The Lets Read Podcast - 108: Episode 096 | Online Gaming & Internet Mysteries Stories | 21 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

Welcome to the ninety-sixth 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 Online Gaming, NYC Subways, & Unsolved Internet Mysteries... 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 & Audio Remastering: Simon de Beer https://www.instagram.com/simon_db98/ PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

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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. The internet is the most powerful informational tool the world has ever known. Although there is an almost endless torrent of misinformation uploaded and shared on a daily basis, the World Wide Web has become a database of knowledge and wisdom so vast that it would have the librarians of Alexandria awestruck. Yet, just as much as the internet can be enlightening, it also can be baffling and mysterious.

And in the darkest of online corners, there are conundrums that can be as terrifying as they can be confusing. This is the story of one of those mysteries. This is the story of Cicada 3301. On a brisk January evening back in 2012, a 34-year-old Swedish computer analyst named Joel Eriksson was engaging in an online pastime familiar to many of us, procrastination. He'd had a long grueling workday, straining his eyes as he peered over lines and lines of coding and was looking for something a little more

inconsequential, something fun and lighthearted. Instead, he found something that would send him down a rabbit hole of epic proportions. Joel was browsing 4chan forums when he happened upon a message from an anonymous poster. It was written with stark white type against a black background Accompanied by a picture of a winged insect The message read as follows Hello, we are looking for highly intelligent individuals To find them, we have devised a test There is a message hidden in this image Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us

We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck. 3301. The number 3301 was the only identifier left by the poster. There was no name, no location, no organization to give Joel an idea as to who posted the message or if it was at all legitimate. But still, Joel's interest was instantly piqued. By his own admission, he was a computer security nerd and a skilled cryptographer in his own right. He knew enough to recognize that this was a classic example of what is known as digital steganography, the careful concealment of furtive information within a digital file. Digital steganography is most often associated with image files such as JPEGs or any other pixelated image. For example, with such images, it is possible to change the color of every 50th or 100th pixel in order to

retrieve or detect an entirely different image from what is considered to be randomized background noise. This is a technique more commonly used by organizations with considerably more nefarious ends, such as those who in which traffic in illegal images or terrorism. Like in 2002, when intelligence officials suggested that agents of Al-Qaeda had planned the devastating September 11th attacks via the auction site eBay using encrypting messages that were secreted inside digital photographs. Although it was late at night and Joel Erickson was exhausted after a long workday, he took the time to try his hand at decoding the messages from the mysterious user known only as 3301. Yet, after only ten minutes or so of working through some of the more basic decryption techniques he knew of, Joel had seemingly made

progress. He found a vague reference to Tiberius Claudius Caesar, along with a line of apparently meaningless letters. Joel recognized this for what it was, a Caesar cipher, a method of encryption once used by Julius Caesar himself in some of his own personal correspondence. A relatively simple but ancient technique, it replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. Given that Claudius was the fourth emperor of the Roman Empire, the reference suggested that the number four may well be crucial to solving the puzzle. Keeping this in mind, it only took a short while longer before Joel found a web address concealed among in the image's code.

With a smug feeling of fulfillment, Joel clicked the link. But the web address only led him to a picture of a duck, along with a goading message that read, Whoops, just decoys this way. Looks like he can't guess how to get the message out. But Joel was not deterred. He often found that if a puzzle seemed too routine or easy to crack, that he would lose interest fast. Yet it seemed that this particular problem was much more challenging than he had been led to believe. Joel was now hooked, and although he didn't quite realize it at the time, he was embarking on one of the internet's most enduring puzzles,

an online scavenger hunt that led thousands of competing cryptographers across cyberspace to several real-world locations across the world and in the previously uncharted areas of the so-called Dark Web. As it stands, the search for the truth behind Cicada 3301 has required an intimate familiarity with the occult, advanced number theory, cyberpunk literature, Mayan numerology and even classical music. The epic puzzle has also included a mysterious, tuneless guitar ditty, a few lines from a poem, and most intriguingly, an enigmatic female known as Wind, who may or may not exist in real life. There was also an apparent clue left on a lamppost in the Hawaiian islands which gave those who wished to decipher the puzzle a crucial clue

as to where the creators originated. There are many variables but only one certainty, that no one really knows what Cicada 3301 is all about or who was actually behind it. Various rumors tell of a secret society who used the puzzle to search for new members, but it is just as likely that it is a challenge laid out by some quasi-military body or government intelligence agency, such as the CIA or Britain's MI5. For many, the Cicada puzzle is merely a piece of cerebral, albeit mysterious entertainment, nothing more than a kind of Sudoku puzzle for the more intellectually curious. But for other seekers, Cicada has become a dangerous obsession. More than eight years after he discovered the puzzle, Joel Erickson is still

trying to discern exactly what the whole thing means to him. Although one thing is clear to him, that's a battle of minds, a challenge so alluring that he finds it impossible to resist. Let's rewind for a moment to the night of January 5th, 2012, the night Joel read the decoy message which featured the image of the duck. Interpreting the duck's derision as an actual clue unto itself, Erickson began to run the image through a decryption program known as Outguest. That's when he made yet another breakthrough, discovering an additional concealed message, this one linking to another thread on the massively popular social media site Reddit. It was there that encrypted lines from a novel were being posted once every couple of hours,

but Joel also found a series of unusual symbols, each comprising of several lines and dots. He copied and pasted them into a Google search bar and the results showed that they were in fact Mayan numbers that comprised yet another cipher. Up until that point, none of the puzzles had required any truly advanced decryption expertise, which gave Joel the idea that this was nothing more than the work of a single anonymous trickster playing an elaborate prank on the online communities he frequented more than the work of a single anonymous trickster playing an elaborate prank on the online communities he frequented. But the Mayan numerals changed everything for him, and led him to believe that the truth behind Cicada ran far deeper, and was far more shadowy than he had first thought. The puzzles themselves had begun to

mutate into several different directions, including hexadecimal characters, reverse engineering, and prime numbers. Pictures of the winged cicada, reminiscent of the death's head moth imagery in Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, had become a common theme. Joel believed that there could be no coincidence there, and began conducting his own research into the biology of the insect itself. He soon discovered that cicadas only emerged over a particular number of years, either 13 or 17, to avoid synchronizing with the life cycles of their natural predators. Being familiar with advanced mathematics, Joel instantly recognized the significance of this. They were prime numbers.

Everything was beginning to come together. Joel poured himself into researching the other cryptic references posted on Reddit, discovering that some of the literary quotes were from a poem about King Arthur taken from the Mabinogion, a collection of pre-Christian medieval Welsh manuscripts, as well as a poem by cyberpunk writer William Gibson called Agrippa, a book of the dead. Written in 1992, the poem was infamous for the fact that it was only published on a series of 3.5-inch floppy disks that were programmed to erase themselves after being read only once. As word of Cicada 3301 spread online, thousands of amateur sleuths joined the hunt for clues.

A veritable army of users from the 4chan forums, the place the first Cicada message is thought to have appeared, pulled their collective intelligence into an attempt to crack the puzzle. And thanks to their mammoth efforts, a new message was discovered after studying the references taken from the Mabinogion. Call us, it read, at telephone number 214-390-9608. By the time the phone number was posted online, Joel Erickson had become so obsessed with the cicada puzzle that he had actually taken time off from his job to work on the puzzle full time. At present, the number is disconnected, but we know that the

line was based in the state of Texas, and that those that called it were met by an answering machine message in which a robotic voice told seekers to find the prime numbers hidden in the original cicada image. They did so, and by multiplying them together, found a new prime and a new website, 845145127.com. A countdown clock and a huge picture of a winged cicada confirmed that they were indeed on the correct course. Joel found the scope and scale of the puzzle simply breathtaking, but unbelievably, the puzzle was about to prove even more thrilling for those who attempted to solve it. At noon, Eastern Standard Time on January 9th, 2012, the countdown clock on the mysterious website reached zero. It was then that 14 GPS coordinates from around the world were revealed.

These referenced real-world locations in Poland, France, South Korea, as well as several places around the United States. Sat in his Swedish bedroom, Erickson pored over the data, waiting patiently as seekers around the globe went to investigate the coordinates in their respective nations. Slowly but surely, reports came in of what they had found at each location. There had been a coordinated effort around the globe to attach posters to lampposts and walls. It was now blindly obvious that the cicada phenomenon was not merely the work of one ingenious, determined individual. There was a network of people behind this thing, operating from the shadows. Each poster bore the same cicada image that had been found on

the websites along with a QR code. Those are those small black and white barcode style things that smartphone cameras can scan, taking the user to a specific website or downloadable application. Joel Erickson found the discovery absolutely thrilling, his suspicions of some kind of underground organization being suddenly confirmed by people all over the world. But who exactly these people were or who they were working for was unnervingly clear. Ever since the first Cicada 3301 image first appeared, theories abound as to whom exactly was responsible. Many believe that Cicada may well be nothing more than an elaborate PR stunt,

an unusual intricate alternate reality game designed by some multinational company whose endgame merely was to promote some new product. And there was a precedent for this. In 2004, during the promotional effort for the video game Halo 2, Microsoft had coordinated what became known as the I Love Bees campaign. They used random payphones around the world to broadcast various episodes of a self-produced radio drama in the style of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. The campaign was well-publicized and helped push millions of units for the company, so it is understandable that the cynics among the Cicada crowd chose to believe that the rabbit hole would come to a commercial

dead end. However, there were certain details surrounding the cicada puzzle which separated it from your average guerrilla advertising campaign. For example, it became obvious that some of those behind the puzzle itself were actively working to frustrate the efforts of those involved. You remember the woman known as Wind mentioned earlier. She claimed to be a cryptographer from Michigan who was actively engaged in solving the Cicada puzzle, but over time, many noticed that she was apparently spreading misinformation in an apparent effort to throw people off the scent. Another detail is considerably more terrifying. A warning was posted by an anonymous user on the website

Pacebin who claimed to be an ex-Cicada member and military officer who was recruited to the organization by one of his superior officers. The warning stated that the Cicada movement purported to be a progressive scientific organization, but was in fact a cabal of satanic worship who practiced malevolent magical practices in order to secure vast personal power and wealth. Their ranks included powerful politicians, members of the armed forces, and leading academics who wished to manipulate the course of history in their own wicked vision. Yet there were also persistent rumors that Cicada was a recruitment drive by the CIA, MI6, or America's National Security Agency,

as part of a search for highly talented codebreakers. And again, there would be a well documented precedent for this because in 2010, the United States Air Force Cyber Command, the American's premier hacking defense force, secretly embedded a complex hexadecimal code in their new logo. Cyber Command Chief Lieutenant General Keith Alexander then challenged the world's codebreaking community to crack it. Yet it took the internet a mere three hours to crack the code, and was a major embarrassment for the organization. And in September of 2013, Great Britain's GCHQ launched the Can You Find It program,

which consisted of a series of cryptic codes designed to find the next generation of top-tier British cryptographers. Jane Jones, GCHQ's head of resourcing, stated that despite it being a puzzle designed to capture the imaginations of younger people, it was also a serious test, the rewards of which would be highly paid jobs that were vital to protecting the UK's national security interests. This kind of viral campaign had been a tried and tested method of recruitment and has been for many years. During World War II, the British government's top secret government code and cipher school used crossword puzzles printed in the Daily Telegraph newspaper to identify potential candidates to break the Nazi enigma machine. But many professional cryptographers were skeptical of the theories that the CIA or NSA

were responsible for the Cicada puzzle. Both organizations are extremely careful with security, and experts believe that since the puzzle originated on what is essentially an anarchic internet forum, it was highly unlikely that the CIA and their ilk would want to attract those with a diminished respect for authority, let alone recruit them. But that leaves us with the possibility that certain private organizations, multinational corporations and the like, were behind the campaign in order to recruit those with a talent for what is known as black hat hacking. The proliferation of wireless devices, mobile telephones, e-commerce websites like Amazon, and chip and pin machines means the demand for cryptologists has never been higher.

But there is one more group that we have yet to mention, who would certainly have the need to go fishing for talented hackers and codebreakers, the hacker group known as Anonymous. It is worth mentioning that the previously mentioned coordinates released by the Cicada Countdown website were all places that are home to some of the most talented hackers and cybersecurity experts in the world. When the QR codes left on the lampposts were decoded, a hidden message pointed people towards a Tor address. Tor, short for the Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the so-called dark web, a huge shadowy section of the internet that cannot be accessed by run-of-the-mill search engines such as Google or Bing.

The dark web is thought to be 5,000 times larger than the regular internet. It's in these recesses where you'll find human trafficking rings, black market drug markets, and terrorist networks. It's here where the cicada rabbit hole came to a dead end. It seems like this particular dark webpage was coded to only give access to a limited number of visitors, as, after a while, it closed down, replaced with the following message. We want the best, not the followers. Those that accessed the website first received personal emails which apparently asked for their complete secrecy in participating in private

code-breaking trials. This has never been completely confirmed, but what we do know for certain is that a few weeks later, a new message from Cicada was posted on Reddit reading as follows. Hello. We have now found the individuals we sought. Thus our month long journey ends, for now. To the disappointment of thousands of fascinated seekers, the journey was over and all hope of finding out the truth was lost. However, on January 4th of 2013, almost a year to the day since the original puzzle picture was posted on 4chan, a brand new image appeared. A new message in the same white text read, Hello again.

Our search for intelligent individuals now continues. Close study of the image would reveal yet another poem. This one from the book Liber alveolagus, a religious doctrine written by the infamous occultist and magician Alistair Crawley. This led to a downloadable file containing thousands of prime numbers along with an MP3 file, a song called The N-Star Emergence by an artist known only as 3301, which begins with the sound of chirping cicadas. Detailed analysis of the song brought seekers to a bizarrely named Twitter account which pumped

out random numbers, which in turn produced a Gematria, an ancient Hebrew code table, but this time based on Anglo-Saxon runes. This led the solvers back into the dark web where they found seven new physical locations, from Texas to Japan and Russia, with yet more QR codes printed on insect-beating posters. The cycle had begun again. But still, we are no closer to knowing the source or fundamental purpose of Cicada 3301, but therein lies the terrifying scope and scale of the mystery, that it is almost impossible to know just who is behind it, and even more difficult to discern why. Whether or not it is the work of some shadowy cult-like organization, or something less nefarious, we might never know.

But it is haunting to realize that there are dark curtains out there that most of us will never, ever get to look behind, with figures working away in dark basements and high-rise tower blocks on a mystery that may never, ever be solved. In June of 2015, Swedish tech blog Gadgetzz.com received a package at their company offices. It was an envelope with no return address, originating from the city of Warsaw in Poland, and was addressed only to Johnny K., referring to John Eric Krobichler, the founding editor of the company. Inside was a single DVD disc labeled with a long, seemingly meaningless string of letters and numbers. A company employee believed that was some kind of product key for a game or piece of software that the sender wished them to review. But when they put the DVD into their computer, all they found was a single video file.

