The Lets Read Podcast - 10: Episode 010 | Doppelgänger & Playground Stalker Stories | 31 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

Welcome to the tenth episode of The Lets Read Podcast! This podcast includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Doppelgängers, Playground Stalkers, & Home Intruders. HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON- ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ♫ Background Music: Iron Cthulhu Apocalypse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFvrqVSJE8E PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get a pro at Tread Experts. Toyo's open country family of tires will get you through tough weather in a variety of terrains. Until May 31st, save up to $100 in rebates on select Toyo tires. Find a Toyo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TredExperts.ca Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino.

Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz. Make instant deposits or same-day withdrawals. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. Visit BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. So this happened to me when I was six years old.

It was my first paranormal experience and it truly sounds like a badly thought up one. But let me assure you that it was by far the most traumatic. Nothing I have experienced since has topped this encounter. Back in 1999 I lived in Midland, Texas. My brother and I had been playing in the living room during a really bad thunderstorm at night. I have no idea where our three younger siblings were, asleep I'm guessing. My mother was in the kitchen washing dishes and singing. As we were playing and running around I had forgotten that I had homework to do.

I told my mom I needed to get my backpack out of the car and headed to the door that went into the garage directly behind her. She just nodded and kept singing her songs and told me to be sure to close the door behind me. I said okay and headed into the garage. As soon as I shut the door behind me I got this sudden rush of fear. It was raining really hard and the thunder and lightning echoed in our garage. So I'm 6, I'm in the garage alone and it's dark outside so of course any kid would be scared. Logical right?

Our garage was an automatic garage and had windows at the top. I kept my eyes facing our car because I was afraid I'd see a monster if I looked out the windows. I opened the car door, hopped in and started making my way to the very back of the car to grab my purple Pocahontas backpack. As I was making my way, the fear I was feeling intensified and the atmosphere started to feel really uneasy, like I was in danger. It's weird and hard to explain but it seemed like every second that passed, the uneasiness grew. I kept my eyes looking down, grabbed my backpack and started to pick up the pace to get off the car and get back in the house. I hopped off,

slammed the door shut and started speedwalking to the door. Right as I was about to grasp the door handle and made it back to my sanctuary there was a knock behind me. I panicked and I don't know why but I turned to see who was there. It was my dad. Let me give you a little backstory of my dad. At the time he used to be a truck driver and would be gone weeks at a time and home for a few days because he was a workaholic. So all we would do was have short phone conversations with him because it was back when you had to buy minutes and it was expensive. When he would come home it was always hugs and kisses when we saw each other and lots of I love you's.

He may have been gone a lot, but when he was home he was an awesome dad and would take us everywhere. Our favorite place being Discovery Zone. He would chase us through the tunnels and ball pits. When he would arrive home we would go to pick him up at the truck stops. He always had his sunglasses on and his army bag over his shoulder holding it by the straps. This is exactly who I saw standing on the other side of the garage window. My dad with sunglasses on and his right hand holding the straps of what I assumed to be his army bag of clothes. I let out a sigh of relief.

Oh, it's just dad I thought to myself and the biggest grin came across my face. The atmosphere remained the same but when I saw my dad the fear eas. But he didn't smile at me like he usually did after being away from home for a long time and he didn't speak. He looked emotionless. He then began pointing with his left hand. No smile, no emotion, only pointing to something. I started looking for what it was. I pointed to a box on the floor. This box? I asked. He shook his head as if to say no and kept pointing. I pointed to several other things and he patiently motioned no once again. I finally looked up above me beside the door behind me.

The green glowing button, the one to open the garage. I pointed to the button and looked at him. The button? I asked. He nodded his head in approval and motioned for me to push the garage. I pointed to the button and looked at him. The button, I asked. He nodded his head in approval and motioned for me to push the button. I was about to do it and suddenly the feeling of danger and fear came back even more overwhelming than the first time. Something was wrong, really wrong. A voice in my head told me to not open the garage. I looked at dad so afraid I couldn't speak anymore. I shook my head declining to push the button. He motioned again, this time aggressively. I declined again and this time my eyes started to water up. He then put his pointing hand down and stared at me for

what felt like forever. His expression changed from apathetic to angry. He just stared at me and I stared back, paralyzed with fear. Then he lifted his hand back up, but it wasn't a hand anymore. It looked like claws. I remember him scratching the window and hearing it screech like nails on a chalkboard. I was finally able to snap out of my paralyzed state to run inside. All I remember next is sitting on the couch, just sitting there, traumatized. My brother knew something was up because I had been all giggles with him earlier. He grabbed my shoulder and gave it a light shake. What's wrong, Vanessa? I don't even think he got to finish that question before I started screaming my head off and having a panic attack. My mother dropped what was in her hand and came running to my screams of bloody terror.

My brother gave my mom a I didn't do it look and she bent down beside me asked what was wrong. I could barely speak through my sobbing. All I could say was daddy is scaring me. She couldn't understand what I was trying to say and asked where. I pointed to the garage and she stormed off in that direction. She came back like 15 seconds later saying that there was no one there. After I was able to calm down I told her what had happened and started the sobbing process all over again since I was reliving the moment as I spoke. She called my dad. He was 435 miles away in Houston, Texas. Nowhere near us. They spoke for a bit and she handed me the phone. My dad prayed with me and told me to never be afraid and to just call upon Jesus to help me and that the bad

things wouldn't bother me again. I slept with my mom that night. Here's the disturbing part. The next morning she went to check out the garage. The claw marks were on the window. I think before she thought it was just my imagination until the scratches proved it to be reality. We've moved lots of times since and now live in a different city. I'm 25 now and I haven't been able to go into the garage at night alone until a few years ago. It still scares me to think about that night. I still have all these unanswered questions. Why was it wearing sunglasses at night? Why did it happen to me? And the scariest question I ask myself, what if I had opened the garage? What would have happened? I collect Ouija boards.

I know how strange this sounds. Most people collect stamps, coins, vinyls, posters and the like. I should probably preface this by saying I have pretty extensive knowledge of the paranormal. I've been having experiences with it since I was a child. This led me to delve into the world of paranormal investigation in my teens and early 20s which coincided with my beginning to collect the boards. Since then I have amassed quite a collection but there is one that I refuse to even keep in my house. I'll call it the Salem board. I used to do special effects makeup for films and I was in Salem, Massachusetts for a job. As you have probably gathered I am a lover of the strange, unusual,

and all things creepy so I was thrilled by this opportunity. I had gotten into town a few days before filming began so I could prep but also so I could do a little sightseeing. I was wandering through some of the shops and happened to walk into one that had a pretty large collection of Ouija boards. Some were vintage, some were etched glass and some were burned wood. At the back of the shop there was a locked display case which immediately caught my eye. Alone on the top shelf was a board that looked as though it was the cross section of a tree stump. It had the usual markings of a Ouija board but they looked to be hand carved into the wood. It was also covered with runes. I went to the guy behind the counter and asked how much it was. It's not for sale, said quietly why not i asked he looked back at the cabinets and then back at me

that board is made from a tree that was used to hang witches during the salem witch trials i looked at him skeptically that was a pretty tall claim i really did want the board though it would look great in my collection and be a cool conversation piece. Are you sure you don't want to sell it? Once again he looked between me and the cabinet. $150. Cash. No returns.

I handed him the money and he walked to the cabinet to unlock it. He must have noticed the confused look on my face when he handed me the board. It doesn't come with a planchette. This board was not exactly meant to be used. I wasn't exactly sure how to respond to that so I just said thanks and left the shop. Fast forward a few months, I am back in Seattle in my one bedroom apartment where I lived alone. I had put the Salem board in my box in my closet since I was waiting on a new display case and didn't really have anywhere else to put it. My closet had two sliding doors and a shelf on top of the bar where you would hang clothes. The shelf was actually

pretty large so it accommodated the box with room to spare. I had gone to bed that night and fell asleep with the TV on. I was awoken at around 3am by the sound of something hitting my closet door. I checked to make sure my ball python, Kronos, was in his cage since every time he got out he would try and get in my closet where the hot water heater was. I saw he was curled up under his log and cautiously opened the closed door to see the box had fallen off the shelf and was now resting against the door. I was puzzled at this but thought in my sleepiness that I had just not pushed it back far enough. I pushed the box back and went back to sleep. About 30 minutes later I heard another noise from my closet but this time it was much louder. When I opened my eyes I could see that

one of the closet doors had been pushed outwards. The box had fallen off the shelf again but this time had done it with so much force it had wedged itself between my clothes and the door. At this point I was becoming a bit concerned. Instead of putting the box back on the shelf I packed it on the floor of my closet and shut the door. When I woke up in the morning, I turned over to grab my phone off the stand and saw my closet door wide open and the box had been pushed out into the middle of my room. At this point, I became concerned. This was an object with a lot of emotion attached to it. A lot of anger and a lot of pain and suffering.

I thought it best to keep it in the box and put the box in my storage unit. A few years go by and my mom keeps bugging me to clean out some things from the storage unit since she needed some space for her stuff. It was in the middle of summer and the storage unit was sweltering. I was going through boxes, aimlessly tossing things in the piles when I came across the box. The room was suddenly freezing. I took the lid off and looked down. The Salem board was sitting on top of several other Ouija boards I had acquired over the years. They had all been cracked in half down the middle. All of them, except the Salem board. I stared into the box trying to comprehend what

I was looking at. These boards looked like someone had broken them over their knee. Surely not the result of a box being dropped or jostled. I removed the board from the box and placed it in the wooden chest I had acquired from my great grandmother who had considered herself to be a witch. It remains in that box to this day. I believe there are forces in this world that we will never understand. I am sure you were wondering why I didn't get rid of the board. In a way, I feel tied to it. It called to me, and I answered. I consider myself its keeper. As long as it's with me, everyone else is safe from whoever or whatever is attached to it. My family and I visited Whidbey Island in Washington back in August of 2015.

The island was beautiful and we found a lot of activities to do there. There was one particular experience we had that I still think about to this day. We were looking for places to hike around and came across a place called Earth Sanctuary. The actual trail itself was easy and I wouldn't classify it as a hike but still had some interesting elements to it. There were several areas that had stones balancing on top of each other. I believe this is some type of spiritual practice that people do but I don't know much about it. Anyway we were walking through this trail and ended up in a huge clearing. In a circle stands these large stone pillars at least

12 feet away. I don't remember exactly how tall but it's not that important. In the middle was this pit that looked like some sort of offering pit. People had thrown in some change, trinkets, crystals and other various items. As we're looking around the area and taking in our surroundings a man walked out of nowhere. He was an older man, he had a cane, was wearing thick hiking boots with his long khaki pants tucked into them. I noticed these details because I was trying to figure out where he came from. He didn't come from the trail that we had come from, more like this small muddy path that led to a marsh area, but there was no mud on his boots, his pants were pristine and his cane

didn't look like it had just trekked through that muddy path. He said a small greeting to us which my mom started asking if he knew anything about the sanctuary. He claimed he had a house nearby and pointed back to the marsh stating it was over there somewhere. He started telling us about the history of the place and how it came about. I was very confused the whole time on how he just appeared out of nowhere. I was looking around for something sharp just in case he tried to pull something because something told me he wasn't who he claimed to be. I noticed several feet away was some sort of spinning contraption. I later discovered that it was a wishing device and it

was spinning oddly fast. There was no wind or breeze to move it and it wasn't the direction this man came from so it couldn't have been him. The conversation between the man and my mom wrapped up and he said, if you keep walking along the trail there's a nice area up ahead to see. I'm headed that way right now actually. So we continued on the trail and when he left the clearing I stared at my mom. We both exchanged confused looks and she asked, was he real? I immediately started telling my parents about what I observed and asked where he even came from. Both my parents and brother seemed a bit confused but my mom wanted to continue on the path even though something told me we shouldn't. No more than a couple of minutes had gone by since the man left the clearing and

we followed his path. We reached a part of the trail where he had stepped across those rocks or planks to cross a creek. At this point I'm thinking how could an older man with a cane have crossed this bridge so quickly without us catching up to him by now. He was nowhere in sight. We all got this uneasy feeling and decided to turn around and head out of the sanctuary. We were walking back through the woods on this trail when I noticed the sound of something following us but it didn't sound like it was on the trail. It was lurking in the trees and the way it moved sounded as if though it was an animal on all fours. I motioned for my parents to stop walking and listened.

Probably not the wisest move but I wanted to be sure I wasn't losing my mind. I didn't hear it anymore. I whispered for them to walk faster now. I hear the motion through the trees again except now it sounded like it was on two legs. We hurried through the trail and back to the parking lot where only our car was there, same as we left it. Once we drove far enough away we started googling the earth sanctuary. My dad pointed out that there were no houses around the area, the only houses were a few miles out. Definitely no houses where the man claimed he

came from. The map had shown marshland around parts of the sanctuary and specifically where the man said he had come from. There were no houses there. My mom also found a few reports of people that had gone missing in the area and bodies being found across the street from the sanctuary. The other bodies that were never found are assumed to be at the bottom of the marsh I don't know who or what this man was I don't know what was following us back in the woods and I especially don't know what would have happened if we actually did keep going on that trail the story is completely true and I'm posting my experience here because I want answers I want some insight into the paranormal world to ease my mind. I truly do

believe that there are things in this universe that can't be fully seen or explained and if anyone has ever been to the earth sanctuary on Whidbey Island have you ever had odd experiences and to anyone that does go be careful and stay alert. This is something I posted on crawler sightings a while back. I've gotten back into my interest on the subject again and decided to post here as well. Back when I was in high school, my friend and I saw something I'd begun referring to as a crawler this was in Rossville Illinois nighttime and in a cemetery I think it was probably late summer or early fall because I don't remember it being too cold out would have been between 2007 and 2010 pretty sure the moon was full or close to it because visibility was pretty good my friend and I used

to walk this loop. We would leave her place and go down a block to a side road that led to a park. We would then turn left and cut across the park to the side entrance of the cemetery. The cemetery and park sat at the very southwest corner of town. Beyond that was just woods and cornfields. If we went straight across the cemetery it would take us to another side road that then led to the main street, back to where her house was. We made it to the cemetery and were walking the main drive that split the property in half. There was a sudden noise that made us both stop. My friend started laughing nervously and asked if I had heard the noise. I told her I had seen what made the noise.

To her left, I had seen something running behind the headstones. It was on all fours but humanoid. It had extremely pale skin and no hair and looked very thin. I remember it was so pale it almost reflected the moonlight. It moved so fast, too fast for any human I had ever seen on their hands and feet, and that I couldn't see many details. It was in a total profile so I never saw the facial details. The way it ran was animal-like as well in that it had the gait where its feet came forward almost between or past its hands. Watch a video of a big cat or a wild dog running to see what I mean. We were both terrified. We just stood there panicking and listening to it move around, just out of sight, while we called one of her friends to come meet us and take us the rest of

the way home. The friend, a very typical high school boy, arrived and naturally wanted to stay in the cemetery and goof off for a while. For some reason with him there acting dumb it was less scary but I remember it just kept making those weird circles around us. It always stayed out of sight but you could hear it as it moved. Occasionally it would come a bit closer then seem to dart further away again. Eventually we left. I spent a while researching it and even reached out to a paranormal group in Champaign for advice. The guy I talked to had never heard of it but wanted to document what we saw. We met up with him and did an interview but the group never did an investigation. Fast forward a few years and I'm living in Aurora, Colorado. I met one of my closest friends in

about 2012. We really hit it off because we were into the paranormal. When I eventually told him about what I had seen, his jaw hit the floor. He told me that he had seen the same thing and told me a story. He described exactly what I had seen but he had seen it under a porch while living in Thornton. It was crouched down and squatting. He thinks that he startled it while it was eating because he said it was hunched over something it was holding. He comes from a Navajo Apache background and when we first met his best guess was Skinwalker or Wendigo. But then and especially now he says he had doubts about either of those things being the answer.

He was dating a girl at the time whom's mom claimed to be a medium. She says she thought it was something that someone woke up and that now it was angry. We both have serious doubts on that one. The stranger part came when he and I brought it up. We both started having very intense nightmares about it. His were worse than mine and lasted much longer. This was also punctuated by a six-month period of time filled with a lot of bad luck and anxiety for us. I always sort of brushed this off as us just psyching ourselves out until I sent my story into a podcast. After it was read, another listener sent in their story. They described what my friend and

I had seen and also described the sightings as being punctuated by nightmares. I couldn't write that off because he spoke about his nightmares in detail and they matched my friend's nightmares exactly. I have never given out details of what actually happened in either of our nightmares. I've read tons of other stories by other users and people on the internet. I've dug through mounds of lore and cryptid lists. I still don't feel like I have an answer to what this thing is. My best guess at this point is that the nightmares aren't coincidental and that this is something that is interdimensional. It seems like it can interact with physical things around it but I've never heard anyone else tell a first-hand account of being physically attacked or even

touched. I've speculated on what it could be for hours and the only conclusion I've come to is that I don't feel like there is an actual concrete answer. It doesn't act exactly like this or that cryptid. I think it might be something that's been around and inspired other cryptids and paranormal tales, but I don't think it's a Wendigo, Skinwalker, Ghoul, or Fleshgate. But what do you think? I don't actually believe in paranormal things, but now that some time has passed, I thought I should probably post this here for you guys to pull to bits. It's worth noting, in case it means anything, that I have had a few very oddly coincidental dreams over the years.

They're just coincidences, but you should know it in case you think it has any bearing on what I'm about to tell you. I have had at least two repetitive dreams that seem to foretell death including the details of those deaths, physical placement particularly and circumstance. What I'm about to relate isn't a dream although I suppose some argument could be made for an auditory hallucination of sorts. Because this is real, I'm also going to keep the details deliberately vague. I live alone in a semi-detached house. Then this one week, the neighbors were away. The only reason I knew this is that the noise was absent and the car was missing from

their drive. Then one night, I hear this desolate, heart-wrenching sobbing coming from their side of the partition wall. I thought it was odd, highly emotional and I listened for a while. It occurred to me that they have a disabled daughter and I wondered if she had been left alone at home and if someone was upsetting her. A boyfriend or something maybe over the phone. I was torn between going around to see if there was anything I could do to help or leaving it be. In the end, I left it. After about an hour or so, the loud crying and wailing died down. The neighbors returned the next day and I resolved, as much as we didn't get on and never spoke,

to bring up what I've heard so that the girl's parents knew and could help her if she was being targeted or something. As I left my house one day the woman was in the garden. I told her about the crying and how serious it sounded and that I didn't want to let it pass if their daughter was in some kind of trouble. The woman told me their daughter had been to stay with relatives and the house had been empty. I simply shrugged and walked on. I tried to be a good neighbor. A week or two later, I heard the news from another neighbor nearby. An ambulance had been called to their house and taken the woman out of it.

She'd died in hospital of dehydration or some such. She was quite healthy as far as I knew. In some ways, when I'm feeling less logical than usual, I can't help but feeling that I gave her a warning and that she ignored it, especially if her daughter hadn't been in the house that night. But that's it. I'm happy to answer questions. If you want to know more about anything that I've said, just ask. In case any of you are wondering, the sound I heard was very definitively sobbing and crying and wailing, and was not a scream, nor was it piercing. I say this in case any of you were thinking banshee right now. It was a very human sound. All I would say

is that, especially considering I was hearing it through the partition wall, it was very visceral. It almost hurt to hear it, as if whoever it was had just got the worst news they could ever have received. I'm going with auditory hallucination, although like my dreams, the timing and nature of the thing just seems so very odd. Not enough to keep me awake, but odd to say the least. My fiance and my daughter and I had moved into a hundred-ish year old house a few months ago. About the house. This house is huge, like 2600 square feet, and much bigger than we actually need. But the rent was a great deal and the landlady is amazing so we went for it.

