The Lets Read Podcast - 130: FIRST DATES FROM HELL | 22 True Scary Horror Stories | EP 118

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Scary First Dates, New Years Eve, & A Psychopath in the Park... 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

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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The I live here in New Zealand and late in 2018 I was feeling sort of lonely. So I decided to download the dating app Tinder to try and find myself a nice guy to go on a few dates with. Maybe even find myself a long guy to go on a few dates with, maybe even find myself a long-term boyfriend out of it. I ended up matching with this guy who'd come over from Australia and we chatted for two weeks before we finally met up. The conversation was quite light, nothing too heavy and it was fun. Like I said, it was from Australia so we talked about Aussie things and I remember telling him how much I wanted to visit Melbourne. He said that he'd been there once or twice and started making

recommendations for some great coffee shops that he knew of. He seemed like a nice, normal guy and when we agreed to meet I was happy to do that. But then maybe five days or so before we were due to meet, he got really persistent and impatient. He would text me multiple times in a day and if I didn't reply straight away, he would ask if something was wrong. I thought it was weird that he was being so clingy after starting off so confident. He kept trying to bring the date forward so we could meet up sooner and would totally forget if I had told him I was busy on a particular day, almost like he wasn't paying attention or didn't care about what I had to say. It was honestly really unusual for someone to be that persistent with me.

I've had guys before who are maybe a bit persistent, but only out of a nervous excitement, a different kind of excited than this Aussie guy seemed to be. I just couldn't understand why it was that he could not possibly wait until the Sunday that we'd arranged to meet. It felt very narcissistic and I should have seen it as the red flag that it was and just not met up with him at all. I had the messages saved on my phone for a while so I have a record of the exact dates and times that he sent some of his messages. So on the 2nd of December, he messaged me just after 9am saying, good morning, how is you? And again about an hour and a half later. I didn't reply to the

first message because I was asleep and I think he took it the wrong way because he said it was fine if I'd changed my mind and didn't feel like going on the date. That was when I messaged him back and confirmed that I would meet him later on that day. We met up and went to a place called Revelry. It's a very standard bar, very popular and lots of people go there but it's definitely more of a night time bar. I had never drunk there during the afternoon or the daytime but it was open, seemed like it had a chill atmosphere and he wanted to go there so that's where we went. He was a bit bigger than the pictures on his tinder profile showed and it was obvious that

he had put on a little bit of weight. He had big distinctive eyes and he was very very clean cut, I mean like his clothes looked freshly washed and ironed. He was also very well groomed, obviously took good care of his skin and stuff like that, like he was really good looking. I remember asking him a lot of different questions, and he just sort of talked at me. He tried to ask me a few questions, but they weren't very in-depth ones. I thought he was a bit nervous to be honest, but that's not unusual for a first date. But things started to sort of unravel at one point because he had said one thing in messages about where he worked and a different thing on the date. I started to feel a bit uneasy, like I wanted to trust him.

But as soon as he started to put on some inconsistencies, I began to wonder if he was just lying about stuff to impress me. Because he was from Australia, I asked him the whereabouts that he had met his Kiwi friends, and he told me that all of his friends were police officers or somehow involved in law enforcement. He said how he had met with them while out drinking in various bars, how they'd gotten to know each other over time and they regularly invited him back to their places for barbecues and stuff like that. He also mentioned that his best friend from Australia was coming over to be a Crown Court prosecutor. That's when I noticed that a lot of the stuff that he was talking about kind of had this running theme to it. It kind of seemed like he was obsessed with that sort of thing, which, in hindsight, explains an awful lot. I think he was sort of trying to process some of

the things that he had been up to over the previous few days, and it came out in his conversation style. He obviously thought an awful lot about policemen, dead bodies, and ways people can be killed, prosecution, justice, and the court system and it just came out in a very strange way like that on our first date. Like I said before, we talked quite a lot about him being friends with lots of different policemen and he went into quite a bit of depth regarding the details of certain investigations that they'd apparently shared with him. He said they were having a really tough time around that time because of bodies going missing in the Waitakere ranges. He told me that police

corpse sniffing dogs can only detect decaying flesh about four feet deep under the soil, so if the bodies are buried any deeper than that, the police won't be able to find them. I thought it was a bit of a morbid thing to talk about on a first date, but it was an interesting fact nonetheless. We also got into a conversation about all the different kinds of poisonous snakes in Australia and he became quite animated about that. He obviously had a passion for the natural world. It was quite out there, but I thought it was cute. I love animals too so I was glad we had something in common and it made me feel a bit more relaxed again. But then, right as I started feeling comfortable with him again, he started telling me this really bizarre and creepy story.

He told me how crazy it is that a guy can make one little mistake and then go to jail for the rest of his life for it. He went on to tell me about this guy he knew back in Oz who had consensual intimacy involving choking with his girlfriend and had ended up accidentally killing her in the process. He assured me that the whole thing was a horrible, tragic accident. How things just went wrong suddenly and how the guy was really upset because he loved her and would never hurt her on purpose. But still, the guy got done for manslaughter and was sent to prison for a long, long time. What I know now is this could have been him testing out his story on me. When he was able to see that I was a bit uncomfortable with what he was saying, he tried to change the subject so we could talk about more mundane things.

I didn't try to make a swift exit or anything, I am quite used to dealing with all sorts of people, and I'm not saying people who talk about dark things on a first date are like bad people or anything, but it was definitely weird. We hung out for a while, but after about three hours or so I made some excuse as to why I had to leave and we said goodbye. As we were parting ways he said, my car is this way and pointed off down a particular road. My car was down that same road but by that stage I was feeling uneasy and my instincts had just kicked in telling me to walk a different way. He was also a lot bigger than me so if something went wrong I knew I wouldn't be able to defend myself. In hindsight it was a good decision. It was my intuition's sense.

