Just Creepy: Scary Stories - Scary Stories For A Sleepless, Cold, And Storming Night

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

These are 5 Scary Stories For A Sleepless, Cold, And Storming Night Linktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepy Story Credits: ►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/ ►https://www.reddit.com/user/Kit0691/►https://www.reddit.com/user/relativelyfunkadelic/►https://www.reddit.com/user/Alhazred01/ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:00:18 Story 1 00:14:04 Story 2 00:22:24 Story 3 00:35:47 Story 4 00:52:10 Story 5 Music by: ► Myuu's channel http://bit.ly/1k1g4ey ►CO.AG Music http://bit.ly/2f9WQpe Thumbnail art: ►Just Creepy Business inquiries: ►[e-mail] #scarystories #horrorstories 💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at Yamava.com must be 21st winter. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. I start retelling this particular experience, I want to preface it with my reason for posting. This happened some years back, and I've always been quick to push it aside and try to forget about it, but a conversation I had recently inspired me to write my story out, so that people with more experience in paranormal or supernatural phenomena might tell me what I witnessed, if anything. This all takes place in northwestern Montana during late autumn of 2009. Apologies for any spelling and grammatical errors. I wrote it all down in one sitting.

When I was 17, I moved out of my parents' house and in with a co-worker, who I'll call John, in his trailer. We got along well at work. It was actually one of the better roommate situations I've ever had in terms of compatibility, and we became close friends during that time. We were roommates until shortly after I turned 18, and some personal stuff happened with my family. I ended up moving back in with my parents for a while to help them cover some bills. It took about three months for that situation to stabilize, and I called this friend up about moving back out there.

This was the first time I remember feeling something was off, though it's been so long that I can't recall the details of the conversation. There was just a sense of wrongness that lingered for a while after I'd hung up the phone. The end result was that I was welcome to move back in, which I expected. I waited for a day off, and another friend, who I'll call Dave, came to help me move. Dave was another Dungeons and Dragons pal from a different group, and we were figuring we'd show up and talk John into a one-shot session or something, so we loaded up all my stuff and drove out there, and it was a nightmare. From the moment John opened the door, everything was wrong. I won't say John

was a clean freak, but he tried to maintain his space, and he'd always insisted we clean up for company when I was living with him. I stood there, open-mouthed, at the thick layer of dust coating nearly everything. The longer I looked around, the worse it got. There was a half-eaten plate of food turned to mold sitting on the table. Both sinks in the kitchen were similarly moldy, and the air in the trailer stank, even beyond what I'd expect from moldy dishes. I was extremely taken. aback by the state of the trailer, but the state of my friend was even more shocking. He worked at a bank and had always kept himself clean, but now he looked like a wreck. He'd lost weight, his skin had an unhealthy, waxy look to it. His hair was overgrown and greasy, and his body

odor was terrible. His smell was the first thing that made me think something was really off about the situation. I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons and doing other nerd stuff for a long time, and I'm sorry to say a lot of nerds don't have the best hygiene practices, so I've encountered plenty of pungent body odor, but this was not the same. It was almost the sickly sweet smell of something dead, but not quite. I've never smelled anything exactly like it, before or since. At this point in the encounter, I was at a general level of unease, and I didn't want to go into the trailer, but John invited us in.

And not wanting to be rude, I went. I figured something crazy had happened while I was away. John wasn't dating anyone, so I didn't think heartbreak was the cause, and we'd stayed in touch after I first moved out. Even when that fell off a bit, I still heard from mutual friends about the Dungeons and Dragon sessions he was attending. Regardless, something had obviously happened. So standing there in his dusty living room with Dave, who kept shooting me sideways looks,

I asked John if everything was all right. After a full three seconds of silence, he assured me everything was fine. That was it. He didn't explain the state of his house or anything else. And what was even weirder was when he said, You guys can crash out here, and then just headed off to the back of the house. I'd always known him to be a diligent host. So this was odd, to say the least, though basically nothing was going as I expected or remembered.

So him ditching us in the living room of his nasty house was maybe the least weird thing so far. This is the part where I'm pretty glad Dave was there. To me, this nasty trailer was still my home. I'd lived there for over a year before my three-month return to my parents, and I had a sense of belonging that I think made me oblivious to things obvious to Dave. Despite the condition of the place and being left alone by John, I still hadn't changed my plan of living there. I set my stuff down and started preparing to clean,

but Dave stopped me and began pointing out things I hadn't noticed. The layer of dust was completely undisturbed across the entire living room and kitchen area, except for a thin track from the front door to the hallway leading to the back of the trailer. Whispering to me, Dave said, Nothing in here has been used for a long time. And once I really looked around, I realized he was right. The TV, the computer, the couch, the chairs, the dining table with its rotten food. He hadn't laid a hand on any of it for at least a month, maybe longer.

Dave, moving almost as if he were sneaking, walked quietly into the kitchen to inspect the fridge. He pointed out a few thick patches of dust on the flatter surfaces of the fridge, but it was harder to tell on the handle. The metal handle had some dust, but not as much collected. Stepping past Dave, I reached out with one finger and popped the fridge open. I was gagging before I'd even open the door enough for the interior light to come on. Throwing my arm across my face and burying my nose in the crook of my elbow, I opened the fridge about halfway. It was top-to-bottom rotten food.

After a second, I stepped back, turning away, trying not to vomit. Once I'd collected myself, Dave showed me a half gallon of milk he'd pulled out of the fridge, indicating that it had expired three weeks prior. Personally, I just wanted him to put everything back and close the door. I was more or less done playing dust detective. I basically shrugged off everything up to that point. Cleared some dust from the couch, got my laptop out, and connected to the Wi-Fi we'd always paid for.

After a while, Dave joined me, and we played World of Warcraft for a bit. Eventually, he told me he'd hang out for the night because he was my ride. And taking him back to his place and then driving back again was a 90-minute round trip. To be clear, I would have taken him home anyway. I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to stay in a room with a giant stack. of moldy dishes in the sink and a fridge full of rotten food. We played games for the next few hours, and John never made a sound. At one point, Dave asked me where the bathroom was, and I told him it was at the far end of the hallway next to John's bedroom. A low level of unease had been building

since John first answered the door, and was getting worse the longer we stayed. Normally, I wouldn't walk with a friend to the bathroom, but it felt like the right thing to do this time. So I led Dave down the hallway, flipping on the hallway light as we went, and ended up with dust on my fingers from the switch. By this point, I was actually getting annoyed. I don't normally have bad seasonal allergies. But all the dust we'd been stirring up had my nose itchy and half-plugged. So on the way down, I figured I'd point Dave to the bathroom and then knock on John's bedroom door to confront him about the condition of the house. But halfway down the hallway, I noticed a hole in the floor outside the bathroom door.

