The Lets Read Podcast - 121: Disney & Trick-OR-Treating Stories | 21 True Scary Horror Stories | EP 109

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Disney, Being Lost in the Woods, & Trick-or-Treating... HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ♫ Background Music & Audio Remastering: Simon de Beer https://www.instagram.com/simon_db98/ PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Until May 30th, purchase four new Michelin passenger or light truck tires and receive up to $70 by prepaid MasterCard. Conditions apply. Details at Michelin.ca. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at TreadExperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at TreadExperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca So a few summers ago, the old ball and chain and I took the kids down to Florida for a week so they could visit Disney World. It was a win-win situation.

They would actually stop hounding us to take them there while us grown-ups could soak up the tropics for a whole seven days to experience what an actual summer feels like. Don't get me wrong, I love my native state of Maine, but the only thing scarier than Stephen King's books is the weather here. As the saying goes, don't like the weather in New England? All you gotta do is wait a minute. So we're down in Orlando for the week, and the arrangement is we'll spend three days at Disney World, with a day on either side where the grown-ups can do fairly grown-up things. So we're walking around the city, seeing some sights and baking in the Florida sunshine. I get the one thing I'd really been after which was a huge Cuban sandwich. So the kids are being corralled by their mom while I'm trailing behind, trying not to pass out from

ingesting my body weight in pork, bread, and cheese. So at one point, my wife needs to use the bathroom so I'm in charge of keeping an eye on the kids while she runs off to find somewhere that'll let her use the bathroom without making her open her purse. Now admittedly, this is where I feel short of being my best as a father. I find a bench nearby, plant my bottom down on it and tell the kids to stay where I can see them, which since I shut my eyes and start sunbathing like the disgusting greasy lizard person I was, was a little redundant. Next thing I know, I'm about to doze off when I kind of jerk out of my haze thinking, ah, the kids. I get up, look around, and see my son like halfway down the street, talking to some guy dressed as Mickey Mouse.

I knew that the Disney characters appeared outside of the parks on occasion, but all the way in downtown Orlando? I was a little confused, but more relieved than anything since they hadn't disappeared into thin air, which would have ruined more than just our vacation, I can tell you that much. So I'm walking down towards Mickey when I start to realize there's something not quite right about him. The Mickeys in the park were super animated, being theatrical movements to keep the kitties entertained and stuff. This one was anything but. While my kids are basically dancing around him, wicked excited to see him outside of the parks, Mickey is just kinda staring at them.

Almost like Mickey Mouse had taken a few Mickey pills. Sorry, dad joke. Comes with the territory. But it's only as I get really close do I start to really see how this particular Mickey isn't just acting wrong. He looks wrong too. It wasn't just that shape and color of his copyright dodging costume was all off kilter was the fact that it was filthy. I mean, I get that those things mustn't be the easiest things in the world to wash, like I'm pretty sure just the head wouldn't fit in the washer dryer we had at home, but this thing was covered in dirt and old stains. Like it looked seriously, seriously gross and I dread to think what that thing smelled like on the inside. Look, I'm not a total jerk.

I understood, or at least I thought I understood, what the deal was with the guy in the knockoff suit. No one in a stable financial situation chooses to wear a stinky old Mickey the Rat suit or whatever and parades themselves around downtown Orlando. So as the kids are still running circles around the dude, who I figured was just exhausted and half heat stroked, I reach into my wallet and go to hand him a twenty. But the guy just looks at me, or rather, the guy didn't. The head did. Which I did not anticipate to be so creepy. This pair of big, black black lifeless eyes just staring me down from a few feet away seriously rustled my jimmies. I kind of thrust the 20 in his general direction like, hey dude, take the money. And the guy actually tilts the head at me, I mean like a well rehearsed

horror movie move. And obviously I respond by putting the 20 back in my wallet as to not offend him any further. I call my kids back to me because their mom is probably wondering just where in the world that we got and they're all like, oh dad, can we play with Mickey a little while more? While Mickey goes back to staring at them which obviously is now making me super uncomfortable. I'm now insisting in my best stern dad voice that they do as they're told or I'd be telling their mom, she's the tough one, that they've been misbehaving. As they do, Mickey reaches out to try to grab at my then 7 year old son.

Red line crossed right there, don't touch my kids unless I know you. So I step to the guy and state just that, that he has absolutely no right to lay a hand on my kids unless I know you. So I step to the guy and state just that, that he has absolutely no right to lay a hand on my kids, especially not in that suit. Mickey then takes to just staring at me again and this whole time, he's not made a single sound. I take both my kids by the hand who are getting pretty distressed at this point since dad is being mean to Mickey and Mickey isn't exactly acting his usual cheerful self either. I make a show of apologizing to the man for being curt with him then try to make it one of those teachable moments as I walk away with the kids making it

clear to them that no adult is allowed to touch them without their expressed permission and that strangers are most definitely not allowed to touch them and to tell mom or dad if they do. But then I make the mistake of looking over my shoulder where I see Mickey still staring at me and somehow managing to be even creepier than before. That night I couldn't sleep. I was so not used to how humid Florida could be. Our motel room's air conditioner had been very well behaved all week but had picked that night of all nights to start malfunctioning. Thank god the kids room's unit was working hard but ours not so much. So I end up getting out of bed and sitting at the little table in the kitchenette while I drink a glass of something that ended up being more ice than water. Just trying my best to cool down so I can get back to sleep.

We had the flight home the next day, so I needed to be as sharp as possible so I didn't screw up and lose boarding passes or whatever. Just so you know, the motel that we were staying at was all bungalows, single story units in a horseshoe shape and the one we were staying in happened to face the highway outside. I take a walk over the window to take one final look at the floor tonight. Like I love vacationing there and I totally understood why it's the retiree's destination of choice. But as I'm looking out through the blinds I see something out there that makes my jaw drop. Outside, silhouetted by the street lights, standing still as a statue over near the highway, is this really obviously

Mickey Mouse shape. The big circular ears, oversized hands, the works. I actually say like no effing way man out loud to myself as the realization hits me. That knockoff Mickey Mouse guy from Orlando had somehow figured out where we were staying. Okay, so I have no idea how he managed to work that out. It's something I still think about from time to time, but the only concrete thing I have in my mind is that, when not wearing that suit, he could have looked like just about anyone. So he could have followed us all the way back to the motel on foot or in a car or

something and I'd have no idea we were even being stalked. But like I said, since we left Florida the next day and I only talked to the cops down there one time, I have absolutely no definite answers on how that guy found us. So, I just find myself rushing back to the kitchenette to grab a knife from the drawer, which might seem like something of an overreaction to some of you, but I can't overstate the fear I was feeling at that moment. Something happens when you're a dad, something where you're just not willing to roll the dice with your kid's safety. So whatever was about to happen, there was no way I was going into it with just my fists. So knife in hand, I rush back to the window and look out, to see that no one is there anymore.

Note that I say no one and not nothing, because lying in the parking lot about a hundred meters closer to the motel room is the entire knockoff Mickey Mouse costume, just lying there on the tarmac. I'm just staring at the thing in terror for a moment like this guy just stripped off his costume in about 15 seconds and is now nowhere to be seen. Then what happened next is literally something out of a horror movie. I'm checking the peripheries of the parking lot, trying to spot the guy when, boom, he appears right in front of the window and bangs his head, yes, his actual head, onto the glass window so hard I thought it would knock the entire pain out. I almost had a heart attack right there, and whatever yelpy scream wail I made when the guy

appeared immediately woke up the wife and kids. I tell the missus to get in the kids room, lock the door behind her and call the cops, which after a few terrified questions pertaining to just what was going on, she did. I'm guessing the window pane was like security glass or something because this guy, who by the way was completely naked from head to toe, couldn't seem to break it no matter what he threw at it. Fists, forehead, whatever, it just boomed and shook in the frame. The whole time I'm just waving this knife at him and shouting that the cops are on their way, the cops are on their way, the second of which he seems to respond to far more than the former. But still, he switches his attention to the door, trying to bash it open as I rush over to the kids room and ask my wife if the cops had sent anyone yet. I hear her respond with a yes

and by the time I get back to the window, the banging had stopped, and the empty Mickey suit is gone from the parking lot. I just watched that parking lot until I saw the blue flashing lights approaching, and only then was I really able to breathe properly. I gave statements to the cops who arrived, told them all about the earlier interaction I had with the guy, and figured it would be pretty easy for them to find a guy who would be butt naked if he didn't have this huge Mickey Mouse suit on. But like I said, it wasn't like we were there for much longer, and the next day we caught the plane back home to Maine and back to reality. I had to get on the phone to the Orlando Police Department to see if there had been any developments at all, which to my surprise, there hadn't. There hadn't been a single arrest relating to the incident that night,

despite having questioned several Disney cast members, both current and former. I know that might seem like a really anticlimactic way to end the story, that no one was caught, nothing was resolved, and I have absolutely no revelatory or illuminating piece of info to share to make you all be like, oh my god, the call was coming from inside the house or something. But that really is where the story ends. The guy found us, he terrorized us, and then we got out of Florida. I suppose I can end by saying that I'm looking forward to going back at some point when the kids are older and they have no interest in going to Disneyland, but definitely not anytime soon, and definitely not to downtown Orlando. There is a place in central Florida known simply as Celebration.

Conceived in the 1990s as a civil project by the Disney Development Company, Celebration was once touted as the definitive dream destination for Walt Disney fanatics, where they could escape the dreary reality of their everyday lives to live either temporarily or permanently in their very own residential dreamland. 23 years ago, the Walt Disney Company invested just short of $5 billion into its planning and eventual construction on the outskirts of Disney World near Orlando, Florida. And over the years, the streets became lined with quaint, picturesque homes, painted white, yellow, pink, tan, or blue, and bordered by white picket fences with lush, green gardens. When fall rolled around, Celebration was known to ship in containers

full of brown fallen leaves from northern states to waft around the carefully constructed streets and piazzas. During the holiday season, fake snow was poured over rooftops to give a distinctly Christmassy feel despite the balmy temperatures. All the while, local trees were fitted with small, barely visible speakers While playing unceasing melodies of songbirds And just in case the unnerving, uncanny valley nature of the town isn't enough to creep you out Wait until you learn of the dark past that Disney's seemingly perfect town Has hidden beneath the veneer of perfection Including tales of seedy escapades, murder, people taking their own lives, and what is terrifyingly referred to as the death pond. On the surface, Celebration appears to be exactly

what it is billed as, the happiest place on earth. Shortly after it was established as a census community, the town expanded and became capable of housing over 10,000 people, complete with a local hospital and school along with a commercial district that could cater to its many denizens. The place was so seemingly perfect that residents soon began to refer to the town as The Bubble because it was almost like living in a parallel universe. There are others who compare it to something out of the Stepford Wives film and more recently the movie Get Out, where an appearance of civility hides dark, foreboding secrets. But not long after the town was established, cracks soon began to appear,

both figuratively and literally with shoddily constructed buildings, painfully strict rules, a dysfunctional and weird school, and even some unexplained deaths among its residents. Celebration might have been many things, but it was not a Disney theme park. It was a real town with a real problem, journalist and author L.J. Charleston once wrote. Plans for the town were initially announced in early 1994. Requests for residency there were initially so great that the Disney Development Company organized a lottery that people could join in order to be eligible for a chance of snapping up one of the 500 homes. At first they expected no more than a few thousand applications to be received. In the end they found themselves with over 10,000 families who longed for a little slice of residential heaven.

According to the original marketing and sales brochure, Celebration claimed that there once was a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer twilight, where children chased fireflies and porch swings provided easy refuge from the cares of the day. A place where the movie house showed cartoons on Saturday mornings, the grocery store delivered, and there was always a teacher who always knew you had that special something. Remember that place? Its name is Celebration. Yet as residents arrived in their droves, complaints of the painfully artificial prettiness and physical imperfections began as a trickle of gripes and grumbles grew into a torrent

of discontent. Supposedly, it was compulsory that every single new home had to have the image of Mickey Mouse displayed somewhere on the property, and that was just one of the plethora of rules in the 160-page regulations book that residents were expected to follow. Other rules stated that only a certain variety of plants were permitted to be growing in the town's gardens, and special pathways were said to have been constructed at the rears of homes to conceal garbage cans and vehicles, which were said to be unsightly. This is on top of the fact that residents were said to have only been allowed to have certain colors of curtains and had to keep their carefully cut lawns at a specific uniform length. Jan and Ori Scheisel, a retired couple from Michigan and longtime residents of Celebration, told a British newspaper that

if you're not one for rules and regulations, we can promise you, you really don't want to live here. They told a visiting journalist that no two adjoining houses could look alike, how no household could have more than two vehicles visible in its driveway, and that blinds or curtains could be any color at all, but had to be white on the outward facing side to give the homes a uniform look. If you don't have enough bark in your ground cover or you have dead plants on your porch, they'll send you a strongly worded letter, Mr. Scheisel said. But as the years went by, more sinister events were to visit themselves on the seemingly perfect town.

In 1998, Celebration's tight-knit community was horrified by the news of an armed home invasion. A couple were bound and gagged in their own home by a gang of masked burglars who proceeded to beat them mercilessly while they emptied the home of valuables. Then in November of 2010, a 58-year-old teacher named Mateo Giovandito, who lived alone with his pet chihuahua, was strangled unconscious with a shoelace before their body was chopped into pieces with a fire axe. Neighbors of Giovandito only became suspicious when he didn't show up to school to teach their kids. Local law enforcement then made the grisly discovery when they knocked on his door and were greeted by the stench of decay. David Israel Murillo, who was homeless at the time, received a life sentence for the murder.

He tried to defend his actions to police by saying that he flew into a rage after Mr. Giovandito tried to assault him. In the aftermath of the murder, former students of Giovandito confessed that he had touched them after inviting them to sleepovers at his house. One student's mother detailed that Mr. Giovandito, who she referred to as a cunning predator, developed a close relationship with her 10-year-old son. She claimed the teacher assaulted her son while on school trips to countries including Mexico, Japan, and China. But the boy suddenly cut ties with Giovandito and she later learned that he had been abusing him for years. Then, just days after Matteo Giovandito's death, a neighbor of his named Craig Fushi barricaded himself in his own house for around 12 hours and began shooting at police officers outside, who had only showed up to question him regarding the murder.