My brain was saying this was strange, that was strange. And looking back on it now it is really strange to think of who he actually was. I don't think it is in the realm of what normal human brains can comprehend. But just the day before we met up, the guy I was out on that first date with had murdered a girl in his hotel room, a British girl called Grace Mullane. The reason he brought up his friend accidentally strangling his girlfriend is because that's exactly how he'd killed her, although whether or not it was on purpose is another question entirely. Also, the reason he'd mention the Waitakere mountain range is because that's where he ended up disposing of her body, and all that other stuff about sniffer dogs was research that he'd been doing the previous night that was still sort of consuming his mind. It is hard to look back and think that that had just happened to her. From what I understand, while we were on our date, her body was still in that hotel room of his, hidden under the bed or something, wrapped in a blanket. There's nothing I could have done, and I know that now, but it is still really hard to come to terms with that.

I do think if it had been a date in the evening potentially I could have been a victim. I take a lot of solace in the fact that I do have my wits about me and do take safety and online dating quite seriously and that is nothing against any women who are willing to go home with someone on the first date but I do want to say to young women to take one more step in your thinking when you are on a date to see how well you know this person actually. Since then, I have been on dates with lovely, trustworthy men but think, how well do I really know them? It has made me go a little slower and divulge a little less personal information to them. I know in modern dating, it is quite common to give people

your Instagram handle but you are giving people access to a lot of personal information. It is really dangerous and I just want to encourage people to take a step back and think before they do that. There's nothing wrong with taking a step back, taking it slow and pacing yourself a bit. Alcohol has a big effect. It is a part of the social fabric of dating and part of life these days, but it still comes with a massive risk. Women need to be really aware of how much they are drinking on dates and unfortunately drinks are sometimes spiked.

We live in this world where people are still idealistic about how things should be on dates, but incidents like these take things back 10 or 20 years where women are still having to grip their keys between their fingers or can't leave a drink on the table. We aren't as developed as we think we are in areas such as dating. Technology has got ahead of us, I think people are as they always are. I think with the advancement of technology we thought we would become more refined, but we are just the same, but with new technology. I think the invention of dating apps is a wonderful thing, and I wouldn't want to live in a world without that,

but I just wish for a world where women don't have to think about their safety all the time. Ingrid Marie Lynn was born on August 2nd, 1975 and spent the majority of her early years living in Tucson, Arizona, going on to graduate from Canyon del Oro High School. Ingrid later attended the University of Arizona and received a Bachelor of Science in Nursing during the year 1977. She then moved to Washington state three years later, gaining employment at the city's Swedish medical center. It was here that she met her husband Philip. The couple dated for a short while before he proposed and for a while they were happily married and had three beautiful daughters together. But like many modern marriages, financial strain and conflicting personality types proved a burden on the young couple's relationship, and in 2014, Ingrid filed for a divorce. It took two years for Ingrid to be able to get back into the dating game. Being the mother of three young daughters does not leave much time at all to be able to indulge in such things, so we can only imagine how smitten she was with 37-year-old

John Charlton that she would actually make time for him with such an already busy schedule. Ingrid and John had met through the online dating website Plenty of Fish and had been chatting online on and off for around a month when they arranged to attend a Seattle Mariners baseball game together as an official first date. To 40-year-old Ingrid, John seemed like the perfect gentleman who could provide some much-needed stability in her life. But John was far from the perfect gentleman that he presented himself as, and despite Ingrid being attracted to the subtle bad-boy, tough-guy vibes that John gave off, the reality was much more dangerous. He had a criminal record in six states including convictions for aggravated robbery,

felony theft, grand theft auto, and third degree larceny. And in stark contrast to him claiming to receive a steady paycheck as a construction worker, John was in fact a homeless day laborer. John and Ingrid's first date was scheduled for the evening of Friday, April 8th, 2016, with Ingrid's friends reporting that she seemed very excited and nervous to meet her prospective mate. She'd even managed to arrange for her three daughters to be taken care of over at their father's place, giving her an entirely free evening to enjoy her new date's company. She told a close friend that she would text her when the date was over to let her know how it went, but as the evening grew later and later, and Ingrid's friend had still not received any text messages from her, she began to worry. She tried to call Ingrid's cell phone time and

time again, but the call kept ringing out and only managed to calm herself down and cease her attempts at reaching her when she considered the fact that the lack of response might have meant that the date had gone a little too well and that it might in fact be a good thing that she couldn't reach her friend. However, the next day on April 9th, Ingrid's ex-husband pulled up at her place in Renton to drop off their three daughters He rang the doorbell multiple times but no one answered And it soon seemed apparent that there was no one home Her ex was irritated but also concerned

