As The Raven Dreams Podcast - Scary Stories For Dark Dreams - Volume 23 | ATRD Podcast

Episode Date: December 22, 2024

Today we have more than 2 hours of True Strange & Scary Stories with a lovely late night ambience. This is part of the "Scary Stories for Dark Dreams" series, which is a collection of stories put together for the sake of sleep or simple background noise. One Ad Spot this time around at around 25 Minutes This collection includes The following true scary stories: Middle Of Nowhere Stories (04/2022), Birthday Stories (04/2022), Night Shift Stories (04/2022) & Other true scary stories (05/2023) 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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If we're on board of Viaray, Embarked and Profite, Embarked and Celebrate, Riggolet, Publié, Savouring, Admirate, and Profite. Viaray, the Vois that we love 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, and please consider doing so. And as always, thank you. Way back in the early 2000s,

I used to have the nerdiest and probably most boring IT job one could ever have. I was contracted out to work as the overnight IT guy for a group of car dealerships in my downtown area. All of the dealerships were owned by the same people, and they were all a combination of the person's name in the type of car, so think something like Carlin's Chevrolet and Carlin's Mercedes. Not hugely relevant, but it helps you to understand that this was basically a very lucrative business for the owner, and they had quite a bit of money.

And that said, for whatever reason, the owner and head of technology for the dealership group was adamantly against using modern technology for backing things up. and every single thing that the company did that was digital was put onto a magnetic tape drive. Most people born after the turn of the millennium probably won't even know what that is. And just for them, it's literally a cartridge-like device that plugs into the server rack, and the data is written to it like a disk. But it's magnetic, and it's actually a tape. I know that that was a poor attempt at explaining what they are,

but what it is isn't hugely relevance to the story. I just wanted to highlight that this place was incredibly retro with their technologies, though tape drives are actually pretty prominent in IT nowadays. Being the overnight IT guy was, as I said, probably the most boring job in the world. The entire job was just me going to one of the dealerships, walking into the server closet, and running the backup system to run. to the magnetic tapes.

Because their back-end system was antiquated, and every backup was required to be a full backup, I would start it at around 10 p.m., and everything would be done and verified by around 7 in the morning. Because they wanted the most value for their money, I would have to start the backup, and then would be expected to answer any support tickets that came in or were pre-assigned for the dealership that I was at.

This would oftentimes lead to me having to wander around the dark and empty dealership to find the system, printer, or whatever wasn't working properly, and stay in that spot until the issue was fixed. This is when things would typically get creepy. We weren't supposed to disturb the dealership or turn on the main lights, all requests and requirements from the owner, so we had to navigate the place by flashlight,

and whatever backup lights happened to be on. Now, before I get into some of the creepiness that occurred during my work, I just want you all to visualize what every night was for me. My night started in a nice, bright, open server closet, and I would have to walk into a big, pitch-black and open building for the rest of the night. If you've ever seen the inside of a service department, for a dealership, you know that it's basically like a big empty warehouse. I had to walk around this with a flashlight to try and locate a single computer or a printer.

I know I'm repeating things, but it was creepy as hell. It was like walking around an abandoned building level of creepy. As stated, there were several incidents that made me regret ever coming to work, some unexplainable and some pretty well grounded in our reality. The first situation that I wanted to mention happened one night when I had a help ticket for one of the technician's machines. I don't remember the reported issue, but it was something simple like, the computer won't turn on. I grab what I need for the limited diagnostics that I could do on the computer in the dark, and headed out on to the service floor, looking for which system I was supposed to be.

be working on. I remember on this ticket, I was actually pretty thankful for the tech because he had the wherewithal to put a piece of paper over the screen that said, broken, which made it pretty obvious, which one I needed to fix. I went over to the computer and checked all the connections to make sure that they were fitted well, unplugged, re-plugged, it tested the outlet. The outlet checked out fine, the cable worked on my diagnostics machines, so I determined. I determined. that the issue was just the power supply for the computer, which then meant that I had to carry it out to the truck and get a replacement set up.

Not a huge deal, just tedious as I had to disconnect everything from the tower and then carry it outside. These things were pretty old, and they were designed to take a beating, so they were fairly heavy and bulky. So I was getting the system disconnected and moving things to pull it off of the stand, when I heard what sounded like footsteps coming from the back end of the service floor. The area in the back was designated for the details team,

basically the guys that got the cars that were for sale and cleaned them to look as shiny and appealing as they could. I shined my flashlight to the back for a moment to see if there was someone back there, but when I looked there wasn't anyone there. I shrugged it off and just assumed that I was hearing things, but then I heard the footsteps again. I quickly lifted my lights to look, and I swear that I saw a vague outline of a person walking behind one of the walls that cut off the break room.

Obviously, there wasn't supposed to be anyone here, so I was a bit concerned and confused. But ultimately my curiosity and thoughts of, I should really go see who that is got the best of me, and I walked away to go look. When I got to the back, I didn't see any trace of anyone or anything that looked like it would indicate someone was there. And then I looked over and noticed that the breakroom light was on. So I again just assumed that they went to the break room.

I pulled the door open and started in with, just so you know you scared the hell out of me, but stopped mid-sentence when I realized the room was empty. There was nobody there. No detail guys, no text. no intruders. Just nobody. The room was completely and totally still,

and honestly, it was cold as hell. As someone that had a firm belief in all things paranormal, I noped out of there as quickly as I could. I left the light on, shut the door, and just told myself that I would finish the work for the ticket, and spend the rest of that night in the server room. That wasn't quite the end of it, though. I took the old computer out to the truck and got them the replacement system,

but I had to leave my diagnostic system and other items on the text desk as I took it out. When I got back onto the floor with the new system and started back toward the desk, my work system, and my tools were on the floor, scattered. The diagnostic system looked like it had been thrown onto the concrete, and I mean thrown hard. The case on it was bent, the tools and wires were scattered around it, and it was pretty clearly damaged. I just shook my head, called myself clumsy, and was unwilling to admit that whatever happened was the doing of something paranormal. I got that new system set up and ready in literal record time.

Probably a record for the entire IT crew honestly, and I ran my happy behind back. back to the server closet and just kind of sat there. The other story that I'm wanting to mention is kind of similar, but ended in a completely different way. I was a bit more seasoned in my work for the dealerships. At this point, I think I'd been working there for five or so years, and I'd experienced quite a bit of weird things, mostly paranormal or just weird, and that does include the support tickets. That said, this was probably one of the scariest thing that had happened while I was working there, mostly because it could have gone horribly.

Like the previously described night, I was running my backups and had a support ticket for one of the service computers down on the floor. It was a network issue, which was typically just a bat cable. So I really didn't think much of it. I grabbed my Ethernet cables and testing tools just in case and walked down to the darkness to fix the system. As I'm sitting there, replacing the cable, I heard what sounded like the door being hit or kicked,

but I really wasn't 100% sure what it was. Like most nights, I decided to simply ignore it and say it was nothing important. But unlike most nights, the banging was followed up by the glass on the door shattering. As soon as I heard that, I knew that someone was breaking into the dealership, and I immediately jumped into fight or flight mode. At first I was thinking, I need to confront these people and scare them off.

But then it occurred to me that I was a scrawny guy in his mid-30s, with nothing more than an Ethernet cable to defend myself. And I decided that that would have been a very dumb idea. I ran as quickly as I could to get behind one of the half walls that blocked the main floor from some of the machines. And I think I literally crawled underneath one of them. I just remember sitting there and thinking that if these guys found me, I was going to die. No doubt about it. The other part of this situation was me trying to figure out why they would break in to a service department of a car dealership.

Then I heard what sounded like more glass shattering, and then more. Whoever this was, it seemed like they were going around to all of the customer cars that were in the bays and shattering the windows. After what felt like forever of them smashing windows, they stopped for a few moments and then proceeded to start trashing the toolboxes and throwing things in all directions. I just stayed there where I was, under what I believe to be a rotor-turning machine, and tried my best not to breathe. After a little bit, it seemed like whoever it was had trashed the entire service floor, and I could hear them breathing heavily, and then it sounded like they had just left. I think I stayed hidden for around 20 more minutes before I literally moved at all, and then took another five or so to just. stand up and see what the hell had happened. The service floor was a disaster.

I was right in my initial guess. Whoever this was had smashed every window on each car on the floor, and it looked like they had gone through every single toolbox, and just trashed everything. As soon as I was certain that the person was gone, I made a mad dash up to the main floor and grabbed one of the phones to call my boss. I told him what had happened, and he told me to call the police. He said he would notify the dealership's owner, and then I did as he said, I called the cops.

I waited for them outside of the door, and explained the whole thing to them when they got there. Then I had to re-explain it because they were a bit confused on why I was there, and what the hell had happened. My boss and the owner showed up at about the same time, and then I explained to them with the police there, and showed them the service floor. I think the cops were confused or suspicious of me, but the owner vouched for me, telling them that I was a contractor and had worked for them for a long time,

and that if I said it happened the way it did, then that's how it happened. Thankfully, and much to my surprise, they actually had decent cameras in the service area that saw everything, and it actually did happen like I had said it did. The guy broke the glass on the door, walked around and smashed as much as he could, and then he trashed the place, all without taking anything or looking like he had any direction other than destruction.

I remember having to sit with the owner as he made a note of everything and everyone that he needed to contact in the morning. And I recall him doing the math and saying that the amount of damage this guy had caused was insane. Apparently, this guy was actually a tech that had worked for the dealership, but had been fired about a week or so prior to the incident. I was told that he was caught stealing from a customer's car and another tech by the exact same cameras that caught him smashing the windows. Apparently, this was him getting revenge, or sticking it to the dealership for firing him. Obviously, he was arrested and charged once they could prove that it was him.

The customer cars all got repaired for free, and the techs that still had their jobs all got new tools. So I guess that's a silver lining to what happened, right? So these are just two of the incidents, and probably the two that stick out the most in my mind for my time working there. I don't work there anymore, at least not out in the field. I'm more of a desk worker for the same company now, and manage a small team of field techs. Thankfully, none of them have had to call me with anything anywhere near this exciting. And before you ask, yes, they still use magnetic tapes. This happened back when I was a little 13-year-old girl.

I was planning to go to a friend's house for her birthday party, and then four of us were going to be staying the night for a sleepover. I was getting to the point that I cared about my appearance, and I liked wearing makeup, so... I packed a little backpack with my cutest outfits and makeup. I was excited to have a makeover with some of my best friends. I got to the party, and there were already about a dozen or so people there. My best friend Lacey was ready and waiting for me to arrive,

and the birthday girl, Heather, greeted me and took the present from me. The theme for their birthday party was American Idol, if that tells you roughly the time frame that this took place. There were other mutual friends there as well, and some that I didn't really know, and also my crush. We had cake, and Heather opened the presents, and then we played some games, and she was kind enough to team me up with my crush as well.

One of the gifts that she got was a karaoke machine, so once all the games were done, and we set that up and all took turns with our goddoll. awful pre-teen singing and trying to find songs with curse words in it since we would be allowed to say them. As the party started dying down and people left, we would then be left with just the four of us, me, Heather, Lacey, and Tamara. We helped clean up a bit, and then Heather's parents helped us get set up in her room. She had a bed big enough for two, and they put an air mattress in there for the other two.