a jagged-edged hole through which i could see the dirt cobwebs and shredded black plastic that had once covered the insulation i sighed exasperated by the weirdness i directed dave into the bathroom and walked to the end of the hallway where john's room was i briefly wondered if he was asleep as no light was coming from under his door the sun was setting but it gets dark pretty early that time of year annoyed i knocked loudly and after a few seconds i heard a great moment i heard a great time of the door the sun was setting but it gets dark pretty early that time of year annoyed i knocked loudly and after a few seconds i heard a grunt from inside. I popped the door open and flipped on the light. This was when it really started to sink in how wrong this whole experience felt. I glanced around the room, and it was in much the same condition as the rest of the house. Dust everywhere, except for a small track from the door to the nearest side of the bed. The bed itself was terrible. Blankets and pillows stained a deep yellow, almost black in places, and John just lay there with a thousand-yard stare fixed on the ceiling. I completely forgot why I had come to talk to him, because looking directly at him

filled me with a profound fear. It seemed odd to feel so afraid in that situation, my sickly-looking, clearly depressed friend lying on a disgusting bed, paying no attention to me at all. John was not an intimidating guy. He was short, a bit chubby, and baby-faced. Yet in my gut, I was afraid of him. I mumbled something about coming to say good night, turned off the light, and shut the door. I turned around to see Dave kneeling by the hole in the floor, which as I write this makes me wonder how long I stood there in the doorway. If I had to estimate maybe only 15 seconds passed from when I left Dave to when I said good night to John, yet he was already out of the bathroom. As I approached, Dave pointed at the edge of the hole and told me the wood along the edge

was twisted upward, as if the hole had been made from below. I wish I could confirm that. I'm including it here because Dave did say it, but I didn't take the time to inspect it myself. Right then, I was at war with my own sense of fear sparked by being around John. I just nodded to Dave and said, we should get back to the living room. Fast forward a bit. I kind of came to my senses once we were back in the living room and I had reopened my laptop. My sudden, intense fear of John eased off, and we played games for a few more hours before Dave said he wanted to rest his eyes. We shut everything down. I settled into a recliner and Dave lay on the couch, positioned so he could keep an eye on the hallway. I was too uneasy to sleep.

After seeing John's room, I knew I wouldn't be living there after all. As much as I disliked living with my parents, it was preferable to whatever was going on with John. Quietly, I told Dave that everything was all wrong and explained how. From what I knew of John, he would never have let things reach this point. We weighed the possibilities. A psychotic break, maybe drugs, or, as I later thought, he might have been seriously ill. All of those remain possible explanations for his strange behavior, but my gut still tells me none of them fully explain it. After a while, we lapsed into silence. I was just waiting for the sun to come up, starting to wonder why we hadn't already left, when Dave motioned with his hand to get my attention. He pointed toward the hallway, and I turned

my head slowly in the recliner. After maybe 15 seconds of staring into the dark hallway, I heard a slight creak. A little while, and a few more creeks later, I saw John's darkened silhouette standing just inside the hallway at the edge of the kitchen. That deep sense of fear started building in me again. The only thing I can compare it to is the time I went hiking alone and ran head on into a bear going the opposite way on the trail. I had bear spray, which I didn't end up using, but it was terrifying, and honestly, I've never really enjoyed hiking since. Standing across from that massive bear with nothing but a can of spray was a terror so deep it still gives me goosebumps. By contrast, I've been face to face with plenty of threatening

or crazy people without feeling that same dread. It's a human threat, if that makes sense. Seeing John lurking in that hallway inspired a level of fear so intense that I have no choice but to consider unconventional answers for what happened to him. Because the only comparable gut feeling of dread I've ever experienced

came from facing one of the largest terrestrial predators on the planet, by myself, on its home turf, armed with basically nothing. There was something deeply wrong and dangerous going on that I can't explain analytically, but my instincts told me I was in danger in a way I'd never prepared for. To fast forward to the end, we lay there in silence while he lurked in the hallway for hours. When I asked Dave about it recently, he said it was at least two hours that John stood there.

Eventually, he crept back down the hallway to his bedroom. Then, quietly and quickly, we gathered our things, snuck out to my car, and left. I followed up a bit with our mutual friends afterward. but got the same story from all of them. One day he just stopped coming around. Later, I heard from someone who spoke to his parents that he had called them and said he was leaving town. As far as I know, no one has seen or heard from him since.

I've mostly tried to forget the whole thing ever happened, although for a while I had panic attacks whenever I thought about it. I realized nothing overtly paranormal took place, so I'm sorry if this is posted in the wrong place. but my gut tells me that something well out of the ordinary was going on. If anyone has any insight, I'd be happy to hear it. If you need more details, I'll answer questions as best I can. And if you don't believe me, I don't blame you.

These events took place in a rural part of North Dakota in the summer of 2012. Anyone who's spent time in the Midwest of the U.S. won't take long to tell you there's not a lot to do in your free time. In places like North Dakota, this is doubly true. It's either hot or frozen. It can be ugly, dusty, and it's as if someone left the wind on for the last 30,000 years. Almost no one wants to live there, and even the bushes evolved into tumbleweeds to try to escape. That said, in 2012, North Dakota had some of the best wages in the world due to its oil boom, and I, like so many other people, just sort of ended up there.

Now, when I say there wasn't much to do, it's not hyperbole. You've got restaurants, bars, and street. trip clubs, none of which were built for the influx of people flooding in from other states, many of whom you wouldn't want to be around even when they were sober. Still, you find ways to pass the time between shifts, and one of our favorites for a while was driving the back roads at night, listening to music and smoking weed. I didn't personally smoke, but everyone else did, so there it is. It was a time and place where a lot of people were constantly on edge.

Everyone was a stranger. We worked all the time, and we slept in whatever houses our jobs could find for us. Every week brought another story about someone being killed or a business being robbed at gunpoint. The local police were overwhelmed by the skyrocketing crime rates. I like to think of it as a brief resurgence of the West's more lawless era. So, at night, we'd cruise down endless dirt roads in the dark, blasting whatever music we had on hand, and trying to laugh off the stress of being there. Sometimes, we'd stop in the darkness, kill the lights, and listen to the wind howl around the vehicle.