Ingrid was mostly a very reliable person and it wasn't like her to not stick to her word over something Especially when it involved the care of her daughters was mostly a very reliable person and it wasn't like her to not stick to her word over something, especially when it involved the care of her daughters. He too tried to call her cell phone, but when he got no answer from it, he proceeded to call up Ingrid's mother. Her mother had no idea where Ingrid was and apparently didn't know that she had been out on a date the previous evening, so instead of making a fuss about the situation, she simply drove over to Ingrid's place with a spare key to allow Ingrid's ex-husband to gain entry. Ingrid's mother then proceeded to take a quick look around the house, just to make sure everything was in order. But in doing so, she found her daughter's wallet, purse, and cell phone all

lying on a kitchen countertop. She knew it would be very unlike her daughter to go out without taking all of these items with her, and it was only at this point that she began to worry for her daughter's safety. At that point, Ingrid's mother calls the Seattle police to report her daughter missing. Around the same time that Ingrid is reported missing, a homeowner who lived about 10 miles from Ingrid's home also makes a call to the police. The complaint details some bloody handprints on one of the recycling bins, one that has a mass of large black flies buzzing around it. They fear the worst, but since they do not want to contaminate any potential crime scenes, they thought it better to simply call the police than act on any of their own suspicions. Police arrived to check the scene out and, to their horror, found the bin contained several dismembered body parts, including a severed head, foot, arm,

and leg, some of which had been haphazardly wrapped in plastic trash bags. The police who then arrived at Ingrid's home searched the residence to find blood, human tissue, and a pruning saw in her bathroom, as well as trash bags identical to those in the bloody recycling bin just ten miles away. It didn't take long for Seattle PD to put two and two together and work out that Ingrid had been violently murdered and cut up using the very pruning saw found in her bathroom. According to Ingrid's cell phone calls, John Charlton was one of the last people she had spoken to before going missing, so he was an obvious person of interest in the case. Police then tracked him down and on April 11th, 2016, he was arrested and

charged with first-degree murder. Due to overwhelming evidence against him, his bail was set at a whopping $5 million, with the judge citing an overwhelming flight risk given his past convictions and his history of running from state to state to avoid court appearances. During his interview with investigating police, John opened with the statement, I am not a normal person. A dark prelude for the confession to come. Although he initially tried to shirk responsibility of the murder by saying that he had a severe drinking problem, had previously dabbled in crack cocaine, and that on the night in question he had blacked out on a

downtown Seattle sidewalk and woke up with facial injuries and cuts to his body, having no memory of the evening's events. Yet, John also said that he thought he remembered the two being intimate with each other, and that he assumed that she had driven him back to Seattle, where he then slept on the sidewalk. To the homicide detectives that questioned him, none of what John was saying added up, so it seemed like a no-brainer to push the case to be taken into a courtroom. At this trial, John initially pled not guilty to the charges put against him, but in the course of being cross-examined by state prosecutors and in the face of overwhelming evidence, he eventually changed his plea to that

of guilty. At one point, the courtroom had heard that John's own parents had filed a restraining order against him ten years prior, stemming from an incident on March 2nd of 2006. John's parents had returned home to find their son drunk at their residence in Thurston County, Washington, where he allegedly acted physically threatening and verbally violent for a couple of hours. His father, Raymond, wrote up the request himself, stating that during this time frame, he removed a movie from the DVD shelf called Hannibal, set the case in front of my wife, and told her she should watch it and beware. The horrific details of Ingrid's killing and dismemberment have fueled concern over the dangers of internet dating. Both experts in domestic violence and

internet safety say the unfortunate truth is there's probably little that Ingrid could have done differently. She seemed to have kept John at arm's length for around a month before agreeing to meet, but still she fell for his lies and his charm and ended up paying for it with her life. In her case, the online dating piece is really almost irrelevant in what happened, said Cindy Southworth, founder of the Safety Net Technology project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. They could have met through mutual friends and she could have still ended up dead. It's a terrifying concept that no matter what Ingrid could have done,

she still would have ended up a victim of John Charlton's alcohol-fueled bloodlust. Even if she had ran a background check, that fact that most of his convictions were for non-violent crimes might not have even put her off dating him. That night in April of 2016 seemed like it could have been the beginning of the rest of her life with a man she could grow to love, but instead, Ingrid ended up in pieces, dumped in garbage bins all over the city of Seattle. You might be able to describe 17-year-old David Faraday as the all-American boy. David was clean-cut, a good student, and a member of the Boy Scouts of America. He was also apparently something of a moral arbiter, having once confronted a marijuana dealer outside of his high school when the man had apparently been attempting to peddle the drug to members of the student body. After threatening to inform the police, the dealer was

said to never have hung around the high school again. And although by today's standards we might consider this to be so-called snitch behavior, David was clearly simply trying to protect his fellow students from something he was concerned would affect their academic performance. He was a good person, with a good heart, and almost all of what he did came from a place of love. But like many boys his age, David found himself increasingly interested in the opposite gender. And there was one particular young lady that caught his attention over all others. Betty Lou Jensen was 16, a year younger than David, but she was incredibly popular and her reputation as a charming, well-mannered young lady preceded her. She was also a very

talented artist who took a great deal of interest in all things creative. It was at a local youth function that David got the chance to talk to Betty Lou, and his affection for her seemed to be entirely reciprocated. Betty Lou shared a great deal with him and even invited him to visit her after school so that he could walk her home. After a few weeks of wholesome teenage dating, something of a relationship began to blossom between the two bright-eyed young people. But all was not entirely well as there was another boy who had his eye on Betty Lou, one who was not about to let David have her all to himself. He squared up to David when the young man was waiting outside of Betty Lou's high school. And although the confrontation didn't

become physical, some pretty harsh insults were exchanged and David was warned to stay away from his new girlfriend. Other boys might have been deterred by such a display of possessiveness and aggression but not David. He was determined to secure his place as the only boy in Betty Lou's life and so one afternoon on their way home from school, David asked Betty if she'd like to go on a date with him, their first date, and to his absolute elation, Betty Lou said yes. David racked his brain for a solid first date idea, and given that it was late December, decided that a great way to capture that festive romantic spirit would be to take Betty Lou to a

