What were they armed with?

Why had they knocked and announced their presence only to slip into a hiding place? I can't stress how loud the knocks on the door were. It wasn't one of those. Did you hear that moments? It was a needle off the record. moment when you all arrive at the same thoughts at the same time and realize something bad is about to happen. We all caught our breath and did a room-to-room search armed with our household items like mentioned above. By the time we got back to the main room with the fireplace, we glanced outside to see where the snow tracks originated from.

Expecting to see snow prints from the road, or heaven forbid the woods, we were stunned to find that the snow was undisturbed. The back deck where the door was slightly open showed no sign of anyone that had walked up. The steps, the deck itself, the walkway leading up were all covered with the six to eight inches of fresh snow. No one had approached the house from any direction. What the heck was going on here?

Whatever it was, there was no person in the house. We were stuck in a cabin with something that was very upset about us disturbing them. We all quickly surmised that the old couple that had once lived there wasn't happy about their nightly routine being replaced with loud music and dancing kids. This insight offered us little comfort. After we finished dinner, we all slept in the master bedroom on the same bed. The idea of being alone and disturbing whatever lurked in that house was too frightening.

The night came and went without incident. Almost as if the ghost had made its point, and was smug in knowing how much we were afraid. In the morning, we packed up and drove out of there in a hurried manner. In the daylight, we all looked back at the snow surrounding the house. It was as pristine as the night before. Not a flake seemed out of place. But I will never forget those three knocks. After high school, I started working as a lifeguard at our community pool.

in the summer. We had an inside and outside pool, so I worked there part-time, year-round, while I was in college. For the most part, it was normal, telling kids to stop running, jumping in the shallow side, just things like that.

I rarely had to do anything life-saving, thankfully, though. However, I did still have a fair share of bizarre occurrences that I will never forget. We had a few guys that thought they would succeed at picking up a date at the pool, but it was typically just amusing to watch. There was this one middle-aged guy that often came in, and he always had his hair slicked back. It was obvious he used some kind of product, and even though he stopped every single time, he will always try to get in the pool without rinsing it out.

Pool rules. You had to shower first if you had any kind of hair process. product, body paint, etc. I've seen plenty of situations that made this rule important, even if it sounds silly to some. So, needless to say, we knew this guy. He would come in, finally shower, and look smug as he walked around the pool

looking for some poor girl that was alone. Most of the girls handled it themselves, and were able to get him to shove off, but sometimes one of us guys, would confront him and have him move along. And again, he would, without any confrontation. So, one time he came in, I walked over to the others warning that he was here and we carried on.

I saw him approach one girl, and she ignored him. Then he found another girl that seemed happy enough to talk to him. I thought maybe it was the glorious day and that he was actually going to find love and just leave. people alone. But things started seeming off. She got out of the pool, but he continued to stand there in the water. The water was about to their chest, so I could see his arms and hands when he brought them up to pull back his hair that wasn't staying in place. She came back, and they continued to talk for a few moments, and I moved on, skimming over the pool. I would return

my view to them every once in a while, and at one point, something definitely seemed off. She seemed to still be talking, but she was looking everywhere except at him. So I started paying more attention, and I noticed his face seemed to be almost glazed over. He was staring at her, his mouth slightly open, and not talking, or seemingly reacting to anything she was saying. So, I continued watching to see what was happening in this group. Then, I realized

his hands were under the water, but towards his front, not his sides. I had a feeling that I knew what was going on. I blew my whistle and I hopped down from my stand. The lady made eye contact with me

and I think it finally snapped in her to get out of there. She threw her hands up and tried saying that she had nothing to do with this, and as she finally moved, he did not shift whatsoever. I tried yelling at the guy to get out, and at that point it was pretty obvious what he was doing. I called out in the Wauke for help because I wasn't confident

I would be able to get him out by myself. Right as two of the other guards came over, he suddenly put his hands up and started smiling and laughing, acting like he had no idea what had happened. We asked the lady what was going on, and she confirmed my suspicions. She said the guy seemed fine with, and even showed interest in a few things that she mentioned and enjoyed,

so she thought it was going to just be a pleasant conversation, until she noticed the change in his face, and that his hands went down. Sadly, she said she just froze, was in place not knowing what to do or how to get out of it, so she just stood there looking around hoping someone else would notice. Unfortunately, we had to close down the pool, not knowing what all he may have done, and he obviously got kicked out.