The house was bought by our father who lived here for years and then when he moved she lived here for years and now rents it to us. It also is across the street from a huge cemetery. So yesterday I came home from work and some ceiling tiles in the downstairs bathroom had fallen and water was dripping so of course I immediately called her and her and her husband came right over. Her husband and my fiance were in the bathroom surveying the damage and landlady and I were in the hall. My daughter was at a cookout with her father. The men were discussing trying to find matching replacement ceiling tiles so I tell the landlady that there was a box of ceiling tiles in the bedroom closet when I moved in and she asked

to see them. As we walked to my room, my daughter's door is across from it and closed because it's incredibly messy in there. Everyone is talking, dehumidifier is running and there are our footsteps on the wood floors. I mean it's noisy. Landlady is behind me and she says, Oh hey there. And then says to me, That must be your little one peeking her head out. I contained my confusion and just smiled because a trashed 15 year old's bedroom is not what you'd want your landlady to see. So I just carried on getting the tiles out of the closet. What was she talking about?

My daughter was gone from five to nine and this was at six and I wouldn't describe her as a little one at all. I'm one of those guys who likes to think of himself as a grounded, no-nonsense person. Coming from a programming background, acting on logic is in my nature, but I cannot make sense of these events using conventional logic. I'll get straight to the events that occurred a few months ago. I had been promoted to a more stressful position, which led to a heavier workload and eventually stress and insomnia kicked in. After a terrible night's sleep I battled with the decision whether I should go into work or not. Feeling guilty about not going in, I was managing the department at the time,

I phoned in with an honest excuse to the staff I was meeting that day and tried to get some sleep. While sleeping I vaguely remember a guilt-driven dream about going into work at my normal hour. When I finally turned up about lunchtime I alluded to my lateness to my receptionist. She looked confused and said you were in earlier this morning. I said she must have been mistaken and was probably thinking about yesterday. A day when I did come in early. She insisted I was in and even got another employee to back her up and he said something like, we both saw you this morning I remember it clearly. I kind of laughed it off leaving the receptionist and myself confused. I proceeded to the room I had my appointment in. There was no such confusion with the rest of the staff. I told them of the

receptionist confusion and we laughed it off too. The jokes must have made it back to her because as I proceeded with the meeting the receptionist knocked and came in and adamantly stated that she had seen me and she wanted to clear it up. I guess she did not want to look crazy in front of everyone. I could tell by her attitude she was 100% convinced that she had seen me come in this morning. With a jocular attitude and to clear up matters, I called my fiancé in front of everyone on loudspeaker who was home all morning. I asked, can you remember what time I got up and did not leave the house sleep driving or anything. She corroborated my story and the receptionist proceeded to turn a slightly paler shade. I then became convinced she

and the other employee who was at the reception saw something. I feel like I'd embarrassed her. This became a running joke for weeks. I wish I could be in two places at once with this workload, etc. It seemed like the best way to deal with it at the time. About a month later came the second event. My fiancé came into the living room on a quiet Sunday looking very confused. She explained that she had followed me into my home office room from the kitchen. She saw me enter wearing completely different clothes to what I had on that day and wanted to ask why I changed clothes. According to her I was wearing my grey t-shirt although I had a green t-shirt on while sitting on the sofa. She again was adamant of the event. She walked

into the office and saw no one there. The hairs stood up on my neck as I remembered the incident at my workplace. Although I don't necessarily believe in such things, I started searching Google for similar paranormal experiences. I read some stuff about doppelgangers and contrary to my usual logical attitude, I never wore that t-shirt ever again. The third event pertains to a recent dream synchronous to my fiancé's. I remember bits of the dream, especially the very emotional part.

There was a playful childlike character in my dream, much like me when I was young. I somehow knew it was my brother. I asked my mom why my brother was not grown up. She started to cry in my dream and with great sadness said he never had the chance to grow up. She started to cry in my dream and with great sadness said he never had the chance to grow up. I woke up emotionally rattled from the dream most of which I cannot remember. I blurted out to my fiance that I just had a dream that I had a brother expecting a dismissive reply from her. I often share my dreams when I can remember them which is rare we usually laugh at them. Instead as she woke up to my statement,

she sleepily replied, I had a dream you told me you had a brother. We were on a boat. Again, chills up my spine, but nothing about a boat in my dream that I can remember. We put it down to talking to each other in our sleep. It was the only rational explanation we could think of. It's worth noting around the time of the events, two significant events happened in my life. One was having a relapse fueled by my insomnia. I'm an alcoholic addict, cleaned for seven years and clean today and now too. The other was a massive life change involving leaving my job to set up what became a successful business with far less stress

than my nine-to-five. Anyhow, I've probably rambled on too much. I suppose I'm looking for opinions outside of my normal framework of thinking and to offload this story. Thanks for reading my story and any feedback would be greatly appreciated. I feel as if though the paranormal and hauntings have followed me my whole life. I do know I have abilities and I'm a strong empath so that might contribute to it. It started when I was about four. I would see vortexes on the wall at night. It wasn't something where I would blink and it would go away. I would stare at it and I would tell my mom what I was seeing and she couldn't see it. I would just have to go to sleep and it would be gone by the morning.

I also didn't know that it was a vortex until many years later when I started to do research on it and I saw pictures of exactly what I saw when I was a child. I also remember telling my mother at 4 to 5 years old that I knew what it was like to die, that it was like someone turned off a light switch. I remember being so sure of how it felt, almost like I was remembering my death in a previous life. I lived in a small apartment in New York City growing up and my mom, grandma and sisters experienced so much activity at night. We used to all sleep in the same room and the bedroom door would face the living room and below the door we would see how the whole room became alive. The TV would come on and off, we can hear heavy footsteps, chairs

moving, cheap plastic white chairs. At one point I remember the chair being dragged to the door. We can see below the door where it would move. My mom and grandma were telling us to ignore it and pray so we did that. On one particular night I remember we slept with the door open. I don't know why we didn't close the door that night. I remember I shared a bed with my grandma and one night she asked me a question and I answered rudely back to her. A few minutes later I hear a demonic voice say my name in a very guttural dragged out way. I was shaken to the core and just started to silently cry in bed. I then look towards the door and I can see a figure standing at the doorway

staring at me. I would often also see a figure sitting on a chair at the table. I would tell my mom about it and she said it was our uncle who died many years ago protecting us. As my sister and I got older, like about 10, we had a shadow figure that would come into the room. We would both see it. It sort of glided into the room. It was a tall, gray shadow. When we saw it, we would tell each other to ignore it and to go to sleep, like our mother taught us. This figure would also open the bedroom door. It would open the locked door very slowly and just glide in and get between our beds.

And then the sleepwalking started. My sister would sleepwalk or run on times that the figure would come and she was asleep. She would actually run out the door. I would have to run out after her and usually when she would get out of the door she would snap out of it and have no idea why she was standing in the hallway of the building. We would often spend summers visiting our family out in the country and the figure would follow us there. At night we slept with the bedroom door halfway open and every few nights we would hear the door start to creak open and we would see the figure gliding into the room towards the bed we were sharing. When that happened we would ignore it and turn our faces towards the window.

My sister was also sleepwalking when we visited our family. The only difference was that our cousin would also sleepwalk with her and they would be like talking to each other but you couldn't understand what was being said. This also happened the same night the figure would appear. One night I remember that my sister and cousin are asleep talking to each other in the dining room and I'm trying to call her to come to the room and I see the figure enter the room. So I turn around and let her stay out. I also experienced different smells with no source. My grandma died when I was 16 and I missed her terribly. Every Saturday morning I would be half awake and I would smell toast and coffee which is what my grandma always made in the mornings. At the same time it sounded

like someone was blasting music in my ears. I would always hear the same Jessica Simpson's I want to love you forever song. As soon as I would wake up the smells and music would be gone and it would be dead silent. Around 16 I decided that I didn't want to share a room with my mom and sisters and I decided to sleep in the living room area by myself even though my mom warned me that it wasn't safe. I didn't care. I was a stubborn teenager. We got a partition and separated part of the apartment and I put my bed there by the windows and I had my dresser and TV there. I was happy. This was short-lived. The first night I started to hear scratching on the other side of the partition and just noises. I then started to get really bad sleep paralysis. I would wake up

and I couldn't move and there was someone there. I couldn't see them but I knew they were to my side and they were talking. There was this orange light that kept going up and down from my stomach to my throat. My body could also feel it as it was happening. It almost sounded quite like the back scratchers from the 90s that made sounds when you would twist it up and down. The voice talking was a male voice and it was saying exactly what was happening to my body as that orange light was going up and down my body. At the same time as my sleep paralysis was happening I was also not sleeping at night. My attitude changed where it was noticeable to my family. I lost a lot of weight. I looked sick. I even would start to smell perfume at night.

I attributed it to my grandma who I missed so it didn't scare me. The final straw for me though was one night in the middle of summer that I was lying in bed feeling more uneasy than usual. I just felt something menacing around me. All of a sudden I smelled tobacco. A really strong smell of tobacco. No one in my life smoked so I just knew it wasn't my family or family spirits visiting me. I immediately jumped out of bed and told my mom what happened and jumped into bed with her. I never slept outside again. Once I graduated high school, my family moved to the south to be closer to my mom's sister who was living there. We rented a two bedroom townhouse

and I finally for the first time got my own room. For the first few weeks I wasn't scared at all. I figured we had left the bad spirits behind. Then one morning my mom is working. My sisters are in school and I wake up to what sounded like Grand Central Station. Lots of people talking. I can hear people going up and down the stairs, doors slamming, and like stomping all around me. I'm totally awake but unable to move or open my eyes. It was sleep paralysis all over again, and I can hear a small boy about three years old. I can tell he's next to me, and he said, she's awake, and the woman who I assume is his mother says no she isn't and he said yes look and he poked my stomach and immediately I jump up out of bed and it's dead silent.

To this day it still haunts me. So a few years pass by and I'm 23 years old and my mom is married in there renting an older house. I move in with them after I break up with my boyfriend of four years. It's a split level home so when you enter from the garage there is this room where they put a tv and a sofa and next to that room is a door that leads to a room that had a room to the basement and had been lived in by other relatives, but they would eventually move because the activity was so bad. These are just a few examples. Everyone knew the basement had a horrible vibe to it, like if you were coming up the stairs you would run up, it felt like you were being chased. My cousin had that room for a bit and the basement would open on its own. It was so bad that

he would have to take a rope and tie it to the handle and hook it onto something to keep it closed. My sister also stayed in that room and she would have horrible nightmares. One morning she woke up to a blue light moving in her room. She ignored it and fell back asleep. Later that afternoon our aunt asked her why she was watching TV so early in the morning and when she was leaving for work and my sister says she wasn't and my aunt tells her that she can see from her bedroom window which faced the front of the house at ground level a blue light which she assumed was the TV that was on. My sister moved out shortly afterwards. Soon it was my turn to move into that room. I always felt like I was being watched,

like I had no privacy but I couldn't explain it. I knew the stories but I figured if I ignored it, it would go away. I started to wake up in the middle of the night and it looked like there was an old school TV white noise on. The whole room was illuminated by it. Only thing is that I had newer TV that didn't have white noise. I would turn around and look towards the basement door and there was a figure that was made out of that white noise. It was just staring at me. I would turn on the nightstand lamp and turn around away from it facing the lamp and fall asleep. Every time I did that the lamp would be off in the morning. I lived there for about a year until my mom and

her husband separated and she moved into an apartment with her daughters and he moved in with family. A few weeks after they split they got together and went to the house to check the mail. It was empty at the time so they get the mail and they both notice like the tv on in that window where my old bedroom was. There were no blinds and the room was empty but they both noticed the light and they were just staring at it wondering what it is there. Then they notice something is bobbing back and forth in front of the window and they realize it's a shadow of a person with a round hat, one that is bobbing. My mom's ex who never believed in spirits was scared out of his mind and he

quickly takes off. So we live in that apartment for a year and we move into a townhouse not far from it. My mom wanted a bigger place at that point. I'm 25 now. It's an older three level townhome where the stairs go through every level in the middle of the house if it makes sense. I take the basement level and I have my own room with bathroom and a small kitchen and living room with a private entrance. So we started noticing strange things happening. All the light bulbs would blow up suddenly. We would tell the landlord about it and she said to use lower wattage bulbs, which we did and it was still happening. I would just be sitting there talking to someone and I would hear a pop and a ball would go out.

It even happened with our lamps. Since I was in the basement, the floor above me was the kitchen and living room area and the floor above that was the bedrooms. I would often lie awake in the room and I could tell when someone went downstairs and into the kitchen. I could hear them come down the stairs. There were times when I would be lying awake and all of a sudden I would hear what sounded like someone had gotten up off the sofa and was walking around the house. I knew for a fact that everyone was asleep. I would even ask my mom and sisters about it and they said that they didn't get up that night. On several nights that I was lying in bed I would hear a woman crying so loudly.

It was the most hopeless, sad, defeated cry I'd ever heard in my life. It sounded like an older woman so I would ask my mom about it and she said it wasn't her. She also hadn't heard it. I can hear it and knew it was coming exactly from the living room. When I was 26 I moved out and moved in with my now husband. My mom needed to find someone to rent out my room so she found a female college student in her early 20s. She lasted one night. She said the first night she was seeing green lights on the walls. Sounded like the vortexes I saw as a child which were bright green and she said she didn't know what it was but thought we maybe had mold. So we tell our landlord about it and she immediately sends an expert to test the air and walls and it is

determined that there is no mold at all in the house. Meanwhile the girl is moved out. About a year later my mom and aunt are in the same house preparing some favors for my wedding in the dining room and both my mom and aunt are suddenly frightened and they look behind me. Behind me is the stairs and they both claim to have seen a woman's legs standing at the landing. The way the stairs are laid out they would have been blocking the top part of her body. I had never seen them this scared before. It validated to me what I had been experiencing there all this time. So my soon to be husband and I purchased our first home. It was just after the recession and we got a great deal on it.

As soon as we move in, I mean, the first day I'm taking a shower and we have a glass door shower and I look over and a shadow figure notices that I saw it and it immediately scooted to the side. I also started to get a feeling that there has and it immediately scooted to the side. I also started to get a feeling that there has been a lot of death in the land. I refused to walk in the backyard. I couldn't explain it and I also kept getting visions of a soldier with brown hair and a long blue coat and I can tell he had died and he had some injury in the side of the forehead. I decided to start doing research on the history of the land

and I'm shocked to discover that there was a huge battle that happened during the Civil War. The exact location where my house stood was where the Union soldiers stood during the battle, which explained the soldier in blue uniform. Another thing to note was that I was also from up north, so maybe he saw something familiar in me. I would often hear drums like monotone banging every three seconds. I had a feeling it was this soldier banging the drum so I looked into it more and apparently there were soldiers that were in charge of banging drums. I can't remember the name of it. My husband's mother was psychic and

I could tell her about the soldier and she told me he was just wanting to introduce himself to me and that he protected the land and often wandered all around the land. She did tell me that he was hit in the head with a small cannon, not sure what that was. She told me that he protected the house which I found to be true because I often found him standing on the end of the long front porch when I would come home late at night when I was in school. He didn't scare me but there was another mischievous male spirit that would run up the steps. It was quite a few steps to get to our door. We would hear it and even see a shadow come up. Dogs would bark. We would check and there would be no one there. We would often see shadows pass by the

tall window near the door. It got to the point where it happened so much that we stopped investigating. One thing that did scare and freak me out in the four years that we lived there in that house was that during the 4th of July there was a park not far that had a huge fireworks show that we pretty much had front row seats to. I know for a fact that the fireworks show disturbed the dead soldiers who died in that land and a few times that I went outside on the back deck to watch the fireworks I would have this overwhelming feeling that there were soldiers in my backyard staring at the fireworks, maybe confused, not at peace. One time in particular I remember I went out and I get that feeling again

and this time I can see in my mind that there are two soldiers looking straight up at the fireworks and then I realize there is another soldier looking at me and it starts approaching to the stairs about to come up to me. It wasn't menacing more like curious. It still scared me and I go inside. A few minutes later I can feel that there are soldiers on the deck and I can hear a faint tapping on the glass door. I obviously don't look. I'm now 33 and live in a new construction home about half an hour away from the other house. I purposely chose a new construction home because it was untouched land, no history, or so I thought. I've been getting the strong sense that this was Native American land which chances are very high that it is just based on

the area. I haven't felt threatened but I had a strange experience about a year ago where I had a dream that I was standing outside my house and I was looking towards where my neighbor's house should be and it was all woods and I noticed three children, a girl about nine, a boy about seven and a small girl about three. Two older ones had blonde hair and the youngest one had long dark hair. I can hear them singing an old song. I can remember the words to it but in the dream I knew it was an old song. All of a sudden I hear a scream and the youngest girl noticed me and was the one who screamed. The other two looked over and noticed me and the boy and youngest girl

run into the woods while the oldest girl is staring at me in a menacing way. I can feel she is not happy with me. I immediately wake up and something is standing over my bed and it attacks me. I don't think it was trying to kill me or more like terrify me. I can sense it was female and angry. I tell my husband in private about what happened and being a religious person he just prays for protection. Which by the way prayer has helped me a lot over the years. We have three daughters and my oldest has now been talking about the kids picking blueberries in the woods and the bad monsters and she even has an imaginary friend who is a little girl. My daughter is almost five and she says that the girl is shorter than her with long dark hair.

She says her name is Livia, which I now know is an old name. If my daughters are psychic I wouldn't be surprised but I don't know how to handle it, ignore it like my mom did or talk to her about it which in my experience opens things up more. My oldest is terrified of the dark, says there are people in her room. So now that I'm older and a mom I've come to accept that this is something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life. Things are more clear now, whereas my childhood was very confusing and scary. I have noticed that I can control it a little bit. It's almost like a door that I can't completely close, but I get dang near close to closing it.

Only thing is, is that something will happen in my life, like extreme stress or pregnancy, and that door is opened all the way and activity starts up again. For example, in my life like extreme stress or pregnancy and that door is opened all the way and activity starts up again. For example, in my first pregnancy, I was having a very horrible time at work. My bosses wanted to fire me for being pregnant and it didn't help that there was a girl who was trying to get me fired by sabotaging me. The overwhelming stress would cause me to wake up in the middle of the night and there would be lights all over the room, like small one inch lights, hundreds of them going horizontally. I wasn't imagining it.

I would wake up and just stare at them. I even woke up my husband and he saw them too. He said he didn't know what it was but he was going to pray and go back to sleep. This happened about three times and the last time it happened the lines were there but they were facing different directions Like one going up sideways. It was freaky. I also was able to move things this happened one time I have a strained relationship with my mother-in-law It's hard when you have abilities and know how people feel about you and they don't have to tell you It's also doesn't help that she also has abilities so I knew that

she hated me and I was about to have my baby about 38 or 39 weeks pregnant and I'm at Walmart in the grocery section and I'm just thinking of her incredibly angry and the thought crosses my mind that she would try to get a ride off me and keep my baby to herself and I'm enraged. I've never been this angry in my life and all of a sudden this breeze comes and this energy I can't explain and I hear papers moving underneath the grocery store shelves. I also hear a can rolling behind me. At the same time I hear two women reacting to something and I just keep walking. Don't turn around and leave the store. First and last time it happened to me. Other things I've experienced now are just knowing things. I can't explain it but

I always know the outcome of a problem that is happening. But being human I don't always make the right decision and it turns out that the right one was the one I had in my head. I also will be thinking of someone I hadn't spoken to in years and a short time later they will reach out to me phone or Facebook or email I strongly feel how someone is feeling about me even if they are not in front of me It has been confirmed when I've asked certain people and they said yes, it was true I can almost feel the energy of the world if that makes sense I'll feel extreme sadness because of the state of the world if that makes sense. I'll feel extreme sadness because of the state of the world.