Her mom made us popcorn and laid out soda basically saying we could have the run of the house other than her bedroom, but after ten we had to stay quiet as her dad would have to work early the next morning. She also had an older brother,

but he had taken their van for the night, so it was just going to be us. We decided to watch a movie in the living room, a scary movie, of course, and then agreed to take it back to her bedroom so we could talk more and listen to music. We got set up in there, and we started talking about whatever young girls talked about,

boys, school, home life, rumors that we heard, things we wanted to try, and just stuff like that. Tamara had brought some teen magazines for us to read, and they had some different makeup and hairstyles that we all wanted to try on each other. We started doing each other's hair and makeup, and gossiping about some of the teachers and other people we didn't like, and just ultimately we're having a lot of fun, when we heard a loud banging coming from outside. Heather lived in a neighborhood where the houses were all very similar and very close together. Their backyard was pretty much shared with her neighbor behind them,

so when we heard the loud noise, she could pretty much pinpoint where it came from. We also had the window open because it was cooler, so the sound was amplified as well. She mentioned her neighbors argued a lot, so they were probably just fighting at the time. We continued on with our night when we again started hearing another loud, banging sound. That's when Lacey turned the subject to them, asking if she's ever been able to hear what the arguments were about, if they ever got physical or if they ever had to call the cops before. Heather assured us that it was never that bad, but they did just get loud, so sometimes she listened to them.

She couldn't always make out what they were saying, but sometimes they took it outside where she could. Lacey was wanting to listen to it at this point, and she stopped mid-eye shadow application to go to the window. We just kind of teased her for being so nosy, and tried to finish our makeup when Lacey said, Your neighbor is kind of creepy. Heather tried to say something about them not being all that bad,

but then Lacey cut her off saying that he was trying to get in through the window. That stopped all of us, and we went over to the window to see. Sure enough, there was a guy trying to open one of the windows from the outside. He was pulling on the sides, and when nothing was happening, we saw him pull something out of his pocket. We still don't know if it was a knife or key or whatever, but we watched him slice the screen and then beat on the glass. I remember looking over at Heather to gauge her reaction,

but she looked just as curious as us, but also a bit nervous. We continued to watch as the guy broke the window and started reaching around and climbing inside. Then we saw a woman inside run to the window, and start screaming at the guy. Once he got all the way in, she started shoving him back, and he grabbed her by the face or throat, and they moved away from the window. We couldn't see them at this point, but we could still hear them screaming.

Looking at Heather again and the fact that she looked scared, I asked her if we should tell someone as that did not look like a normal fight, and she agreed. agreed. She ran to grab her home phone, and we continued to watch to see if they would come back to the window. After a while, Heather came back and asked nervously if she should call 911, as she's never had to do that before. Neither had any of us, so we didn't know if we should or if we should wake up her parents. We didn't want to bother anybody or get in trouble for calling 911, but as we discussed it, Lacey said, he came back. So we all went back to the window and watched as the guy stopped at the window, looked down at something, and then walked over to the door next to the window and walked out of it.

He seemed to stand there after he closed the door for several seconds, and then looked up at the sky and wiped his face. As he turned away from the door, he looked around, and, to my horror, he looked right at us. That felt like forever as we all just sat there and stared back at each other. And now, it was still dark and there was a light above the door, but his facial features, we couldn't really make them out. Unfortunately, I don't know if we could say the same for him.

The awkward stare was finally broken when he looked around and quickly ran away from the door. However, instead of running towards the door, the driveway to leave, he walked towards Heather's house. I think we all noticed it at the same time and immediately moved away from the window, but Heather quickly ran out of the room. We then followed her to the living room where she was checking the front door to see if it was locked. As we all stood there trying to figure out what was going on, we started hearing the doorknop rattling. I think it was Tamara that led out a small yelp of sorts, and I was just frozen.

wasn't in fear. Lacey looked out the window and confirmed that it was the guy, and I remember that I started crying. I thought we had just witnessed something that we shouldn't, and now we were next. I ran back to Heather's room, planning to hide in the closet or under the bed, when I heard Heather yell and run into her parents' room banging on their door. I was just standing in the bedroom at the time, so I heard them open the door and ask what was wrong. and Heather tried to explain as she pulled them to the living room. I followed behind them. Lacey was now frozen standing back towards the kitchen entryway, and Tamara was crying too.

Heather's dad had a booming voice and said something like, You have five seconds to get off my property before I blow you to pieces. As he was saying this, her mom made us all go back down the hallway where the bedrooms were, and we could hear him opening the door. I heard him yelling as he ran outside while her mom made us all stay back. At this point, I had grabbed the phone from her room and gave it to her mom, and she called the cops. They showed up, and we had to explain what we had seen, but apparently we weren't the only ones that called. Someone else had called the cops, too, so while they were talking to all of us,

there were cops at the neighboring house, and the house next door where the scene had taken place. It was a little hard to sleep after that. As it turns out, the guy actually was her old neighbor, or at least her neighbor's boyfriend, as he didn't actually live there anymore. He tried and successfully broke in, and she caught him doing it. He had apparently strangled her and stabbed her, but she managed to survive, probably because of everyone else that called the cops on him. It was really strange because it was.

wasn't a bad neighborhood or anything like that. So it was unsettling for something like that to happen. Tamara wasn't allowed over there at night anymore, but mine and Lacey's parents were still cool about it. Hell, I don't blame them. It's not like it was their fault either. But we definitely made jokes about it growing up, about how she had one hell of a birthday party.

Thankfully, that guy went to jail for a long time, so I do hope he's forgotten our faces and that we never meet again. Whenever I was 18, I met this girl in an online game that lived in a different state, about 17 hours away. We talked for months about anything and everything, and got to know each other and became really good friends. We shared pictures and even video-chatted, so we knew that we were the real person.

and in the pictures. After a while, it became more than just a friendship, and we gave long-distance dating a try. We promised each other that, after we graduated, we would save up money and fly to be together in person. At the time, I'd been working with my dad at a shop that he owned part-time while I was still in school. Then, instead of finding another job,

I decided I would start working there full time to save up more money. When you don't have to drive to work and still live with your parents, you tend to have some extra spending money. I was thankful that they let me stick around, though. So, after a few months, I bought a ticket and I flew out to see her. It was definitely nerve-wracking at first, not seeing this person before, but it was a lot of fun. We did a lot of things, like going to the movies.

She suggested some of her favorite restaurants and parks, and we got to play the same game together, next to each other where we first met. I was there for about a week, but I loved it there. I loved the area, I loved the neighborhood, I loved the weather. It was late summer, early autumn, and it wasn't hot or huge.

like it was where I lived. I also fell even harder for her, so, as some young people in love do, we started making plans for me to move there. She was currently living with her mom, so we could both save up money to get a place of our own. After I went home, we started looking for places to apply and move to,

and started saving for the fees, deposits, and moving expenses. Now, I did have some belongings that I, of course, wanted to bring with me, as well as a car, so flying was going to be out of the question at the time. It took us a little longer than we wanted it to, but we had some things come up and halt our process. But then we were finally ready to sign for the move in the next spring. So it was my turn to pack up all my stuff and drive out there to start my life. I also figured once there, I could look for a job and maybe even go to college or something, if I found something that I wanted to pursue.

Now, of course, I'm 19, almost 20, full of excitement and love, and thought, sure, I'll be tired when I get there, but I could totally drive the 17 or so hours in one sitting and be fine. So I packed up my car and went to bed early the night before. I got up and had some coffee with my parents. Mom was still a little hesitant and worried about me going alone, but my dad was pretty happy for me. I grabbed some things to eat and energy drinks the day before as well, so I gave my parents' hugs goodbye, and I headed out.

Finally, I was on the road and felt really good about myself and my future. I had music blasting. Katie called me a few times, to see how I was doing, and I helped myself to some snacks to keep me going. I was definitely a little overconfident, though. This was the first time I had driven by myself longer than an hour, and I didn't really know how to pace myself. I also had trouble sleeping that night as I was so excited and nervous,

so I ended up sleeping in longer than I wanted to, and also got held up talking to my parents, so I left later than I wanted. I was about 12 hours in, and I was starting to feel it. I could feel my eyes getting heavy. It was already dark, and I was on a long stretch of highway that didn't have any exits coming up soon. I called Katie to talk to her for a bit,

even though I shouldn't talk on the phone while I was driving, but it was at least keeping me awake. She convinced me to stop and stop. sleep, though, just to make sure I was okay and didn't get into any accidents. So I did end up speaking to her until I found an exit that literally only had a gas station on the sign. I said I was just going to pull into that parking lot and sleep there for a few hours. Then I would get back on the road. So we said good night, and I made my way to the gas station. I followed the arrow to the right, from the exit, like the sign said, but there was no gas station.

I ended up finding a gravel path that led to just a concrete slab in a small shack-like building. There was no pump or any sign of one. The dilapidated building had a white sign that went across the top, but there was no text. It looked like this was once a gas station, or maybe just a convenience store, but it definitely wasn't at this point. While it looked a little creepy, I was too tired to care, so I got out to relieve myself before I went to sleep and then got back into my car. But as I was lying there, preparing to doze off, I got a strong smell of sulfur. It was just weird being where I was, so I got up and looked around,

and I didn't see anything. I wasn't the smartest at the time, but since I didn't immediately see anything and didn't care to check the building, I just made sure my doors were locked, tried to ignore the smell, and went back to sleep. I don't think I ever went into a deep sleep, or the dreams were very surreal,

because I started hearing what sounded like someone rubbing against my car. like running their hand and nails along the side of it. I opened my eyes and I continued to stare at the roof in my car, trying to process what was happening. That's when I started hearing whispering. I couldn't make out what was being said, or if it was even words or hanglish for that matter, but I again sat there listening,

not knowing what to do. But when I began hearing them pull on the passenger side door handle, that's when I sat up really quick. I looked over at the passenger door and didn't see anything. The whispering, the noises, it all stopped. I was pretty much parked parallel to the building, so I looked over to see if someone may have ran in there to hide, but I didn't see anything. Again, I was stupid and tired at the time and feeling like I could take on anyone that had the gall to mess with someone's car while they were in it. I decided to check it out and confront them. Don't worry, I still regret it to this day.

The front of it just had a small door with a window that was almost impossible to see through. I could, however, make out a small counter and shelves along the back. I tried to reach for the door and, to my surprise, it was unlocked. I started to slowly pull it open when I heard a blood-curdling scream come from inside. I looked up, just to see someone completely naked and nearly skin and bone run from the right side and jump and tumble over to the other side of the counter. I let go of the door and immediately ran back to my car. I locked the door, staring at the building to see if anyone would run over to my car when I heard a banging on my hatchback.

I looked back to see another, or maybe the same man, trying to climb on top of my car. My thought was, I was in the middle of nowhere. No one knows really where I am, so if anything happens to me, what the hell was I supposed to do? So, with only a couple hours of sleep, I started my car and burned out of the parking lot, watching the guy kind of tumbled backwards away from my car. I got on the road and I was shaking, trying to start the navigation back up, but not wanting to stop. I finally got it started and I just drove the rest of the way fully awake. I was terrified that they might try to come after me.

There weren't any cars around from what I remember, but I didn't know if there was somebody waiting or what. When the sun was finally peaking up, I called Katie and told her that I was already back on the road, and that I was a few hours out. I think she could tell that something was wrong, so I pulled over to explain what had happened. She was trying to assure me that it was probably just a homeless person that had taken over the place, and I probably spooked them too. It made sense to me at the time, so I calmed down. I found an open gas station to stop and got some more coffee and tried to get a hold of myself.

She had me send her my location, so she at least knew where I was. Something we probably should have done in the first place, and then I left again. By the way, being able to send your coordinates to send your coordinates to see, someone via text is an absolutely incredible tool and very good safety measure. Anyways, I finally got there with no further issues or scares, and after having lunch, I slept for the rest of the day. The kicker, though, was the next day when Katie told me that I actually wasn't too far from an asylum of some sort. It was on the same road, but probably a few miles up.

So I may have come into contact with the patient that somehow got loose, maybe. I'll never know because I never went back to look for them. It was just an all-around unpleasant experience, and I wouldn't suggest driving alone, at night, in some unknown area, outside of civilization to anyone. So this happened on my 30th birthday. At that point in my life, I was still single and had nothing really significant going on in it. In fact, I lived with my mom as she was a paraplegic due to a car accident,

so if I wasn't working, I was taking care of her. My grandmother also lived there and helped out, but she also had mobility issues. I'm thankful to have both wonderful women in my life, but I still did want a day or night off occasionally to myself, So, for my birthday, I just wanted to party, drink, and let loose a bit. Me and a couple of friends hit up a few local bars to start. We lived in a small town, so everyone knew everyone else. This didn't really work for me, because that meant that the dating pool was low, too.