Hopefully he didn't try to do that at another pool. Another haunting memory that I was less involved in, but didn't make it any less terrifying to think about, the community center was built in a city that was no stranger to crime. It was built in hopes to give those an opportunity to grow closer, having something special and unique as well as create programs for youth groups, to help them while growing up to break the violent history that it had. I can't say it was a failure because it was always busy with people of all ages.

But, unfortunately, it can't remove all of the problems. The outside pool is by a cement wall and a chain-link fence to try and keep trespassers out. The only way to get to the outside pool was through the main entrance of the building. However, there are some that cannot always follow the rules. One night, there was a group of teens that wanted to try and go for a late-night swim alone. They devised a plan to go over to the fence, but once over, they were sure. surprised to find that they were not alone. Kind of.

There was a body of a guy floating in the water, and they called the cops. I learned all of this when I went in the next day for work, and was told that I could just go back home since the pool was going to be closed today and for a while after. Sadly, it was actually one of the supervisors. The story got around that he was a dealer or a buyer. he was closing up that night and was confronted by someone else.

They knew what he was up to, and they shot him. Because it hadn't been broken into, the alarm, of course, hadn't been triggered, so no one had been alerted until that group broke in. I can't say it's a good thing that they did, but if they hadn't, he could have died. He did live,

but he had a lot of permanent damage done due to being shot and the obvious lack of oxygen. The pool was closed for the rest of the summer, sadly. And it did seem to hurt business a bit, but thankfully it did bounce back. It's still talked about, and we'll have to live with that one forever, but it did teach us a valuable lesson in security and safety, which definitely got better. So those were two that I specifically remember being pretty crazy to say, the least. I'll eventually have to write up some more for you because people can get kind of weird in the

summer. I used to live in this house when I was younger, since the time I was born to maybe the age of six. It was a big house. It had three floors and two kitchens, one on the third floor and one on the second floor. I lived with my dad, grandpa, and two of my uncles with my cousin. They all have stories about this house. They all experienced paranormal activity. However, the children would experience more, such as scratching on the walls, voices, shadow figures, you name it. My room was on the third floor.

I had two closets. One was just a normal closet, but the other closet had a crawling tunnel that would lead to the master bedroom. just like in the movie Caroline. We kids would go and play there. However, I remember vividly seeing an obituary in that closet of a little girl with curly blonde hair. I asked all my cousins that visited the house

if they remembered seeing the obituary, and they all saw it, but they remember the little girl's appearance is all different. I remember her with blonde curly hair, My cousin remembers the girl with black curly hair, and my other cousin remembers the girl with red hair. I've asked my aunts and uncles if they remember the obituary, but none of them saw it, only the younger children. I remember my father would tell me that when I was a toddler, I'd be laughing at something and playing with someone who wasn't there, and that the locks would lock themselves as well.

We all moved out when I was six or seven years old. However, in the new house, I would experience the same things. Now that I'm older, I remember more. I would be home alone in my bedroom upstairs and hear footsteps downstairs coming close to me. In my sleep, I felt someone grab my ankle and pull me down a little. I would have recurring nightmares about a girl in a white dress with a little. long black hair chasing me. I would hear glass fall in break, but nothing broke. Once, when I was about 11 years old, I was waiting for my friend outside. She lives right across from me in the

complex, and while I was waiting, I was jumping off the porch and climbed back up, to jump back off again and by time. I kept doing that, and then I went to look at my reflection in the window, and after I jumped off the porch, I saw some other girl jump off after me in the reflection. She had long, dark hair, too, like in my nightmares. But I was alone. Sometime later, my dad had a new girlfriend. She started to live with us, and she would feel that the house was haunted as well. She finally had enough and wanted to get the house blessed.