local Christmas event, and being the gentleman that he was, he made a promise to her parents that a great way to capture that festive romantic spirit would be to take Betty Lou to a local Christmas event. And being the gentleman that he was, he made a promise to her parents to have her back home by 11pm at the very latest. Rumor has it that David and Betty were planning on attending the Christmas themed party with a few other local high school students. But perhaps this was simply a cover to reassure the young girl's parents because what we know for certain is that they ended up driving over to Lake Herman Road in David's Rambler station wagon, parking it up in quite a well-known spot that was known to many as Lover's Lane. The whole appeal of the spot near Lake Herman is that it was quiet and unfrequented by members of the public, hence why young couples

might use it to gain some privacy for certain unsavory activities. But it wasn't just infatuated lovebirds who noted the location's seclusion, because someone else wished to take advantage of the isolation for something that was considerably more malicious. At some point during their stay up on Lover's Lane, David and Betty Lou noticed another car pull into the spot, one that parked up alongside them before turning its lights off. At first, David and Betty were worried it was the cops come to arrest them for committing lewd acts in public, but as they peered through the darkness to study the vehicle next to them, it became increasingly obvious that it was not in fact the police. All the young couple could do was watch,

growing increasingly scared as the shadowy silhouette in the front seat stayed statue still, staring at them through the passenger's window. Betty Lou told David she was spooked and asked him to see if he could get the person to leave But unlike previous encounters where David's bravery had shown through when confronted with a source of maliciousness He too was far too frightened to do anything But as he prepared to start up the Rambler's engine so he could drive Betty Lou out of there The driver of the other vehicle got out and approached David's side of the Rambler. David was transfixed, frozen in fear like a deer in a car's headlights,

but when he saw the mysterious stranger pull out a pistol and aim it at his window, his flight response kicked into gear. Betty threw open the passenger side door, throwing herself from the Rambler before David followed suit. But neither kid was fast enough to outrun a bullet. The stranger fired once through the roof of the rambler, then sprinted around the back to fire another shot at David through the vehicle's rear window. Both shots hit the young man, and he crawled along the ground near the station wagon's back wheel on the passenger side, trying and failing to escape. Betty Lou, however, began to sprint away through the darkness as the first shots were fired,

but the stranger was fast. He took aim and fired five shots at the right side of her back, each bullet striking her torso before she fell. As she lay dying in the darkness, the killer turned his attention back to David, pointing the pistol towards his head and pulling the trigger one last time, sending a bullet crashing into his skull just behind his left ear. Apparently, the killer then simply got back into his car and drove away into the night. Sometime later, someone who drove past the spot on Lovers Lane must have seen the bodies lying in the dirt and then rushed to call the police. David was still breathing when they

arrived on the scene, but was completely unresponsive and was dead on arrival when he was finally taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. The double homicide stunned and horrified the local community, and rumors abounded that there was a crazed, firearm-wielding madman on the loose, with it only being a matter of time before they struck again. One of the first people contacted by the police as a potential suspect in the murders was the young man who had confronted David as a result of his own jealousies over his and Betty Lou's blossoming relationship. But it was discovered that this young man had a strong alibi for his whereabouts, meaning there was no way he could have been the mysterious bloodthirsty stranger who pulled into Lover's Lane that night. As the summer of 1969 drew to a close, journalists and law enforcement alike wondered if the teenage lover's killer would ever be found,

but little did they know that the nightmare had just began, and what would follow would continue to baffle all those involved for decades to come. Because the man who took David and Betty Lou's lives that evening, the man who relentlessly fired bullet after bullet into the Rambler station station wagon would come to be known by a name that would echo through the annals of true crime all over the world. The Zodiac. Zodiac's identity remains a complete mystery even to this day. The killer's nickname originated from a series of taunting letters and cards sent to the San Francisco Bay Area Press. These letters included four cryptograms based around a number of ciphers, one of which was recently solved by the FBI after over 50 years of research and study. We know for certain that the Zodiac murdered five people in Benicia, Vallejo, Napa County,

and San Francisco in the 11 months spanning December of 1968 and October of 1969. It seems he preferred to target young couples, which is how he seemed to have come across David and Betty Lou while the pair were on their first date. Yet despite only five confirmed victims being attributed to the Zodiac, He once claimed to have murdered 32 other people, bringing his total body count to 37 victims. A killing spree that started with two young lovers, so excited to finally have some time alone together on their first date, never being able to imagine that it would end in such a brutal moment of painful finality. So the next time you're on a first date, don't be so quick

to go somewhere secluded as you never know who might be watching or following, just ready to turn a perfect romantic moment into a living nightmare. We'll be right back. Till 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. TreadExperts.ca. Ashley Nicole Pegram grew up in Somerville, a town of around 50,000 people in Dorchester County, South Carolina. Ashley was the mother of three small children, lived with her mother and in 2015, she was just 28 years old

when she met a guy named Edward Bonilla through a dating app known as Meet Me. 30-year-old Edward used the screen name eMoneyBond and after he and Ashley matched, they began to use the messaging app Kip to stay in touch. They arranged to meet on April 3rd of 2015 and Ashley was extremely excited at the prospect of getting herself a long-term boyfriend. It wasn't easy finding men that were interested in a single mother of three and she knew her children needed stability, a healthy father figure in their lives to give them the best chance possible in life. But the few hours before her first date with Edward were the last time she was ever seen alive. She didn't return from her date that evening and she was

