Just Creepy: Scary Stories - 6 Scary Stories For A Sleepless Rainy Night | Deep Woods, Scary Encounters

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

These are 6 Scary Stories For A Sleepless Rainy Night | Deep Woods, Scary Encounters Linktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepy Story Credits: ►Sent in to www.justcreepy.net Timestamps: 00:00 Into 00:00:18 Story 1 00:21:24 Story 2 00:30:54 Story 3 00:38:36 Story 4 00:45:01 Story 5 00:54:06 Story 6 Business inquiries: ►[e-mail] #scarystories #horrorstories 💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

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When I was growing up, one of my best friends was a guy we called Ricky. His real name was David. Ricky won our respect pretty quickly, too, and not just because he could handle a little playful abuse. He was obsessed with the counterculture of the 1960s. He loved the music, the rebellious attitudes, and he was fascinated by the whole concept of psychedelia. So it should be no surprise to anyone that Ricky was the first of us to seek out something a little stronger than the cans of Molson

that we used to steal from our dads. We were big into partying, so we wanted to try stuff like weed or LSD, but only Ricky had enough balls, or street smarts really, to go off looking for it, and things stayed like that for years. We'd be happy to just sit in someone's bedroom, passing around a one-hitter and watching Conan O'Brien, but Ricky wanted to keep raising the stakes and pushing the envelope. He wanted to learn how to brew up his own super-powerful LSD,

and then go out into the woods and trip for days. And like most things with Ricky, if he said he was going to do something, you could bet your butt that he was going to go ahead and do it. He was wild. He loved a party, but he never let his lifestyle get the better of him. He did okay in high school, graduated from college, and then landed himself a well-paying job at some financial company near the waterfront, all while making home-brewed batches of high-potency LSD in his apartment's spare bedroom. He was like Jim Patterson on Monday, and then Jim Morrison on a Friday, which is an awesome joke if you're Canadian, I swear. Anyway, so Ricky carries on like that for years and years, slowly ramping up his psychedelic

adventures until he was doing things like going to Mexico, to do peyote with indigenous tribal people, or to Peru to take part in some ayahuasca ceremony hosted by his very own personal shaman. And we never worried about him. Ricky always seemed to be in control, and I guess that remained true right up until the day he seemed to just lose it. It started when his sister started calling around his social circles, which obviously included me and a bunch of mutual friends who all went to the same high school. Ricky's sisters said neither she nor their family had heard from him all week, and we tried calling Ricky on his cell phone, and he wouldn't pick up any of our calls either.

By the end of the next day, his family had called the cops to file a missing person's report, and as you can imagine, we were all pretty worried about him. But then, a few weeks later, Ricky reappeared, only to not check in with his folks or let us know that he was okay. All he did was clear out his apartment and leave a letter in his parents' mailbox, one that basically said, Sell or burn anything I left behind, I'm not coming back. Everyone was as freaked out as you can imagine. We went from mildly concerned to extremely worried about him, and the not knowing was the worst part. Like, I personally had this irrational fear that he'd been. kidnapped or murdered or something, and that someone else had written the letter to confuse people

or throw the cops off their trail. But when the cops spoke to Ricky's landlady, she confirmed that he'd been in town that day, and that, although he seemed rushed, she didn't think that he was in fear for his life or anything like that. He hadn't given her any kind of forwarding address. He just packed up what he could, and then left. On paper, that was contact right there, and knowing Ricky was alive might have been enough for some other folks to call off the search. But then, because his folks still didn't know what was happening, they told the cops that they still wanted him found, so they could confirm that he was safe.

And by that time, we'd given up trying to call his cell phone, and it was a weight off our shoulders knowing that he was still alive, and that he hadn't fallen victim to a murder or kidnapper or really anything. But we knew that there must have been something that made him run off like that. and I worried over that almost as much as I wondered where he'd gotten to. About two or three months went by with me and Ricky's other friends, keeping in constant touch with his family, and then one day we heard that the cops had gotten a tip from someone up way over near Ottawa,

and that's how they traced him to some cabin out in Algonquin Provincial Park. A few cops went out to talk to him, and he only told them who he was after they promised to leave him alone. The cops left but immediately told Ricky's family, where he was. Ricky's brother then went up to try and talk to him, but he was gone, moved on again to who knows where. Ricky's family tried to get the cops to carry on looking for him, but that's not how those missing person things work. If the person doesn't want to be found, the cops can't very well go stalking them from place to place, even at the behest of the person's family.

If they wanted to track Ricky down, they'd have to do it themselves. And looking back on it, It seems like the obvious thing to do would be for everyone to keep looking and not give up. We've been handing out flyers, putting up posters, and this was in the early days of MySpace too, so I remember Ricky's sister making a little page for him and adding a bunch of people to try to raise awareness. But that was before the cops went to talk to him out at that cabin, before Word got around that he basically decided that he hated everyone, and that he didn't want to see or talk to us anymore. People didn't take that well. They took it personally. They didn't see it for what it was,

and I say all that from experience. We basically grew up together. We were best friends, and I was ready to drive out there myself to go see him, because just hearing that he didn't want to see us wasn't nearly enough to make us want to quit. It was the leaving the cabin that did it. Leaving the cabin said, This isn't some cry for help. Stop looking for me. Leaving the cabin said, I don't owe you an explanation, which was honestly all we really needed. We didn't want to control him. We just wanted closure. And I feel like we were entitled to it at the very minimum. That was in early 2004. And there was a time when I thought that we'd still be looking by the time it was 2005. But in reality, we'd all stopped looking by then, even his family.