No officers were hurt in the shootout, but when they gained entry to the house, they found Mr. Fushi dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It is believed that Fushi was involved in what had happened to the local children. There was also talk of a death pond near the tranquil town. Up until the late 90s, there were no warnings on the nearby road that if you took a wrong turn, you risked driving into the alligator-infested water. Several incidents gave the pond its macabre name. Perhaps the most infamous concerned three young men who had been vacationing in Florida during the summer of 1998 before they mysteriously vanished. Their bodies were discovered nine months later inside a car at the bottom of the lake. A two-year-old boy was also eaten by an alligator as he played by the pond's edge.

A property investor named Malcolm Longley, who had been relocated to Celebration from Maidenhead, also claimed that there was a sleazy element to life in Celebration, with the act of wife-swapping being widespread. We call it Celebration Separation, he said during an interview in 2010. Pretty much all the British people I know who have moved here have come happily married and ended up divorced. It's an incestuous town, and there's an element of wife-swapping. I'd never met swingers that much until I came here. He admitted that he had seen some move to celebration to hide away from problems and find some fairytale ending, but they don't get it.

After many years of strife and struggle, 2004 saw Disney selling Celebration to a company based out of New York City. Since then, many residents have hid out at the creepy reputation it has garnered. In response to a defamatory blog post, one resident wrote, I have lived in Celebration for nine years and I love it. The best part about Celebration is the wonderful and caring people. I absolutely love living here. It is not creepy at all. Everyone is really friendly and it is beautiful. The current problems are for people living in condos, not houses. So many people that live here think it's the best place in the world to live and that they are truly blessed. Where else do you have beautiful walking trails, a selection of community pools to use,

community events, and the ability to see multiple displays of fireworks every single night of the year? Plus, it is located so close to Disney, Universal, and SeaWorld, so I am able to go to a free concert all the time with my annual passes. What's not to love about this beautiful town? And a second confirmed that they had lived in celebration for almost 10 years and wouldn't live anywhere else. It has a true community feel that I've never had anywhere else. Our town is far from perfect but it's a place full of wonderful people. I love raising my kids here. Yet both posts have been thought to have been written by marketing executives employed by the

new Northeastern owners in an attempt to reserve the fortunes of the failing town. The official Celebration website states that Celebration was founded with the concept of building a better place and a better way to live. There's a reason Celebration is not a town, but a community in every positive sense of the word. But scratch the surface, and it appears that behind the facade of perfection, sinister events lurk behind almost every corner. And that for many, moving to the town did not make for Celebration, but devastation, abuse, and death. It's every kid's dream to go to Disney World, right? It's a dream that a lot of American kids never get to have come true, let alone British kids. So, I always felt extremely fortunate and privileged that my parents were not only financially capable of taking our family over to Florida for a couple weeks, but also that they actually put the time aside to do something like that.

In all likelihood, they probably didn't want to. I mean, no offense to anyone that does, but what kind of actual grown-up wants to spend all that time queuing up for rides in the baking hot sun after paying for overpriced churros and chocolate sauce. That's not even touching on the pure scam that is Disney dollars. But still, my parents relented to mine and my sister's pleas to take us all the way across the Atlantic to arguably the craziest state in the Union, Florida. This happened a long time ago, back in 1998, so excuse me if I misremember any details about the park itself. But I remember the year pretty clearly because of the game Starcraft had just come out, and I was fortunate enough to pick up a copy in the US before it was even commercially available in the UK.

To a 10-year-old me, Florida was like the land of the lost or something. I mean it had actual dinosaurs, i.e. alligator farms where you could feed the big old beasts with hunks of meat, something I was way too scared to do myself but was only too happy to watch my dad do before he scampered away down the wooden walkway like he was regressing into a childlike state out of pure primal fear. It was the land of Tropicana, where the food portions dwarfed those in the UK, and the grass and trees were so different and fantastical that I might as well have landed on a paradise alien world. It was the sunshine state in name and in nature, and of course, it was the home of the most magical place in the entire universe,

Disney World. But it was during our third and final day trip to Disney World that something happened that I didn't properly understand until I was a great deal older. The truth of which my parents tried their best to shield me and my little sister from for as long as they could, and this is how it happened. So I remember we were in the animal kingdom part of the park. I was always really interested in natural history when I was growing up so I was particularly excited to see this part of Disney World and was incredibly happy and excited to be there. I had to wait three whole days at Disney before we finally got to see that particular

part of it and every other kid there seemed to be just as happy as I was, all except one. On the shuttle bus out at the park I remember seeing this one little girl with her dad who looked uncharacteristically miserable for a kid who actually had the good fortune to be visiting Disney World. But I mean, there's always one moody kid out of the bunch, isn't there? One who never seems to have any fun no matter what's happening. So honestly, as confused as I was about it, I forgot about it pretty quickly as my own excitement at seeing all the animals quickly overwhelmed me. My favorite Disney film was The Lion King, so go figure, I was buzzed.

But throughout the day, whether we were on the rides or on the little safari tour thing, or eating at one of the cafes there, I'd see this little girl and her dad, and she looked consistently exhausted and unhappy. I found myself starting to point where my mom and dad were like, stop staring at other kids, it's rude. So I did, because I knew they were right, of course it was rude to stare and besides that, the little girl seemed awfully upset and surely me just staring at her would only make it worse. So a little while later, I remember walking along drinking one of those ginormous American zillion ounce sodas or whatever,

happy as Larry, when I see the little girl and her dad in front of us. I'm not going to pretend to be all like I knew something was wrong. I sensed it, cause I didn't. Not at all. But one thing struck me as kinda odd about the whole thing. By the time I was 10, I hated holding my mom or dad's hand. It was what babies did, I'd say, and like me, this little girl didn't seem all that keen on holding her dad's hand and at one point even tried to shake it loose. But he kept holding on to her, and at one point started properly gripping her wrist and telling her to behave.

I obviously found this kind of distressing and I looked up at my dad as if to be like, are you seeing this? Half expecting to be told to stop staring again. Both my parents looked kind of concerned about what was going on but I didn't dare say anything. I was old enough to know that some kids misbehave sometimes and people around had that kind of cringy pretend it's not happening kind of feeling about them. Only then, instead of just calming down, the little girl just bursts into tears and starts wailing, I want my mommy, I want my mommy, while the guy is trying his best to calm her down all like, get you to mommy soon sweetie and all this other stuff that

he was saying. What happened next is kind of a blur in my memory. There was just a lot of commotion but this is how my dad tells the story from his perspective. Apparently while the little girl is waiting my dad hears her blatantly say, I want daddy, where's daddy? The way he tells it, the mood in the crowd around us like visibly shifts as it suddenly becomes obvious that this guy that had been taking her around the park was not her father. There's slight hesitation though. No one actually acts on the revelation for the first few minutes or so, and for good reason. The guy might have been her uncle, a family friend, a legal guardian or carer.

There was nothing evidently insidious about it. That is until the guy snaps at her in a way that is distinctly unparental. Apparently some other American dad was all like, is there a problem buddy? Or something and the guy is quick to calm the situation down by telling them that no, there's no problem, the little girl is just having a temper tantrum. Then someone asks if the guy is actually the girl's dad, to which he apparently replies yes, before trying again to reassure the gathering crowd that everything was okay and that she was just having a tantrum. Now the next part I remember pretty clearly, because the girl shouted something before the man with her clamps her hand over her mouth so hard it sounded like a slap. My mom starts pulling me and my sister away from the scene since it was starting to turn ugly, like really ugly,

really fast. According to my dad's version of it, what the girl had screamed before the guy tried to shut her up is that he wasn't her dad at all. Not only that, but he had took her. And that's when it starts getting confusing for me again because all kinds of people started moving forward and blocking my view and all the shouting and moving kicks off. But I do remember seeing this tubby woman shoving her way through the crowd of people with that same little girl in her arms who by that point was just sobbing uncontrollably. After that I remember seeing the crowd that had formed around the guy begin to sway and shift. There were shouts and screams. I mean like the kind of screams that were so intense and frightening that they made me shake and shiver with fear

and had my little sister bursting into tears. By the time park security showed up, who 10 year old me just assumed were the police, the crowd began to disperse and I distinctly remember seeing the man who had apparently taken the little girl from God knows where pinned to the ground with someone on top of him. That's about the only part that I can remember crystal clear to this day. A lot of my memory has been filled in with my mom and dad's retelling of the event but the image of that guy's rage, how it twisted up in his features, is still burned into my mind. And it's been made all the more sinister by the fact that I now know what he was so angry about.

He'd taken that girl and kept her pliant because he'd promised her a trip around Disneyland. She was probably so keen to go that she just hadn't fought back, and God knows what he was intending to do with her afterward. But that chance had been taken away from him by a bunch of do-gooders, at least that's the way I imagine he thought of it. Playing this sick long game of lolling his prey into a false sense of security before he finally got his way with her. Not that I realized any of that at the time. To ten year old me it was all just this big mess of confusion and fear, but knowing that whatever was going on was just very, very wrong. We have

no idea what happened to the man or the little girl after that. No one spoke of it again for the rest of the holiday and I'm pretty sure it was almost five or six years before one of them brought it up with me and explained exactly what the situation was. As far as I knew, all I'd seen was a dad mistreating his daughter who had then been arrested for it and even to this day day it screws my head that one of the worst things I'd ever witnessed happened in what was billed as the happiest place on earth, and how if things had gone just a little differently, that girl could have been a corpse or worse. A few days later and none of us would be any the wiser. Thank God she spoke up when she did.

Thank God that there were people there that reacted the way they did, because I really don't want to think about the alternative. We'll be right back. by prepaid MasterCard. Conditions apply. Details at michelin.ca. Find a Michelin TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca Back in 1999, I used to work at Disney World down in Orlando, Florida. I was a custodian, which is really just Disney World's fancy way of saying janitor. We mostly worked when the park was closed to clean the place up, empty the trash, and treat all the water features around the park with cleaning chemicals to keep them from getting stagnant and smelly. But there was also a little guest interaction

involved too, including things like giving directions, helping guests plan their day, and answering the millions of questions they'd have about the park. So I suppose my job was 70% janitor and 30% walking information point. There were major perks, but there were huge downsides too. I'd get disgruntled guests coming up to me and complaining about the stormy weather as it meant that some of the rides were closed for a few hours. So I'd have to deal with that, just smiling and nodding and sympathizing, but sometimes I swear it was like they wanted me to clap my hands and just magically disappear the clouds above our heads as if I had

the power to do it. Like it's not my fault you choose to visit Disney World during a freaking hurricane season dude but make better choices would ya? I had to deal with lost children a few times too and I also had to take valuable items to Lost and Found in Main Street which was fun as it meant you could wander through Magic Kingdom on your way to the Lost and Found in Main Street, which was fun as it meant you could wander through Magic Kingdom on your way to the Lost and Found. That was one of the good things about being a custodian, you're allowed to walk all over the park, within reason. For instance, if a guest wanted directions to Space Mountain, I could walk them over to Tomorrowland instead of just telling them how to get there. This worked well when trying to communicate with guests who didn't

speak any English. I had a lot of good times during that job. The whole team was like one big family. But I suppose that's why what I'm about to tell you happens to be probably the worst thing that's ever happened in my entire life and why it still kind of messes me up 21 years later. So this happened on the second weekend in February of 99. The actual park opened at 11am, so we used to spend the first 2 or 3 hours of our shifts basically doing cosmetic cleans, testing rides, and generally making sure the park was ready to go for the day. The morning section of my shift involved helping out with cleaning and prepping Fantasy Land and Tomorrowland. So at one point, I'm walking through the park and I see this guy, Ray, up on the platform for the Skyway in Fantasy Land. He's sweeping away, whistling to himself,

generally being the cheerful guy that he was. Ray was in his 60s at the time and had already been with us for like a year. Everyone liked him. He was older than most, but he was super chilled out and friendly and always willing to help out his fellow cast members. Like I said, we were one big family like that. We worked together, partied together, and some of us even lived together. I called up to him like, Morning Ray Ray. He just smiles down at me, returns the greeting and waves a little before going back to his sweeping.

It was a beautiful morning. Everyone was in a good mood. It was another day in literal paradise in my mind. So I'm walking towards Tomorrowland for a few more minutes when I hear like this slow electric whirring sound above my head. The sound of the skyway starting up as the four person gondolas start moving along the track. I still feel terrible that it took me as long as it did to realize what was so wrong about the situation. It was a Sunday morning and I was pretty tired and slightly hungover from having gone out drinking the night

before with a few of the other cast members. Honestly, it took me a little while to stop blaming myself for not having prevented what happened because I figured that if I'd been a little sharper, I'd have been able to really help. But then it hits me. The gondolas are moving, pretty fast too on their first test loop and Ray is still up on the platform. Someone has switched on the skyway and they hadn't checked if the thing was clear or not. So I just start running back the way I'd walk, following the platform of the skyway and hoping I'd catch up to Ray before the gondolas reached him. I was running as fast as I could, trying to catch up with the lead gondola, but I just couldn't seem to close the distance in time. I look up, and see Ray whistling away to himself with his back to the gondolas, just not seeing them at all as they're approaching. So I start shouting to him, and trying to warn him before the gondolas knock him off the skyway which are like 60 feet up in the air.

He hears me, turns around, and is obviously horrified to see that someone had turned the skyway on before checking if it was clear. He has this mix of anger and fear in his voice as he turns back around and starts moving as quickly as he can away from the gondola, but he just couldn't move fast enough. The thing caught up with him pretty quickly, but it didn't knock him off right away. Ray grabbed onto the gondola and tried to pull himself inside of it to stop himself from falling, but he just wasn't strong enough, and all of a sudden I'm watching him dangling from the thing, in danger of falling

the whole sixty feet onto the concrete below. I'm just shouting up to him, hang on Ray, just hang on, but there was nothing I could do. I just had to watch him struggle to hold onto that gondola as it moved along the skyway, knowing it was only a matter of time before he lost his grip and fell. I can see Ray looking over his shoulder and down at the ground below him every so often and I'll never ever forget the look of absolute terror on his face or that feeling of pure helplessness I felt as I watched the whole thing unfolding. Then the gondola starts passing over these flower beds instead of just pure concrete. I figured the soil and plants would have to be a better option to fall onto. It had to be. So I

just start shouting, jump Ray, jump the flower beds, let's go. Then I don't know if he deliberately let go or just lost his grip, but he fell, 60 whole feet down, landed with an audible thump in the flower beds below him. Watching him fall was like slow motion or something. He seemed to fall so slowly but I guess that's just because he had such a long way to fall. He was in a bad bad way when I reached him. He wasn't moving at all. He just laid there among the flowers all glassy-eyed and he wheezed and groaned in agony and in the moment before I ran off to get help, I saw him spit up blood onto his bottom lip and chin. I was in tears by the time I found another cast member to help out, begging them to call 911 so we could get an ambulance out as fast as possible.