reported missing shortly afterward. The police officers who investigated her disappearance instantly honed in on Edward as the number one suspect after obtaining and analyzing his cell phone records. Then, during a subsequent police interview, they found that the questions they posed had his account of the date's events sounding suspiciously inconsistent. He tripped up so many times under the intense scrutiny that the police had the grounds to arrest him on initial charges of obstruction of justice, which would buy them the time they needed to search for evidence

that he had murdered Ashley and disposed of her body. During the searches that followed, investigators managed to find traces of blood in the car that he owned, as well as around the places that he was staying. Subsequent analysis showed that the blood contained DNA that matched that of Ashley's, and Edward was formally charged with the young woman's murder. All that the police were lacking for an airtight case against him was Ashley's body. But while he was being held without bond in a local holding facility, police who were using corpse-sniffing dogs to scour an area of woodland just outside of Somerville managed to find what remained of her. She had been buried

in a shallow grave, with injuries that were consistent with that of homicidal violence. Ashley's neck and wrists had been bound with electrical tape, and there were visible signs of blunt force trauma to the girl's face and head. The electrical tape around her neck was tied painfully tight too, suggesting Edward had used it to strangle her before bashing in her skull with a heavy object. A toxicology report found a large amount of alcohol and muscle relaxants in her bloodstream, the latter suggesting that she had been drugged so that Edward could have his way with her before he ended her life. A coroner attempted to confirm the suspicions of indecent assault, but Ashley's

body was in such an advanced state of decomposition already that it proved impossible. Yet despite so much evidence against him, prosecutors were unable to establish a clear motive for the killing. However, they were able to establish his proximity to the victim on the night in question, with Edwards' cell phone records placing him at Ashley's mom's house and near Harleyville on the night of their date. Investigators also looked at Ashley's meet-me profile, as well as her kick messages and discovered that she and Edward hadn't been chatting back and forth for months by that point. Prosecutors managed to find one of Edwards' ex-girlfriends who willingly told the courtroom at his trial that he was more than capable of being forceful and violent, and how she had been forced to break up with him when he had physically threatened her on more than one occasion.

The evidence against him was so compelling that Edward didn't dare deny that he'd murdered Ashley, and tried to fall back on a claim that it was simply an accident. His defense attorney had the gall to admit that Edward had a series of choices that makes this case look real bad, but that ultimately Ashley's death was purely accidental, and that his client should be shown a degree of leniency based on that fact, arguing for a conviction of involuntary manslaughter over first-degree murder. It seems the prosecutors had the upper hand, however, and opted for the cold and callous move of showing the jury some extremely graphic photos taken of Ashley's body in the hours after she was located and excavated. They pointed out the binding, the drugging, and the state of undress she was in, arguing that Edward hard-targeted a vulnerable, desperate young mother to enact his sick, depraved fantasies with.

A girl he cared so little for that he couldn't even be bothered to dig her a proper grave. in a shocking display of desperation. Edward Bonilla actually took the stand in an attempt to convince the jury of what actually happened that night that he and Ashley had their first date. According to him, Edward had been to a party at his brother's house on the evening in question, where he had drank heavily to give him the Dutch courage needed to actually meet the girl that he had been talking to for at least a month. Somehow an argument had broken out when Ashley accused him of having stolen her mother's cell phone, one that was so intense that Edward thought it best to leave the residence to drive back home. He got back into his car before he found that he needed to use the bathroom and as he attempted to get back out, he accidentally stepped on the gas, lurched forward, and hit Ashley with his front bumper.

This made an already ferocious Ashley explode with anger, and she began to violently kick and punch at the car's chassis. Edward claimed all he was doing was trying to defend himself and his property when he put her in a chokehold that was a little too tight, and was so scared that he didn't realize that he'd cut off her oxygen and killed her until it was way too late. It was only then that he was filled with panic and remorse, acting on pure animal instinct when he drove her body out into the woods and buried it in the shallow grave it was found in. But Edward also admitted under questioning that the electrical tape was present around Ashley's neck because he had taped a plastic bag around her head because it was bleeding and he didn't want to get blood on his upholstery.

He also inexplicably told the jury that he had then dropped her off at a gas station before sending himself fake messages on the Kik app using Ashley's phone in a foolish attempt to create a kind of alibi for himself. It never entered my mind to harm someone, he told the courtroom. It was an accident, an accident influenced by the way she was acting. But the jury saw through Edward's sickeningly transparent attempt at diverting away the blame from himself and twisting the nature of Ashley's death in order to save himself the harshest of sentences. If all he had done was choke her, why was she bleeding from her head? Why were there muscle relaxants in her system that evening? And why was it that her wrists were bound? Just like Edward's initial police interviews, there were far too many

inconsistencies and far too many unsubstantial explanations for the jury to give them the benefit of the doubt, and they found him guilty of first degree murder, with a judge then sentencing him to life in prison without parole. What Edward and Ashley's terrifying encounter proves is that there are people out there, predators like Edward, who hunt those too weak and desperate to resist their entrapment. Edward spent an entire month learning about Ashley, discovering her need for a man in her life, sniffing out her neediness like a shark smells a drop of blood in ocean waters. And when he couldn't wait anymore, he struck. What's more, Edward was so narcissistic and sociopathic that he seemed to genuinely believe that he could talk his way out of it. He actually seemed to convince himself that his peers would come to imagine the events of that date night in whatever way he painted them.