So I suggested that we'd go a town or two over. New area, new bars, new people. right? We got to one and pretty much got kicked out of it due to some stupid drama already taking place, and my friend adding to it, but we finally found this little club that had a local band playing, so there was an entry cost. It wasn't much, and we all agreed that there would probably be more people there too, so we went for it. The band was all right. It was three people, a drummer, a bassist, and then a singer that also played guitar and keyboard. They probably could have done without the keyboard because it sounded off and didn't really co-with the songs.

The singer also sounded like he'd already had his share of drinks and was slurring his words. If I had to describe it, it was like a weird mix of metal bands with an EDM sound, but just done really bad. but they were new to this, so props to them for putting themselves out there. After a few drinks, I was standing in the crowd towards the back, dancing in place to the music, as it did seem to get better with alcohol, when a guy walked over and stood next to me. I glanced over and smiled as he nodded doing the same thing, and then said very loudly, these guys suck. It was kind of harsh, sure, but...

It made me laugh pretty hard. We started talking the best we could over the music. We talked about our favorite bands, the worst concerts that we'd been to, and just stupid stuff like that. We then started doing stupid and old dances, like disco style, and we're getting stares from people, but we also had a few join in with us. We were having a blast, and even had the singer from the band come out and hang with us. We were all drinking and having a good time, and then my friends slowly left. Some of them had kids and had to work the next day, so I understood why. They offered to take me home since I'd been drinking, but I wasn't ready to go home yet,

so I declined and said I would figure it out later. When my friends were leaving and telling me happy birthday, others heard them, including my new guy friend, and that caught me another round of drinks for free. We all did these shots and started dancing again. To be honest, this is kind of what I was wanting. I wanted to just get wasted and get stupid for the night, possibly hook up, and I think this guy was figuring that out too, by the way he was acting at this point.

The dancing, the touching, all of it. The only problem that I had was that I was not feeling. feeling good. I've been drunk before, but this was different. I felt dizzy and nauseous, and it was just like the room was spinning. I was trying to ignore it or move past it since this was my one night off. Shortly after, he asked me if I wanted to leave. I was pretty ready to go at that point, so thinking maybe afterwards I could get something to eat or take something. and maybe start feeling better, and then get home. It's not like I could drive myself anyways, so why not take the offer?

I walked back up to the bar because I wanted to get a bottle of soda, something I often did after drinking, and as the lady was grabbing it, she asked me if I was okay. I kind of laughed because I thought that she was just joking, and I said I was fine. She then motioned for me to lean in, and said something like, Be careful.

Don't be afraid to holler if you need help. Not knowing what she meant by this, I again just kind of laughed. I thanked her and paid for my soda and walked away. I walked back towards the guy and started talking about leaving when my phone started ringing. I noticed it was my mom, so I told him I had to take it since I was technically her caregiver and, of course.

She's my mom. I walked to the restroom to answer it when my mom started freaking out. She said that my grandmother was having troubles breathing, and that she needed to go to the hospital. She called an ambulance to come get her, of course, but she wouldn't be able to go without me taking her. I immediately started freaking out, and I told her I would get home as quickly as possible,

and then hung up the phone. To my surprise, This guy was standing at the end of the hall to the restrooms waiting for me, smiling. Choking back tears, I told him I had to get home because my grandma had to go to the hospital. He first said he was sorry to hear about her, but then joked about it not being my responsibility, and kind of pulled me closer to him. Not many people know or understand how I live, so I didn't take offense, and I explained him that I took care of them, so I had to go.

Hell, I even offered to give him my number so he could continue this later. Instead, he got a little more pushy, saying that someone else could get her there and that they didn't need me to take her. I then insisted that that person was me. I looked after them, and then he started getting mad. He made a comment about how it was. was a piss-poor excuse to get out of going with him and that next time I shouldn't lead someone on like that if all they wanted were free drinks.

Now, at this point, I'm still dizzy, drunk, flustered, and now I'm furious. I'm telling him that it wasn't an excuse and that he could go screw himself if he was that desperate. I started walking away from him and headed for the bar since it was closer to the back, as I was was going to get an Uber being that I was drunk. And then the lady at the bar again asked me if I was all right. I kind of started laying it all on her as to what was going on, and she offered to take me home. I said I didn't want to bother her or take her out of work, but she insisted.

She then mentioned that she was actually partial owner of the bar, so she could leave if she needed to, as someone else would be able to look after the place. I again told her that I appreciated it, and if I couldn't get an Uber, then I would take her up on her offer. As I started setting it up, that same guy walked up to me with a completely different demeanor. He apologized for his actions, and he said it was the alcohol, but offered to take me home since this was a serious situation. I accepted his apology, and almost took him up on the offer, but since he'd been drinking two, and it affected his personality the way that it had, I thought it probably wouldn't be a good idea.

I tried to phrase it that I didn't want to ruin his night, and risk him driving somewhere that he didn't know, but then mentioned that we should try an actual date. I did like him otherwise. He was attractive and funny, but maybe he was just a better person when not under the influence. This again, seemed to enrage him, and he started going off on me about being a gold's digger,

and that I was just mooching off of people. Dumb crap like that. My mom was now calling me back. I didn't know how to react to everything, so I just got sick. On the floor, and on this guy. Yeah. It was awful and embarrassing, but thankfully the lady ran around the other side of the bar and yelled at the guy to leave and started getting me to the restroom.

After I got cleaned up, she insisted on taking me home at this point, and I agreed. My head was still all over the place, but I called my mom and told her that I was on my way, and she confirmed that they had picked up my grandma already, and that she was stable. This all took place in her truck, and after I got off the phone, she started explaining her actions. She said she had seen that guy there before, and that she'd always had an off feeling about him with the way that he would just constantly buy girls' drinks, and sometimes he would end up leaving with them.

Some would decline his offer, and he would always act the same way. He got irrationally angry at the girl until one of them would leave, or he was escorted out. However, this time, when he picked up around, he was. of shots, she clearly saw him drop something in one of the glasses. She said she stopped and stared at him, and all he did was wink at her and walk off. She watched as he handed me the drink and kept an eye on me from then on. That's why she asked how I was feeling. She was worried that he had drugged me.

I told her I had felt sick and dizzy, which I didn't normally get like that, but I thought it was just because of the shots. since it was different from what I usually did. We got to my house, and I hugged her, and I thanked her for looking out for me. She gave me her phone number, and told me to call her if I needed help getting my car back home, but that it would be safe there until then,

and I went inside. Just to add, my grandmother did turn out okay. I did get my car back with no issues, and even when the creepy guy found me on fear, Facebook, I blocked him, and then never heard from him again. I don't know if he really did drug me, but either he did, and that explains why I felt the way that I did, or he at least got way too angry at the stupid things. Whichever one it was, I no longer wanted anything to do with him.

However, it wouldn't be the last time that I would hear about him. I went to that same bar several months later with a friend, and the owner asked, and the owner actually recognized me. She came over and told me some pretty shocking stuff. She had said that her bar, as well as a few others, had been investigated for reports of women being drugged, and it was traced back to those few local bars and clubs. She, of course, didn't have any physical proof,

but she did explain to the investigators her concerns, and suspects, and she actually helped with setting something up to catch this guy. They were successful. and he was not only arrested for that, but also IDed by someone who was drugged and then assaulted by him. Sure enough, I went and looked and found a news article about it later that night confirming it. It was surreal to me that I was most likely targeted for the same kind of scheme, but had managed to make it out of a bad situation. So there's my story of me being stupid and probably selfish, too.

Don't worry. I'm a lot more careful when I do go out now, and having my fiancé with me also helps out quite a bit. I took a spontaneous road trip to Arizona for a week several years ago with a homeless stranger. Let me preface this statement with, I only wanted to help him get something to eat, because he was looking through the trash outside the local library for food. I should have just given him his requested meal, large French fry, and a large chocolate shake for McDonald's. I was originally going to get him a subway, but he didn't want to eat that. Anyway, he was super scrawny and was wearing a Jamaican-looking beanie, but he was as white as could be. For some odd reason, I was inclined to see where he lived, because he made it sound like maybe he wasn't homeless.

I drove him to where he laid his head, which was an empty dirt field next to some trailer homes with a fence. I don't know what happened, but he kept telling me these stories about how something bad was going to happen in California. I really just thought that it sounded delusional, but I went along with him anyway. I ended up burning my battery out that night, but I think it was drained supernaturally somehow. I say this because a giant chunk of dirt or rock flew out of nowhere and hit my car. Pat, which was his name, asked if I had a dead brother, which I did. He told me that he was evil and that he had caused that. I was so confused.

He then proceeded to tell me that my parents wanted to murder me and that they weren't my real parents. I don't know why, but I knew this wasn't the case. even though I hated my parents' craziness at times. I can't explain why, but he convinced me to leave to Arizona from California, which I did. I really don't know why. I told him I wanted to get some things in my check first, but he wouldn't let me. This guy seemed to possess some sort of mind control over me,

as if my good judgment was overridden by paranoia. and I wasn't under the influence of anything. I never drove that long without stopping in my life. I didn't call my parents to tell them where I was leaving to, and they ended up putting out basically an APB on me. It was like I was an adult being kidnapped without force, but under duress due to mind control. In the week I was gone, I fasted the entire time,

except for some fruits and a protein bar that I had. I found in the trash, and I slept in my car. It was probably Tampa, Arizona, but for whatever reason he was trying to get to Phoenix. There was a school there, a school of culinary arts slash cordon blue. On the night that I was found, in my vehicle by the police, I was parked next to what appeared to be an abandoned train station, next to a railway. The scary part about this was that it was also next to a vehicle bridge, running almost parallel to the train tracks, upping the creepy factor. The kicker, and an ominous sign for alarm, was that there was actually a train running.

And I remember that on one of the cars there was an Illuminati pyramid with an all-seeing eye graffitied. As soon as the police arrived, there was a female officer that spoke. spoke to me as the mail arrested the man in the passenger's side. I told her that I felt that I was under mind control and that I didn't know this guy. But he swore that I was his girlfriend. Apparently he had a warrant for possession of meth. Once he was accosted, they told me to go to the Albertsons just down the street to throw away all of his nasty items in the dumpster.

He had dirty blankets crammed in my trunk, as well as he was. one of those New Testament Bibles. A part of me was still in shock over the whole situation and nervous to think of what may have happened to me. I left out a major detail that creeped me out so much,

and that's the fact that this guy kept talking to someone that I couldn't see, as if he were on an invisible Bluetooth. The weird thing is, the person he was talking to was named Heather, which is my name. He was actually yelling at her and demanding for help. It was very confusing, and I don't know if this guy was fully human.

Maybe he was some kind of alien hybrid. I don't know. Either way, I was happy to be safe, and I never set foot in that library again. So I've been listening to scary story channels for ages, and I've always been a skeptical believer in all the stories. I feel like some of them are certainly fiction, but others sounded more true than some, but I've always looked at them as probably made up. That actually changed recently for me because I had something happened to me that I would have

listened to and immediately thought it was fiction. It's not super eventful, it's actually pretty straightforward, but it was seriously weird and is legitimately the stuff of nightmares. It was a regular Wednesday night to begin with. I had woken up somewhere around three to what I would say was the most annoying feeling in the back of my throat. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night, your throat feeling like the Sahara, and you absolutely have to go downstairs and down half a gallon of water? Yeah, it was one of those nights.