We figured that if he wanted to reach out, he'd do so. And it was all just a matter of time. until that day came. Now cut to 2011, a full seven years later, when I got a call from a mutual friend of ours named Obdi. He got a missed call while he was at work, and when he listened to his voicemail, he heard a familiar voice on the other end telling him to call a number they left in the message at the exact time. The caller never said who it was, but when my buddy Obdi called me, he said that he was 99% certain that it was Ricky, and then asked if I wanted to come over so I could be there, when he called the number he'd given me. I drove over to his place almost immediately, and we talked about the call, and how sudden it seemed

right up until the time to call the number, at which point we sat down at his table with a pen and paper in hand, and then gave it a call. We didn't actually talk for all that long, but the long and short of it was this. It was Ricky that had left the message on Ab's voicemail, and although he didn't say where he was, he told us that he needed our help. He thought it was a big ask, considering that we hadn't talked in seven years, but that he didn't know who else to call, even though he'd spent the last few days trying to track down a working cell phone number for one of us. He'd understand if we told him to go F himself needless to say, we didn't tell him to do that. And although he had a ton of questions, Ricky said that he'd answer them all if we agreed

to meet him at this place called Whitney, which turned out to be a small town about halfway between Toronto and Ottawa. We were nervous on the drive up there and mistimed our arrival by around 15 minutes, so we had to sit there biting our nails and wondering if Ricky was actually going to show up or not. But lo and behold, right on the stroke of six, we spotted someone walking into the parking lot of the little burger place that served as our meeting spot. someone who looked a lot like Ricky if he'd spent seven years living on the streets, or more accurately living out in the middle of nowhere in the woods. It was an emotional reunion, no tears were shed, but it felt very positive, though intense,

mainly because Ricky started out by telling us how sorry he was. He said cutting off contact was a mistake, and one he'd never forgive himself for, and that it hurt to think about all the time that we had lost. Hearing all that pretty much knocked us off our feet. I mean, he covered a lot of stuff that we wanted to talk about in his opening little speech, and after that, there really wasn't much else to ask him. We wanted to know where and how he'd been living, but he wanted to know all that same stuff from us too.

And since we had him right where we wanted him, we figured that we could get him up to speed while we went inside and got a burger. We got to talking about all kinds of things, but eventually, me and Obdi were able to ask Ricky two things. Number one, where had he been living, and number two, what did he need our help with? Both questions could be answered by finishing our burgers, getting back into our car, and letting him direct us towards the place that he was living, which was way out near this place called Little Hay Lake. As it turns out, Ricky had been living almost completely off the grid for almost six years,

in a trailer that he'd managed to haul down a dirt road, and then far enough into the trees so that you couldn't see it anymore from the track. He walked into Whitney every so often to pick up whatever he couldn't shoot or forage for, and then hitched a ride further afield whenever he needed to make a few bucks. And the way he was earning those few buckaroos was by making LSD, ultra-potent medical strength LSD, and then because he was making it, he was having to test it out too very frequently. But as far as we could tell, that suited him just fine.

I guess Ricky just sort of found his calling, and the way he talked about it, he was happy, at least for a while. He had everything he needed out in that trailer. The place was relatively clean. He had a little generator that he'd used to power a laptop, and he had no internet. But Ricky didn't mind. He had his DVDs, and that was all he needed. But then came the problem that he needed our help with,

and at first, I was actually kind of scared that he'd killed somebody or something, and that he wanted our help disposing of a little. body. As it turned out, that wasn't the case, and there was nothing Ricky needed help disposing of, but by the end of the next morning, there would be a body, and it wouldn't be one we needed any help disposing of at all. We did a little more catching up back at the trailer, but then after a little looking around, I asked Ricky, half-jokingly, if he was about to enlist our help in digging a shallow grave. Ricky actually seemed kind of offended at first, but then Obdi started to laugh. It was a release of tension, I guess, pure relief that whatever Ricky needed didn't involve covering up some

horrible crime. I remember Obdi joking around saying, well, whatever the hell it is, it can't be worse than that. As in, helping Ricky hide the body, that is. Ricky had been kind of laughing along with this, at least after shaking off the offense that he took at the suggestion that he was a murderer. But when Obdi joked about how things could have been worse, Ricky didn't laugh. He didn't even smile because to him, things were about as bad as it was possible to get. I think maybe an hour past between us arriving at the trailer, and Ricky actually sitting down and telling us what he needed help with, and when he did, that nervous tension returned again. I mean, if it was more serious than hiding a dead body, then it must have been really serious, right? Serious enough to be scared

of the consequences, serious enough to consider just getting the hell out of there if he dropped a bomb on us. But when he actually told us, it was this weird mix of depressing and relief. Basically, Ricky wanted us to call up just about everyone we knew, or everyone who we wanted to save, as he put and invite them out to the woods to set up an encampment. If we didn't, they were all going to suffer a fate worse than death. In so many words, Ricky said that there was going to be a major change in Canadian society, that folks were going to be rounded up by mass soldiers, and taken away to camps to be fitted with microchips and all sorts of crazy stuff.

It was basically this giant conspiracy involving international governments looking to wield absolute power over the people. And the only way to really enforce that was to eliminate huge sections of the population, basically anyone who might put up some sort of resistance. Ricky was convinced the whole thing was going to start within a month. And although he wouldn't go into too much detail about how he knew all that stuff,

he seemed to think giving away sources would put them on some kind of government hit list. He seemed completely and utterly convinced that his predictions were correct. What followed was around six hours of convincing Ricky that he was wrong. It wasn't easy, which is why I mentioned the six hours thing, but by the time night had fallen and Ricky was riding a low dose of LSD, we'd gone from making a little headway to actually getting through to him

that his theories might just be wildly wrong. We didn't fully convince him, not all the way, but we did talk him down to the point where he agreed to come home, mainly by convincing him that he'd be in the best possible position to rescue people if the government did decide to start putting people into camps. He could be like an early warning system. He could recognize the signs, and that way he could be the hero we needed when we needed him most,