Expecting it to be some kind of disguised malware, the employee ran a quick antivirus scan on it to ensure it was safe to access. When they discovered it was clean, they opened up the file and began to watch. What they saw sent shivers down their spines. The black and white video was no longer than two minutes in length. At first, it showed only a shadowy figure, standing before two open windows set into the crumbling walls of an abandoned building. A dark, creepy-looking forest was visible through a hole in one of the walls behind him, skeletal, gnarled trees making for a deeply unnerving backdrop. Suddenly, the figure steps out from the shadows, a dim light revealing a person dressed in a 14th century plague doctor's costume. The kind with a goggled mask with a mouthpiece resembling a bird's beak,

along with a long, dark, long-sleeved hooded cloak. The video was soundtracked by loud, jarring, buzzing noises as the plague doctor held up a single hand, a flashing light blinking out from his black-gloved palm. Then, as abruptly as it began, it suddenly ended, bearing no credits or claims of authorship. All who watched the video found it was disturbing as it was fascinating, but one particular company employee who watched it began to notice a series of codes and letters hidden all around the video. After a brief attempt to find the meaning behind such a mysterious video, he gave up and letters hidden all around the video. After a brief attempt to find the meaning behind such a mysterious video, he gave up and instead deferred to the internet, posting the

video to a blog he ran, along with the images of the envelope the disc came in, as well as the disc itself. Soon, a Reddit user who had seen the post on the employee's blog found other coded messages hidden within the video. An encoded encryption on the DVD's menu was found to read 11BX1371, which has since been universally used as the title for the video. Others who analyzed the video slowed down the isolated audio track told of being able to hear something that sounded like a voice saying, I would love to kill you, being repeated over and over. An additional Reddit user worked on creating a spectrogram of the sound, a spectrogram being a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. He soon discovered a variety of both text messages

and images concealed within the sound waves. These included a message in plain text stating, You are already dead. But many others were encrypted and he was without the cryptology skills to decipher them. However, he was able to access some of the images concealed in the audio track. These images were incredibly disturbing. One depicted a woman, tied to a tree, who was being tortured and mutilated by an undiscernible figure wearing a dark mask. Another image depicted a visual still from the 2010 horror film The Bunny Game, in which a drug-addicted

woman of the night named Bunny propositions a truck driver. He kidnaps her and subjects her to extreme torture, inflicting brutal, humiliating, and extreme forms of physical abuse. Additional images included stills from a German film called Slasher, a movie about a picnicking couple being murdered in a forest by a disfigured man, as well as an image of one of the Boston Strangler's female victims. This raised initial concerns that whoever had made the video was a serial killer, and that this was his way of leaving a kind of breadcrumb trail that might lead to their eventual capture. This was evidenced by the fact that a triangle and square message near the end of the video was found to read, Ad opognere homine, Latin text which translated means to attack or target man. Another series of plain text messages led to even more disturbing theories surrounding the

origin and purpose of the video. One read, the infected eagle will spread his disease, we are the antivirus, we'll protect the world body. Along with another which read, strike an arrow through the heart of the eagle another sequence of 20 pairs of two-digit characters was found to be the latitude and longitude of the white house the seat of american power in washington dc this was accompanied by morse code which read red lips like tenth when it was decoded one extremely disturbing cryptographer noted that this could possibly be an intended anagram for the words, kill the president. The same user reported that

a cipher in the video could be decoded to reveal the message, stand and fight with us, take down the beast, kill his disease or fall with the rest. The year, 1371, is also suggested was one in which the Black Death was ravaging Europe. This, coupled with the imagery of the plague doctor in the video, led other decoders to interpret the video's threats as related to bioterrorism. Early investigations soon found that John Eric Krobichler was not the person to make the video public. In May of 2015, a YouTube account with the username AETBX had posted it to YouTube and was the only video the account had ever posted. There it had been identified and described in binary code with a string of zeros and ones as other users began commenting on it.

AETBX returned to ask why there was suddenly so much interest in his 5 month old posting. Some commenters speculated that he had actually created it himself, but the user vigorously denied that it was his creation. But in late November, after the intense rumors and initial speculation about the video, its creator and purpose had died down. A Twitter account was opened under the name Parker Warner Wright. He claimed to be a US citizen who lives in Poland and that the videos were meant as an art project. After finishing the video in May 2015, he had left three copies, two on discs in a subway in

park in Poland and the last one posted to 4chan. While the identity of the video creator remained unknown, the location at which it was filmed had been identified. A Polish internet user who was following the story went to the former Zofiówka Sanatorium near Otwock, a short distance south of Warsaw. One of the rooms there had the same kind of forest nearby, along with the same graffiti seen in the video. The latter were not present in a photo of the room taken in November 2013, suggesting the video was made between then and April 2015. Given that Parker Wright was living in Poland at the time,

this makes him one of the more likely claimants to being the video's creator. But despite him being the most likely person to have posted it, Parker Wright was not the only person on the internet actively claiming the same thing at the time and throughout the last months of the year the video was posted, others posted their own videos in an attempt to authenticate themselves as the video's true creator. So it is frankly impossible to determine whether or not it was simply an attempt to keep him to promote his wider work through fraudulently claiming to have made the video himself. We may never know who truly posted the video known as 11BX1371 or what their true intentions or motives were, but I just hope that they're not still out there plotting their strike against humanity that in all likelihood may well come in the form of a deadly, infectious disease.

Internet streaming services such as Twitch has had an astronomical rise over the past few years. Millions upon millions of viewers turn into a variety of live streams every day which span a variety of subjects from video games and cooking to creepy story readings and practical jokers and you might be forgiven for thinking that such things are relatively new but as far back as 2008 there have been people live streaming the intimate details of their lives via webcams and perhaps the creepiest and most intriguing of these live streams were focused around a woman known to many only as Chip Chan. On the anarchic internet forum 4chan is a webcam thread where users explore various open source webcams and share the most

interesting finds with their fellow users. Sometime during 2008, one user shared a webcam broadcast showing a woman lying in an extremely uncomfortable looking position, and those that viewed it quickly speculated that she was dead, pondering over the idea of alerting the authorities to the apparent fact that a corpse was being livestreamed to views all over the world. But to the surprise of those watching, the woman apparently got up and had in fact been sleeping in this unusually uncomfortable position on her apartment floor for a very long period of time. This was one of the first things viewers notice about this mysterious Asian woman that she slept in abnormal ways, often either on the floor without a mattress or even sitting up

in her computer chair and did so at seemingly random times of the day, often for periods of more than 12 hours at a time. Those who frequented the 4chan webcam thread quickly became fascinated with her. One user even did enough research on her to find a wordpress blog that they discovered was actually written by the woman shown on the webcam, having matched up certain details of her life such as the appearance of her apartment, her sleeping habits and other such details. This in turn led them to several other blogs, apparently written by the same woman which detailed some incredibly dark thoughts she seemed to harbor. The woman claimed that she had been implanted with a kind of top secret

mind control weapon which had been inserted into her body in the cartilage just three centimeters away from her left ankle bone. She also claimed that another microchip that had been implanted under her left eyebrow. This is apparently what led 4chan users to christen her with the name she is synonymous with today, Chip-chan. Soon, even more disturbing details began to emerge. Chip Chan asserted that she was being held hostage by a corrupt police officer known only by the codename of P. In an attempt to prove this, she used various streaming sites to live stream her apartment on a daily basis, and has now been doing so for more than a decade. She does this by using a multitude of webcams set up

throughout her apartment, which is filled with signs written in Korean. These are webcams which she is very obviously aware of as she has been known to move them around or adjust them from time to time. The streams are accompanied by an audio clip where she in her own voice informs the viewer about P, the mind control weapon and her situation, and many of the handwritten signs also inform the viewer of her particularly terrifying and unique situation. So we can conclude that she set these up herself, and they are unlikely to be a method by which the mysterious P is watching Chip Chan exclusively. She claimed that this mysterious P figure was also to use the micro

trip in order to keep her confined in her apartment, as the micro trip gave him the ability to render her unconscious at any time. She also told viewers that the micro trip, which she specifically calls a very chip, allows authorities to activate certain thought patterns in her brain, as well as giving them the ability to see through her eyes as chip chan has often horrifyingly stated chip chan has made it explicitly clear that she does not try to contact the police and has no intention of doing so for fear that the corrupt police officer p will find out and have her killed she also has expressed that she needs her live livestream viewers to help her deal

with P by spreading the word and contacting a man named Park Sang-man, who is apparently the company director of Samsung Card, South Korea's largest credit card company. Chip Chan has a rather unkempt appearance, and her apartment is extremely disorganized. She also appears to be in very poor health and it is evident from her extremely lethargic lifestyle that her health is suffering. Add that to the fact that she has outbreaks of skin rashes and often appears on webcam with wounds of unknown origin, which she regularly uploads pictures and videos of. She claims to have no idea where these wounds have come from, but suggests that they were

related to the mind control devices inserted in her body. Since it is evident that she has been living this highly unusual and worrying way since at least 1999, viewers have often expressed concern for her mental health and general well-being. She is known to have responded to viewers via mail and comments on her blogs, but refuses to communicate via the chat functions on her streams. In each correspondence, Chip Chan makes it clear that there is nothing wrong with her, and that the shadowy corrupt police officer P is entirely to blame for her situation. Further research has revealed that Chip Chan's real name is in fact Park Jae-on, and that she is a resident of Seoul, South Korea.

Researchers were baffled by the fact that Chip Chan is somehow able to do nothing but surf the web, livestream, and sleep all day without any obvious income stream. But one correspondent claimed to have communicated with Chip Chan, asking after her find-out situation. She told him that she did not have a job, and was obviously unable to apply for or keep one due to financial situation. She told them that she did not have a job and was obviously unable to apply for or keep one due to her situation. However, she also told them that she was financially independent thanks to a large inheritance left to her by her parents when they died. Several theories have emerged from around the internet

speculating on exactly why Chip Chan is engaging in such bizarre and disturbing behavior. But the most commonly believed theory is that Chip Chan is suffering from a variety of mental illnesses. Many have pointed out that her behavior displays many symptoms of paranoia and paranoid schizophrenia. These include her paranoid delusions that almost anyone and everyone is acting in ways designed to cause her suffering. There is also the fact that she has become increasingly withdrawn from her family and friends, alienating them with accusations that they are part of P's network of informants, a common trait of paranoid schizophrenia. Chip-Chan's declining health is also a common symptom of paranoid delusion,

since her mental state seems to have deteriorated to the point that she avoids any kind of self-grooming or self-care. However, criticism of such a theory is rife given that in general, paranoid schizophrenics do not enjoy being washed in the least bit, and often go into hiding or seclude themselves to alleviate their suffering. Therefore, it would be highly unusual that a sufferer of such a mental illness would go about installing webcams all over their living space or opt to stream their lives in such a detailed, consistent way. People have also suggested that Chip Chan is suffering from narcolepsy and that this is why she has such odd sleeping patterns and why she sleeps in such odd positions. For example, Chip Chan has been known to fall asleep lying on her back with her feet elevated on a nearby office chair. This would make circulation to her feet difficult and would cause painful pins and needles which would in all likelihood

wake her up. Yet, she still sleeps for more than 12 hours at a time. Chip Chan also complains that she does not dream, which is also a symptom of narcolepsy, since the condition interferes with the REM cycle required for dreams to occur. However, this theory has been ruled out by experts who are quick to point out that people suffering from narcolepsy only tend to fall asleep for very brief periods of time, usually only minutes, while Chip Chan is able to sleep for unusually long amounts of time. As of now, it is still unclear just why Chip-Chan is doing the things she does and due to her unwillingness to seek any practical, tangible help, we may never know just what is

going on inside her head. But one thing is clear, she obviously has a passionate belief in her own mistreatment at the hands of authority figures to the point that she would allow her health and well-being to degenerate to dangerously low levels. It is entirely possible that someday soon, a user may tune into Chip Chan's stream to see her lying in one of those characteristically unusual positions. They will assume that she is sleeping, just like many have become accustomed to believing when, in fact, she has passed away, and the truth of her existence may well remain a mystery forever. On November 10th, 2014, YouTuber Kenny Veach set off on his last hike. He'd informed some close relatives that he was going on a short overnight trip into the desert near Area 51,

but it was one from which he would never return. Yet Kenny was hardly an inexperienced desert hiker or spelunker and had ventured into the arid, dry deserts of Nevada many times before. He claimed to have hiked solo across mountaintops that many people would have never dared to attempt and had lost count of the number of caves that he had explored. But there was one particular cave that had terrified the veteran explorer. It was during an additional visit to that particular subterranean cavern that he disappeared without a trace. As I've stated, Kenny was no amateur. He had been hiking and caving for 20 plus years, having encountered all sorts of life-threatening dangers on his travels, from sheer cliffs and animal traps to

rattlesnakes and freezing conditions. Kenny had faced some of the most terrifying threats the world of nature has to offer. But he always made it back, he always got himself out of whatever jam he was in. He might have returned beat up and exhausted from his trips but only once was he ever forced to call for help, in an incident in which he'd hurt his leg on a mountaintop and was forced to call in a helicopter rescue. So it is well documented that he had an excellent safety record and was in no way reckless or foolish. One day while Kenny was out exploring the desert near Nellis Air Force Base, he came across a cave system with an entrance shaped like a perfect capital M. Kenny entered every cave he came across and naturally he was even more curious about this one given its unusual shape. But on his approach, he found a strange feeling taking

over his body, a bizarre vibrating feeling that shook him to his bones. The closer he got to the cave's entrance the more intense this feeling became until it was so strong that he became intensely terrified, fleeing the area without even attempting to explore it. He posted a YouTube video under the username SnakeBiteMcGee, which was titled, Son of an Area 51 Technician. This video detailing the events, telling his viewers that it was by far the strangest experience that he had ever had whilst out hiking in the desert and so began one of Nevada's most peculiar and puzzling urban legends obviously the video sparked a huge amount of interest from his subscribers a multitude of users enthusiastically encouraged Kenny

to return to the cave to properly explore it and to properly document its appearance and location as to provide proper evidence of his strange and terrifying discovery. Naturally, he obliged them. On this second trip to the M-shaped cave, Kenny armed himself with a 9mm pistol along with a video camera so that he might show his subscribers exactly what he'd seen. However, much to the disappointment and skepticism of the YouTube community, Kenny couldn't seem to be able to retrace his steps to the cave's location. Some called him out as having lied about what he'd seen, calling him a fraud and a fabricator. However, in the video itself,

Kenny is visibly shaken that he can't seem to locate what he'd easily stumbled across during his previous visit. His experience with hiking and navigation meant that he'd have no trouble finding it again if he wished to do so and we can understand why people might think that that made him a liar. But Kenny insisted that it was like his mind was playing tricks on him and rebuked any who accused him of having made the story up. To save face, Kenny vowed to go back out into the desert a third time in order to prove he was not simply lying about the whole thing. This seemed to satisfy the

doubters and reassure his regular viewers, all except one. No, do not go back there. If you find that cave entrance, do not go in. You won't get out, read one user's comments on the video posted. Other commenters asked them exactly what they meant by the plea, imploring them to share what knowledge they had of the cave that would cause them to leave such a stark warning, and the user never replied. Even in spite of the warning, Kenny was undeterred. He was determined to prove that he was not a liar, determined to prove that his hiking and navigating skills weren't slipping. At some point, he posted a comment telling his

viewers that he was making a third trip to the Mojave, one of the hottest and driest regions on the planet, in order to finally relocate the cave and to explore it. He told viewers that, although he was not taking his video camera for mobility's sake, he would be making a detailed record of the cave's location so that he and his subscribers could easily find the M-Cave for themselves, for the sake of making their own judgments. Viewers awaited his return with bated breath, thrilled at the prospect of more information on a place that could well be connected with nearby Area 51, or at least have some kind of extraterrestrial or paranormal significance. Since Kenny would be making an overnight trip, they knew that they would have to wait until the following day

for a new post from their favorite desert explorer. But the day came and nothing was posted. Then another day went by and still nothing was posted on Kenny's YouTube channel regarding the M Cave. Eventually, concerned viewers alerted local authorities that Kenny might well be in some danger and after the mandatory 72 hour period, Kenny Veach was officially listed as a missing person and the search for him began. On the 22nd of November 2014, search and rescue volunteers found Kenny's cell phone lying in the dirt at the entrance to an abandoned mine shaft. This was the same mine shaft featured during the video entitled, M Cave Hike.