So, that happened. As the priest was blessing the house, we were all just following him, but I started to feel weird and uncomfortable. My body was getting sore. There was pain in all of my joints. It felt like growing pain, but everywhere. When the priest was blessing my room, he said to us, This room has the most energy in the entire house. I wasn't shocked, to be honest, because I already knew that.

After the blessing, I told my father's girlfriend that my body was hurting, and she went and massaged my body. I was doing exercises and stretches, my neck cracked, all of my knuckles cracked, and my back as well, which I thought was very weird. I then went straight to sleep after. However, after that day, I had never had those recurring dreams. I never heard footsteps again, no shadows, no voices, nothing. It's been probably seven years since, and I haven't experienced any paranormal activities since that happened. Now, I constantly question myself. Did she follow me from the other house?

Did she try to possess me? Was she good, bad? What do you think? This is my first time ever really putting this story out into the world, but I figured it was a good idea to share my experience. I went through all of this, and it was a pretty intense time in my life, so maybe it's best to just get it off my chest at some point, and now seems as good a time as any.

When I was young, my mother was pretty heavy into the occult, and claimed herself to be a practicing witch. Whether or not that's related is completely up to you on whether or not you think that stuff is real, or has any effect on people around those that are practicing. But because of that, us kids were always hyper-aware of the supernatural side of things. We were aware of ghosts, hauntings, demons, and all that, and I've always had a pretty strong belief in the paranormal. And I'm pretty sure we had a haunted house back then, but that's something.

not really here nor there. A little context on who I was at the time. I'm female, and when this all happened, I believe I was just turning 16. Because of my mother's obsession with dark things, I do not scare easily, mostly because she always had a word to say about anything scary or strange.

I have a pretty solid foundation, and there's very little that'll make me jump, flinch, cringe, or be otherwise, afraid. My sister, on the other hand, seemed to have been the opposite growing up, and that you could make her jump and scream by just going, ah, really loudly at her, even if she knew you were there the entire time. Growing up, the house we lived in was only a two-bedroom, so it was always a struggle with my younger sister about the room. I was 16, she was 14, and it was a pain to have to sleep there with her in the room because she had no respect for privacy at all.

I had a point where I was pretty tired of being in the same room as her, so I asked my parents if we could figure something out for me moving out of the room. They had told me that they were not willing to get in the middle of it, and that we needed to sort it out for ourselves. My idea for sorting it out, I would just move my bed out of the bedroom and down into what was basically an entry landing for the basement. It wasn't really large enough to be a room, and it was just there as a place to store things outside of the laundry room, but to me it was the best option.

At least, that's what I thought. It didn't take long for me to really understand how bad of an idea it was to set up my bed in the basement. About two nights into this new agreement, my sister and I were up late watching some dumb TV show on Netflix, and I decided that I needed to head to bed. I said good night and headed down onto the landing to get dressed and shut off the light before lying down to go to sleep.

No more than a few minutes after lying down, I heard a voice say, What are you doing? In a deep, whispering tone. I opened my eyes and looked over to my doorway thinking my sister had come down, and I started to say, I'm going to sleep.

when I noticed that no one was there. I shook it off after a moment, thinking I was just losing my mind when I heard it again. But this time, it said, You're not. At this point in time, my guess was that it was just a spirit trying to mess with me, since my mom was into the witchy stuff and all of her cult stuff was in the room next to me, the laundry room. I just assumed it was some spirit that had been attacked,

to something that she owned, or was brought forward by something that she did, and they were messing with me. Continuing to think that it was just a spirit, I told them that this was my house, and that it was welcome to stay, but that I had power over it as this was my domain. I don't know why I felt the need to tell it that I had the power.

I just remember that being something I needed to do. I kind of sat up and waited to see if this thing was going to cause me any more problems when I noticed what looked like a hand coming out from underneath the laundry room door when I say a hand it seriously looked like a person's hand but it was pitch black and it was reaching out toward me from under the door I stood up and opened the door to see what the hell this thing was but when I did there was nothing there obviously I I wasn't feeling too good about any of this, but I again just thought I was dealing with the basic spirit or ghost, and I was pretty tired.