and it was a win-win either way. We proved things weren't as bad as he thought, and he could save our butts, and we'd follow him to hell and back. And that seemed like the idea that really got its hooks in him. Ricky agreed to come home with us, but not before he sobered up a little. We could sleep in our car, he'd sleep in the trailer, and then come sunrise, we'd get ourselves some breakfast, and then drive back down to Toronto and drop him off at his parents' place. After we agreed on that course of action, we finished off our beers, walked back to our car,

and agreed to head back over to the trailer come sun up. It felt like a huge victory, and the second we got back to the car, we were texting people, mainly Ricky's family, and telling them how he was finally ready to come home. We were so excited we could barely sleep. I kept thinking about how happy everyone was going to be, how driving back into Toronto was going to feel like a victory parade. I think I only nodded off for maybe an hour or so before I could see the sky changing color, and after that, Obdi and I just talked and tried not to get too nervous as we waited for Dawn to arrive.

Finally, around 6.30, Obdi and I got out of his car, and then started walking back through the trees in the direction of Ricky's trailer. I remember feeling pretty exhausted but very excited to get back on the road. I wasn't even thinking about food by that point. I'd have happily rolled all the way back into Toronto and gotten a bite there when the nerves had died down. The only thing that mattered was getting Ricky back home, home where he belonged. But then, after getting within maybe 20 feet of the trailer, we started to smell something on the breeze, something strong, something artificial, something that smelled very, very much like gasoline. I remember Obdi saying something like, can you smell that? And I told him that I did.

And then after a few more steps towards the trailer, the door opened up, and Ricky appeared in the doorway with this gas can in his hand. He told us not to come any closer, and by the end. then, the stink of gas was so thick in the air that it kind of stung my nostrils. He didn't say it in an I don't want you to get hurt kind of way. He seemed mad at us, and as we kept asking him what he was doing, he kept telling us to leave while we still had the chance. And that's about the time we noticed that it wasn't just Ricky's trailer that was soaked in gas. It was his clothes too, and it was complete chaos. Me and Abdi were shouting different

things, but all along the lines of don't do it, you don't have to do this. Think of your family, and all sorts of stuff like that. Whereas the previous night, when Ricky treated us like friends and we could actually get through to him, that morning was like a complete shift, like it was the first time seeing him, and that last night didn't count for anything. It was like he hated us, like he might have actually shot at us if he had a gun, which is why that leave while you still can line has just had such a chilling effect on me. and almost worked in making us back off before he closed the door to his trailer. Ricky told us one last time to stay back.

I didn't have any trouble staying away from a trailer that I was pretty sure was about to explode into flames. But Obdi clearly wasn't in his right mind at the time, because I had actually to drag him down to the ground, to keep him from trying to rush up to the trailer and stop Ricky in his tracks. What happened next seems kind of like a blur. I remember hearing the sound of the fire starting, and Ricky wasn't kidding when he said to stay back, because there was an actual bang, and I felt the heat on my face. I didn't see much of the flames after that, though.

I was facing back towards where Obe's car was parked, basically trying to tackle him away from the burning trailer. When he finally gave up trying, I was focused, focused on getting him back to his car, getting his keys for him. He was definitely in no condition to drive, and then telling him to call 911 while I drive. drove us to the nearest highway, figuring that was the best place for the fire department to see us, so we could guide them into the spot by the lake where Ricky's trailer was. Obdi could barely speak while he was on the phone, and it got to the point where I thought that I'd need to take over and talk to the dispatcher myself, while struggling to keep the car on the track. Like I said, the whole thing was total chaos, but in the moment, I didn't really

have time to process any of it, not until the whole fire department was hosing down the trailer, and we had a moment to ourselves before the cops showed up, and that's when all the emotion hit for me, seeing them put the trailer out and thinking there's no way in hell Ricky survived that. And then it was OB's turn to try and console me, when it was my turn to break down, right up until the cops showed up, and we had to talk to them about what had happened.

We thought we'd be going back to Toronto as heroes, and I'm not trying to say that we would have been saving him as much because obviously Ricky had agency and all of that. and it would have been him making the decision for himself. But getting to be the ones who actually brought him home, that would have been a hell of a thing, you know? And I was so excited for that, so to go from there to having to drive back and tell Ricky's parents

that he was dead all in the space of about an hour. It was my own personal hell, and I truly mean that. I lived hell on earth for a day, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. There was a reunion in the end. It was just never one that I thought, it would be. All the old crew showed up to pay their respects at Rickies, some that I hadn't seen

in years. I felt it devastating that it took his death to finally bring us together, but it was also very uplifting that people dropped what they were doing to come comfort Ricky's family as well as each other, and I just wish that it could have happened when Ricky was alive. I wish that there were enough of us up at that trailer to drag him into the car and drag him back to reality before he had a chance to do something so insane, and it was insane. Ricky didn't seem like he was in control of himself when he did that, and I refused to believe that he was. I just hope that he can forgive us all for not acting sooner, for not trying to rationalize something that now that I look back on it, just isn't healthy, no matter how happy someone claims it makes them. I get that some

people call themselves introverts, and prefer to be alone or away from large groups, but we're still social animals. We need that connection, even if it is one that we can keep at arm's length. So please, people, check in with your friends, check in with your family, and especially around the holidays. You can leave people be, just don't ever leave them alone. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them.