I struggle with the news a lot but at the same time I'm constantly reading news stories and have several news apps on my phone. I feel people's energies. I just know when someone is bad or when I can trust someone. This one I don't mess around with. I know right away and bad people I avoid like the plague. It's usually confirmed later that they are not who they try to portray. I also had issues with street lights. In my previous house when I would be driving home from school at night I was tired and stressed and as soon as I was turning into the center lane to turn into my subdivision the one street light closest to the entrance would shut off and it would only happen when I was alone driving.

If my husband was driving it would stay on. If you read this until the end, thank you and sorry for the length. I apologize if things were hard to understand. I welcome comments and ideas about what could be happening. I have never told everyone how haunted my life has been. People know bits and pieces, but not my story. Which, by this way, this is just scratching the surface of what has happened through my entire life. I'm 23 now, and at the time it was my first summer out of high school,

not counting the initial one right after graduating, and me and three friends fresh off their freshman year of college decided to live together. One of my friends, my best friend for years, we'll call him Earl, had a longtime girlfriend whose father owned the property. It was a decently sized plot of land with several old cabins on it, their house, large and out back in the woods, and a few other scattered buildings. I think it used to be a campground before he bought it to live on and run his business out of. We live in southern Maine and the property is heavily wooded,

pine tree state. The house that we lived in was at the very front of the property, right on the road. The owner's house was at the very rear and could only be accessed by a dirt road with two ditches on the side. A one-minute walk towards the woods from our front houses was a small little cabin across the clearing, and it was furnished and powered. In the house was me, Earl, John and Chuck. We all had some different girls and girlfriends, pals and parties through the summer. We would frequently come here to the cabin and the owner's house before moving in. Some of the story is word of mouth from some of the others living in the house but we had all been friends so long I knew they would not lie to me and I witnessed enough myself that it all lined up.

I'll be breaking this up into encounters and important events that I feel irrelevant as they happen with a simple number identifier. 1. The first encounter was at the very beginning of the summer, before we even moved in. It was evening and dark and everyone was at the owner's house watching a movie. As I slowly drove my car down the everyone was at the owner's house watching a movie. As I slowly drove my car down the dirt path to the owner's, something white and large and size ran in front of my car in a blur. It was too fast to really catch what it was but being in the woods I assumed it was some kind of albino fox. I shrugged it off and made my way to the house.

Number 2 A week later we were all situated and moved in the front home by the street and things were great. I'll admit the front area of the property was spooky despite being the most open and least wooded. The owner's mother had lived in our house and died years ago. We could see an old statue of mother Mary off in the woods that was always kind of sketchy. Across the street was a small independent tire shop with a small dirt lot. Only thing in the house when we moved in was some antique type of cheetah statue, looked like maybe from the 60s. Tall and skinny in a sitting position and went up to mid-waist. We put it in the corner in the hallway, thought it was neat and retro. Number

three, for a few weeks all is normal. Admittedly some friends experimented with some different substances and paired with the normals like drinking. I did not believe this impacts would happen. We have some parties, invite girls over for some fun, jam out on the guitars in the cabin. It was a great time, but things slowly become tense and go downhill. A lot happens and I believe they are all connected, even though they seem disjointed and random. After a few weeks of fun, Earl had developed crippling insomnia due to some tooth pain that unfortunately he could not afford to fix. He would clock maybe one hour of sleep per night and slowly became more and more irritable,

but nothing too serious. Number four. One night, John and Earl and one of their friends, who we will call Don, are in the back of the cabin. They had done some slight drinking, but John was straight edge, who never touches anything of any kind. Earl is playing on his guitar and singing some kind of original tune. This portion of the story, until I came came into play is recanted by John.

During this night, our fourth roommate is Chuck and I sleep in bed while I'm in my room. As Earl plays his guitar, he says to Don, Wow man, those are some great harmonies you're doing. Since when can you sing? Don looks a little confused and tells Earl that he wasn't singing along with him. Earl starts singing again, but stops when he hears the harmonies a second time. He thought his ears were tricking him, but John and Don had heard it as well. They put the guitar down and decided to investigate. They walk through the clearing,

briefly startled by Mother Mary in the woods, until they reach the front of the road. From across the street they see the biggest white cat they had ever seen. Not just a cat, but the size of a larger dog or mountain lion. They scramble to try and get videos with their phones, at which point I see them out the window and run down to meet them. As I hit the yard, I'm just stunned as they are seeing this giant white bobcat sitting on a hill across from the tire shop. It's massive, about the size of a German shepherd, but something was wrong.

It's tail, man. It had a gross, nasty, fleshy tail as if though it had the tail of a rat. It's long, so I can't see all of it, but it is definitely proportionately wrong and way longer than a normal cat, let alone fleshy and bald. Don picks up a rock and throws it. I kid you not, all four of us, too fully sober, watch this thing stand up on its hind legs and it calmly walks into the woods, its tail dragging behind it. We all book it inside. 5. Earl is more sleepless than normal trying to drink himself to sleep. He is successful. Dawn does the same. I don't remember how John and I fell asleep that night. Every creak of the house scared the crap out of me. The next morning we wake Chuck up and

thoroughly scare him. We're all kind of on edge the rest of the day but with the sun out the fun starts back up and we put it into the back of our heads. Today Earl confides in me about his lack of sleep and how he does not expect this experience to help. 6. The night comes again and everyone decides to have a low key evening after all the excitement from the evening prior. That evening Chuck suffers from his first and only night terror of his life.

He awakes in his bed and he's in some kind of paralysis. He hears the growl and snarl or scream of a cougar bobcat type creature as a giant white mass runs across the doorway of his room. He slowly regains movement and comes into my room to tell me what happened. He doesn't sleep the rest of the night. The next morning, we bring the cheetah't sleep the rest of the night. The next morning we bring the cheetah statue into the cabin across the clearing. Number seven. For another few weeks nothing tremendous happens. We continue to be on edge. Earl slips a little further but things are slowly getting better. I do a little research about what we've seen. Cryptozoology, demons, monsters, etc. I finally make a breakthrough. I find an article,

nothing big, from an old book about Maine urban legends. The book was from a while ago and described something called the Dingball Cougar, aka Plunkus. I just like the sound of Plunkus better. Anyways, it said, Dingball was a cougar whose last tail joint was ball-shaped and bare of hair and flesh. Dingball was fond of human flesh and would sing with a human voice to lure the incautious out of their cabins at night where it waited in the darkness to crack their skulls with its tail. My heart stopped as I read this because it matched so well with our experience. Mind you, it said nothing of walking on hind legs or being white, but the similarities still

shocked me. I kept this info close to my chest for a while. 8. A few days later, Earl's insomnia came to a head. It was around 10pm and I laid in bed before I heard a massive crash. From the audible vantage point I was at, it sounded like someone had fallen down the stairs. I rushed into the hallway as Earl came from his room and I yelled, What was that? Earl turned to me and raised his fist and yelled, Shut up! Shut up! and ran down the stairs. I sat in my room for a minute, angry and confused.

After about 20, I went to my car and drove to my parents to spend the stairs. I sat in my room for a minute, angry and confused. After about 20, I went to my car and drove to my parents to spend the night. 9. I stayed the rest of the day with my parents as well. That night, Earl called me to apologize. The crashing had come from his room where he angrily had kicked a chair due to oral pain, and when I came out out he thought I was angrily yelling. What was he doing to him? We made up on the phone and then he asked me something peculiar. Hey man, did you come home today at all? No, why? I replied. He explained that he was the last one out so he had locked the doors and as we had been doing for about two weeks since we were all freaked out, Earl had the only key. Okay and? I asked. He sighed and sounded a little scared.

The uh cheetah statue was on top of Chuck's bed. I told him not to touch it. Number 10. Even later that night when I got back to the house Chuck's room was closed and we went and took a look. The cheetah had been placed in the center of Chuck's bed standing up. He had a lumpy mattress and the fact that it had stood so straight was impressive and unnatural. It was not leaning tilted or anything. As soon as I touched it it fell over. The next day I took it and hid it somewhere no one else would bother to look for, in one of the older cabins where they were only used for storage. The thing is, the next night it was back in Chuck's room.

The bed was made neatly and the cheetah was placed under the blankets with its head out, like it was taking a nap. We burned the statue the next day. Number 11. I wish I could say that solved everything, but it didn't. Over the next few weeks we continued to be stalked by white blurs in the corner of our vision, the rustling of leaves and the occasional faint whisper of singing in the distance. At one point, the Mother Mary statue was even turned backwards, no longer facing the home. I'm not sure when, but we only noticed at this point.

A few days passed and summer was up and we all left. We still visit different spots of the property, but avoid the house. We hear the occasional rustle, but we don't watch for color anymore because we don't want to see the white blur. After all this time, I don't know what the Plunkus is. A beast? A demon? A spirit? Or all of the above? All I know is Earl never got his tooth fixed. The pain just went away. Chuck has never had a night terror since.

I know that it's still there. And I remember how old and mysterious my state still is. Hey, Stephen King loves it for a reason, right? When I was ten, I was at a lake way out in the woods on some land my dad owned. I was alone aside from my dog and Airedale Terrier. I had been fishing on the little pier in the southeast corner for about ten minutes when I noticed something or someone watching me from the tree line on the other side of the lake. I was only ten, but I kept my composure. For some reason, I felt it important that whatever or whoever it was did

not know I was aware. It started moving slowly from tree to tree, never taking its eyes off me. The lake was about 75 yards wide so I couldn't see any details but I could tell which way the figure was facing. I realized that it was stalking me and I nonchalantly put my pole down and walked down the pier and up the bank towards the trail back to our cabin. Once I hit the tree line, I hauled it to the cabin and waited there with one of my dad's guns until my parents got home. The only witness I had was my dog and he saw it as well. I know because he was staring intently at the figure while giving a low growl until I quietly told him to stop. I have no idea who or what it could have been but I know its intentions were most definitely not good. This took place in southwest Mississippi near the Alabama border back in the early 90s. We didn't live there, our home was in Mobile, Alabama, but we spent most weekends up there.

I know it could have been a person, but the nearest neighbor was a very old couple that lived a few miles away. The closest paved road was a good 15-20 minute drive away from our land. Aside from the lake and the open area our cabin was on, the surrounding area was all really thick forest. The figure was extremely tall as well. I have an extremely good memory especially for details. Also, shortly before I actually noticed it, I got a very strong I'm being watched by something dangerous feeling. I never felt safe there again and I was glad when my dad sold it and got a place near Gulf Shores. When I was eight, I would walk to my town home approximately ten minutes away from my school. I would be home by myself every day for about an hour and a half because my parents worked

and my older brother went to a different school. I always used this alone time to sink into the couch and watch cartoons before my family came home and took over. I actually really enjoyed the alone time. I was raised in a very Christian home and was very sheltered. I would get in trouble watching Power Rangers sometimes because the bad guys were too evil. I remember being taught that after you die you either go to heaven or hell. You don't get to say whether you're going or not so that means there are no such things as ghosts or so I thought. One day after school I come home to the same routine but this time standing in the corner

was a dark figure at the height of the door frame staring at me. It looked like a textbook grim reaper minus a scythe. It had a long black tattered robe with skeletal features showing. The most disturbing thing was its grin. It looked like a skeleton but wore a long grin. Keep in mind I'd never heard of the Nightmare Before Christmas or anything else I could relate it to. Of course I was startled by such a horrific sight but I literally didn't believe what I was seeing. I remember saying out loud, Wow, my imagination is really jacked up.

I would just keep calling myself a stupid little kid with a stupid imagination. It helped me make sense of what I saw and made it easier to deal with, because I see a ghost, but there's no such thing. It had to be my imagination. I saw it every day after that. It would never say a word but if I looked at it, it would lean its head at me as if it were to say, I see you too. It always left when my family came home but I saw this thing every day for three months straight. It started to get more aggressive the more uncomfortable I became. I questioned my sanity every day, just telling myself that it didn't make sense. I'm seeing a ghost, but how because ghosts aren't real. I would say I don't believe in ghosts

because that's what I thought, but that was a ghost. I didn't understand anything and as days went by I became more scared every day. This thing started cutting me off. It would be so uncomfortable that I would want to go into my room upstairs. It would move slowly as if underwater then quickly zip as if it teleported onto the stairway leaning over the staircase while looking me in the face to block me from going to my room. I was stuck to my little corner of my couch with this smiling skeleton that wanted something from me. The best way I could relate how it moved was like the ghost from the movie 13 ghosts.

That was actually pretty spot on. I never told my parents or anyone else what I was seeing. I was afraid my parents wouldn't believe a stupid little kid and honestly I was afraid of getting in trouble. My brother would just call me gay and tell everyone to make fun of me. One day I slowly walked home with about 6 inches of snow on the ground. I came home and this thing like every day was waiting for me. I sat on the couch in fear like always. This time it zipped in front of me, in front of my face and it took its hands and shrouded them over my face as if though it wanted to grab me then zip back. For the first time I screamed as loud as I could and ran outside.

My parents came outside to me crying and sitting in the snow. My parents asked me what was wrong and the first thing that I said was, I know I'm a stupid little kid with a stupid imagination and you're never going to believe me. After I told my parents, I expected them to look at each other in disbelief and make me look under my bed for monsters. They turned to each other and said in a stern voice, Why didn't you tell us? That scared me more than they knew because they sounded like they knew something. My parents have never told me anything that would scare me before but my parents told me the god honest truth as if I was grown. They told me that people that lived in the house before us

had a little girl that was demon possessed in her house and took her own life and now the demon wanted me. My parents immediately poured baby oil into a cap and prayed over it and put a dab of it in the shape of a cross over every door and window in the house. After that I saw it outside my kitchen window looking in. That is the first time I saw it outside. Then a week after that and two weeks after that. Then I never saw it again. Whether anyone believes me or not isn't important. Whether it was my crazy eight-year-old brain like I thought or something paranormal, I saw it for three months straight. No one can take that from me.

What would it look like if we all listened more? Listening to audiobooks inspires us, motivates us, even brings us closer, and there's no better place to listen than Audible. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet, and now Audible members get more than ever before. Each month they get three titles of their choice, one audiobook, two Audible originals, and fitness programs that they can't get anywhere else. I myself have been working my way through Lullaby, by author Jonathan Mayberry, narrated by Scott Brick. The fears and horrors of being a new parent take on a shocking dimension

in this heart-stopping original story. A young married couple just bought a gorgeous house to escape the hustle and bustle of the city to raise their baby girl, Hope, in relative peace and quiet. When night falls, however, their dream home becomes a house of nightmares. They soon learn that darkness takes many forms, and sometimes, darkness is hungry. There's never been a better time to experience Audible. Try it for free for 30 days by visiting audible.com slash read or by texting read to 500-500. That's audible.com slash r-e-a-d or by texting r-e-a-d to 500-500. You can do it with audiobooks. This event took place 25 years ago, so I apologize in advance if it's not as detailed as you like.

I want to stay as true to the memory as possible and only share what I remember. If there are any questions or comments which trigger more details, I will gladly flesh it out a bit. I was 7 and my younger sister was five and we disembarked for the school bus hand in hand excited about our first week of school ready to tell mom all about it. We rounded the corner for home and saw that there was no car in the driveway. Little sister was happily chatting about her teacher, new friends and the playground but I felt unsettled. Why was mom gone? Mom was always waiting for us usually with chopped fruit or veggies. She was ahead of the curve on that.

The no junk food rule embarrassed me as a kid but I'm so grateful for that now. Well maybe just the car was gone. Silly thought but not everyone's a genius when they're only seven. As we reached the intersection of the porch and driveway I knew the car was gone because mom was gone because the front door was shut. We weren't latch key kids although that was quite normal in our neighborhood but I did have a house key just in case. I'd wondered what our parents had meant but this must be the case. I released my little sister's hand and knelt to fish the key out of the bottom pouch of my backpack. I was a little nervous but proud I'd remembered and when I rose to unlock the door

I froze. Looking down on us from inside the house was a figure dressed head to toe in black. To my mind now this camouflage was so complete that there wasn't anything revealed around the eyes to indicate this person's race. I had stopped with the key in my hand and although I had no intention of getting it now, the figure shook its head back and forth. I dropped the key and urged my little sister off the porch. I was at a loss of what to do so I led her to the side yard where we had a tire swing and a rope swing and told her we would wait for mom. This had not been part of a just-in-case conversation. When I folded myself into the tire swing I realized I'd wet my pants. Little sister asked me what was wrong and lying was

never my strong point so I told her someone was in the house. She looked puzzled and said it's just daddy's friend. I asked her how she knew and she answered that she just did. I told her we would wait for mom anyways. I don't know how long we waited. I was frightened, hungry and uncomfortable in my wet pants. Whoever was in the house left from the back door because after some time my dog darted around the house and happily greeted us. The fence was being redone in the back door because after some time my dog darted around the house and happily greeted us. The fence was being redone in the back and everyone who lived in their house knew to put him on a chain rather than let him run freely and escape through the gaps. Upon Sunny's arrival

little sister was ready to go in and I was not. We argued in the way kids do exchanging witty insults such as dumb dumb and stupid head, but I was able to win the battle due to the merit of my age. Mom finally pulled into the driveway and Sunny and I beelined for her. I had given in to the tears I'd been repressing, and the only thing that shocked me out of my hysterics was Mom urging me to come into the house. I managed to tell her about the man in black and little sister chimed in with daddy's friend and then mom ushered us into the car, even sunny,

and drove a few blocks to her friend's house. The police were called, we were questioned together and separately and were left with mom's friend while she and the officers walked through the house. There had been a break-in focused on the basement, dad's territory, and my parents' bedroom. If anything was gone, mom didn't know what it was, and dad feigned innocence in relation to his friend. Nothing like this has ever happened again, and when I asked mom if she remembered it,

she told me the past is better left there. My sister Penny was always afraid of the upstairs at our house. She never went up there at night. Our main conversation every night went something like this. Buffy, go upstairs and find me a white sweater, black jeans and leather jacket. The clothing items would change from night to night but I always asked her to get her things but she would not go up without an adult after dark. Why can't you go get them? Because something is up there. I sleep up there, nothing has happened to me. Just wait, someday it will. Okay, I will admit it is creepy up there. I will give you the layout. There are two rooms that lead into each other, no hallway, and there is an attic above and one on each side. The house is well over a hundred years old and there is a

banister over the stairs but it is closed off by a door. I remember Penny coming home from dates and before she would take her boyfriend upstairs she would send him up with a flashlight to check the closets and under the beds even though I was in one of those beds. Once when our mother asked her why she would not sleep upstairs in her room she rattled off numerous reasons. You can see small lights come out of the closet and you can hear footsteps and heavy breathing in the attic and there is always a sense of being watched a little too closely. I would respond, that's ridiculous I had never seen or heard anything. My mom would say, she's

okay she can sleep wherever she wants she's not hurting anything. I think my mom knew but since nothing was bothering me at the time she overlooked it, better to have one daughter on the couch than two. I even took this problem to my dad, being as he was always on my side, and mom seemed that she was always on Penny's side. Eventually my sister got married and moved out when she was 18 and I was 11. Then I guess the ghost or whatever thought it was my turn and this is my experience. In the attic I would hear stomping and it was not just one attic it was all three spaces.