Emergency services got there less than 20 minutes later and they carried Ray out of the park on a stretcher before driving him over to Orlando Regional Medical Center. We all prayed that he'd be okay, and it brought us all a great deal of hope that he'd actually landed on the flower beds and not on the straight concrete, which definitely would have killed anyone who'd fallen that far. But a few hours later, we got word that he hadn't made it, that his injuries were so bad that he had passed away despite what the hospital staff had done for him. The fall caused too much trauma, too much internal bleeding and he had slipped away after they'd operated on him to drain the blood from his lungs. We were all absolutely devastated to have lost such a cheerful, charming and dedicated cast member.

Ray made all of our days just that little bit brighter, and it would be impossible to really replace him. I felt for his family, I felt for his friends, but I really felt for the cast member who had turned on the gondolas before making sure the skyway was clear. Technically, Ray should have been done with his sweeping by that time in the morning, but like I said, he was dedicated and the kind of guy who didn't finish a job until it was properly done. The person had turned on the skyway who I won't name was totally inconsolable, so much so that they had to be put on leave before they eventually quit. They blamed themselves for Ray's death, saying they should have checked the cameras, done a walk around to make sure the platform was clear. It was no one's fault, I've come to terms with that. It was a simple breakdown of communication and it could have happened to anyone.

It wasn't my fault, it wasn't Ray's fault, it wasn't the Skyway operator's fault, it was just a horrible twist of fate. Everyone that could get time off attended Ray's funeral. We all wanted to be there for his family as best we could to assure them that their husband and father was one of the sweetest guys we'd ever known. Ray was the first cast member to die in the park in over ten years, and a little memorial was put up backstage for him so that we could all remember him at his best with a smile on his face instead of scared and broken. Rest in peace, Raymond Barlow. We love you and we miss you. Every single day. To be continued... I grew up a military brat in San Diego, California.

My dad was in the Marine Corps for 25 years, eventually reaching the rank of gunnery sergeant before he retired in 2011. I'm really proud of him and I love him very much, but I won't sugarcoat it. Growing up with a parent in the military wasn't easy. He wasn't at home much and when he was, he was something of a disciplinarian. I didn't have nearly as much freedom as some of my friends did but that was as much of a boon as it was a burden because it kept me on track at school and gave me the means to get into a good college later on in life. But without a doubt,

the worst part of him being in the Marine Corps was when he had to go to war. Although he wasn't part of the initial invasion force, dad was deployed in Iraq in June of 2003. I was 11 years old at the time and it really, really sucked having to say goodbye to him. No matter how much he tried to reassure us that he would be okay, I was old enough to be acutely aware that it might well have been the last time I ever got to talk to him, the last time I ever got to hug him, the last time I'd ever get to see him alive. Needless to say, the next six months were some of the most stressful of my life. Every little news report I saw on the TV

gave me the worst anxiety and every time we got news that a serviceman had died over there, I feared for the worse. Mom tried to shield me as best she could but as the risk of sounding a little full of myself, I was smart, inquisitive and sensitive as a kid and she could only do so much to keep me from worrying. So in September of 2003, mom decided to take me to Disneyland for the weekend to take my mind off of things. To be honest, it was exactly what I needed. I was hugely into Disney movies when I was a kid and although I'd been over to Disneyland a few times before, being so stressed around the house meant seeing it again was like doing so through

fresh eyes. I took pictures with as many of the characters as I could and each ride me and mom went on seemed to alleviate my anxiety and depression that little bit more. The whole first day was going wonderfully well. That was until we got in line to ride the big thunder mountain railroad. I'm pretty sure it was about 11.30 by the time we got into the little rail cars for the ride itself. Everything was going smoothly at first, we're speeding along, all these twists and turns, and till we hit the little fake desert set up and then up an incline into a dark tunnel. I just remember feeling like this jolting sensation shake the cars all while we're in the dark, then this horrible grinding of metal and a thud before people in the cars in front of us started screaming. Everything came to a sudden stop and everyone was all really shaken up from it, but it's then that I heard some of the worst things I've ever heard in my life. This woman starts asking

out loud, Mark, Mark, Mark wake up, wake up Mark. We're all mostly in the dark but there's a little bit of light coming from the openings of the tunnel on each side of us and I remember seeing how some of the cars weren't even on the tracks anymore and that the cars in front of us were all wet and shiny with some kind of fluid, a fluid that I would only later realize to be someone's blood. In the moments after the rail cars came to a stop, people started clambering out of them and walking down the tunnel as fast as they could, calling out that someone was hurt really bad and that we needed help up there as soon as possible. As me and my mom climbed out of the rail car and followed, I could see that the train car thing at the very front of the coaster

had derailed and that the rear of the thing had like mounted the car behind it. It was only then that I realized that whoever was in the car behind it would have taken the full force of that thing as we sped up that incline. But there were also people in the cars ahead of us who were trapped by it, stuck in the rail cars and unable to get out because of the way they were positioned in the tunnel. Thankfully me and my mom weren't trapped, so we could just get out of there, but I think it took like another half hour before firefighters could get them out so that paramedics could treat them before taking them to the hospital. All the people that could get out were herded off by park staff towards the River Bell Terrace, where a medical treatment area had been set up. Like I said, me and mom were mostly okay, just a little shaken up from the whole thing.

But there were people with some pretty serious injuries who hadn't been so lucky, and we later found out that the guy who had been in the first car had actually died of his injuries. It's horrendously tragic that someone should lose their life when all they wanted to do was go to Disneyland to have some fun on a few roller coasters, and I know it's kind of messed up for me to think of it like this, but we got really lucky that day, as way more people could have died and honestly, I was surprised when I found out that it was only one person that lost their life that day. At least half the riders on the coaster could have died from the way that train just straight up mounted the cars behind it. Since that day, I've never ever ridden a roller coaster

and theme parks in general just kind of creep me out. I know they're super fun and I hope I get past my fear of them one day, but for the time being I'm more than happy to just avoid them and stay safe because even the sound of people screaming on them reminds me of Big Thunder Mountain, and the way that poor woman just kept screaming for her husband or son or whatever to wake up. I moved from Idaho to Alaska about two months ago and already I have experienced something I never thought I would ever experience. After taking a week to recover from a five-day trek across Canada on the Alaska highway, I had decided I was going to get out and explore the wilderness of my new home state and try to catch a glimpse of the wildlife such as moose and bears. The house I am renting is on the outskirts of the nearest town so I basically live in the middle of the forest and have access to miles of dense woods. I still don't know what I had been thinking when I decided to go into the woods without anything but my phone, which at the time

didn't get service in Alaska and some earbuds. I began running at a medium pace into the woods, hopping over bushes and branches while jamming out to some shaky graves. I had probably gone through about 5 songs when my shoelace got hooked on a fallen tree and I was thrown to the ground face first. I immediately got back up, swore out of irritation and began to put my earbuds back in when I realized I had no idea where I was. At some point, I had lost my sense of direction and had only but a faint idea as to which direction I had came from. I started to run the way I thought I had come from when I began to panic and second guess myself, when I realized I should have come out into my backyard ages ago. I didn't want to panic because I knew that it would make everything worse if I did and I started to try and pinpoint the right

direction. Of course I eventually realized that I was hopelessly and utterly lost without the slightest indication of which way would bring me to some sort of civilization. After a few brief moments of cursing and groaning, I decided to follow my gut and go the direction which I thought would possibly lead me home. I started running at full speed, hoping to break the tree line in a matter of minutes when something on the ground had caught my eye. It was a backpack. I stopped instantly and looked around for a person or campsite, but there was nothing I could see from the spot I was at, which was situated at the bottom of a small hill.

The bag looked as if it may have been abandoned for a few days at least but was slightly damp from the rain earlier that morning. I kneeled down and picked the bag up, resting it against my knees. It had a heavy weight to it when I moved it so I knew that there was something inside. Looking back now I remember the dark feeling I had that I got in my chest right before I had unzipped the main part of the backpack. Inside there were bags of what I immediately knew was an assortment of illegal drugs and items used to administer them. I quickly stood up and took a step back. I had such a powerful feeling of dread that I felt like I was in imminent danger. I just wanted to get out of there and find my way home so

I started to run again up to the top of the hill. I was hit with a wave of excitement when I saw a house at the bottom that was buried in the trees. I'd begun to make a start for it when something in my head told me to stop. The thought entered my mind that what I had just discovered was awfully close to this house. I wanted so badly to be out of the woods and find some form of civilization but something told me that it wasn't safe. I ran away from the house along the tree line hoping that I would possibly stumble upon another house. After about 10-15 minutes I stumbled into a neighborhood of sorts and asked a man working in his yard for directions. He was kind enough to drive me home and assure me that everyone gets lost in Alaska at some point.

As soon as I got home I showered and chugged some water and then immediately called the police to report what I had seen. However, due to the fact that I had no idea where I was, I couldn't tell them where to find the drugs or where the house was, so my report was basically useless. I just would have felt guilty if I hadn't at least said something. I've driven all over the area down different roads trying to find the house, but I never have. It's probably for the best though because I don't want to get caught up in something I shouldn't be. I'm glad I listened to my gut and kept running from that house because people in possession of such a large amount of illicit substances, I lived alone. It was a downstairs flat with my bedroom facing towards the street.

I had some heavy green curtains, so didn't mind too much. My friends lived about a 15 minute walk away and I would go over every day till sometimes about 3 or 4am or sometimes sleep over. I had a long distance boyfriend at the time so I would sometimes be up late on Skype with him. Sometimes one thing might lead to another if you know what I mean. Halloween rolls around and I'm out with my friends. I decide to go back to mine and do a little Skype supergirl for my boyfriend. We get into it. We're having a great time. Curtains close, lights off, just to be safe. I've had a drunk person try to get in once, sometimes trying to force the door open.

Another time I fell asleep early and left the curtains open. It had been super creepy. I woke up and looked up to see a man in my window, staring, stood so close his nose almost touched the glass. I'd freaked out and spent the night in the living room. So the lights were off, curtains shut. I noticed a kind of flickering in my peripheral and looked around. While meeting at the bottom, the curtains parted very slightly near the top. Through the gap, there appears to be a trail of steam rising. I cover myself and get up to investigate. I have to get up and stand on my mattress on my tiptoes to see through.

I'm not that too intimidating as I stand about 5'3". The source of the steam was the man's mouth, hunched over and panting, exposed at the waist, violently stroking his member. He'd managed to angle himself to take advantage of a barely two inch gap where the curtain didn't quite meet the wall. I try to quickly rearrange the curtains, grab my laptop and rush to hide in the living room. A few days later, there is a pink envelope waiting for me when I walk through the door. As I pick it up, various small change falls out.

Written on the lip of the envelope in jagged capital letters, I mean you no harm XXX. A horrible cold feeling spread through my body, dread overlapped by shock, I'd never felt anything like it. That feeling when your stomach drops, only it stays dropped. I turn the card over to read the address side, there in the same handwriting, to the girl in the front room. Opening it, I see it's a quite traditional sort of grievance card, cream with a delicate watercolor of a bouquet on the front, thinking of you in gold curvature next to it. The inside was completely covered by a message in all capitals, some letters backwards and words misspelled. I gave the card to the police,

so can't recite the whole passage verbatim, but the essence was, I'm an old man who has lived on the street for a long time. Wasn't sure if it meant my street or the streets in general, more on that later. You made me the happiest I'd ever been in my life on Halloween, and I'm sorry I scared you. You were very beautiful. I love to watch you whether you're working on your computer or touching myself. Please leave your curtains open just a little bit more for me. Each time you do this, I will post a couple of pounds through the letterbox. Signed, Ken XXXXXX. I called my friends, then got the police to come around. Basically, they couldn't really do anything. They took the card as evidence,

gave me a case number and said that they would get the patrol car to drive past my house for the near future. I stayed at my friends for a week and had one of them stay over at mine after that. That wasn't quite the last of Ken. Sometimes there would be a knocking on my window, but I kept my curtains 100% closed. Three or four months of no incidents later, we got snow. I was leaving my house, now in the habit of checking my curtains every time I left or got back to the house. I see a set of footprints tracing the entire front window, back and forth, back and forth, like someone had been pacing, searching for the tiniest gap to peer in. After I moved,

my friend had a job where she could check the local electoral register. We did find that a K. Mordu lived on my previous street, but that was as far as our investigating went. Because it was a studenty area, I would walk past that house on my way home for the next two years. A while after I moved out, I saw that the windows had been completely covered in newspaper, stuck from the inside. It seemed like someone else was having trouble with Ken still coming around. We'll be right back. of $70 by prepaid MasterCard. Conditions apply. Details at michelin.ca. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations.

I'm going to preface this story by saying that I am currently a 19 year old girl and when this story occurred I was 14. In the summer of 2016 my grandmother, two younger sisters and I drove 19 hours to San Antonio in Texas. My great aunt lives there and my recently deceased great uncle lived there too. We were all going to visit my grandmother's oldest brother as he had never really spent much time with us before. We spent the entire trip going out and about this military retirement home which my great uncle lived in. We went to a neat little thrift shop that was a part of the community and I bought a really old letter opener which I pretended was a dagger to freak my friends out with. The trip went well. We were there for about a week.

We said our goodbyes to our distant relatives and my grandmother told my sisters and I that she wanted to visit the Holocaust Museum before we left Texas and started our long drive. The museum had and still has a picture of her father in it. He was one of the first American doctors to get to Dachau which was a a concentration camp, and the picture is taken in front of a rather large pile of innocent people whose lives were stolen at Dachau, while my great grandfather stands behind them with a look of sorrow. My sisters and I readily agreed to go. We wanted our sweet little grandma to see a picture of her daddy. She was very excited to show us the photo. We eventually arrived at the Holocaust Museum and

it was devastatingly beautiful. The overall mood of the museum was somber and the walls were lined with photos from concentration camps and various other things that were present during the Holocaust. As we started our tour through the museum, I realized I had to use the restroom. Curse my tiny 14-year-old bladder bladder but I decided I would hold it in until we would finish with the tour. Little did I know, the tour would take about an hour. I suffered through most of the tour and distracted myself by listening to people who worked at the museum and listened to my grandma recall stories from her father. There were a few people scattered about the museum as we walked through it. The lights were somewhat dim as most museum lights are.