With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. To start off, I'd like to state that I'm a 20-year-old male who lives in the UK in a house with my family. My family consists of my dad, mom, sister, two step-sisters, one quite young and the other almost as old as. me, and a young stepbrother, so there are a lot of people living in this house. We also have a German shepherd who is quite large and protective of the property. As well as that, this story needs some background to make sense. I currently live in a town in the UK that could be considered safe, but it has its fair share of dangerous people lurking around. I previously worked at a gas

where I've had numerous encounters with people trying to shoplift, many of them carrying knives and such. I hope this gives you a brief idea of what my neighborhood is like. Now that that's been said, this story happened only a few days ago. My cat had been missing for a few weeks, which wasn't normal for him, so I was evidently quite worried. I have been keeping my window open every night in case he came into our garden and started meowing like he usually does when he wants to come back into the house. I had spent the past few nights going out and looking for him but finding and hearing nothing. This night was like any other. I was spending the night playing games and listening closely for anything coming from my window. At around three in the morning, I thought that I had heard something,

so I bolted downstairs because I believed that what I was hearing was my cat. I thought of taking my dog with me in case I needed protection, but I realized that would be a terrible idea since the cat is scared, of the dog. So if the cat really was out there, he would just run away the second he saw the dog. I went outside with a flashlight in hand and started to hear weird noises. I couldn't put my finger on the noises at first, but when I listened closer, I realized that they were the sounds of scuffling around the back of the garden, where we have a garage, a greenhouse, and a chicken coop. My first thought was there was some sort of animal trying to get at the chickens. This didn't worry me because we have a very aggressive rooster that can and will attack anyone that gets too close

to the chickens. He has done so multiple times in the past. I started walking closer to the back of the garden and the noises started to sound more human-like. It sounded like multiple people were running around. I was confused and stopped for a moment, standing there and listening. A gut feeling started brewing in my stomach, telling me to just go back inside, but I couldn't move. I didn't know if it was because of fear, or me trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for the sounds. The more I listened, the more frequent the sounds got,

as if something or someone was trying to lure me to them. I went back inside to grab the biggest knife I could and started scanning the garage with my dog, finding nothing. When I got back outside, I heard the chickens going crazy, which made me think that there was an animal attacking them. I walked to the chicken coop to check on them and make sure that they were okay, and they calmed down. As I exited the chicken coop, I soon realized the sounds had all stopped. I stood still, searching for the sounds, trying to strain my ears.

After what felt like hours standing there in the pitch dark with my flashlight not daring to point it in the direction of where I heard the sounds previously, I snapped out of my days and bolted back into the house. I made sure to lock the front door, and when I got to my room, I left my window open. To my surprise, I heard whispering coming from the garden and then a sudden metallic bang. I thought I was imagining things, and this is all some sort of dream or hallucination. The next night, I went out again, calling my cat's name multiple times, but I got no response. Then I heard the snapping of branches coming from the direction where the greenhouse was located. I stood there, and I heard a person scraping or hitting something with a stick.

followed by footsteps coming towards me. I hurried back into the house, and I heard my gate opening, so I locked the door just in case. Right after I closed the door, the handle slammed down, which scared the life out of me. I immediately thought that it was someone from my garden coming for me. I opened the door, ready to fight the person on the other side, and it turned out to be my sister coming back from walking the dog.

I'd like to say thank you to her for scaring the soul out of me and putting me in full fight mode. She asked me why I was going around locking all the doors, and I explained to her everything that had happened over the past few nights, specifically what had happened the night before and that night. After I told her the story, she obviously didn't believe me and told me that it was all in my head. I told her that the sounds were there right now and asked her to come with me if she didn't believe me. We stood in the garden, listening, and on cue, the sounds started back up again. My sister stopped dead in her tracks. I looked at her and said, I told you so. She shushed me. The sound of someone jogging or sprinting

towards us came from the darkness. We both ran back into the house, and my sister reasonably demanded that we lock all the doors in the home. On the third night of looking for my cat, I was sitting in my room and decided not to go outside, because of all that had previous, happened. At 2 a.m., I decided to go outside and look for my cat once again. I put on my coat, because that night, I was determined to finally find my cat, and put this all behind me, not caring how long it would take. I stood there in the open pitch black outside again, calling my cat's name, but I didn't get a response. I went to the front of the garden with my flashlight, looking and calling for him as well. After not a little,

getting any response, I sat myself down on the front steps of my house, flashing my light and still calling for my cat. An hour went by, and I got thoroughly bored just sitting there doing nothing. I started walking around the garden again, headed towards the greenhouse. I stopped myself, remembering what had happened the previous night. Thinking about it, I went and got the dog, both for protection and because, as stated before, the dog would bark if the cat was there. This would tell me if the cat was there or not. I know, genius thinking on my part. The dog and I went towards the greenhouse area knowing that either my cat was there or there was some random person. I let the dog go, and she did nothing, no barking, just silence. This gave me a feeling of

relief that allowed me to walk after her, still scanning the area. And then I saw it, the discovery that chilled me to my bones. Someone had some of the feeling of her. Someone had some of a stick into the ground through a plastic bag. Now you might be thinking to yourself, why did a stick in the ground scare you? The reason being that it was sunk so deep into the ground, not even I, being pretty fit, could take it out of the ground. Someone had stabbed that stick into the ground with a scary amount of force.

Making the situation worse, there was a pumpkin sitting right next to the stick, knife as I called it. But here's the thing. We don't grow pumpkins. We never have. but there was a pumpkin sitting in our garden. It clicked in my head.