There were whispers in the closet like two children having a conversation. The conversation I overheard were from talking about dolls, sometimes they were trying to figure out what happened to someone named Uncle Duffy and sometimes it sounded as if though they were discussing how they could run away. I did not get a bad feeling from the girls in the closet. I was always being watched all day and all night and lived in a constant state of panic. When I was upstairs, every nerve was on edge. The worst thing was this big black shadow in the middle of the night was asking where Penny was. The voice wasn't the voice of a kid, it sounded like it came from someone who smoked four packs a day for 50 years. The black shadow asked my sister six times every night.

When I would not answer out of fear, the shadow would throw things at me. Books, figurines, even pictures. Then it was my turn to sleep on the couch, and then I understood my sister. It wasn't an excuse, she actually heard those things. I never understood why I didn't until after Penny moved out and I was bullied by this ghost or whatever it was. That's what this entity was. A bully. Something that always had to have power over us. The young powerless sisters that lived in the home. Fast forward two years. After Penny was gone she had her own home. My oldest sister Jeannie couldn't afford the house she was renting due to being in the middle of a divorce. Brought her three kids and moved in with us. Jennifer which was five, Kevin who was three and Amanda who was

two. Which meant Jennifer would be staying with me and we were both expected to sleep upstairs. We were woken up all the time by stomping and when Jennifer would start to cry from being scared I would tell her it was because the house is old and that's what old homes did. They settled at night. Exactly what my mom always told me when I heard odd noises in our home. Jennifer's sixth birthday rolls around and my mother buys her one of those creepy clown dolls. You know the ones with a plastic head, a wire body under its clown clothes and has the most insanely evil laugh. That clown was always going off by itself at night, never during the day. One night I decided that I had had enough so I got out of bed and went over to take the batteries out.

But when I opened the battery pack no batteries were inside. I told my mom and older sister but no one cared or they thought it was an overactive imagination. Penny believed me. So the next day I got up and threw it in the attic. But it would still go off in the middle of the night. Then one day I came home and the doll was out of the attic and sitting on the chair across from my bed. When I asked who put it there, no one knew. We ended up burning that doll. Penny came and burned sage in our home.

Now that I'm grown up, my kids who like to stay with my mom always tell me about their things being moved and their chargers being jerked from the wall, but I still feel that it wastes to this day for Penny to come home. Maybe because she feared it the most, I don't know, but I know that that bully brought me a lot closer to the sister whom I couldn't possibly live without now. This is a true story that happened several years back when I was 13. This was a time when I was growing up in New York. We actually had a summer house on Cape Cod and spent every other weekend there, if we could. Cape Cod is a peninsula off the east coast of Massachusetts. It becomes very busy, even crowded during the summertime, but during the winter season it becomes empty.

The majority of houses in our area are owned as summer houses, so during the winter the houses are still there but the people are not there. In contrast to New York, there are only street lamps on the single main road in this town. The main road goes from the town center to the beach. Aside from this road, all the others are dark and very black at night. Also, Cape Cod extends out into the Atlantic from the mainland, forming a bay, Cape Cod Bay. Not only can one watch the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean, but they can also watch the sunset over Cape Cod Bay on any given clear day. Another effect of being surrounded by ocean is

that there is very little man-made light at night. The stars are so clear that the Milky Way is clearly visible spanning across the sky on clear nights. This story happened during the vacation period between Christmas and the New Year. The Christmas celebrations were finished. There were plenty of leftover turkey and pumpkin pie. We got a bit of cabin fever with all the Christmas food and family on one evening. My older sister, who is seven years older than I, 20 at the time, came up with an idea to take a walk to the harbor, which was about a 20 minute walk from our house. The harbor can be fun because we can walk out onto the docks and walk among the boats.

While I was a bit creeped out to walk around a deserted beach town on a cold winter night, I also thought it would be fun to get out of the house and maybe even a bit exciting. We headed out. Across the street from our classic Cape Cod cottage is a field with a forest at the other end. At night time, I would also have a little fear that there would be a psycho watching from the tall grass. Perhaps he would have an axe. But while it kept my nerves wary, I knew it was my imagination. But still, icy wind blowing on tall grass is a perfect setting for some horrors. Add to this a moonless sky with a million sparkling stars and the Milky Way above, and the horror setting is at level with Stephen King. We walked out into the main road, went a bit down the road,

and then turned to walk down a side street that leads to the street that dips downhill toward the harbor. This side street rungs along the backside of a long hotel. It's more like a two-level motel, painted light yellow, that has a pool. It is well situated in town so it can be full of life during the summer. On this December evening, the hotel was closed for the season, completely dark and several windows are covered with plywood for protection. My sister mentioned that a hotel that spans an entire block but is partially boarded reminds her of a horror movie, like one of these slasher films where the characters make all the wrong decisions and walk in the worst of dark places just to find their worst nightmare come true. At the end of

the street with the hotel we continue to the left which is a long road downhill through the woods to the harbor. This isn't a pure forest because there are houses set back from the road with an occasional driveway. Many of the driveways have reflectors on a rock, a fence, or just standing on a metal stick. These reflectors reflect back the headlights from cars. I mention this because we could not see any of them or anything. It was pitch black in the wooded area and the road seemed to continue into the black. Come to think of it, we had not seen a single car or a single person or a single sign of life since we left our house. My nerves were on edge. I was only 13 at the time and although my nerves were

screaming, I tried to stay calm because I wanted to seem tough to my sister. The woods alongside the road were particularly nerve-wracking. The trees come right up to the asphalt on each side of the road. They provide many opportunities to hide someone or something. The houses beyond the woods were dark because rarely did vacationers come here in winter. I started to notice that my sister was also starting to lose her nerves and that's when I felt it. I felt a flush of energy move up the back of my neck. It makes it feel like the hairs are sticking out on end. This is a feeling I get when I'm being watched. It's hard to describe this feeling but I still get it

today, sometimes when someone is looking at me from behind. It's either some kind of sixth sense or it's just my imagination working with my intuition. We were now midway into the wooded area, down the hill towards the harbor. I was sort of starting to lose it and was just about to stop pretending not to be freaked out and tell my sister let's go back when she suggested it. She said it's late maybe we don't have to go all the way to the harbor. I replied back yeah plus it's kind of creepy and dark down there. The back of my neck was shivering and I felt my body shudder as it wrestled between acting relaxed and flipping the switch to fight or flight mode. My sister replied, yeah pretty creepy, come on let's go back to the house and we can see the

harbor tomorrow. We turned around and she grabbed my hand and we started walking fast back up the hill. I remember that she held my hand so tight it hurt and my sister never holds my hand. I can't think of another time she did this and this is where the story takes a deep dive down the rabbit hole. As we got towards the end of the wooded area my sister screamed out, I've got a knife and I'm not afraid to use it and she did not lose any rhythm of her fast walk while saying this. We crossed the street and headed onto the street with the back side of the closed two level motel. My sister continues speed walking and looks back.

She let out a little panic noise and looked back again. She then commanded me to not look back. I was utterly freaking out at this point. Aside from the eerie vibe of the dark empty street and my own inner panic, I had not actually seen anything out of the ordinary, with the exception of my sister's completely and now suddenly insane behavior. Then she said, when I say run, you run okay? Okay. We were almost at the main road, a block from our street and she screams run. We book it. She let go of my hand and both broke into the best sprint we could do. I could hear our footsteps banging the asphalt and could also hear several other steps banging

in the distance. We cut across the grass area to a shortcut towards our street and ran through the front yards of our neighbor's house to make a beeline for the front door of our house. We made it. We both ran in and locked the storm door which is mostly glass. I was panicking but not sure if there was anything or if we were just going crazy. It was a strange transition from outside which was terrifying to inside the warm lit house which seemed safe. I was questioning what happened in my mind. I could sense that my sister was also questioning herself whether there even was a threat or we both just lost our minds out there. I asked my sister what she saw and she said that there was a man that was standing at the edge of one of the driveways. We walked right by him on the way back. She said that when we were behind the hotel he crossed the street and was following us for a while. She said he was looking right at us and although we were walking very fast he was gaining on us. She explained that it doesn't make sense that a man would be standing out there in that dark

wooded area. Honestly I really don't understand what happened that night and I'm not sure how much of what my sister said is true if she was seeing things or not. But one thing is for sure, I realized that I prefer walking to that harbor during the daylight. For most of my childhood, my family and I lived one house away from a creep. For the sake of the story, I'll call him Mr. Stan. Our old neighborhood started at the top of a hill and went down to a small lake where the road turned right and branched off into a cul-de-sac and another residential road. Mr. Stan's house was at the top of the hill and ours was in the middle. Mr. Stan lived in the neighborhood long before we moved in. It's hard for me to remember any vivid details about him

as I was very young at the time but what I do remember is that every time he saw us his face would scrunch up as if though he smelled something terrible. There was one house between his place and ours, something I'm very grateful for. I don't know what life would be like if we had to live right next to him. Right from when we were little, my parents were very strict about walking past Mr. Stan's house. They told us that Mr. Stan was sick in the head, and if he ever asked us to come into his house, we were to never ever, ever be allowed to do so by ourselves. For years, no one told us exactly why Mr. Stan was bad, but we didn't need details.

We just knew to avoid him. The look he gave us whenever he was working on his car or planting flowers in his garden was enough. When my sister and I would walk up the hill to school, we would cross the street when he got to his place just to be safe. Like I said, I don't remember very much about Mr. Stan and his twisted story begins long before I was even born. For this I turned to my mom to fill in the details. My mom said that before we ever moved into the cul-de-sac around the late 70s and early 80s Mr. Stan already had the reputation of being a heavy drinker. He would get drunk and go over to

the house of the family right across the street from us to do terrible things to the daughter while she was babysitting. The daughter tried to tell her mother about it but since she was a rebellious child, her mother didn't believe her. Her family and Mr. Stan's family were actually good friends. Mr. Stan worked as a corrections officer and soon accusations surfaced that Mr. Stan and another officer regularly would do terrible things to their co-workers kids. Mr. Stan was able to avoid conviction by ratting out the other officer but in the process he lost his job. As far as I know he never really worked after that. Mr. Stan had two daughters of his own and while the older one claimed she was touched and suffered from mental problems as a result

the younger one said she was never mistreated in any way and grew up to be a very positive person. Mr. Stan's wife stood by her husband and claimed he was innocent throughout the whole ordeal. Ironically the older daughter's emotional instability resulted in her children going to live with grandpa, more on that in a moment. When my family moved into our house in the cul-de-sac, our next door neighbor, a kind but nosy old man, told my dad to keep my sister and I away from Stan. He told my parents the gossip and Mr. Stan's history with children, which understandably horrified them both. As a result, my mom and dad were wary of him from the start. Mr. Stan was cordial enough, and he would wave hello to my family and all that neighborly stuff.

According to mom, he even offered to babysit my little sister and I, to which my parents politically but emphatically declined. Then sometime around 2002 my dad was going to work when he came across a neighborhood kid, let's call her Lana, on her way up the street. My dad is a chatty person and so he asked Lana what she was up to. Lana told him that she was going to Mr. Stan's house to give him a back rub. Dad knew that something was off and so he told Lana's parents. To his surprise they weren't alarmed at all and said that sort of thing happened all the time. According to mom, when Lana was older dad asked her if Mr. Stan ever acted inappropriately toward her during those visits and her answer was definitely. When my sister was in kindergarten and I was in grade 3,

Mr. Stan's grandkids came to live with him and his wife for reasons I mentioned earlier. My parents couldn't believe this was allowed by anyone, especially considering the allegations and neighborhood gossip around Mr. Stan. His granddaughter was in the same kindergarten class as my sister and his grandson was about my age. Mom told me that it was so disturbing to see the sweet little granddaughter at school every day and know what was probably going on behind closed doors. My parents have always had strong morals, particularly my dad. They would often talk about what they should do. They wanted to report Mr. Stan to the authorities before any harm could come to his grandchildren. Mom and dad knew that if they reported Mr. Stan, they would be putting themselves

at risk, and the rest of the neighborhood was no help. Mom said it was as if they were all hiding under rocks and turning a blind eye to what was happening. In the end, my parents' strong morality won out and they decided, with the risk of being exposed as whistleblowers, to report Mr. Stan to the principal at my elementary school. The principal in turn called the ministry who sent people to Mr. Stan's house for home visits and investigations. In the end, it was decided that the grandchildren would be removed from Mr. Stan's house. Mom isn't sure how it happened, but somehow it was leaked that my parents were the ones who reported Mr. Stan's house. Mom isn't sure how it happened, but somehow it was leaked that my parents were the ones who reported Mr. Stan. She thinks Lana's family may have had a hand in it,

and as mom put it, that's when the real fun began. Mr. Stan was no longer friendly toward my family, no more waves, no more chit chat. Instead, he would target my mom with his car if she was walking down the road alone, or scream obscenities at my dad as he went to work. A few times he crossed the center line to scare us if we passed each other while driving. He told my dad that he ruined his life and that he was a horrible person. Thinking about that now really boils my blood because my dad is one of the kindest and most considerate men I know. Mom was miserable and wanted to move but dad, as unshakable as he is, said he wasn't in a hurry. Mom told me it took three years of house hunting before she finally convinced dad it was time to go. Only after all of this, when we had been living in our beautiful new home out in the country,

did I finally start to uncover the details of the story but sadly it doesn't end there. After we moved out of the cul-de-sac Lana and other girls who were now grown up came forward to report Mr. Stan and what he had done. He was hauled into court for a second time and this time there was no one he could rat on to save himself. The testimony against him was building up. My parents followed the trial in the newspaper. They wanted to see him put away for all of the terrible things he'd done. I have no memory of these proceedings, of course, and nobody wanted to explain it to me. I don't blame them. Mr. Stan was not only a former corrections officer, but now he was also convicted. He knew he would not last long if he went to prison. So, on a quiet morning one week before his sentencing, Mr. Stan took a hunting rifle and

shot himself. The folks who moved into Lana's house after her family left were walking their kids to school when they heard the shot. Mom tells me the image of that scene haunts her to this day. I think she imagines it would have been like that if it were her walking my sister and I to go to school in place of that other family. Or maybe she was disturbed to learn that Mr. Stan had a gun. I know it sounds harsh, but I'm glad he's gone. He could never hurt another child again. My memories of this whole ordeal are far less interesting than the actual event, but one thing I do remember very clearly is being afraid of Mr. Stan's house. I knew it was a monster's house, though I didn't know why.

My sister and I only ever went to Mr. Stan's front door once. It was Halloween and my parents decided it was okay for us to trick or treat at his house since they would be standing at the bottom of the stairs. I was actually very reluctant to go and my parents had to encourage me that it was okay. Mr. Stan's house was the only one that didn't need Halloween decorations to be scary, so my sister and I cautiously climbed the stairs and rang the doorbell. Mr. Stan's wife opened the door. She was kind to us and gave us candy and I remember being surprised that Mr. Stan's wife was so nice, but what I remember most was that I wanted to see inside the forbidden house.

For some reason this has still stuck with me. I looked behind Mrs. Stan and there was Mr. Stan in a wife beater top, beer belly and all, sitting in an armchair watching TV. It was dim in the living room except for a lamp and the glow of the TV. Mr. Stan didn't look at us. For years I wondered if that was what bad men look like. When I think about this story now 11 years later it really hits me how dark my neighborhood was under the surface. It's quite disturbing to me because my childhood was actually quite happy. I was too young to notice anything wrong. I couldn't sense the tension that my parents

lived with every day. I didn't know how much potential danger my sister and I were in. All I knew was that it was a beautiful day to play with my marbles and go to the lake. But now that I think of it, Mr. Stan may have been the reason that my parents bought a copy of You Can Say No, a picture book that teaches children about safety around bad people. I think my parents handled the situation very well and I am so thankful they were attentive and brave during the whole thing. This story could have gone very differently. When I think about our old house on the cul-de-sac it's usually the happy memories I think of first. Mom tells me that despite all of the trouble they went

through neither she or dad regret the decisions they made and she left me with one last ominous message. They say that every neighborhood has a monster living there. Most of the time we just don't know it. This happened last year when I was 15. Me and my friend, I'll call her Kate, were messing around in our neighborhood one day. We were on the side of the road, playing around with sparklers and other stuff like that. Suddenly, Kate said to turn around and look behind me. I did, and when I looked at the home behind us I saw someone looking through the window. I couldn't really tell what he looked like so I just ignored it and turned around.

A few minutes later Kate said to look again. I did but this time it was a woman with him at that window. They were just staring at us and I began to feel uneasy but again I turned around and ignored them. As the sun went down I walked back to my house which was across the street and Kate went to hers which was a few blocks away. A couple of hours later at around 10 my phone lit up. I was watching Orange is the New Black so at first I ignored it. Then I got another alert So I picked up my phone and looked at the screen. My two alerts were from Snapchat. Someone added me and their username was something like Jaden with a few numbers after it and then they sent me a picture. I waited until the episode was over to open it. It was a black screen with a message saying hey. I ignored that message. Around six to seven minutes later I got another snapchat

from the same guy and this time it was a black screen saying why didn't you answer. Again I ignored the snap and went back to Netflix. When my phone buzzed again I didn't look at it. Throughout the episode I got around four more alerts which I all ignored. Then I fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning I had 11 alerts. Most of them were black screens saying why aren't you answering or I know you're awake answer me. But the last one freaked me out. It was a picture of my house taken from across the street with a caption answer me now. I was stupid so I didn't screenshot the pictures but I did block him. I didn't hear anything for a few days but then I got another alert that someone added me. It was the same usernames as before but with a one after it. Then I got sent multiple snaps. I didn't open any of

them because I was in class. Four hours later I checked my snapchat. All the pictures he sent me were pictures of me. Some were during lunch and some were when I was walking home from school. Again I blocked the user and I didn't get any screenshots. Last night I got a snap of my window again taken from across the street and from the same user, but this time with a 2 after it. I told my dad and he freaked out and called the police. When they arrived, I told them everything, but they couldn't do anything since I didn't get any screenshots. I don't know what to do. Now, to update this, I deleted Snapchat, but he has found me on other social media sites. I blocked them on everything and I'm thinking about deleting

everything. I'm wondering, could this have been the same person that was at the house that we hung out and played outside of the other day? This podcast is brought to you by Casper, the sleep brand that makes expertly designed products to help you get your best rest one night at a time. You spend one third of your life sleeping, so you should be comfortable. Casper products are cleverly designed to mimic human curves, providing supportive comfort for all kinds of bodies, and Casper works tirelessly to make a quality sleep surface that cradles your natural geometry in all the right places. The original Casper mattress combines multiple supportive memory

foams for a quality sleep surface with the right amount of both sink and bounce. Breathable design helps you sleep cool and regulates your body temperature throughout the night. With over 20,000 reviews and an average of 4.8 stars across Casper, Amazon, and Google, Casper is becoming the internet's favorite mattress. Casper offers two other mattress Google, Casper is becoming the internet's favorite mattress. Casper offers two other mattresses, the Wave and the Essential. The Wave features a patent-pending premium support system to mirror the natural shape of your body. The Essential has a streamlined design at a price that won't keep you up at night. Casper also offers a wide array of other products like pillows and sheets

to ensure an overall better sleep experience. All designed, developed, and assembled in the U.S. Affordable prices because Casper cuts out the middleman and sells directly to you. Hassle-free returns if you're not completely satisfied. Delivered right to your front door in a small, how-do-they-do-that-size box. Free shipping and returns in the U.S. and Canada. You can be sure of your purchase with Casper's 100-night risk-free sleep on a trial. And get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com forward slash LRP

and using my special promo code LRP at the checkout. Terms and conditions apply. I was a 13-year-old female who had to go to a hospital to get my spine operated on. Up until the day before this, I was in a wheelchair. I decided to ditch my parents and enjoy walking while I could after the surgery. I was free for once in my life. I was wandering around the hospital looking everywhere for nothing in particular when I wandered near my room to see a middle-aged woman passed out on the floor. I got one of the nearest people to help me and

they called a code blue. Since I was really into anything medical I knew what a code blue was. I stood in horror as I watched the lady being shocked when I couldn't take it. I was watching some random lady being brought back from the dead. I found the cafeteria and got a sandwich from the deli and sat in an empty seat. A 25-ish year old man sat down at the table which I ignored. He muttered to me that he was very thankful I found his wife. I flashed a kind smile and continued eating. He touched my head and this really got me creeped out. He said I had nice hair and I was just like hold up. I squeezed his arm until he let go. I just glared at him and that made him

walk away. Then a couple of minutes passed and the guy was back with the same sandwich as me. He stated that the setup was not how he imagined our first date. I said, hold up, you go around with other women while your wife is in the hospital dying? I'm out of here. I found a group of adults who I knew and told them about the situation. My dad was amongst the group and he angrily stood up and pursued the man, pushing him against the wall, yelling so much his face was red. The guy proceeds to say that my dad had a pretty girlfriend, referring to me, and that pushed me over the line and 13 year old me snapped. I told my dad to step aside and I gave that guy two black eyes and a bloody nose.