I told it that I wasn't scared of it, and that I was going to sleep, and then I lied back down and pulled the blanket over me. This is when it got genuinely terrifying. I felt the blanket shift slightly, and as soon as I leaned up to look, I felt a hand grab my ankle and pull. pull me toward the laundry room. And when I say that it pulled, it absolutely felt like an adult grabbing my leg and trying to gank me away from my bed and into another room. I freaked out and ran over to the stairs and just stared at my bed thinking, what the hell was that? I gave up and decided that I would just sleep on the couch and then move my stuff back into

the bedroom in the morning. The next morning, when I woke up, I thought maybe I was just dreaming it, or that it was just my brain being stupid, but then I looked down at my ankle. My right ankle, the one that was grabbed the previous night, had a massive bruise on it, about the size of a very large hand. The bruise wrapped around my entire ankle, and it kind of looked like the sort of bruise you would get if you were grabbed too hard. hard, or held down by someone. This solidified that, whatever this was, was likely not a good spirit, and was probably demonic. I told my mother about it. I showed her the bruise, and she said that she would cleanse the basement.

She did her cleansing and said that it was all good, but I didn't go back down there to sleep. I immediately moved everything back into my sister's room and just told her that. she was going to have to deal with it. After that event, I never went back into the laundry room, or even really down those stairs. Because every time I would hit the top step, I would feel like something was down there and waiting for me. This was honestly the most terrifying night of my life, and was probably my most solid experience with the paranormal. I'm just thankful that whatever this thing was, it wasn't able to latch on to me and

follow me out of the basement. Because I don't know what the hell I would have done. In Australia, we have a swimming pool place called Ripples. It serves as the community pool, and I used to spend every summer there with my friends. There's a large indoor pool, one for the small kids, and another outside where the athletes would come to train in the early morning. and we also had our swimming carnivals there through school. Every weekend we would try to get there before it got too hot and would bring enough money to buy food.

If you walked out to get something, they wanted you to pay to get back in. It was a pain, but whatever. My group of friends were all around 14 at the time, mixed group of boys and girls, and everyone got along with each other really well. We felt safe at Ripples, and we'd been going there for years. The staff were all friendly to us and let us get away with little things, but things changed, and there was a new manager who took over the establishment.

I'll call him Rob. He was a lot stricter than the previous manager had been. He was a real pain in the ass. The moment I met him, I knew there was something off about him, but none of my friends thought he was a problem. I all said he was harmless. Anyway, like any other day during the summer, we all met at my friend Baza's place

before we had it over there. It wasn't uncommon for us to be in our kossies or swimwear to you Americans most of the day. When I got there, I saw that there was already a crowd beginning to form. I wanted to get to our favorite spot that was a small hill, that overlooked two of the pools. It was comfortable. It was our spot.

When we got in, we ran to get there, threw down our towels, and to claim the area before leaping in the pool. Okay, fair enough. It was against the rules to run like that, and the lifeguard told us off. I noticed a couple of girls of the group heading to the canteen to get some snacks and something to drink. I called out to them to get me something.

while they were there, not sure whether they heard me or not. I swam and mucked around with my mates when I heard one of the girls scream. They were making a scene. I had no idea why it was happening, but I wanted to know what had happened. I shouted, You tell them, at the girls, and I saw their faces. They looked genuinely upset and not like they were mucking around. I got out of the pool and ran over to them,

and one of my friends was holding the top of her bathing suit and were screaming at this Rob guy. They said he pulled the string to try to get it to fall down, and one of my other friends decided to get violent, and I had to hold him back. Rob, that dickhead, just stood there shaking his head and saying that that never happened. The cops were called,

even though other people saw the, the damn creep do it. We were the ones that ended up getting kicked out. And later we heard that he was fired. It wasn't the first time he was caught doing this. I heard through the grapevine that a group of men kicked his ass in the parking lot one day. That was what I heard, but I didn't see it. I guess the story didn't happen to me, but make sure you keep an eye out there for weird people.