There had either been one person or multiple people in the garden that night. The sounds that my sister and I had heard were people sharpening the sticks and messing about with them. They had been making noises around the property to lure someone out to investigate and do God-knows-what to them. In that moment, I was thankful to have had the common sense to run away when I did, because thinking about what these people could have done to me in the dark gives me chills, even as I write this. After this revelation, I checked behind the trees and such, making sure no one was there,

content with not finding anyone and making a note to myself to come back in the morning to get a clearer picture. I returned to my steps. I sat there waiting for around an hour longer, starting to get tired, bored, and hungry. I went back into the house, the acceptance of my cat being dead lurking in the back of my mind,

while I continued to mess about on my PC with my window open. And then, once again, I heard meowing. I rushed outside so quickly that I forgot to put on shoes. But I also had the presence of mine to grab a knife on my way out, deciding that if anyone was out there, I'd confront them on the spot. I reached my gate and saw my cat standing on the fence. I dropped my knife and my heart was filled with joy. I can't explain to you how happy I was to see him. There had been no noises since that night, but I'm still wary when I go out at night. I thought about this experience and realized how lucky I was

to not have gone further into the greenhouse that night. I could have been killed right there, or one of my younger siblings could have heard the noises and gone out themselves, and they'd have been killed. I try not to dwell on it too much because the thoughts truly disturb me. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong.

Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. You tell yourself, no one wants your college-era band teas, but on Deep Hop, people are searching

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This story comes from my experience in the military, specifically from a certain training area in Arizona. I won't be too specific about where exactly I want. was for obvious reasons, but the location isn't really important. It's what happened while we were there and what I saw that I still think about to this day. For context, I was raised in a rural part of North Idaho, so the outdoors are very familiar to me. At first, training in the deserts of Arizona didn't sound too bad. I'd been in for a few years at that point, knew my way around, and was a good soldier, in my opinion, always doing my best to keep a leg.

level head. Our training started sometime around mid-October when the air starts to get colder, and wind plus rain affects you more than it usually does. If you know anything about the desert and temperatures, it can get very, very cold and fast at night. Even if it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit out at lunchtime, it could hit well below 20 at night, and the wind and rain that usually accompanied it didn't help. The reason I specify the nighttime conditions is that's the only time we were allowed to run our training in operations. We were testing equipment for the Army, but could not go out during the day

because it had the potential to screw up communication between airplanes and such. So, at night, when little to no aircraft were out, we would head out and begin our training. We started at 9 p.m. and ended missions at 6 a.m. That way we could sleep during the day and train again at night, sometimes multiple times in a row. Now personally, I believe that there are creatures

and entities on this planet that we can't really explain. Little did I know I was about to have two encounters in a single night, one of them face to face. The first happened at about 11 p.m. Three other men and I were scanning a road and field to watch for opposing forces. They were played by other soldiers in different uniforms for training purposes, so we were on our guard. It was my job to watch the field and the road while the other two made radio calls,

waiting for the signal to move in further. I moved maybe 30 feet away from them to get a better spot for pulling security. I backed myself into a bush with some leaves still hanging to somewhat cover my position. On my left was a wide open field with a single tree in the middle, about 300 feet away from me. It only had two branches, both in very awkward positions for a tree. One was angled upwards, while the other one seemed to point straight out at the road. On my right, on the other side of the road I was watching, was a tree line. which turned into a hill that we would be walking up later after we got the green light.

As I scanned the field and the road for opposing forces or vehicles, I spotted some headlights cresting over a hill not too far away from us. They were easy to see with our night vision. You could see someone using any kind of light for miles. As if it wasn't already easy enough to see light at night, I raised my voice to tell the other two men that there was a vehicle coming and to tell everyone else to stay hidden. I pushed myself even further into the bush so that I would be completely concealed.

The truck drove right past us. We had remained undetected. My heart was racing, excited to have stayed hidden and been so close. But what happened next made my heart sink. I looked back out at the road and field to see if there was anything else coming, and when my eyes crossed over to the field, the tree had moved. I rubbed my eyes and refocused my night vision to see if that would help. help, but the tree had in fact moved closer to me, and the branches had also moved. Both of its

dead limbs now seemed to point at me. It was about 200 feet away from me. I convinced myself I was just seeing things. About five minutes later, I felt a tap on my shoulder, causing me to jump a bit. It was just my teammate. He said it's time to move up. You good? I turned to face him when I said I was ready to go. But when I turned back to take him. take one more look at the field, that tree was gone. I sat there on one knee in disbelief. To have hallucinated the tree's distance and shape was believable to me, but to have made up the tree entirely to myself. No way. A chill ran down my spine as I searched for the tree before cautiously emerging from my bush and walking back to my team. As I did, I constantly looked

over my shoulder at that wide open field that was all of a sudden empty. This put me on edge for the rest of the night, and we still had not completed our objective. After another hour of walking through the woods and a couple of open fields, we finally arrived at the objective. The mission was a little tricky. We had to infiltrate a small mock village and secure an HVT, high-value target. Only after all that could we call the mission complete. For context, all the opposing forces we were fighting were just other soldiers in uniform, all using blank rounds with, lasers. This let us train for a real-world fight without getting hurt. When you get hit by a laser, a beeping sound will come from equipment on our body armor, which means we were considered injured and had to play dead. Anyway, our front element was spotted by the opposing forces,

so we had to fight to take the village. It was both fun and intense. After walking for hours, not doing much, we finally got to train and work on other skills. My team was in charge. My team was in charge of securing the HVT, so after we had eliminated the OPM for, my team and I moved to the building he was supposed to be in. The HVT was simply a soldier in a white robe that we had to capture in order to call the mission complete. When we finally got to the building, which was simply a one-room building with two large doors, I had one of my soldiers open the door so that I could peek inside. When he did, I saw a silhouette in the back of the room. I was about to yell and tell him to put his hands up, but something was wrong. This person was far too short. They had long black hair

and what looked to be a black robe under our night vision. I hesitated, and this shadow person in the room broke into a sprint right at me. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. I panicked, firing off three blank shots. When the smoke cleared, a yell came from inside the room. My adrenaline was pumping now more than ever, and I moved in, yelling as if I was trying to scare someone. I expected to see it again when I swung into the room, but when I looked, it was just the HVT covering his ears because my shots had echoed, becoming very loud in that small space. I had trouble relaxing as my soldier came in after me, and without question, began to search the man, pretending to detain him. The HVT had not seen the black figure that charged me.