Kenny's second trip into the desert in which he filmed himself being unable to locate the cave entrance, much to his own anxious confusion. The search and rescue volunteers superficially explored the bottom of the shaft but could not find Kenny or his body. Yet, there was no other trail leading from the cave that would indicate that Kenny had headed off in any other direction. To the volunteers, it seemed like he had just straight up disappeared, plucked from the face of the earth by some unknown, unseen force. Additional rescue teams were called in from surrounding areas, and on the advice of Kenny's girlfriend and sometime hiking partner, they found his truck in its usual parking spot.

But again, Kenny was nowhere to be found, and any trails they found went cold near the abandoned mine shaft. Kenny's sudden disappearance fueled all manner of conspiracy theories which speculated on his fate. Some insisted that Kenny had fallen down the mineshaft, even in spite of the search and rescue team's insistence that there was no corpses to be found down there. Others asserted that Kenny had found a hidden entrance to Area 51 or had come across some kind of military secret that led to him being detained by the US military. While more outlandish theories abounded that the End Cave was some kind of extraterrestrial structure

and that Kenny had either been abducted or killed by visitors from other worlds, it is most likely that Kenny simply fell victim to the elements, went a bridge too far in his search for the truth, and had died of dehydration or heart stroke. But if that was the case, there is very little doubt that his body would not be found and recovered by the search and rescue teams, who at one point used a helicopter to scour the area for any signs of him. But a post from Kenny's girlfriend in the months that followed his disappearance might

shed a little more light on what became of him. She mentioned that her boyfriend had been battling with depression for many years by that point, and that he may well have gone out into the desert one last time to end his own life. At least, that's the only logical explanation she could think of. Yet as much as we can rely on her for an insight into his personality, it ties into our previous point that surely someone somewhere would have found his body. We might never learn the truth of Kenny Veach's fate, but if we can learn anything from his disappearance, it's that it would be extremely unwise to go looking for that M-shaped cave. Back in 2002, a Scottish man named Gary McKinnon was living and working in London as a systems administrator for a large software company.

He was a quiet man and suffered from several depressive illnesses including Asperger's syndrome. But despite this, Gary was very very good at his job and proved to be a valuable asset to his employees. Yet Gary McKinnon was busy working on other things too. Things that led to a knock on his door on the 19th of March 2002. It was the police. Gary was arrested and interviewed under caution and it was after this interview that his computer was seized by the British authorities. He was interviewed again on the 8th of August, only this time by the United Kingdom's National High Tech Crimes Unit. The charges against Gary McKinnon were massive. He has been accused of hacking into almost 100 United States military

and NASA workers over a 13-month period between February of 2001 and the time of his arrest. By using a simple dial-up connection at the house of his girlfriend's aunt in London and using the name hacker's pseudonym Solo, Gary shut down the United States Army's Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for more than 24 hours. However, what really drew the ire of the U.S. military was that in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in New York City, McKinnon erased weapons logs at the Earl Naval Weapons Station in New Jersey, rendering hundreds of U.S. military computers inoperable. This effectively paralyzed munitions supply deliveries for the U.S. Navy's Atlantic fleet

and was said to have caused almost a million dollars in damages. McKinnon was also accused of copying top-secret data, account files, and passwords onto his own computer over in London. McKinnon had admitted that he obtained unauthorized access to computer systems in the United States, but has since stated that his reason for doing so are not what the U.S. authorities made them to be. After a meeting at the Washington Press Club on the 9th of May 2001, he had told a gathering of journalists that his motivation for hacking into the military's computer systems was to find and expose evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, anti-gravity technology, and the suppression of what is known as free energy.

The free energy theory is the idea that technologically viable, pollution-free, no-cost energy sources are being suppressed by government, corporations, or advocacy groups. Devices allegedly suppressed include perpetual motion machines, cold fusion generators, Taurus-based generators, reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology, and other low-cost energy sources, the application of which could change human civilization as we know it. McKinnon believed the fact that the United States had come down so heavily on him seeking his extradition was evidence enough that such technology existed,

and was being kept secret to keep humanity in a permanent state of essentially being wage slaves. If extradited to the US and charged, McKinnon would have faced up to 70 years in jail, and could have possibly been sent to Guantanamo Bay to live out his sentence. In an interview televised on the BBC's Click program, McKinnon stated that he believed wholeheartedly in a group known as the Disclosure Project. He told an interview that they were made up of some extremely credible, high-profile individuals who all confirmed that UFO technology had been obtained and put to use by secretive divisions of the U.S. military. He referred to the Roswell incident of 1947, asserting that the United States had indeed

acquired and reverse-engineered alien technology and used it to develop anti-gravity technology along with devices that produced safe, clean, and infinite amounts of raw energy. McKinnon also stated that he had taken the advice of a NASA photographic expert and investigated the databanks of the Johnson Space Center's Building 8. There he had found evidence that images were being regularly cleansed of evidence which proved the existence of an alien spacecraft. There were multiple copies of some photographs, some of which showed bizarrely shaped aircrafts

and other identical photos in which such aircraft had been scrubbed from the images. He said he was sure that such aircraft was definitely nothing that humanity were capable of producing. Even using the most advanced technology, claiming to have seen bizarre, cigar-shaped crafts floating above the northern hemisphere. The only reason he did not use screen capture programs to record these images was because he claimed to be so awestruck with what he was seeing that he simply forgot to do so. By the time he thought to do so, his invasive presence on their servers had been detected, and he was forced to sever his connection to the databanks.

In October of 2012, acting British Home Secretary Theresa May announced to Parliament that McKinnon's extradition to the US had been blocked, saying that the Director of Public Prosecutions would determine whether McKinnon should face the trial before a British court. Then just a few months later, then Director of Public Prosecutions and current Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer announced that McKinnon would not be prosecuted in the United Kingdom because of the difficulties involved in bringing a case against him when all of the

relevant evidence was in the United States. Essentially, Gary McKinnon was off the hook. But the question remains, was McKinnon telling the truth about what he'd seen whilst hacking into top secret US government computer files, or was it all a cover for the very real crimes of his cyberattacks on the American military?

Regardless, statements by McKinnon sound alarmingly specific and detailed, and it would take an extremely imaginative fantasist to have come up with such stories. Not to mention that the extremely harsh punishment sought out by the United States justice system only lends weight to the idea that he most definitely saw things that they didn't want any other living soul to see. We may never know the truth of the matter and we can only continue to speculate at the wider conspiracy at work. I've been a gamer for as long as I can remember. If we define art as producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power, then surely by this point in time, video games are actual works of art. Maybe not so much back in the days of Doom 93 or Mortal power, then surely by this point in time video games are actual works of art. Maybe not so much back in the days of Doom 93 or Mortal Kombat, when the only visceral reaction to

be had was when Scorpion pulled a dude's spine out along with his skull. But try telling anyone who rolled a silent tear at the end of Red Dead Redemption 2 that the almost 60 hour emotional rollercoaster they just went through wasn't a work of art. Yep, you can't. Not only because art is entirely subjective, with the beauty being squarely in the eyes of the beholder, but because the work itself fits in perfectly with the agreed upon definition of the word. Like many gaming aficionados, I had a great deal of affection for what I refer to as the undiscovered gems of the video game world. Games that were just too bizarre or obscure to make it into anyone's

radar. The kinds of adventures that were pure labors of love, created by some neckbeard genius still living in mom's basement. I even got hold of a copy of The Legendary Polybius, writing an in-depth review of the video game turned urban legend for my website. That is before I had to take the entire thing offline. You see, in my search for the most twisted, disturbing horror game imaginable, I found something quite different but nevertheless terrifying. Something which crossed the boundaries of imagination and into reality itself. So one way I'd find games to review was to trawl the depths of online forums, forums like Reddit. I'd peruse comment sections, make my own query posts, anything I could to find the strangest, most disturbing video games imaginable.

I had a good run for a while, but it wasn't long before I was really scraping the barrel for things to review. I was getting desperate, and right when I thought I'd be without review one week, I got a direct message from an anonymous account. To cut to the chase, the message stated that there was an old MMO, a massive multiplayer online game, that I might be well interested in. The public servers for this game were long dead, but apparently there was a private server which a small group of dedicated enthusiasts still regularly visited. The message sent from a throwaway account stated that the author would be extremely grateful for any further information regarding the occupants of the private server. According to them, they'd had a friend that had somehow gotten access to the server before seemingly disappearing entirely from their online spaces. Emails, Steam, and Discord accounts for this person had been completely deleted and

the person had even gone so far as to stop answering their phone before it was disconnected completely. I had to be completely honest here. I didn't believe a word of the message. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is, and I applied this exact line of logic to the message's contents. If I could put the work in, the review might end up being the best I'd ever created, but to have it just pop up in my inbox seemed way too easy. So I asked the sender if he minded having a brief Skype conversation so I could make a few notes on necessary details. If he sounded disingenuous or if I heard laughter in the background, I'd know it was an elaborate prank. Only, it wasn't.

When I finally got the guy on the phone, he was so genuine it almost scared me. He was extremely worried for his missing friend and told me the whole saga. When I finally got the guy on the phone, he was so genuine it almost scared me. He was extremely worried for his missing friend and told me the whole saga. The police had done a welfare check and declared him fine, even though he was living alone and barely venturing out of the house. When he traveled across state lines to visit the guy, he refused to see him. I suggested hiring a private investigator if he was truly concerned for his friend's safety, but he replied that he couldn't afford it, hence why he was turning to me.

The more we talked, the more I was hooked into the guy's story. One of the sort of trick questions I asked him was if he believed there were any supernatural elements at play. He sounded almost offended at the inquiry, batting it away as if he'd grown frustrated at people doubting his story. It was around then that I realized that I had no other option than to investigate. My first task was to download the game itself. This was easy enough, and I actually managed to get a hold of a pirated copy, obviously free of charge from a torrent site. The secret world billed itself as a massively multiplayer online role-playing video game set in a modern-day real world under attack from occult forces, nothing out of the ordinary so far. But accessing the private server was another issue

entirely. It could only be done by entering the server number into the game's command code. The guy I had spoken to had given me the number itself, but had been unable to access it himself because he didn't know the passcode. Again, I took to Reddit to try to find the passcode. When Reddit failed to yield an answer, I tried Tumblr, but that too led to nothing. I ended up posting on a few different sites, including my own, inquiring if anyone knew the password or had any way on working it out or hacking through it. And that's when I received his message in my professional Gmail account. Avoided by all, but feared not by the brave. Yet without me, there'd be no one to save. Doers of evil have plenty to give. However without me you'd struggle

to live. A riddle. Someone had sent a freaking riddle and yes I was kind of freaked out to see it appear in my inbox. It took me a little while to work out exactly what the answer was but I shuddered when I did. Pain. The answer to the riddle was pain. And I know it was the correct answer because when I plugged that four letter word into the command line in the game when prompted for a password, the screen went black and one word appeared on my screen. Loading. I was practically shivering with anticipation by the time the server loaded in but when it did, it appeared there was absolutely nothing special about it at all. As far as I could tell, it was completely empty. No replies, no other voices, no sign of any activity whatsoever. Just as I was about to give up on the whole thing and log out, a voice emanating from my

headset almost made me jump out of my skin. I turned my character around to find another standing behind me and, after taking a deep breath, gave him the friendliest greeting I could muster. He totally ignored it. How did you get in here? The voice asked. I'm not quite sure. I lied. I was looking for a full server and just kind of came across this one. There was no response from the avatar this time and I got the strong impression they knew I was lying. Follow me, the voice said. And so I did. I followed the digital character through empty streets and alleyways until we reached the very edge of the map space.

I was led up to two lone trees, the bark pale and white. They looked more like bones than plant life. Stay close, the voice told me, and began to walk between the true trees. Suddenly the voice's character disappeared. I called out after him but again got no reply. Whoever it was was just screwing with me, that much was clear. How wrong I was. I walked through the gap in the trees and found my screen turned black. Slowly, light returned and I found myself standing in an underground chamber filled with many other game characters. I was asked by the same voice as before. I stand among them and repeat every

word he said. I just did as I was told. I was in too much amazement that there seemed to be an actual cult here operating in a private server on a long dead MMO. I am the lamb, the voice said. I repeated it word for word. I am the lamb. I am the blood. Again, I repeated the words. You are the blade. It took me a second, but I echoed his words. Louder, the voice ordered. I knew this was not for me to repeat, it was a command, so I said it louder. But again and again, the voice demanded I say the words louder until in the end I was practically screaming you are the blade down my headset. That's when I heard something else entirely. It was a sound I'd heard before on elementary school field trips to petting zoos many times over.

It was the bleeding of a lamb. He is the lamb. He is the lamb. He is the lamb. All the other voices seemed to chant in unison, but as they did, the soft bleeding became more and more distressed, until the poor thing was practically screaming over the microphone before it began to choke and gargle. I'm almost certain I could hear the cutting, slicing sounds of a knife cutting through flesh meat. That was when I lost

it. I shouted something along the lines of, what are you people doing? What is this place? Down my mic, backing my character up so I could look at all of them. But not once did they cease their chanting. About the same time I could hear something dripping coming from one of the other users. I was hammering Alt F4 as fast as I could, trying to just end the program so I could get out of there. But that's not where the story ends. As soon as I had time to compose myself, I tried Skyping the guy who'd been in touch with me about his missing friend. I had no idea how I'd break the news to him that what was going on in that server was anything but healthy or natural, but I knew I had to. His friend's mental health or even his life was at stake and the sooner he knew, the better. But when I tried calling, there was no connection.

The user's contact information wasn't even my contacts anymore. Either they blocked me or had deleted their entire Skype account for some reason. Now I was really freaked out. Had these people gotten to the guy who called me? Had they somehow managed to silence him and were about to pursue me now instead? Or, and I was filled with dread as the thoughts occurred to me, he was part of that group the whole time. That there was no missing friend. How it was just a ruse to get me in that server and make me say all that freaky stuff to begin with. The reddit account that had sent me the pain riddle was also deleted. Could it have just been the same guy, leading me down the garden path and making me think it was all out on my own,

when in reality it was all just part of a sick plan. Thoughts like that fried my head for days until I was finally able to sit down, compose myself, and write out a few thousand words describing the experiences I'd had. My usual readers were fascinated by my account although a fair few tried to call me out on making the whole thing up for clicks. According to them if I didn't have screenshots or a recording of the whole thing it didn't happen. I assured them it had, that I was just too taken aback by the whole thing to remember to run a screen capture program or take any screenshots. I actually ended up editing the post to say that, no matter if people believe me or not,

they were under no circumstances to try to access the servers themselves. Not long after I received a three-word email. Take it down. The words had a picture file attached, one that was just a straight-up Google Earth street view of my own apartment complex. So I did. I took the post down. Not only that, but I deleted my website along with the hundreds of time-consuming reviews I put so much work into, all gone in a few clicks

of a mouse. I try to do the same with my online presence in general, creating whole new email and social media accounts with absolutely no clue as to who they belong to. That seemed to stop the harassment and thank god no one ever vandalized my property or tried to ambush me outside my home. Although I sometimes get a feeling that someone or a group of people have been to visit once or twice just to make sure they know where they can find me. I suppose this whole thing is intended as a warning. I open with saying that video games have evolved from something very simple into something very very complicated and deep. That their purpose has changed over the years, sometimes in ways we can't fully understand. Many aspects of human

criminality have moved online such as the Silk Road, so why would it not be the same thing for the occult? And even if they do worship something ridiculous and archaic, something that isn't really real, that mightn't even matter. Because what was real was the sick, skin-crawling feeling I felt when I realized that they really were torturing and killing animals together, even if it was via meetings in cyberspace and not in some deep, dark woodland somewhere at some grisly sacrificial altar. Stay safe, everyone. Especially when you're online. Note that I said girl who plays video games and not bloody gamer girl since that term seems to be now irrevocably associated with dirty bathwater and a twitch thought turned scam artist.