The sound could even be kind of soothing sometimes, but not that night. And it was the last time I ever took a recreational night drive through the countryside. I think we all felt the difference right away. We pulled off to the side of the road, killed the lights, and turned the radio down. When clouds cover the moon,

and stars and your many miles from the nearest street lamp, it's hard to describe how complete the darkness can be. You turn off the lights, and suddenly it's not just an intangible absence of light. The dark becomes more solid, like it has a certain weight you can feel against your skin. This part of the experience can actually be fun in a scary way, but we'd done it many times, and I was fairly used to it. The wind howled differently around us this time. If you live there long enough, you'll experience all kinds of winds at various volumes and pitches. By that point, I had lived there for quite a while, and I'd never heard this particular shriek before, or since. It was menacing, and I felt my hair rise at the sound. A girl who rode with us was the first to speak up, after maybe only a few seconds of being

pulled off the road. I remember hearing her voice in the dark. Damn, that's creepy. I nodded silently, my head turned as if to look out the window on my side, though I couldn't see beyond it in the darkness. With every passing moment, it seemed like the unnatural shriek on the wind rose higher. It was an entirely inhuman sound that, as it climbed, gave the impression of something approaching. I was convinced, as I sat there in the dark, that something was descending on us while we were parked off that road. While my fighter flight response was still catching up, my friend next to me in the back seat, beat me to the punch. Go, he snapped from the darkness, and instantly the car lights clicked back on, the engine started, and I felt it more as a vibration through my seat than a sound.

I remember vividly being unable to hear anything over the shriek. I felt the tires spin for a second in the dirt and grass before catching. We lurched forward and shot off down the dirt road. From the moment we stopped to the moment we floored it out of there, I'd estimate no more than ten seconds I think if it had ended here, we might have kept driving around at night, laughing it off as jumping at our own shadows. If that had been all, I wouldn't even bother to write it down. But it wasn't, so here we are. As we shot off, I experienced a revelation that chills my blood to this day. While we were parked in the darkness, the wind blew consistently across the car from right to left, and the shrieking sound also moved in that direction. As we tore down the road,

I was acutely aware of the sound, and the direction it emanated from shifted from my right to behind me, even as we sped away. I knew instinctively that this was wrong. The road was more or less a straight run for a few miles, and every sense told me that shriek was not the wind, as I had first believed. My hearing told me it was something else, and as we fled that something gave chase, though it seemed unable to keep up, because after a few miles the shrieking faded away entirely we drove on in silence except for the car rattling down the uneven road and jostling me in my seat my muscles were tense and my heart pounded like mad i remember vividly leaning toward the middle of the back seat so i could look out the front windshield trying to calm down and confirm we were in the clear from my angle i saw movement in the headlights and a pair of eyes reflecting back at us far too near to miss hitting whatever it was But the driver slammed on the brakes anyway, and we skidded along the dirt road. I watched as we slid straight into the eyes shining in the headlights, bracing for an impact

that never came. We slid right past them and came to a stop somewhere near the middle of an intersection of dirt roads. After a moment of stunned silence and around of, is everyone all right? We opened the car doors and got out, looking around for signs of whatever we'd hit, though I never felt any impact. There was nothing, no damage to the car and no noise in the immediate area. A cold chill crept along my skin as I turned in place, taking in the narrow crossroads poorly illuminated by the headlights. I repressed the urge to shiver and gave up the search, calling out that I'd found nothing

and heading back to my open car door. I'd taken only a few steps before I found myself rooted to the spot, an icy fear rippling across my skin and seizing my chest. Even as the wind gusted over us, I heard the edges of that awful shrieking begin to creep in. We all stood there for a moment, equal parts terrified and fascinated, and just like before, the volume steadily climbed as if to signal an approach. Almost as one, we scrambled back into the car, slamming the doors and getting ready to take off. I still remember a certain mad curiosity lingering in the back of my mind. A part of me even then wanted to know what the source was, because I'm fully certain it wasn't the wind.

As before, the sound quickly faded behind us as we sped down the dirt road. No more shining eyes appeared to impede our escape. After perhaps 40 minutes of driving, we turned on to a paved highway and headed back into town. After that, night driving became a much less popular pastime. We rarely discussed what happened that night, and though I've never. moved far away from that wind-blown dust bowl, I can't deny that I still stop and listen whenever the wind picks up, hoping against hope I never hear that cold shriek again. As I was writing out this encounter with the unknown, I did some follow-up research on paranormal

phenomena or mythological accounts that might be consistent with what happened. I'm sorry to say I didn't find much to corroborate my experience. There's some lore about crossroads at midnight, which isn't super helpful since it was considerably later than midnight. I'd appreciate any information or insight, if there is any to be had. And of course, if you don't believe me, I don't blame you. I've been searching for some semblance of similarity to someone else's encounter for three years now, hoping another's experience might align, even a bit, with my own, to validate it. Until last night I'd found details that kind of aligned with my encounter, but nothing I felt was concrete enough to keep my story

from sounding absolutely insane. It still does sound insane, I know, and I have no way to further explain any of it. All I have is what I witnessed. I found a post on here from 18 days ago that sounds eerily similar to my own. The key difference is the familiarity of the voices it mimicked, which leads me to wonder if this thing had been watching us for a while. To get both of our voices down, it would have had to have heard us, at the most recent 10 hours earlier, before we left for work. All right, to preface this, I typed all of this up as a DM to send to someone else after reading the other guy's story, so the syntax might be awful. Sorry if this reads like a trashy DM, but I honestly get terrified of this thing whenever I spend too much time talking about it,

so I'd rather not type it all out again. I've been wanting to write this since it happened in 2018 and 2019, but I legit get really uncomfortable the moment I start. I'm sure the thing isn't actually watching or whatever, but I don't know. I just hate retelling it. I do think it's important to share though, because finding someone else's story led me to several others that seemed to align with whatever I saw, and it was honestly so cathartic. I figured maybe somebody else might be in the same boat and need some sort of validation that they aren't insane. So I was living down in West Texas in this national park where the restaurant I was working at rests at the top of a 15-minute hike up a mountain trail from the housing they provided us.

I closed up the restaurant after everyone left each night, so I was always an hour or two later coming down the hill than everyone else. It was usually pretty empty, really quiet, and uncommon to encounter anyone else, as the only thing at the top of the mountain is the closed restaurant, gift shop, store, and some trailheads. There isn't much reason for anyone else to be on the trail at that hour. One night, I'm coming down.

No moon. so it was pitch black, the trail was empty, and it was characteristically quiet. I round the last bend to get to my house, and right before I get off the trail to take a shortcut through the thicket of cactus and brush. There were maybe 15-20 trees, even though it's a desert, the top of the mountain has a high Sierra microclimate. I hear my best friend roommate call my name, clear as day, in the other direction. He said my name, and when I turned, he said it at a little bit. He said it again. In retrospect, it sounded funny. It was close, maybe 15 yards away, but also sounded far off at the same time, like if someone recorded his voice from far away but played it very

nearby. It just sounded off, but not enough to flip a switch immediately. Maybe I'm remembering it differently than it actually sounded. I'm facing my house, maybe 50 yards away, and the voice comes from directly to my left, on this foothill of the mountain we'd hike around sometimes. It has much more tree coverage than the trail I was on, and considerably more than the thickets separating me from the clearing around my house. If you walked five feet in the direction the voice came from, you'd completely disappear from the view of anyone on the trail, or on the back porch of the house, immediately. So hearing my friend's voice calling me over, I thought, Oh, cool, we're night hiking, and I turned to follow it, but right before I take my first step into the tree line, I hear his actual voice down on our porch saying, hey, who are you talking to? That stops me. I turn back to face my house, confused as hell, just in time to see this thing.