It was my own fault. I had eaten a whole bag of pretzels and I knew that the amount of soap, sodium I had consumed was probably close to fatal. I grumbled to myself not wanting to leave the comfort of my bed, but after a few minutes of trying to ignore it and go back to sleep, I sighed and I relented. I stumbled my way down the stairs in the dark, nearly eating the hardwood floor in the hallway at the bottom. I made my way to the kitchen, grabbed a glass from the cabinet, and then walked over to the sink.

Now, like a lot of kitchens, there's a big window over my sink that faces out into the backyard, and at night it's pretty much pitch black. There's a small light on the shed that's on the far left side, but that's about it. Normally, I wouldn't even bother looking out back, or would and wouldn't think twice about seeing nothing. But this time, something actually did catch my eye. Right there, in the middle of my backyard, was a figure. Well, not a figure like something I couldn't make out. It was a person, and they were just standing there.

Seeing someone in my yard was enough to startle me in and of itself, but the creepiest part was that this person was wearing a mask. This mask was terrifying. It had a weird twisted jaw with spiked teeth that were stretched to, out, the eyes were hollow and dark and really just was terrifying. Now, my brain made me stand there and just kind of stare at this person wearing a weird mask that was standing in my backyard for several moments. At first I thought I was hallucinating or dreaming, or that I was just seeing something else

and only thinking it was a person in a mask. But as I sipped my water, watching this person, watching me, My mind finally clicked in to drive, and I realized that I was staring at a person, wearing a creepy mask, standing in my backyard. Like, this was not a normal thing to see at 3 in the morning. I started freaking out at this point, and I dashed back up the stairs to put on my pants and grab my phone on the way down. I had 911 already dialed, and I ran back to my window, but was surprised. surprised to see that the person was gone. The backyard was back to being empty, and there was zero trace of this masked person.

I had already dialed 911 at this point, and the operator was asking me where the emergency was, and I didn't want to just say, oh, never mind, I'm just crazy. So I explained to her that I saw a person in a mask in my backyard, but that they seemed to have left? She was a bit confused, but I explained that I saw this person, and when I went to grab my phone, they had disappeared. And after explaining things like the idiot that I am, she reassured me that they would send a unit to drive around my neighborhood. After I got off the phone with her, I stayed downstairs and just kind of watched out the front window, feeling paranoid and creeped out. After a while, the police had pulled up to my house and knocked on the door,

and I opened it to speak with them. The officer asked me a few questions, mostly about what I saw. I described to him the guy with the mask, described what else they were wearing to the best of my abilities, and I could tell by the look on the officer's face that he was as confused as I was. He even said that it sounded really strange, and then asked if it was okay if they have a look around the property. I told them that I had no issues with that.

After a few minutes, they had actually come back to the door, and the officer asked me if my gate had been broken. And I looked at him like, huh? He motioned for me to come out, and sure enough, my gate was busted. The fence was wooden, and the gate was fairly large, and the latch had been completely pulled from the wood, like pried out with a crowbar or something.

I told him that no, it wasn't broken like that before. And he then told me to stay there while they checked the backyard out really quick just in case. They looked around for a few moments, and when he came back, he asked me if what he'd found was the mask that I had seen. It was. It was that same creepy-ass mask the person was wearing. After that, they seemed to take this a bit more seriously. and they asked if they could come in and if I could give them an official statement.

That's pretty much where this ends, really. They took my statements, that gave me the report information for the insurance company, since the gate was destroyed, and they left, telling me to call them if I saw anything else. I have no idea if they ever found anything past this, as they have never contacted me about it. Now, I know that this sounds. Sounds like some creepy event from some dumb B-rated horror movie,

and I would have had that same thought had I read or heard this story. But I lived it. And even though nothing further has happened, what did happen was enough to be terrifying. I was paranoid in watching the backyard the entire rest of that night. But when morning came around, I was feeling better. Now, when I go to bed, I double-check all the night. the locks, and the gates that I had installed is reinforced way better than the old one.

I have no idea how they pried that gate open, or why they did it, but they did. I also installed a floodlight that is motion-activated that shines into the backyard, just in case I wake up at 3 in the morning again and feel the need to look outside. I love my night shifts. I've always been a night person, and waking me me. up before noon is impossible. Therefore, I typically worked third shifts or overnights. Overnights were better, because I didn't lose part of my day and typically didn't deal with a lot of customers, so it was a win-win for me. I've done several different odd jobs, too, that others may not have

wanted to, but I wasn't really bothered by much, so I was cool with it. The bigger problem, that I tended to have was the people. Part of the reason I worked these jobs was to avoid a lot of them, but the people I did come across were always so far out there and just kind of creepy, and I've got plenty to share. One of the earlier jobs that I did was working at the bookstore at the college that I attended. It was pretty cool because you could put part or all of the money you made towards your tuition, which helped cover some of the costs.

I also loved it because I'm an avid reader, so I was in there reading all night with other students that were like me. I all just wanted to be left alone. Perfect, right? However, it is a college town, and it's quite a popular one, so we would get the typical drunks roaming the streets out front. We could typically get them to leave with little confrontation, but sometimes others took authorities, but still nothing too crazy.

Except for this one guy that came by, that still freaks me out thinking about it. So, the bookstore also has a small cafe attached to it, and a lounge area kind of carved out on one side of the wall. It was like a cozy sunroom that you could sit in and read and study. Even when I was working, I would sit over there if no one else was. This one ordinary night, I was in the store putting back the rentals when I saw a guy walking by the window where the sunroom was at. There were a few streetlights and ones along the campus, so I could clearly see that someone was there.

I just saw him in my peripheral as he passed by, but then I saw him going backwards by the window again. And when I say going backwards, I mean it was not. like I was seeing him rewind. He was walking backwards, but his motions weren't natural. This, of course, got me to look over at him. He stopped at the window and was just staring, so I looked over at him to see if he would do or say something. Occasionally, people would just stop and look in for a bit and then move on, but this guy

became fixated on something. I tried turning around to follow his line of sight. But the only thing I could see in his direction was a motivational poster and a lamp. There was a desk with a stack of books, but I doubt that he could read them from that distance. So I turned back around to look at him, and he was still staring. I tapped on the window to possibly get his attention, but that did nothing. He didn't move. He didn't change his stare or even acknowledge me.

I stared back at him waiting to see what would happen next, and that's when I started noticing things that made me uncomfortable. This guy's face was drained of all color. He looked gray, and his face kind of looked like it was melting. I want to say it looked like it was drooping, but it wasn't like that. It kind of looked like it was just going to fall off. His eyes were the worst part. they looked cloudy and lifeless.

He didn't look old either. There are those people that just don't take care of themselves, and they end up looking a lot older than they actually are. That's kind of what I got from this guy. Maybe he was under the influence, though, and maybe that was why, but as mentioned, I've seen my share of addicts and drunks, and this just did not look like that. so as I continued to watch, he stood still, minus a slight sway staring up in the corner.

After some time, I decided to continue my work, thinking and hoping that he would eventually walk off, but every few minutes, I would look over and he would still be there. I walked back behind the counter and sat there for the remainder of the shift, because he was still there. He stood there for two more hours just staring. I was pretty good friends with the campus security guard that was working that night, and he usually stopped by the store before we left, so I called him from the store phone asking him to walk me out, just because of this guy.

I didn't know if he would do anything when we tried to leave, so I wanted someone there with me. So when Brian got there, he immediately saw the guy and didn't feel comfortable about it either. He wanted to call someone about it, but I figured he wasn't really doing anything, so they probably wouldn't care too much about it anyways. He agreed, and I finished closing stuff and then locked up. Right before I closed the gate and turned the light off, I looked over and the guy was still there.

Now, to leave, you had to walk to the left of the store where the entrance was. There was a solid wall there for the store, and the other wall had glass displays of awards, and in between was the swinging doors to enter. As we left the building, I stepped forward hesitantly, expecting to see this guy, but he was just gone. There were no signs of him. I walked over by the window to see if there was anything there. there, but there was nothing. There was nothing on the ground, nothing on the glass,

and the building was pretty long, so we wouldn't have had time to get out of view, as it was a straight path down. Even if he was running, I feel like we would have been able to see him. I didn't even see a car nearby that could have picked him up. He literally just vanished, and after that night, I never saw him again,

and neither did anyone else claim that they ever saw him. Another job that I worked at was with the sterilization team. We went in late at night, typically overnight, and cleaned places like restaurants, grocery stores, and even some hotels. It was actually a friend of mine that worked there and got me to apply at the time. Again, it wasn't too bad. That one I never dealt with customers, so it was headphones in. in at all times and just cleaning.

We typically didn't get anything too serious or gross, but sometimes the hotel rooms were questionable. Again, people are creepy and disgusting, but surprisingly, this one isn't about a person. It still is very strange, though. There was one restaurant that we cleaned on a weekly basis. It was a local chain, and the owner was very strict about how he wanted the place. cleaned and organized. Once we finished the cleaning, we had to make sure that everything was put up in a specific manner.

Otherwise, he would just complain. For example, the chairs had to be stacked in one spot specifically. The chairs were not to be put on the tables, even if they were completely cleaned or upside down. We had to use a specific cleaner because he thought the standard one we used was too abrasive, and it would take the coating off of the tables, that kind of stuff. So it probably took us the longest because of the specifics we had to follow,

but overall still not too big of a deal though. So when a radio would come on randomly in the restaurant, I first just thought it was something the owner set up to come on and maybe just set it for the wrong time. It was 1.23 a.m. when it would go off, but it was never an alarm sound or a specific song or anything, but really just static. I could hear it over my headphones and it actually startled me the first time. I went to find the source when I found one of those old antenna and dial radios that plugged in or took those giant batteries.

It looked ancient and it stuck out with the very modern look of this place. However, it was back in the kitchen, so then I just assumed someone probably brought it in to have something to listen to. Maybe. Either way, I walked up to it and turned it off and then moved on with my night. Then the next week rolled around, and as we cleaned, 1.23 a.m. rolled around, and it went off again. I went back to it to turn it off, and that's when I realized. There was no way to set some kind of alarm on the... dinosaur of a radio.

It was literally just an on-off switch, a tuner dial, and a switch to change from AM to FM. So, again, I just turned it off and moved on, thinking, maybe it had some kind of shorts, and then I forgot about it. But then, it happened thrice, at the same time. Curious, and maybe a little annoyed, I inspected it a little. little more. I noticed it was on FM, and the dial was actually on a station that I listened to frequently. It was some alternative rock station. Maybe it went down at some point for some reason.

I don't know if radio stations ever have to reboot or do maintenance or something to that effect, but that was my initial thought. However, while I was looking at this thing more, I noticed it wasn't just static. It was faint, but... I could hear people, or at least one person, talking. I tried to listen closer to make out what they were saying, but it was so quiet that turning it up only made the static louder, so I really couldn't decipher anything. I wanted to mess with the dials some,

but I'd been called for and knew that I needed to get back to work. So I just unplugged it and walked off. Thankfully, I guess, it happened. happened again, but this week we actually had an extra person with us, so the cleaning was getting done quicker than normal. I decided to take my last break a little earlier so I could go mess around with that radio again. And I walked in a little before 123, and I watched as it clicked on and the static started. That was the one that actually spooked me a bit. I felt like I was in some dumb, scary movie, and there was going to be a good,

ghost behind me. This time, however, I brought my old MP3 player that I had because you could listen to the radio on it, so I thought I would try going to the same station. And to my surprise, it was just actually playing music. There was no static, just a clear station. I even tried going to the numbers in between that one in the next station, but I could not replicate it on my device. So I again held its to my ear and tried to listen to what I was hearing.

This time, I could make out a few words and phrases. I got, listen, becoming, execution, right-of-way, being, or beings. Those are the ones that I can't remember. The guy sounded angry, though. Maybe it was the way it was coming through, but he reminded me of my dad. giving a stern talking, but this guy sounded like he was slowly becoming more and more enraged. And to add to it, I tried changing it to the AM stations, and it didn't change. I changed it back between the two, and the static was, well, static.