My dad had never been more proud. My ex-boyfriend and I are still very good friends and occasional FWBs. He and I sometimes do things with other friends of his, please don't judge me, and I recently went drinking with my ex, Carter, and his friend Paul, recently as in two days ago. Carter and Paul showed up Sunday morning at 7.30am. Carter wanted to drink with me since he's been put on probation soon and won't be able to. So I went with them and got to know Paul a little. He's 22, just broke up with his girlfriend of a year and decided to just avoid relationships entirely.

He has a slightly huskier build with an oval face and slightly beady blue eyes. His blonde hair is in a crew cut and his style of glasses kind of made him resemble the BTK killer. Carter, Paul and I did our thing and then Paul offered to give me a ride back home. Carter had his license taken away and had to go to class to get it back. I didn't want to walk home later

as it was supposed to be a really hot day so I accepted. He drove me home asking if we could pull over and do a few more things before he dropped me off but I declined. I really only sleep with his friends because it's something he enjoys and I just want to make Carter happy. He dropped me off and told me he would hit me up to hang out sometime but made it very clear he wasn't looking for a relationship which I was totally okay with. He added me on snapchat but didn't try to talk to me so I figured he was just another douche from mine and Carter's little adventures. I woke up at 2 a.m today to Paul sitting on my bed. He squeezed my leg which is what woke me up. At first I thought it

was my brother JJ because he gets nightmares sometimes and will come into my room. Then I realized how weird it would be if he grabbed my thigh to wake me up so I opened my eyes and saw him just staring over me. Hey you texted me earlier so I stopped by. I hadn't texted him. After he left I checked my phone to make sure I hadn't and I was right. There was no conversation between us at all but I was very groggy and not really comprehending the situation. I told him how late it was, turned away from him and told him to leave. Are you sure you don't want me to stay? Are you okay? I came over to hang out. He kept his hand on my thigh the entire time.

I was fully awake at this point and had a growing sense of just, this is bad in my stomach. I repeated that he needed to go and he finally stood up telling me to call him tomorrow. Sure, whatever dude, just get out, it's 2.30. I grumbled. He stood there for a minute and then asked me to walk him out to his car. I told him no and he asked me if I was sure and I didn't want to walk him out. He was pretty insistent on it but I told him he needed to leave now. I needed my sleep and I have to be up at 6.45. I heard him start walking down the hallway and my chest relaxed a little until he came back in. There's someone downstairs so I really need you to walk me out.

I was mad at this point. Paul had interrupted my sleep, broken into my house and now he had the audacity to demand I walk him out of the house he just broke into. I'm not getting out of bed. Go out the back door, nobody's going to say anything to you. He got the hint. I heard him walk downstairs and I heard the door shut. I waited about half an hour before going downstairs and making sure he was gone and making sure the doors were locked. I told my aunt when she woke up around four what happened and she told me to come get her next time. I also texted Carter about what happened.

I don't want to tell my dad or uncles what happened and I don't want them to blame Carter but I know I have to. What happened tonight was so weird especially with how normal Paul was acting about it. For a minute there I thought I was overreacting and that because I'm a bit promiscuous that Paul was allowed to do this but my aunt pointed out that no normal guy would do this and it's not mine nor Carter's fault. I'm going to ask JJ to sleep in my room tomorrow in case Paul does come back. At the time of this story I was around 3 or 4 years old. I'm 18 now. I'm a blonde haired blue eyed girl and have always liked to think of myself as a pretty nice person.

A little back story to my situation then. I was living with my mom, grandma and aunt in a duplex located in a fairly large city. Believe it or not the city that I did happen to live in didn't have a whole lot of creepy people or my family was just very good at keeping me from that side of the world. My mom had recently gotten out of an abusive relationship with this guy who happened to be my dad and we're going through a pretty rough patch. A few more months passed and it was Christmas time. On this particular day my mom and I were at the store buying some groceries. It was a completely normal trip. That was until we got

to the end of it. We stood in line to check out and some lady was on her way in when she noticed me and abruptly approached. She was probably in her late 30s early 40s with long brown hair that reached about the middle of her back. She was a little shorter than my mom, she's 5'10 and was pretty skinny. She smiled and I assumed it was supposed to be warming but it was far from it. She said hello in a semi-friendly tone. I smiled back and said hello, trying to be polite. I tried to scoot closer to my mom but there was a cart in between us. This woman then started asking me questions such as how old are you, is that your mom, etc. Part of me found no harm in answering her questions and the other part of me was hoping if I gave her

what she wanted she would leave us alone. I told her what she wanted to know and she continued to get closer and closer with every minute. She then asked me if I had seen Santa yet. My youthful eyes grew wide and my heart raced, excitement getting the better of me. I told her I hadn't and asked where he was. She explained that he was in the back of the store and that she could take me to him. Before she could get another word in, I turned to my mom and asked her loudly if I could go with this person to go see Santa. She looked at me confused and then realized the woman standing there and you could see her mama bear attitude start to kick in. She smiled obviously annoyed

at this person standing uncomfortably close to her kid. She then started talking directly to the stranger letting her know that we were going to the mall soon to take pictures with him anyway and that she appreciates the offer but it wouldn't be necessary. She quickly paid for our food and started to push the cart out from between me and her. The woman then insisted that it was no big deal and that she would bring me back as soon as I got to see him. She then proceeded to grab my arm lightly and tug me in one direction. My mom became horrified as she rushed to my side and lifted me into the cart and insisted we didn't need her help. The woman then had the audacity to tell my mom to suit herself in an annoyed tone and turned on a heel out of the store not shopping at all. She never had a cart or a handheld basket. I have since moved from

that city and moved out to be on my own and have luckily never seen this woman again and have been lucky enough not to run into any more situations like this. I think back to this scenario every once in a while and think of what would have happened had I not asked my mom to go with this stranger or if she had grabbed my arm more forcefully and pulled me away without caring what kind of attention she might get. I'm glad the situation played out how it did though. I know this is long overdue and I never really thought I had a reason to say this until now, but creepy lady in the store, let's never meet again. After living in Vancouver, British Columbia from 1984 to 2001, I decided to move.

Mom was getting up in years and the dumb reasons for leaving the province didn't exist anymore. I was a single mom of a preteen at the time. So I settled into a small town outside of the capital region and worked in a daycare. I loved my job but ended up getting double pneumonia so had to find different work. So I went back to school but ended up working as a nanny for a year so I wasn't able to find work. I went back to school and did a course in customer service and call center work. I had a call center job selling the history of Christianity. When I left they had just published book 6 of a 12 book series. So finally I was thrilled. I got my dream job. I started part time but soon I was being called to fill in for other shifts as employees had their

choices of jobs. Also Lewis Craft had a requirement of being able to fill in for other shifts as employees had their choices of jobs. Also, Lewis Craft had a requirement of being able to knit or crochet, as well as know most of the product they sold. Because I was moving around from store to store, I often wore my apron home, forgetting that I had my name tag on it. This is important for what happened later. My name tag was a cross-stitched tag using a rather large alphabet so my name was easy to see from far away. It was stitched in turquoise on a white background so it was easy to see. So I got pretty settled into my new job that I supplement with another part-time job that paid more and got SSI off my back. It was also around this time that I met my future husband. During this time I realized I had to deal with my alcohol consumption so I was attempting meetings after work unless I

worked at WEM, west end of the city. So one cool late summer evening I was waiting for the bus to head home after a meeting. I could have walked but I was tired. My boyfriend, now husband, said he could come pick me up but I said no, that's okay. I don't mind taking the bus. Little did I know I wished I had taken him up on his offer. Everything or More or Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits Volume 3, so the area I live in has some big issues. Drug deals and crime. It was also where I could find the cheapest rent. I'm minding my own business, listening to tunes and waiting for the bus when this old truck pulls up in front of me. I'll call him Dude and Truck. The passenger window is rolled down. The dude in the truck says, hey Janice, want a party? I can hook you up with some good stuff. I actually didn't realize he used my name at this point. No thanks, not interested. Come on, it'll be fun. What part of no don't you understand? I see the bus and sigh with relief.

He sees the bus and pulls away, but he then does the strangest thing. Where I'm waiting there is a Catholic church, a dead-end lane next to it, and then a community league with a playground and park. He backs his truck into the dead-end lane and watches as I get on the bus. By this time, I've pulled out my cell and called the boyfriend asking him to meet me at the 7-11. Don't bring the truck, just walk there as it would be faster. My creep radar was going off and I was in flight or fight mode, not that you could see that though. Driver asked me if everything was okay. I said I was being followed and I stayed next to the driver. The driver saw I was being followed and let me off at the light as it just turned red so I could cross the road to the 7-Eleven.

Now my boyfriend doesn't do PDA. He has Asperger's so he's on the autistic spectrum. But he realized what I was doing when I was exaggerating the hug and kiss. He saw the car drive off quite fast. After that he pretty much picked me up. After a while I didn't see the vehicle but winter had set in so no more evening walks or waiting for the buses. So I put it out of my mind until one spring day I saw a picture of Thomas Zvekla on the front page of both major newspapers. I actually got physically ill. He was the dude in truck. He was found guilty on one account and acquitted on another. He was

questioned in several murders and disappearances. He's currently sentenced as a dangerous offender which means he will never get out of rising. I found myself at home one weekend night. My parents were out of town and I was returning from a cancelled sleepover at a friend's house. The lights were on when I got in the door and I remember getting a phone call from that same friend shortly thereafter which would end up being the last normal event of the night. My brother was playing video games in the next room and I could hear him tapping furiously at a video game while I spoke on the cordless phone. I walked around in the living room and ended the phone call in the kitchen when I remember hearing some kind of

high-pitched squeal that came from the house somewhere and I couldn't place where it was coming from as it sounded the same in every room I went to investigate. It ended after about a minute after it started and was interrupted by the phone ringing but the phone was not in the kitchen where I left it. It was in the bathroom on the counter in front of the sink. I answered the phone and there was nobody there so hung up. It was at that point where I heard a dragging sound like a large heavy object was being dragged in the attic crawl space above me. I followed the sound as it slowly navigated from room to room and ended up in my parents bedroom who still had a waterbed. After the sound made it to the far wall it stopped and the phone rang again. This time my friend was on

the other end of it. I told him what was going on and he told me to be careful and call the police. After I got off the phone I laid down on the waterbed and was horrified to find a body-shaped solid object inside the waterbed mattress and leapt out. I then heard a knock at the door and answered it quickly but there was nobody there. It was at this point where my brother called me from his room to check something out that he had just discovered in the game he was playing and a little more than annoyed at his lack of interest in what was going on I stormed into his room. There was nobody there. His bed was made and the room spotless. Neither the console nor the TV was on and the controller was wrapped and unplugged. There was no way he could have hid and cleaned

his room in the few seconds it took me to make it from the front door to his room. I had been alone the entire night hearing for 20 straight minutes my brother playing a game that he was not present to be playing. The phone rang again but again it was not where I left it. This time it was resting on the kitchen counter where I originally had left it so I walked through the entire house to answer it. It was my friend calling again this time saying that the call was dropped for some reason and he was calling me back. I explained what just happened and there was another knock at the door. Since I was standing right next to it, I peeked out the window within two seconds of the knocks

and there was nobody there. At this point, I opened the door and stepped onto the porch to make sure I didn't see anyone running away as I had a large wide open yard and there wasn't anything to hide behind. I walked into the yard to look around but didn't find anything. I found myself engaged in several more minutes of talking before my friend got off the line and it was at that moment where I realized that the place I had been staring off into space while talking had two very large black reflective eyes looking back at me. The figure was tall and lanky and stood only ten feet or so from me in the shadow cast by the front of the garage from the front door light. The most notable feature he wore was an inhumanly large smile,

and he was grinning with oily metallic teeth from literally ear to ear. Despite me staring directly at him for more than five minutes I pretended I did not notice him and through willpower alone made it inside the house without running as fast as I could and instead walk calmly. I remember feeling like if I ran he would chase me and somehow knew that he would have caught me easily. I barricaded myself in my room the rest of the night and did not fall asleep until the sun came up the next morning and my parents were home. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before and nothing like that has happened since. It happened three years ago. I was then living in a small city in Romania.

It was summer. Me and my friend Andrew, both age 18 then, used to play basketball at an outside basketball hoop in our town. We were playing for a long time there so we started to know everybody that was coming there. One day a new guy came to the hoop. He was rather short with short blonde hair and blue eyes. One thing I noticed about him was a scar on his forehead. He shyly asked us, do you guys want to play horse? For those who don't know horse, it's a game of basketball that can be played in

more than two players, but I won't go into any more details because it has no relevance at all to the story. We finished the game with Andrew coming in first place, me in second, and the other guy last. He then asked for our names and said his name is Alex. He asked for our phone numbers and Facebook. He seemed like a nice guy, so we hoped to see him again there. It was not until that midnight when I started to believe that there was something wrong with Alex. I woke up to a text message on my phone. It was from a number I didn't have in my agenda and it said, Hey, wanna play some basketball? I'm at the hoop.

Alex. I was so angry then as I just wanted to sleep so I ignored the text message. 15 minutes later I got another message. Hello with an exclamation point. I ignored it but five minutes later my phone rang. I picked up and a voice on the other side said to me are you sleeping? It was Alex. I tried not to seem angry so I jokingly said, I was. Come outside, he said. At this point I was starting to become really annoyed. I shouted at him, it's freaking midnight and hung up. The next day I told Andrew what had happened last night and he told me something that really freaked me out. He also got a text message from Alex, but he also heard a silent knock on his window. He looked outside, but he saw nothing. He said that maybe it was just his mind playing tricks on him. We told each other that he might have followed us home after the game of basketball. He was maybe jokingly playing with us. We wanted to call him that day but eventually forgot about the story.

That night around 2am I got a message from Alex. Come outside. I texted him back no and put my phone on silent. I fell asleep again. When I woke up that morning and opened my phone I saw that I had received another 20 messages from Alex. This time they were not text messages but photos on Messenger, as we were friends on Facebook now. The first two were photos of the hoop, the next two were selfies of him, but what I could see myself watching the TV. There was another with me brushing my teeth, another of me looking at my phone, but then there were others even worse. I saw photos of Andrew's house and then another one of Andrew fighting Alex in his own yard. Then there was

a photo of Andrew blacked out with Alex on his right side smiling and another guy on his left side smiling too. I immediately called Andrew. His mother picked up. She told me that Andrew was in the hospital and that Alex wasn't found by the police yet. Andrew was taking out the trash at 10pm that night when he was attacked by Alex and his friends. Andrew's mother heard nothing outside but after 10 minutes of her son yet not returning, she went into the yard. Andrew was laying there on his back. She called the ambulance then the police and Andrew couldn't remember anything. That night me and my family slept at my uncle's house. Around midnight my phone rang.

I didn't know the number and so I knew I shouldn't pick up but then my father told me it could be Alex so the police could track him down. I answered and it was Alex. You're gonna die he said. I asked him why he was doing this and he replied because you're ignoring me. He started shouting at me saying that he deserved attention and then he hung up. In this time my dad was on the phone with the police. I then received another photo of my house from Alex. My dad gave the policeman our home address and so Alex and his friend were eventually apprehended by the police. It seemed like he had some serious mental problems so I hope he is getting full medical attention and kept away from the public. His friend who was a homeless man received money from Alex to attack me and my friend, and Andrew was getting better, thankfully,

and soon left the hospital. It took a long time for us to ever go back and play basketball at that hoop again. At the time of writing this story, I'm a 19-year-old teenage guy who is about to go to college. My grandfather owned an old house on a farm. I'll give you a little description of the building. It was built in 1927. The date is inscribed on the house and was originally used as a sort of police station.

It survived World War II and there are still bullets left by German soldiers in its walls. It has two floors, a cellar and an attic that was sealed off and inaccessible when I lived in the house. In fact, the whole second floor was sealed off as well, except for one room that was occupied by my grandmother and grandfather. We lived on the first floor floor which is made up of a square shaped hall that leads to the kitchen and to my parents large bedroom that was used as a living room during the day. The square shaped hall continued into two narrow tunnel like halls. One leads to the boiler room and the bathroom the other to the room that me and my sister slept in. Near our bedroom there was a chamber that had an

entrance covered by a curtain. There were no lights in it and if you pulled the curtain away and peered into the room you could not see the end of it. To get into the cellar you had to go outside. The entrance to the house wasn't originally the same. It was where the boiler room is now. I suppose the house had been renovated once. There are three chimneys on the roof, but no room has a fireplace anymore. People like to point out that it's a nice house, but that's just the decorated exterior. Anyone who walks into it can feel its frigid and gloomy atmosphere. My grandfather moved into the house with his sister, named Maria. She married a man, Joseph, who too moved into the house. Shortly after named Maria. She married a man Joseph who too moved into the

house. Shortly after my grandfather married my grandmother. My grandmother and Maria both gave birth to a boy and a girl. Now what's weird about our family in general is that everyone seems to only have two children who are not the same sex. People such as our neighbors and family and friends frequently pointed this out. Maria's husband got a job offer on the other side of the country and they decided to move out. Joseph became pretty successful eventually but he tragically passed away of a heart attack at the peak of his career. My grandpa died of a sudden heart attack as well. Aunt Maria would often visit my grandmother and they would commiserate over their

lives. But as time passed, Maria stopped visiting my grandma. She was a single mother and needed to work hard to feed and raise her children. My grandma and her children were rather poor, but since they lived on a farm, it was easier for them to get food. When Maria's daughter and son grew up, they followed in their father's footsteps, became quite wealthy and both started a family. They seldom visited my grandmother but would occasionally bring Maria over for a few days. When I first met Maria, she was about 60 years old. I always thought that she was a gossipy old woman. It's important to this story because she used to tell me about my grandpa in the past of the old house, which my grandma refused to talk about.

