Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 186. Summer Camp Horror, Scary Camping, and Mimics: Campfire Scary Stories with Sylas Dean

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

A rock taken from a ritual site while at summer camp finds its way home… even after being thrown into the ocean. A smiling man in a suit beckons two girls hiking toward a dark treeline. And a voice outside a tent whispers, "Are you inside, girls?" Kaelyn and Sylas read your creepiest true campfire stories: haunted camps, mimics, time slips, and the things waiting in the woods that none of you have been able to explain since. You can Find Sylas Here!Socials: https://www.instagram.com/sylasdean/?hl=en & https://www.tiktok.com/@creeptime?lang=en Creeptime The Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2ETo1REWYsqJgebv5jx5Uy https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/creeptime-the-podcast/id1637005250 The Sinister Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2TPaYb8hS9StH8hokGFvud https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sinister/id1701665672Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt.You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts.Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ and⁠ Instagram⁠ for a daily dose of horror.

Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, dark summer edition. As always, I'm your ghost, Kaelan Moore. Gather around the campfire, everyone, because today I have terrifying stories from you guys. These are true scary stories that come from our community. And let me tell you, what the hell, you guys. You never cease to amaze me with the terrifying things that you all experience. And thank you, thank you, thank you for sending these stories into me. If you have a story that you want to be read on the show, you can check out the form to submit on hardstartspounding.com.

And even when I was writing this episode, I actually got a note. from one of you guys, Rizzaline, that just said, years ago, I was on my way home on the bus when my mom called me. She asked where I was, and naturally, I told her that I was on the bus. Then, silence from her side, so I asked why. She told me that she heard me arrive home, put down my bag, and then announced that I was going upstairs, but she couldn't find me anywhere when she checked the house for me. Very, very spooky. Joining me today is my dear friend Silas from The Sinister and Creep Time the Podcast. He also brought me a story from one of his listeners that is so scary, I kind of wish he kept it to himself.

I cannot wait to hear what you guys have to say about it. And just as a reminder, if you can't get enough of Dark Summer, we do have a bonus episode coming out on Patreon and Apple podcast subscriptions tomorrow. The High Council tier on Patreon voted on Dark Tourism. And I am somehow shocked and somehow also not shocked at all at what people will travel the world to do. We get into the tour companies that lead people into North Korea. The people who traveled to a war-torn area to hunt other people for sport and more. Check it out on Patreon and Apple Podcasts. And don't tell producer Matt that I told you this,

but there is a free trial on both and you can listen with that. Okay, let's get into today's episode. Well, Silas, welcome to HeartSourts Pounding. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Happy to finally have you on. Because we spent a lot of time together

outside of Hartstorstowning. I know. There's no proof of that, no photographic proof. I know. We always forget to take pictures. Do we forget or do you refuse? Or am I just refusing?

I'm like, I can't let people online know that I am the plus one in this situation because I never actually get invited to anything. It's always Silas gets invited and invites me. There's a couple of things I'll get invited to, but I do love being a plus one. I mean, it feels better to turn down an event and be like, I can't. Yeah. That's the better position to be in. That's so true. That's true.

I get that. We have, what are we going to next? Evil Dead. Evil Dead. Yeah. I was just showing you the look for it. Full contact. Full whiteout contacts.

So by the time this airs, we will have gone and we'll have the photos of it. Okay. I was going to say, I was like, hopefully that that will not. spoil a damn thing. Yeah, but I am anticipating having to guide you around because you're going to be blind. I don't, I definitely won't put you in a position to be like, can you be my handler? Yeah. Would you mind walking to head into the carpet?

Walked ahead into the car. I'm like pushing people out of the way. Like, I'm my client. Just look like your manager. Can you make room? He can't see. He's blind. He's blind.

Just guiding you. I think it's going to be fun. I think it'll be great. But I'm so excited for today because we have lots of really spooky scare. I wanted this episode to be kind of like Campfire tale. So we're doing summary-themed spooky stories. And I'm really excited. And these are also all coming from you guys.

It's all coming from the community. If you have a spooky story that you want to submit to maybe be read on one of these episodes, our website, Hartzorspounding.com, has a form. You can fill that out. It helps me stay organized because people DM me, like, stories all the time, and they just go. But a lot of spooky stuff is still happening to people

in our community. And then you have a story too from your community. The sinister, they wrote into the sinister. Or no, this is... Yeah, they wrote into creep time, because we took this on the road. Again, nobody has heard this on any of our episodes because we only did it for live shows.

So it's like an exclusive for Heart Starts Bounder. Yes, okay, I'm so excited. So I am gonna start... I have a story here that I want to tell you about. It's called The Haunted Church Camp, which I'm obsessed with the haunted church camp. We read another haunted church camp story on Hard Stars Pounding.

How you been to church camp? Is that why? I, well, I went to church camp when I was probably in the second grade and it was just being locked in the church basement watching fetchy tales the whole time. Like, I don't think I learned anything. I didn't even know at the time, veggie tales.

I was left in the basement the entire time at camp. Yeah. Something called the chokie? Yeah. I'm not totally sure. Yeah, like a bunch of agents came and like saved us from the basement of this church. Yeah, there's a woman named Marge, but I don't think she worked. Yeah, right, yeah.

And she kept telling us to shut up, so I don't want her ears. No, it was just that. But I did go, I worked out a summer camp for years when I was in college. Oh, I didn't know that. And it was like in the forest of upstate New York, is actually where this one takes place, so I'm curious if we went to the same camp or if they went to the camp that I was a counselor at.

But this is from a listener named Carly, and Carly writes, I was recently listening to your episode about the haunted church camp, and it reminded me of this story that I had to share. So this happened when I was around 14 years old, and I was attending a summer camp in upstate New York. For some context,

it's important to know that there were three girls' cabins and four boys' cabins, with campers ranging from 12 to 16 years. years old and we were all split up by age. This story takes place on one of the annual camping trips on one of the nearby islands across the lake. Every cabin would be going on this trip together. So there was a policy that changed at the camp because of the events in this story. So we split up into groups of four, we got into our canoes and the entire camp paddled across the lake to set up our tents for the night. It was about 25 to 30 minutes to paddle and on the way there everyone was really

excited and this was something that we looked forward to all year. Since I was one of the youngest girls, it took us on the longer side to get across the lake. And by the time we got there, it was clear that something was off with the older kids that were already on the island. But not thinking much, my friends and I set up our tent and began to explore. While we were walking around, we stumbled upon a tree stump with a circle carved into the cut edge and lines coming from the center. Similar to lines you would maybe see on a compass, at the The edge of the stump where the lines met the circle, there were different rocks and crystals placed on each intersection next to different symbols carved next to each line.