I noticed that it was really quiet. Most people were very empathetic as was I throughout the tour. Near the end of the tour my grandma finally found the photo she wanted to show us. She pointed to it excitedly and told one of the workers, that's my daddy. She went on to tell the worker about her father and what he did in Dachau and at this moment I realized I really, really had to use the restroom. My sisters were looking at me funny as I frantically searched for the bathroom.

My middle sister, I'll call her Jay, pointed to a restroom not far from where we stood. I told my sisters that I would be right back and I practically ran to the restroom. I opened the door expecting it to be vacant but to my demise it was packed with women who were babbling on about nothing important to a 14 year old me and women who were actually using the restroom. Now I don't know if it's something wrong with me psychologically but I absolutely cannot use a restroom when other people are present. It's always been an issue and it still is. You can imagine how rough that can be in certain situations. I resigned to waiting for the mass of women to leave the restroom and as luck would have it, the women all left in about 5 minutes.

There were about 6 stalls in this restroom, the handicapped stall being on the far left. I rushed into the stall directly next to it and practically threw myself under the toilet. Except, as I sat there, I began to have a really eerie feeling. I held my breath. The restroom was completely silent and I knew it should be because everyone had left, but something churned in my stomach. The silence was deafening. It felt thick. Someone could have cut a knife through it. Something wasn't right and I needed to get out of the stall. I didn't even use the toilet, I just scrambled from the stall and assessed the restroom. Everything seemed alright. I didn't see

anyone. All of the stall doors were closed and yet I still felt scared. I went to wash my hands as I would always wash my hands even if I didn't actually need to when something inside me told me to look at the handicapped stall. I don't know what persuaded me to look but I did. Alarm bells were ringing in my head. I slowly leaned back to get a better look at the stall and my heart dropped. I know people claim that their heart sinks or drops or they freeze with fear and all of what they claim is true. My heart jumped to my throat and I suddenly felt ill. What I saw was a leg on the floor. A child's leg. It was attached to someone but I was too scared to investigate any further. I ran from the restroom

to my younger sister's. I don't know why I did this, I was a dumb 14 year old but I needed my sister to confirm what I'd seen. They were skeptical when I told them what was in the restroom. I dragged my younger sister back into the restroom with me begging them to be quiet and I pointed to the handicap stall. My younger sister, Anne, looked at me in alarm then Jay did the same. There was long hair next to the leg now, almost as if though they were crouching to look under the stall at us but at the same time they were completely still, unnaturally still. I grabbed both of my sister's hands and urgently pulled them from the restroom. We ran up to my grandmother and all three of us started rambling at once.

The worker by my grandmother looked at us all in concern. I eventually explained the situation to the kind woman who worked there and she looked very unsettled. I watched as she grabbed a large, burly security guard. He looked from her to us and said that he would go take a look. We waited with my grandmother and the worker for the security guard to come back. He exited the woman's restroom fairly quickly and rushed to speak to the worker. A man was speaking on his phone in there. The security guard spoke lowly. My heart seemed to drop a little more. He? I saw a child's leg in there.

There wasn't a man in there too, was there? I thought. The woman glanced at my sisters and I before listening to the security guard again. The security guard confirmed that there were two people in the handicapped stall, and by this point my grandmother was freaked out enough to say it was time for us to leave. The security guard had readily agreed. I'm sorry to say that we didn't stick around to find out what that man was doing in the woman's restroom in the handicapped stall with a child on the floor. I didn't get to find out why they were so silent that I couldn't hear them breathing in the stall next to me or why he was on

the phone after I rushed out. I will say though, that this experience left me with an even bigger fear of public restrooms, and since I have such a wild imagination, I did not sleep that night. Images of that leg and thoughts of someone trying to peek at me, either over or under the stall, haunted me all night. About two years ago, I moved into a new apartment. The walls were very thin and because of the fire safety laws in my city, my bedroom had one window, which led into the living room and none with outside access. The window will be important later. It was three bedrooms, one for me, one for the master tenant, and one spare, which at the time was rented out by a pretty friendly guy. Well, friendly guy had issues with his work visa and had to move back

to Canada last minute, leaving us about two weeks to find another roommate. Our quickest and easiest option was Craigslist. Due to my work schedule, I had no part in the selection process but was content when the new roommate moved in a little later. He seemed a bit off but friendly. He was very tall, a large guy but pretty quiet and not someone I wanted to go out of my way to hang out with but was okay to be around and be cordial with. About two weeks into his move in, the master tenant left for Hawaii, leaving him and I alone in the home for the month long duration of his stay. For the first few days, things are normal. All of a sudden,

about four days into the trip, I'm woken up at about 8am to a frantic knocking at my door. Roommate, who we'll call Kyle, is staying there when I open up, looking frazzled. He looks me dead in the eyes and says, do you want to tell me what went on last night? To which I was shocked and confused because I had come home from work at about 9pm and immediately showered and went to bed. I explain this to him and he tells me that he heard me screaming and arguing with someone in my room, that he saw me in the side alley out the window arguing with our landlord, whom I'd never even seen at that point, that he'd heard coming in and out of our house.

I tell him no way, none of that ever happened. After staring at me for a little longer, he leaves and doesn't bring it up again. The next morning I wake up to the same thing. This time he says he saw me arguing with my boyfriend, I was single at the time. He had seen me talking with our other roommate who was in Hawaii and asking me for the badge number of the officer I had spoken to, since he had apparently seen me talking to a bunch of police as well. This time, I get angry and more or less tell him to cut this out because I'm not doing anything and don't know what he's talking about. He gets a weird look on his face and says,

I think I had a seizure in my sleep. The next time it happens, call an ambulance, and leaves for a bit, only to start knocking again about an hour later, and when I open up, Kyle repeats the exact same story verbatim. This happens once more before I tell him to leave me alone and leave for work. I go to work as normal and I am reluctant to return that night but am too tired to switch to an alternate location. Big mistake. About 1am I wake up to slamming doors. Kyle is pacing back and forth between his bedroom, the living room, and out the front door. Walking in and out of each room, turning the lights on and off, mumbling angrily and slamming the doors. I can see his figure pacing back and forth through the frosted window in my room that leads to the living room.

Since my room is dark, he can't see inside. Suddenly he screams, I can't live like this. Why are you doing this to me? I think he's on the phone and don't respond. A few moments later he screams my name repeatedly and I realize he's directing it towards me. I knew I had to get the F out of there so I very quietly creeped out of bed and started getting dressed and packing a bag of clothes for work in the morning. I'm almost done when he screams I hear you, and charges over towards my room slapping the wall next to my door but not touching the door itself. I look towards my window and see his shadow lean all the way forward, pressing his ears against the glass.

I was terrified and sat completely still, unmoving. He eventually screams my name again and moves away from the window, and I hear him start pacing between rooms again. Now, my shoes are kept on a rack outside my door and not inside my room, so I know that when I leave I'm going to need a moment to put them on. I decide to wait until his pacing takes him out of the front door again, at which time I plan to grab my shoes, put them on and run. As I'm formulating this plan, the pacing stops. He screams, Do you want to fight about this? Come out right now and we'll fight, I swear to God. I'm a very small girl, 5 feet tall and this guy is easily 3 times my size,

so I'm definitely not looking to fight, thanks. After a few minutes, he turns off all the lights and I hear the door to his room open and close, followed by silence. I wait for a moment to be sure I can't hear any movement and then decide to take my chance. I took a breath and pull my door open quickly. I step out and grab my shoes before I look up a second later and see him standing shirtless with just a pair of boxers and socks on. In the dark of the hallway his arms hung slightly outward in an awkward position. He says in a low calm voice, ma'am we need to talk. This is a hard no for me so I grab my shoes and run out the door with them in hand.

I run about half a block barefoot before I stop to put them on. When I look back, he's standing in the porch light of our front door, watching me run but not moving. Luckily, I have a friend who lived two blocks away and I had their spare keys so I let myself in and crashed there for the night. And that's where I stayed for the next week or so while we work things out with the master tenant and Kyle agreed to move out within the week. He says he doesn't remember anything that happened and wasn't sure if it was real or not. But if I said that's what went down then it must be real. The day Kyle left he sends me a photo of the house keys sitting on the table and says, I'm out. Nothing else. I take a friend over there with me to scout it and ensure that he actually had left. When we get there, we discover that not only had he left

a ton of food and furniture, but he had ripped all of the fire alarms out of the ceilings. He had unscrewed and removed the deadbolt to the front door and left them lined up neatly on the front table. We then realized that my front door can only lock by using a key from the outside and had been locked when we arrived, meaning Kyle still had a key. We called a locksmith immediately. Even after changing the locks, I was still terrified to stay there alone afterwards and never went to sleep at night without barricading the doors with chairs and other furniture. To this day, I still fear for his safety. He was obviously psychologically unstable, but also wonder what could have happened if I hadn't been as lucky as I was.

I have no idea how we got home. To this day it defies logic. I have asked the people that were with me. They have not even given in a second thought. Bizarre. I wouldn't consider them to be the type of people to ignore crucial details but then again neither am I and I never even thought to bring it up. Not the next day, not the remainder of our trip, none of the years that followed. Not until one night at a casual dinner that we had together some seven years later.

They were just as bewildered as I was. Both of them sat in silence for a moment, bug-eyed and caught deep in thought. How did we get home? I asked them again. I could feel a slight smile tugging lightly at one corner of my mouth as I said it. I knew the answer already. I pondered it for months. I don't know. They both said in unison. We all sat in silence, unsure of how to continue the conversation. I suppose I should start at the beginning. The listing of the characters and whatnot, what we were doing,

why we were there, set the scene I suppose. The couple I was having dinner with are Ben and Stacy, long time good friends of mine. They are good people, Ben and I shared a mutual interest in JDM drift cars in my early 20s and I had met his partner Stacy not long after he and I had met. In 2005 my girlfriend Tegan and I had been invited to go to England to visit my stepfather and I had offered for Ben and Stacey to join us. They eagerly accepted and saved up the money to come along. I've always held a fascination for old, creepy and or abandoned

properties or houses and was extremely excited to explore England and see what the country had to offer. St Stacy shared my interest in such places and had expressed her interest in accompanying me should I find anything. Ben and Tegan were not as keen on the idea but seemed happy to tag along if anything were to eventuate from this. A few days into our trip, I was able to find that there was an old hospital that had been abandoned since the 80s but it was soon to be repurposed into a mental health clinic. The hospital in question was around a 2-3 hour drive away into a rural English countryside. We rented a car and I spent the best part of an hour explaining to Tegan that

if she was going to chicken out on us, it was best that she stayed behind. She insisted that she possessed the testicular fortitude to join us and I, perhaps stupidly, believed her. The rental was not cheap as we were all under the age of 25 which meant that the premium remained in the cost for the rental. Regardless, we split the rental cost between all four of us and we asked my stepfather's partner to drop us off to collect the car from the rental hub. We picked up the car, an absolute POS manual Fiat 500 as it was the cheapest, yet still expensive, option. The rear seats had literally 0% padding for Stacy and Tegan who had to sit in the back as I was the driver and Ben towered over all of us.

We set off driving and using an outdated roadmap book that my stepfather had lent us. The navman option had been out of our price range and let me tell you, I'll never again complain about NSW road posting after trying to navigate around the English countryside. The roadmap was of minimal help as it was so ancient that three of the turnoffs that were clearly displayed on its yellow weathered papers no longer even existed. Twice Ben had informed me of an upcoming tea section that never arrived and yet we seemed to seamlessly enter into the route that we had planned out regardless. We stopped at KFC which was a massive culture shock to all of us. No potato and gravy, baked beans instead? Thank

god our ancestors had committed crimes that had them sent to Australia back in the day. Tegan and Stacey were mumbling about the lack of padding on the back seat which Ben and I brushed off as unnecessary whining. We finished up lunch and set off on the road again. The days are short in England, the sunlight disappears much quicker than back home. I was not particularly bothered as I just thought that it would simply add to the dark atmosphere when we eventually arrived. We arrived in the general vicinity of the hospital after about two hours of driving and said to heck with the roadmap as it was much more trouble than what it was worth. We saw some old signposts on bent poles that indicated that we were heading in the right direction and decided to follow them.

It took us through a rabbit warren of back roads and dirt tracks, doing U-turns and a lot of swearing until we came across the ruins of a castle-esque type house that had obviously been gutted out from a fire some years ago. I decided to stop here to stretch our legs and get some photos. The ruins of this place were amazing. I managed to get some great pictures although I was only starting out as a photographer and so they are grainy at best. We loitered around for about 45 minutes before deciding to give the hospital one more crack. We piled into the car and white knuckled the reading of the road map. Ben and I decided on a likely route before I started the car

and we set off. We actually managed to find the hospital this time. Ben had chosen the route well and I rolled up to a toll booth that was located on the road just outside the hospital grounds. I could see the building in the distance and the plant equipment section off nearby in order to begin demolition or renovations. The security guard at the toll booth did not seem too pleased to see us and was very dismissive. I imagine he turns people away all the time for the very same reason that we were trying to gain entry. I was determined not to give up though. After I did a three point turn to get out of the small section of road I rounded the corner in order to circumnavigate the patrol area and entered an estate at the rear entrance of the hospital. Parking the car I could see that the hospital

lay just beyond an open field nearby. The sky was pitch black by now. The only lighting was coming from dimly lit street lamps that flickered on and off every few seconds. When I opened the door I noticed that the air was incredibly cold and the street was eerily silent. Stacy and I practically leapt out of the car in anticipation of getting to the hospital while Ben and Tegan reluctantly opened their respective doors to get out. We all zipped up our jackets and put our scarves on while trudging into the field. The ground was so wet and muddy that we had to use torches on our phones to prevent ourselves from sinking our feet into foot-deep puddles. Clearly this field had been recently used to move the plant equipment to the area and as a result of much of the terrain was torn up with deep turrets from machine tracks.

Stacy and I took the lead while Ben and Tegan lagged behind. I didn't think too much of it. I knew that they were not into this stuff. We walked for about two minutes before I heard Ben call out to us. Stacey and I stopped and turned around. What? I said as I stood still. A light breeze beginning to blow now.

Tegan doesn't want to go. Ben said in an apologetic tone. I looked at Tegan. Her head was bowed down towards the ground and her arms were crossed tightly over her chest. We all stood still for a moment and I sighed loudly. Okay, let's go back to the car. Stacy and I were not happy. But we knew that leaving Tegan at the car was not an option and we wanted everybody to come with us.