We can only thank God that they didn't, and that they were able to see through his lies, and put a violent, sadistic, and perverted predator where he belongs, in a jail cell, never to see the light of day again, for as long as he lives. A few months back I decided I was pretty much over the breakup I'd had during the summer with my long-term girlfriend. It took me months to be able to get over it as I was really heartbroken but at some point you just sort of have to get back on the horse, don't you? So I downloaded that dating app Hinge and started swiping through profiles. It's definitely the best dating app I've come across as it lets you actually message girls directly instead of just sort of hoping that they're going

to see you and match with you. So it definitely gave me a better chance at getting to talk to the kind of girls I'm into and one of these was a Persian girl named Sarusha. Sarusha was honestly one of the most beautiful girls I'd ever laid eyes on. She had this big mess of wild dark hair that was dip-dyed blonde towards the ends, really high cheekbones, perfectly sculptured eyebrows, and some of the deepest, darkest, most alluring brown eyes I'd ever seen. She was simply stunning, and because she'd grown up in Tehran, the capital of Iran, I had something of an edge.

You see, I speak a little bit of Farsi, the language they speak there, and I figured that might impress her if I told her as much, which it did, and boom. Only an hour or so later, I sent her my opener, and we were chatting. She was an extremely busy person, and I was flattered when she said that she would make time to see me, so we arranged to meet for coffee over the weekend. She showed up to our date in her gym gear and apologized for being so underdressed, but could only make it after a scheduled workout with her personal trainer. But I didn't care at all. She looked absolutely smoking hot in her yoga pants.

And we were having coffee, just kind of chatting about our lives, our interests, all that first date kind of stuff when I look out of the big glass windows to see this dude leaning up against his car. I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me at first but after a minute or two I realized that he was just straight up staring at us. At one point Sarusha noticed me looking over her shoulder and asked what I'm looking at and I make a comment about the bloke outside who seemed to be proper eyeballing us. She then turns around, looking over her shoulder, then spins back with this terrified look on her face before saying something like, we have to leave, now. I'm all like, why, do you know that fella? And she denies knowing him, but I'm not a dope, I knew what the score was like straight

away. Either it was a controlling family member or something, or it was a psycho ex-boyfriend. I figured all he'd do was follow us to try and be intimidating or something, but I never imagined he'd actually lay hands on me, and the way that he did it absolutely scared the soil out of me. You see, where I live is built up along this big mile-wide river, and the coffee shop me and Cerise had chosen to meet at was right on the docks. So we're walking along the city's promenade when the guy cornered me, grabbed me by the throat, and started pushing me backwards so my back was leaning over the rails. I tried to get him off, but this bloke was an absolute unit,

and as much as I tried, there was no getting him off of me. And the thing about the river where I live is that it's got a really, really strong current. Like if you fall off of a boat, or over the side of the prom, you can be in serious trouble as the current will suck you under the water, drown you, and then just drag you out into the Irish Sea. So the whole time he's threatening me, telling me to leave Sir Ashay alone, all this big macho masculine stuff. Sir Ashay is smacking him around the head, telling him to get off me, and all the while I'm thinking, if I go over the edge here, I'm a dead man. And I don't think he had any idea of it either, like it didn't sound like he was from

our city as we have a very particular accent which he just didn't have, so he was probably thinking he could lash me in the water and embarrass me a wee bit and I'd just be fine, but I'm telling you now, I wouldn't have been, and he'd have been done for manslaughter. But thank god, he didn't throw me over the railings, he just sort of backed off and headed back the way that he'd come after he'd blown off a little bit of steam. I mean the girl was gorgeous, I don't blame him for being a bit sore after a breakup or jealous of another lad, but Jesus Christ, if he'd been angrier, if he'd have lost his cool, really lost control, I legit wouldn't be here typing this. I'd be floating in the Irish Sea somewhere, maybe washing up as a rotten corpse on the beach in County Cork,

all because of some idiot getting a bit jealous. So before this whole lockdown thing happened and my dating life went to hell in a handbasket, I used to swipe through Tinder and Bumble quite a lot, looking for girls to hook up with. So I'm bored in my silver-like apartment one day when I come across this absolute smoke show of a girl who was listed under the name Lilith. She had these big green eyes, wore pigtails a lot in her profile pictures and had absolutely no qualms of showing off this big peachy butt she had. She also had this goth girl vibe going which was something I find really attractive. I mean she was definitely not the kind of girl I'd bring home to mom but that's not really what I'm looking for when I'm swiping so naturally I swipe right. Boom.

We match. I think I actually let out this involuntary, no way, when the old it's a match text appeared and kind of cynically told myself, nah, she's a bot, this isn't real. But yup, it was real. And she was so cute to talk to. At first anyway, because things started to go a little different when we actually met up. She worked at this coffee shop at the Getty and asked me if I wanted to pick her up after her shift so she could take me somewhere real special, which turned out to be the Museum of Death on Hollywood Boulevard. I mean, not my ideally romantic place to go on a first date, but like I said,

she was a slam piece and it was basically impossible to say no to her. So it was decided, and after I picked her up, she kept it a mystery for a while, only telling me to drive her to Hollywood Boulevard before revealing where she actually wanted to go. The area around the museum is kind of sketchy, but again, I'd have driven through way worse neighborhoods for a date with this girl so I just pushed all my concerns to the back of my mind. Despite the interior being as dark and dingy as it was, looking like an over-clustered basement, the whole thing was actually kind of interesting at first. But I'd be lying if I said my eyes stayed on the exhibits the whole