They were pretty and being a kid, I picked one up as a souvenir and I put it into my pocket. When we got back to the main camping area to have dinner, we walked into absolute chaos. The older boys and girls bunks were pleading with our counselors to radio back to camp and let them go back to their bunks because there were, quote, scary carvings on the trees, and they felt like there was something watching them. After some investigation, we located around 15 to 20 carvings on the trees, each with different symbols and intersecting lines and circles, the same symbols that were carved into the stump that my friends and I found, shapes that I can only describe like the sticks hanging in the woods in the Blair Witch

Project. After that, some of the staff were spooked as well and called the camp, who came by to take whoever was too scared, back on a pontoon boat, and back to the camp. My bunk ended up staying the night, and we were sent to bed at around 9.30 or 10 p.m. The next morning, we woke up at sunrise and loaded everything back into the boats and paddled back to camp for breakfast. At breakfast, we learned that when the first canoes arrived on shore, there was a fire burning, an empty boat, and a pair of men's boots laying on the beach. What they thought at the time was a clear sign that there was someone already camping there. However, when the staff combed the area, no one was there and there was no way

that a person would have been able to leave without their boat as we were way too far from the shore to swim. By this point, our camp director made an announcement that if anyone took anything from the island, they needed to give it to him and it would be returned back to the island. They didn't give us any more information, but it was clear that there was something larger at play here, something that they didn't want to mess with. Flash forward, just a couple weeks later, I was now home from camp, and I can't describe it, but the moment I left,

I had this weird feeling of something dark looming over me. I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I'm a deep sleep sleeper, I never wake up. I had sleep paralysis most nights, another thing that I had never experienced prior to leaving camp. I attributed this to stress of starting high school soon

and just from being tired from a long and exciting summer. However, when on patched, my bags, deep in the pocket of my backpack, was the rock that I had put into my pocket from the island. I pulled it out and immediately had this feeling of dread. I called my best friends from camp and explained to them that I forgot and I needed to hand it back to our director somehow. They agreed that it was weird that I couldn't sleep anymore and they urged me to get rid of it. I lived near a beach so the next day with my friends on FaceTime for moral support, I took the rock and I threw it into the ocean. I immediately felt so much better like this

weight had been lifted off of my chest. We all agreed that whether or not it was haunted or involved a cult ritual or whatever, it was better that I did not have this in my possession anymore. A few days after that, though, I got home from school and I went into my room to start on my homework and to my horror, sitting on my desk, was the same rock. I called my friends freaking out and I showed them. We could not believe it. It was the exact same rock. I still have no explanation for this, but my symptoms never came back. In the summers that followed, that camping trip became somewhat of a legend, with everyone wanting to hear more about our eyewitness accounts of what actually happened. We never returned to that same island again, but we were urged to not

retell that story anymore. I'm 23 now, and I still have that rock sitting in the exact same spot on my desk. Girl, get rid of it. I have not had that dreadful feeling again, and I have never experienced sleep paralysis since. I would appreciate any advice that anyone has. Is this a glitch in the Matrix? A freaky cult? A local from the mountains just trying to scare kids? I'm not sure I'll ever know, but I am curious what everyone thinks.

And that's how she ends it. I love the idea of experiencing something possibly paranormal and asking for advice. Yeah, I'm being like- Any tips? Yeah. So what is it? It's still on my desk. So should I sell it? I am curious what people are going to say, though.

I feel like people listening. My gut reaction and don't do this because I'm not qualified to give this type of advice at all. I'm listening. I would say if you threw it into the ocean and it came back to you and you were having these horrible symptoms and now you're kind of in this stasis where everything's fine, leave it. Like I almost think that you should just leave it. Yeah. Maybe it's an artifact that wants to like hang on to you or something or like a ghost or something that follows you. Yeah.

Like are, is it going to get worse if you try to get rid of it? Right. Right. Do you really want to go up against a demonic spirit, if that's what they're dealing with? I don't know. The fact that it's a church summer camp. We talked about it before,

but the church summer camps are always where the bad things are. There's some sort of portal that opens up, especially at like a Catholic summer camp. The demons just go through the children and come out into these summer camps. Camping always is a weird vibe. Are you a big camper? I have camped before.

It's funny. We do a lot of camping stories on Heart Starts Prounding because it is so scary. and some of the scariest stories come from people camping, but I have nothing against it. I still, I enjoy camping when I do, but I also recognize that it's terrifying being out there by yourself.

It is. It's also interesting, too, that this takes more of like a paranormal and like a church turn with this, because I think when most people think about horror camping stories, they think about true crime or serial killers. Yeah, yeah. This is a much more sinister, like, undertone to it.

Yeah, well, the idea, too, that there's just stuff in the woods that you can't explain. and has been there. Longer, the carvings, too. The carvings. Well, I mean, that's really dark too, but I was thinking about the Delphi murders

that just happened because in the woods, like he was also making carvings in the woods, and it was sort of this like Odin, Norse mythology, weird thing that he was obsessed with. Yeah. I don't remember that from Delphi. I just covered a case like very, not similar, but it reminded me of this.

It was a Madias Borg, which is out of Sweden, And he had some kind of like a flip reaction at a house party. House parties, like young men at house parties. I'm thinking of like Brandon Swanson. I'm thinking of like Brian Schaefer at a bar. Like something goes off. And some kind of a psychotic slip fled the house party when running all through this town in like rural Sweden.

And then he eventually somehow made his way to the woods never found again. But they found markings outside of the woods in the dirt and the gravel. He had drawn basically like a smile face, the smiley face murders. Yeah. He had drawn a smiley face with exes of the eyes and an open mouth. Whoa. Still to this day, no explanation for what happened.

When did that happen? 2020. So, yeah, not that long ago. It's weird to say, I'm like, not that long ago, but I'm like, we're coming up on almost seven years ago. I know for, yeah, 2020, which is wild. But in the grand scheme of things, I mean, 2020 was a time. There was so much social media and surveillance and like everyone is on camera all the time.

They even caught him on camera. like sprinting at full speed. And I think only a few people ever interacted with him on the street. There was a girl from his high school and knew him because he was like 17 and she's like, are you, are you good? Like, are you okay?

And he was like, I'm looking for a girl. She's a few streets over and she was like, what girl? Like which street? And then he was just like, see you later. And they've never found him. Never found him. They found his sock.

Whoa. And they found the markings. One of which was the smiley face, with the exes over the three. the eyes and the big open mouth, which is haunting. But they also found arrows pointing in, like, random directions. None of it made sense. I just covered it.

Wow. It's such a weird case. Oh, my gosh. I mean, everyone in my, everyone listening is going to go listen to that because that's, like, that's really haunting. Yeah. Yeah, I've never heard of that, which is, and I, I mean, I look up a lot of, like, disappearances, like, the woodsy disappearances too.

I'm always, like, terrified of. So I feel like I know a lot of those, but I've never heard of that one. So camping, we're going to put the lid on camping. No camping for us. There was like a, that like magnet, like my friend had a magnet growing up of like, my favorite thing about camping is staying in a hotel or like something about like is not camping. I love my RV when I can. Yeah, literally.

Yeah. So no more camping. We're putting an end to that. But do you want to read the one that you brought me? Sure. Mine is actually also a campground story. Yes. And it has to do with a group of girls.