I have a bit of a weird story that I wanted to share, because I'm not really sure what to do with the situation. This isn't about me or my child, but my nephew. My sister and her family moved from the East Coast to the Midwest, to the city that I'm actually living in. They did this to be closer to the rest of our family. She moved away when she was 20, but after having kids and spending time away,

her and her husband decided that they wanted to move somewhere a bit more quiet, so they decided to move back here. Apparently, the whole process had been incredibly difficult, getting a house and living in an extended stay kind of hotel. However, they did find a house that they decided to purchase, and everything was good to go with it. However, she said that her son seemed to react to the house in a weird way. She said that while they were looking at the house,

her son, Brady, who is three and very intelligent and vocal, looked like he was scared of something. The entire time they were walking around the house, he just seemed really quiet and reserved, and his eyes looked like he wanted to cry. Then they got to one of the rooms that was obviously a kid's room, and she told him that this would be his bedroom. As soon as she said that, he said,

We can't live here. They already live here. Obviously, a bit weird, but my sister told him that no one lived there right now and that they were going to be moving in. He then burst into tears telling her that they cannot live in this house, and he was aggressively adamant about it. I will say that I understand that this would be an awkward situation to be in, your three-year-old son telling you that he didn't want to live in a house

because they already lived there, but they'd already signed the paperwork, and the house was practically there. Plus, they weren't going to let a three-year-old tell them that they couldn't own the house. He is a little kid, after all. She then said that on the day that they were moving into the house, Brady spent most of the day outside sitting in the backyard

and just talking, staring at the house. After a while of loading things into the house, she went out back to ask him who he was talking to, and he said, my new sister. It is best to mention now that Brady is the youngest of three boys. He's three, and his brothers are ten and seven. They made sure that they couldn't have any more kids, so this wasn't some kind of premonition he was having about them having another one. This obviously kind of freaked her out, so she told her. told him that it was time for him to come inside and have lunch, and he told her that his new sister couldn't come inside the house with them, because she was trapped outside. She just kind of said, okay, and picked Brady up and brought him in.

The entire time he was inside and eating his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he was just staring out the window in the backyard. He was smiling and even waving. I feel like most of the time this could be acceptable. He is three, but she said that it was actually kind of creepy how he was just staring and giggling. And as soon as he finished eating, he said he wanted to go back outside to play with her. She let him go back out and said that he was having a good time, but the whole thing really creeped her out. They've been living in the house for about two months now, and she says that he hasn't had any of the

issues that he had when they first showed him the house. But he's been constantly talking about his sister and how much he enjoys spending time with her. The way she sees it, so long as this sister doesn't cause any negative events, then it's not really a huge deal. For the most part, it seems like it's a kind spirit of a little girl that just wants to play with him, but if it gets any worse, then she said she'll go through with a cleansing or something. I know this isn't super creepy, but it's definitely a bit of a spooky paranormal story, as there's absolutely some kind of spirit there that is playing with my nephew. Maybe Brady has a

really strong connection with the paranormal, or maybe this spirit is a guardian of sorts, but either way, she seems to be his new best friend. Back when I was in my early 20s, my best buddy, Lawrence, and I used to do a lot of urban exploration in places that were completely abandoned. Run down are just really, really old. Most of the places we went were just a shell of what they once were. But it was really fun to just check the buildings out and see what we could find, and what kind of tags were left behind. I know it sounds weird, but I've always had a bit of a thing for architectural photography,

which included the buildings that were basically nothing more than a pile of detritus, and I was always willing to check out new spots and see what kind of picks I could get. The event that happened took place in, I believe, the summer of 2007. Lawrence and I had a few places that we wanted to check out that he had done some research on and gotten info through other Urbex enthusiasts. They were across a couple states, so we decided that we would split them up over a couple of months when we could get the time off work to go out to them. None of them were more than a few hours away, but, you know, adult life and all that. The first one we went to was a bit creepy, but didn't have much to report other than being really run down.