She told me my grandfather had died in a boat. He had been fishing on the pond near our garden while my grandmother had been picking herbs for an infusion. Grandpa hadn't returned home till the evening so my grandmother had gone to look for him. She had found his lifeless body in the boat which had cast ashore. I spent most of my childhood in this house. When I was about three years old my grandmother moved down to the room me and my sister slept in. A tall quiet man would sometimes stay up in that room. To this day I'm not sure who he was. He would never speak to me but did seem rather fond of our cat. One day he came down to the kitchen and said he was. He would never speak to me but did seem rather fond of our cat. One day he

came down to the kitchen and said he was leaving and he never came back. My aunt, father's sister Helena, had moved out by this time. She married a guy and gave birth to a boy and girl. When I and my sister became older we started exploring the house. Our parents prohibited us to go to the second floor, saying it's not a safe place and we didn't really feel like doing that anyway for it creeped us out. In fact, as far as I remember I was always afraid to be alone in the house. The floors creaked and there were strange drafts in the house. My father said that there had to be some way the wind was getting into the house. Perhaps there were tunnels in the ceiling above the second floor. Once he took me up there and explained the doors are fastened with a chain so they don't open fully and smash into the walls because of the wind. I always had nightmares if I slept on my own so I frequently slept with my parents and even my

sister who had more courage than I did and was sometimes too afraid to sleep in our room. The fact that my grandmother slept in our room only added to my fear. I was always afraid of her as a child. She would murmur to herself and it always seemed like she was talking to someone. My father said that she was weird ever since grandpa died. Whenever I and my sister did something wrong she would lash out. The diligent woman from Maria's stories was nothing like the grandmother I knew. She looked beautiful in her wedding photo, but in real life she had a part of her nose missing due to skin cancer and some of her teeth had fallen out. A few of my dreams involved a woman similar to her. In my nightmares I was usually in my house or around it. Sometimes I dreamt that I woke up and looked around the dark room when suddenly a cold hand pinned me down and hissed to fall asleep.

After dreams like these, I would wake up and hurry to my parents' room, but one night when I jumped out of bed and ran out my room to the hall, I saw the curtain covering the chamber entrance swaying back and forth. I looked into the dark abyss of the chamber, and I got that strange feeling like someone I can't see is staring back at me from the chamber. I felt a very strong current of air that made a stack of boxes in the chamber fall over, and then I heard a very loud smack. I cried out loud, and everyone woke up. I was sitting in the corner of the hall, sobbing. My mother comforted me but my grandmother called me a coward and laughed at me. My father went upstairs and when he came back, he said the chain on one of the doors was broken so the door smashed into a wall. I slept in my parents' room that night. We had no chains left so my father opened the door ajar and put a heavy vase next to the door so it wouldn't close and smash in another direction.

It never made sense to me how the draft could move in so many different directions. That night was particularly cold because of the open door and the draft was so strong that we could hear howling sounds. After this night my other nightmares started. I would dream I am alone in the house and something sucked me into the dark chamber and I couldn't get out. I would hear something approach me in the dark and grab me by the legs. I was afraid to go near the chamber even during the daytime. On the bathroom door, there was a strange shape that looked like a dark figure reaching out. I was probably just paranoid paranoid but I felt like it

was constantly changing its shape. Sometimes it appeared as if though it was waving. In my dreams I sometimes had to go to the bathroom and when I entered the bathroom the door would close by itself and the figure on the door would go bigger and bigger until the whole door turned dark and then the door slowly opened and a very creepy old man would walk in. He usually had a nosebleed and licked his lips when the blood reached his lips and smiled. He looked like Penguin from the old Batman movie with Catwoman in it. The bathroom was too narrow to slip past him. I tried to run but he would always catch me by the collar, stuff me into the washing machines and watch me drown while still licking his lips.

In a lot of my dreams I would go outside and a big hairy beast would grab me and pull me into a room on the second floor. He would put me in a cage and tell his wife who looked like a normal human to cut me up and put me in the freezer. She would say of course honey and would go to sleep. The lady would walk up to me and say she didn't want to hurt me so she always left me out of the cage. She would tell me to run down the stairs and lock myself in my parents room. I usually did as I was told. When the thing woke up he slaughtered his wife and she would scream in pain. Then the monster would crawl around the house looking for me. Sometimes he found the room I was in but I jumped out of the window on my head,

broke my neck and died. If I killed myself in my dreams it usually didn't hurt but getting hurt by others made me very uncomfortable after I woke up. To this day if I want to wake up from a bad dream I'd have to die. One of the rare kind of dreams was about an old hag with no teeth. She was very short and had long gray hair. These were the only dreams that contained my family. We would sit in the kitchen or another room and suddenly everything would go quiet. Everyone except me would fall asleep. The old lady would appear and she would make weird sucking sounds with her mouth. I would try to scream and wake my family up but I couldn't make a sound. I would become petrified and the old lady would come up to me, staring at my face, try to laugh but she couldn't make any

sounds either. She would stretch my mouth open and want to crawl inside my body. She wanted me to eat her. The scariest dreams for me were of a lady that looked remarkably like my grandmother. She carried a butcher's knife and had grey eyes with no pupils and sharp teeth. She looked like a rabbit grey fox. She would appear if no monster had caught me in my nightmares. She screamed for me to come out and if I didn't, she would correctly shout which room I was hiding in. What scared me the most were the sounds she made. I suppose sounds can't really be loud in dreams but the ones she made were ear splitting. She would bang on the doors and growl deeply. It was hard for me to

find a proper way to end myself for she walked very fast. My dreams stopped when my parents got divorced. One day they had a huge fight and my mother yelled she can't stand this house my father nor my grandmother my father had always had anger management issues but i've never seen him this furious before he let my mother walk halfway through the outside of the door then he smashed her into the door she fell and half of her body was outside and half inside he tried to forcibly close the door and kept fell and half of her body was outside and half inside. He tried to forcibly close the door and kept hitting my mother with it. My neighbors called the police. My mother, when she came out of the hospital, took us to the village she grew up in. We stayed there for a few

weeks then we moved around the country a lot because my mother desperately tried to find a cheap apartment and a job. We ended up in a small apartment in some town. We all slept in the same room. Weird things started to happen to her. She would sleep all day. She didn't take me and my sister to school. When we would tell her we are hungry she'd just mumble something, get up and make something. One time when I said I was hungry she got up, took a loaf of bread and she threw it at my face. Eventually, the school found out what was going on, and my mother was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. When I and my sister moved back to the old house, we found out my Aunt Helena's husband had died in a car crash.

Basically, if you would look at my family tree, you would see that every family has a parent that is deceased, or something else happened to them. It sometimes feels like a curse. I had issues with anxiety all my life, but strangely I wasn't that afraid of the old house anymore. Sure, I was still afraid to walk around it at night. The floor still creaked, the cold draft was still present, but I rarely dreamed about those monsters. My father built a new house near our old house. It's in such a decrepit state at this point that it isn't safe to live in it. My grandmother was against moving out of it in spite of this. She sometimes visits it. I often

have dreams that I still live there. They aren't exactly nightmares but they aren't very pleasant dreams. Usually just things that have happened in the past. When I return home from my evening walks, I always stare at the old house. Sometimes the curtains are moving in it, and it's probably just the draft. But if I look more closely, it's almost as if though I could see a face in one of the windows on the second floor. I'm 19 years old and I have lived in North Carolina all of my life. I was a year from graduating high school and had started working at a local neighborhood grocery store. I started working at this grocery store as a junior in high school. I was 17 years old and spent most of my time here. My shifts had me working well into the evening and this is when I first saw this man. He would come in every week at around 5 to 6 p.m. and buy a steak

and a 40 ounce Budweiser. Every time he came in he would always go through my cashier line no matter how long my line was. I didn't think much of this at the time but he started to engage in conversation with me about where he worked, his family and kids and more specifically his daughter and how she had a horrible boyfriend and how he wished she was more like me. Red flag number one. He continued to do these over the course of my first year of working there. He would also pull me aside to talk to me about me and his daughter and would tell me how he always enjoyed seeing me and this weirded me out. I didn't know how to escape this guy but it's about to get even weirder. His next visit, which I thought was his last, and he proceeded

to tell me, hey my sweetie, my work is moving me away and I won't be coming here much more. In my head I erupted with joy because I thought that this would finally be over, but no, now I was so, so wrong. For the next year I continued to work there as normal and was being moved up to another position. It was around April of my senior year of high school that he began showing up again. I was working behind our cigarette counter and the floor digging into the shelves. He happened to walk in and he walked around the back of the cigarette counter and just powered down at me. I didn't know until I hear him call me by the nickname he gave me. My skin began to crawl and as he started to talk I acted as if someone had asked me to do something so I ran off into our office

and just sat by the cameras. He just walked around the store and it was almost like he avoided the cameras. Ten minutes go by he bought cheese and left. my cashiers told me he asked where i went and he wanted to see his sweet girl i wanted to cry i didn't know what to do and it was as if my managers didn't believe me now he began to show up every time i was working saturday sunday tuesday and thursday every time i saw his car pull into the parking lot I ran to hide. He would walk around and look for me and ask for me. Now he wouldn't even buy anything. He also knew that I was the one who would bring the carts into the store from the parking lot so he would sit in his car and wait for me. I went out to get shopping carts one day and didn't know he was there because the

parking lot was full. I was gathering carts and he was walking up behind me and said, I finally have my girl to myself. If I ever get you out here when no one's around, I'm going to hold you down and do what I want to you. I was horrified. I started to cry and this was a 50 plus year old man saying this to me. I ran back inside and he left. Now I knew that he knew my schedule and what I did at work. I was afraid to go to work and was starting to carry pepper spray on my belt at work. On the next weekend I worked, he had come in twice during the shift but the second time he just came through the door. I saw him and he didn't see me so I ran. I watched the cameras and this was the absolute most awful thing he did.

I watched him walk through my store and I searched the parking lot for his creepy Toyota minivan. I couldn't find his car anywhere. This really freaked me out. He was now in the store for 20 minutes, bought a beer and started to walk out of the store. But he walked out to the parking lot and walked straight to my car. He stood by my car, looked inside my windows and just walked away to the side of the building. Meanwhile, me and my co-worker are just standing there watching in shock. We tried contacting the police but there was nothing they could do unless he was present when they were.

So I had to live with the constant fear that he would come back. But eventually my dad came up to my work to talk to my managers about what to do about the situation and the man showed up. I went to hide but my managers barred him from coming into the store and told him, you make my employees uncomfortable and we ask that you don't come back. He said my girl is so sensitive I guess just like most people these days. He turned around to leave and my dad walked up to him and said hey gonna talk to you for a minute buddy and he ran to his car and tried to leave. Cops told me that this was classic predator behavior trying to run from the problem. My dad

proceeded to chase him by car to a neighboring county and lost him in a neighborhood near another chain of my grocery stores. He drove all the way to my store to see me. There was another store five minutes from his house, apparently. He hasn't been back, but the police are still investigating because he has daughters and I can only think of what they had to go through. I hope he rots in hell for what he's done to other girls. No one should have to go through this. Where I live, not a lot of creepy things happen since I live in the upper middle class and everyone is extremely nice.

Probably the worst person you could meet where I live would just have a twisted sense of humor. At least that's what I thought, until junior year of high school. My algebra class was filled with different kinds of people despite it being a small class, though I didn't fit into a lot of groups since I mostly kept to myself, and I did this boy, who I will call Tank. At the time, I felt Tank was the only one in the class I could actually get along with. He was really good with math, so whenever I was stuck on something or missed how to

do a problem, I always knew Tank could help me out. And when we did group projects, he would always be my go-to guy, even if I knew what we were doing. But when we were done with our work, we would talk about anything we liked, such as metal and creepypastas. Yeah, we were those kids. However, one thing he liked to talk about was weapons and how much he knew about them. I didn't see this as a red flag because there are people out there who are into weapons such as guns and swords, but are pretty chill people and wouldn't think about hurting someone. But as he talked about weapons is when I should have listened to the red flags. Sometimes Tank would talk about how he could use

a pencil and stab people with it. Two things I vividly remember him saying are it's ironic because say weapons aren't allowed at schools and pencils can be weapons and anything can be used as a weapon. The latter was true and me being stupid I brushed it off thinking he was just saying facts. One other red flag I stupidly ignored was how Tank talked about his grandmother who lived with him. He always complained about how she was lazy and never did anything but watch tv and told Tank to do things that she could easily do herself, like get her water or food. He told me how he wanted to hurt her, but idiotically I sympathized with him. But this wasn't the worst thing about this twisted individual.

What I should have taken note of, but didn't, was when he said how he would love to destroy the school. It did unnerve me a little bit, but I didn't, was when he said how he would love to destroy the school. It did unnerve me a little bit, but I didn't take the hint. Before I go on, I need to say this. If you are a student and anyone says that they want to hurt someone or destroy the school, even if you hate the school with a burning passion, tell someone of authority. Even if the school you go to is filled with teachers who could care less, please let someone know if someone is thinking or talking about violent behavior as violence only makes things worse. Don't be like I was and simply brush it off. Later on as my junior year was mere months from ending, I began to notice that Tank had

stopped showing up at class. At first I thought he was sick but as the days passed by he never showed up. Soon I was approached by a man from the dean's office who I will call Mr. Baldwin. Now this man was outgoing and despite being friendly was a serious man and nobody messed with him. He took me into his office which scared me because I thought I screwed up at something because as you can tell screwing up is what I do best. However, Mr. Baldwin told me I wasn't in trouble, but he did have some questions to ask me. He asked me if Tank told me that he had plans to take down the school. At that moment, everything hit me all at once. I told Mr. Baldwin that he did, but I never thought he would harm anyone. I was in so much shock that I could

feel my heart pounding in my chest. After a few questions, he sent me back to class. I later heard the tank was suspended from school and taken to juvenile detention after harming an old woman and robbing her with another student. At least that's what the rumor is, but it's one rumor that I honestly hope is true. I'm the 16 year old daughter of an atheist father and devout Christian mother. I was raised in a religion where I never celebrated holidays, made friends in school, or did anything remotely childlike. I couldn't because us children of the church were supposed to prepare for the end of this quote-unquote wicked system of things. Saturdays were dedicated towards going out door-to-door and preaching the good news by handing out magazines and brochures about God's kingdom. School years were spent being outcasted by

classmates, watching them celebrate holidays all the while thinking about how one day God would eliminate each and every one of them. My childhood as a whole was spent training myself to become the archetypical spiritually enlightened sister so that one day I could marry an equally enlightened brother, have many children, and teach them in the ways of the church. Up until a few years ago, I had an estranged relationship with my father. After all, I wasn't supposed to love my father because, as I mentioned before, he's an atheist. The church leaders, commonly referred to as elders, discouraged me from pursuing a relationship with him as they insisted his worldly viewpoints would damage my

relationship with God, and I believe this wholeheartedly as does my younger brother. I had many friends within the church, however, I was particularly close to a girl who, for privacy reasons, I'll call Winnie Carter. Winnie Carter was a beautiful, intelligent, kind-hearted young woman who carried a perfect reputation within the congregation. Her father and mother, brother and sister Carter were equally beloved by everyone in the church alongside her older brother, the fun-loving and incredibly goofy Eric Carter. The Carter family owns around 50 to 60 acres of land and every year hosts a camp out in their backyard inviting everyone in a church including members of their previous congregation which is a couple counties away from ours.

Through these annual camp outs I met and befriended Jonathan. Mind you I was 13 around the time I first met Jonathan and was in no position to become friends with a 17 year old member of the opposite sex. However Jonathan often flattered me with compliments varying from my looks to a couple of my more embarrassing social quirks. The catch was though, Jonathan lived two hours away from our congregation, so our relationship was dependent on text messages and selfies. Things were initially light-hearted and our messages basically revolved around memes and anime. However, as time progressed and I physically matured, so to speak, our relationship escalated into something more... sexual. As a fan of Conan O'Brien, I often imitate his self-deprecating sense of humor, not out of ten times joking about the fact that I have a smaller chest.

I've never been insecure about my body, nor have I been ashamed of the fact that I have a smaller chest. I've never been insecure about my body, nor have I been ashamed of the fact that I have small breasts. However, while making this specific joke, Jonathan interpreted that as me acting shy and insecure, and as a response, replied saying that I was naturally beautiful and shouldn't be ashamed of my chest. The conversation went something like this. Ah Oh no, I was just joking. Oh, okay, well, now you have me curious. Curious about what? Your chest. Surely it can't be that small. Why don't you send a pic so I can see? Very funny. I generally thought he was goofing around since we had never once flirted in any way, shape or form.

Yes, I did have feelings for this person, but I was aware of the limitations of my social skills and never bothered attempting to flirt with someone who, at that point, seemed completely out of my league. However, it eventually became clear that Jonathan was serious about wanting to see my chest and that the conversation wasn't going to change until I did. I was uncomfortable about the idea of sending nudes from the beginning. First of all, ever since I was nothing but a kindergartner, I was taught about the birds and the bees and why I should abstain from anything until marriage, that is. I was told to avoid things of that nature and discourage from self-pleasure. I viewed sex as something

immoral and the concept of sending nude pictures genuinely horrified me. However, so did the thought of disappointing Jonathan. I eventually sent a picture of myself in one of my more seductive bras in a lousy attempt to be somewhat presentable. He responds, wow, I must say I'm impressed. You've definitely grown since we last saw each other and by the way, are those curves I see? Looking back, I curse myself for blushing while reading this, as all it does now is send shivers down my spine. Time passes, and eventually I'm a 15-year-old freshman in high school, therefore making Jonathan 19 years old. As summer vacation progressed, the Carter family announced their annual campout, and I was ecstatic to see Jonathan once more. Throughout the campout,

I made an effort to avoid Jonathan and socialize with different members of the congregation, so as to avoid suspicion of our intimate relationship. Nevertheless, while never actually witnessing it for myself, I could feel Jonathan eyeing me from head to toe and examining my now fully mature figure. As I dreaded, though, I wasn't the only one who noticed Jonathan's behavior as confirmed when around midnight, Winnie approached me, her expression worrisome and anxious. Hey, is there something going on between you and Jonathan? What? No, why would you say that? Well, it's just, I saw the way he was looking at you and... I don't know, it just made me think that there was something going on between you.