You should settle in for this. Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm already. So when we did this on the road, again, it was submitted a non-examination. anonymously, so I had to go in and change all of the names and whatnot. But there was no title to it because people don't often title their stories they submit. So I just called it.

I don't know if I want to give this to you, actually. I was like, maybe I should reveal it as it comes. Yeah, let me just go in cold. Okay. It's been years since this happened to me. But back in 2015, I was on a camping trip with a couple of my girlfriends and something went down that we all consider to be the scariest night of our lives. I'm fine for you to share my story, but just for the sake of my own privacy and theirs, please just change out their real names and use Sarah and Maddie, which I did.

At the time, the three of us were juniors at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and we were planning a spring break road trip down to Georgia. We were all pretty avid campers. I grew up doing it, so the plan was to drive down to Blue Ridge Lake as the first stop on our trip. And if you don't know this area too well, it's beautiful. It's scenic. It's by the water. so the three of us, we were feeling pretty good about camping there for the night. I remember we packed up my Jeep, loaded in the tent, the booze, the food, all the gear,

and we hit the road at around 10 on the first day of spring break. Everything seemed fine, as it always does. So Blue Ridge Lake is a pretty well-known spot, and most people who are going to go down there, you're probably going to camp out at Morgan Point. But we wanted to find a camping spot deeper in the woods. But before we did, it was actually Maddie's idea that we could do something a little bit different. She wanted to add a creepy vibe to the trip and suggested that once we got down there, we would go up Cemetery Road.

And yes, this is a very real road deep in the forest that leads out to an old cemetery. Maddie had told us all of these ghost stories about the cemetery because she used to camp there when she was a kid. Like if you walk through the cemetery at a certain hour of night, you might hear whispers coming from different directions, but nobody is. there. So we drove for a few hours and finally got to the entrance of the area and the sun was beaming at this point in the afternoon and we passed all the cabins, all the other campsites, and we just kept going deeper and deeper into the woods until we saw the cemetery up ahead. It looked kind of how I imagined it at first. It was gravestones that were really small. They

were also kind of spread out and definitely old, but while I was driving us, I saw something up on the hill. there was a guy who was standing in the cemetery towards the back of the lot with his back towards the road doing absolutely nothing. Like he was just there. Stood completely still with his arms at his side, like he wasn't on his phone, he wasn't taking pictures, just perfectly still.

And I remember looking over at Sarah in my passenger seat and the matty in my backseat because all three of us were sort of silently agreeing that something felt very off about the situation and we were not going to get out of our car and explore if this guy was hanging around. Even if it was broad daylight, something about it felt wrong. I remember it was mostly the weird way that the guy was standing. He had his back turned towards us, and it was like this crooked looking back, like his right

shoulder was hanging really low, but his left shoulder was pointed up really tight and really high, and again, both of his arms just down at his side. So I was going to make a U-turn to get us back on the road that we came down, but while I was turning around, I noticed that there wasn't another car anywhere around here. It's not like seeing somebody randomly up on the hill, maybe visiting a cemetery, was maybe all that strange. I just couldn't figure out how this guy actually got this deep in the woods if he didn't drive there. And that's when Sarah grabbed my arm and she said, look at him.

We were a lot closer now, and I could clearly see that this man had turned his head, over his right shoulder, and he had one wide eye staring at us. His left hand was down at his side, and it was like scratching his thigh really fast, or maybe it was shaking. I'm not sure how to describe it. But then he started to turn and walk down towards my car, which quickly turned into him borderline running towards the road. I just spun that car around as fast as I could.

I got us back down the road, the trail that we came down. That alone was a scary encounter, and the game plan was for us to drive really, really far down one of the other roads and find a safe place to camp far away from the cemetery. So that's exactly what we did. We drove out pretty far from the area, and we got our way to a new camping spot where we could set up the tent for the night, and we were a little freaked out and high strung from what just happened, but we just focused on getting the tent out of the Jeep. Sarah and I decided to pitch it while Maddie got a fire going, since the sun was going to set pretty far. soon. After all that, everybody started to calm down a bit and we just relaxed by the fire for the night. We were drinking. We were telling stories about stupid shit. And we didn't stay up that late. I think it was maybe like 10 or 11 that night before we called it and we got into the tent to go to sleep.

We crashed pretty soon, but I wasn't out long because something woke me up. The second I was awake, I sat up and I listened. I was pretty sure that I heard it, but I think it was the sound of something or someone very quickly running through the woods right by the tent. It only took me a couple of seconds to realize that Sarah was also awake,

and she was already sitting up and she was crouched at the front of the tent, so I knew, I didn't imagine it. I wasn't hearing things. We both heard this. And it's strange to say, and you never really think about this, but you can tell if something is running on four legs or two. and we both knew we heard to.

There was a person out there in those woods. I don't know if she thought this in that moment, but my mind immediately remembered the man from the cemetery with the crooked back. All I thought to do was just get Maddie awake and do it fast, and I could tell that my body was having a lot of adrenaline running through it because when I reached down to grab her, my arm was kind of shaking, and my hands were shaking bad. But as soon as I got her up, Sarah shushed us and she said, listen.

We just paused for a second and we tried to make out what we were hearing on the other side of the tent. Very, very softly, you could hear the footsteps of someone that was slowly creeping up towards the front zipper. Maddie looked up at me and she whispered, it's that guy. So I knew that she had the same thought that I did, the man from the cemetery and all three of us got up in case we were going to have to run. And at this point, my whole body got tight, and I just remember feeling how hard my heart was pounding. And we didn't have one of those tents that had like a mesh screen at the top so you could see in or out. It was just one entrance, one exit, a tarp and a zipper between us. We just waited.

And at the exact moment that I didn't think I could feel any more scared than knowing that somebody might be outside of the tent, that's when all three of us heard it. It was a very hushed and low male voice at the front opening of the tent that whispered. I could hear the little metal sound of the top zipper getting pulled down from outside the tent. We just started screaming and kicking our feet towards the front as hard as we possibly could. Sarah was the closest to the front zipper, so she kicked out the furthest, and she definitely made contact with somebody because you could hear what sounded like a groan, And then she just kept kicking in that one spot repeatedly.

This all happened really fast. She reached up to the top of the tent, ripped open the zipper, and all three of us went running in different directions into the dark looking for my car. There was so much chaos in such a short burst of time, and I don't remember seeing anybody or hearing where they might have run off to, or if they were chasing us. The only thought I had was get to the car, get in, lock the doors, rip my keys down from the visor.

I remember I jumped in the driver's seat, I slammed my door, and as soon as I heard the other two doors slam, I knew that Sarah and Maddie were in the car with me, and I locked all the doors, I hit my brakes, and I threw my keys in the ignition, but for a second.

I got a quick glimpse of the rearview mirror, and I saw it. My red brake lights were on behind my car, and I saw the cemetery man looking back at me in the mirror, and I swear to God, was holding something in his hand that looked like a hammer. I floored it out of there as fast as I could.