Burst out of the thicket I was about to shortcut through in the first place before I got distracted by the voice. from the exact spot I would have walked through, this thing bolts. It was humanoid, technically, but the thing is tall as hell and way too skinny for a human, at least eight feet tall, but slim, inhumanly slender. It was hunched over and running like it had just taken off from a track mark, you know. But it kept that same hunched form the whole time and never stood fully upright. Okay, so, about the color. That part has always messed with me.

because for one, I'm colorblind, and it was a greenish yellow. I get greens and yellows mixed up a lot, especially that particular hue. And two, it looked like it was giving off its own glow, which has always sounded so absolutely ludicrous that I never tell anyone, unless I trust them not to think I'm completely joking, because if I heard this story, I might think someone was at least a little bit joking. Our back porch light was on, though, and the thing lined up with where it would have been shining, so if this thing was translucent, it could have taken on that sheen by reflecting the porch light. The colors do kind of line up, I guess. If it reflected the light, it may have looked like that color, but it certainly wasn't identical. Honestly, I swear it had its own shine, like looking

at a dying glow stick. More than enough to see, but kind of faint. Regardless, it was a light that definitely wasn't there a second before when I'd gotten to the shortcut. It was a light. It was a would have stood out for the last 50 yards of the walk at least. It should be noted that, had I followed that thing's voice, two things would have happened. One, I would have completely disappeared from anyone's view, and two, I would have turned my back on whatever that thing was and entered a thicket of trees, weeds, and cactus, far too dense to turn around, run, or fight back in. And that trail it led me toward goes directly to the edge of a cliff that drops into a massive break in the mountain, the window in Big Bend National Park, that cleanly drops all 6,000

feet to the wide open desert below. That could have been its purpose, leading me in that direction. If I were going to do something nefarious, that would be the perfect place to catch someone alone, and lead them somewhere no one else would come across them. Legit, in the middle of the day, you could probably make someone disappear there if you wanted. Anyway, how this thing was running, It immediately felt like I'd spooked it, like how a deer runs off at a noise. But this was different in that it seemed a lot more determined. It seemed intelligent, aware of its own movement, not just acting on instinct. It was like spooking a person if they'd been watching you from the bushes,

spooked, but sentient, and definitely acting like I'd just foiled some nefarious plan. So naturally I also bolt, exposing my back to this thing, but taking the opposite, slightly longer way to my back porch. My buddy, God bless his soul, is still there when I make it, and he asks again, who are you with? His face is just confused as hell, and he keeps looking past me. I'm like, you heard it too, right? And he says, yeah, where are they? I was like, what? What? There was multiple? Apparently, from his perspective, he had heard multiple voices alongside my own, all carrying on and joking around, talking back and forth pretty loudly. He said there were at least three other voices talking with mine, but it sounded like a whole crowd coming down the trail. He heard us

getting closer and closer for the past few minutes, and just assumed I'd run into a hiking group and was talking with them as we headed down. That's not unheard of in the daytime, but very uncommon for the hour of night. It took me a minute to show him I wasn't messing with him, that I was completely alone and hadn't vocalized a single word until he called up to ask, Who are you with? It took a second to even express my side of what was going on. I was so out of whack I couldn't find the words to explain, so I just kept shouting something like, I swear to God I just heard your voice. And then this thing. Dude, this thing. Eventually, it registered with him that there had been no other lights on the trail. I wasn't using a flashlight

that night, so maybe there was actually a moon out, and that I had just heard his voice calling me off trail and into the dark. We both started trying to figure out what the hell we'd just witnessed. Okay. This part might be a little crazy, but I'm not implying anything. I'm just saying, this is what I had been doing on the walk down before this happened. Obviously, walking home solo, I hadn't actually said a word. Whoever he heard was certainly not me, and I certainly didn't come with a crowd. But I had been praying like crazy on the hike down. There had just been this super dark, negative energy in the house lately, and I was trying to surround myself with light and positivity, asking God to give me strength before I walked back in. Out of nowhere, midway through the trail,

I got this absolutely overwhelming joy, like an absolute ecstasy. I was screaming inside, feeling happier than I could describe, like I could take on the whole damn world. Maybe I am implying something because, call me crazy, I've always felt that had something to do with how the night turned out, as opposed to how it might have. I know that part makes me sound insane, but so does the rest of it. So, whatever. I certainly don't think it was a coincidence. I'm just not sure what to make of it.

Every detail means every detail. That's just what was going on with me as the walk was happening. It would have been a noteworthy, memorable night, even if the thing that was a thing that hadn't shown up. It was that powerful of an energy. Anyway, that's pretty much it. The only other thing is our memories of it. Out of nowhere, I just sort of stopped thinking about it, not like I forgot, but it was hidden behind some thick fog in my head. The next morning I told the story to a friend, and she uncharacteristically shut me down, saying something like, y'all are just crazy and getting scared of these mountains, and then walked away. It really was a lot of it. It really was a

like her to dismiss someone, especially a friend, without hearing them out. She was a very empathetic person. It was like she'd heard something that triggered a memory she refused to touch and shut it down before it got too close. I don't know, maybe I'm reading into it, but that's happened a couple of times with this story. Anyway, we'd been living on that mountain, off and on for a few years at that point, and had never once heard or seen anything remotely similar to that thing. until that night we'd never even heard a story vaguely resembling it we weren't just randomly spooked by our own house or the trail we took twice a day every day and we weren't seeing or hearing things based on stories we'd projected into the darkness but the weirdest thing happened the moment she walked away it was like a fog just slowly poured over the memory and the last time i remember thinking about it was that moment then it just disappeared for months How in the world does something that massive, that frightening, happen in your life, and then you just stop thinking about it?

Then one day, it just popped back up. I was honestly so surprised and unsure of how I hadn't thought of it in so long. That was almost more baffling than what we actually witnessed. I asked my friend, the one who was there, just before I sent this if he'd felt the same fog thing, and he said absolutely. He doesn't really like talking about that night, and he's told me so, but I can't help bringing it up whenever possible, hoping that by talking it through, we'd find some sort of explanation for what happened.

Even as I typed the message, I felt like I'd asked him about this a million times and just kept forgetting his answer. Maybe I have. That's not super uncommon, I guess. Anyway, that's pretty much everything. I'm really sorry if you read all this and found it underwhelming. But I really felt like I needed to convey as many details as I could possibly remember, just in case someone reading this has had any sort of experience with any part of it.