It is the second one that actually had the most going for it. for the sake of not giving away the exact location, I'm just going to make up a name for the place and call it Sunny Days Youth Camp. Now, Sunny Days Youth Camp was a religious summer camp type of place that was, at one time, pretty big. As the years had gone by, they had been wrapped up in a number of scandals and things that really shouldn't have been happening at a youth camp,

especially a religious one, including one of their youth pastors walking out into the woods on a random day of the camp and deciding to end his life in a very gruesome manner. After that happened and became a pretty big deal locally, the people at the top decided that there wasn't much they could do to save face. So they locked the doors and basically abandoned the camp. And that's the backstory of the place. It was pretty messed up and it had been empty,

for quite a while. And, as such, Lawrence and I had added it to be the second stop on our list that summer. When we got to the area, it looked pretty well abandoned. It was actually pretty hard to find as it was overgrown and barely marked. However, most of the front gate was still there, so you could tell that something was there at one time. Based on this information that we had, this was where Sunny Tum, days was supposed to be, so we just went for it. We had to park at the gate because of the growth, but it wasn't too far of a walk to the

actual building. The main building that was in the center was marked as the counselor's lodge, and it was pretty boring. It was mostly just an empty husk of what it once was. Fake log cabin-looking walls covered in old, faded posters, citing certain Bible verses, and of course the Code of Conduct. There wasn't much there. The second building we went to

was one of the lodges for the kids, and that's where I started to feel uneasy. The room felt incredibly heavy, like the air was almost hard to breathe, and it was almost cold. This was in the middle of the summer, sitting at a comfortable 85 degrees outside, but this building,

felt a lot colder. Like, it was in the 50s or so. We walked around a bit, but within a short amount of time, I started feeling like I wanted to pass out. If you've ever passed out, you know that weird tunnel

vision like feeling you get, and how you struggle to focus on one thing at a time while your hearing goes hollow. Yeah, it was that. I told Lawrence that I needed to take a moment, and it came over to help me sit down asking what was wrong.

I told him that I felt faint like I was going to pass out. He asked if it was just anxiety, and I told him that I didn't know. I was feeling fine until we got in here. He told me to go ahead and sit there until I got better, and I asked him to take my camera to get some shots for me. He agreed, and I sat there and he kept walking on into the building, taking photo after photo. I honestly thought that I had sat there for almost half an hour.

It felt like he was taking forever, but then he came back and told me that he had only been gone for about three minutes. I knew then that I wasn't doing well, because that three minutes felt like ages. What was worse? The second we stepped out of that building, I was feeling better. Like the literal first step out of the building onto the dirt,

I was feeling back to 100%. I asked him for my camera so I could see the pictures that he took and he handed it back. I remember scrolling through the shots, and I got to one that he took of me sitting on the bed in the front corner, and it was the creepiest thing. I looked pale and sickly, which made sense, but in the picture, you could see what looked like the outline of a man standing right behind me, with his hand on my shoulder. He was completely black with no real features,

but it was pretty clear that this was a humanoid shape that was touching me. I wish I still had these pictures, honestly, because they were terrifying, but this was 15 years ago and that camera's long gone, as well as my computer. But I digress. We looked over the shots, and that was the only one that we saw anything weird in that building. We decided that we would check out the last building, building really quick and then call it a day. The last building was the quote-unquote activity center, and it was a bit away from the other two.

Like maybe a couple hundred feet. As we got close, once again, I started feeling like there was something severely wrong with this place. It just felt like it had this grossly negative presence that resided within it, like something was there that had the most ill intentions possible. I mentioned to Lawrence that this building felt off too, and he said I could stay outside while he got the shots if I wanted. I thought about it, but I said that I would go in with him and just leave if it got to be too much. Well, as it is, neither of us actually went into the building. We opened the door, and we were hit with a blast of freezing air, and then the smell of sulfur.