I got us back onto the main road that we came down to get as far away as possible from this campsite. And I just kept driving through the woods. I will save you the rest of the story to let you know, yes, we got out safe. We spent the next hour in this like haze of adrenaline while Sarah was in my passenger's seat, just repeatedly trying to call 9-1 and get through. and I could see her hands shaking. But eventually, she got a hold of someone.

They sent out two different cops that night, and we told them everything, everything that happened out there. A couple of days after, we got a follow-up call from one of the officers, and we were hoping to hear that maybe they'd caught the man, but what they told us was that there was no one in Morgan Pointe, who fit that description. None of the locals they interviewed knew of a man who looked like that, and they never found him in those woods.

So we still tell this story to people to this day. If anything is a word of caution for anyone venturing out into the woods for the night. Keep your wits about you because you don't always know what's out there waiting. Oh my God. The way when I first read this, I think I had a seizure. Yeah, camping season is canceled. It's a wrap on camping. It's a wrap on camping.

We had a good run. I really hate to diminish the sales of like the tourism at Morgan. Yeah, Patagonia is going to like come after us for. But wow, holy smokes. Like, I would take 10,000 of those rooms from the Blair Witch Project being in the woods before ever, ever, ever having to come in contact with that man, with the cemetery man. The reaction of reading this on the road every night in every city was wild because at the same point of the story, you would get the same reaction from the crowd, no matter which city you were in.

And I always thought I was like, surely it's got to be like the scariest part where he's like, are you inside, girls? But surprisingly, most people, like, the shock from the audience was always, they ripped the zipper down and they ran out in the dark, looking for the car in different directions. Audible gas from the, everyone's like, no. Yeah, I know, because then you're out there and you're exposed. But it is funny, like, I do picture them just kind of like,

like little chickens with their heads cut off, like just running around in the dark being like, where's the car, where's the car? We've went camping and this happened to us. Oh, my gosh. I don't know that we'd make it out of the tent. No, I mean, like, bear spray. Two words, bear spray. Like, you have to have something on you that in a situation,

like, because you really just never know what you're going to encounter out there. Or who's out there. And I don't trust myself with, like, small weapons. What am I going to do with a pocket? No, I'm going to hurt myself. I'm going to engrave my inus on a tree. Yeah. I'm not doing it.

You're like, I'm done here. You want this? You take it. No, literally. I think I'm more of a threat to myself if I'm holding a weapon than like to any sort of threat. But have you ever had a situation? where like you felt like you were in danger like that? I've had some sketchy situations.

I've had a million jobs, one of which was I used to be an Uber driver. Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been in the line of fire, you know. Thank you for your service. People talk about first responders, you looked at those Uber drivers. Yes. But there was one of my first drives I ever did. Oh, you're from Connecticut, so you know this.

Oh, we're from 20 minutes away from each other. Oh my God, okay, this makes me so happy because you will know what I'm talking about. This is the first person I've ever told this story to who will know what I'm talking about. I was driving to Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Okay. Long drive from like where I picked this person up. And she came into my car and she was in like scrubs. So I was like, oh, she's probably maybe a nurse or a doctor. She could be anything. And I was so nervous because it was my first time driving somebody. I was trying to make conversation. And I'm like, so. So what do you do? She's like,

I'm in the medical field. And I'm like, okay. With chasminal. And she's like, I float. Or like, I'm She's like stonewalling me, so I'm like, okay, she doesn't want to talk. I'll take the hint. At a certain point on this drive, we get to like an entrance to the woods. And I'm like, I'm so sorry. I think something's wrong with the map because it's telling me to go like into the woods. And she was like, no, no, no, no, this is correct. You go into the woods.

And I'm like, okay. First time driving. Sure. Sure. So I'm driving her in. And then at a certain point, the road ends. And I was like, I'm really sorry. I'm like, I must have like messed something up.

I'm like, but it's telling me to keep going on this road. And she was like, you will. She was like, keep going on to the dirt road. And I'm like, what's going on? Yeah. This woman is, she's in scrubs. She's in scrubs. Finally, we get deep, deep into the woods.

And there's this building that has no windows that's out there in the middle of the woods. And old Seabrook. And she's like, this is it. She's like, you can just pull up to the side. Don't pull into the parking lot. And I'm like, okay, she gets out. So when she's getting out, I'm like, all right, well, have a nice shift. I don't know, and she's walking.

I'm doing like a 15-point K turn trying to get myself out of the woods. And I just kind of clock her as I'm looking back. I swear to God, she opens like a storm hatch in the ground and walks down a set of sticks. Is that organ trafficking? It has to be something like that. It's for sure organ trafficking. You know, it's the price I pay. It's the price you pay.

To be an Uber and Lyft. Yeah. To have my third job in college. In like old Sabre, Connecticut where you're probably getting like three rides. a week or something. Like, I can't imagine there's like a lot of stuff. At maximum. At maximum. This episode is brought to you by Salas Health. Salas pairs you with a personal health advocate. And the best part is it's covered by insurance. Healthcare frustration is such a real thing. I mean, think about the time that you lose being on hold with doctors offices or insurance,

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Okay, so this one comes from a listener, Samara. And the title of this one is just The Haunted Hotel. Samara writes, hello, I've been obsessed with the podcast for about a year now. and as a love of all things spooky mysterious, I absolutely love listening while I'm at work. I've only been in Reading for about five years now, three of which I've spent working at a hotel. I started out as a laundry attendant

and as someone who's sensitive to energy. I noticed right away that there was definitely some energy there, but I never really paid any attention to it because I was at work and I didn't want to feed into it. At first, nothing crazy would happen other than feeling like I was being watched when nobody was in the room. or maybe feeling a cool breeze go through the room.

The room had no windows, so where would it have come from? Most of the time, though, I had other girls on the shift with me, so I wasn't really alone that much. About a year into this job, some stuff started to happen, mainly to some of the housekeepers. I heard stories of the girls hearing their names being called by the housekeeping supervisor was nowhere near the room that they were in.

The housekeeping supervisor was also scared of room 206. She claimed that when she went into that room, she immediately would feel uneasy as if someone was watching her. Sometimes the bathroom door would swing open on its own. There was also a time where she and I were trying to get into the room, but when we tried to open the door, it felt like someone was forcefully shoving the door closed, hard enough to almost knock us off our feet. Our first thought was that someone was still in the room, but when we finally entered, there was no one inside. We tried to recreate this, but just couldn't. But even that couldn't prepare me for what I personally experienced by myself.

It was a long summer day and I was alone on a shift in the laundry room. It was a weekend day and the laundry supervisor wasn't on shift. She and I were pretty close. She knew my family and was kind of like a big sister to me. And because we were so close, she would often call me by my nickname, which only my family calls me by. On this day, when I was alone, I heard her voice call my name. It was soft, almost like a whisper.