A mimic. A humanoid. The memory loss. Anything. I don't know. I really don't know what to make of all this. All I have are the details of that night and my memory doing something bizarre afterward. I have never known what to make of it, but the other guy's post from a few weeks back

honestly helped me after three years of grappling with the experience. Just seeing something that might be similar makes me feel like I've learned as much about it as I honestly feel comfortable knowing. I figured maybe somebody else might be in the same boat and need some sort of validation. Just validation, I guess. Anyway, thanks for reading. I'm a 28-year-old male living right outside Chicago, over the border in northwest Indiana. I'm currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences at Purdue. I'm not exactly what you would call scientifically illiterate, and I consider myself fairly

mentally sound. I've never had any problems on that front. I have only ever openly discussed this once before, in a random Quora question I answered anonymously. So I'm still not very good at discussing it openly, and only two people who know me personally are aware of what happened. I avoided talking about it for a long time because I feared the stigma associated with the topic, especially in professional and scientific communities. I was immensely relieved when the people I did open up to believed me without question, which is why I'm typing this here today. Please go easy on me.

All that being said, I've been trying for a few years to come to terms with something that happened to me. It was almost five years ago, shortly after my 23rd birthday. My father is very sick, so I was staying with my parents at the time to help take care of him and the house. I woke up in the middle of the night. It was warm, but I could hear and feel the breeze from the fans I need to sleep. I reached over, grabbed my phone, and checked the time. 3.31. I put the phone back down and tried to settle back into a comfortable position.

After a moment, I realized I could hear and feel a humming. I knew right away it wasn't from my fans. It was very deep, and I could actually feel it in my body. Our house is near train tracks, so at first I thought it might be a train, but I quickly realized it wasn't. While I was lying in bed wondering what it was, I noticed for the first time that my door was open. My door is never open during the night, or even during the day. Never, ever. And I could see a light shining down the hallway into my room.

At first I thought maybe my dad was going to the bathroom and had his flashlight out, but then I realized the light was wrong. It wasn't the right color. As I watched, it started to get brighter, as though someone had set up a white-blue LED array at the end of the hall in the kitchen. As the light got brighter, so did the humming. I tried to jump up to investigate, fearing an intruder, when I realized I couldn't move.

Let me clarify, I could move my hands, my neck, my feet, but it felt like someone had strapped down my limbs and torso. After a brief moment of utter terror and confusion, I thought, Okay, maybe this is sleep paralysis. I'd read about it before, but never experienced anything like this. Right after that thought, I realized I could no longer feel the bed under me. I started rising into the air and gently, floating, for lack of a better word, to my doorway, and toward the light.

I know how this sounds, but I'm 110% serious. Please stay with me. As I levitated through the doorway and into the hall, I had a clear view into my parents' room. Their door is right next to mine on the left side of the hall. If you step out of my room, turn 90 degrees, and take another step, you're in their room. I could see them lying on the bed, and I started screaming, begging for help. They didn't move. In fact, I couldn't even see them breathing, and at that moment I was convinced they were dead, and I was next.

That moment of pure, unadulterated panic caused something to snap. In the blink of an eye, I found I could move my arms again, and I flailed helplessly in the air. I eventually got my hands on the doorframe and clung on for dear life, because in that moment I truly believed it was a matter of life and death. To my dismay, my fingers slowly started to slip as I continued to be pulled inexorably down the hall toward the kitchen. I dug my nails in as hard as I could to stop it. Then, in a quick burst of pain and terror, I lost my grip and continued to float.

A few more seconds of terrifying levitation, and I was in the kitchen, floating with the top of my head facing our back door. It's a large sliding glass door, and I could see that the light was coming from just outside it. Something as bright as the sun was hovering right above our pool. We have a large in-ground pool almost, in the middle of the backyard, which is surrounded by a 10-foot privacy fence.

Whatever this was had to be directly over the water, maybe a couple of feet off the ground. I took this in within a heartbeat and was still in a state of terror I'll never adequately explain when I felt a breeze. My back door was wide open, but I can't tell you if it had been open all along, or if it had just opened. At that moment, I slowly began to settle back onto the floor. I felt the cold surface against my back as my shirt lifted slightly. Right as I touched the ground I saw them.

If I thought I was afraid before, it was nothing compared to this. One stepped in and stood over me on my left side. Even from my perspective on the floor, I could tell this thing was huge. If I had to guess, I'd say at least seven foot ten to eight feet tall. We have nine foot ceilings in the kitchen, and its head was surprisingly close to the ceiling. The light was so painfully bright at this point. that I didn't get to see a lot of detail because it was silhouetted by the light behind us. Two more entered and stood on either side of my shoulders, near the door, almost like guards.

Keep in mind all of this happened quickly, and at that moment I began to realize what might be going on. The terror was unspeakable. I remember thinking they looked nothing like the movie portrayals. They were skeletal, and their skin seemed... Well, I don't know what it was. it wasn't like ours. The one standing to my left held something in its hand. As I turned my neck to get a better view, I could see a little more of its form. Its fingers, Christ, I can't describe what seeing those fingers did to me. They were almost spider-like, way too long, with too many joints. To this day, that's probably the most haunting image. It was clutching something black,

maybe gunmetal or dark silver. It reminded me of an iPhone that was turned off, but it was thinner, shaped more like a remote or a short rod with a squareish shape and rounded edges, a smooth, glassy thing. As its fingers moved over it, every muscle in my body tensed up. My lungs filled as if they'd been forcefully expanded, and every limb shot straight out like I was a plank of wood. My jaw clenched so tightly I thought my teeth might shatter. I lost all control. I lost all control. The only thing I could move were my eyes, and even that was limited. It was like the signals from my nervous system were completely hijacked, and some other signal was overriding them.

The two behind me, above me, I was still on my back, moved closer, and I started to rise off the floor again. I felt fingers on my shoulders as I began to hover out the door. The second I got outside, the light became overwhelmingly bright, and then, nothing. I woke up in my bed at 5.45 a.m., sweating profusely. My stomach hurt. I got up and started my morning routine, trying to dismiss the experience as just a dream, and it worked, until I was about to get in the shower and noticed a sharp pain. I looked in the mirror and saw bruises everywhere, arms, ankles, thighs, but the worst were on my shoulders and back. They clearly looked like handprints, albeit elongated ones. I threw up almost instantly. I pulled myself together and went back to my room.

I saw the doorframe and I saw the scratches. They lined up with my fingers. There was wood and blood under my fingernails. I've never come to terms with it. My fiancé has encouraged me to share, but it still feels deeply uncomfortable and jarring to walk through it. As I type this, my hands feel like they're sub-zero, and my whole body is shaking.