That's just one of the things you get. Others just assume you're trash at the game because of what's between your legs. The only time I ever get any real respect from guys is when I prove I'm actually good at the game we're playing. Not that all guys are like that, I'd actually say that most don't really care that I'm a girl, but when it gets bad, it gets really bad. And sometimes, that's all it takes to ruin the experience for me completely. But there was one incident that occurred while I was playing online that put me off gaming entirely for quite a while. This is the story of Twi'lek Zane. I met Twi'lek Zane one night on Sea of Thieves. For those that don't know, Sea of Thieves is an awesome multiplayer game

where a crew of two to four players take control of their very own pirate ship. I was a huge fan of the Disney Pirates franchise when I was a kid, still am I suppose, so the idea of a game like that was hugely appealing to me. I had a lot of fun on Sea of Thieves, for a while anyway, until one night I found myself on a ship with a crew member called Twi'lek Zane. Zane, as we'll call him, was nice at first. He seemed a little surprised to find himself sailing with a real life girl, but a lot of people are and just get over it pretty quickly. Zane seemed like one of those

guys. Kind of quiet, but perfectly nice otherwise. He kind of faded into the background for the most part, being overshadowed by much louder, more extroverted crew members that ran around showing off their pet parrots and playing their musical instruments. At one point, after fighting a ship full of skeleton pirates, I needed to regenerate some health. So I go below deck to our little food barrel and pick out a few pineapples to nom on to get myself back to full strength. I made a remark to the guys about eating all the ship's pineapples and how it was making me hungry in real life. They asked what my favorite food was and my reply is probably in line with like 80% of people everywhere. Pizza, I told them.

This sparked off a little debate on ship when one of the crew threw the question out there. How do you feel about pineapple on pizza? Now unlike most of civilized society, I actually kind of liked Hawaiian pizza. I just can't resist the whole sweet and salty thing that it has going on. But when I tell them that, this sparks off something of a mutiny. The two louder crew members start laughing and one even jumped off the ship, saying he refused to sail with someone who liked pineapple and pizza. It was funny, sure.

We had a few laughs. All the while, Twi'lek Zane stayed quiet, not saying a word as we had our little bit of banter. About 45 minutes go by and I'm getting hungrier and hungrier, so I tell the guys I'm about to jump off to go make some food and that I'd be back on afterward. Then I hear my doorbell. Luckily my flatmate was home so I didn't have to worry about rushing off to answer it.

So I don't really take much notice of the exchange I can hear through my bedroom door but I did start to take notice when I heard my flatmate's footsteps coming up the stairs to my room. As she opens the door I slide off my headphones and there stands my roommate with a pizza box in her hands. It was a godsend to trust my BFF to just know when I was hungry, or at least that's what I thought. I was so hungry that I actually cut her off and asked her if I could have a slice of her pizza as I was absolutely ravenous. She looks confused, then says she was about to ask me the same thing. I'm beyond confused at this point, so I ask the guys on Sea of Thieves to hold on a minute.

I mute my mic, then turn back to my friend. My jaw's on the floor by the time she's finished talking. The pizza delivery wasn't for her at all. It was for me. What's more, it had been paid for and the topping was, you guessed it, ham and pineapple. I felt sick. I told my friend she could have it that I wasn't feeling very hungry anymore. In a confused voice, she thanks me and turns to leave but asks me if I'm feeling okay before she shuts the door.

I just lie, straight up lie and tell her I'm fine, just a bit under the weather I suppose. When she shuts the door I get right back on the PC. It was horrible. I found myself asking a question that I already knew the answer to. Did one of you guys order me food? The first two louder sailors said no with one actually laughing at what seemed like such a bizarre question. But Twi'lek Zane was silent. His character just stood still on deck, quietly watching and listening as the situation unfolded. And then he spoke up. Enjoy.

Is all he said. I freaked out. I pulled the ethernet cable out of the back of my computer so hard the connection snapped off and remained in the slot. But it was severed. And that's all that mattered. But it was way too late and that was the worst thing of all. There was no way for me to know just how much information Zane had acquired just from using my Microsoft ID and IP address. If he managed to work out my home address, what other information had he been able to dredge

up? The only comfort I could possibly take in the whole thing was that because of his accent, I knew he was North American. But that didn't rule out the possibility that he was either living or studying in the UK and was actually much, much closer than I first thought. I barely slept the week that followed. Nightmares came every single night. Nightmares in which I'd wake up to a figure standing over my bed, a crooked smile twisting their lips before they pounced. I'd wake up crying, bedsheets soaked in a cold sweat with my roommate rushing into my room to see if I was okay. In the end I told them everything and they drove me down to the police station immediately.

There I spoke to an internet safety officer who was overloaded with cases just like mine, but all they could do was tell me to block the person in question, to possibly avoid the same game as them, but generally to carry on as normal. Basically, there was absolutely nothing they could do. And that's what's so scary, that maybe the internet will never be a safe place for girls like me. No matter what we do, there will always be people whose predatory attitudes seem to override all normal human feeling. I'm a headphone connoisseur. Always have been, always will be. I also play a fair amount of online video games too, ones where it's pretty crucial to have clean, crisp audio.

In games where you're reliant on hearing other players' footsteps, having that kind of audio quality gives you a real edge over other players. That's why I had my heart set on a Bose A20 aviation headset. They were without a doubt the best gaming headphones on the market and at a $999.99 set price point just shy of $1000, they took a lot of work to afford. I had to work 10 months at a local gas station including weekends saving just a few bucks each time until I could finally afford them. But when the delivery guy finally dropped them off and I carefully unboxed them and plugged them into my iPhone for a music test, I discovered they were well worth

the wait. The depth and range they produced were absolutely phenomenal. I heard songs in ways that I'd never heard them before, but most importantly, I couldn't wait to see how they improved my gaming performance. A few hours later, a buddy of mine and I were playing a game called Hunt Showdown. Apologize for the tangent, but it's an absolutely terrifying experience. Set in the swamps of post-Civil War Louisiana, the game has all kinds of monsters to hunt and take bounties from, but not without a little competition from other players. There's heavy emphasis on stealth, sneaking up on other monsters before mercilessly dispatching them and robbing them of their prize. Hence why I was so excited at using such high quality audio gear. I was certain it'd give me

and my buddy a crucial edge. I was only partially right. The quality of the headphones just made the game all the more terrifying. I could hear every little footstep, every creak of a door opening or a rifle reloading. At one point I was about to ask my buddy if he'd opened a door in the place we were hiding out. I turned in time to see a figure in black holding a fire axe above his head. Rory, I screamed down the mic as a sickening crunch of the axe impacting with his skull echoed around my ears. It was intense, seriously intense, and it was every bit as amazing as I imagined it could be. So obviously we spent hours hammering round after round and not once did I take the things off.

Usually after a few hours wearing a pair of headphones can get kind of uncomfortable but these things had foam padding on all kinds of places, ergonomically designed not to cause any kind of discomfort. I swear I could have worn those things all night, just plugging the wireless connector into the phone, TV, laptop, anything and everything. I was actually kind of disappointed when it came to the end of the night and my buddy logged off to sleep. I stayed up for a few hours testing out each game I had and seeing how the new headset enhanced the audio and not once was I disappointed. I remember finally logging out and taking the headset off before checking my phone. I had like 4 or 5 missed calls from an unknown number, and my phone wasn't even on silent. It had been ringing and vibrating over on my coffee table at multiple times throughout the evening,

and not once had I heard so much as a peep from it. That was seriously impressive, and I knew that every penny spent on that headset would be worth it. Only that's about the time my phone buzzed again, the same unknown number text popping up on the screen. It was the sheriff's department and on the other end of the line, a female deputy was asking me if I had been home that night. My first thought was to wonder just how they'd gotten my number, but I guess the cops just have access to that kind of info. But I answered the lady's question, told her sure, I've been home all night. That answer seemed to confuse her quite a bit. All night? She asked again, and again I reiterate that yes, I've been home all night.

When I ask her why she was calling, she just answers a question with a question. We've had deputies hammering on your apartment door for the last four hours and you didn't hear us. Not even once? Then it hit me. I'd had my new headset on. Not only that, the volume was way up on them. Not an usual thing I do, but like I said, I was testing them out. I sighed before I started on my long-winded explanation as to why I hadn't heard them calling.

I felt kind of dumb having not heard them and actually wondered if I'd been in danger at any point, totally oblivious to the home invader attempting to break in, all while I'm just sitting there, gaming, in total ignorance. Only when I asked what had happened, it was worse than I ever could have imagined. There had indeed been a break in, only it obviously wasn't my apartment, it was the one above. A guy had busted into the apartment of the girl that lived there with the intention of robbing her. According to the cops, she resisted, tried to fight the guy off but hadn't gone well for her, not in the least bit. The home invader had tortured her at first,

trying to get her to confess where she had money or jewelry hidden. When it turned out she didn't have any, he beat her to death in frustration. This whole thing had happened without me hearing so much as an iota of noise from above. I'd been sat there happily playing PC games and someone had been getting murdered above me. If only I'd taken them off for five minutes, if only I'd stopped fawning over them for a little while, that girl might still be alive. It took me a while to get over it. I moved out of that apartment and back into my parents' house, at least until I could find a new place to live. I also sold the headset too, not losing too much money in the process, but sometimes I feel like I'd have been happy to throw those things in a lake, even if I did work the better part of a year to be able to

afford them. What makes it all the worse is that it wasn't some random accident. My greed, my own selfishness, that's what killed that girl. That scumbag psychopath might have been the one that murdered her, but I was the one that nailed her coffin shut. Shut. In 2017, just three days after Christmas, a group of young American men are playing a new Call of Duty game set during World War II. The young men were using a website known as UMG, or Unorganized Management Gaming, in order to organize matches in which there were bets placed. Obviously, whenever money is on the line, even if it is relatively small amounts,

intensity and competitiveness go into overdrive, and this is no different when it comes to video games. Two of these gamers, named Casey Viner and Shane Gaskell, were playing together on the same team when an incident of friendly fire occurred. Due to confusion, frustration, or both, one of the players ended up accidentally eliminating their own teammate for the proceedings. This meant that each man would each lose $1.50 that had been placed as a wager. In a distinctly unsportsmanlike follow-up, the two players took to Twitter and began to argue amongst themselves, each blaming the other for the lost match.

This is about the time that Casey Viner threatened to SWAT Shane Gaskell. SWATing is a criminal harassment tactic of deceiving an emergency service into sending a police and emergency service response team to another person's address. This is triggered by false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency, such as a bomb threat or murder or hostage situation, or a false report of a mental health emergency, such as reporting the person is allegedly trying to end their own life or someone else and may or may not be harmed. The term derives from the law enforcement unit SWAT, Special Weapons and Tactics, a specialized type of police unit in

many countries carrying military-style equipment such as door-breaching weapons, submachine guns, automatic rifles, and sniper rifles. A threat may result in the evacuation of schools and businesses or sometimes even graver consequences. Like many of you, Shane Gaskell was very familiar with the concept of swatting as a phenomenon with an almost decade-long history. He was never about to give away his actual address, but he also didn't quite believe that Casey Viner had it in him to commit such a destructive, irresponsible act, so he simply called his bluff. Gaskell gave Viner an address in Wichita, Kansas that had an element of truth to it, since it was the residence that a Gaskell family member had previously called home, 1033 West McCormick Street. As it turns out,

Gaskell was right. Viner did not have the mental faculties to SWAT his one-time teammate, but he knew someone would. Tyler Raj Barris was 25 years old and technically homeless at the time of the incident. He was known throughout online gaming communities as SWATistic, a portmantle of the acronym SWAT and the word autistic. But Barris was also known to law enforcement for quite another reason, as he had once served 16 months in the LA County Jail for making false bomb threats against local TV stations, elementary schools, and middle schools throughout the greater LA area. He was wanted by police in Florida for calling approximately 30 other bomb threats, and also wanted up in Canada on fraud and mischief charges,

as well as online harassment of a woman in Calgary. Using a system known as voice over IP, Barris was able to use the free wifi provided by a South Los Angeles library to call the Wichita Police Department. This is a crucial piece of information in what unfolded, given that the voice over IP technique used by Barris meant that the call would be transferred from Southern LA to Wichita City Hall. Meaning that, from the perspective of the dispatcher in question, the call appeared to be coming from the city of Wichita itself. There was absolutely no reason to suspect the call's authenticity as there may have been if it was evident that the call came from California.

Barris, identifying himself as Brian and claiming he was calling from 1033 West McCormick Street, went on to tell the dispatcher that he had fatally shot his father and was holding family members at gunpoint. He asked if police were coming to the house, saying he had already poured gasoline all over the house and was threatening to set it on fire. Over a thousand miles away in Wichita, local police officers scrambled into action. It is unclear why the city's actual SWAT team wasn't called into action, but the most likely explanation is that given the seemingly urgent nature of Barris' call, senior officials made the call to simply get to the scene as quickly as was physically possible.

Any later and the fictional Brian might set about burning his own family alive. And so a handful of police officers were not SWAT team members and therefore untrained for tactical situations or hostage rescues, responded to Barris' call and surrounded the house at 1033 West McCormick Street. Meanwhile, in the house, 28-year-old father of two, Andrew Finch, was going about his evening as normal. The Finch family were no strangers to tragedy as, just a few years prior, Andrew's sister had died suddenly in a horrific car accident that had left Andrew as guardian of her teenage daughter. That might seem like enough heartbreak to last a lifetime, but that night, tragedy would once again visit itself upon the Finch family. Andrew, the man of the house, always took his role as his niece's guardian very

seriously and, upon hearing a noise outside in the street, went out to investigate. To his utter shock, he was greeted by red and blue flashing lights, unable to see the men who screamed at him to show them his hands. One can only imagine the terror and confusion experienced by Andrew Finch that night, the contradictive emotions of knowing those heavily armed cops were screaming at him, yet knowing full well that he hadn't done anything remotely illegal. However, Finch knew the only rational thing to do in that situation would indeed be to comply with the officer's demands and raise his empty hands calmly and slowly. Yet for some unknown

reason, Finch didn't throw his arms up all the way. It's likely that he was turning to tell the other members of his family to stay indoors Since it was already an obviously tense and dangerous situation But this would prove a fatal mistake as police officers later stated that his movement Appeared to mimic that of retrieving a firearm from a hip holster A single shot was fired from a police issue AR-15 assault rifle One which pierced Andrew Finch's heart and right lung. He collapsed right there on the porch, a steady flow of blood pumping from the hole in his chest. Finch's traumatized family members were forced to step over his bleeding body as the police

ordered them out of the house. Andrew Finch was driven to Via Christi Hospital St. Francis, but was pronounced dead on arrival. To the attending officers, they had done their job almost perfectly, defusing a dangerous hostage situation in mere seconds and rescuing all vulnerable parties. But that could not have been further from the truth. As police questioned Finch's family members down at the station, the truth began to come out. In the aftermath of the shooting, outraged Wichita residents used the opportunity of a city council meeting on January 9th to voice concerns on the subject. They questioned the release of only seven seconds of the police body cam footage and argued that the city should assume full responsibility to avoid a lengthy struggle by the Finch family for justice. The council did not comment directly, but indicated a willingness to consider training procedures at a later time. Nearly a week later, Andrew Finch's mother Lisa wrote to the Wichita

mayor and police chief stating that she did not know where her son's body was being kept and that she wanted to give him a proper funeral service and burial. Please let me see my son's lifeless body, she wrote in a letter dated January 3rd. In the same letter, Mrs. Finch asked why the police officer who killed her son had not at the time been identified, why the family was handcuffed in the immediate aftermath, and when police will return their belongings including two cell phones and a computer seized from the house. The family attorney, Andrew M. Stroth, has also called for the city, police department, and officer involved in the shooting to be held liable for the unjustified shooting of Andrew Finch. On December 29th, just a day after the Wichita swatting incident,