time, when they were pretty much glued to her butt whenever I wasn't going to get caught looking. It most definitely wasn't particularly creepy either, but the things that Lilith started to say to me as we were walking around the place did in a big bad way too. Like I said, the exhibits were interesting, but that's all they were aside from being gross and spooky. There were death masks, body parts preserved and for Mal to hide, all the things you might come to expect from a place called the Museum of Death, and then some. But this Lilith chick starts saying how pretty some of this stuff is, looking at it the way any other girl might look

at a picture of a puppy or something. She then starts asking me all these weird questions about how I'd like to die. Yeah, how I'd like to die. I tell her I wouldn't like to die at all. I mean, it was legit the creepiest question I think I'd ever been asked and she insists that everyone has a way they'd most want to die. I don't want to screw up the date or anything. She seemed crazy and crazy girls can be real fun if you catch my meaning so I give her some throwaway response like whatever way is most pain-free. She starts telling me how that was a boring answer and how she'd like to die of hypothermia because it apparently makes you feel all warm and sleepy towards the end. How some victims of hypothermia have even taken their clothes off before they died and just lay down in the snow or whatever

before their heart stops beating. She also then gave me this long in-depth speech about how taking another person's life would be better than even getting intimate to catch my drift. How that feeling of pure power must dwarf any feeling that drugs or alcohol have to offer. She then tells me how hot she thought it would be to watch me drown at the bottom of a pool while there's an audience and I'm totally naked. How it'd actually turn her on to see my final moments of desperation before my body went limp and floated around the tank. Then something about how the vikings would make wings out of the skin on a person's back by peeling it off and spreading it out, calling it beautiful, how it

was like art or something. When she's done telling me all of that and I'm suitably freaked out, she starts calling me pet and how she wanted me chained up at the end of her bed so she could do whatever she wanted with me. Now any other girl I'd think that was incredibly kinky but after what Lilith had just talked about I really didn't think what she had in mind for me involved any kind of pleasure whatsoever. When it came to driving her home, she actually told me to stop a few blocks away from her house because she didn't want me to know exactly where it was that she lived at, saying that you couldn't be too careful these days with all the psychos in the world who use dating apps. Yep, she said that to me after she'd

spent like an hour talking about all the ways she'd want to die or how she'd watch me die. As soon as I got home, I blocked her number. I've never been more scared of anyone like that before, let alone a girl I wanted to hook up with. So, Lilith, if you're reading this, let's not meet again. For 18-year-old Marina Bolter of Bloomfield, Indiana, New Year's Eve of 2014 was much like any other. It was a night of excitement and revelry among those nearest and dearest to her. It was also a night when the adults of her family might just be too home to get ready for the New Year's party that she had been planning on going to. Needless to say, she was excited to blow off some steam. You see, 2014 had not been an easy year for Marina. During the summer of 2013, Marina had discovered she was pregnant, and after the birth of her child in April of 2014, Marina had to do some growing up, and fast.

She got herself the grocery store job, trying to put her wild child days behind her, and committed herself to being a responsible, loving mother. But God laughs at well-laid plans, and tragedy was about to befall her. In August of 2014, a violent argument erupted at the family home between her older sister and her boyfriend. The argument quickly became physical, one in which household items were thrown around the home and in a horrendous stroke of misfortune, Marina's baby was injured in the melee. Neighbors happened to catch wind of the injury to the infant and swiftly reported the incident to Child Protective Services. A social worker was dispatched to the home, who, with a heavy heart,

made the decision to remove the child from the home and place them into foster care. Marina was devastated and vowed to do everything she could to win back her child. But it was not to be, for yet more tragedy was to strike Marina and her family, because that New Year's Eve, after she clocked out of work, she would never arrive home. In fact, as people would come to learn, it was as if though she had simply dropped off the face of the earth. One of the first places we might wish to look in order to get answers as to what happened to her is her relationship with a young man by the name of DJ Lockhart. Marina had a rather tempestuous on-again-off-again love affair with DJ, who was the father of Marina's child. They were young,

foolish, and headed in two very different directions in life, but as Marina's mother insisted in the years after her disappearance, they were very much in love. Despite what many have said about DJ possibly being responsible for Marina's disappearance, there are just as many who are or were close to the Bolter and Lockhart families that insisted that DJ was only guilty of loving her too much given that he was devastated beyond belief at her having vanished on New Year's Eve. Yet there is another man in Marina's life who we must consider as a possible suspect or who at least may have had a hand in facilitating her disappearance. In late 2014, Marina and DJ were not seeing eye

to eye at all and to all outside observers, it seemed they had definitely broken up. This was mainly because Marina seemed to be seeing other people, mainly an older man named Toby who she seemed to be rather secretive over. But she was being secretive about him for good reason. You see, not only was this older man married, but he was actually an old friend of the Bolter family, one that had known Marina's parents ever since she was born. Toby acted as something of a sugar daddy towards Marina, helping her out financially until she was able to afford the rent on her own apartment. However, it's important to note that Marina having her own place was one of the stipulations for regaining custody of her own

child. It appears that Toby was less of a serious relationship option and more of a means to an end. But as much as Marina tried to keep the relationship a secret, in a small town like Bloomfield, it's only a matter of time before even the deepest secrets see the light of day. And in the process, Toby's wife, who was also an old friend of the Bolter family, discovered her husband's infidelities. And shockingly, it was actually Marina's own mother who informed her of it. So as it turns out, the New Year's Eve party that Marina was supposedly headed to that night was none other than Toby's. But as she strolled out of work, calling Toby on her cell phone to confirm a few last minute arrangements, she spotted someone walking