I'm sure if I asked my fiancé, she'd say I'm extremely pale, even more than usual. This happens every time I think about it. Many nights spent doing research, watching YouTube videos of uphologists, reading reports. It's always the same physiological response. After a lot of reading and watching, I realized I'd had another experience when I was five. It's my clearest childhood memory and my earliest. Most of my childhood is hazy.

I have only snapshots. But this memory is exponentially clearer than anything else. Until recently, I shrugged it off as a quirk of being young. I was never the imaginative child who claims to see what they imagine. I always had a firm grasp of reality versus imagination, which is why this earlier memory stands out. I was five. It was Easter morning, and I woke up excited to see my Easter basket. My mom always went overboard, and it was essentially Christmas in spring, only child perks.

I jumped up and snuck out of my room. It was just before dawn, still dark, but the horizon was starting to glow with dawn light. I crept down the hallway, aware my parents were still asleep, hoping they'd wake soon so I could dive into a giant basket of candy and toys. As I neared the end of the hallway and peeked into the living room, I saw it. At first, I thought my parents were up, but as I got a better look, I realized this thing was big, tall, and gray, and something about its skin made it. me think of short fur. Naturally, I assumed it was the Easter Bunny, or my dad dressed as the Easter Bunny. The exact form alludes me. It was just tall and gray. The weird thing is that when I

picture it in my mind, the rest of the scene is crystal clear. Everything except this being. It's like someone put a blur filter over it, the kind they used to obscure faces on TV. Maybe that's where I got the impression of fur, or maybe it was genuine, blurry like active camouflage, or it was obscured afterward, assuming this memory is what I believe it to be. As I said, that experience can't be proven physically, so I used to shrug it off. But it still pops into my thoughts sometimes, like when I go to the dentist. Everything is fine until they lay me back with the light in my eyes and the drills and suction going, and suddenly I feel a primal terror. Since the main encounter, the Easter Bunny memory is less frequent, but it still happens.

All these tiny and not-so-tiny details I never really thought about before now make a scary kind of sense in light of the experience I wrote about. I don't know for sure what happened to me. I'm not going to pretend I do. All I know is it wasn't a dream, it wasn't sleep paralysis, and I've never slept walked. There was physical evidence of something happening. I'm angry at myself for trying to suppress it and not documenting everything, although the scratches are still visible on my parents' doorframe. I can definitively rule out what it wasn't. And after eliminating other possibilities, well, you know how that saying goes. I apologize for any spelling or grammatical mistakes.

As I mentioned, I'm on an iPhone, and at this point my hands are shaking like I'm in a freezer. If anyone has questions, I'd be happy to try answering them. But what I really want is to hear from people who've had similar experiences, how it compares, what's the same, what's different. I contacted the mutual UFO network, and they did a phone interview for two or three hours, then gave me the name of a hypnotherapist in Chicago. But the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, because they kept trying to spin it as a positive experience, saying the beings were benevolent.

I can conclusively say there was nothing benevolent about them. They may not have been overtly malevolent, but they were utterly unconcerned with my well-being. I looked into one's eyes, most of its own. face was shadowed, but I could see its eyes, and there was nothing kind or benevolent there. In that moment, I was simply a thing, not a sentient being to it. It didn't necessarily feel robotic, more like aloof. I could be mistaken, but I'm not mistaken that it was in no way, shape, or form a positive experience. Since then, I've been diagnosed with severe abnormal hormonal imbalances. I already had nerve damage and an implanted neurostimulator in my spine,

so I've had a lot of scans done. It was put in when I was 16 after an electrocution injury that fried most of the nerves in my left leg. They've examined my brain many times, but now I can't have an MRI because of the spinal implant. The CT scan revealed an abnormal mass in my brain that wasn't there in previous scans. They say it's benign, but they can't see it in high enough resolution to make a definite diagnosis. I also have a strange black object under the skin, of my left kneecap, exactly where the nerve damage is, like a piece of lead or something. I tried having it removed once, but the doctor couldn't get it out and said it wasn't bothering me or causing problems, so I should leave it. Aside from the nerve damage, everything else

arose soon after the experience. I have another strange side effect, although I'm not 100% sure if it's caused by the neurostimulator changing my body's EM field or something else entirely. I blow out light bulbs. I can document it. Friends, family, professors, and even strangers have witnessed it. It happened so reliably that based on my proximity to certain types of bulbs, I can almost predict when it'll happen. I used to keep a lamp next to my bed, and the bulbs kept burning out or exploding. I tried different sockets, tested everything with a multimeter, nothing was abnormal. But moving them away from me fixed the issue. A professor in the engineering department even took an interest, thinking I was joking him until he witnessed it himself.

I once walked down a hallway with a low ceiling, and four fluorescent bulbs burned out in sequence as I passed under them. It happens all the time, but it's more of an odd quirk than a true problem. If we ever figure out the exact cause, I'll definitely post it. I'm sure I left some things out, and I've rambled on quite a bit. I'm sorry, it's the anxiety. If you've had a similar I'd really appreciate your insight, what was similar and what was different. I've thought about doing the hypnotherapy, but a bigger part of me doesn't want to know. I'm convinced that whatever happened after my memory stops was horrific. I can't explain it.

It's just a feeling. Absolutely nothing about the experience was pleasant, and I can't imagine anything good about being taken. To those who've had similar experiences, does it get better? Does it go away? Or will I always have these subconscious triggers? I suspect it won't just disappear. If I try to watch a movie about abduction, like fire in the sky or the fourth kind, I have an overwhelming physical reaction.

I watch a ton of horror movies, my favorite genre, and I've never had a reaction like that to anything else. I lose all color, start shaking uncontrollably. My jaw chatters as if I'm freezing, and my hands become clammy and cold. I've even blacked out once. Those two movies are by far the worst, but I have lesser reactions to others or to situations that vaguely remind me of it. Sometimes, when I'm lying in bed at night and everything is quiet, I get absolutely terrified that I'll feel that vibration or see that light again. I guess I just want someone who's gone through

something similar to tell me it gets better, but I don't know if it ever will. I remember the exact moment I first pulled up to Redwood Glen Mill. Even in that early light, the whole place looked worn and tired, like it had seen too many storms and never quite recovered. I hopped out of my old pickup and felt the ground crunch under my boots, a reminder of how remote this spot really was. No paved roads or fancy signage, just gravel, timber, and the low hum of machinery starting to wake up. The mill itself loomed ahead. This hulking mass of course. corrugated metal that dominated the clearing. They called the main saw Big Ripper, and you could tell right away why.

Even from a distance, it stood out like some mechanical beast, cables and blades jutting everywhere. I'd heard stories about saws that could rip clean through a three-foot trunk in seconds, but actually seeing it up close, sent a jolt of nervous energy through my gut. I tried not to focus too much on those rough edges. At that hour, our little crew usually gout. gathered by the office trailer, sipping coffee that tasted more like bitter water and swapping small talk to wake ourselves up. We had Leroy, our supervisor, scanning the daily logs on a clipboard.