Stacy let out an audible curse as we began the painstaking journey back to the little Fiat. When we got back to the car, we all silently got in and took a moment to make our clothing a little more comfortable for travel and this is where the story gets a little strange. Not much was said between any of us. I started the car and began to drive. We did not discuss a route home and I had no clue where we were. I just started driving. I found a dirt road and took that. Nobody in the car said a word about this. I noticed a sign haphazardly nailed crookedly to a gnarly looking tree that said London 40 miles that somebody had obviously painted and made it home.

I continued to drive. I remember nothing about that road. I don't recall anything until I was at a large intersection back in London. I looked around the car. All of us wore stoic expressions and seemed rather listless. Then another skip like a damaged VHS tape. We were at a Chinese restaurant near to where my stepfather lived. We were all sitting around a square table with a cheap blue tablecloth. All of a sudden, all four of our forks slid off the table and onto the floor. Stacey and I were opposite each other when this happened, and we glanced at each other with perplexed expressions before bending down to retrieve our forks together.

Stacy looked at me again and said, That was weird. She sounded far off and distant and as though she was talking underwater. What? I asked, straining my ears to hear her just as her volume and cadence returned back to normal. That was weird, she said clear as day. The bustling noises of a busy restaurant

are all now returning to fill the void of ambient background noise that I had not even noticed was missing up until that point. Skip again, getting into bed and feeling extremely heavy and sedated. We all woke up the next day and seemed perfectly normal. We ate breakfast together while Ben and I cracked bad jokes off each other as we always did. We returned the car later that day, after I checked the back seats, after the fuss the girls had made and yes they were indeed devoid of any padding, and never spoke of the outing again. Not once. Losing hours of time with friends that can verify that they experienced the exact same thing, a subconscious refusal to dwell on it or

even bring it up? What actually happened that night. I'm currently in my late teens, and since I was a child, I've had obscure, incredibly vivid dreams, most of them being lucid. However, I've had some dreams, or visions I suppose. They have unnerved me for as long as I can remember and since I was about 4 years old, I have correctly predicted every family death to happen yet. The first of these strange occurrences happened when I was 4 years old. As a child, my family had a close friend who I considered a second father to me. We'll call him Anthony, out of respect. Anthony visited our house every weekend since I was about two years old.

Together we would go swimming at family barbecues or whenever he had time off of work. He was a great man. At the age of four, though I didn't understand at the time, Anthony passed away after a long battle with skin cancer. My family was devastated and I miss him to this day. In the following months, I recall having a dream in which Anthony and I were sat around our swimming pool in the backyard. Our feet dipped in the deep end, which was filled with dozens of beautiful tropical fish and bright coral. I've had this dream multiple times over the years and the main detail that has always stood out to me is the intense, overpowering smell that accompanies every dream. For years, I could never put a name to the scent, but I know now that it

was coconut. At the age of nine or so, I began to notice the same overpowering scent of coconut, only this time it was while I was wide awake. It didn't matter where I was or what time of the day it was, to this day I may be sat in my room and the scent appears. At work and I sense it again, or even out with friends and it's all I seem to be breathing in. No one else has ever smelled the same scent though, not in the 10 or so years I've had these experiences. Fast forward to age 14 and we're doing renovations in the backyard which required moving a bit of outdoor furniture around. When it comes to moving the barbecue, my mom stops and pulls out a bottle from the corner of the grill that had been sat in there for at least 10 years. She holds it up to me, asking if I remember Anthony's iconic tanning lotion. In that moment, I remember my child family friend's favorite lotion.

He wore it religiously. Can you guess what scent the lotion was? Coconut. For the premonitions, the first of many unnerving dreams to come occurred in 2015, in which I was with my family, my parents and grandparents. All these years later, I no longer remember the exact details, but what I do remember is that my grandfather got sick. Very sick. I awoke with a churning sensation in my stomach, but for the most part I tried to brush it aside, blaming anxiety or paranoia for the vivid dreams. Fast forward to 2018, I find out my grandfather had just been diagnosed with cancer. We were devastated, but for the most part my parents tried to remain optimistic. We were hopeful he would get through it. 2020, I awake from a horrid dream. I had dreamt I had just gone to my grandfather's funeral.

In the following months, it became clear that he would not be recovering and was one of the hardest things my family and I have gone through. June 2020, I experience another dream, only this time I, myself, am not present in the room, but rather hovering over the scene observing what plays out. For the sake of keeping this free from possible trigger warnings, my grandfather is in a hospital bed surrounded by my grandmother and mother. Things don't look good, and strangely in that moment I distinctly remember the number 38 coming to mind. Two days later, I told my grandfather has gone to hospital on palliative care and he won't be returning home. Heartbroken,

my mother and I go to visit him. We are directed to room 38. I walked into the exact room, same bed, same room, arrangements, same windows. He passed away two days later and I am at least grateful to say that I got to say goodbye because I knew I had to go and what would happen if I hadn't. These premonitions don't just extend to human family members, but pets as well. Back in April of 2020, I had a dream in which I said goodbye to one of our beloved cats and watched her walk into the distance. I awoke with the strongest sense of dread, but for the most part part brushed it off once more with the excuse of paranoia. On May 10th, we rushed our sweet girl to the emergency vet where we were informed she was suffering unexpected heart failure. We had to say goodbye to her that very day.

She was only 11. At this point, I had mentioned my dreams to my mother who, despite not believing in the paranormal or whatnot, found the dreams grimly fascinating. I was relieved she didn't brush me off like every other ghost film to exist. October 2020, one day ago as of when I'm writing this, I had another premonition. I was there with our other cat who had just turned 12. He was my cat. He was my fur baby. His sister, our cat who we had just lost months before, sits calmly before us. I watch as my cat joins his sister and together they walk off into the distance. I wake up in the morning to hear my mother frantic in the dining room. I step out of my room to discover my boy isn't well. He isn't well at all. A mere 50 minutes later, we are told he, like his sister, is suffering unexpected heart failure due to a

genetic heart defect. We say goodbye to him. He passed away yesterday, two hours after I had a dream in which he joined his sister. They're together now and I hope they keep each other good company. I'm upset just putting this into words, however I don they keep each other good company. I'm upset just putting this into words, however I don't feel it's over yet. Approximately two weeks ago I had another dream in which my biological father got sick, very sick. The dream showed my family members exact life spans and the time each of us have left. Now I'm conflicted.

Do I tell my mother to warn her in case it too happens? What if I'm wrong this time and cause her unnecessary worry just months after the passing of her father? I really don't know what to do. Take this as you will. Maybe this is just a long list of coincidences or keen senses. All I know is that sometimes I'm afraid of what I might dream next. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Until May 30th, purchase four new Michelin passenger or light truck tires and receive up to $70 by prepaid MasterCard.

Conditions apply. Details at Michelin.ca. Find a Michelin tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. Trade Express.ca The first story takes place in my dad's hometown in the Mexican state of Chihuahua in the year 2000. Living in Mexico was very different from living in the U.S. to say the least. Our family would move from home to home due to my parents being from different towns and the respect of in-laws not liking each other.

My father's aunt allowed my family to move into the vacant home attached to hers for as long as he wanted. This small home was very typical for a rural Mexican home, and it was made of mud brick with an iron door and two windows next to the door. The inside of the home was composed of one large family room that was a mix between a living room and a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen that led out to the garden. Due to the small size of the home, my parents and I would sleep in the family room. My parents had their queen-sized bed by the front door and my bunk bed by the rightmost wall of the home. The night that I had my encounter was a night like any other. My parents and I

ate dinner and watched TV in bed until we fell asleep. I remember being awoken by a feeling of panic and fear. I felt paralyzed and I could only move my head. Something told me not to look at the wall to my right yet I felt compelled to. I could not fight the urge to not look for long. Turning to look at the wall I saw a woman's face coming through the wall. The face was grotesque to say the least. She had long messy black hair, pale skin, white eyes and her mouth was full of what I could only describe as shark teeth. I wanted to scream as she opened her mouth and got closer to my face. After what seemed like an eternity, the face vanished and I could move again. I immediately ran over to my sleeping parents, crying and trembling as I woke them up.

My mom woke up and asked me what was wrong in a sleepy tone. I told her what I saw and she simply dismissed it as a nightmare and let me sleep between her and my dad. My mom told me years later that I refused to sleep in that bunk bed until my dad removed the top bunk and stored it in another home. Until this day, my mom believes that I simply had a nightmare or sleep paralysis, which I always deny especially after she revealed that a woman died in that house. This next story takes place in the US. I was 19 at the time and I was working at a family dollar store up the street from my house. There was nothing weird or off about this house aside from it being a low income part of the city. 7 months into my tenure at the store the other employees began telling me about

weird things that happened at the store. They even had a name for the ghost, Jeff. I was very skeptical about the claims my co-workers made. I just thought they wanted to scare the new guy until one day I experienced Jeff's presence first hand. It was a Saturday. I was working 8am to 5pm. I got the urge to go to the restroom. I headed over to the stock room where we had the employee restrooms as the regular restrooms were disgusting and often not working. I opened the stall and got to do business. It was no more than five minutes when I heard someone exhale and what sounded like boxes falling outside of the bathroom. I finished my business as soon as possible. I checked the stock

room and nothing was out of place. Out of panic I immediately ran back to the register and continued my shift as normal. The last 30 minutes of my shift came and I needed to take a leak and thus had no choice but to go use the restroom in the stock room again. The room had a very unfriendly atmosphere to it and I got a headache as soon as I stepped foot in there. I took the fastest leak I ever had taken and ran out. The headache faded after five minutes of leaving that room. I went home and began feeling a cold coming on that night. The next morning I woke up with appendicitis. I have no idea if this was brought on by whatever was back there but I still refuse to even

look at the room when I go shop there. The last story happened two years ago. I was home alone drying myself after a shower. When the bathroom doorknob made turning sounds, I turned to see the doorknob turning. I knew no one was home, so I ran out to see if someone had broken in. I checked every room and made sure that all the windows were closed and the front door was locked. There was no sign of a break-in. I was the only one in the house. I was the one who snapped, and this is my story.

I'm a pacifist. I give bees honey water when they are dying, and I love all living beings. The thought of anything or anyone being in pain hurts me within my soul. I was 14, I grew up in a violent household and my 7 year old brother and 5 year old sister and 12 year old me were abandoned by our parents. I could take the easy way out and blame them but no, this was me. I remember the day in a haze, the day I snapped I wasn't feeling well. I often have days that I hurt all over and have pains in my chest and heart. So the day in question I was feeling unwell. My siblings had been driving me

crazy for days. It was a school break. I asked my brother if he would wash the few dishes in the kitchen. He agreed. After resting for a couple of hours I made my way to the kitchen to cook them dinner. However the dishes had not been done. I called my brother in from outside and asked him why. He laughed at me. After a few minutes of me trying to explain to him how we all needed to help each other out, and I don't ask much, this is where things get hazy, he just laughed at me. I tried to reason with him and he continued to laugh. Then he pushed past me and stormed to his room, still laughing. It was like a switch just flipped and I yelled, Don't laugh at me.

He laughed harder and I heard his bedroom door slam shut. I stormed up to his room. Every time he laughed at me, I broke something. I smashed everything up and threw the TV at his head. He just kept laughing at me. At that point, I launched myself at him and wrapped my hands around his neck. Go on, keep laughing, I spat between my clenched teeth. I saw him turn bright red and gasped, clawing at me, but I couldn't stop. It was as though I had no control. At this point, my sister had ran for help.

Unfortunately, everyone was at work, so the only help she could find was the neighbor's 12-year-old. By the time they got to us, my brother had turned blue. His eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he went limp. My sister screamed at me to, Get off, you've killed him! I turned to her and started to run towards her. The fear in her eyes as she ran, it was like watching myself yet having no control. I chased after her and she ran through our back garden and towards a small woodland area.

I ran after her and on the way I spotted a small wooden axe and picked it up. The neighbor's kid ran to try and find an adult. I saw her jacket or whatever she was wearing hidden behind a tree. I swung the axe as hard as I could. She ducked and I missed. As I tried to pull the axe out from the tree, I saw my terrified baby sister cowered into a ball, sobbing. I heard the neighbor kid running to her aid. He hadn't been able to find an adult, so he had ran back to try and save her.

Stunned, I walked home. I slowly walked the staircase to my brother's room. He had come too and looked me in the eye before raspily saying, I'm sorry. Empty, I walked into my room and broke down. When my sister got home, she ran a bath and walked my zombified self to the bathroom and said, here this will help you feel better. When I got out of the bath, my brother had done the dishes. They all stood by me and although they don't remember much of it now, I'll never forget the day I snapped and almost killed my siblings. To start off, I'm a 17 year old from Virginia. About a year and a half ago I got a job at my local Wendy's.

The job kind of sucks, but I keep it to have gas and a little pocket money for the side. I get along well with my employees. I actually made two amazing best friends there. First let me give you the layout of the kitchen area. There are two ways to come into the kitchen area, one to the left and to the right. If you go to the door on the left, you will walk into the crew room where people place drinks and jackets to be easy to grab when they leave. As you walk through the doorway of the crew room, you will enter the kitchen.