Tyler Raj Barris was arrested in Los Angeles on a fugitive warrant stemming from a 2015 charge of making false bomb threats to KABC, a local TV station. He was then charged with false alarm, which happens to be a federal offense. In the investigation that followed, it was discovered that Barris was responsible for potentially hundreds of swatting incidents all over the country. It wasn't long before investigators discovered a connection between him and the Wichita swatting incident. Communication channels were opened between the California and Kansas state governments, and on January 12th, 2018, Barris was extradited to Kansas where he was charged with involuntary manslaughter and was held in Sedgwick County Jail. As the extent of Barris' criminal activity was being unearthed, investigators turned their attention to the

police officer who fired the fatal shot, Justin Rapp, a seven-year veteran of the force was identified as the officer who had killed Andrew Finch. Attending court in May of 2018, Officer Rapp testified that he had been given absolutely no information when he arrived at the scene, including when Finch was given his records request pertaining to the 911 call, stating the police department had asked that no more records be released. It was clear that, despite firing the shot that killed Andrew Finch, Justin Rapp was simply doing his job. If the hostage situation had been a genuine one in which Finch was indeed threatening to kill his family, Rapp would have legitimately been a hero. It was only because of malicious intent on the part of a complete stranger that the shooting even occurred in the first place. As a result of these testimonies, the Sedgwick

County District Attorney Mark Bennett has announced that no charge would be brought against Officer Justin Rapp. On May 23, 2018, Tyler Barris, Casey Viner, and Shane Gaskell were indicted in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas on charges related to the swatting. Viner was charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to make false hoax reports, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. In April 2019, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Then, more than a year later in September 2019, he received a 15-month prison sentence in addition to two years probation, during which time he would be banned from playing video games. Gaskell was charged with obstruction of justice, wire fraud, and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

However, in July of 2018, as his trial unfolded, a horrifying revelation was revealed to the court when it was announced that Gaskell had encouraged Barris to try again. Apparently completely undeterred by the death of Andrew Finch on the night of the 28th of December, Gaskell gloated that he had not been successfully swatted. This could easily have caused yet more deaths in what was a pathetically petty war of words between two man-children. Gaskell's case was originally scheduled to go to trial April 23rd, 2019. If convicted on all charges, he was facing over 60 years in prison. In September 2019, it was reported that Gaskell struck a deal for deferred prosecution that could allow the charges against him to be dropped. For the previous two defendants, the charges only

really reflected their involvement in the Wichita swatting incident, but for Barris, the arrest led to his entire criminal past coming back to haunt him. He was charged with false information and hoaxes, cyber-stalking resulting in death, making threats of death or damage to property by fire, interstate threats, conspiracy to make false reports, and wire fraud. However, on October 26th, 2018, a whopping 46 additional charges against Barris were added, which included financial fraud and fake threats of bombs and shootings made to police and schools. Some of these charges included unindicted co-conspirators residing in Illinois, Florida, Michigan, and Missouri. Just two weeks later, on November 3rd, he pled guilty to 51 federal charges.

Under the terms of his plea agreement, Barris has also been required to formally apologize to Finch's family and pay $10,100 in fines and restitution and has agreed to five years of supervised release. On March 29th, 2019, Barris was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The sentence includes 150 months imprisonment for the Kansas case and 90 months imprisonment for the federal charges in California to be served consecutively, and 30 months in prison for the Washington, D.C. bomb threats to be served concurrently. No officer was charged with a crime for the event, but the tragedy didn't end there. On the 9th of January 2019, Adelita Finch, the daughter of Andrew Finch's deceased sister who entered her uncle's guardianship after her mother's death,

shot herself in a South Wichita apartment. Andrew's mother, Lisa Finch, said she blames her granddaughters taking her life attempt on the events of that fateful December evening when Andrew was shot to death by Wichita police. Because Adelina was made to step over his dying body and she had to hear him breathe, Lisa Finch said, and she's been going downhill ever since. She didn't know how to handle it. She had internalized everything. If somebody even mentions Andy's name, she withdraws and walks out of the room. She's not been able to deal with it.

I guess this was the way she was dealing with it. Adelina Finch had been a certified nursing assistant and wanted to get more education to become a registered nurse. But thanks to the trauma inflicted by Tyler Barris and others involved in the swatting incident, her aspirations would never be realized. Numerous pieces of legislation have been passed in recent years to prevent such incidents from ever occurring again. Some police departments have gone as far as training their dispatchers to be able to recognize hoax calls and the kind of people likely to attempt them. Yet passing laws has never been able to suppress the desire or ingenuity of people who simply want to hurt their fellow man. The most terrifying day of my life began early one morning in 2015. I don't want to give away too many details. I don't want the person at fault here to be able to gain any satisfaction from this retelling,

so I apologize if I seem overly vague when it comes to describing people or places. It all started one afternoon when I decided to unwind after work with some video games. I live with my brother, who finishes his daily shift a few hours after I do. It was his console, so from about 3.30 to 6pm every day, I can actually have that thing to myself without the danger of him claiming it back to play Call of Duty, which he obsesses over. Driving games where more of my things still are I suppose. I'm a real gearhead and it was my dream to live out on the California coast, so I guess you can call it escapism. That and the idea of beefing with people over voice chat just didn't appeal to me. But as I came to learn, sometimes it's simply unavoidable. So I'm winning round after round of this particular game when I start getting griefing messages from some salty moron.

They weren't happy that I was using a setup that they called OP and demanded I change my settings to see if I was skilled enough driver as I thought I was. I sent him back a lull, told him no, and carried on playing. Next round finishes and this time a flurry of messages start pinging their way towards me at an astonishing rate. I don't know if this guy was using a USB keyboard or whatever but the grief came thick and fast. At the time I just thought it was funny how anyone could get so irate over something as small as a video game was beyond me. So as you can imagine I just sent a few messages back telling the guy how pathetic I thought he was being. Then the guy just rage quit or at least I figured he had. He wasn't in the game anymore and from

what I could tell he was either offline or had blocked me but he did send one final message before he did. You deserve what's about to happen. Rest in pieces. I have to admit this did creep me out a little. Although I was mainly worried about him like hacking the console or something. Like I said it was my brother's and he would not be happy if someone screwed up his sessions. However a few hours go by there's no problem with the internet connection or the console so I figured the guy was just full of hot air and was just trying to scare me. And I just sort of forgot about the whole thing. I remember briefly telling my brother about it when he got home and he thought the whole thing was funny but other than

that yeah it just didn't register with me. We had dinner, watched a little tv, shared some beers and then went to bed, the usual routine. The next thing I remember was being shaken awake by my brother. There was no light coming through the cracks in the curtains so I had no idea what time of night it was. But as I'm slowly rousing myself from a deep dreamless sleep, the fear I heard in his voice had my heart going from zero to sixty. Wake up, there's people trying to break in, he hissed. When I looked, I saw he had his pistol in his hand. He was deadly serious. This was no dumb prank and I could see from the look in his eyes that our lives might actually be in danger. Everything was kind of a blur after that.

He hadn't called the cops yet. He'd rushed into my room right after he'd grabbed his gun, so that was the first thing I did. I grabbed my phone and immediately called 911. It's in the middle of explaining to the dispatcher that we were in the middle of a home invasion that I heard my brother scream something about the guys outside being armed. They had to send me into overdrive. I was pleading with the woman on the other end of the line to send help but when I told her our street address she seemed to get all cagey right when I was panicking the most she asked me to hold the line instead of reassuring me something, anything to let me know the help was on the way she literally said, hold the line please sir

and then silence silence until I heard the shots five of them to be exact something that's completely burned in my memory the distinct pop pop pop pop pop that I described to the police over and over again then there was screaming my brother barking at the invaders outside. He'd shot at one of them and his aim had been true. There was more screaming too. My sister-in-law was hiding somewhere in the house and was wailing with panic now that the shots had been fired. I was so scared I just ran to my closet, crouched down and shut the door. I tried to keep as low as possible while staying on the line with the dispatcher but each second seemed to drag itself out into an eternity as all I could do was wait and listen.

Then I heard the words that made my jaw drop and had me hanging off the phone immediately. This is the police. Put down your weapons and surrender to the officers immediately. Not exactly what was said but I won't reveal exactly that because they use my real name. I remember seeing my brother on the stoop outside, his hands held high in the air as a few extremely bright lights illuminated and blinded him. I was convinced they were going to kill him. I mean, the shots he'd fired, the ones I thought were aimed at some violent intruder, he'd shot at the freaking cops. Not just shot at them either, he hit one, I know he did, a bunch of times too. As far as I was concerned at the time, he'd killed a cop and how was he not dead himself?

They arrested my sister-in-law and I and took us down to the station. I had no idea what was about to unfold. I was convinced my brother was about to get life in prison for killing a cop. But the truth of the matter and how that situation ended was something I never could have expected. We came to find out that my brother was facing absolutely no charges. None. He had fired at a cop and I was right. Had in fact hit them, but was still facing no charges. It was all because of that video game I'd been playing. The salty guy who was messaging me had somehow found out my IP,

then used that to pin down my social media details, which he then used to find out my address. Then, he waited until the following morning to SWAT us, which he did so with horrifying efficiency. Long story short, because the cops hadn't followed protocol and announced themselves properly, my brother had no idea it was them, hence why he opened fire in the first place. The cop he shot was wearing a state-of-the-art bulletproof vest, military style, with armor plates. Each round hit the plate, so other than some bad bruising, the cop was able to walk away. That night was probably the worst experience of my life, but I still play video games. Whoever it was that almost ruined our lives will never have the satisfaction of thinking he had put me off gaming. I still play, every night almost,

and I will continue to do so as long as I'm able. This happened not long ago. I'm 15 going on 16. I live in New York City and have had some strange late night experiences before but none as disturbing as this one. My parents were out of town. It was a summer night. I was at a pretty large party. There was quite a lot of drinking and smoking which is expected at a party with a bunch of 14 to like 20 year olds. I'm pretty tall for my age, like 6'1 and I have a pretty deep voice so I easily pass as older. I knew that I had to get home on my own so I tried to regulate the amounts of drink that I had. At around maybe 2 or 3am, I realized that I should start heading home. It was a Friday and I didn't have anything to do

the next morning but still I was tired and figured most people would be leaving soon anyway. For those of you that don't know, New York City's transit system runs 24-7, 7 days a week so I wouldn't have any problems hopping on a train even at 3am to get home. The party was in Far Rockaway in Queens and I live in an apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan so I had a pretty long ride to get home. I wasn't worried though, I was no stranger to long commutes on the subway. I would take the train everywhere I went since I was like 9 or 10. I headed over to the Far Rockaway Mott Avenue train station and sat on one of the benches.

There's a screen that says what time the train will be coming and this late at night it would be a while. After maybe 10 or 15 minutes of waiting the screen showed A train Inwood 207th street 20 minutes. I waited for a while longer until I saw the headlights of the train coming down the tracks. The train arrived but since this was the first stop I had to wait about another 10 minutes until it would actually leave the station. I got on and a few people exited leaving the car empty. I sat all the way at the end of the car so I wouldn't be next to anyone if anyone else got on. At this point I was really really tired and felt like I was about to just pass out right

there. So I did. For those of you that don't know, New York City subway cars are rectangular with three doors on each long side which open at the stations and one door on each short side where people can walk through from other cars. I woke up a little while later to the sound of one of the short side doors close to me opening. A man who appeared to be homeless walked in and the smell immediately hit me like a truck. I remember him having raggy clothes and tangled hair. He looked at me. Hey brother, you got a dollar?

Uh, nah man, sorry. I responded. Come on man, I know you got something. He insisted, smiling for some reason. Not for real, I don't, I'm sorry. I didn't have any singles, just a few twenties, and I wasn't about to give this guy $20. He just stood there for a few seconds and said, Alright, whatever.

And walked away, still smiling. Now this didn't strike me as weird at all, not yet at least. I've been living in New York my whole life and I'd gotten used to all the homeless people on the subway and them asking for money. It didn't bother me. I looked out at the stop I was at. I was just in Brooklyn. The A train ran local at night so my ride would be longer than usual. I figured I still had a pretty long way to before I got to the 42nd street Manhattan where I would transfer to the Q train

that brought me to the station near my apartment. So I went back to sleep. When I woke up again I was in downtown Manhattan, I think like West 4th or 14th street. I was getting close to my stop. I looked around and the train wasn't empty anymore. There was a guy sitting on the other end of the train with his headphones on and in the middle of the car there was a guy sitting there head down muttering to himself. I was pretty sure it was the same guy that had asked me for money before. I thought that was a little weird but I wasn't nervous or anything, I just figured he had some sort of mental illness or something. After a little while I arrived at the 42nd street station. The guy was still there and when I got off the train he must have been going in a similar direction as me because he got up and off the train also. Now 42nd street station

is huge and I needed to go all the way to the other side of the station to get from the A train side on 8th Avenue to get to where the Q train was on 7th Avenue. Walking through the huge station, specifically the passage that takes you from one side to the other, I'll admit was a little creepy. It was eerily quiet for a place that usually is packed with so many people during the daytime. The only other people around now were late night workers and homeless people. I arrived on the side where the queue train would be going uptown towards my stop. When I got to the platform there were only maybe 3 or 4 other people that I saw waiting for the train like I was. I walked over to the benches and sat down to wait. I looked up and saw that there was a guy a little further down the platform on the side from where I came from

standing there muttering to himself like having a full on conversation with nobody. I couldn't make out his face from where I was sitting but I was sure it had to be the same homeless guy that I'd seen on the A train. Now I was getting a little suspicious. Was he following me? The train arrived after a few minutes and I got on. I'd only have a few stops from where I was to my apartment, so there was no point in trying to sleep. The man boarded the same car as me and I could see clearly now it was him, the same guy. There wasn't anybody else in the car at the moment.

I wasn't entirely nervous but at the same time I was definitely on edge now. I tried not to look at him to avoid eye contact. He was still mumbling to himself and now I could pick up on some things he was saying. Random phrases like, Should I? Maybe. Help me. When I got to my stop I promptly got up and got off the train. Honestly, at this point, I wasn't even surprised when the man got off too, still talking

to himself. The station was completely empty. It was 4 going on 5am by now. I walked through the station up the stairs toward the exit ignoring the man who was definitely following me. When I got to the street level I started walking faster towards my apartment. The station was on 72nd street. I still had to walk a few blocks further up to get to my apartment. I looked back a few times to see the man, still behind me, speaking pretty loudly now. I was honestly more annoyed than scared at this point. Maybe it was the tiredness, maybe it was the little bit of liquid courage left in me, but I was seriously done with this guy's stuff, so I stopped walking, turned around and said, hey, can I help you? I just want some money. I know you got some.