We both just stood by the entryway staring in, and I could tell that we were both debating and waiting for the other to go inside, or say something, but for several seconds neither of us did. I just aimed my camera and took a picture really quick. I swear as soon as I hit the button and the flash went off, we both heard what sounded like a deep, guttural hissing sound. As soon as that happened, we noped out of that. We shut the door, and we decided that we were going to call it right then and there.

I don't want to stretch the story too much longer than it has been, mostly because that's the core of what happened. But there was a bit more that actually took place afterwards. A few days after we got back home from the trip, Lawrence actually got really sick with flu-like symptoms. But worse than any flu than I've ever had. He had a really bad fever. He said he was an immense pain the entire time, and he couldn't keep down food or water. He said that while he struggled to sleep every time he would doze off,

he kept having these weird dreams where he was being slaughtered, and they all took place at sunny days. It was like he was dreaming that he was in the activity building, and something there was attacking him, tearing his skin, cutting him, and he said that every single dream ended in him bleeding out and dying. I will say that this could have been coincidental,

but I have heard of demons having residual effects on people that encounter them, and I have to say that I'm pretty certain that place was inhabited by some kind of demon. Lawrence did get better after a week or so, and thankfully the nightmare stopped as well. That said, We never went back to that place, nor have we told anyone where it is. I don't even know if the buildings are still there, but if they are, I hope that no one ever finds them. That place had a really bad history, and there are certainly some negative, and I would say demonic, energies that have attached to it.

I'm glad that we got out mostly unscathed, but I'm also terrified about what could have happened. if he had actually gone into that last building. Part of me is fairly certain that, had we gone in, that thing would have attached on to one of us. That scares the hell out of me. I'm going to just jump right into the story. I was up at 3 a.m. doing who knows what, but I got tired and wanted to go to sleep already.

I got up to go use the restroom when I heard my dogs barking in the living room. I told them to quiet down, thinking that they were barking because they heard me come out of the room. I go to the bathroom, do my stuff, and as I'm walking back to my room, I just had the urge to go into the living room. I saw my dogs now crying and shaking. Then, I noticed the TV was on, but it was just static playing on the TV. I was caught off guard because I knew that I didn't turn on the TV.

I was a little weirded out, but I didn't think much of it. I walked to my room and close and lock my door. I've never done that, but something in my guts told me to do it. I go to lay on my bed, a few minutes pass by, and I hear the door jiggle, and then a knock comes after that. It's my mom. She asks me if I went outside earlier. I said no, and her face dropped.

I asked her what was wrong, and she didn't answer. A few days after that whole incident happened, she finally told me and my sister what happened. She said she was woken up by a noise, and my mom is not the type of person to hear something and just leave it alone. She said that when she went to check what the noise was, was, the back door was wide open, and our outside dog was at the corner of our backyard crying. Later on, I found out that a woman had committed suicide in our home after her girlfriend left her to go back with her ex-husband.

Both the lady and her girlfriend used to host dog fights, with mainly pit bulls in the backyard. After that incident, more things started happening. We thought that she was a friendly ghost because she wasn't causing us any harm, but later on she tried to. One night my family was staying over and my aunt woke up to her son crying and running around saying that a lady was trying to choke him. Another incident that happened to my cousin, she said that she woke up one night and was facing the closet and said that she saw a girl with long black hair just sitting in the closet. She thought that she was just a bit sleepy, so she turned her back to the closet. She had her eyes closed, and a few moments later,

she said she saw the girl sitting next to her on the floor looking at her. She would also do little things like open cabinets or open doors, but those two main incidents just made us realize that she was not a friend of her. only ghost, and could be something more than just a ghost. I have more encounters that I could write an entire book on, but these experiences are from one of the houses that I've lived in that were haunted. Not a swimming pool, but a swimming hole. I was in grade school, and it was early spring.