And the talking didn't sound any clearer or any worse. The only thing that would change it or stop it was unplugging it. but this time I wanted to see how long it would go and if it would even turn itself off before we left so I went ahead and turned it down a bit and I waited as I did some of the last cleaning bits in the kitchen to my surprise and after delaying some it did turn off at 1.46 a.m. It was on for exactly 23 minutes. Anyone know of any significance to that number? Anyways, we left for the night with nothing else weird happening. I was pretty invested, though, so I agreed to return to listen to the mystery radio for the fifth time.

But beforehand, I did try to replicate the station again at home. I tried in my car, in my stereo, in my room, but no luck. I tried all the stations in between, and I even spent way too long on the AM ones. but found nothing matching that guy's voice. It actually did happen again, right on schedule, but this time I told my friend, since they were on the same shift with me to come and check it out. I told them what had been happening,

and they found it even more interesting, because they'd cleaned here before, and they said that that had never occurred. I told them it's been doing it every time that I've been here. The kicker to this was the following two weeks. I didn't go there because I was sick one day, and I had called in on the other, and I was scheduled off. However, both of those days, my friend did work it, and they said that it never happened. Then I went back, and it happened again, like clockwork.

So now I feel like I'm being used as a channel or conduit of some sort for something to reach out. It's a weird feeling. I never really thought about that kind of stuff before until that moment. I didn't stay at that job, though, because they started cleaning a little more risky things, like crime scenes, and that I wasn't personally comfortable with, so I left. But I still listened to some of the creepy stories with my friends. I tried looking into the radio, the station,

the time, and even paranormal occurrences to see if there was any correlation that could possibly connect it, But the most I found was that the owner had a kid that died at a young age, and the date of his death was January 23rd. It may just be a coincidence, but I thought it was weird. And even if it was related, what significance does the angry guy with his words have? Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should look into?

I don't want to give too much information out about the restaurants, or the company, especially since they do more legal services now, but I'm still very curious, if not a bit creeped out by this occurrence. Maybe it's just me, though. Maybe I attract strange and bizarre people and things. I used to work for a company that did a lot of survey work out in the woods and national forest areas. Basically, we were paid to walk the trails, take pictures of everything around, and report anything we find back to the park services. It may seem like a really weird and pointless job, but it's more about trying to determine if we have people coming out and using the land for things they shouldn't, camping in parts of the forest that are considered off limits, and also to survey the wildlife.

Sometimes we get migratory animals that make nests in part of the trails that are fully open to the public, and if that happens, we have to shut that part of the trail off, as it is a felony to disturb them. It's one of those positions that most people really don't even know exists, and it's probably one of the most important ones for the park services in my area. Now, doing this job was mostly uneventful. It was a pretty by-the-book kind of position, where I just had to determine what information was relevant, irrelevant, and write out the reports with the photographs.

That may upset some people. A lot of people out there seem to believe that being out in the national parks all day every day must be super exciting and eventful. It's not. Go walk around in the woods for a full day, and then multiply what you see by five. And that's pretty much a normal week for us. And that said, we did see some weird stuff sometimes.

A lot of the time, we would just see homeless people trying to set up small gatherings in places they weren't allowed to, or drug addicts getting lost on the trails after a bad trip. Sometimes we would find things that were a bit odd, but again, it was mostly tame. I actually have two specific stories that I wanted to share that were both pretty creepy. The first one happened during one of my first outings. I was still working as a trainee, and I was required to go out with one of the more seasoned employees for the entire thing. They pretty much teamed you up with someone that. that was a senior for the first year,

then after that you were expected to do the work on your own. On my first survey, I was with an older gentleman named Dan. Dan had been doing this job for somewhere close to 12 or so years. Having done this for so long, there wasn't much that Dan wasn't accustomed to. He'd pretty much seen it all and knew exactly what to do in all situations. On the first outing, we had to camp out for a majority of the trip, as there weren't any nearby ranger stations for what we were doing,

which was fine by me, as I've always loved camping and hiking, hence why I took the position that I did. Anyways, we were set up on our second or third night. The tents were ready to go when we were finishing up dinner. At around the time the sun had fully set, and it was pitch black, and we were about ready to call it a night. Then, I started hearing what sounded like something rustling around a bit to our south. It was like something or someone was walking a bit beyond the tree line, and I couldn't see them.

This really isn't abnormal at all. When you're out in the woods, you encounter tons of wildlife, like dears, foxes, and typically you can just ignore it and continue on with your evening. I just assumed it was something like that, but when I looked over at Dan, I noticed he had his service weapon in his hand and was staring out into the trees. I asked him what was wrong, and no later than the last word exiting my mouth, did we hear what sounded like a child screaming at the top of their lungs. When I say screaming, I mean like they were yelling in absolute agony,

and it 100% sounded childlike, high-pitched, whiny, and followed with what almost sounded like a sobbing. I stood up, confused, and started looking over to where it had come from. Dan grabbed my arm and pulled me back down, as he watched the darkness. I asked him what the hell that was, and he just looked at me and said, I have no earthly idea,

but we're going to treat it like it was just a coyote and not pay it any more attention than we have. I was beyond confused, but the stern look that he was giving me was enough to tell me that I needed to follow his lead. I nodded, and we both turned in for the night. I will say that nothing else did happen. It never got any closer or made any other sounds,

and there was nothing around us in the morning, but I laid there the entire night with my firearm near my hand and ready, just in case. The second story happened closer to the end of my tenure with the company, and was probably the weirdest thing that any of us have ever found on one of our surveys. It started pretty normal. I was on the trip by myself, as I wasn't training anyone, and I was about done with the whole thing when, on one of my trips, I saw what looked like a small hole in the ground off the trails.

When I say off the trails, I mean practically in the middle of nowhere in this forest. There weren't a lot of people that came out this way, honestly. We'd never had any issues with the surveys out here. I walked over to the spot where it looked like it had either been dug out or sunken in, and I noticed that something was covered in the leaves that had collected there. I moved them all out of the way and was surprised to see what seriously looked like a manhole cover. It was round and metal, and was pretty damn heavy. I was able to lift it up and kind of roll it over to the side,

when I realized why it looked like the spot. had sunk in. Because it had. I was looking down a concrete tunnel into what kind of looked like a bunker that had somewhat collapsed inside. This area wasn't owned by anyone, and

there was no one that should have been living here, and this bunker wasn't marked on any of the maps or the documentation. I grabbed my radio when I called it into the station. They told me to stay there and informed me that they would call the authorities to check it out.

They did, and I was pretty spot on with my guess. It was a bunker. It was a nuclear fallout shelter, to be exact. One that apparently no one ever knew existed. It was built some time in the Cold War, most likely. Because of what it was, in the fact that no one knew what could be in the bunker, the officials had determined that they actually had. had to dig it up, which I completely understand.

There was no way of knowing if this was a stash house for illegal goods or anything potentially dangerous. They dug it up with an actual excavator, and they found some interesting things. First and foremost, they found the person that was living there. He was long dead, mostly just a skeleton at the point that we found him, which told me that he had probably passed away years ago and no one ever knew that he was there. It was pretty weird. They couldn't find anything that identified who he was,

why he was there, or honestly how he had managed to build and hide in this bunker for so long. There wasn't anything illegal in the bunker, just a lot of canned foods and books, as well as a few photos of seemingly random landscapes. It's the weirdest thing that this guy had managed to build this bunker that long ago and fly under the radar. My thoughts are that he built it and then just never left. But this begs the question of why.

Why did he decide to go underground like that? To the best of my knowledge, they never identified who he was at all, and he's basically marked as a John Doe. This was several years ago at this point, so he probably fell into the cold case files, as there wasn't any evidence of foul play, and he likely just died of natural causes. It's just that no one found him or knew he was there until the bunker had collapsed. In the end, he went off the grid, and even after death, that's where he remained. Back in the 90s, I worked a small, local store. sporting goods store.

It was decent-sized, but far from the ones like today. You know the ones. I worked there when I was younger because it was super laid back, and for the time I made decent money as a teenager. I was one of the stocking associates, so I would help open boxes, fill shelves, organize things like that. There were a lot of older folks that worked there, too, so it was easier to have us younger kids doing the heavy lifting.

While it was a job, I did still have fun with it, though, as I was pretty athletic. I loved baseball, and I played on my high school team as well as swimming, but I also liked hiking and hunting, too. So, when we got new supplies, it was almost like Christmas, as I went through the items. I checked what they did, tried them out, if they weren't in packaging, of course. The even better part about it all was that I worked the later shift, like 4 p.m. to midnight, because, again, the older employees didn't want to work that late. Now, there aren't a lot of people buying golf clubs and camping gear at 10 or 11 o'clock at night,

so most of us just fold around in the store with the supplies, or just red magazines from the front. But my boss, Rick, at the time, was also really cool about it. He typically stayed in his office after eight or nine and would come out occasionally to ask us to do something or just to check on us. But since he trusted us, we were pretty much left to our own devices. I liked checking out the camping equipment myself since I often went with my dad. We had a few full-sized tent set up on a wide metal shelf-flank. like awning. One of them I wanted to save up for because I thought it would be really convenient for us. It was a little longer and had a separator in the center, so it made it look like it was two separate rooms.

I think it was to be used more like a mudroom, or maybe to hold your belongings, so that they didn't take up so much space where you slept, but I thought it would work for us since I got mine from a thrift store, and it hardly zipped up. That way, we could share one or just have an extra place for our stuff and know that it was secure. We also sold guns and ammo at the time, so I was always telling my dad what we had and when we would get new items. These were just some of the few things I did in our downtime, but don't worry as it is all relevance to the story. So one of the other perks of working the late shift is doing inventory. The thing is, it was the 90s, so we did most of it by hand.

This also went overnight, so most of us took turns on that shift. I didn't mind doing it, but if I had a choice, I wouldn't have. Sometimes it was good, but other times were a struggle depending on what was going on the day before, or even who I worked with. You know the type, the ones that complain about everything, never stopped talking, They have a million problems. Call me whatever, but it can make a shift drag. So it was my turn to do inventory, and I was working with Ed, Casey, and Laura.

We did it by department to make sure that we covered each part and did it correctly, with two of us in one department at a time. As we made our way around the store, we got to the camping equipment. The tents that were on display weren't part of the inventory count, so normally I wouldn't even have given them a second glance. But I saw a backpack sitting next to one of them. When I grabbed it, it felt heavy. And I also didn't see any tags on it like it was one of ours.

So I just assumed that someone had left their bag there. I stopped to bring it to the front to show Rick, and with him standing there, he suggested that I open it to see if there was any identification in it. There were no IDs or wallets in it, but plenty of small food items, like jerky, chips, candy bars, similar to the impulse items and some other random things like a pocket knife, toilet paper, and a towel. We all thought that maybe whomever it was was planning on stealing stuff, but got spooked and just decided to ditch the bag.

Some of the items could have been from our store, but we had no way of knowing for sure. sure. So, Rick took the bag, and we put it in his office as we continued on as normal. We noticed a few other items in the camping supplies and other departments toward the back that seemed out of place, too. One of the things we noticed was a step-ladder that employees used to get stuff off the top shelves for customers, or for stocking stuff in the back, and it was sitting in the middle of an aisle. Of course, that being a safe, hazard, I asked on the walkie if anyone was using it or who left it out, and no one said

that they had used it. I was annoyed at first because either someone was lying or someone from the day crew left it out, but I just took it to the back and moved on. After several long hours, we finally finished the inventory at around four in the morning. We were delayed a few times due to unrelated situations, and maybe a few of us slacking off, but we did get it done. The store was going to be opening at 8 that morning, and I was scheduled to work later that evening,

so I was pretty ready to leave. We did a final walk-through to make sure all the lights were off and things were locked up. As I mentioned, this was back in the 90s, so our systems were pretty simple, lock and keys tile security. Hell, we only had cameras at the door and registers. Most of the security we had in the store was motion sensor lights.