He had no idea what I was shooting at. We wrapped up the mission, leaving the field around 5.30 in the morning. As we drove away with the rising sun chasing away the desert's mirages and the mountain shadows, I still could not shake the thought that what I had seen felt so real. Thankfully, that was the last mission we did out there, and I had trouble sleeping for days afterward. Needless to say, this confirmed my belief in the fact that there are things on this earth that are beyond our understanding right now, and I'm just thankful it didn't go down any worse. streaming.

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Although this might not be your conventional scary story, It sure as hell was the most unsettling otherworldly thing that's ever happened to me, and I think some of your viewers and listeners will get a kick out of it. So, I used to do a lot of trail running near the Asabo River in northern Michigan. Some of my favorite routes were right in the middle of the Huron National Forest, and passed near some pretty good fishing and swimming spots too. I used to load up my pickup truck, drive a few miles up river, and then run in a big old loop until I got back to my truck,

feeling like I'd lost a few pounds in sweat alone. Both sides of the trail are shrouded by tall white and red pines, occasionally birches and the like. It's very scenic, very lovely, but it gets hot as hell in the early July afternoon, and some days I'd much rather have been tubing down the river than sweating my butt off on the trails. Some sections of the trail are pretty close to nearby highways,

so typically you could either hear a distant radio, or music playing from a passing car or truck. But then, on one day in early July, like I said, I heard something which sounded like classic rock music coming through the trees. I used to run without headphones if I was trail running because it's not the kind of place where you want to lose your situational awareness. As I was running, I could hear the sound getting closer and closer,

like I was about to see some ATV or bike off-roaders coming along the trail at any moment. Within the span of 30 seconds, it felt like the sound had gone from being very distant to sounding like it was almost on top of me. But bizarrely, even though the sound was so loud, I couldn't see its source. It must have been easily within 30 feet of me, just off to the left in the forest, and it should have been obvious, but it wasn't. The sound got a little louder one second, and it went from sounding like a cross between

heavy metal music or a high-pitched engine to sounding like a great buzzing of tiny wings. Then I saw it. It was perhaps five feet from me, and the second I laid eyes on it, it appeared as a big shapeless shadow floating through the trees. There were little flies, thousands of them, all buzzing in unison in this big cloud that moved like it was one ethereal body. Their buzzing sounded like it was in differing octaves of the same note, definitely not classic rock music, but still eerily mesmerizing. But then, the cloud of tiny buzzing insects suddenly and unexpectedly veered towards me. I tried to back up, but the cloud moved surprisingly fast,

and before I could turn and really sprint to get away, I felt and heard the cloud of flies enveloped me. I was expecting to feel them biting or stinging me, and I started to scream and wave my arms in a pointless, flailing attempt to keep them off of me. I could hear them, and feel them buzzing in my ears. and even though their wings were probably no bigger than an eyelash, their combined buzzing sounded almost deafening. As the cloud took me over, I could feel my skin crawling, not from sheer fright or disgust, but because there were literally things buzzing and crawling

all over me for a moment. And it made that moment feel like an eternity. But just a second later, the buzzing subsided, and the cloud moved on. When I opened my eyes, I caught one last glimpse of it before it disappeared among the trees again. Then, as it left the area for good, the audible buzzing diminished, and its noise warped back into what sounded like ACDC being played from a small, tiny speaker. It was easily the most frightening, unsettling, and downright skin-crawling thing I'd ever experienced. The kind of thing that if I didn't know any better, I might think was a demonic manifestation, I mean go back a few hundred years, and a more religious ancestor of mine. might have died of fright when this dark shadowy presence veered towards them out of nowhere.

I mean, it's the closest thing to a ghost or spirit I think I'll ever see. Just this inexplicable, mystifying presence that heralded itself before it became visible. After I got home, I did as much online research as I could to try and figure out just what the hell I'd experienced. This was back in the fall of the year 2000, a time when the internet wasn't nearly as patted out with information as it is now, but I still managed to find a few relevant websites which gave me a clue as to what had happened. Apparently, during the summer of just a few months prior, Grand Traverse County discovered it had a major tent caterpillar infestation. They're called that because they make little webs that look almost like tents, and they completely strip the leaves

of trees that they make their homes in. Obviously this wasn't all that good for the environment, so officials in Traverse City consulted with some nature expert who told them that flooding the area with black flies who like to lay their eggs on the tent caterpillar's cocoons would thin out the infestation and return the balance of nature. Believe it or not, there are actually companies out there who specialize in breeding things like black flies or any other insect species that might prove valuable

in managing ecological problems such as a tent caterpillar infestation. They probably made tens of thousands of dollars selling the city of Traverse a whole bunch of these little black flies, and because they'd been living in swarms and close spaces for their short lives, some stayed in formation longer than others, I guess, and resulted in the thoroughly spine-tingling sight that I had witnessed in the woods that day. It was nice to have some kind of explanation for what happened. I didn't think anything supernatural was at work or anything, but I was still creeped out by the experience. Having something to explain what happened that actually made sense to me on an environmental level gave

me an awful lot of peace of mind. I guess there's a lot of things in the world that are like that. Things that are really creepy, even when there's a perfectly rational explanation for them. But I'm certainly in no hurry to experience them, because feeling that huge cloud of swarming, buzzing black flies swallow me up and the raw terror it produced in me, it's not something I ever want to feel again. So this is going to be a really wild ride, and there are some pretty personal family details in here too. I'm not naming any names or places to try and keep my anonymity, so basically a few years back, I found some old photographs of an uncle on my dad's side. There were photos that I was not supposed to find, and the reason behind that was pretty obvious.