Listen, I don't. Leave me alone or I'm calling the cops. He said something about how I don't know all the stuff that he's been through and then just walked in the other direction, still muttering angry slurs under his breath to himself. I continued home, shaken but too tired to think about what happened at this point. I got to my apartment and went to bed. The next morning, my friend who lives in the same building as me called me and asked if I'd heard about what

happened last night. I hadn't told anyone about the incident yet so I said I didn't know what he was talking about and he explained. Apparently a neighbor in our apartment building who was coming back from an early morning jog or something called the police because there was a man lying outside the doors to our apartment. As he was arrested he was yelling and screaming resisting arrest yelling stuff about how his life was horrible and how he was waiting to kill that person last night that didn't have the heart to hand over any money to him. I assume the guy that he was referring to was the guy that I had encountered last night

and the guy that he was talking about was me. And he must have followed me all the way to my apartment which, given how tired I was, must have not been that hard to do without me noticing. Who knows what would have happened if the police didn't take him away. The man was obviously seriously ill and I do hope that he gets the help he needs. All I can say to you all is be safe when you're alone at night. Especially in the city, always watch your back. This all begins back in December of 2014 and ended around December of 2018. I'll include as much detail as I can remember and will also change the names of people since events and stories like this are often met with doubt or ridicule. In 2014, my pregnant wife, our son, my wife's niece, whom we gained temporary custody of for a year so she could finish high school,

her son and I all moved to an area close to where I grew up in Central Texas. It was a growing suburb with good schools and a good community that was located close to where I was working. To the east is a large safe city and to every other direction is ranching land, hill country, and old creeks. We found a house to rent in a subdivision that started being built in the late 90s and finished around 2010 that had a nice creek running through it. It was once a Texas ranger fort before the Civil War. There were many skirmishes that occurred in this area between the rangers and natives, some of them are pretty well known if you know the history of the area. There were a few locations a few miles away where the natives massacred settlers traveling between towns in the early to mid-1800s. Also, there is a location not too far from where they found remains of a 14,000 or so year old Neanderthal, which at the time was one of the oldest ever found in this region.

I guess I'm saying this is old and has some history. Anyway, after the Civil War started, the Texas Rangers abandoned the fort and it was almost immediately set on fire by the natives. We rented this house during the summer. There was nothing special about it. It was one of possibly ten home models, what were built in that section of the subdivision. Every house had two trees in the front yard, a two-car driveway, and around 20 feet of HOA-approved grass between each house. We lived so close to the elementary school that we could hear the bell for school every day.

One afternoon, I wanted to show everyone the areas I remembered growing up. We drove by the house I grew up in, my old high school, and a few other areas I remembered running around in, causing the same minor trouble you did growing up in what was once a small town of 2000. We passed the old burnt down house that was said to be haunted by the meth heads that everyone talked about but no one ever saw, the woods that was said to have giant shadow dogs running around at night, and finally the cemetery that the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre opening scene was shot at. Our niece was fascinated with the cemetery because even though that area was built up, you could still tell it was most likely filmed there. Since she liked it so much, I thought I'd give her a

scare by driving everyone by the old cemetery on the other side of the town. It was a private cemetery that was located off of one of the FM roads and said to have some of the settlers that were killed by the natives there. This place probably hasn't had any new arrivals in about 70 years. It was getting dark by the time we got there so I decided to pull off the road to try and shine my lights on it so everyone could see. As soon as I did, I felt off, like I shouldn't have been there. The area was in the middle of a drought and because of that all the ground had massive cracks in it. Some of the markers and headstones had fallen over and the ones that were still standing were leaning over pretty bad.

The picket fence surrounding the markers were barely standing and discolored and even though no one did maintenance on the ground, it looked like the grass wasn't wild. Instead it was oddly bare compared to the surrounding area with only a few tufts of tall weeds scattered about. Just then the sun set behind the cedar and oak trees that covered the horizon. That looks creepy, my wife said jokingly. Yeah, with the way the headlights hit the rocks over there, it looks like dolls sitting on the ground. I said, trying to scare our niece. Only when I looked harder, there were old dolls sitting upright in the middle of the cemetery. Old sun-bleached dolls. They could

have been there for a few days or a few months. It had been so hot and dry in that area for so long you couldn't tell. Everyone in the car got quiet, just staring and trying to figure out if we should laugh or be freaked out. The wind blew a little and something caught my eye. There was a lone dead tree off in the distance. This tree was an old post oak about 40 feet tall, completely bare of leaves. Originally what I thought were branches, small branches, were actually what looked like chicken bones hanging, a lot of them. And yes, there were dolls hanging too. Alright, who wants to get some snow cones? I said as cheerfully as I could in an attempt to disrupt everyone's gaze before they saw what I did. The mood quickly changed as our son, our niece, and her son all hollered, me! And just

like that, everyone put our previous stop in the back of their minds as they went through all the different flavors that they wanted on their snow cones. About a week later our son, who was about six at the time, started telling us he was seeing shadows in the halls and eyes looking down at him from the AC vents in the house. Our niece started complaining of shadows in the house and a feeling like she was being watched while her son, who was two, would walk, point to walls, and start jabbering to them, then would suddenly get upset and start crying. My wife and I never saw, felt, or experienced anything, and didn't really think much about it other than it was a new house for us, and the kids did like to watch scary movies. One night I had to go drive past the old cemetery for one reason or another. While passing it, I thought I saw a deer out of the corner of my eye.

I immediately slowed down except it wasn't a deer. It was some kind of large shadow that moved across the tree line and smoothly into the cemetery then vanished. Well then, I said to myself in disbelief. This is where it all began for me. On the way home I felt like I was being followed. I kept looking in all my mirrors, taking side streets, going through subdivisions, going through parking lots, but there were no cars following me. I jumped on the toll road and floored it, turned around, got back on it and went home. When I got home the kids were watching a movie and my wife was in the kitchen making herself a hot cheeto sour pickle covered in kool-aid with lime

juice and a warhead in the middle. Yeah, I don't get it either but she was about 4 months pregnant at the time and finally started the show. I rubbed her belly and gave her a kiss and told her I was going to lay down for a few minutes. It was dark but still only about 8.45, 3-4 hours before everyone went to bed on a weekend. At the time, we had a headboard that had curved decorative steel bars spaced about 18 inches apart so you could see and touch the wall and if you reached far enough, you could feel the carpet on the floor. I was laying down on my stomach, trying to clear my mind and had just closed my eyes when I had this feeling of dread. After about 10 minutes of this I finally opened my eyes expecting to see the wall.

What I saw instead I will never forget. It was a face grinning back at me from less than six inches away. It had red and black skin, no hair, black eyes, and bright yellow teeth. Imagine a mix between Darth Maul from Star Wars Episode I and the demon from Insidious. My brain said, stay calm, don't show fear. But my mouth said, F this. My mind started screaming, get out of here, but with every ounce of self-restraint I could muster up, I rolled out of bed, turned my back to this thing I just saw, and walked away down the hall and back into the living room. I thought you were going to lay down for a while, my wife said with a sour look on her face as she took a bite from the sour science

experiment that was on her plate. Yeah, I think I'm going to lay down in here instead. I thought I saw something. I replied calmly, trying not to freak out my family. I don't know how I did it. I've been in combat situations and different scenarios where my life and lives of people around me were on the line, and I don't think I've ever felt more physical and emotional fear than I did in those 10 seconds. Not only did I see what at that time felt like the pure incarnation of evil, but it was in my house where my pregnant wife slept, where my son played, where my niece's son liked to hide. This thing was in my house, and it was playing games with us. Over the next week or so, things were getting worse. I was having nightmares and hearing footsteps in the house.

My son was having night terrors, and our niece couldn't fall asleep and her son was always crying. I was new to my section and had recently changed jobs when I re-enlisted, so it was a new situation for me and I worked along many civilian contractors. Most of them were retired sergeants major, a few of them were lower enlisted guys that just happened to be at the right place at the right time for a job opening when their contract was up. Mrs. Z was somewhere in between. She was one of the only contractors I spoke to regularly so when I came into work one Monday looking like something was wrong, she asked me if everything was okay. I was trying to test how she would respond. My son is saying he's seeing shadows in the house and it's keeping him up at night. Last night was a rough night. I said, really? Is your house haunted? She said

totally serious. Boom, question answered. I looked around. Well, I proceeded to tell her everything that had happened. She explained to me that her family were strong Catholics and from Brazil. Her mother was able to sense things, could see auras, and could end up giving me some tips that might be helpful. Well, nothing helped. Then finally she said her family was going to South Texas to see some friends this coming weekend and while they were there they were going to stop by this miracle church to pick up some holy water and would pick some up for me as well. That next Monday could not come fast enough. At work she handed me the holy water. I looked at it. It was in an old Osarko water bottle. Odd but who am I to say what type of container such a gift should be held in.

She told me what to do. Put it in a spray bottle. Spray every corner of every room of the house, every closet, bathroom, pantry, up high and down low. Spray above every door and every window, every AC vent. Do this all while saying this Bible verse. Start in the front rooms of the house, leave the back door open, and slowly work your way to the back door so anything in there is front rooms of the house, leave the back door open, and slowly work your way to the back door so anything in there is forced to leave the house. She handed me a slip of paper. I looked at it and it read, Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me. Fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of their shield and buckler and stand up for mine help draw out also the spear and stop

the way against them that persecute me say unto my soul I am thy salvation let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devised my hurt let them be as chaff before the wind, and let the angel of the Lord persecute them. For without cause have they hid from me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged from my soul. Let destruction come upon him at unawareness. Let his net that he hath hid catch himself

in that very destruction, let him fall, and my soul shall be joyful in the Lord, it shall rejoice in his salvation. After you are finished, keep it in your wallet for as long as you can, so it will always be with you, she said with a smile. As soon as I got home I did exactly as she said twice. That evening, there was a noticeable change in the house. Everyone was laughing and having a good time in a way we haven't had in months. When it was time for bed, no one had any complaints and all the kids went to bed without any problems, including myself. I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to talk, unable to move.

I was completely paralyzed. I don't know if it was from fear or sleep paralysis. Something was in my room. I could sense it. I could feel its hate towards me, feeling ice cold like death while burning up from the pure disgust. It was watching me, and it was angry. You know how I said seeing that demon thing was the most frightened I'd ever been? No. This. This is it. I could feel my death. I could feel the hatred this thing had for me. I was fighting to move, fighting to tilt my head, even a bit so I could at least look at what was going to end my life. Then suddenly I remembered. My pregnant wife and the little baby girl that was growing in her belly were laying right next to me.

I stopped fighting it. What if it moved and woke her up? What if her being asleep is the only thing that is keeping her from experiencing the fear I'm feeling? What if her sleeping happily right next to me is what is keeping her from experiencing the fear I'm feeling? What if her sleeping happily right next to me is what is keeping her safe? What if I wake her up and it kills all three of us? I accepted my fate. If me dying silently in the night means she is safe, fine. So I closed my eyes, I relaxed, and started praying. God, please protect my wife and children. Please let me fall back asleep. Please keep them safe. If I die tonight, please let me die in my sleep. I must have said it a thousand times in my head. I wake up to my alarm going off. I made it. I'm alive. I lean over to look at my wife and suddenly her eyes pop open. I gotta pee. And she hobbles quickly to the bathroom. I get ready for work and that was the last I ever saw the demon creature but it isn't the end.

Over the next three years my beautiful daughter was born. My wife started working again. I got a promotion and everything was going amazing. Then I developed heart problems. Pericarditis at first. Then I was diagnosed with Brugadus Syndrome, which is very serious. The doctor said that I could drop dead at any moment and it's amazing you haven't already. Thanks, doc. A month later, I had a defibrillator implanted in my chest and 8 months later, I was medically discharged from the military. I was 27. Our niece and her son moved out. Then in June of 2017 my sister passed away from a

seizure suddenly. She had some serious medical problems but was working through them and for the first time in a few years had a positive outlook on life, making plans for the future and was back to being the beautiful person she'd always had been. It hit the family hard. One night in August 2017, I was unable to sleep. My new job had me working nights so on my days off I'd go to sleep at around 3am. My wife was already in bed. I went to lay down but kept hearing noises, creaks, chirps and what sounded like footsteps. You know, the kind of stuff you write off as the house setting, the wind blowing outside, or the AC kicking on or off. I kept my eyes closed mainly to not alarm myself and try to force myself to fall asleep. Then I got this feeling that something

was in my room. It wasn't like the feeling I had previously. I was just uncomfortable, like something was off. I opened my eyes and as soon as I did, a shadow bolted around the corner in my room. I thought it was my wife. Babe? You okay? My daughter moved around in her crib a little and looked over to her only to see my wife asleep next to me. This happened a few more times, but things were starting up again, slowly. It started with my oldest son sleepwalking. He had never done it before.

We would wake up with him staring at a wall in our bedroom. It completely frightened my wife for the first time, and I'm not going to lie that I thought he was possessed or something the first time. He was just standing there in the corner of the room, breathing hard, and would quietly say, Ha, ha, ha. Really creepy. But after the third or fourth time we found him doing that,

or found him walking around the house, we would just gently guide him back to his room and everything would be okay. He never remembered it in the morning. Then about three months later the sleepwalking stopped. I kept hearing the footsteps though. Light bulbs would go out faster than usual. Different rooms of the house would always be extreme temperatures. One room would be uncomfortably warm while another room that was along the same exterior wall would be really cold.

The insulation in the attic seemed to be the same. There were no outside factors like a tree blocking one room and not the other and the AC vents were never clogged or bent. My wife would mention all of these things to me but she never really wanted to discuss anything that was going on. It freaked her out but she didn't want anyone to know how badly. Whenever I would talk to her about it, she would just nod her head and agree with any situation I thought would fix or explain it. She did ask to place crosses above the exterior doors in each room, and that's about it. One night, my wife took the kids to one of her friends' houses about an hour away, which left me alone. This doesn't happen often at all, especially at night. I'm used to kids running around, babies crying, dogs running into things,

and barking at squirrels that constantly pester him outside the window. So I use this opportunity to, as any parent could, sleep. I like to sleep in the living room on the couch. Something about my back being to the wall and the center of the house. My wife doesn't understand it, but this is my time. She isn't here to pester me and try to convince me to sleep in the empty bed while she's away. So I turn on Netflix, put on a Planet Earth documentary, and slowly drift asleep to the narrator's calm voice and whale mating calls or something like that. I'm suddenly awoken by a loud

scream. I look towards the TV. Netflix is already in its are you still there mode. I look at the clock a little after 3am. Did I scream in my sleep and wake myself up? I jump up. If it wasn't me, that means there is someone outside my house, again. I forgot to mention, we have had a problem recently with high school kids throwing parties like they do, getting busted by the cops, and running away through people's backyards trying to get away. Annoying, but nothing too major, we've all been there before. Just be prepared to get yelled at if anyone catches you. There was also a break-in on the other side of the neighborhood a few weeks prior and these events were unrelated. I jump up to get my gun I have hidden away in a drop-down shelf behind the couch, a recent purchase that I was quite happy with.

I run to the door, look through the peephole, see no one is there so I open the door. I walk around the outside of the house as quietly as possible. I don't want to startle my neighbors, they already don't like me too much because of my new work hours. The wind blows and my dog goes absolutely crazy inside the house. I take off, adrenaline pumping like crazy. I thought for sure someone was inside the house. The door had closed slightly so I shoulder it. It flung open. Nothing. I was fully expecting someone to be in my house. Instead I see my dog slowly raise his head and look at me like I disturbed his sleep. Then turn his head and go back to sleep. I checked every room in the house. Under, every bed, moved all the clothes hanging in every closet, everything. The house was empty and I

was unable to fall back asleep until my family got back the next morning. Everything got quiet again after that. My wife had our youngest son, June of 2018. In December of 2018 I began going through confirmation classes through the Catholic Church and this is when things started happening again. The footsteps, shadows, all of it. I would hear scratching on the exterior door about four times a week. Whenever I got up to look out the peephole, there would be no one there. My father-in-law had a job near where we lived and instead of staying in a hotel, he said that he would pay us what his company gave him for a hotel if he could stay with us. We thought that was a good idea. He said that he would pay us what his company gave him for a hotel if he could stay with us. We thought that was a good idea. He quickly began to see things. Shadows. He said

he is seeing shadows pass by his door. What looks like a person walking past the bathroom door when he is shaving. He started hearing footsteps walking down the hall to the room he was staying in. He jokingly asked me about it and I gave him a brief rundown of what had happened over the past few years without giving in to too much detail. He said he believed me and that he had never felt anger or just annoyance from whatever it was. One night while I was working, my oldest son had his friend over. I get a call at around 11pm from him crying his eyes out and barely understandable. My wife grabs the phone. Hey, you get that? What? No, what happened? Is he okay? He said he saw

your sister in the hallway. I started to tear up. My oldest son and my sister were very close. She worked in a comic book store which hosted different card game tournaments and even got opening night tickets to many of the new Marvel and DC movies that were coming out. What more could a boy want in an aunt? What? My sister? What do you mean? She handed the phone back to him. Dad, I saw her. She was just standing there. A wave of emotion came over me, followed by a wave of questions. What did she look like? Was she happy? Sad? Did she move at all? How did you feel when you saw her? These were all the questions I could think of. What I would tell my family to do next depended solely on the answers to these questions.