When we turned off the main lights, we had the two towards the sides that were always on, and the others kicked on only if there was motion. So after turning off the lights, we all walked to the front to get ready to leave, and Rick pointed to the back mentioning that a light was on. I poked fun at one of the girls because they were supposed to turn it off, and they told me that they did. so I just walked back to the office to turn it off when I noticed it was actually off

since that meant that motion set it off I went back and told Rick and I remember we all stood there thinking out loud what could have set it off did something fall off a shelf maybe the AC caused something to shift or move and caused it to flick on but Rick was more than ready to go home

and sleep in a bed instead of an office chair and just said not to worry about it. So we all started to head out. And we all got outside into our cars when I realized that I couldn't find my keys. It was like I was meant to stay there until my next shift with how things were going. It was four in the morning after all. So I'm sure my mind wasn't all there, and I just forgot to grab them from my locker. So I had to quickly flag down Rick before he left.

Thankfully, I caught him. and he handed me the keys to go in and get them. I ran up to the store, unlocked it and walked in, and began to run towards the back when I noticed again that the light in the camping gear had kicked on. I tried to ignore it as I went to get my keys, but when I came back,

I heard something that sounded like falling. I couldn't not check it out at this point. I swiftly walked over to it and again saw the step ladder sitting by the tent shelf, knocked over on its side. Now, this time, I knew for a fact that I had put the ladder up, so I was confused and cautious about what to do next. As I stood there staring down the aisle,

I started hearing what sounded like someone very quietly talking to themselves, or whispering very softly. I couldn't make out any of the words, but I could definitely tell that it was there. I either had the choice of walking to the front, calling 911, leaving or attempting to confront whatever it was. I was young and naive, but I thought I could definitely handle whatever it was and decided to proceed. I walked up to the stepladder, and I looked around to see the tent slightly moving. Since you had to use the step ladder to get closer to it, I moved it to the side, and in the

most threatening voice that I could muster, I yelled at the person to show themselves. After what felt like forever, whoever was in there stopped moving, slowly unzipped the tent, and tried to quickly jump out of it. I think they thought that they could make the jump, but quickly stumbled into the shelf in front of us knocking it over. He quickly ran off, and I took chase as he ran to the employee back room. As I ran around the corner, I heard a familiar voice shout out for me, and I turned around to see Rick running towards me. I tried to explain to him what had happened when he told me to go call 911 while he stood at the doors.

There was only one exit in the back. That was an emergency exit, but it was locked when we were closed, so if he was going to get out, he would have to come back to where Rick was now standing. I went and called 911, and while I was on the phone with them, I could hear shouting.

Once I finished, I set the phone down like the operator, told me to, and I ran out to check on Rick to see him wrestling someone to the ground. So, to not turn this into a pay-per-view match, the cop showed up and restrained the guy as we gave our side of things. The guy looked normal for the most part. He had decent-looking clothes on, he had a buzz cut in a short beard, and he seemed pretty coherent. What we learned, though, was he looked clean because he had taken some of the hunting clothes that we sold. He was wearing a pair of camo pants and a fisherman shirt.

His clothes and some of his claimed belongings were in the tent, including a razor, some soap, and a few things of food. We also learned that the backpack was his, and he admitted that he had taken some items from the store. This man had been living in the tent for a few weeks now. He came in at some point during the day and knew where to stay hidden until we closed up. However, he didn't realize that we were going to be there late doing the inventory, so we had to quickly scramble to get in the tent and forgot to grab his backpack.

I've thought about it on occasions because the guy had a knife in the backpack as well. If he'd had it, would he have attempted to use it on one of us? And something even more startling to me was, I had never seen this guy before. We had regulars, and I regularly saw people. come and go, but for two weeks, this guy was here daily and I never saw him. It was honestly kind of bizarre. It definitely made me more aware of my surroundings, but I always remember this, and I do play

different scenarios in my head about what could have happened. Back in the late 2000s, me and my then-boyfriend Omar were taking an impromptu road trip, and we just wanted to get away. so we just set off heading east and whatever direction we were pulled, and stopped at places we were drawn to. We didn't have a lot of money, so we slept in our car a lot, which was fine, as it gave us more time to look around at places to go. However, our idea of places to go also included urban exploring.

It was fun enough finding places local to explore, but even better went out of state. Places you've never been to or heard anything of, and just going in blind. We were driving through Mississippi at the time when our car started having issues and overheating. Thankfully, we were near an exit, so we got off the freeway,

and, with our hazards on, slowly drove into the closest parking lot and turned the car off. We had to figure out what was wrong with our car, car and most likely without moving it, so we got directions to a nearby gas station and started walking. I was so incredibly thankful it was September, so it wasn't very hot. On our way there, we noticed what looked like this big old house with the fenced-in yard, until we started looking at it more. It was actually an old church that looked like it had been closed or abandoned for a while. At that moment, we could read each other's minds.

We knew we were going to be staying in this little town for the night. We got to the gas station where they thankfully sold antifreeze and started our walk back. On our way, we looked around to see if there was anyone watching. We checked for no trespassing signs and looked for the best way in. However, the best way in would turn out to be the front gate. didn't have a lock or a sign on it. Once we got back to the car, we poured in the antifreeze, and thankfully that seemed to help. We decided to eat while we were there, and then left to find a good place to leave the car while we went exploring.

Turns out, there was a small motel not far off from the church, so he agreed to park it there. It was already evening when we first pulled into that first place. parking lot, so we didn't have to wait much longer until it got dark. Once we were good and didn't see anyone loitering around the motel, I emptied my purse, so all that I had on me was my pepper spray and a flashlight, and we left. As we walked to the church, we opened the gate and quickly ran up to the door to get in. The door looked like someone did a poor attempt at boarding it up, but missed one whole side of the frame as we could slip through and inside easily. Once in, I immediately noticed how creepy the main hall was.

There was spray paint on the walls that said welcome. It looked like someone had taken the boards that covered the windows and made a sign that, again, said something like, she welcomes all here. It was weird, but probably people that snuck in trying to, to make a church creepier than it already was. We walked over to the right that had a couple of rooms. It looked like it was for children based on the decorations and the bright-colored paint that was peeling from the wall.

The first room seemed to have a really old TV in it, but the actual center of it was busted out. There were a few toys in a small chest in the back as well, as a little cubby shelf with different needs. names on it. Don't get me wrong, I love doing this, but seeing places like this with a name attached to it, it gives me a weird feeling. It makes it more real or brings it back to life, in a sense. I proceeded down to the next room, which was when things started getting weird. The room had been stripped. The cubbies and shelves on the wall had been all ripped out,

The light fixtures and wiring seemed completely gone. The carpet had started being ripped up where it could be, leaving the bare wooden flooring underneath. But the creepy part was in the middle of the room. There was a pile of toys, or rather things. More specifically, it looked like anything with a face. Dolls, cars with faces, VHS tapes with faces, on them, the clock with literal hands in it and eyes, all anything you could really think of.

However, it was all red. It looked like someone had poured buckets of red paint on this stuff and then just left it. I thought that once again it was just someone trying to be creepy, so I just left it. As Omar and I started walking to check out the other side, we could smell something that was like an incense or a candle. Going further in the hallway, though, we couldn't smell it, and we definitely couldn't smell it on the other side either. Curious to know what it was, though,

we decided to go to the only other place left, which appeared to be the main chapel area. We slowly creaked the doors open and went in cautiously. This is where we became a little more on alert, At the altar, we could see what looked like lit candles. Omar was hesitant to continue at first, worried that someone could be in here, but it wasn't that big and I couldn't see anyone from where I was. So, we agreed to walk further in together. As we did, I started to notice weird symbols in the walls, and they appeared to be written in the red paint,

just like the room that we first saw. Omar then pointed at the pews that also had the symbols all over them. I was starting to get some weird vibes from this place at this point. I had never seen these symbols before. I was far from being well-versed in different religions, but these all seemed more cryptic. However, the altar is where I waved the flag. From the entrance, I could see the candles but couldn't really make out anything else up there.

Once we approached it, there was a pew that was up there but still facing the same way. I was startled at first because there was a tarp over it, and it looked like someone was underneath it. Omar softly kicked the pew to see if whatever was under there would budge. When nothing happened, he slowly pulled the tarp. back. I almost got sick. It looked like a pig that had been dead for a very long time, which explained why we couldn't really smell anything. The podium, though, had a disturbing framed picture on it. It was a naked woman that looked like she'd had a long cut from her neck to her belly button. She looked like she was sitting on one of these pews, legs straight down and

crossed at the ankles, and arms. stretched out across the back rest. However, she was alive and smiling. The podium also had what we were smelling. It was an incense that was almost out. And the candles that we saw were those fake battery-powered ones. At this point, we were on edge. This meant that someone had to have been there fairly recently.

Omar didn't want to stick around anymore, and I certainly didn't want to get to know anyone that did this, so we bounced. We quickly and as quietly as we could went right back out the front door. Omar had me go out the door first, and when I turned back to hold the board open some, I noticed he was looking to the left. I told him to come on when he finally walked out and pushed me towards the gate. Once we got out, we took him. off to our car and when I thought we were just going to chill for a bit, he actually drove off.

He said he would feel more comfortable if we got away from there. He didn't talk much while he was driving, so I did a lot of the talking, trying to just make jokes about what we saw to lighten the mood. I think we went a few more exits before we ended up at another hotel. After we slept that night and headed off the next morning, it was at that time that he finally told me what was wrong. He thought he had heard a noise when we were leaving, and when he looked over, he saw a man in a dark blue parka-looking thing, holding a huge knife. He was just watching us leave.

He wasn't comfortable staying there in case they came looking for us, so that's why we left. He hadn't said anything to me because he didn't want me to worry. I was okay with that, too. I felt bad that he had to carry that on his own, but I'm thankful that he was watching out for us. We still like to do this, and it hasn't stopped us, but if we see anything even remotely off, it's not worth the risk, so we leave. And thankfully, we haven't run into any more pigs since. First, thank you, Raven, for all of your content.

I binge episodes while working my corporate job. Well, I would like to say thank you, Samantha, for sending me the story, and for the kind words. I've been enamored with the paranormal since a very young age. I wanted to be a paranormal investigator when I was a young child, but I went to the corporate route instead. The story begins in 2008. My father's younger sister at the time, 39, passed away. Through the years of her young life, she had lived what they call fast and very hard. She was mixed up with drugs and alcohol, among other things.

Because of the abuse to her body, she developed some illnesses. She knew that she would not live to be an old woman. She had two young daughters, who she asked my parents to take in if and when anything ever happened to her. This was a constant thought for her, and she would call my dad often to remind him about the girls. There had been a few scares where she would be put in the hospital, but she always made it out. That was until 2008, when she succumbed to her illnesses and addiction.

I would get into the details of the death, but it's just an entire other story that could be told. Fast forward to a few months later, The girls lived with my family and things were starting to become normal. One day, my mom, my sister, four at the time, and I were watching TV. The way the living room was set up, the chair I was on was in front of the couch. The couch is where my mom and my sister were sitting. I was casually watching whatever program it was when I heard someone say my name.

I replied to my mom with what. She said that she didn't say anything. I was so confused because I was sure that I heard my name. I shrugged it off. A few minutes later, my sister says, Auntie says that she loves and misses her babies, and to tell them that she says hi, my mom and I were stunned.

How could she possibly know any of that? How could she think of that on her own? She wasn't even in school yet at the time. And then it hit me. I had heard my name called first. Could it have been possible that my aunt was trying to reach me first, but when she couldn't get through to me, went to my younger sister? That is my belief.

So after that, things were calm again. When one day I got a new digital camera, a friend decided to come over, and we had some wine and decided to try out the camera. We posed in silly fashion with the wine bottle, wine glasses, and so on, we steadily added our photos to MySpace at the time.