The only photos I'd ever seen of this uncle, who had moved away when I was much younger, were from when he and my dad were kids or in their early teens. I'd never seen him as an older kid or a grown-up because by that stage, he was very distant from the family and then moved across the country before I was out of kindergarten. Apparently, he came to see me one time when I was a baby, but aside from that, I had no real memories of him, just the old photos my dad let me see.

But by that day, I saw the photos that he didn't want me to see, and everything kind of just fell into place. I remember opening up the little envelope, taking out the pictures, and feeling this intense feeling of confusion for a few minutes as I flicked through those pictures. The photos seemed to be taken at a music show of some kind, as I remember thinking, did my dad used to be a punk? Because there was a lot of that kind of style among the people attending the show. But then, the more I looked, the more I noticed that two or three people appeared over and over again.

They had closely shaven heads, wore big black boots and denim, and each had a swastika either on their jacket somewhere or tattooed somewhere prominent, like their neck, shoulder, or arm. That grabbed my attention all on its own, but the thing that really had me pulling back was the fact that one of these skinheads with that tattoo looked a hell of a lot like my uncle Alan, the one I hadn't seen since I was a baby. There was actually a moment where I thought one of the other guys might have been my dad, so when I was half freaking out by the time I climbed down from the attic and took the pictures to show Mom, who just kept saying, I think you need to talk to your father about this, in a way that told me that she knew the whole story, but didn't want to be the one to have to tell me.

Now anyway, about half an hour later, my father and I are having a massive yelling match, mostly surrounding the fact that he and Mom had chosen to hide. something huge from me. But the thing that really made me explode was how he started telling me, Alan's not a bad guy, you don't understand. Now imagine being me in that moment and having your dad tell you that your Nazi uncle isn't a bad guy. I mean, that's the dictionary definition of a bad guy, right? I couldn't understand why dad would say something so insane when the evidence that his brother was some evil bastard was right there, right in front of him. And the argument got really intense,

Things got very emotional, but as much as I tried to get my dad to talk to me about it, to explain why he'd kept things hidden, he just didn't want to talk to me about it at all. And then, after, I don't know how long, he burst into tears, and it's the only time I'd ever seen my dad cry. My mom then basically chased me out of the room, telling me to give your father and me a minute to talk, and much like my dad crying, I rarely saw my mom get that mad. Seeing Dad cry had already shut me up, but then seeing my mom so furious had me running upstairs. When she started to snap at me, like I know it was already a tense situation,

but seeing Dad cry and seeing Mom get so mad, that's what made me realize that there might have been more to the story than just my uncle being a jerk. I was still angry, but I also felt kind of dumb for not realizing that there was a whole backstory behind my uncle and his especially bad life decisions. And it was one that was very painful for my father to have to remember. I knew it would be a crazy story. There's no way that it couldn't have been. But when I sat down with dad and he told me the whole thing from start to finish,

I had to pick my jaw up off the floor afterwards. Uncle Alan was just two years younger than my dad, and they were best friends growing up. But around the age of 13, my uncle's behavior started to change, and he became my dad's polar opposite in just about every way. He fell in with a bad crowd, a really bad crowd, and the deeper he went down that skinhead rabbit hole, the more he became completely incompatible with any kind of civilized society.

Those were basically my dad's words too. He didn't want my uncle around me when I was a kid. He still loved him, but he wasn't about to let some meth head around his daughter. And the same applied to almost everyone else too. He became a pariah, and soon living in the city got too much for him. You can't exactly walk around with those kinds of tattoos and not get yourself into trouble, I guess. So Uncle Allen started looking for some other place to live, and that's when he heard about some white supremacist militia turned Doomsday cult living out in the middle of nowhere.

He and Dad were talking around the time he moved away, so Dad doesn't know exactly how it all came about, but Uncle Allen ended up living with these people, and basically preparing for the end of the world. Not the end in any biblical sense, but like a helter-skelter-style race war that had end society as we know it. There were all kinds of people out there too,

from all walks of life, whole families too, but they were all there because of that one ugly thing that united them, hate. Yet having families meant that there were kids there, a bunch of them, but apparently not everyone had their best interests in mind. Somehow, Uncle Allen discovered that a few of the guys that he'd stayed with were in the process of trying to groom one of the girls that was part of one of the families.

I don't know how exactly, but there was some kind of confrontation, and Uncle Alan's worst fears were confirmed. He went straight to the group's leader, but instead of acting on the tip and investigating what was going on, the leader tried to downplay the whole thing and told my uncle that he was just being paranoid. Personally, I think the guy was in on it, but excuse me if I'm kind of biased towards literal Nazis. Anyway, Uncle Allen figured that he was faced with two choices at that point. Number one, do nothing, and just allow these racist scumbags to groom a little girl. Or number two, find a way to get those kids as far away as possible, and do so by any means

necessary. I guess he knew he couldn't prove that the guys were trying to groom the girl, so there was a chance that the cops wouldn't be able to do anything about it. But what they'd be very interested in was all the illegal weapons and bomb-making equipment that they had stashed up there. And so, my uncle Alan became a snitch. Apparently, he helped the fed sneak up to the place the group was staying too. If he hadn't, there probably would have been another Waco out of the same. out there in the woods, and all those kids might have been killed in the crossfire. Heck, they might even have done like a Jim Jones and killed everyone so the feds couldn't get to them. So I understand why he'd cooperate to the point of actually guiding them in or telling them

the secret password or whatever it was. But then after that, when everyone was up on charges, Uncle Allen had to go on the run. He could have turned state's witness, got a whole new identity, but he didn't want to work with the feds any more than he had to, and he didn't want to go running to Uncle Sam to protect him from anyone or anything. And so instead, he pays my dad one last visit and then just disappears. I asked Dad what was said during that last meeting, and apparently, it was mostly Uncle Alan explaining what had happened out there in the woods, and then apologizing for being away for so long without reaching out in any way. He then apologized again because he had to move far away and never come back, because there were people who wanted Dad,