And it sounded not quite like her. I looked up to see her walking into the side closet. Confused as to why she was there on her day off, I followed her into the closet. But when I walked in, it was empty. I quickly turned and I left the room because I was freaking out. The closet has no other doors and no windows, so there was no way she could have left without me seeing her. Still, I called her to ask if she was there, but she hadn't been. She wasn't even in the area at the time.

I still get chills every time I think about this moment because I saw her and heard her clear as day and then she was gone. After that, I started bringing sage to cleanse the room. I couldn't cleanse the whole hotel, although I definitely wanted to. Since I started using the sage, the energy in the laundry room has felt a lot lighter.

But occasionally, on the days that someone has to work nights, it seems like the energy comes back and you can feel it in the way that your hair stands up and your heart starts beating a little faster. I know it hasn't left, but somehow maybe we coexist. Stays out of the laundry room and out of my way, and I leave it alone. Every day before I close the doors for the night, I always make sure to say, good night, Casper.

It started as a way for me to set a boundary, like telling a ghost to not follow me home, but on the days that I forget to say this, I do get nightmares. That's all I have. Thanks for listening, Samara. And then she says, P.S., Mount Shasta is not too far from where I live. There's a bunch of really fascinating myths and legends about this mountain. The main one being a secret civilization that lives under the mountain. I know people who go hiking on Mount Chasta a lot, and they all claim that the energy is really wild there,

almost like the mountain itself is alive. That one gave me chills. Yeah, very spooky. I looked into Mount Chasta a little bit more. Can I tell you more about it? Because I have heard that there's something going on up there. Have you heard about like vortexes? Yes.

So there's like vortexes throughout. the world, the country. Sedona is one of them. It's like an energy vortex where that's why you feel so calm when you're in Sedona. There's like something about the energy. Mount Shasta is also like one of those energy vortexes. It's the only one in California.

Oh, okay. So there is a lot, apparently, that happens there. And first of all, okay, so I looked into this secret civilization that she talks about. It's called Telos. T-E-L-O-S. It actually comes from a novel. The city under the mountain is Telos, a five-level city of light that supposedly inhabited by survivors of the lost continent of Lemuria. The lore goes that Lomorians escaped before their continent sank, and they took refuge in Mount Shasta,

establishing telos inside of it. They're described as being these seven-foot-tall beings with white robes who communicate only through crystals. Oh. Yes. So this is not like missing 411, like feral people. This is not. I mean, maybe it kind of is, because some feral people stuff is that they live in the caves and things, right? The cave system throughout the United States. Yeah, yeah. There's a few other. These are like giants.

I know. That sounds like giants. There's also this like vanishing prospector story from the area. In 1904, a British mining company prospector named J.C. Brown reported finding a sloping tunnel under Mount Shasta that ran 11 miles back to an ancient underground city. He saw a strange hieroglyphs, gold artifacts. and mummies that were 10 feet tall. So again, seeing really tall people,

he kept it a secret for three days, and then he just couldn't keep it in any longer, I guess. But in 1934, he told his story to John C. Root and organized an expedition. On the day the men were set to depart, Brown disappeared without a trace. Very spooky. Very spooky.

So I don't know, maybe there is some stuff happening in Mount Shasta in general, but... I would say most mountains, there's something weird going down. I agree. I know. This actually reminded me, there's a story out of Colorado. You just reminded me of it. I'm forgetting the name of the town.

I think it's plum. Plum is something in the town, or maybe that's the mountain, but a man had gone missing there, and he was like, live, own this like business, it was a bookshop or something. Well, a man came to basically do an investigative piece on it. He was going to write a novel about it. So he bought the same bookshop also went missing. Whoa.

Yeah, and it's like, it's like an old Gold Rush Mountain Town. Like, it's literally surrounded by mountains. Yeah. Very, very soon. They never found the second man. Well, with, like, gold-fresh towns, the big thing is there's all these, like, mines. Like, the mine shafts and, like, scary, like, scary underground stories. And they say that in Appalachia, like, all the mines are haunted.

There's just, like... Kentucky, the caves there, the cave system. Yes, the caves, like, things living in the caves. They're beautiful. People just going missing in the caves. We were even talking about... We did a bonus episode on Route 66, because it's the 100-year anniversary this year. this year of R. 66.

So I was doing like scary stops along the way and one of the stops was this brothel. I forget exactly where the brothel was, but they, the... I was about to ask. I was like, and which state was that in? Yeah, it's since shut down. Sorry, but the family that owned it and the girls that worked there would kill the clientele and dump them in the mine shafts

so their bodies would never be found. Because the miners would come in, the like coal miners would come in and would only be there for like a week because they would do contracts. They weren't living in the towns or anything. So if they went missing, no one ever thought about it. That's like pirates getting killed in Singapore by sex workers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Very similar. It's just like a US version of that. You know that like no one's gonna come looking for the body. So we could just kill this guy and take all his money and then throw him in the mine shaft. It's one of the strongest safeguards against investigators cracking a case like transient serial killers or people being killed in a place where they're not from. And they have like no connections to. The people, the places, the businesses around there because police have nothing to go off of.

Yeah. Yeah, which, like, that's always so scary. My cousin's a cop and he always says it's like shockingly easy to commit crimes like that. And I'm like, don't tell me that. That's terrifying. There's a huge theory about like a network of long-haul truck drivers in the United States, possibly being serial killers. Have you heard about this? Because there's a book on it.

I haven't read the book, but I know someone wrote a book about it. Yeah. I forgot how they're stitching it together. through a series of maps and like strange murders and dumpings of bodies that have happened along major truck routes. Yeah. But again, the thing that safeguards most serial killers today because there's so much surveillance from getting caught would be that they're transient. Yeah, it would be that there's no way to tie them to anything. Yeah.

Yeah. They're not from that place. They're passing through. Wild. Yeah, the truck driver thing is scary. I know they say that like that's probably the career that the most amount of serial killers have. we just haven't caught them yet, which is really spooky. I don't know.

It makes sense because you're just moving around all the time. So, like, if you wanted to get that job. I think so. Yeah. Okay, I have one for you to read. Okay. So I have another one for you. A blind read.

Thank you for putting it in big font. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can crank that up even more I know. This is called The Smiling Man in the Woods, Silas, not to be confused with I am the smiling man in the woods. The neighborhood I grew up in was right next to a college campus. The campus was pretty heavily wooded, but very pretty. Since it was so close, we would walk our dogs or just hang around the campus.

One night when I was 16, my friend and I had been driving around, and we wanted to scare ourselves, so we parked and got out of the car. That's mistake number one. This part of the campus was super close to my house, and normally, I would have just walked. But we had been out driving anyway, so we parked in the dirt lot. Quick side note, it's important that I share the layout of this part of campus, because it's pretty confusing. There is one parking lot that is bigger,

and more in the forest. This is the one we parked in. From this lot, there is a small trail that winds through some pretty thick forest for about a quarter mile. From there, it leads into a paved trail in the middle of the hill. On the left side, up the hill,

are some buildings, just offices and whatnot, and down the hill leads to a tree line. A tree line always creeped me out because on multiple occasions I found dead deer, Lying just past it. God. I know it's probably a coincidence, but it's always weirded me out.