The next day, I discovered that the camera was faulty and didn't work correctly, so I returned it along with the memory card that held the photos. A few days later, while browsing MySpace and adoring the new photos that my friend uploaded of us, I noticed something. In one frame,

you can see me and him in the picture, and the TV was off. The next frame it's us again, but the TV appears on. The next frame, the TV is off again. In the image where the TV appeared on, I looked a little closer, and in the TV, there clear as day, was the image of my late aunt. My aunt was in the TV. The TV was not on, but that one photo she is there in it. We showed everyone we knew.

It was super emotional, and everyone was. agreed that it was definitely her. It was the strangest thing. Even more odd, a few months after that, those photos were mysteriously deleted off of my friend's MySpace page before I could download them. And I had returned the memory card that contained the original, so it's lost in cyberspace now.

The strangest thing about that day that we didn't realize was that those photos were taken on what would have been, my aunt's 40th birthday. It has become an ongoing joke in my family that my birthdays are cursed. Just about every year, something happens on my birthday, be it weird, disastrous, creepy, frustrating. There was just always something memorable there. I wasn't upset about it, though.

Maybe as a kid, I probably took it differently. but now, as an adult, I just grow to expect it, and I can't even get mad about it anymore. I wanted to share some of the weird or incidents that occurred, though. For this story, I have to explain my appearance, at least as a young child. My uncle always poked fun at me, calling me pretty boy. I had super curly blonde hair. Trimming it was always difficult to do,

partially because I had troubles holding still and also because it was hard to make it even, I suppose. I also have bright green eyes. I still have the bright green eyes, and some people thought that I edited my pictures because of how they looked. I also had pale skin, but freckles everywhere. Both of my parents are gingers. I don't know where the blonde hair came from, though.

So when my parents took me to places like the doctors or to get my hair cut, or to even get family photos taken, they always made comments about how adorable I was and confused me for a girl. That didn't stop them from saying I should be in pageants or that I would be great as a model. Just weird stuff like that. My parents just kind of took the comments in stride, thanked them, and moved on. As a young child, I didn't understand what they were talking about, but it did get annoying as I grew up, which is actually why I started shaving my head. Anyways, so for one of my birthday parties as a kid, my parents took me to this local arcade place.

It was kind of like Chucky Cheese, but without the animatronics and with more games. They had a few entertainers that were there on random days too. There was a balloon guy one time that made balloon animals and hats. There was another guy that did magic tricks and another that played a bunch of different musical instruments at the same time. So there were a couple of people like that there as well. All in all, the party itself was great up until the end. My mom was talking to another parent, and I told them that I wanted more nuggets before we left, or something like that, and she told me to wait or ask my dad.

I looked around as much as a kid would, and when I couldn't find him, I decided to just wander off to see if I could find some tokens on the ground or games to play. While I was pretty much crawling on the ground, a woman crouched down next to me holding a token and asked me if I was looking for it. I smiled and took it from her, and then remembered looking around for my favorite game to play. It was this game where you were a bear, and you had to basically use a steering wheel as a controller to go left and right

to catch apples in your mouth. I had won a lot of tickets from it before, so I usually spent most of my tokens on it, expecting it to work again. As I walked over to it, this woman followed me and again crouched down to me, be at eye level with me. She told me happy birthday, and I asked her how she knew,

and she said because she was invited, as she was part of my family. I asked who she was, since I didn't recognize her, and all that she said was that she was my aunt, my dad's sister. That was all the verification I really needed at the time, so I said hi and continued playing the game.

After a few minutes, she asked me where my parents were, and I said that I couldn't find my dad, and my mom was talking to someone else. She then made comments about how pretty I was, and that I could make a lot of people happy. Confused by this, I asked her what she meant, and she vaguely talked about other mommies and daddies that wanted a kid to make them happy, too. I remember at this point thinking, Cool, I don't know what I have to do with any of this, so I continued to play the game. She then asked if I would like to go with her to meet new moms and dads, and I said that I liked mine,

but she said that I wouldn't have a choice anyways, because they're going to be having another kid, which meant that I wasn't making them happy anymore. This is where she got my attention. I was scared that I was in trouble or that my parents didn't really love me anymore. She told me that's why I needed to go with her now, so that way I could pick my new parents. Through tears and heartbreak, I agreed and took her hand as we walked out of the building. I heard screaming as we left, but didn't pay any attention to it at the time,

until I clearly heard my dad's booming voice yell my name. I looked up to see him running towards us, and the woman yanked on my arm, nearly dragging me as she ran towards her van. She tried shuffling to open the door, but my dad had caught up to us, grabbing her by the wrist, and pulling me back and telling me to go to my mom.

I shuffled back towards her as I saw her in the doorway crying, and she grabbed onto me tightly. My dad was then yelling at this woman asking who the hell she was, all while she was begging him to let her go. The cops showed up, and I was brought back inside with my mom as they talked to my dad. I told them what the lady had told me, and they explained that none of that was true. They said people don't have more kids because they don't want the ones they already had, but that it could be just because they wanted more kids to love, things like that. My mom also told me that she started looking for me at some point in time that I was playing the game,

since it was towards the front, and she was more in the back by the prize room. That was when she saw me walking out with a woman, and she could tell that I looked sad or scared. My dad was also talking to someone but was closer to the front. front, so my mom yelled at him and pointed towards me. And that was when my dad took off toward us. I don't know whatever happened to that lady, but let me tell you my surprise and fear when I learned about a week or two later that my parents were having another kid. They may have had to have calmed me down a bit on that one.

Again, now it's a joke in the family when something happens, that they're just going to trade me in. even now at 27. Another event that occurred was at my birthday party, at around age 14, I think. I handed out invitations to those that I wanted to go in between classes. If I didn't give them to everyone in the classroom, then the teacher wouldn't let us pass them out, to be fair. I was limited on the amount of people I could invite, which was fine, because there wasn't a huge list of people I really wanted to be there anyways. In fact, there was this one kid that I was semi-friends with.

We'll call him Chad. Chad was actually a new student, so no one really knew him there, but he quickly tried to fit in with different clicks to make friends. At least he tried, instead of just sitting there every day waiting to be invited to something. I can at least give him that. However, his personality, his jokes, and just some of his demeanor, it was just weird, and maybe a little above our age. Some of us had crushes and boyfriends or girlfriends, sure, but he was very sexual with his comments. Like, way more colorful and in depth than what you would expect to 13 or 14-year-old to.

know about or to say. Like, even for me and my friends being raunchy, it was uncomfortable. So I didn't really hang out with him outside of school, therefore I also didn't initially invite him to my party, and didn't really think twice about it either. What I didn't realize, though, was that my mom knew his mom from the PTA meetings, and he, of course, was a completely different kid around my mom. mom. She saw this kind and polite boy that was new to the community, and that maybe that I just didn't know him enough and invited him to my party. Yay. My party was on a Saturday, and she decided

not to bring this up until the Friday before. I explained to her that he was weird, but at that age, I think I was too embarrassed to repeat some of the things that he had said or done. So, she was She just said that I should get to know him, and that this was the best way to do it. Not that I had a choice, but I reluctantly agreed. Enter the day of the party. Everything was going great. My friends all showed up, and we were having a great time. My little sister was six or seven, so she was occupied with her own toys and games,

and being watched by my grandmother for the most part. Then, Chad showed up. It was normal at first. He came over, said hi. He had brought a present and acted normal throughout cake and ice cream and the games. Then, when we were all left to our own devices, I was just hanging out in our tree with my friends. We had a little ladder set up that we could climb the trunk and just sit up in the tree.

Chad joined us, and he made some weird comments about the few girls that were there that I'm not willing to repeat. At the time, I did have a crush on one of them, so I didn't like it, and I basically told him to stop because it was messed up. That's when he made a similar comment about my little sister. At that point, I could tell my friends were uncomfortable, too, so I remembered telling him that he was gross, that that was my little sister, and that that was why no one liked him around. It was awkward for a moment, but Chad then jumped out of the tree, still smiling as he made a motion like he was shooting himself in the head, and then walked off into my house. My friends all had mixed reactions to it, but we just tried to move on. After a while of us not seeing him come back out, I decided to go check on him to make sure he wasn't doing something weird. when I started hearing my mom and grandma shouting back and forth about something.

They sounded scared, so I went to find them to see them banging on the door to my sister's room, and my sister crying from the other side of it. When my mom noticed me standing there, she yelled at me to go get my dad, so I ran off to find him. And we both ran back to my sister's room, where my grandma was now on the phone with 911, and my dad immediately started body slamming the door. He finally broke it down, and he was hit with a bunch of smoke. Something in the room had caught fire and the door was locked,

and no one knew how it happened. My grandma felt really bad for the longest time because she thought that she may have accidentally locked it when she left the room, but it was one of those knobs that you have to push in and turn, so you couldn't really do it by accident. She also typically left the door open in case she woke up or something and could hear her coming out. After the police came and they all talked about it, they determined that the fire was intentionally set after finding candle wax and a burnt stuffed animal.

There was also something else that was part of the origin of the fire, but I don't remember it now. Also, it was just by her toy chest and dresser, which is why there was so much smoke, but thankfully it didn't damage much other than her toys, some of her clothes and then part of the wall. Anyways, after all this, we had to end the party, and have people go home early, all while having to explain to the parents why this was happening. My mom was eyeballing all of my friends

trying to figure out who could have done it. It was pretty terrifying as well as embarrassing, having your mom pretty much interrogate your friends and their parents. After everyone was gone, then they talked to me about what had happened and told me because of how serious of a situation it was. We had to think about who all went in and out of the house, asked me if I thought or knew anyone that would try anything like that, and so forth.

And that's when, going through the order of things, I had mentioned Chad going into the house, and I went in there after a while. since he hadn't come out. After describing which one he was to my grandmother, she said that she saw him coming out of the hallway, but thought that he had just used the bathroom, which was in the same hall as mine in my sister's room. That's when we realized that he was nowhere to be found after he left the house. His mom never even showed up to get him.

He was just gone. Then I had to tell them more about him and why I didn't really like him. him, which was awkward as hell. So, after my mom did her thing and tracked his house down, his mom got him to admit what he had done. He really tried to light my sister, her hell, my whole house on fire, for the fun of it. I didn't see him in school after that, but we did get an apology letter in the mail from his mom, as well as a gift card to replace some of the things that were lost. After that, my mom stopped doubting me when I told her I didn't like someone in my class.

So, yeah, that's a few of the crazy events for you. That's literally why I tell my wife to just treat my birthday like every other day. That way, we're less likely to spontaneously combust or something. I might share some more birthday horror stories with you, if you ever want them. For context, I am now a 45-year-old man. living in a Baltimore suburb. I was 19 or 20 when this happened. I just got off work at Sears Auto Center.

I was tired and covered in Greece and all of that good stuff that comes from working on cars all day. As I left the parking lot, I noticed a big, older model Ford Bronco tailgating me, and as I pulled up to the stoplight, I changed lanes to get this guy off my back end. I felt the eyes these guys gazing at me. I'm not going to lie, I was scared. I didn't want to look at them. They started screaming at me and I still wouldn't look, but finally I was forced to look once they threw a beer bottle at my car.

I looked over and the passenger yelled at me, You cut us off, and now we're going to kill you, followed by a slur that I'm not going to repeat. I immediately said, Uh, no, dude, I didn't cut you off. Stop throwing stuff at my car. The light turned green and I thought they were going to follow me for sure. I was right.