She looked happy, his ten year old voice broke a little. She smiled and waved at me. I felt happy when I saw her, he finally said. Good, she just wanted to let you know that she was doing okay and she missed you. I said, trying to calm him down. If it was anything else, I would have come home and we would have stayed in a hotel for the night. It's been about eight months since that happened. Since then, nothing creepy has happened in my house.

Absolutely everything stopped. I am thoroughly convinced that my sister made everything leave and that was her way of letting everyone know that my family was safe. I told one person about my story. They wanted to know more about the first time I felt the demon in my room and I felt I was going to die. They tried to relate to it my heart problems. A symptom of Brugada syndrome is a racing heart like 300 beats per minute which causes blood to not flow properly to my brain which leads to blacking out. Without immediate medical treatment the person will die within minutes. They said that experience could be the result of being awoken because my heart was literally about to beat out of my chest and everything else was my brain trying to

understand what was happening. I don't know, not ruling it out, but the doctors said that if my heart begins to show the symptoms there is literally 0% chance of pulling out of it without getting resuscitated. The scream I heard when I was alone may have been someone outside when I went to check they may have tried to come inside only to be met by my intimidating 40 pound Brittany Spaniel. Not very likely since I could have possibly seen them run away from the house and my dog is lazy but not lazy enough to fall back asleep immediately after barking at a potential intruder. Those are all the explanations I could come up with. We move out of the house in a few months to a new construction on a few acres out in the country.

Hopefully nothing follows us or nothing is already there. Angry people are disturbing their final resting place. My sister has already saved my family once, I don't want her to have to do it again. And now here I am, in a newly built house at 1am. It's June 2020 and three days ago the lights on my daughter's room turned off. I was in the room next to my now almost five years old daughter, my wife was in the kitchen, my youngest son was asleep and my oldest was playing Xbox in the playroom. I say this because there is no way someone could have turned the lights off without me seeing them. I even heard the click of the switch. My daughter's been terrified of her room since we moved in. We thought it was because her room is far away from us and big but now that all

of this has happened again, I'm starting to question things. It made me sit down and think about all the times I thought I felt things touch my arms or legs and just blew it off thinking it was a muscle spasm or twitch of the skin. Sometimes I see shadows out of the corner of my eye. That got me thinking about the first time I thought I saw a ghost, how I felt there was evil in my childhood house, the times I almost died, the times I should have died. Recently, my oldest son told me a story about walking around in the storm drains of the old neighborhood, which led me to conclude what him and his friends saw was a skinwalker. I'll post those stories if this one goes well,

possibly a few of my friends from overseas stories as well, and answer questions if you have them. Thank you for reading. Like all women, I have a fair amount of creepy experiences with men. I have a whole host of stories I could tell here, but one of my more memorable stories happened when I have a whole host of stories I could tell here, but one of my more memorable stories happened when I was a student. For context, I went to university in France and spent a few months doing an internship in Paris where this encounter took place. I was only 20 years old and so,

it being a Friday night, I was on my way to meet some friends at a restaurant. The apartment I was living in was in close proximity to a couple of metro stops and the line I needed was a few blocks away on a pretty busy street. When I was only a block from the stop, a guy looking to be about my age suddenly approached me, asking me if I knew where the metro stop was. I indicated the large yellow M glowing above the stop on the corner and thought that would be the end of our conversation. Instead, he fell into step with me, explaining that he wasn't from the city and didn't know the train lines too well. I said it was no problem and he gave me a funny look as he asked, you aren't from here are you? Hmm, I thought. He was right. French is my second language and although I've spoken it from a young age, I still have an accent on a few words. Normally I don't mind having an accent or people

remarking that I'm not French, but when a guy you just met on the street one night comments on it, it can make you a little uneasy. I confirmed though that I wasn't French and we actually ended up having a decent conversation as we walked to the metro stop, down the stairs and through the turnstiles. During that first and what would turn out to be our only conversation, he seemed nice enough and didn't set off any red flags. I told him where I was from and what I was studying and he told me that he was in the city visiting some friends. We ended up getting on the same train, though even then I questioned whether he was actually going the same way as me or not, and kept talking until my stop.

Right before I got off the train, he asked for my numbers so that we could meet up sometime, and in a move completely out of character for me, as is talking to strangers, I did. Big mistake. He texted me that Sunday, asking if I wanted to meet up on Wednesday. I agreed, but then he asked if we could meet at Châtelet. For anyone who doesn't know, Châtelet is an enormous metro stop near the center of Paris. Several metro lines run through it, as do other trains that go out of the city proper. It also connects to a huge shopping mall.

When he asked this, I started to feel uneasy. My intuition told me that there was something wrong with wanting to meet up in a place that had so many ways in and out, a place where if you got on a certain train or were forced to do so, no one could find you. My mind tends to jump to worst case scenarios, but my gut is never wrong. In any case, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt as he supposedly didn't know the city that well so I told him that Chatelet was pretty big and it might be hard to find each other in there. I suggested meeting up at the bookstore in the connected mall, still a public place but less hectic, but he didn't seem to like the idea and stopped replying to my messages.

The next day, Monday, I was on my way to a meeting with my boss when my phone buzzed and I saw it was a text message from him. Can you call me now? Another message came in. Or can I call you? My intuition spoke up again in the back of my mind, telling me that something still wasn't right. I replied, I'm going into a meeting right now, let me get back to you. With that, I turned my phone all the way off and didn't turn it back on again until after the meeting was over and I was on the bus home an hour and a half later. Turning it back on, I almost dropped it as it started to buzz uncontrollably with several dozen text messages loading simultaneously.

I only scanned them, there being so many, but they seemed to range from proposing that we meet at a friend's house on Wednesday night, to why won't you answer, where the F are you, followed by a number of missed call notifications all from his number. My intuition was doing more than pinging at this point so when his number popped up on the screen again I turned the phone off again until I reached my apartment. Once again I dare turn it back on and saw even more missed texts and calls from him. Pretty spooked at this point I shoved the phone back into my purse and made dinner not even looking at the phone until well after I had eaten. Once I could stomach it, I took the phone out of my purse.

I felt a shiver go up my spine as I saw that he had called me no less than 16 times and that his text messages had become more and more vulgar before ending with a final, Fine. I guess this isn't working out. Maybe I'll see you again. Goodbye. I've never blocked a number so fast in my life and immediately called my mom. I could barely hold the phone again though this time it was because I was shaking so badly. To this day I can't help but feel that I dodged something extremely dangerous, more specifically someone who was probably just looking for a girl to take advantage of and jumped at the chance when he met a young foreign one in a big city.

I'm still not sure what possessed me to give him my number, but I console myself with the fact that I didn't tell him I was living near that metro stop where he approached me. I just have the feeling that he might have come looking for me. The lesson that I have taken away from this incident aside from never giving my number out ever again is to always trust my gut. She saved me before, saved me that day, and will most likely do it again. I'm a 17 year old girl who goes to the local high school here. I never really had much dating experience but this guy clearly didn't have much either. When the story takes place I was around 14 years old.

For some quick context in my state you are legally allowed to date someone under 18 so long as you are two years older or younger, meaning that someone who is 16 can date an 18 year old, but a 14 year old dating an 18 year old could lead to serious consequences. I've been a part of a classroom that we refer to as BMC, which is a class for kids with behavioral issues such as anger or depression. I've been a part of this program since middle school, but never have I been through a person quite like this. I normally keep to myself, listening to my music at a deafening volume, and because of this, I never had friends in that classroom, especially since this was during my freshman year and sophomore year. I was nowhere

near popular during that time, yet I did happen to get several desperate guys approaching me. Normally I would reject them, yet for some reason this time I didn't. Maybe it was pity, perhaps. I was waiting at the far end of the bus loop one day, given the fact that my bus was a special needs bus. As I was listening to music, I saw a boy approach me. He was bigger in size, always seemed to wear the exact same superhero shirt and jacket. I still to this day don't even know if he even washed it. For this story, we'll call him Freddy. Mainly because he reminded me of the freaky animatronic. Anyway, he came up to me and

told me that he had a crush on me, despite me not even knowing his name prior to this point. I was a little creeped out by this, so I was a little lost in terms of words. He asked for my number. I said yes, but then what he said next, later, gave me goosebumps. This is very important to keep in mind. Don't tell your parents, he said. I asked why and all he said was, I could get in trouble. At this time I was very gullible and thought, why get him in trouble when he doesn't know better? See, I'm autistic and at the time I had a feeling he was as well.

Before you go off and tell me that he really doesn't know any better, I should tell you that just because someone is autistic doesn't mean that they are dumb or can't be manipulative. Even people with mental illnesses can be a bit of a bad apple. I know that from experience with Freddy and many others. When I gave him my number, we small talked for a small bit until my bus finally arrived. Even at the time, I was so relieved to see my driver to see that I would escape Freddy. So I bid my goodbyes and he waved. He then said to me, I love you. I nearly vomited at that statement. I gave him a bewildered look and he asked, too soon? Yeah, too soon, I confirmed. I hurried onto

my bus and sat down. I tried to avoid looking in the window so I didn't have to look at him. Once again, he was far from attractive or even hygienic. I soon got blown up by texts from him to the point that I had to turn off notifications for his texts. But then when I did respond, he would complain and ask why I wasn't responding. When I said I was busy, he would just ask when I would be done. When I told him I didn't know in order to buy myself some time away from him, he'd just text me 10-15 minutes later asking if I was done. Clingy people were my biggest turn off, especially since I was that person at one point as well. I know that being on the receiving end of that sort of affection can be very uncomfortable.

When I finally had enough I casually told my parents the whole story. They panicked and told me to block him while they contacted my BMC manager. The next day my BMC manager called me to see her privately. She explained that even though he was a senior he had attempted to pull these things off with several girls before me. She explained that he knew full well what he was doing and that I had to stay away from him. I got scolded by her and family that next time. I should communicate what is happening, especially given the fact that this boy was far from the first boy to attempt to take advantage of me. He was luckily one of the few that this boy was far from the first boy to attempt to take advantage of me.

He was luckily one of the few that failed, thankfully. I am sad to say that even though I went through this experience, I still am too gullible and always have been. And because of this, I'm asking all of you, regardless of your gender, to consider what it is you want. If you don't want to follow your gut or communicate your feelings, you could fall into the same trap I've fallen into more times than I'd like to admit. This story didn't actually happen to me, rather to a close friend of mine. He told me this story a few hours ago and I wanted to share.

He lives in Hayward and was attending a march for the BLM movement at around 4pm I think. I don't know what street or anything specific like that, he had just sent me a couple of videos of the crowd marching and taking a knee. So after about 10 minutes, he said that they were passing through a street lined with shops and alleyways. There was an older man sitting on a curb by one alleyway watching the march. Jordan describes the man as looking upper 40s, wearing a black and white flannel shirt and jeans and a cap. Jordan had the misfortune of walking nearby said alleyway and the man stopped him, saying something along

the lines of what he needed help fixing his passenger seat since the recliner handle was broken and it was a two-person job to get it back into its upright position. The man gestured towards his car, which Jordan examined. It was a black Chevy Malibu that was parked in possibly the most sketchiest part of the alley, right towards the back kind of hidden behind a trash dumpster. Jordan declined and quickly walked away before the man could say anything else. Now for his sake I wish the story ended here, but I wouldn't be posting it here if it did. I think sometime later, like an hour maybe, Jordan decided to start heading home while the march continued. He says he was cutting

across some field that was in between houses where only two other people were in sight, and as soon as he emerged at the other side, his air was suddenly cut off as a thick arm wrapped around his throat and began aggressively yanking him backwards. Of course, Jordan yelled as loud as he could, and thankfully the aforementioned two guys began to rush to his aid, shouting at Jordan's attacker. The guy let go and pushed Jordan. As Jordan stumbled forwards, he spun around and saw the guy who had asked him for help with his car, hopping into the Chevy Malibu and speeding off. The two other people asked Jordan if he was okay and comforted him and whatnot.

Keep in mind that Jordan only told me this over a few texts and I haven't gotten a chance to talk to him in public about it so some details were spared. I think Jordan contemplated calling the police but didn't think it was worth it. He told me that they were probably already busy enough and he might be ignored or have an extremely long response time to which the only info he had was a description of the guy. He hadn't gotten the guy's license plate. Jordan went home and that's pretty much all he told me so far. It might sound cliche but please, everyone stay safe. These are terrible times and with all the looting and protests, stuff like this is bound to happen in the shadows.

Back in 2005, I was 15 years old and like any teenage girl, my main source of income was babysitting. I mainly babysat for two families, family A, which was every Monday and Wednesday for four hours in the afternoon, and family B, which was different evenings when the parents had events they wanted to go to. The moms of the two families were first cousins and the mom of family B used to babysit myself and my sisters when we were little. All of us, myself, family A and family B lived within a five mile radius of each other in the Michigan countryside. On the night my story takes place, I was babysitting for family B. It was a Friday night in the middle of summer and the two children, a boy four years old and a girl, two, went to bed fairly easily. I know it was after

10pm because it was dark out when the little boy came downstairs and said he couldn't sleep, so he wanted to sit on the couch with me. I was watching the movie The Patriot on TV and let him snuggle up with me and he went right back to sleep. Shortly after he came down, the phone rang. I looked at the caller ID to see if it was the family calling when I saw it was my home calling. I answered the phone and. I looked at the caller ID to see if it was the family calling when I saw it was my home calling. I answered the phone and it was my dad. He said something that basically boiled down to this. Hey, so there's an escaped convict in the area. Police are out looking for him, so if you hear police sirens or a helicopter, don't be alarmed. And then he hung up. I, quite frankly, was terrified. I was a 15-year-old

girl alone in an old farmhouse. The nearest neighbor was about a quarter of a mile away, and I had two babies in the house that I had to protect. My dad had sounded so cavalier like he was warning me that it was going to rain. I had no idea what this man had done to be chased by the police, but it had to be bad. I went looking around the house for something to defend us with. All I had were kitchen knives, no baseball bat, no crowbar, and no access to the gun in the safe. I ended up calling my dad and asking him to come stay with me. He actually thought I was being ridiculous, but I didn't care, I felt better. Thankfully nothing happened. When the parents got home an hour later my dad explained why he was there. The mom was very understanding and showed me how to get into the gun safe and where the

bullets were. Like I said, she was our babysitter growing up and she was basically my older sister. She was and still is a big believer in the second amendment and self-defense. But my story didn't end there. That next Monday I was babysitting for family A which had two girls, four years and two years old. The older girl was telling me a story about someone in the backyard and how they couldn't go back in their house and had to stay outside all night. When the mom got home I asked her about it. It turns out that the previous Friday, the police had been at their house until the wee hours of the morning. Family A's neighbor had a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend for domestic violence,

and he had shown up at her house late on Friday. She called the cops, and he had fled into the property of Family A because he had several arrest warrants out. The police kept family A out of their house for safety reasons while they searched the area. They eventually found the guy and took him to jail. That's what all the fuss was about that Friday when I was babysitting for family B. Fortunately he never got close to family B's house. That incident was the start of me being more proactive in safety, making sure I knew how to lock the doors, where any weapons were, and to make sure I had a knife with me at all times. If something like that ever happens again, I know I will handle I live in Utah and I go camping a lot.