To your right, you will see the fry, grill, and front sandwich station that also leads to the front register. If you look to your left you will see the side sandwich station and drive through. As you walk towards the back of the store you will see the storage room for food and the sink and office in the back. About a year ago I was working near the fry station alone. Everyone was either in the back office or outside. We didn't have much for orders, so I was just playing on my phone when all of a sudden, I hear very clearly my first and last name in my right ear. Note that when you are standing in the kitchen, there are a lot of beeps and noises coming from the different machines. Of course, my first instinct was to look around and I didn't see anyone. The hairs on my arms stood up. I looked around to

see if anyone was in the store. I looked in the back to see no one at this point. I was terrified as my heart started beating out of my chest uncontrollably. A few minutes passed by and all the crew was back in the kitchen. I told my best friend what happened and he chalked it up to the wind or something like that. I still didn't fully know what that was until one of my co-workers confirmed my suspicion. She said that she had the same situation and no one was around and something said her first and last name in her right ear. A day after we worked the same shift and was talking about the incidents in front of the store and all of a sudden a stack of cups that was sitting on the

counter fell to the ground. We thought it was weird but once again didn't think much of it. Fast forward to just a couple of days ago I was working night shift. I was in the back doing the dishes listening to Led Zeppelin. I was in such a good mood knowing I didn't have to deal with the customers on drive-thru. I stopped doing the dishes for a second just to check my phone in the office. I was facing the opposite way of the door when I felt this sudden eerie feeling to turn around like if someone was watching me. I quickly turned to find no one there. I go to the storage space to see if someone walked by but nope, everyone was

up front in the kitchen area. So I go back to the office, this time facing the sink and the walkway leading to the storage room and kitchen. While I was on my phone I felt this presence to the right of my shoulder like someone's head was over my shoulder. I felt like someone was actually there looking forward. I slowly turned to see nothing. This incident has really shaken me up to when I was driving home that night I felt as if though someone was in my back seat watching me. I stopped in the road, flipped on my light to see nothing. I have no idea if I should be scared if this thing is still with me or just carry on. Either way I really think something

or someone is lurking near the restaurant that being a demon or just a lost spirit. Tell me what you guys a college major you enjoy, you'll never have to work a day in your life because that field isn't hiring? Well, that joke became a reality when I graduated college and was faced with a pretty much non-existent job market. The only thing I had going for me was a significant amount of money that my grandma had left me when I was 16. I put that money away and planned on using it for a down payment on a house one day, but I realized that a house wasn't going to be any good to me without a job to pay the

mortgage, bills, and other expenses. I pulled out about half of that money and purchased an old John Deere 310C backhoe loader and decided to start an excavating company. Being in a fairly rural town, I made most of my money starting out doing tile drain work for farmers. For those of you who aren't from a farming background, tile is actually this plastic hose that's perforated with millions of tiny holes and then surrounded with filter cloth. It's buried in trenches and fields to drain excess water away. Most of the trenches are dug with a big machine called a tile plow that would look right at home as a Decepticon in the Transformers movie, but the corners and T-joints where the two tile drains would meet would need

to be dug with a backhoe. Also, they needed another machine to fill the trenches in anyway so that's where I came in. It was a good practice since you can't really mess up digging a trench for a tile drain and after a while I got pretty good with the machine. Well things just kind of snowballed from there. One former I was working for said that he had a brother closer to town who wanted an in-ground swimming pool and asked if I was interested in doing that. I accepted the job and once that was done, he referred another customer to me. Eventually winter came and I bought a box plow attachment for the front bucket and secured a contract with the town to clear snow in the parking lot of the town hall,

arena, library and a few parks. I pretty much broke even on my investment the first season I was in business and after the second season I was starting to see profits. Being a waterfront town, the construction industry in my area was booming with cottages being put up all along the shoreline so there was no shortage of work. The only shortcoming in my business plan was that I didn't have a commercial license to drive a semi so the only way I could get my big machine from job to job was to just drive it down the road. This wasn't a big deal since the majority of my work was in town or the immediate surrounding area and a friend of mine whose family owned a storage complex was letting

me keep the backhoe in their yard free of charge but still the travel times did limit how much I could get done in one day. It got to the point where I decided I needed a second machine and to hire another operator. Fast forward five years into this and I have my own yard with three machines going. The original John Deere 310C, which is now being run by Kayla, who's probably better at running it than me and thusly the only one I trust with that machine. It's kind of my baby since it's what's built the company. I have a smaller John Deere 110 backhoe for doing smaller residential landscaping work where the 310 is too big. It's also got a cool feature where you can take the backhoe arm off and use it like a normal farm tractor so I can hook up other attachments to it and do all

sorts of jobs. Finally, I have a Bobcat S100 skid steer loader mostly for cleanup work or spreading gravel and stuff in tight areas. As it is with owning your own business, I'm stuck in the office most days and not able to get out on the work sites as much as I'd like, but I'd come to learn one day. Maybe that isn't such a bad thing. One afternoon in late October, I was sitting in my office when the phone rings. It's Kayla telling me there's an issue with the job she's currently on and that I need to come out there immediately, although she seems reluctant to tell me what exactly the problem is. I remember it was another case of a customer being a bit of a jerk and not taking her seriously since she's a female about my age. People don't even take me seriously due to my age sometimes and she is very attractive like she really doesn't look like the type of

person who would be doing this type of work so she gets a lot of guff from people about it. Her and I have dealt with this pretty much ever since I hired her and it doesn't faze her. It's more of an inconvenience than anything so I knew how to handle it. I get out to the farm where she's digging a trench to bury some water lines for the guy's cattle and when I get out of the truck I see her having a perfectly friendly conversation with a farmer. Great, I think to myself, if she's not being harassed then we must be dealing with some kind of equipment failure for her to make me come out here. I ask her what's up and she walks me back to where she had been digging with the 310 and tells me to look in the dirt pile. I turn and look and I'm about to ask her what I'm looking for when I notice, looking back at me, is a human skull. I almost fell over backwards when I saw it.

You dug that up here? I ask her. Yes. She replies. I haven't told the farmer yet and he hasn't seen it. I just told him I had a hydraulic leak, and that's what you were coming to fix. I don't know what to do. Should we call the cops? I was hesitant to call the cops because if it was just a skull, it's not like it was fresh and part of some open investigation. We should probably tell the guy, I said. Farmers bury relatives in the back pasture all the time, it's probably just his great grandfather and he forgot where he was. Kayla seemed to agree with me so we told the guy. He chuckled and pretty much confirmed my theory. He didn't know who it was but he did say that he knew some of his ancestors were buried on the property in various locations. We had him put

the skull back in the trench and we rerouted the water line so that we wouldn't have to disturb his ancestor's final resting place. From that day forward, the John Deere 310C developed a whole host of mechanical problems. One day it was a hydraulic leak, the next it would be an electrical issue. One morning I came into the shop and all four tires were completely flat despite them having no damage and the bead being perfectly seated on the rim. This was a big problem since the 310 was my main snow removal machine for the winter months and snow season was fast approaching. Luckily most of the digging work I had lined up was smaller jobs the 110 could handle so I spent most of November in the shop trying to fix the 310. The problem was that any of the issues I found seemed to magically resolve themselves whenever I tried to find the cause,

making it basically impossible to figure out. This was incredibly frustrating since it meant that it would just break down randomly and there was nothing I could do about it. The snow finally flew in December and even though the 310 was still temperamental at best, I had no choice but to send it out. Kayla had given it the nickname Christine after the car from the Stephen King book since she always joked about it being possessed by the farmer's great-grandfather after our accidental archaeology incident. My take on the situation was that Christine was just getting old and needed more attention and I was already in the market for a new main backhoe.

The most notable incident from that winter was when Kayla was out plowing a gas station parking lot at 5am and the engine ran away on her. For those of you who don't know, a diesel engine doesn't have spark plugs so the only way to shut it down is to shut off the fuel supply. If something goes wrong and fuel gets in where it's not supposed to, you essentially lose control of the engine. Luckily, Kayla was able to shut the machine down by shoveling snow into the air intake and avoid a massive disaster. After that happened, I decided to finally pull the trigger on the new machine I had been eyeing up, a John Deere 310SK. I just didn't trust Christine's engine anymore after that night. I put her out behind the shop while I decided what to do with her. It seemed a shame to get rid of her since she had

started my whole business and been what got me out of my depressing situation. She had taken me from a broke college graduate in debt with student loans and no job to owning my own business and a house in only 5 years and she felt like a member of the family at that point. Even more so now that Kayla had stenciled the name Christine onto the loader and arm with a can of spray paint making the name official. Well, the decision as to whether or not to get rid of Christine was one I wouldn't have to make. The night before the new backhoe was to be dropped off in my yard, I was working late in the office. It was around 9pm and I was just getting ready to shut down my computer when I smelled smoke, and not like wood burning smoke, like rubber burning smoke.

I ran outside and through the thick black smoke saw Christine completely engulfed in flames. It took firefighters until 2am to get the fire under control and another hour to completely extinguish because every time they put it out, it just sparked right back up again. The next day, I arranged for a local junkyard to come and take the remains away. What was weird about the fire was it was hot enough to melt some of the steel components yet somehow left the wooden fence that the machine was parked up against completely unscathed, like there wasn't even a burn mark on it. In fact, once the burnt out wreck was hauled away, there was hardly any evidence that there had even been a fire at all. The official verdict was that an electrical fault caused the fire, but I'm not entirely convinced.

It's got me thinking that maybe Kayla's theory about the old farmer's ancestor we disturbed has more truth to it than I initially thought. An awful thought had crossed my mind that maybe the skull really was some unsolved murder case and the victim was taking out their frustrations on me for not getting their case solved. I don't know, maybe I should have called the cops, but it's in the past now. Either way, whoever it is, their reign of terror over my business seemed to stop with the destruction of Christine. Outside of normal wear and tear, I've had no issues with any of my machinery since, and the business is better than ever. For Christmas one year, Kayla's boyfriend,

who's a graphic designer, made me one of those call-before-you-dig signs, but where the phone number normally is, there's a picture of a widget board. It's hanging up in my shop beside our health and safety board as a humorous reminder that you never really know who's down there until you dig it up. We'll be right back. Purchase four new Michelin passenger or light truck tires and receive up to $70 by prepaid MasterCard. Conditions apply. Details at Michelin.ca. Find a Michelin TreadExperts dealer near you at TreadExperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca. It's Halloween night of 2007, and me and my little circle of friends are all serious horror fanatics. We've just gotten done watching that Rob Zombie remake of Halloween at a local movie theater, having been snuck into a showing of it

by my older sister's boyfriend even though we were way too young to be in there. It's not a brilliant movie I guess but we didn't care because we're about to go trick-or-treating in a neighborhood where Halloween is a huge deal. Every kid for miles around was going to be walking the streets in their spookiest costumes, streets that were decked out in decorations so lavish that it'd make even the wealthiest theme parks blush. The parents in our area seemed to turn the whole thing into something of a competition, which made for a very, very spooktacular atmosphere. Needless to say, we were pumped. We all make our way back to our various parents' house, put on our different costumes,

then meet up at the end of our street to begin our undead shuffle around the neighborhoods. It was honestly one of the most memorable nights of my life. I can barely describe the kind of youthful excitement that possessed us that evening. It was absolutely electric. And since our costumes were tip-top, we absolutely cleaned up on the candy front. Some houses we called at gave us a few extra handfuls because we were just so excited to be trick-or-treating. At one point, one of my friends hid just out of view from the door of the house that we knocked on. Some mom and dad couple answered the door, smiling and wishing us an enthusiastic happy Halloween after we gave them

our best trick or treat. Then, just as they're about to give us a handful of fun-sized candy bars, my friend jumps out at them from around the corner, wearing his awesome-looking werewolf mask and makes the loudest howling noise you could ever wish to hear from a 14-year-old kid whose voice hadn't quite dropped yet. The dad of the couple is absolutely scared out of his skin, backing off from the doorway with this girlish wow sounding scream. The mom freezes for a second, all wide eyed and shocked before she just bursts out laughing at her husband's reaction. The dad's all like, Not you kid, you scared the life out of me man.

But kind of starts cracking up too which then just makes the mom laugh even more. Everyone is laughing to themselves at this point. It's a super wholesome moment, and it's something I'll remember fondly for the rest of my life. And thanks to the efforts of our werewolf buddy, we each got an extra handful of fun-sized bars in our candy sacks. It was a win-win scenario. So a little while later, we're all walking around still, our candy sacks absolutely stuffed with goodies that are probably going to last until December if we ration them right, and if we keep the stashes well hidden from the sticky fingers of our older siblings.

We're not entirely bored yet, but the conversations have started wandering way beyond where we might be able to hit the motherload of candy next. That's when someone brings up a particularly scary story. I don't mean, ooh, super spoopy skeleton story. I mean like legit terrifying. One of my buddies starts telling me the urban legend of the evil woman who got so sick of trick-or-treaters knocking on her house on Halloween that she gave them all poisoned candy and ended up killing a bunch of kids as a result. Scary enough, considering what we were doing, but totally not true, right? Wrong.

Another of my buddies is all like, Nah dude, that's a true story, and tells us how that stuff actually happened like back in the 80s or something. Apparently, and I did look this up myself later on to confirm it, this poor kid gets given a poison pixie stick while on his trick-or-treating rounds. He eats the candy inside, totally unaware of the sugar crystals inside are actually laced with cyanide. Yep, cyanide. Like one of the deadliest poisons known to man,

same stuff Hitler swallowed to end his own life at the end of World War II. Then boom, the kid froths at the mouth and dies. It was no urban legend at all, that stuff legit happened for real. Then our buddy goes on to tell us that it wasn't some evil old lady that did the poisoning. It was his own dad that did it for some insurance thing. Like, he took out life insurance on his kid, murdered him, then tried to claim on it. Sick, right? Seriously disturbing story and obviously we're all actually terrified by the prospect of it.