We had Jeff, who cracked corny jokes that nobody really laughed at, and me, leaning against the trailer wall, taking it all in. Once we drained our cups, we spread out to our stations. The bunkhouses weren't far off. Some old trailers scattered. behind the main yard. It amazed me that a few thin walls were all that separated me from the noise of logs rolling in at all hours. When I did manage to sleep, it was usually a restless doze. The nights here weren't exactly quiet. Machinery word, tree branches tapped on tin roofs, and occasionally there was this weird echo, like something was moving around by the fences. People said it was nothing, raccoons, maybe a stray dog, but I overheard whispers.

A veteran named Gus claimed he spotted footprints near the log pile that didn't belong to any of us. He tried laughing it off at dinner, but his eyes told a different story. Nobody likes entertaining the idea of intruders, especially when there are rumors floating around about sabotage at other mills. We brushed it aside, but it still nagged at me later that night. The next morning, I joined a group clearing debris near the log deck. As we hauled broken branches and stray bark off to the burn pile, I started picking up on tension in the air. People were glancing around more, double-checking the fence line. A few days before, there had been reports on the radio about tree spiking in northern counties.

Something about metal spikes hammered into trunks to wreck cutting equipment. It sounded like a grim urban legend, but we all knew it had happened in real life to other crews. There wasn't much talk of it, though. didn't want to jinx ourselves. Thing is, Redwood Glen wasn't exactly the pinnacle of security. We were far from any town, practically in the middle of nowhere, with miles of forest around us. The idea that someone could sneak in without us noticing felt too easy to dismiss. But every so often, Leroy would hover by Big Ripper, scanning the yard, as if waiting to catch someone out of place.

By the time we finished our shift that day, I would be able to move. was bone tired and more jumpy than usual. Back at the bunk house, I lay on my bunk listening to the wind scrape branches against the thin metal walls. My co-worker on the top bunk dozed off, but I just stared at the flickering overhead bulb, wondering if those strange footprints were more than just rumor. Some of the others tried to lighten the mood over a few beers, telling jokes about Bigfoot or local legends. But under the forced laughter, you could tell we weren't entirely convinced it was just silly talk. We'd all heard enough to know that sometimes people do crazy things to make a statement. And if a spike was out there, hidden in any one of those

massive logs, that spelled danger for everyone in the mill. I tried to shrug it off. We had a job to do, right? Show up before dawn, cut wood, ship it out, get paid, but I found myself craning my neck at dinner, peering out the window into the darkness beyond the yard lights. I swore I saw movement just past the tree line, but when I blinked, it vanished. That's the thing about Redwood Glen. Your mind is never quite at ease. Every shadow feels a little too long, every bump in the night a little too close, and I had no clue how quickly that tension would explode into something far worse. I woke up feeling like the air itself was taunting me, heavy, claustrophobic. just plain wrong. Over in the bunk my roommate was already gone, leaving behind a half-empty

mug of cheap coffee on the rickety table. I gave myself a pep talk, telling myself it was just another day at Redwood Glen Mill, just another round of logs, saws, and the steady hum of machinery. When I got to my station, Leroy was pacing, clipboard in one hand, and a deep scowl etched into his face. He kept mumbling about how we were behind on orders, and telling me I'd need to to hustle. I remember shrugging, trying to hide my nerves. In the back of my mind, a question simmered. Were those whispers of sabotage just rumors, or something worse? The morning began like any other. We examined Big Ripper, made sure the belts were secure, and tested the blade with a low spin. Everything sounded smooth, no rattle, no squeal. It was oddly reassuring, so I let that tension

seep out of my shoulders. As the first log arrived, I motioned for the loader operator to roll it onto the feed track. That log looked normal at first glance. Long, rugged bark, a few knot holes, nothing we hadn't seen a thousand times before. I threw a lever guiding it forward. The saw roared to life, that familiar shriek of steel against wood. But a couple seconds in, the pitch shifted, like the machine was biting into something denser than usual. A high-pitched whale tore through the mill, louder than I'd ever heard. My hand shot to the lever, desperate to stop the feed, but it was too late. In a flash, something inside Big Ripper gave way. I saw sparks. Someone screamed. It might have been me, or it might have been the loader guy, I couldn't tell.

The blade blew apart with a thunderous bang. Shrapnel whirled through the air, shards glinting under the fluorescent lights. I was knocked backward, ears ringing so fiercely I could barely think straight. The world seemed to spin. My knees hit the ground, and the pain that sliced up my arm told me a chunk of metal must have found its mark. The taste of iron filled my mouth, and when I spat, there was blood on the floor. My brain struggled to register the chaos, co-workers yelling, alarms screaming, the heavy thud of something crashing onto the concrete. Smoke or dust swirled, making it tough to see who was hurt or how bad. I forced myself up, adrenaline pumping. My arm stung like fire. I pressed a shaky hand to it, and my fingers came

away smeared red. Somebody lunged toward the shut-off switch for the mill's conveyor system, while Leroy barked frantic orders. People were stumbling, trying to dodge the scraps of wood and twisted metal scattered everywhere. Then I spotted the log. It had split open, and it had split open, revealing a vicious rust-flect spike driven straight into its core. The thing glimmered in a sickening way, like it was proud of what it had done. For a second, I couldn't wrap my head around it. This was no random accident. Someone had hammered that spike in there.

Terror turned to anger as the reality sank in. Sabotage. Those rumors we'd heard about activists spiking logs to sabotage mills weren't just tall tales. This was it, right in front of me, lying amid the room. wreckage of Big Ripper and the blood on the floor. A co-worker grabbed my shoulder trying to steady me. My vision swam, and the pain in my arm pulsed harder than any throbbing I'd felt in my life. I gritted my teeth, stumbling forward as Leroy yelled for someone to call an ambulance. But we were hours away from any decent hospital, so another guy hollered about using a pickup

to get me, and whoever else was hurt, to the clinic. I let them drag me away from the saw's shattered remains, every step jarring the torn flesh in my arm. A small part of me still wanted to check on the others, see how badly they were injured, but my body was on the verge of shutting down. My mind kept latching onto the image of that spike. I pictured the person who had driven it in, hammering away with no care for the carnage it might cause. Someone got me onto a makeshift stretcher. I leaned my head back, refusing to pass out. My breath sounded ragged and weasy in my own ears. It took everything I had not to black out, but I knew if I did, I might never get another chance to see the sunlight glinting off the mill roof again. As they hoisted me into the pickup bed, I caught a final glance of the shop floor.