Anyway, this path is super short, maybe 200 feet, and then leads to another parking lot, which is right across the street from my house. So this night, when we all walked down the path, it was almost pitch black, and all we had were our phone flashlights. Trying to scare each other, we would gasp and point at trees

and jump at each other from behind. I am very easily spooked, So I was already on edge from all of this. All of the sudden, seemingly out of the shadows, we see a man walking down the path towards us. He looked perfectly normal, but he was wearing a nice-looking suit and tie, and was walking weirdly,

as action figures do on TV shows, with his legs spread and his arms held out to the side. His arms spread out to the side. The weirdest part was that he had a big smile on his face, not a little grin or a happy expression, but a big, toothy smile. We both jumped a bit, but rationally, it was not that crazy to see people.

College students were always walking around or camping in the woods. So passing someone on the path was not too unusual. As we walked by him, he nodded at us and said, Hello? We kept walking, giggling at each other until maybe 20 seconds later, when I turned around to see him, stopped, still looking directly at us. I urgently whispered to my friend, and we started to walk faster, as we both turned around seeing him beckoning to us,

waving with one hand as if telling us, come over here. Since this happened, I have tried to rationalize it in any way that I can. Maybe we dropped something, that he wanted to give it to us, or maybe he was lost and needed directions, but why would he just wave and not shout or say anything to us? Instead, he just stood there. At this point, I'm fully freaking out, and to this day, I have never felt more unsettled. However, I was still trying to convince myself that there had to be some explanation.

Maybe I knew him. Maybe he was just a weird college guy trying to scare us. Nonetheless, we walked as fast as we could without running until we reached the open, paved path. We continued to look behind us. but didn't see him again. At this point, we were terrified, and we decided we could not walk back through that trail to get to my car. And instead, we had to walk through the parking lot to my house.

Almost running and too scared to talk, we hurried to the parking lot. We were about halfway down the path. I looked to my right down the hill. Standing right at the tree line was a dark figure. It was too dark to make out any features, but it looked like a male figure. Almost paralyzed with fear, I watched as he lifted his hand and beckoned us, beckoned towards us. That's when we sprinted.

We ran straight through the parking lot and across the street into my house, we locked every door, closed all the windows, and stayed all night huddled in my bed, barely sleeping. The next morning, we talked about what happened. Both of us agreed that the figure by the tree line, must have been the man we passed. But there was no possible way that that man could have made it to the tree line unless he had run at an impossible speed through the woods. But both of our memories of the event were the exact same.

We told my parents, and they told us we were being dramatic and that we were just seeing things. Or we would both remember the events clearly, eventually. We had to go back the next morning to retrieve my car. At first, we didn't notice anything amiss, until I saw heavy, big, human footprints around the back of my car, up the driver's side, and towards the front.

We got out of there immediately, and I avoid going near that part at all costs. Cut the cameras. Oh, I hate that. I hate that. I hate that. They're like beckoning. What did he think was gonna happen? You could just like beckon people in the woods and they'd come over.

Oh. It's almost. It's almost, it's reminded me of another story that I, I heard once on, or no, I told, I think I told this story. We shared it on creep time and it was a guy, it was a woman in the woods near a national park. And she was like, softly being followed. She was alone, like on a trail softly being followed by a tall, gawky, like, rogue man. Yeah. Like just kind of trailing her.

And she's like, okay, don't let him know that you're panicking because then you're like sitting dead, basically. Yeah. But at a certain point, like, from a distance, she heard, like, a Yelp behind her. So she, like, flips around and she's, like, looking in the distance. And she, oh, God, it's, like, going to bring me, like, fear, tears. She could see, because he's so tall and so big. He was, like, trying to hide behind a tree, like, a little kid. But he's so big that, like, he's very obviously there.

Yeah, you can, like, see his shoulders. No, like, see, like, half his... I'm crying. Oh, my gosh. But he, like, thought he was hiding behind the tree. And then this is the beckoning part. Like, he, like, steps out when she's, like, paralyzed, frozen, and just, just like holds his handout like this,

whatever that means. Yeah, whatever that means, like, come with me. Oh, that's bad. Where was that that she was hiking? Okay, it's Jasper National Park. Oh, that's what it was. Interesting, okay. Which I'm not exactly sure where that is.

If there are any, I almost if there are any creepers, rogue detective society members. Yeah. With Ben to Jasper, please weigh in. Ooh, that's so scary. The idea of coming across someone in the woods. I mean, it's just, because. That's the last place to approach me.

If I'm alone in the woods and you see me, don't come near me. I know. I'm already panicking. I'm already scared. That's pretty bad, though. That is pretty bad. It reminds me my dad, you know, how, like, your parents will sometimes drop, like, wild lore about themselves. Just randomly at dinner when you're, like, come home from college or stuff you've never heard about them.

So one time, my dad was like, oh, yeah, I almost got kidnapped when I was seven. And we were like, dad, what? He's like, yeah, I was just. just out playing with some kids and I was, he was walking by himself and this car drives up to him. There's just a man in the front seat. And he goes, he says something literally like, you should get my car. Like, doesn't try, no, like, I have candy. I have cats. There's literally Uber for Spencer. Get in my car. And he, my dad just like turned around and ran away and the car drove off. And there was like no more beyond that. But this guy just like shot his shot trying to get my dad.

Was that like in the 60s, would you say? 60s 50s? Probably the 60s. Yeah. For some reason, I imagine the 60s to be a really grim time, especially in Connecticut for some reason, for like potential, like, child abductions. Like, or just weird things going on. My mom, when she was growing up, my grandmother used to, like, check her candy around Halloween. Somebody, they never found out who had given her, like, a chocolate bar that they had pressed, like, pin needles in. Oh, my gosh. An adult. Yeah.

There's, like, the urban legend that you hear, like, check for razors. Yeah, literally that. I'm like, it doesn't come from nothing. It's scary, too. Because that's not even, like, oh, I was. I want to abduct you. It's just like, I want to hurt you. I don't, I don't care what happens. I'm not even going to be around to see it. I just want to know that like a kid out there is eating these pins that I put in this candy. That's so demented. It's very sinister. It's very sinister.

It is the sinister. That's what they say. Sinister. Every time I say it, it's always unironic too. Yeah, I know. I know. I never mean to like make the pun and like give the wink. I just like, sometimes in the stories, too, people would be like, and that's when my heart started pounding. Can I tell you, heart starts pounding is my vocal stem because I love your intro of it and this is no slight to you because you do an amazing job with it but I always mimic it and it's always

just like in the voice of a gay guy who's like well it's when your heart starts pounding. Well, it's when your heart starts pounding. Well, I don't know if you know this but it's when your heart starts pounding. I love that if someone's vocal stove out there now that makes me so happy. Like every time I listen to an episode when you get to that part I have to shout it out.