We're walking along actually wondering aloud to each other if we'd called at anyone's house who seemed weird enough to actually do that. There was no seemingly evil ladies that night but one of us starts joking that maybe, just maybe, the dude who we'd scared was actually angry at us and the extra candy that we'd been given had been laced with something to get revenge. Spooky prospect, I'm sure you'll agree, but a dumb one nonetheless. No one would actually lace candy with poison and give it to kids, which someone actually says aloud at one point. Then not twenty minutes later, we decided to dip into our candy halls a little early to sample some of the evening's well-earned delights. We're all chowing down when suddenly, my buddy Tyler starts telling us how he doesn't feel so good. He hadn't eaten any candy up until just a few moments before so it's not like he could have had a stomachache from that. We're asking him if he's okay, if he needs to sit down,

and if we need to get him some water from a nearby house or something. But he can barely respond, other than to tell us that he feels dizzy and wants to go home. He then walks over to the curb and almost collapses down onto the grass, beginning to violently cough as he does so. And that's when he starts getting scared. I remember being all like, come on man, stop faking it dude, this isn't funny, stop it. But he doesn't stop,

and deep down I could tell he wasn't faking it. I can't feel my tongue, he suddenly says and my heart just stopped in my chest. All I could think about was the candy poisoning story, how we'd been unlucky enough to actually run into someone evil enough to give us candy that had been laced with something toxic or maybe even deadly. Oh my god dude, it's poison candy, I remember saying out loud, which was incredibly stupid because not only did the three of us who were okay start to lose our minds out of fright, but Tyler started seriously panicking too, which obviously made his symptoms worse. Then, unbelievably, I actually watched as Tyler's face started to go all red and swell up, like his head was on its way to exploding right in front of us. One of us had ran off to get some help from a nearby house by then though,

banging on the front door and screaming for help as the rest of us watched Tyler hold his stomach and begin retching. We told him that he'd be okay, that we'd get him some help, but honestly, I thought I was going to watch one of my best friends die that night, murdered at the hands of some mystery poisoner who would probably get away with the crime and go on to kill countless others. I imagined this mass funeral of kids from our town, all victims of the Halloween poisoner. The national press would get involved, the FBI. It would all go on for weeks and weeks while the town mourned the largest mass poisoning in the history of the FBI. It would all go on for weeks and weeks while the town mourned the largest mass poisoning in the history of the USA. That's all that was rushing through my 14-year-old head, pure terror and speculation. But I mean, could you believe me? I was literally watching my

friend's head swell up right before my very eyes, and then Tyler passed out. He was just that, unconscious but I thought he was dead and I was holding back whimpering in tears by the time a pair of grown-ups ran out from the house nearby before running back inside to call 911. It was a terrible scene after that. A big crowd gathered to watch even more showing up and gawking at the morbid scene when the ambulance showed up and stretched Tyler into the back of it. We couldn't go with him to the hospital, not realizing that the paramedics could find a way to contact Tyler's mom and dad once they had his name, which he had obviously given them. We were devastated at the idea of having to call around at their houses to tell them the horrible, horrible news that their son had died in front of us. It was horrendous, truly horrifying, and one of the most memorable nights in my life suddenly got so much more memorable,

but for all the wrong reasons. We headed over to Tyler's parents' house, but no one was home. We thought we'd been spared the job of breaking the awful news to them, but in actual fact, they had already gotten the call that Tyler was at the hospital and had headed over to be with him. I told my parents what happened when I got home. Through ugly tears, I described the dizziness, the coughing, the wheezing, and the puking. My mom, who used to be an EMT back when she was in college, gave me this weird, knowing look, then headed off to get in touch with Tyler's parents while I went up to my room and cried myself to sleep. I was shaken awake a few hours later by my dad, who had some news for me. Some good news. Tyler wasn't dead, and neither was Poison the reason why he had the terrible episode on the curb that night.

You see, Tyler had an allergy, specifically to gelatin, something which is found in a lot of candies, cakes, ice creams, and yogurts. Tyler knew not to eat anything like that and had to agree to go through his candy haul with his parents later that evening so they could weed out anything that might give him a reaction. But what he didn't know, what I didn't know, and what many of you there might not know, is that some cereals contain gelatin. Yep, cereals. God knows how or why that might be the case, but it is. So as it turns out, Tyler sifted through his candy and found some chocolate cereal bar type thing and assumed that he could eat it. Fun fact, Tyler also checked the label himself to see if the thing contained any gelatin, but didn't realize that some products use different types for gelatin.

Things like hydrolyzed animal protein, collagen hydrosolate, or denatured collagen. Obviously, 14-year-old Tyler was not a nutritional scientist and had no idea that these terms were pure semantics and that he was eating gelatin. But still, Tyler could have gone into anaphylactic shock. His throat could have closed over and he could have suffocated, right? Again, wrong. He was never in any real danger of this happening because only rarely does an allergic reaction to gelatin do that. Very rarely. Not like nut allergies, which can actually straight up kill you. Tyler just got taken to the hospital, given some antihistamines, and was kept overnight so the doctors could monitor his condition. So, in the end, everything was okay. No one died, and there was no mass poisoning in our town that year, but still.

What happened that night was one of the most horrible events of my entire childhood, and I'm pretty sure you can all understand why. I love running. I'm not like competitive about it or anything, but I've been doing some casual 5k's and 10k runs for a few years now and I find it's a great way to stay slim and maintain my mental health. But about this time last year I started to get a weird tight pain in my lower back whenever I was running. Turned out I had a kind of stress injury from a strength imbalance and would need a little bit of rehab to get over it. So all throughout the

month of October I stuck to a course of various strengthening exercises that were designed to help me build up my core and my glutes. It was hard going and like a lot of injuries like mine there was no quick fix to get me running properly again. It was a hard road of rehab and disappointment which left me feeling pretty anxious and depressed. And it all kind of culminated on Halloween of last year when I went for a run which left my back pretty messed up. I usually run around a big loop of a local park which happens to border a lot of housing and neighborhoods. What's more, the city council holds a few Halloween events in the park itself, some for kids, some for big kids. So naturally the place is absolutely teeming with nightlife on the evening in question, which made for a particularly interesting Halloween run. But the joy of

slaloming around kids dressed in their spooky best was quickly overshadowed by the pain that began to burn in my lower back. It got progressively worse until after a measly 3.1 kilometers I was forced to stop, limping my way along the outside path of the park, feeling shamefully defeated. Then right as I'm walking past this group of trick-or-treaters who were apparently old enough to be able to trick some poor off-license worker into selling them a few bottles of lager each, one of them makes some daft comment. Look at this idiot over here, one of them says. Looks like he just soiled himself. They all burst into juvenile laughter. Now running usually makes me pretty zen so

any other time I might just let a comment like that slide. Only that time, I'm in absolutely no mood to be spoken to like that. So obviously, I come back, hard, deliberately shoulder barging the gobby offender on the way past him and telling him he'll be picking up his teeth with broken fingers if he keeps up that lip. Look, I'm not some hard case, but I had a really tough time that month and I was really, really pent up from not being able to run properly. Remember I mentioned how it was good for my mental health? Yeah, that. Well, these kids were about 16 or 17 at the most, just about the right age to be put back in their place by someone older than them. Only it turned out I was seriously misjudged their level of bravado,

especially given the amount of Dutch courage that their bottles of lager had given them. So instead of just taking it on the chin and carry on walking in the opposite direction the group of teenagers then turn around and start following me. Little side note here, I've seen a lot of Amera bottles type out you what mate as a funny way to mimic British parlance. I'll admit, it is amusing, but when we've got a group of drunk teenagers following you actually shouting, you what mate, it's not in the least bit amusing. So there I am, getting followed around a dark part

on Halloween by a bunch of costumed teenagers who are now intent on kicking my head in, and any potentially deterring witnesses are quickly dwindling. A trio or so of them wouldn't have been a problem, but like I said, there was more than a handful of these little buggers, meaning that if they actually plucked up the balls to do something about it, they could actually do me a fair bit of damage. Only there was one big problem. If they did happen to go on the offensive, it wasn't like I was in the condition to be able to actually run away from them. In fact, in that current state,

I wasn't in the condition to be able to maintain a steady pace either. They were gaining on me pretty quickly, and as I said, the little gobby one was definitely keen to save some face. So I kept plowing on, just sort of hoping that if they did attack, I'd have caught my breath enough to be able to properly defend myself. Only right when I do start feeling back to my best, the jibes from behind me stop and when I actually look over my shoulder to see if they're still following me, I don't see a thing. Now I don't want to give those little toe rags too much credit here,

but having them just straight up disappear from behind me was legit unnerving. They really did just up a ninja out of sight somehow, and aside from a nearby tree line, there really weren't many places to hide. I scanned the dark spaces between the aforementioned trees for a minute or so but didn't see anything obvious and once I figured I was alone again I kept on walking back to my flat. But again, like some proper horror movie, there was once or twice on the way back that I thought I heard something rustling in the bushes nearby or thought I saw something darting among the trees nearby. It was definitely unnerving, yeah, but I really did just put it down to my imagination.

Besides, how psychopathic and predatory would these kids have to be to successfully stalk me through a park like that? They were drunk teenagers, not the offspring of Michael Myers. I thought I was just losing it, but in the end, I ended up wishing that was the case. Because right as I walked onto the streets where I lived, got to my flat and turned up the path, I heard footfalls scrambling behind me. I turn to look behind me and my vision just goes white. When I come to, I'm lying in my pathway, hearing the sound of glass shattering and teenagers screaming. I try to look up to see what's going on, but I can't see out of my left eye at all.

It felt hot and sticky, and for a moment, I thought it might be altogether gone. That's when the panic hit, and I tried to bring myself to my feet, when another blow to my head from a foot or a fist sends me collapsing back onto the gravel. That's what you get, I hear this squeaky little voice yelp, and now we know where you live. They didn't quite know where I lived. They ended up breaking the window of one of my neighbors, which obviously they weren't too happy about. But they did end up breaking my orbital socket which kept me in a hospital overnight. But since the house we were in had no CCTV and there was basically no witnesses who could identify the kids in question, they pretty much got away scot-free with it.

But honestly, that wasn't even the worst part about it. A skull fracture was bad, sure, but that healed with time. What didn't get any better was these kids hanging around outside my flat for months on end, pretty much every night until the wee small hours of the morning. No matter how often we phoned the police and got them dispersed, there was pretty much nothing they could do about them coming back and the more we called, the less they were interested in actually doing their jobs. I expected the kids to actually attack me again, but they didn't. They ended up doing some considerable more damage to my car once they worked out which one was mine. Not particularly scary I know, but the bill for getting the scratches out of the paintwork was. It just ground me down over time though. Messing with my sleep,

my mental health, everything just slowly turned to torture after the attack. So I ended up moving out and that did solve everything. And I know they're just teenagers and I bet there's a hundred of you sitting there like, oh I'd have powerbombed that kid right then and there. You're just a little baby for letting them stitch you up like that, but I don't care. You get yourself into a position where these feral, bloody teenagers want your blood. Minds of children, but bodies of full-grown blokes. The fear is very, very real. So this isn't just my scariest trick-or-treating story. This is the story of the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life. It's not some dumb story about ghosties or ghoulies or anything supernatural like that.

It's something very real and very tangible that left me seriously messed up for a long, long time. My parents arranged counseling sessions for me to help deal with it and I can't say those didn't help a little, but what happened that Halloween night has stayed with me for my whole life and every single year without fail I think about it a little. Like a lot of suburban neighborhoods here on the east coast of the US, Halloween decorations have become something of an art form. I remember when decorations used to be confined to just a pumpkin and maybe a few things pinned to a front door. But now it's a whole different ballgame, with lawns overflowing with orange-colored decor and even the occasional roof being covered in those fake spiderweb-type things.

Things have gotten pretty intense, too. tense too, like last year I saw how someone had actually dug up a patch of their own well preened front lawn to make like a fake grave type thing that had a skeletal hand sticking out of it. It's been that way for a few years now and it's key to how my story even happened in the first place. So on the night in question, me and a friend of mine are wandering around our neighborhood in costume collecting as much candy as we could possibly carry. We come to this one particular house that's totally decked out in all kinds of Halloween themed decorations. I mean it was honestly pretty impressive how much effort the family had put into it. And if they were so into Halloween that they go to such lengths to decorate their home, there was a decent chance that they'd be incredibly generous with giving out candy too. So me and my buddies started walking up their pathway,

all slow, just admiring all the decor as we went. Things got progressively spookier as we went, but nothing could compare to the scene we saw as we got close to the front door, and that buddy of mine spied through the front window of the house. Inside, the entire front room had been turned into a pure vision of hell. This family was indeed the most dedicated set of Halloween decorators we'd ever come across. It appeared that they set up an actual sort of murder scene. The whole room was trashed with ornaments strewn over the room, china plates smashed to smithereens with pieces laying all over the carpet. There was blood everywhere too, splashed all over the couch along the bloody handprints on the walls and in the middle of the room, laying on the carpet, was the most convincing looking dead body I'd ever seen.

The family had done a decent job of obscuring the mannequin or whatever it was was, by having it pretty much caked in blood and gore-soaked, torn-up clothing. It was maybe a little much for Halloween, though. Like I've always been something of a scary movie fan, but even I couldn't stomach to look at it for very long, so I moved up to the front door and began ringing the doorbell. I rang once, then twice, but no one answered, and all the while my buddy is just staring through the front window, white as a sheet. I try a third time, banging on the door extra loud just in case the doorbell happened to be broken or something, and still my buddy is just gawking through the front window. I remember him saying something like, God, it just looks so real.

Before I finally walk over and start trying to drag him away from the window before he vomited or something. The homeowners would certainly not be giving us any candy if we went and made a big old throw up mess on their property. Only right as I'm doing so, I happen to look through the window just in time to see one of the TV room doors opening. In walked a man who looked like he'd been crying, like a whole lot too and in his hand were these big plastic trash bags. We're only peeking in from the edge of the window so he didn't see us right away and we watched as he walks over to the mannequin thing and kneels down beside it. He reaches out to touch the face of the thing and that's when I see how he's got these rubber gloves on too, the kind you use for washing up. I get that he didn't want to get any of the corn

syrup blood or whatever it was on his hands and I started kind of wondering how he's going to get the stains out of the carpet. I mean that's real dedication to ruin your own upholstery all in the name of Halloween decorations. And that's when it hits me. We're not looking at Halloween decorations. The body lying on the carpet isn't a mannequin, and it's not corn syrup on the walls. It's real blood. A real body. We're not looking at a decorative setup

We're looking at an actual murder scene My buddy says just one word Dude Loud enough for the guy inside to hear us His head spins towards the window These big tear-stained eyes just focusing on the little spot we're peering in from And the sad look in his eyes turns to one of pure shock and anger. We lock eyes for a moment and I feel my heart rate go into overdrive,

a thousand terrified thoughts flashing my mind all at once. Then the man is up on his feet, storming out the TV room and towards what I could only guess was the front door. Me and my buddy just sprint back down the path, running as fast as we can as we hear the front door open up behind us. I look back briefly to see the man, clothes soaked in blood, chasing us out into the dark street. He was bigger than us, faster than us, and had absolutely no intention of letting us get away to report what we'd seen. I can't even describe the kind of fear that I'd felt, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before he caught up with us,

and when he did, we'd probably suffer the same fate as whoever it was lying on the carpet back in his house. But his luck would have it. The streets were still pretty busy with trick-or-treaters at that hour, and he must have realized that chasing a pair of kids, still covered in blood, would arouse way too much suspicion. Even if it was Halloween and people might mistake the real blood for fakery, just like we'd done in the first few minutes of peering through the front window. We ran and ran, all the way back to my parents' house where we begged them to call the police. At first my parents figured that our imaginations had just gotten the better of us and dismissed our claims that we'd seen an actual murder scene as pure fantasy. In the end, my dad insisted on seeing the scene for himself before calling the cops out, and even if the idea of going back there sent me into fits of terror, he wouldn't take no for an answer.