Twisted metal scattered everywhere, co-workers trembling, bloodstains trailing across the concrete. The entire mill seemed frozen in shock. Leroy climbed in beside me, shaking so hard he could barely dial his phone. His voice cracked as he spoke to the dispatcher, trying to explain the disaster. I closed my eyes, clutching my arm, my thoughts bouncing between pain and outrage, between fear and the gut-wrenching truth that someone had targeted us. Before the truck peeled off, I heard new voices echoing in the yard, a wild mixture of terror and disbelief. A spike in one log was all it took to turn Redwood Glen into a nightmare zone.

And now, we were going to find out just how bad one. one act of sabotage could hurt us all. I remember waking up to a piercing white glare overhead, my head buzzing like a broken radio. It took me a few seconds to recognize I was in a hospital room. My arm, battered from the explosion at the mill, throbbed dully beneath layers of gauze. The entire space smelled of disinfectant and stale coffee, and I could hear the rhythmic beep of monitoring machines nearby. A nurse appeared at my side, her eyes sympathetic. She leaned in and told me they'd managed to remove the biggest fragments of shrapnel. I was lucky, she said. No main artery had been severed, though I'd lost a sickening amount of blood. That was a tough pill to swallow,

knowing how close I'd come to something even worse. I noticed the stiff bandaging on two of my fingers and felt a pang of dread. She explained gently that the damage was severe, and I'd need additional surgeries. The rest of her words blurred, but the message sank in. I would never regain full use of my right hand. That would have been tough to handle under any circumstances, but the knowledge that this was no random accident, this was sabotage, gnawed at my insides. As I stared at the bandages, my mind began looping through questions. Who hammered that spike into the log? Did they realize how much pain they'd cause? And if they did, did they even care? I drifted in and out of sleep. I drifted in and out of sleep.

for the next couple of days. The staff checked my vitals and changed dressings while doctors murmured in the hall about follow-up surgeries. When Leroy finally showed up, he had a haunted look. There were dark circles under his eyes, like he hadn't rested in days. He told me the authorities had swarmed Redwood Glen after the incident. News crews, cameras, the whole circus. Our story had become a headline. Eco terror at local sawmill was plastered across every channel.

across every channel. It made me feel exposed, like the entire world was gawking at my mangled arm. I asked about my co-workers, and Leroy's voice lowered. Three others had been hurt in the blast, none as badly as me, but one guy took a flying chunk of metal to the leg. A few folks had minor wounds, cuts on their faces or arms. Some watchers on shift had dodged most of the debris, but the shock did a number on everybody's psyche. And then there was the law, that single sabotaged trunk that nearly took my life. A couple of days later, I was propped up in bed, mindlessly flipping through stale daytime TV, when a local reporter somehow snuck past the nurses.

She poked her head into my room, microphone in hand, asking if I had any statement to make for the news. The frustration boiled inside me. I was half-medicated, confused, terrified for my future, and she wanted a sensational sound bite. I told her to leave. She flashed an apologetic smile and mumbled something about the public's right to know, but the heaviness in my stare must have convinced her she'd gone too far. That night, sleep was impossible. My dreams turned into chaotic flashes, the shriek of the blade, shards of metal spinning,

me clutching my arm. Even in that hospital bed, I felt like I was still at Redwood Glen, bracing for the next disaster. Whenever I managed to doze off, I'd jerk awake, half expecting to see the silhouette of someone hammering a spike into my IV pole. Leroy came by again just before I was discharged. He said Redwood Glen had shut down temporarily. The company had rushed to install metal detectors and new safety protocols, but production had ground to a halt.

Word was the entire operation might be sold if they couldn't guarantee worker safety. He looked devastated. Like the place. place he dedicated years to had been gutted from the inside. I finally got to go home, though home didn't feel much like a comfort. My family tried to help me settle in, cooking meals, fluffing pillows, making sure I took my meds on time. But I couldn't silence the anger pumping through my veins. This was supposed to be a steady job, a place where the biggest dangers were the ones we were trained for, mechanical failures, missteps around heavy logs,

not sabotage, not some hidden piece of metal waiting to turn my life upside down. My phone buzzed non-stop with calls from coworkers, some sounding enraged, some just plain scared. One close friend confessed he was so rattled he hadn't been able to sleep for more than a couple hours a night. He was paranoid someone else might have set spikes. Another told me he was quitting, said he couldn't face the daily tension anymore,

always glancing over his shoulder for hidden threats in the log. It felt like Redwood Glen was disintegrating piece by piece, torn apart by the memory of that single morning. A local radio station invited me to share my story on the air. I refused. Dealing with the press didn't appeal to me. My arm still stung every time I shifted in my makeshift recliner, and I couldn't hold a cup of coffee without trembling. My mind raced back to the battered log, each time conjuring up that savage spike. Would they catch whoever did it?

Would the saboteur be proud to see me like this, half crippled, struggling to button my shirts? The physical therapy was grueling. The therapist tried to mask her pity by cheering my baby steps forward, wiggling a few digits on my right hand, fighting through scar tissue. But I saw the look in her eyes whenever I flinched. She knew I was battling more than just torn muscles. I was grappling with sleepless nights, nasty daydreams, a constant hum of anxiety that never let up.

Not long afterward, Leroy called to tell me Redwood Glen was limping back to life. Metal detectors beeped over every log. New security guards patrolled the perimeter, and the main saw had been replaced with a slower, supposedly safer model. But morale was shot. Half the crew wanted out, afraid of another spiking incident. Some openly talked about revenge or teaching those activists a lesson, which scared me more than I wanted to.

to admit, anger was swirling around like a storm, and I couldn't see a clear path forward. Eventually, the time came for me to decide whether I'd ever go back. I'd always prided myself on being a dedicated worker, the sort who showed up early and stayed late. But now, I couldn't imagine stepping onto that concrete floor again, hearing the saw roar, and wondering if a hidden spike might rip the blade apart again. My heart pounded at the mere thought of walking past Big Ripper's replacement. So I made the call. I quit Redwood Glen for good. The decision felt like a betrayal of everything I'd known, my livelihood, my routine, my identity. But every new ache in my wounded arm reminded me that I had to protect what little peace I had

left. My family needed me alive, not living in perpetual fear. Some nights I still flash back to the moment the blade shattered, the air thick with metal shards and choking dust. I see that spike lodged in the log, mocking our idea of safety with its cold glint. But at least now, I don't have to stand in front of another saw, waiting for history to repeat itself. I wish I could say I found closure. Maybe I never will. Part of me hopes they catch whoever's responsible, make them see the devastation they caused, and another part of me just wants to forget it all. to stop picturing that sabotage every time I hear heavy equipment. In any case, Redwood Glen is behind me now.

The scars are permanent reminders that no paycheck is worth risking life and limb against an invisible enemy, someone willing to use nails and metal rods to prove a point. And whether they cared or not about who got hurt, I still have to deal with the damage they left behind.