you see. I guess it was already a risk meeting my dad, and they met somewhere quiet after dark, too, so I guess Uncle Allen was really serious about being in danger. After that, Dad never saw or heard from him again, not even so much as a phone call. I don't even know if Uncle Alan came to regret his beliefs or his actions. I hope he did, and in my head I like to imagine that he found some dignity in helping those kids, or at least trying to help them, and that he was able to build himself up from that. But then again, maybe he's still the same guy, and I'd call him a piece of crap to his face if I ever met him, and he still has those disgusting tattoos. But it's just kind of weird to think that a person like that could at least do some small amount

of good in the world. Not enough to balance out the hate that he has, but still better than nothing, I guess. I've been walking and running on forest trails for most of my adult life, and And here are some of the weirdest, creepiest, and most frightening things I've experienced on those trails. One day, I went trail running on a rainy, foggy day. There were no other cars, and I didn't see any other people up there, but I was around five miles up the trail, which is about eight kilometers for you find people across the pond.

There's a part where the trail is really steep, and you kind of slow down and stoop low to avoid this really low-hanging branch, so you can't really see what's on the other side. But then I pass under the branch, stand up, and suddenly I'm face to face with a raccoon head sitting on top of a big rock, deliberately placed facing the trail. It looked fresh too. The blood hadn't finished drying, and its eyes had been gouged out. It still looked like a fresh wound. It was very unnerving to randomly come face to face with that on a foggy day alone in the

woods. I stayed very well away from that head, kept on going, and didn't see anything else weird that day, unless you count two crows following me, circling above me the whole time I was there. The second thing happened when I was running a new trail that I'd never been to before. I was having a lovely time until I came to a long, straight section of the trail, and I could see up ahead two trees that looked like they'd been propped together to create an incomplete archway over the trail. On the tip of each tree was a deer skull, placed so that if you walked in the center of the trail, they were both looking down at you as you

them. Seeing this obviously set off some alarm bells, but I just kept running. You can bet that I stayed ready to pull out my can of bear mace from my little fanny pack. Moments after I passed that archway with the skulls, I started getting chills all over, and I felt like I was being watched. I also remember it suddenly got very quiet in the woods, where moments before I could hear birds and the chatter of small animals in the brush. Anyone who is an experienced outdoorsman can tell you that sudden silence in the woods is not a good sign. Generally, it means there's a predator of some kind nearby. It almost feels like the whole forest is holding its breath, waiting for it to pass. I only made it like 20 feet past the archway before that bad feeling

in my gut convinced me to turn around and leave. I felt like I was being stalked or watched the whole time I was going down the trail until I got closer to the parking lot. I didn't see a thing, though. To this day, I have no idea what that was all about, but I'm glad I listened to my gut and turned around. Any supernatural explanations aside, it easily could have been a cougar, or a grizzly bear that was living out there, or maybe even a moose. I didn't see or experience anything other than the feeling of being followed or watched, and when you're out in the mountains alone, though, you trust that gut feeling. This one took place in the same place as the first story with that raccoon head. This time, I was not alone, and I had three friends with me.

Something to note is that there was only one way to get into this canyon and to reach the trailhead. You have to park on a residential street up in the hills and walk on the trail past like three people's houses. When we arrived, there were no other cars around, so most likely no people up the trail either. Early on in the trail we encountered our first oddity. There were some clothes on the trail, laid out on the ground as if though someone had recently been wearing them. A shirt, jacket, pants, boots, socks, all arranged as if someone had been laying there

and then just melted away, leaving only the clothes behind. I thought it was weird as heck, but I made a joke that we might find some crazy naked person running around here on the way up, and we laughed it off and kept going. Not much further up the trail, we saw the second oddity. Just a whole bunch of camping equipment in a big old pile. I'm talking big hiking backpacks, tent bags, sleeping bags. All of this gear looked brand new, never used. There was enough gear for like ten people, and there was no one around.

I thought that was weird, but we kept going. Well, we saw a couple more similarly big piles of gear stashed in clear view along the trail, but again, no one at all around. Further up the trail we had probably gone three-ish miles or four point-point-eight kilometers at this point, and we encountered yet another large pile of gear, but this time it was right in the center of the trail for some reason. I remember there were a few backpacks sitting next to each other, and they were just full, bursting with something. I wanted to look, I really did, but none of us wanted to touch the bags or open them up. It gave us all kind of a weird feeling. I remember there were a handful of leather

coats strewn about that area too, for some reason. At this point, my friends and I were getting a little uneasy about all of this because none of this made any sense, and it'd be quite an undertaking to bring all of this camping gear up to this trail. It's not an easy trail, and it was enough gear that it would take probably 20 to 30 plus people to bring it all in one go. We decided not to touch anything, and just kept going. I remember a very distinct moment when something changed. I led the group and climbed up a boulder to continue on the trail, and what do I see up ahead? Yet another big pile of equipment laid out in the middle of the trail. Suddenly, at that moment, it got quiet, and as you know, that's never a good sign out in nature. Nothing changed other than that, but this feeling of dread came

over me suddenly, and my intuition was telling me to get the hell out of there. So I turned around and said, executive decision, we're leaving. No one argued. My friends had picked up the same vibe as I had. It was kind of a tense hike, but we didn't see anything other than the stuff that was still there, or anyone the whole way down. When we arrived at the car, I called the nearest ranger station and told them what we saw, and I never heard back from them. I have no explanation for any of this, but ultimately, what was weird to me is that they brought all this stuff up there, and just left it in plain view of the trail, and then they were just gone. The last couple of piles we saw in the middle of the trail gave off a distinct, it's a trap vibe for some reason, and we didn't

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