That's when your heart starts pounding. Well, you know, that's when your heart starts pounding. Oh wait, can I read you this tweet someone sent me Yeah, please. Someone wrote, so my dad has been at, this has 139,000 likes at this point. I didn't know, was that viral. It's pretty viral right now. It's 6.5 million views.

Okay, so someone goes, so my dad has been ending every phone call with stay dangerous instead of goodbye for like six months now. We all thought he was just being a weird dad, but it turns out he's been mishearing the ending of a podcast he listens to. The host says, stay curious, but my dad is slightly deaf in one ear. He's been going around telling his coworkers, my grandmother, and apparently his doctor to stay dangerous the entire time. My mom only found out because his doctor called to check if everything was okay at home.

My dad has now decided he likes his version better and refuses to stop. Yesterday, he told a nun to stay dangerous. I hope this all gets back to him too. I hope so too. If that's your dad somehow, like, reach out to me because I'm going to send a merch codes. Like he's gonna, I'm gonna send a merch or something because I love that so much. Like telling a nun to stay dangerous is objectively hysterical.

Stay dangerous. It's like a play on my favorite murder slogan. where it's like, stay sexy and don't get murdered? Yeah, there's like, be rude, stay, or it's like, stay rude, stay alive. Someone says there's also like, stay sexy and don't get murdered. I think morbid is maybe be rude, stay alive. Be rude.

Something like that. Or I even said in an episode that we did recently, we were talking about cold cases, and I was like, stay annoying. Because so many cold cases these days are getting solved because the families just keep calling the cops and they have to, you know, look through the files again and stuff. Yeah. Sometimes all it takes is being annoying.

And also it probably can save your life, too, in some points. If you're just, like, super annoying, maybe that'll save you in a situation. Who knows? I hope so. But, God, that's so cool, though. It's so funny. Stay dangerous. Stay dangerous.

I love that, which is also something that, like, my dad would say he, like, just got the ending wrong. God, I wonder if anybody like, because goodbye and good luck is our sign-off for creep time. I wonder if anyone... Oh, I love that. Goodbye and good luck. I don't know where it came from. It feels like old-timey radio, like Vietnam-era radio of, like... Yeah.

Goodbye and good luck. I think maybe it started as a joke of like, goodbye and good riddance, but we were like, it's too harsh. Maybe like goodbye and good luck would be softer. I don't know how I end the sinister. I think I'd just go, good night. Just in your dad's voice.

Because there's no cuts in the sinister. So after like an hour long, like one-man show, I'm just like, goodbye. Yeah, we're out. You're just so tired. I get so tired by the end of recording episodes, too. It's tough. I love that.

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help and to not be exhausted by the process, get started now at helloalma.com slash heart starts. That's helloalma.com slash H-E-A-R-T-S-T-A-R-T-S. I'm going to read you another one. So this one is called Lantern Flame leads to time slip from a listener named Dane. Dane Wrights. Sorry. Not to be confused with gay rights. Well, the first thing that Dane writes is my name is Dane.

It's funny to be like, listener, Dane. Dane writes, my name is Dane. He just wanted to be clear. Dane, if you're out there, points for the clarity. We get it. I haven't thought about this experience until I started listening to your show. I'm 30 now, and this happened when I was 15 years old. Back then, my dad and stepmom used to take me to visit my grandparents in a small town south of Mansfield, Ohio.

My cousin, Chan, and I used to go play in the expansive woods outside of my grandparents' house. This specific year, my stepmom, who was already a really big, horror fan, told us a ghost story about an abandoned house deep in the woods. The story goes that an elderly couple used to live there in either the 1890s or 1910s, I can't really remember which. They never had children, so they built this house to be secluded in the wilderness. The old man who lived there used to get up around midnight, turn on his gas lantern, and walk with it to the restroom. Then he would walk back to the bedroom, turn off his lantern, and go back to sleep. The bathroom and the bedroom had windows on the front side of the house and they were adjacent to each other on the second floor.

My stepmom took us out to this run-down shell of a house and said that if we came back at midnight, we could still see the lantern flame flickering. So naturally, Chan and I wanted to go see this, so we left the house at about 11.50 p.m. one night. I know. Real smart move already. And we even thought to not tell any of our parents where we were going. We followed the trail that my stepmom took us on and we were lucky that the move. was pretty bright that night. We had brought flashlights, but they were really dim. When we got to the shell of the house, it looked different. It didn't look old and dilapidated anymore. Now it actually looked like an old house, but no signs that time had claimed some of the home.

And then, at midnight, we did see a small flicker of a flame come to life in the second floor window. It bounced as if it was being picked up and moved to the right until we saw it in the second floor, right window, and it stayed there for a little bit, and then it bounced and it moved back to the left window and went out. We were ecstatic. This was really cool to see. Chan and I turned around and started walking back, and as I turned, I noticed the light came on again, but this time it looked like it was stronger and had a dark red hue. I called out to Chan but got no answer. I turned to look where he was walking, and I saw nothing but dense forest. Now, the forest near my grandparents is definitely thick, but this forest was way too thick for this part of Ohio.

When I looked back at the house, the flame now looked like it was this big, deep red inferno. I could feel the intensity of the heat, and then the windows started to glow red, both the upstairs and downstairs windows, which was five in total. Then the light went out, and the door opened into the house, and it was pitch black on the other side. Shambling out of the doorway was an old woman in a nightgown. Her eyes looked like they were missing, and her skin showed burn scars. I could feel her staring right at me. Then she let out this primal, blood-chilling scream.

And as soon as I heard that, I fell backwards onto my butt, frozen in fear. She started sprinting at me, and my trance was broken. I scrambled to get back to my grandparents' house. I felt like I had run for 30 minutes when out of nowhere I slammed into my dad's car. I went inside, nearly crying, looking for Chan, and when I looked at the clock on my grandmother's stove, it read 11 o'clock, as in 11 p.m. I went to the basement where I saw Chan playing a game on the GameCube that I brought. He looked at me and I asked if he remembered going to that old house and he looked so confused and he shook his head.

No, you were in the bathroom for a while, though. That was the only response I got. So when I went upstairs, I asked my stepmom about the ghost story she told us and the ruins of the house that she took us to. She had no idea what I was talking about. She never took us into the woods, and she said she never told us a ghost story about it. At least that's what she told me. I mean, maybe she was trying to mess with me at that point,

but I could have thrown up from the fear. For years, I had nightmares about that place, and I still, to this day, have no idea what happened. Anyways, thanks for letting me share my creepy story. There are loads of other stories Chan and I have from those woods that I would love to tell, but not right now. I've spooked myself enough already. Much love, Dane.

Like a time slip story. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like going back in time, yeah. Or like losing track of time in a way where like the thing you thought happened. Also, you've been in the bathroom for a while. I was like, baby's first time on DMT. Yeah, just like did something in the bathroom, like did a little DMT in the bathroom. No, it is wild, though.