My folks took us down to the beach to see what it looked like after the winter floods had reshaped it. The water was still chilly, but us kids pleaded to get in, and my folks allowed us to wait in, but not far, because the swimming areas hadn't yet been marked, and there was no knowing what the floods had done to the floor of the river. Now, this was the Russian River in northern California in the early 1970s, and things were different then. I hear the water has dramatically cleared since Santa Rosa started pumping its gray water elsewhere,

but back then, the river was a dark and murky green. The soil in the region is volcanic ash weathered into superfined sand, and it mixed with organic material, and a little blue clay to make the floor we walked on, and often sank ankle deep into. It was soft on my little feet and squished delightfully between my toes, until I stepped on something that my child brain interpreted as a skeletal human hand. I walked on water, screaming all the way to the beach.

Mom and dad took me seriously and waited around for quite a while, trying to find the branch or twigs that they were sure it had to have been, to prove that I had no reason to be afraid. They found nothing. A few days later, the area was bulldozed to expand the beach, and the area where I felt it got buried. Floods the following winter would have washed whatever it was downstream, and out to sea.

The fear of what's under my feet plagued me for decades, and I dealt with it by learning to swim, along the bottom rather than on the surface of the water. 50 years on, I know that it probably was a twig, but that kid who still lives inside of me is not convinced. This all happened back when I was around six or seven years old, and I lived in the old house that I grew up in. It was a nice house, but I swear that throughout my entire childhood,

there was this weird feeling that I always got while I was in certain rooms or during certain times of the day. Being so young, I obviously didn't have any understanding of the paranormal, but nowadays I can look back and think about how creepy the whole thing was. I remember that during one of these events, I was sitting in my room and just staring at the wall in the middle of the night. For some reason, I couldn't sleep, and my brain was telling me that I shouldn't close my eyes. Like, it was in flight mode, and causing me to have a bit of anxiety. Again, super young, so I didn't know what anxiety felt like.

What ended up escalating the whole thing was, while I was laying there, and just watching the wall, I saw the door to my room slowly open. It wasn't like the door just shifted in the frame and opened, but that the knob actually turned and the door opened like someone was coming into my room. I sat there and stared for a few minutes, but after several moments of no one coming into my room, I started to freak out. I got up from my bed, and I went over to look out into the hallway and see if someone was there, but there was no one. I remember noping it out of there and walking into my mom's room. My dad worked nights at this point, and I asked her if I could sleep in there. She asked if I was okay, and I told her what had happened with the door,

and I just said I was scared. She told me that it would be okay, and then moved over so I could lie down. I hopped into the bed, she told me good night, and then fell back asleep pretty much instantly. I remember lying there for several moments just trying to fall asleep, but I started getting that feeling again that something was watching me. I opened my eyes, and as soon as I did, I saw what looked like a child standing near the door of the room,

except they had no details whatsoever. The child was completely nothing more than a shadow. But they looked solid. I know that sounds really weird, but it's the only way that I can think to describe what he looked like. I just laid there watching the shadow thing stand there and slowly make its way across the room to the door. Then, as soon as it got to the door, I swear that I saw this thing look at me and smile, though the smile was just more darkness. The second it smiled at me,

I watched it reach up to the bedroom door and grab the handle. The next thing I know, the door flung open and slammed open against the wall. My mom jumped up and looked over at the door and then down at me. I had obviously jumped up staring at the door too, and I had started crying with how freaked out I was getting. My mom asked me if I was okay, and then asked me what had happened. I told her that I saw a shadow boy open, the door. My mom dismissed what I said. It sounded a bit impossible, admittedly, but she then

got up and went out to look to see if there was someone in the house. After about five minutes, she came back and basically just shrugged it off and told me to go back to sleep. That was honestly the creepiest night that happened when I was a kid. I saw that weird shadow boy several times after this happened, but he never really did anything aggressive like this. I think because I never showed him that I was scared of him anymore, mostly because I didn't want him to do anything else. I saw him in the middle of the night multiple times throughout the years, but I haven't seen him for well over a decade at this point. I know some people may not think that this is super scary or anything, but I hated it dealing with him.

with the weird little shadow person as a kid. That said, I'm just glad that he hasn't shown himself for a while. And I hope that it stays that way.