Now, you're sure you guys are just friends, right? Jeez, Winnie, what are you, my mom? I just... I don't want to see anything bad happen to you, that's all. Okay, well, as I said before, there's nothing going on between the two of us. The next morning, Jonathan, Eric, Winnie, and I headed over to a nearby trail where we went hiking for about four to six hours. As we delved further into the woods, I could feel myself grow unusually fatigued, losing my sense of appetite, and growing pale in the process. By the time we approached the

end of the hike, I was on the brink of collapsing from exhaustion, when Jonathan swooped me off the ground like a majestic prince of some sort and carried me to Eric's car. I blushed and felt my heart race as his eyes met mine. However, as I noticed Winnie's expression transition from loving concern to pure rage, the romance of it all faded immediately. As I laid in bed that evening texting Jonathan, who was showering me with texts about how wonderful it felt to have my body pressed against his, all I could truly think about was Winnie and, well, everything that happened during the camp out from our late night conversation to her reaction towards Jonathan carrying me during the hike. I was tempted to text her and looking back I should have, however my

mind was completely fixated on my new boyfriend. As a nightly routine, Jonathan would explain in explicit detail of all the things he would do to me if we were ever alone in a room together, and I in return would do the same. It wasn't until late August, however, I realized that ever since the day of the campout, my best friend had become a complete stranger to me. Whether it being during congregational get-togethers or the mandatory services, Winnie would always make an effort to engage in conversation with someone else so as to avoid me. The realization of this immediately made me feel uncomfortable, almost nervous in the sense that I suspected Winnie barred feelings for Jonathan, and jealousy was destroying our friendship. I attempted resolving

the situation through text as talking to her in person was nearly impossible. However, each message I sent was always left unread. And no less than a week after sending those desperate attempts to reconcile and make peace, Winnie vanished completely. I often approached Eric asking him about Winnie's whereabouts only to get the same undoubtedly scripted response. She's not feeling well. I think the stomach bug's going around or something. I continued texting Winnie with frantic remarks as, where are you? Is something wrong? Please text back and let me know you're okay, Winnie. However, to no response. I confided my anxieties to Jonathan

and he reassured me, revealing that he was going on vacation with the Carter family and when he saw Winnie that he'd do some detective work. This was the first time I heard Jonathan talk about going out of state with the Carter family and was immediately reminded of my recent suspicion of Winnie possibly being in love with Jonathan, thus her recent behavior. I began visualizing a scenario where she seduced my boyfriend during their vacation, and as I replayed the scene in my head like the possessive, overtly dependent girlfriend I was, my nervousness developed into irritation towards Jonathan. Despite the erotic nature of our relationship, Jonathan and I rarely associated with one another in person. Throughout the years of us knowing each other, Jonathan had never once

made an effort to go out on dates with me. Everything was only ever sexual and sending pictures. The beginning of sophomore year coincided with Jonathan's departure to Delaware and I was in a depressive state of mind as the supposed love of my life gradually became a stranger to me, much like my best friend. Several of my classmates noticed the negativity radiating from my presence and confronted me about this, asking if I was alright and wanted to talk. I was initially reluctant as I was constantly being told by both my mother and fellow avid churchgoers that my schoolmates were obstacles placed by the devil himself, so as to destroy my relationship with God.

However, although my mind urged me to abstain from worldly association as taught within the church, my heart practically forced me otherwise. I remember crying hysterically in the arms of a girl I barely knew while she whispered reassuringly that I was going to be okay. Ever since that fateful moment, that girl, the one who even despite hardly knowing me, cried as I cried, Heidi and her group of friends, Pete, Maria, Julia, and Darren, had become the greatest friends I had ever had the pleasure of knowing. Through the company of my new set of friends, I found myself eventually losing interest in Jonathan, recognizing the unhealthy,

abusive nature to our relationship. In addition, I became a supporter of the LGBTQ community despite the church's intolerance for homosexuality, since Pete and Darren were gay and Heidi and Julia, as I later discovered, were bisexual. I also became close friends and developed feelings for a classmate of mine named Owen, as we both enjoyed the band The Gorillas and Marvel Comics. Jonathan took notice of how I had recently begun refusing to send him photos of my body and, rightfully so, accused me of having feelings for someone else. I became furious with Jonathan as his main complaint in the entirety of the situation was the fact that I no longer wanted to be his little slave.

So, as irrational as it was looking back, I told him with full sincerity, call me whatever you want, be my guest. It doesn't change the fact that you're a terrible person. See you in hell. Weeks after sending my au revoir to Jonathan, Owen asked me out to homecoming, to which I gladly accepted, and for the first time in about a month, I finally felt some sort of relief. Life was peaceful, the world around me was starting to make sense once more,

and I couldn't have been happier when Owen asked if I wanted to stay after school and play our favorite game, Super Smash Bros. in the student center. As it neared five o'clock, Owen and I packed our bags and waited outside where the late buses were designated to arrive. We were holding hands and talking about the upcoming Justice League movie when a worn-down Kia swerved towards us aggressively. By then, several other students were outside waiting impatiently for the buses, and the sounds of the tires screeching against the pavement had also raised their attention. With the engine still running, a tall figure emerged from the vehicle, and my heart nearly exploded when I made out who it was. Jonathan. I vaguely remember Jonathan calling me all sorts of terrible names, something along

those lines, before charging towards us, and Owen, as a response, jolting me away and punching Jonathan right in the nose. I fell to the ground and watched in horror as Jonathan grabbed Owen by the wrist and twisted it in ways I didn't think was physically possible, an eerie cracking noise piercing my ears in the process. The psycho of an ex-boyfriend shoved Owen to the ground and began dragging me to the backseat of his car as I tried desperately to escape Jonathan's grasp. It was when I began losing a sense of hope. Basically every student who witnessed the ordeal from afar charged towards our direction and pushed Jonathan onto the ground. The police arrived shortly afterwards alongside an ambulance and the rest of the night was a blur. The following morning my family was visited by

the local elders of the congregation who were informed by my mother of what had just happened. I remember sitting shamefully as the two church leaders coerced me into revealing everything that had happened from my perspective and drunk with tears I revealed Jonathan and I were once intimate to one another purposely excluding the aspects of our relationship that I didn't want to reveal, and I had recently ended things between us as I was in love with a classmate. I was then harassed by both elders to share whether or not I had plans to press charges against Jonathan, and when I revealed that at the very least I wanted to file for a restraining order against him, I received the most menacing, bone-chilling glare.

I was ridiculed by both church leaders for my actions from leaving a spiritual brother for a worldly classmate to admitting and wanting a restraining order. Through my actions, I supposedly disrupted the peace of the congregation and was rewritten as the villain in this entire situation. By the time my father returned home from work, unaware of the elder's visit, I told him with extreme hesitance, as scripted, I wouldn't press charges on Jonathan as I had forgiven him. Jonathan was released from the police's custody with the help of several church leaders, and from what I understood, went about his merry way as though nothing significant happened. Weeks passed like months, months dragged on like years, and my personality as a whole changed entirely.

I became obsessed with the supernatural, intrigued by the concept of suicide and abandoned my love for art. It was as though the uptight religious zealot I once was died within me. I drifted away from the teachings of the church ever since the moment I discovered that the elders bailed Jonathan for his unspeakable actions and grew resentment towards basically everyone in the congregation. I felt betrayed and, even more so, confused as I began noticing other shortcomings of the seemingly perfect religion. More often than not, I was forced

to attend meetings alongside my brother and mother, and socialized to a minimal whenever I encountered a fellow brother or sister. Later that week, lo and behold, our family is visited by the same two elders that harassed me several weeks ago. Conveniently, my father, who they were aware of the fact was an atheist, was scheduled to work late that night, and even now, I believe that them coming to my house on that specific day was no coincidence. Their expressions were grim, somewhat irritable, as they sat across from me. I prepared myself for the worst, and thank goodness I did, because what I heard next left me completely and utterly speechless. A couple hours ago,

dozens of brothers and sisters within the congregation, specifically those that were close family friends of ours, complained about having received several erotic photographs of myself from an unknown number. I immediately had my suspicions as to who was responsible. Obviously, Jonathan. However, what I couldn't fathom was how exactly he got a hold of these brothers and sisters' private cell phone numbers, considering he hadn't even met most of them in person. I was no longer furious at Jonathan, though, but rather furious at myself. I genuinely thought that I was terrible, and I deserved the humiliation.

To make matters worse, the elders in no way showed any concern for my self-destructive way of thinking, and instead encouraged it by reciting biblical passages which disapproved of my depressive attitude towards life. six months worth of extensive psychiatry which would eventually lead me to being disfellowshipped or shunned by the congregation because of my doctor recommending that I no longer attend services. As a therapeutic tactic, I began volunteering in different festivals throughout the county and helped manage an arts and crafts station for young children. I often worked alongside a senior from the same school as me, and every so often we'd take turns running the stands so that one of us could take a 45-minute lunch break. As I was returning to my arts and crafts station, I couldn't help but notice a booth for the religious organization I now despised more than anything in the world.

However, before I could even think about the thought of dismissing the sight entirely, I saw someone I hadn't seen in what basically felt like forever. Winnie. Winnie! I exclaimed. She looked up from the ground and as our eyes met I immediately knew something was wrong. She had put on weight, a tremendous amount to be specific. Her eyes were bloodshot, expression grim and hair unkempt. This, I thought to myself, was not the Winnie I knew. What are you doing here? She asked. Her voice was full of uncertainty, contrasting greatly from the tone of her former outgoing self. Volunteering? How's everything going? I feel like I haven't seen you in, well, forever. I heard you got disfellowshipped.

Word travels fast, huh? I'm still trying to figure out how this all works. Sorry, I'll leave you. So it's true? Oh god, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Tears began to fall from Winnie's eyes. It's all my fault. What? I gave him everybody's number. I'm the one who did it. What are you... Wait, you did what? I'm so sorry, I had no choice. He practically forced me to.

You knew about the pictures? Winnie nodded her head as a whimper escaped her mouth. And still you gave him those numbers knowing what he'd do? I'm sorry. How could you? Winnie, I don't understand. I texted you for months trying to make things right between us. I don't even know what went wrong. I thought we were friends. You did nothing wrong. Please listen. This whole thing goes back. I don't care. This is all your fault. My mom won't talk to me. Stay out of my life. I left the booth and apologized to the senior running the arts and crafts station saying that I was feeling ill and would be leaving the festival early.

Through the unspeakable actions of my best friend and former lover, I nearly took my own life. I had spent months suffering from depression and being shunned by an entire half of my family whereas Winnie was preaching the truth and festivals and Jonathan was partying with the local brothers and sisters. I contacted my psychiatrist as I was on the verge of having an anxiety attack and luckily was able to schedule a last minute appointment later that day. Upon returning home that evening, my mother received a frantic phone call from Sister Carter,

who I hear screaming on the other end of the line that Winnie was missing. The search for Minnie lasted for months. Members of the religious and the secular world alike combined efforts to discover the whereabouts of the seventeen-year-old Winnie Carter, however, to no avail. I would have nightmares about finding Winnie's body in my basement with Jonathan doing terrible things to her corpse. Before I could scream for help, Jonathan would leave us, however, not before handing me a bloodied knife, the one he presumably used on Winnie. I would then be convicted as the police dragged me to jail in a cell. With me begging that I was innocent, I'd wake up to thankfully find myself in the comfort of my own

room. On one occasion, after having the same usual nightmare, I woke up gasping for breath when in the corner of my eye I saw the silhouette of a person staring inside through the glass of my window. However, as I rubbed my eyes and squinted toward the direction of the window, the silhouette vanished. Nearing the conclusion of April, the investigation, after months of constant failure, was eventually abandoned, leaving sister and brother Carter heartbroken beyond words. Once again, I was waiting outside for the late buses to arrive when a familiar golden Volkswagen made its way towards where I stood. The window to the passenger seat rolled open and strangely enough, I saw Eric sitting at the driver's seat. Hey, don't worry,

I'm not going to drag you into the car. Why don't you hop in? I trusted Eric as he was basically an older brother to me and at this point in time, my mother couldn't care less about how late I arrived home so I shrugged and entered the car. We exited my school and drove towards town, an awkward silence reigning our presence. I'm really sorry about Winnie, I finally mustered the courage to say. Thanks. How are you holding up? Kiddo, that's all everyone asks me.

I'm exhausted. I just wanted to move on with my life. I can't deal with any of this anymore. Eric. Eric wiped a tear from his eyes as he slowed the car down, preparing to stop at an approaching light and says, Winnie loved you more than anything. I love you more than anything. I mean, that's what family's all about, right? That's why I feel like you have the right to know about everything that's happened before. Things went sideways. Okay. Before we moved here, we lived in

the city, and that's how we met Jonathan. Jonathan, Winnie, and I were inseparable, so when we found out we were moving, well, we were devastated. For the longest time, we really didn't have a home because we were always moving from county to county. Eventually though, after about, let's say five to six years of traveling around the state, we came here and settled down. When we first moved in, we invited Jonathan since we hadn't seen him for so long and, as you'd expect, it was like meeting each other for the first time all over again. So much had changed. He looked different. I looked different. And Winnie, she definitely looked different because, god, I feel weird saying this, she developed at a pretty

young age. Jonathan noticed this almost immediately and it became clear to all of us that the two of them were totally crushing on each other. I don't know what I was thinking. I just thought it would be cool if Jonathan married Winnie so that way we'd be like actual brothers you know. I was young and stupid so I pretty much told them that they should go at it. I didn't realize how far that disgusting monster would go though. They shared their first kiss with each other. Held hands when no one was looking of course. Cute stuff like that. When they each got their own phones, forget it. All they ever did was text each other non-stop. Winnie began developing severe anxiety though. She'd have

panic attacks over the littlest things which is why my mom eventually had to homeschool her. She grew incredibly sensitive and had these weird esteem issues and none of us knew why. The first time we hosted a camp out, well, we didn't invite you because at that point we hardly knew you and, god, we should have known right then and there that psycho was bad news. I was playing volleyball with a couple of my friends and that's when I realized that I hadn't seen Jonathan in a while. As a matter of fact, I hadn't seen Winnie either. I started looking for them, asking around until finally someone mentioned how they saw Jonathan go inside a while ago. The minute I stepped foot in there though, I just knew something was off. So I made my way over to

Winnie's room and weirdly enough, the door was locked. I knew they were in there though. I just did. So when they didn't open the door I slammed against it until it broke down and that's when I saw it. My little sister crying and shirtless with Jonathan on top of her. We told the elders about it almost instantly and I just couldn't believe I considered that monster as my best friend. I told the elder this though and they told me I was looking at the situation the wrong way. They said I had to forgive Jonathan because he was brother and that the fault was on Winnie because she seduced him with her body. That's what they told me, my mom and my dad and they kept telling us that until

we believed it. Still, instead of shunning this person, this horrible person from our lives, we just kept inviting him to these campouts regardless of how uncomfortable it made Winnie. Although Winnie said she ended things with Jonathan, I always had my suspicions that things were never really over between them. As time passed, Winnie's anxieties just became worse. However, we truly thought that she deserved to be in all of that pain. The elders told Winnie that if she got baptized, then she'd feel better. After baptism, it was a matter of, oh, you should go preaching more, but that nothing the elders recommended worked. However, I think it just made everything worse.

Right before our most recent camp out, our family went to Delaware for vacation, and we invited him and his sister to join us since there was extra space. The vacation lasted for three weeks before we ended up having to leave early because Winnie supposedly had the stomach bug. Every morning, she was puking her guts out, and Mom wanted to go get her checked out at the doctors just in case it was something serious. Turns out Winnie was healthier than ever and the reason she was puking so much was because she was pregnant with you know who's kid. Once

again the elders got involved and of course that just made the situation much worse. They told us that Winnie had to deal with the consequences of her immoral actions and that she was forbidden from having an abortion. I'll never forget what Winnie said when they told us this. She screamed like a maniac and shouted, Please, have mercy. Please for once, be human. From that day forward, Winnie was expected to act subservient towards Jonathan until they got legally married since he was the father of her child. God, it sounds so crazy saying it now, but then we were convinced that she deserved all of this nonsense.

Things escalated to the point where we had to get rid of all the alcohol in the house because sometimes we'd fight her trying to chug an entire bottle of wine so she could end the baby. She would do crazy things like hit herself in the stomach. I mean it was downright scary and that's where you come into the whole story. Jonathan, as crazy as it sounds, didn't attack you and your friends because he was upset with you. No, he did it to prove a point, to Winnie. Winnie and Jonathan got into a fight. She refused to act submissive towards him because she rightfully felt it was undeserved. When news of what happened broke out between you and her friend, Winnie realized that he could take down a guy who's six foot two with that much ease,

that she basically was living at his mercy. Winnie apologized to Jonathan but I'm sorry wasn't enough. No, he wanted more. He wanted to make sure his little soon-to-be wife wouldn't rebel again. And what could be better than ruining her friendship with the one person in the world who maybe, just maybe could understand the pain she was going through. Because our dad is, was an elder he had basically everyone's contact info on his phone so it was easy enough for Winnie to send him all of your friend's numbers. Jonathan threatened Winnie saying that if she didn't send him those numbers he would do the same thing to you as he did to her saying that was enough to make her give in. So that's why.

Eric parked the car. We were directly outside of a local playground and looked at me. I didn't realize up until that moment I had tears streaming down my eyes like waterfalls. He leaned over, kissed my forehead and held me in a tight embrace while whispering, I'm so sorry little sis. By then I was sobbing. I haven't seen or heard anything regarding Eric Carter ever since we last saw each other in April. When we shared our final conversation five months ago, he was 21 years old although I think his birthday passed just recently. Eric revealed he renounced his faith shortly after Jonathan confessed to all of this and received little to no punishment a couple of days prior. Before dropping me off at my house,

he also admitted that, as selfish as it may seem, he planned to start life anew so as to forget the tragic story of his sister, Winnie Carter. Meanwhile, brother and sister Carter have dedicated their entire lives serving the church, and from what I understand, even now believe that all of which that happened was no way Jonathan or the Elder's fault, but rather Winnie's completely. To this day, I deeply regret my last words to Winnie Carter being what they were, and every so often I can't help but feel my saying that was what led her to resort to such drastic actions, whether she had ended her own life or ran away to live life anew similar to her brother. And to this day I cannot fathom how Jonathan,

someone who had spent his entire life studying the Bible and being taught how to be respectful to his brothers and sisters, could bring himself to do something so absolutely wretched to not one, not two, but seven innocent girls, which at this point I'd rather not discuss. I'm also confused about why Jonathan would lie about something so little and meaningless like going to Delaware in the beginning of September when he had already taken the vacation in June. I will never comprehend why the elders of this particular church defended this horrible excuse for a human being when he did terrible things to a defenseless minor,

assaulted a high schooler trying to protect his girlfriend, and obtained pictures from a naive girl who wanted nothing more than to be loved. In addition, I will always be at a loss of words when I think about the couple dozens of brothers and sisters in the congregation who have pictures of me as a minor on their handheld devices and still refuse to report to the authorities merely because of the elders commands. I truly believe that the fact Jonathan is somewhere roaming around our state deceiving young girls and being defended by several church leaders is a crime on its own which is exactly why, as of next week, I will be pressing charges. Jonathan, you are a despicable creature, the devil incarnate himself, and you're quite fortunate you were away during the time of

Winnie's disappearance. Before you ask, no, I'm not pressing charges so as to prove myself to the world and seek justice on my own terms. I'm pressing charges so as to prove myself to the world and seek justice on my own terms. I'm pressing charges so as to become the voice of seven girls who have mentally and physically damaged, but more specifically, the voice of my best friend, Winnie Carter. You stole someone I loved more than anything in the world, my sister, my best friend. And for that, I hope that your future entails only darkness and misery and for Winnie Carter if you're somewhere out there wherever you are please know that I'm sorry I'm sorry that someone as beautiful and precious as you had to experience something so downright horrific and that you had to experience it all alone I'm sorry about what my last words to you were

and I hope one day I can make it up to you with a nice coffee date at Starbucks just like we used to do every weekend. Winnie, I love you and if you ever see this one day, please know that none of this was your fault. You, Winnie Carter, are not the monster they say you are. Sincerely, your best friend, forever and always. My family has always been spiritual and I was raised as much. I was more or less always aware of the paranormal.

I have strong reasons to believe that a spirit has been following me around throughout my lifetime. Perhaps it's just a guardian angel, since I'm just as religious as I am spiritual. For some extra context, I was born and raised on a little island in the Mediterranean Sea, southern Europe, called Cyprus. I've always moved around a lot with my single mother and my brother in pursuit of the perfect home. I've lived at three homes in and near the capital of Cyprus, two homes at a coastal city, and I've even moved out of Cyprus all the way to Sweden five years ago and moved into two different homes during that five-year period.