But I do get a lot of stories of like, it's almost, oh, this is not. term for it at all, but like a wood psychosis. Like some sort of like, when you're in the woods and you start losing track of time and you start seeing things that aren't there maybe, I have heard of people having that. I do get a lot of stories of people being in the woods and coming back and realizing the amount of time they thought had passed has not passed. Yes, I have heard that too. Yeah.

The visual two of the old woman with the missing eyes. Yeah. Really something specific about that. Have you ever seen a ghost? Not a full apparition. I have had like ghosty encounters, but not a not a full apparition, but I have heard from like true non-believers who have seen full operations and can't explain what they saw. Yeah. Have you seen a full operation? I think, I think I saw something when I was five and then same experience. I'm like people who like are non-believers who then like captured something like at home, even on their phone.

When like they were like, something just seems like wrong in this room. My brother had an experience when we were. young, I think he was like eight or nine. This was like a pretty, pretty big deal in our house, because my brother is not very theatrical. He will kill me for telling the story for the 200th time, but he still won't talk about it, which is why I will. Yeah. When he was like eight, we were at my grandma's house for the night, and my dad was there, and we were like in the living room area watching TV and he's sitting on the far end of the couch. He, the far end of the couch looks directly down the foyer to the front door.

In the middle of us just quietly sitting watching TV, it's like maybe 8, 9 p.m., he starts screaming at the top of his lungs. Scream, he's like, there's someone in the house. Didn't think he saw a ghost. He's like, there's a person. Like, there's fully a person. There's a person in the house. So my dad goes into like, my dad.

Hey! Hey! And searches the whole house. Like, we searched the basement. I think we called police. Like, we really thought there was an intruder. Oh my gosh. We never found anybody.

So my brother's like dry heaving crying crying through this to like, like a long story short, and I think my grandma and my dad were just like, what did you see exactly? And he was like, it was a man in a white suit with long white hair and a white hat who was peering at me, like watching me from behind the corner of the foyer. Whoa. We still have no explanation for what he saw. Yeah.

Every time I probe him about it, because he's still kind of like non-believer. Yeah, yeah. Well, how do you explain that? Explain it. Yeah, what is his explanation? Like, when he does try to explain it. He's truly like, I don't know. I think I was stressed.

He's like, I don't know. He has no explanation for me. I was stressed out. Yeah, he's like, I think I was a really strung out eight-year-old. You know when you're eight-year-old and you're so stressed? You see the hat man? The 40-hour work week turns into the 120-hour work week. He's like, it's tough.

So hard being eight. But the conversation usually ends on like a button where he's like, I don't really want to talk about it. Wow. So I leave it at that. And then I go on shows and talk. Yeah, so now you tell everyone. But I mean, that is kind of like the story I've heard from a friend, too, of the like

eight years old, this thing happened. I still don't believe it goes, but like, I don't know what I saw. I think I was eight probably when I was playing the piano in my house. We had this piano that my dad got from an estate sale. Already bad news. It's like... You're inviting a certain type of...

You're inviting something in. So he had this piano. There was always sounds coming from it. We used to always think the cat had jumped. on the piano. And it, like, we'd run downstairs and be like, get the cat. And like, the cat was never there. It was like, cat's always up on my bed or something. So it was like known that the piano would just, like, make noise on its own. But no one had ever seen it until I was there playing piano one night, practicing my little scales. And I see the last three notes or like three of the low notes on

the register, like just go down on their own and come back up, just played themselves. Like, someone was standing there and pressed it. And I got up and started screaming. and ran away. My parents still talk about it to this day. Like, whoa, is that crazy? And then we got rid of the piano and never had any issues after that. I was gonna ask, did you keep that piano in the home? It was all tied to that piano?

Mm-mm. Didn't keep it. Was that the only instance where that happened or had that glimmers of that happened before where like you almost thought like out of the corner of your eye while you're practicing, you were like, did that key just do that? We always, I mean, I imagine that? My dad always joked that the piano was haunted because he kept having weird stuff happen and just like things in the room.

would move. I had this one really spooky situation where I was playing the piano. I've told this story on the podcast before, but my grandma had just died. And it was the middle of summer when she died. And I was sitting and playing piano and thinking about her. I was like 14 years old. And I hear behind me like paper fluttering through the air. And then I hear it like like a piece of paper land on the floor behind me. And I turn around. There's just like one piece of sheet music on the floor ripped out of a book. And we in my family, we don't rip sheet music out of the book. You all always like open it and whatever. You don't tear the sheet music.

So like, that's so weird. It was serrated like it was torn. And it's away in a manger. It's a Christmas song. And not even thinking I put it on the piano, I start playing it and my dad runs into the room. He's like, why are you playing away in a manger? I was like, it's gonna sound wild,

but this sheet music just appeared out of nowhere. And he's like, that was your grandma's favorite song. And so I'm always like, I think she wanted to hear it one more time. Mm. It's just, like, and I can't explain it. It's like, tied to that piano too. Yeah. It keeps credence to like the memory that you have with a person too.

Yeah. It makes it feel more real. Yes. Legitimate. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like a sign. Yes, it is a sign. I get so many stories about signs.

Like people just get so many signs. It's so cool to see the signs that people get from their loved ones. I love those stories. Those are my favorite kinds of ghost stories. It's like the... Because not every, we should say, not every ghost encounter is necessarily spooky. No. Sometimes they can be reassuring for a lot of people. I know. I want a

really good, like, romantic ghost story. Like, no one sent me like a... My boyfriend is like the... 200-year-old ghost. I would pick up somewhere in a big Y in Connecticut. Yes. Oh, my God. Me and my invisible man. At an Ocean State job lot somewhere.

That's in the clearance rack at the Hobby Lobby. 100%. Yes. Oh, my gosh. I know. It's got to be somewhere out there. If anyone has any recommendations on any good ghost lover stories, I don't know. Like, go watch Ghost. Patrick Swayze. Oh, yeah. I mean, yes. Yes, that's a classic one, of course. But we want, like,

romance novel level. We want fan fiction. Yeah, or someone that's, like, going to write in with a story. Like, maybe someone has had something like that happened to them. I don't know. I could see it. Yeah, I feel like it's a story that I don't often come across, so I'd be curious what people would say. Yeah, I am curious. Anyways, reach out with your ghost stories.

And again, like, I love hearing stories from you guys. Not all of them have to be ghosty. I get a lot of good, like, spooky true crime once. Let's Not Meet Style Stories. close encounters. I love it. I almost joined a cult. The stories like that are my favorites.

Silas, thank you so much for coming and being on an episode. Where can everyone find you? Everyone can catch me as the lead host of the Sinister podcast or on Creep Time, the podcast, both are true crime shows. Perfect. And that is all we have for today. So until next time, stay dangerous. Bye guys.

Art Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kila Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heartzart pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound design a mix by Red Rum Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Drinigan, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request.

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