I've got it pretty much down to a wrinkle. Usually I do a bunch of research on the areas where I plan to camp. Even missing persons in the area or identified remains that have been found, accidents, anything creepy of note because I love macabre stuff like that. I was coming down from Salt Lake and wanted to visit my great-grandfather's ghost town first, which is fortunately all on private property now, as well as check out Castlegate Cemetery. If you don't know about the Castlegate or Winter Quarter's mining disasters, you should read about it. The Castlegate Cemetery contains the remains of 171 men who died in a series of mine explosions on March 8th, 1924. It's just really eerie seeing the same date of death on all the grave markers. It was a very small town and almost all men of working age died

that day, leaving almost every woman in the town a widow. The bodies were unrecognizable aside from some bits of clothing, so there aren't many names along with the grave markers, just a white cross with March 8th, 1924 inscribed on them. Anyway, my story isn't about that. My final camping destination was near Vernal, so I had to take a scenic route to get there. I really enjoyed the drive, so I started taking it more often on many trips to the Vernal area. Recently, my fiancé, who we will call Colby, and I noticed some pretty sweet looking camping spots along the way, so we decided to camp there last month. It was great, beautiful, and easy to access for our SUV. I preferred to camp as far away from people as possible while still having my car nearby, so this spot was ideal. I hadn't noticed any signs except that we were camping in the Ashley National Forest,

which is weird because I always thought that the Ashley Forest was closer to Flaming Gorge. It's just really big. Colby and I love camping so we decided to take his 12 year old son, who I'll refer to as Kyle, with us for the Father's Day weekend. Kyle had never been camping before. The night before we were due to leave I couldn't sleep at all. I had an abnormally long anxiety attack which was unabated by my anxiety medicine. I couldn't shake the feeling that something awful was going to happen to us if we went. I spent the morning crying and shaking, wondering if I was experiencing a legitimate gut feeling or if it was just my mental illness causing me to think irrationally.

I voice my fears as Colby also experiences anxiety and he is incredibly understanding when my mental illness gets rough. I didn't want to ruin father's day for him and our kiddo and they were very set on going. I eventually calmed down and we arrived at our spot after about a two and a half hour drive. There were no people around which was fantastic. The area is home to a lot of free range cows and there happened to be a ton of them around our campsite. They kept their distance and we left them alone but we had a plan to jump in the car if they get too close or a bull came along. The weather was perfect. There weren't too many bugs and aside from the cow pies and incessant lowing of cattle, I couldn't have asked for anything better. Clearly my anxiety was just that, anxiety. We each set out to prepare

the camp. The boys focused on the fire pit and gathering wood while I set up the tent and inflated the air mattresses. We planned to sleep in the tent while Kyle slept in the car on a twin-sized air mattress so he would be plenty comfortable and safe. We have a decent amount of gear so the spot was pretty awesome once it was all finished. We even hung up a string of solar powered lights for when it got dark. Around this time, a very large bull came along so we had a chance to implement our emergency plan of getting in the car just in case. He just kind of herded the cows away from our area. It was nice having the cows gone as the sun was setting. All we still

needed to do was make dinner so I started working on that while Kyle hung out in the back of the car on his mattress snuggling up with a blanket as he had been saying he was tired and wanted to take a nap. Colby and I went out to gather more wood and though we didn't mention it to each other at the time, we both felt very uncomfortable. We didn't want to go far from the campsite or split up. We just had this feeling of being watched, like something was lurking behind the many bushes around us. I attributed it to a stray cow or maybe some deer. We returned to the campsite less than five minutes later. Sunset was gorgeous from what we could see in the clouds and this was about the time that Kyle got up and wanted to wander around. I totally understand wanting to roam around and explore as

a kid so that was normal. He started walking off in one direction and his dad said, where are you going? To which Kyle responded, places. He then turned around and walked to the tent like that's what he wanted to check out. Maybe 20 minutes later he said he saw some eyes reflecting in the trees behind us and that he was going to check it out. I just laughed and said, nope. Besides, dinner is going to be ready in another 20 minutes or so. I thought maybe he had seen another cow or deer, no big deal. He and his dad were on the other side of the car when I pulled dinner off the grill. I stood up to tell them that we could finally dive into a tasty tinfoil dinner of chicken, potatoes, broccoli, carrots, shallots, and garlic. Not to brag, but I make a dang good fine campfire dinner. It was incredibly dark, the kind of dark that only really remote places can get before the moon rises,

so we were using our flashlights pretty heavily. I did a quick scan around with my flashlight and straight ahead of me, a stone throws away, and about five or six feet off the ground, I saw a pair of eyes reflecting back, just staring at me. They were not the eyes of any animal. They couldn't have been a cow, deer, elk, bear, or mountain lion. They were just barely reflecting, and they were very close together. They looked distinctly human. There's a person just staring at us in the middle of nowhere, I asked. They didn't make any noise getting there and they did it in the dark without a light. My stomach sank and every hair

on my body stood on end. I called out and said something like, babe, come look at this, because I was unsure of what I was actually seeing. As I partially turned to look for my fiancé, my flashlight left the eyes and I immediately whipped it back over. The eyes were still there, just staring at me. That's when I realized how real it was. Most animals would have bolted away after that and a cow would have made noises getting there. I was frozen, my eyes trying as

hard as they could to see any form of the darkness. As Colby came around the car to me, the thing stood up, unnaturally quickly, and the eyes went up to about ten feet off the ground still staring at me. That's it, a human is scary enough, but some 10 or 11 foot humanoid creature with that kind of speed is beyond terrifying. I backed up and yelled, get in the car, get in the car, and my voice was shaking. My lovely, obedient son, for the first time in his life, didn't ask questions and just hopped in the car. I threw myself in the back with him and Colby got in the passenger seat as I had piled some bags in the driver's seat. Stupid, I know. I quickly described what I saw and I noticed I was visibly shaking. I'm not the toughest chick around, but I have been through a lot of stuff I probably shouldn't

have survived. I've done solo camping trips and solo hikes and I've never been spooked. I've been snorkeling in the ocean at night and seen eyes reflecting or eels and stonefish within a foot or two of me and I might shiver a bit but that's nothing compared with the absolute terror I felt upon seeing those eyes rapidly ascend. Colby quickly moved the bags and climbed into the driver's seat, started the car and turned on the high beams. We couldn't see anything, but we knew we needed to leave. We pulled the car right up to the tent, grabbed our machetes and told Kyle to stay in the car no matter what. Colby covered me while I grabbed the bags of our clothes out of the tent and I doused the fire with a few gallon jugs of water we thankfully had nearby. Needless to say,

we flew out of there like banshees, leaving the tent, cooler, and dinner still steaming on the grill. The drive down the pitch dark canyon was nerve-wracking. After we had all been silent for a bit, trying to make sense of the situation, Kyle asked, what color were the eyes that you saw? And I responded that they were light bluish green. He said, that's what I saw too. I asked him how far apart the eyes looked. He said they were close together, like a human's eyes would be. I know now that human eyes reflect red, so it couldn't have been a human. Besides, I don't know many ten foot tall people. We pawled over at a well-lit gas station when we got to the nearest town and booked a hotel room for the night. On our way there, we noticed a car following us closely.

We were already unnerved. Colby slowed down a bit in case they were wanting to pass us, and then we saw the red and blue lights blinding us through the mirrors. He pulled over and an officer told us that we were going 10 under the speed limit. He asked where we came from and where we were going and we told him the truth. We knew it sounded insane. We hadn't been drinking, we didn't have anything illegal on us, but I did still have the machete next to me. Luckily, he didn't notice it and he seemed interested in the story.

He said, and I quote, It doesn't really surprise me. I heard a lot of stories of weird stuff happening up here. He told us to have a nice night and let us go. Thanks, officer. We returned to gather our stuff in the morning and nothing had been touched. The food that was sitting out, the chicken, the bread, the bag of garbage, nothing was disturbed or nibbled on. Later that night, I decided to do more intensive research on where we had been

camping. I finally found the name of the actual canyon, Indian Canyon, and it turns out the Indian Canyon is a hotspot for paranormal activity and Bigfoot sightings. It's also very near the Skinwalker Ranch. Kyle thinks it wasn't a big deal and that we were overreacting, which is fine. I don't want him to have nightmares about it or anything, and he seems totally okay with it aside from the fact that he was deprived of the s'mores-making experience. Maybe it was nothing, but maybe it wasn't. I'm not taking my chances. We have promised to take him for another camping trip so he can have his s'mores, but we will not be visiting Indian Canyon ever, ever again. My name is Chloe, I'm 21 and I'm from Scotland. In 2018, me, my ex, and his little brother decided to explore abandoned places. We stumbled across an old abandoned mental hospital, Lenox Castle Hospital is the name. We decided to check it out, bearing in mind it is approximately 10pm so it was

dark. We went in having to climb rocks and stuff. When we got in, we were just wandering around enjoying scaring each other like you do. My ex, who we'll call C, went into one of the rooms. Me and his brother stood outside, we'll call his brother R. Me and R were standing at the window of the room C was in when we heard keys being shaken behind us. I thought it was my keys, but then I remembered C had them in his pocket and he was in front of us. We kept hearing movement as well when there wasn't any wind. The next time I went up was with four of my friends towards the end of 2018. The middle of winter and around 10-11pm so it was pitch black. There was me, A, K, J, and T. Me and T kept hearing high pitched screams coming from above us but no one else had actually heard

them and they thought we were just joking. We also kept hearing movement in the bushes and again. hearing high-pitched screams coming from above us, but no one else had actually heard them, and they thought we were just joking. We also kept hearing movement in the bushes, and again, no wind. The walk back down was probably the most terrifying thing to ever happen to me. T told me she had seen glowing red eyes in the trees. I told her it's her mind playing tricks, trying to create a reason for the noises we heard. We walked further down and I had the feeling that I had to look into the trees. And as I looked, I saw them. The red eyes. I tried to pass it off telling myself that it was an animal in the trees, but Jay had the light and it was way ahead of us, but not only that, the trees were far apart and on a hill. The eyes were between the trees and looked like they were floating. No one else had seen or heard anything. We had no explanation

for why it was just me and T who had seen them. Fast forward to tonight, 11pm. Me and my best friend Jed decided to check it out. We walked up but kept hearing screeching. We passed it off as possibly being foxes. The movement started up again just as I remembered it. The screeching was the same noise I heard before but this time Jed had heard it. We got to the hospital and we were quite far back from it. I had my flashlight on and I pointed it towards the building. Jed stood mesmerized by it as it's a lovely structure. I stood my light to one of the windows and I saw a railing. The railing looked like it had a black figure standing, holding on. I mentioned it to Jed and all he said was,

no, top left. He paused. I asked him what it was and he rushed me back to my car. When we got back to the car he said he had seen a pure black figure in the top left window which twitched its head as if it were trying to get us to go to it. All the way back to the car we hear footsteps and the screeching again. This place definitely has something going on and I will not stop going there until I find out exactly what. This happened to my grandpa. I'm not sure exactly when this happened but this was when all my younger aunts and uncles weren't married yet and still live with them. In all, I had 7 uncles and 5 aunts just from my dad's side of the family. Years ago, my uncles bought a house and my grandparents lived with them.

A lot of paranormal stuff has happened in that house and I don't know why my grandparents didn't move out sooner. At the time of this incident, everyone was out shopping or doing whatever they used to do outside of the house and it was just my grandparents' home. My grandpa sat in his big chair as always and was occupied by the television. Usually my grandma would stand behind that big chair and just watch TV with my grandpa. I don't know why she always did that when they had so many other couches to sit on. After a while of my grandparents just watching TV, my grandpa spoke. Honey, go grab me something to eat, I'm hungry.

My grandpa waited for an answer. Did you hear me? Silence. My grandpa was in his late 70s, so his body was quite weak. That's why instead of turning around to see if my grandma was still there or not, he reached over his shoulder to where she'd usually be. Instead of a shirt, however, he felt a soft breast that would belong to a young lady. Just as he was about to use his strength to turn around to see who or what was behind him, he felt a hand on his ear inside of his head. The hand then slowly started moving towards the middle of his face.

Once the palm of the hand covered his cheek and the fingers reached his nose and mouth, he opened his mouth and grabbed a hold of one of the fingers and bit as hard as he could. As he spit out the finger, he felt the hand pull away fast. He finally looked behind him and saw no one He didn't bother wasting his energy to look around as he knew he wasn't going to find anyone or anything Because, as he recalled, he didn't see or taste any blood when he bit the finger off But unexpectedly, the finger that he had bit off had fallen onto the floor and it was real. There was no blood or anything, just a clean, chewed off finger. My grandma finally showed up as my grandpa picked up the finger. Here, he said, handing her the finger. As expected, my grandma freaked out and asked,

what is this? He explained to her what happened and he told her to keep the finger for good luck, as he said. It may seem crazy, but my family is a religious shaman family and we, or the elders at least, believe these things. I've actually never seen the finger myself, but one day when I was young, I saw my grandma in her room picking up a small, red triangular pouch that she dropped. I didn't know then, but usually those pouches were filled with herbs believed to keep you healthy, so I stepped into the room asking, what is that? She smiled before answering, It's a finger. When I was a young girl, me and my family used to love going to historical sites and learning the history of the many towns we visited.

Me being a young history buff jumped at every chance to go to old battleships or naval graveyards. So when my mother informed me that we were going to one of the tallest lighthouses in the United States, I was ecstatic at the chance to climb that high and look over the beautiful landscape that surrounded it. This trip in particular was close to my birthday so my parents agreed to allow me to bring a friend along. I chose my best friend at the time. For the story's sake we'll call her Sarah. Now this lighthouse was part of a haunted tour and I begged my mother to allow us to go at night with the paranormal team to do the spooky tour instead of the normal one. Being young she wouldn't allow us and it was past the time that she would like to be in bed. I really didn't believe in ghosts at the time, I just wanted to go for fun's sake. So disappointed yet still excited, I agreed to go on the regular tour during the daytime.

So we arrive and buy our passes to climb the lighthouse. My mother starts her ascent up the lighthouse's winding stairs followed by my brother's father, me, and my friend Sarah. As soon as I walked through the doors I started getting an uneasy feeling but attributed it to the thought of climbing up the very tall monument and standing out on the edge. How I wished I would have listened to what my gut was telling me. It was a hot day so I had my hair up in a ponytail and as soon as I got about one eighth of the way up I felt my hair being slightly tugged. as soon as I got about one-eighth of the way up, I felt my hair being slightly tugged. I turned behind me and told Sarah to quit messing around, I hate getting my

hair pulled. I, growing up with two brothers, will do this to you. She gave me a puzzled look and claimed it wasn't her. I brushed it off thinking, oh, she's just messing with me. Next thing I know, I feel a hard tug that causes me to fall backwards down the winding stairs, cracking my head open in the process. My mother rushed me to the hospital and after the initial shock and pain wore off from falling down solid metal stairs, I started to get angry at my friend asking her why she tripped me. She swore up and down she didn't do it, but I refused to believe it. But the thing is, my mother had taken a picture about one minute before my fall which showed Sarah way too far behind me to have caught up to cause the incident without me hearing her

loud footsteps running up behind me. My mother also corroborated this story by telling me when she turned after hearing me trip, my friend was far down the stairs as she had to stop to tie her sneakers. It then clicked. The uneasy feeling, the hair pulling, the unnatural cold air I felt around me just before the fall. After this, I never doubted that there is something after death. be sure to submit them to my subreddit, rLetsReadOfficial, and give and receive feedback from the community, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And join my Discord to interact with me and other listeners directly. And if you want 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. And check out the Let's Read podcast, where you can hear all these stories in long compilation form and save huge on data, located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the bio. Thanks so much, friends. And always remember to charge your booty binky. Thank you.