I had horrible visions of the bloodied man just sticking a shotgun through his front door and blowing my dad away so that there'd be no witnesses, and the whole walk around the murder house, I was absolutely terrified. But as we got closer, we started to see a bunch of blue flashing lights. It was only then that dad actually took me seriously and as we edged around a corner and saw a bunch of cop cars sitting outside the murder house he realized that I'd been telling the truth. I figured someone who saw him chasing us briefly had the wherewithal to call the police before us and I thank god that they did because I don't know if I'd even be writing this if we'd actually been able to walk back up that pathway and back towards the house. It was all over the papers for the next few days, how this guy had stabbed his wife to death, and rumors went around that he'd

found out that she was cheating or something, but I never really got those confirmed or not, so only God knows what actually caused him to snap and murder her. Like I said, I had to have a great deal of therapy throughout my teenage years to help me get over what I saw that night and for a long, long time I saw that body in my nightmares. In the worst of them, me and my buddy would be looking through the window and the body would rise up into a sitting position before the woman screamed to us to help her, blood pouring from her cut up mouth as she did so. In some others, the guy would catch us, drag us back into the house, then lay us on

the carpet next to the body before taking a knife to us, one at a time. It took a while, but I got past it. Yet Halloween remains a time of year when I can't quite keep those memories out of my head. A time of year when others pretend to be haunted by ghosts and whatnot, whereas I'm actually haunted by the sight of that poor woman, lying on the carpet, covered in blood. I don't know if this is going to scare any adult readers out here, but as a kid this definitely scared the life out of me. My dad used to take me and my sister trick or treating around our neighborhood here in Toronto every year when we were kids, being a chaperone so we didn't get lost or picked on by older kids. He was always good like that and me and my sister used to share our candy with him when we got home. It was a major dad tax but we never minded. There's no way I'd have felt safe enough going out on my own on a dark freezing night, not when I was that age anyway.

So this one year, we ended up knocking at a new neighbor's house on Halloween night. They'd only moved in like a week or two before and I don't think my parents had any interactions with them, so I imagine dad thought that it would be a good idea to knock that night so he could get some candy while he could say hi to the new arrivals. Two birds, one stone and all that. But what we didn't know was that these new neighbors were super hardcore Christians and most definitely were not down with the whole spooky Halloween atmosphere. So we knock on their door, the neighbor lady answers and we're all like, trick or treat. Pretty much every single household up

until that point had reacted wonderfully, told us how cute we looked in our costumes, given us candy, all that good stuff, but this lady reacts really, really badly and starts telling dad how irresponsible he is for taking us out into the cold on a night like that. A little exchange kicks off between her and dad who politely defends his reasoning, even making a joke about how he got to eat a little candy for himself. The lady just stared at him blankly for a second before she starts screaming all this bible stuff at us. She had this horrible look of pure anger on her face, all twisted up with big furious eyes and she pointed a long bony finger at us. I couldn't

remember exactly what she said so I spent a little more time doing research so I could pull up some of the exact quotes that came out of her. Like I said, not totally terrifying for adults and I remember my dad shaking his head and just leading us away from the house. But to me and my sister, all the screaming about God and demons and the devil and what not just absolutely terrified us and we cried so hard for a while until dad could manage to calm us down. So one of the things that she had said was, abstain from every form of evil. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Which I guess was her implying that you couldn't partake in any spooky fun around Halloween if you really wanted

to be a good God-fearing Christian. Another was definitely, take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness but instead expose them and give no opportunity to the devil. She screamed that one at us as my dad took us each by the hand and led us away from the house. The final thing we heard before we got out into the open street was, be sober-minded, be watchful, your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. I mean, she carried on screaming stuff at us, following us outside and into the streets,

as I'm guessing she started ranting at all the other parent and kid teams who were out that night, but I can't really remember what she said after that. I didn't hear over my own sobbing. Dad walked us away until we couldn't hear her anymore, then gave us each a big hug to calm us down. I remember asking him if trick-or-treating made us bad people, but he told us no. There was no harm in a little bit of spooky fun on Halloween, and that God wouldn't be mad at us for visiting our neighbors or sharing candy with strangers. That kind of thing made people and communities feel closer together, not further apart. The only

thing that did push people apart were horrible neighbor ladies who scream scary things at kids and get mad at them when they don't deserve it. All that made us feel much better, and calmed us right down just about in time to knock on a few more houses before we called it a night, heading home to eat ourselves into a diabetes hole in front of a Nightmare Before Christmas movie, which coincidentally is still one of my favorite movies ever. Years went by but I never forgot about how horrible that neighbor lady was to us that evening and me and my sister grew to hate her. Y'all might be pretty happy to hear that she used to get the trick side of trick-or-treating quite a lot too and it wasn't unusual for my sister and I to head off to

school on the morning of November 1st to see them pulling toilet paper out of the tree in their front yard. But anyways, that's definitely the scariest thing that ever happened to me out of all the times I went trick-or-treating during my youth. Maybe that makes me sound a little sheltered but as I said, I challenge any 11 year old not to get super creeped out by a lady screaming scary bible verses in their face on a dark, freezing night like that. I was about 14 years old when my family had just moved to a new town. I was also lucky enough to make a fast friend at my new school and we subsequently made plans to go trick-or-treating together since it was coming up to Halloween night. Because we were 14 and lived in a fairly safe neighborhood, my parents told us that they didn't think I needed a chaperone that year. So while everything was going great and we were having fun, getting some solid candy, it was kind of cool just walking around on our own, feeling sort of grown up.

We knock at one house and this middle-aged man opened the door. He seemed happy to see my new friend in me so I assumed we were in for some grade A candy. I don't actually remember what candy he handed out but I do remember what happened next. He asked us to come inside which is weird but we really wanted candy so I guess we were dumb enough to take the bait. He disappears for a moment and I kind of assumed that he was going to get us some candy but when he re-emerges he doesn't have any, only a camera in his hand. Then he asks if he could take a couple of pictures of us, explaining that he'd like to take photos of kids every Halloween because he loves seeing the costumes, how he was

something of a collector. At this point, even being a fairly naive 14 year old, I got weirded out, yet knew it was best not to upset the man and let him take the picture and then we could leave. So he takes the photo of us, waits for the Polaroid to come out, then hands us a pen, asks us to sign our names on the back. Me and my new friend did as we're told, but although we'd been dumb enough to actually go into this guy's house with him, we weren't dumb enough to sign our actual names, so we wrote fake ones on the back just to satisfy him. Only then were we allowed to leave with the candy that he gave us after we signed. I don't know if this guy was on some sort of list or some sort of

offender or anything like that. There were no more run-ins with him and nothing in the way of rumors going around town, but I still get creeped out thinking about high school has to be one of the most stressful, daunting experiences of their entire education. But for me, it was particularly rough. You see, I was a real late bloomer, still very much a squeaker by the time I got to be a freshman. While the boys my age were getting growth spurts and sprouting facial hair, I could easily have still passed for like 11 or 12. I mean, I got caught up eventually, don't get me wrong, but there are pictures of me from back then that my current roommate has seen

and he jokes that I had the body of an anorexic bikini model. I'd like to argue to the contrary, but honestly, that's not far off. So unfortunately, I was an obvious target for bullying seniors, the worst of which was this big slab of meat with red hair named Josh. Josh used to push me into lockers on a daily basis like, are you sure you're old enough to be here short stuff? And I was in absolutely no position to be able to defend myself. So this goes on for like a month and each time I get sicker and sicker of how he's treating me. It's not like I was a total pushover either. Despite my small stature,

I'd managed to deter any potential middle school bullies by being something of a pint-sized brawler. Even if you don't quite win a fight, you can still inflict a fair amount of damage and after that, suddenly they don't want the smoke anymore. So it was honestly only a matter of time before I snapped at Josh. Sure, he was bigger than me, but I was about perfectly positioned to nail one good punch to the balls and after that, there was little chance he'd want to lay hands on me again. Anyway, it's getting closer and closer to Halloween and some of the bullying is getting pretty intense and I said each time something happens I get more and more furious. Up until the point where on the morning of Halloween me and my friends are talking about going trick or treating that evening, swapping costume ideas and stuff, when Josh appears like out of nowhere and starts verbally pounding on us about how we're such a bunch of nerds. I think it was how he was

trying to show me up in front of my friends that really did it. I just couldn't stand the thought of losing face in front of them so I clap back with like, yeah but your mom loves it when I dress up for her. Josh just stops dead like this blank expression on his face. My buddies are all laughing like goddeme and I'm half expecting Josh to start trying to pummel on me but he doesn't move. He just stares off into the near distance for like a full minute while I look back at him in confusion. Then without a word in reply Josh just storms off without so much as looking at us but before he disappears around a corner he full on throws a right hook into a locker so hard he put a dent in the thing. Just like boom, punches it so loud a teacher comes out from a class screaming and asking what was that. It felt kind of good knowing I'd gotten him so mad,

even if I probably would end up suffering for it. But just how much I'd suffer for it, I had absolutely no idea. So cut to like an hour or two later and we're all having lunch, sitting around the tables just minding our own business. One by one, seniors start coming up to our table like, did you really say that stuff to Josh about his mom? And when I say yes, they're all like, wow dude, just wow. Walking away, shaking their heads and laughing. This happens like a bunch of times too, and at first I think they're just impressed that I flamed the bully so hard, but there's something else there too. Something that kind of piqued my curiosity. So, in the end, when this one senior kid asked what I'd said, I stopped and was like,

why is this such a big deal? Guy had it coming. Yeah, but you brought up his mom. The kid replied, like it wasn't what kids always bring up against each other when they're trading insults. I'm like, so what? Your mama jokes are like old news by now. The kid then looks at me like I just told him I thought the earth was flat. Dude, Josh's mom died over summer break, sudden cancer diagnosis or something. It was brutal. It's hard to even sum up the mix of emotions I felt in that moment. Like I felt like a douche. Bully or no bully, losing your mom like that must be one of the worst things that can ever happen to a person and to remind him of it made

me feel terrible. Then, having not known, that just made me feel so out of the loop, just like an outsider or something. Like I had no place being there, which was already bad enough considering my physique. But what really overwhelmed me was the fear I felt knowing I'd made him so unbelievably furious. The locker punch suddenly made all the sense in the world, and I imagined the kind of revenge I'd personally want if someone made fun of my dead mom like that. Suddenly a few crotch punches didn't seem like such an effective deterrent. Josh would be wanting to tear me apart. I managed to duck him for the rest of the day.

For a while I was actually debating whether or not I should actually just bite the bullet and apologize to him. A little empathy might have been good for all involved and it's not like I would be doing so just to save my own skin. Like I genuinely felt bad about having said what I said. But I guess I was just too cowardly to actually seek him out, and doing so seemed like a dumb move on my part when it would just be easier to ninja around school and bail when the final bell rang, which is exactly what I did. Then just headed home in the hopes that a little trick-or-treating fun would be exactly what I needed to take my mind off the whole thing. Besides, it was a Friday and whatever was going to happen over the mom insult fiasco was at least going to have to wait until Monday. I'd gotten myself what was essentially a stay of execution. So like I said, that night was Halloween and me and a few buddies had planned on going trick or treating together.

It was a good time, I mean, anything involving free candy always makes for a good time, right? And the night was going smoothly, right up until we stop at a crosswalk where this car is pulling up. The car stops and we step out into the street as we start to walk in front of it. Then right as we're on a level heading with it, one of my buddies is like, don't look dude, under his breath, nudging me and pointing towards the car.

And naturally I look. Big mistake. Because who sat in the driver's seat of that car cruising around on Halloween night with his buddies? Of all the people on the face of earth that I really, really didn't want to run into that evening, it had to be them sitting in their car at the crosswalk. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. It was the slab of meat, Josh. And right then, as I'm perfectly positioned in front of his car, we lock eyes with one another. Obviously, I'm wearing a costume but no mask so although it takes him a minute of being like why does this little runt seem familiar to

me he does actually recognize who I am. Now I knew he was going to be mad but I didn't expect him to be this mad because as soon as it hits him that it's me walking in front of the car. He guns his engine and just lurches forward, actually trying to straight up run me and my friends over. We manage to run out of the way just in time and he heads up the street while onlookers are like, oh god did you see that, those poor kids almost got hit and stuff while we watch from the sidewalk as he does a very illegal u-turn before coming right back at us. We just start running down the sidewalk trying our very best to escape but the dude was in his car, so we stood absolutely no chance of getting away from him. Josh just guns it past us, cutting off our route of escape then jumps out of the car to give chase.

It was a big dude, but Jesus Christ was he fast. So needless to say, he catches up to me in like no time at all and just tackles me down onto the sidewalk. Then as you can probably guess, Josh then proceeds to beat the goo out of me, with me shouting I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't know the whole time. Like he's just raining blows down on me, kicking me while I'm balled up on the sidewalk. When I hear something, I still feel kind of conflicted about. He's grunting and cursing at me for a while, but then I hear something else. He's like whimpering or something as he's hitting me. Then his voice starts to break while he's calling me all kinds of names,

and I come to realize that he's actually crying. It was weird. I could have at least tried to get up and make a run for it but I didn't. I just shut up and let him wail on me for a while because honestly I felt like I kind of deserved it. I know that probably sounds really dumb. He was a bully and he's probably still a bully now but but yeah, there it is. I just felt really, really sorry for the guy. No one deserves to lose their mom like that. No one. He only stops beating on me when he's actually full on ugly crying, then he heads back to his car and just drives off into the night. My trick-or-treating partners had long since ran off, leaving me alone and

bloodied on the sidewalk, trying and failing a few times to find my feet. I mean, I didn't blame them. Hearing that car engine revving behind us was one of the scariest experiences of our lives, but yeah, I was all alone at that point. So like I said, it took me a while to be able to stand up enough to start my walk home. But not until I gathered up some of the candy that had spilled out of my sack during the beatdown, which was going to be badly needed for some soul soothing that night. I snuck in, dodged my parents, and told them the next morning that my bruises were just down to us play fighting and trying the kind of stuff that you don't try at home was all about. Mom was mad, but it meant I didn't have to tell them something that I was deeply ashamed of.

Yeah, maybe it was like an unprovoked thing. Just Josh being the monster that he was. I'd have to tell them the truth, but given the circumstances, it had probably come out that I had insulted this kid's dead mom, in which case I wouldn't have a leg to stand on. But there it is. It was the scariest thing to happen to me, for that Halloween, and really any Halloween to come after. And the bullying didn't stop, but then again, when does it ever? Hey friends, thanks for listening.

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