Now this was in 1998, way before cell phones, so I couldn't call for help. These guys were as close to me as possible without hitting my bumper. It was about 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night, so there was hardly any traffic on the road. I was terrified. I did, however, have my softball gear in the car, and I pulled my aluminum bat close to me in case I needed it. These guys seriously wanted to hurt me, and I didn't want them to follow me to my house,

so I desperately tried to lose them. Their truck was huge, and I couldn't outrun them in my 89 Sundance. I wanted to drive to the police station, hoping these guys would just figure out what I was doing and get lost quickly. However, I did have an ounce of weed on me, so I couldn't risk getting arrested again for weed. I decided the only thing I could do was call their bluff. If they wanted it, they were going to get it. I could hear them screaming and throwing stuff at my car for what seemed to be forever,

but it was probably more like seven minutes. They kept calling me the slur. I guess that that was their go-to insult. Now, I'm not a huge guy, but I'm not scrawny either. I clutched my bat tight to my body as I drove thinking about the best place to stop and just get this over with. I pulled into a small cemetery that backs to some woods. The small road does a loop around the cemetery, one way in and one way out. They kept screaming,

We're going to get you, slur, and laughing uncontrollably. However, the laughing stopped when I slowed down and came to a stop. Once I put my car in park, I heard the guy in the passenger seats say, What the hell? I knew it then that these were just scared little guys. I opened my car and jumped out aggressively. The driver then said, Oh, screw this!

Since I was blocking the small single-lane road, the only way out for them was to navigate in reverse in this really big. truck. They had to reverse slowly so as to not hit anything. I walked them down as they reversed out. I said, where are you guys going? I thought you were going to kill me. The passenger all sudden said with the shaky voice, we thought that you were someone else. Sorry. I then took my bat and smashed one of the headlights of the truck. They were both screaming in terror and I'm not sad to say that it gave me a rush. They finally made it out, and it was over.

The next day I had to work again, it was about 11 a.m., and I got the work order for a headlight repair on a Ford Bronco. Yep, it's a small world. This event changed my life and how I live it. I've never backed down from anyone, and this moment molded me, Since you and Spukarya have been telling me to submit these, I figured I would.

I don't remember which direction these two go in, so I'm just going off which one I remember first. Story 1 So my grandma had a house filled with my grandpa's ten-ish cats. She slept in the basement bedroom, with her cat Kiwi. Also, she made sure that no other cat would get in, so when I saw a cat's tail pass by the couch, I was shocked. Also, two things to remember. One, Grandma wasn't in the room, and two, the tail was an orange tail.

Kiwi was a gray cat. At the time, the only orange cat was named after one of her kids. Also, I should mention that I tried to look for the cat after it passed the couch, and the cat wasn't there. When Grandma came into the room, I asked about the cat, the one, named after her kid, which she then told me it had died. Story 2. So this one happened in my old apartment.

I had just woken up and was seeing or more accurately hearing if my mom was up. But whilst I'm doing this, I see my mom run into my room, go over to my bedside table, and do something with my phone. I logically say hello, and as I say it, she slowly vanished. Story 3 So this was in the same bedroom as in story 2 I was digging through my toy box and I found my old Hobbs Which is a stuffed tiger who looks like Hobbs from Calvin and Hobbs He's deemed old due to being my first of those plushes

And when I pulled him out, I was scared I have no clue why, but I knew that I didn't want it in my room So he went into the dirty clothes Into not on top. When I was walking into my mom's room, I had this weird feeling, so I turned around to see him atop the clothes. Not where I had put him.

It wasn't that crazy since I did find out my mom moved it, but that feeling was the scary part. This all happened back in 2015, which wasn't that long ago, but it honestly feels like it was several decades ago. completely off topic, but these last three years have kind of felt like three lifetimes. And remembering 2015 makes me feel seriously old, and I'm only 32 as of last month. This happened before my wife and I were married, and we were just dating, and honestly we weren't even sure if we were going to be a permanent thing.

I won't give the exact location of where I live, but we live in a northern state with a good amount of wilderness and backroads, back roads that nowadays pretty much just lead to nowhere. I'm sure there was a time where they were important, but now it's just dirt roads that have no real destination, and you could spend way too much time on them getting lost, just kind of absorbing the scenery. Eventually you'll end up back in the main roads, or a small town, sure, but if you're not careful,

you can seriously pull up into someone's backyard and get greeted with a shotgun to your face. Some of these roads were used as logging and mining delivery roads, but as time has passed, those industries have died down in our area, and the roads have all been practically reclaimed by nature. We've gone and gotten lost a few times in those areas, but there was one time that we actually found an old abandoned mine that was more or less just a cave now with the back end collapsed. On this particular day, we had actually wanted to go back out into the area with the cave, and we were thinking about getting some nature shots of the inside of said cave and the woods around it. It had been a year since we'd actually been, and we kind of had the way memorized, but at the same time, the growth had changed and made it to where things were looking a bit different. What made it worse was that it was actually starting to rain a bit, which was going to make navigating the abandoned dirt roads harder, and also make it more likely that we would end up getting stuck. We'd been driving for a while, and at that point, I had decided that we likely weren't going to find the cave, and the rain was coming down pretty hard.

I then decided that we should go ahead and pull over and just wait out the storm. I turned down what looked to be a flat road without much in ways of hills or valleys, and then pulled over to the side and parked the jeep. At first, I was pretty happy that we had found a nice flat area to park to waded out. But then it kind of hit me. Where we live, it's not really flat. And this area kind of felt unnaturally placed in the middle of the old mining roads. My girlfriend didn't seem to realize how strange it was, but as I was looking around, I started to kind of feel uneasy about it.

To the left was pretty much just normal woods, but to the right was what looked to be an empty field. Like, purposely empty. It was as if someone had completely cleared it out and was just leaving it dead. After a while of just sitting there and talking and resting my eyes for a few minutes, because as uneasy as I was feeling, the sound of heavy rain against the roof of your car is enough to knock almost anyone out. The rain had started to slow down. So I was more so able to see what was around.

For the most part, it looked to be pretty empty, just the trees to the left and field to the right. But then I noticed what looked like an old camper near the edge of said field. When I say old, I mean old. It was beaten up, rusted, and it looked like it had been abandoned for a few years. I pointed it out to my girlfriend,

and she excitedly said, Let's go check it out. Maybe they'll know where the cave is. Yeah, she actually said that we should get out and go toward the creepy old abandoned camper or RV or whatever you want to call it and ask if they knew where the abandoned mine was. I kind of laughed at her and mentioned that that was how

horror movies started. She just kind of laughed me off and said, Yep, and then open the door, which meant that we were about to go check it out. As we were walking towards the RV, I was feeling a really deep sense of this is a bad idea, all wrapped up with the feeling like we were being watched.

My initial thought was that maybe there was somebody in the RV and they were camping out here, but honestly with how trashed it looked on the outside, I really didn't think someone could be living in it. We got up to it and she knocked softly on the door. After a few moments with there being no answer, she knocked again. And I decided to kind of look around the RV because I was pretty well convinced that there was no one in it.

When I got around to the side that I couldn't see from the road, I was proven correct. There was a massive hole in the side that I could see into. She yelled over that she didn't think anyone was there, and I told her that she was correct, and as I was sitting there just kind of staring into the hole, she opened the door and walked into the RV. I was genuinely surprised and asked her what the hell she was doing.

She said that it was most likely abandoned, and that no one was going to kill. care. I mentioned that it could be a crime scene or that there could be a dead body in it. While that last statement was a joke, she actually responded with, you might not be far off. I asked what she meant, and I walked around to follow behind her. In the RV was a bunch of clothing, like really old clothing, that was dirty and torn up. and some of it was stained brown with what was either blood or something else, which is more disgusting. It got worse the more that we looked around.

There was the clothing, sure, but then there were also what looked like toys lying around. There were boxes of really old food in the kitchen net area, and then when we got to the bedroom area, there was what looked to be really old handcuffs connected to a pole that was a fifted, fixed to the floor. Both ends were still closed, like the person that had them on was able to slip out of them, or like they were relocked. But they were dirty and rusted over at this point.

After seeing that, I was done looking around at this thing, and I told her that we should probably go. To my surprise, considering this was her idea, she actually agreed. We got out, and as soon as my feet landed on the grass, I seriously got hit with the sense of somebody was there. I looked around and I didn't see anyone, but I just knew that there was someone watching us, which scared me even more. My honest thought was that there was someone living in that RV,

and that we had intruded on their home. Obviously, we just showed up when they weren't. in it. I don't know how someone could have possibly been living there, but I think they were. We quickly made our way back to the Jeep and decided to just give up looking for the cave, and we seriously never went back down those old roads. Something about the RV and what was in there was too much for us, and there's literally nothing in this world that will ever make me want to go back to see if it's still there,

or go anywhere near it. Nowadays, when we get that feeling that we want to go out and be one with nature, we just go to the park. Hi, Raven. My name is Brianna, and I happen to come across your channel one day, and now I'm hooked. You have some interesting stories, and I love your narration. And with that being said, I think it's time that I submitted a story to you. This should be under the paranormal category,

as the story that I'm about to tell you happened under very weird circumstances. I'm a mother of three. I have one boy aged 13 and one girl aged 9. I did lose my twin daughter to SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. My daughter was a fraternal twin, meaning not identical. But anyways, after I lost my daughter, strange things started to happen. First, it was just grief, and then I started to have dreams. These dreams were terrifying, to say the least.

I remember the first time it happened. My little girl was nine months old, and her sister passed at three months old. So a couple of months after I had lost her, I would go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night, and it always seemed to be 3 a.m. I couldn't move or breathe, but I could see and hear everything around me. It is the scariest thing I have ever been through, just not being able to breathe. I was stuck to my bed and I couldn't move a muscle to even try to get out of whatever thing or dream I was in. I started to fear sleep because, of course, I didn't want to go through that again. I did eventually sleep, and this one started off as a strange dream of me and my baby daughter, whom I lost, walking through the clouds.

It was very calm and beautiful. I felt nothing but love and her energy. But then out of nowhere I felt a dark presence, and all of the sudden I have both daughters and were running away from it. Then, out of nowhere, I ran into a closet to hide my girls. I have no clue how I ended up there. I just remember in my dream that it was the only thing in the sky. This creature was evil. I could feel its intent, and it was not good.

To give you an idea of what the creature looked like, it was just all black and menacing. It was this evil, dark figure that was just, trying to take my babies. Once I entered the random closet, I couldn't breathe. I woke up, and I was under another sleep paralysis episode. Once I was able to move and breathe again, it felt like my chest was going to explode. That, to this day, scares the crap out of me, because it was about my baby that I loved

and lost. I sometimes wonder if I'm going through her last moments on Earth before she passed away. But the entity came back one more time and it was angry. Maybe because I got away from it with my girls, I don't know, but I do remember

that it wanted my kids. I remember I had a few months where I thought I had finally gotten away from whatever it was that was haunting me at night. I remember falling asleep and at 3 a.m. I was woken to a strange smell and noise

that I can't even begin to describe. because it was so high-pitched. I was alone in my bed and I couldn't move or breathe, but I could hear, see, and smell. And it was scary. I felt it on the right side of my bed, and it wasn't even three feet tall. I felt on the ground near me,

and it had this evil hatred towards me. I was so afraid. I tried to breathe, but I couldn't. I thought I was going to die. I started to pray, and after what felt like an eternity, I was able to move and breathe, and the figure was gone. I searched online, and the only possible thing that I can come up with is sleep paralysis. I've had maybe one or two more over the past nine years, but that figure is gone. I can now finally sleep good, but Raven, that is hands down the most terrifying paranormal event I have ever.

gone through. I feel like my baby is protecting me and her sister, and also her brother, and I believe that is why the entity has not come back since that faithful night. Sorry if this was long, but I thought it was well over the time that I told my story, and how I believe that there is something beyond death, and to know that I can feel her around me is just beautiful. I also have a glitch that I'll put it. soon, but I need to recover from reliving this event first. Let's just say that I believe as a child I was somehow glitched into another timeline, and leave it at that for now.

And thank you, Raven. I love your channel, and congrats on the 20K. Oh, thank you, Bree. I appreciate that.