I'm currently a high school graduate with a job only enough to sustain a casual cannabis use. The earliest encounter with the paranormal that I can recall occurred when I was five years of age. We lived in a rundown apartment which is now at the very least 30 to 40 years old smack in the center of Cyprus, so chances are things went down there. Perhaps someone died and that's the spirit I witnessed. When you enter the apartment, you're in the living room. My room is the first room to the right once you take a left

turning from the living room into the hall. If you go straight instead, there's the restroom, once you pass the kitchen which is the first door to the left, and my mother's room which is the second to the right. Most of this information is essential as it explains the mindset one may have when there are three long paths in every direction as soon as you leave your room, so keep that in mind. I remember I had this stuffed gorilla at the top of my bookshelf which I would wake up every now and then and then start crying because I was in a dark room with a massive gorilla staring me down. You'll realize the irony later on but basically I remember waking up probably to the thought of said gorilla and walking towards my mom's room out of desperation for some security but to do so I had to enter the hall and once I did I had an urge to look towards the living room which was the opposite direction from my mom's room, just to make sure

a messed up monster doesn't come from behind me and claw me to death, which is when I saw the spirit. It was big. Maybe I was just young and experienced it as out of proportion but if I go by the image I have engraved in my mind I'd say it's at least six feet tall, reaper-like, and keep that in mind as well for the other experiences. It was staring right at me, or rather right through me. It was nothing but emptiness. It's as if though it expected me to come out of the room at that very moment, like it was waiting. I unfortunately don't remember what happened after, and if you have theories by all means, please enlighten me. Nothing paranormal I can recall occurred between that and the next paranormal occurrence, but we did move twice until we settled at a home we finally purchased instead of rent, and expecting that to be our final destination.

We lived there for four years and actually quite a lot happened throughout those years. I've probably experienced more paranormal activities during these four years than the rest of the 14 years combined, both before and after that four-year period. Our new home, which we moved to when I was about 9 years old, was much more straightforward. You could see the door to every room in the home as you walk through the front door, which brings you again directly into the living room, a common structure for every home in Cyprus, which isn't the case in Sweden. Two steps in and you find the sliding door to the right leading into the kitchen. Another two steps and there's a washing machine to the left to keep in mind for later experience and a door to the right for a restroom. Another three

steps and there's the bathroom to the right and my brother's room to the left. Another step and you reach the end of the rather long hall which has my room to the left and my mom's to the right. I was about 12 when I found myself sick one day and to make sure that my mom can help me if need be, I slept in her room that night. This implies that there were no night lights on. The only light illuminating our apartment at the time was the street lights which barely shone into our second floor apartment. I needed to go take a leak and so I did. I turned the lights off. To turn the lights off though was the scariest thing that could ever have happened since I always had to look towards the living room in order to

see the switch light. As I turned the lights off I saw something I can only describe as the same exact spirit I witnessed seven years prior to this but only this time. It wasn't staring at me, it was moving. It came from the living room, like a hovering reaper but without his scythe and went straight through the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. I was terrified, scared out of my mind, so I dipped. I booked it, Audi 5000. I could hear no car nearby, which I would have if there was one, as I always hear them, so there couldn't have been headlights given the illusion of what I saw. Even if there was a car as I always hear them, so there couldn't have been headlights given the illusion of what I saw. Even if there was a car, due to the road's angle, the headlights

wouldn't have been capable of reaching all the way to where I saw the entity. I discussed this with my mom the day after and she claimed that when you're sick, you're at the border between the dead and the living, which makes it more likely for you to experience the paranormal. Growing up at that home I spent a lot of time outside. The house we purchased was in a brand new neighborhood and everyone who lived there was the first to do so. Families with children are the ones who are most likely to move into a new home which is why I had so many friends there. We would stay outside for hours on end and come up with fun stuff to do. Since we lived a bit outside the city, our neighborhood was surrounded by fields which cultivated wheat and corn, so there were hay bales stacked just over 50 meters, roughly 160 feet away from one of the

corners of the neighborhood. We used to play at those hay bales a lot, but when the sun went down, we didn't dare set foot there as we would scare each other off with stories about the human bird as it's called in greek which was just an owl-like bird but because none of us was aware of that the name alone was enough to scare us away from setting foot anywhere near that place. One day when we were playing at the side of the neighborhood me and my friend decided to just sit and admire the beauty of our local nature when we saw something that looked like a man standing on the bales staring right at us i didn't make the connection until now but it looked just like the

reaper i saw multiple times in the past only this time you can make out the arms my friend and i decided to go tell the others but in that split second of us turning around the creature had disappeared. Why is that thing following me? Why me? What does it want? Many creepy things happen at that time in my life and I just can't understand why. A year later I moved to Sweden but I still visited Cyprus every summer as we kept the apartment and it was a nice place to visit during the summer. We had two cats which I forgot to mention. During the summer my grandmother would take care of them while we spent time at the apartment in Cyprus. One day while on

vacation there I was up late. I visited the restroom one last time before going to sleep at around 2am when everyone was sleeping. I came out of this restroom, right in front of the washing machine, there was a creature staring right at me. It was like a cat, only our cats were in Sweden at the time so it couldn't have been that. It was pitch black, even though there was light coming from the room and should have illuminated the thing but it didn't. A pitch black cat-like creature with two bright glowing reddish eyes staring right at me as if frozen in time. It didn't make a single move. I was terrified and had sped walk up to my room. I just assumed it was the laundry basket since it was in front

of the washing machine and although I couldn't justify the eyes I just assumed I imagined it. When I woke up the next morning I realized that I was the first to have woken up, and when I walked out of my room, the laundry basket wasn't there, but since I was the first to have woken up, my mother couldn't have moved it in the case that the creature was indeed just an illusion caused by the darkness combined with the laundry basket. I really love that place, but I can't look at it the same way after all of that. It haunts me to this day. Minor creepy things happened even in broad daylight. That same summer while sitting in

the kitchen doing absolutely nothing. In the deafening silence of a hot summer where everyone is at home, hiding from the scorching sunlight, I heard the noise a metal trash can makes when the lid drops closed. For the last time, what is going on? Why am I experiencing all of this? It really makes no sense to me. Someone please explain. Even my next door neighbor has stories to tell me, but those are stories for another time. For those who are curious, it's stories that revolve around being possessed,

seeing really messed up dreams, vigorous shaking right before sleep as well as seeing silhouettes standing at the corner of his bed staring at him. He even told me about this one time when it was the middle of the night, he was under his blanket out of fear of the shadows staring at him. He had just a little opening at the side so he wouldn't suffocate under the blanket thinking the shadows wouldn't really get up in his face, when what seemed like a man bent over, as if to peek at my friend for a split second, then went upright again. Kind of like in the movies when there's gunfire and you want to peek for a split second but don't want to risk your life by looking for too long. When he told me that stuff, I just freaked out. His mother made him read some verses from the Bible as she noticed how he was getting more and more aggressive with her.

He told me he enjoyed making her cry, or as he put it, using a Cypriot expression, it was my life to make her miserable. Reading those religious verses, he said it's as if though he forgot how to read. The words were distorted and he couldn't make out what it said. All he could make out was Satan. So he read that. His mom didn't waste a second and purified the house with a religious ritual and made an appointment with a priest she knew. When they visited the priest, my priest was re-baptized and the priest used an extensive blessed palm oil the priest kept for his son that he applied on my friend's

chest in a cross shape, and the palm oil turned his skin red, as if burning the devil out of him. He hasn't experienced anything since, which makes me really happy for him, as he really didn't deserve any of it. There are many stories to tell, but those are for another time. Myspace. Good old Myspace. I was 16, always on there, doing teenage stuff, making my layout, changing my music, talking with friends. This one kid would keep messaging me. I would reply sometimes. Typical hello, what's up kind of thing. I thought nothing of it. One day me and my friend, Hannah, were walking around the city as per usual. We stopped in this complex building that is near my house just to take a break. It was about 10pm and I had to be home by 11. We were sitting on the stairs

when some guy came up behind us and said to Hannah, do you have a lighter? She says no. He walks away. Then about 15 minutes he came back and stood behind me. I see in my peripheral a hand movement happening so I turned a little more and saw his hand at his pants moving up and down while facing me. My heart instantly went into my stomach. I wrote on my phone in a text to Hannah and said I think he's touching himself. We felt stuck. He sat down next to Hannah, so close he was touching her arm. I pretended to be on the phone so maybe he would leave. He looks at Hannah and goes, is her name Nadia? Not my real name, but you get it. Hannah was instantly scared and blurted out to ask yourself, but I was still pretending to be on the phone. About five minutes later, the security guard walked around and said hello to us,

then talked to the kid. We'll call him Antonio. What's up, Antonio? Hanging out with the ladies tonight? I knew help had to be written all over my face. Why can't he see it? Then he says, Well if I hear two white girls go missing, I know who to call. At this point I felt more sick than I already did. He leaves and yet Hannah and I are still feeling stuck. A few minutes later his friends come along and go,

Want to come inside? I finally have enough energy to say no. I have to go meet up with my cousin. We start to get up and Antonia's friend stands in front of me and says, come on, just for a little bit. I said no. Me and Hannah start walking towards the exit. My house is up the hill. start following us we get inside the tunnel and hannah says to take off your shoes so we can run we don't want them hearing where we go so there we are barefoot running like our lives depended on it we get on in my street run up to my house go into the back hallway and it was so quiet all i heard was myself trying to catch my breath and i heard my heart beating in my ears.

I looked at Hannah scared, just hiding behind a wall staring at the glass door waiting to see someone pop up. We eventually calmed each other down. Thought everything was over until the next morning when I logged into myspace and had a message from him saying, I know what house you live in, with my street name. I blocked him. I never walked past that complex again. A few weeks later, I found out that he was in jail, and from what I know now at 25 years old, he's still in jail. I can only imagine what he did, but I hope I never run into him again. I have lived in the same duplex with my mom for almost 11 years. It's a small two-bedroom that mirrors connected by the garage to the other unit. Though we had lived there for a long time,

it almost seemed new. People were moving in and out almost yearly. Some people were friendly and wanted to hang out with us and some wanted to keep to themselves. This story is about a couple that fit the latter. We hardly ever saw either of them and knew next to nothing. I knew she was much younger than him by the looks of things when seeing them coming home or leaving the house. I knew they had dogs, seeing toys and hearing a bark every once in a while, but never seeing them outside, and we knew they shopped at the same stores as us, running into the wife once and her telling us she knew us, but that was the long and short of it. We never heard a peep. That was until I had a friend over playing games in the living room.

She heard it first and we paused our game wondering what the strange noise was, but it was quiet again. Once the game began again I heard it, a scream. We paused and for a moment we thought of playing it off. I shared a fence with an elementary school and kids screamed all day long while playing, but then it was louder. A woman was screaming for help. We both ran to see what it was and outside saw my neighbor hanging out of her bedroom window naked screaming for help. I told my friend to grab a blanket, both because she was naked and because she was dangling above rose bushes, and I ran to try and catch her. Before I even made it to their front door, a hand reached out and pulled her back inside. I ran back to the house and told

my friend to call 911 while I woke my mom, who was sleeping just home from work. It was deathly quiet as we waited for the police wondering what to do. Two 20-year-old girls wondering if they should storm the house. We didn't because that wouldn't have been smart. Luckily, the police came before the anxious energy and adrenaline made us do something dumb and took my friend and me for statements. We watched my crazy eyed neighbor be loaded into a police car staring daggers at us. We asked about his wife and were told she was going to be taken to the hospital. I didn't see or hear from them for a couple of weeks. The dogs were still there and I would hear them barking wildly whenever I got home from work.

Finally a truck showed up, and all the woman's things were packed up and moved. Our weirdo landlady told my mother and me sternly that if the man ever came back, we were to tell him to leave and call the cops if he refused. Finally mom got more details from the landlady. He had been beating her for some time, it turns out, silently next door locking her naked and with the dogs in the extra room built in the garage. That day, he tried to choke her to death after she tried to escape. He came by once, wanting to get his things,

and I locked myself in my house with the lights off, trying to keep my puppy quiet, when he pounded on the door angrily that he was locked out of the other house. Other neighbors have come and gone since then and I even made friends with one, but I hated going into that house. Somehow walking those familiar but mirrored halls and seeing that spare room gave me the creeps. I wish I could have saved her that day. I wish I could have saved her earlier. I wish I could meet her again and tell her how sorry I am I couldn't help more. But more than that, I hope I never meet that man again.

I used to see dead people. They used to stare at me until I blinked. Not just your typical see-through spirits in dated clothing, but literal decomposing bodies. I recently thought about how strange this recent experience was. Well, outside the obvious. My family is gifted in seeing, hearing, and feeling the paranormal. Some of us are also gifted in dreaming things. I can cover those in later stories. I lived with my great-grandmother in a two-apartment building she owned. I hadn't had too many terrifying experiences until after she passed away when we moved to the first floor. My sister and I shared a room with a curtain covering the

doorway. I slept on the top bunk and she slept on the bottom. I remember always being afraid to close my eyes when it was bedtime. At first I didn't know why and I always ended up facing the wall or covering my face with my blanket. Before long I would wake up to facing the room. I remember thinking, they know I'm awake now, I can't turn my back. My heart would start racing and there was a person standing by the doorway. Not moving but staring right at me. One time I decided to sleep with my head by the bedroom doorway since they never walked past it maybe I wouldn't see them anymore. I was so wrong. I had not taken into consideration the body length mirror we had right across the doorway that showed the dark living room. There one was, standing by the doorway but this time it seemed like he was walking into our bedroom, yet he only got closer in the mirror. He still never took his decaying

eyes off of me. His dirty blonde hair was in patches, dirt under his nails and bags under his eyes with his skin pressed to his skull like it was ripping away. I was frozen from what seemed like forever until I blinked and he was gone. From then on I decided I needed to sleep in my sister's bed with her. She didn't see what I was seeing and I wasn't going to tell her either. After all, I was twelve and she was seven. They kept coming closer and closer to the point where one was standing across from the bed, so close that they could touch the bunk bed with their body if they were alive. But this one didn't seem to know we were lying on the bottom bunk.

I didn't have eyes piercing my very being this time. It just stood there, probably looking at the empty top bunk for me. My sister felt claustrophobic sleeping by the wall, so she slept on the outside. I held her every night when I would wake up and see them, or I would at least wrap my legs around her. I felt as if though they were trying to take her away. I wasn't only afraid to sleep, I was afraid to shower, to close my eyes when I washed my hair and face, so I tried to never do it. That first part took a long time, but this part shouldn't be as long. Six years later, we moved out and I stopped seeing them. I forgot about them until last year when I was 28, when I was sleeping over at a friend's apartment. We were in her room so as not to disturb her

roommate since she was smoking. I decided to try it since I trusted her and we were just having fun drinking and watching Rocky Horror. Before long, she fell asleep on the couch across from me, and I fell asleep half on her bed and half on the floor because her bed was on the floor. I woke up. My vision blurred and I saw a horde of decomposing bodies standing across from me, pointing and twisting their figures about by her door. They were inching closer and suddenly appeared to be hovering over me, like they wanted to grab me. I started panicking and crying, trying to move my body but I couldn't budge. I finally calmed myself down and was able to let

out one forceful kick to her leg. She automatically woke up. I could move again and they were gone. I don't know why they came back or why I attracted whatever these kinds of spirits are, but I think it's just odd that after 16 years they appeared again. They, among other things, made my childhood a nightmare. I really hope I don't experience anything like this again. This event occurred a little over two years ago. I'm from Texas, but this happened in Tennessee. One summer I took a road trip with my friend for privacy reasons we'll call her Sarah. I traveled with my friend Sarah and her family. On the second day of our

trip Sarah's mom allowed Sarah and I to go ziplining by ourselves. So Sarah and I arrive in the place to see a big group of people ranging from all ages ready to zipline. The instructors started lining us up and dividing us into van numbers because our group was so big we needed multiple vans to take us to the campsite where we would be ziplining. While me and Sarah were standing in line we realized a man in front of us trying to take a selfie with this big camera. He had his hands so high up that me and her were in the background. He realized us staring and quickly turned around and smiled. We all laughed about it.

He started up a conversation with me and Sarah. He started asking where we were from, considering we were in a tourist area. At this point, I had no weird feelings about this guy. I thought he was just being friendly and wanted to have small talk. Sarah did most of the talking and I silently stood next to her. He started telling us stuff about him. He told us he was 22 years old and was traveling. We thought this was cool and was interested in what he was saying. Eventually the instructors had us get in the vans. The vans had about eight seats. I was first to get into the van and then

Sarah was after me. I had realized that there was a woman next to get into the van but the camera guy quickly jumped in front of her and took the seat that was next to Sarah. Quickly the van filled up and the people left over went to another one. While in the van the camera guy continued to talk to us. At this point I had a weird feeling about him. He started to ask us more detailed questions. He asked us what our names were. I quickly told Sarah not to tell him our real names, but she didn't listen to me and told him our real name.

I never told him mine. On the trip to the site, the camera guy continued to ask my friend more questions, like what her Instagram and Snapchat were. This had me feeling weird, considering we had told him our ages back at the zipline building that we were 14 and this made me feel off considering that he was 22. He then proceeded to ask Sarah and I to take pictures with him. I then told him no and held up my hand to block the camera and tried telling her not to engage with him but she thought everything was fine.

So she did take pictures with him. Eventually we reached the campsite and everyone got out. The instructor then began telling us the rules and giving us directions. As me and Sarah moved to the front to hear better, camera guy moved slowly behind us. Sarah finally caught on to what I was feeling which was discomfort from this guy. So me and her kept moving around the group to get away from him. He just kept following us. The instructors finally ended their talk and asked us who wanted to go first. I volunteered first and then my friend Sarah after me. We wanted to get away from him as fast as we could. But then he, as predicted, went right after

us. Me and her did the right thing and told the instructors that he wouldn't stop following us and trying to talk to us. The instructors then held him up and allowed people in front of him. I felt like I needed to say something so he would leave us alone. When he finally met back up with us I walked up to him and said, hey so I don't know what you're trying to do but you can stop following us now. I'm not trying to be rude or anything I'm just informing you. You're much older than us and you know our age. I don't think it's right so just please stop following us. He then proceeded to throw his hands up in defense and back away saying he didn't mean to. The day went back to normal and

when we left the campsite, to our luck, the camera guy took a different van. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, rLetsReadOfficial, and give and receive feedback from the community, and maybe even hear it featured here on the channel. And if you'd like to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt.com. Links in the bio. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon. Find a Toyo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there, treadexperts.ca.

You can't rely on blind faith to get the pregnancy support you deserve. Ritual's Essential Prenatal Multivitamin is the only leading prenatal backed by its own human clinical trial. Essential prenatal is proven to deliver key nutrients, including folate, biotin, and vitamin D during pregnancy. Get 25% off when you visit ritual.com slash clinical. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Did you know that many products for pregnant women do not have their own clinical trials for safety or efficacy? That's because pregnant women are often excluded from clinical studies. Ritual is aiming to set a new standard with their Essential Prenatal Multivitamin. It's the number one best-selling prenatal and the only leading prenatal backed by its own human clinical trial.

Essential prenatal is proven to deliver key nutrients, including folate, biotin, and vitamin D during pregnancy. Moms taking essential prenatal had a lower overall cortisol level during pregnancy than those taking a leading prenatal. Plus, it's designed to be gentle on the stomach. Ritual doesn't just have your back. They have the receipts. Get 25% off at ritual.com slash clinical. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.