towards her across the store's parking lot. According to Toby, Marina's last words to him before she hung up the phone were, uh oh, it's DJ. Marina did not call Toby back. In that surprise parking lot encounter, DJ straight up told Marina that he knew where she was planning on going for New Year's Eve, adding that he didn't approve of her relationship with Toby whatsoever. He then pleaded with her to attend a New Year's party with him instead, insisting they should work on repairing their relationship for the sake of their child. Marina replied that it was not the time or place to be having such a discussion, that she had made plans with Toby and she was sticking to them. DJ was furious, but supposedly

took the rejection on the chin before offering to give her a ride home so she might get out of the cold. But it seems that Marina actually managed to get a ride home from a regular customer. Whether or not she did this out of pure happenstance or begged to be taken home because she was afraid of DJ is entirely up for speculation. But one thing is abundantly clear. The following day, Marina failed to show up for her scheduled New Year's Day shift at the IGA store. Knowing full well that she would head out to a party after work, Marina's employers were initially unsurprised by her unauthorized absence. There had probably been some drinking involved, and with drinking comes hangovers, and with hangovers comes tardiness.

But still, they tried her cell phone to see if she was going to be heading into work at some point, yet there was no answer. IGA management then got in touch with Marina's mom, hoping she might be able to provide some answers on her daughter's whereabouts. But Marina's mom hadn't seen her either, and the news that she had failed to show up for work only succeeded in worrying her. She headed over to Marina's apartment, using her spare key to let herself in. There were no signs of any break-ins or struggles, but Marina's purse, cell phone, and keys were all missing, along with her work uniform. This meant that, in all likelihood, she never made it home from work that evening. Marina's mom immediately reported her missing, and a police investigation began shortly afterward. Obviously, given the fact that she seemed to have disappeared

immediately after leaving work, police stated very publicly that they wished to speak to the customer who had apparently driven her home that evening. It took three whole weeks for the man to come forward, but we can understand why he might be nervous. In an interview with investigating police, the man claimed to have dropped her off at a pizza place near to her home. The restaurant was closed, but Marina apparently openly stated that she didn't want the man to know where she lived. Although this might seem like an unusual thing to say, when it was put to Marina's mom she attested that it was just the kind of thing her daughter would say and that to her it was a totally believable story. This was backed up when the man was made to undergo a polygraph test and

pass with flying colors. Despite being one of the main suspects in Marina's disappearance, DJ did all he could to help the family find her, even if it was to no avail. He was said to be absolutely bereft about her disappearance and was never quite the same afterward. Marina's mother spoke highly of the young woman and always insisted that he couldn't have been involved in her vanishing. However, Marina's father and his extended family have perennially viewed the boy with suspicion, openly stating that he had the most to gain from her having disappeared. But the fact remains that we will never truly know if he was responsible, as we will never get a full confession. You see, DJ took to drinking

heavily after Marina went missing, getting into more and more trouble with the law and the local populace. So much so, that he got into a violent altercation on February 12th, 2015, one which ended in him being stabbed to death by the man he had gotten in a fight with. And then there's Toby, Marina's old lover who had given her thousands of dollars to try to help her get her life together. He was one of the last people Marina spoke with on the evening of her disappearance, and one might think that he would cooperate fully with the investigation into her whereabouts. But by all accounts, Toby acted very suspiciously in the months that followed. He apparently stopped talking to Marina's mother altogether and only involved

himself with Marina's father, almost aggressively asserting that DJ was to blame for her disappearance. However, there is another person of interest in this case who we can simply not ignore as a suspect, a man by the name of Vernon Gale Briner. Vernon was a convicted murderer who had been previously sent to prison for the murder of a 19-year-old girl and had only been released from the penitentiary in 2012. As it turns out, Vernon had a solid alibi for his whereabouts at the time, with an employer testifying that he was at work at the time. Vernon also passed a polygraph test in which he was straight up asked if he had done anything to Marina, with the results

indicating that he was telling the truth when he said he had nothing to do with her going missing. To this day, there have been no significant clues as to what happened to Marina Bolter. No dead bodies have ever been found that could have matched up to her DNA or description. No one outside of her small hometown has ever seen anything matching her description either. For all intents and purposes, it is as if she just vanished from the face of the earth. It's a terrifying prospect that, even in the digital age, with man's ability to track and trace using the plethora of electronic devices we employ in our daily lives, that a girl as well-known and well-loved as Marina could simply disappear, never to be seen again.

There were many suspects in her case, many people who could have snatched her up and disposed of her in a way that no one would ever find her. But only one man is guilty. Only one person really knows what happened to her and how her final moments on this earth played out. And to our knowledge, that man is still walking the streets of the United States, knowing he committed perhaps the worst crime imaginable and knowing that no one can touch him for it. We're going back about ten years for this one, but this was without a doubt one of the worst nights in my life, and it's one that all started on New Year's Eve.

A few friends of mine all congregated in one of our parents' houses, doing some pre-drinking before we were due to head out to a New Year's party. We got toasty on a few tins, then ended up getting a taxi into the city center, where there was this massive student house in the Georgian Quarter where a load of locals and students alike had gathered to get bladdered and see in the new year. It was a decent enough party at first, like everyone seemed nice and friendly and whoever lived there had to put in a great deal of effort to make people feel welcome. Putting out snacks, ice for drinks, rigging up a big old speaker system to pump out the tunes, that sort of thing.

Then at one point during the night I noticed a few lads wandering around the party who looked like they didn't exactly belong there. It wasn't because of how they looked or dressed, like there was a big mix of people there from all different backgrounds and it definitely made for a better atmosphere. The thing that got me was that while everyone was engaged in conversation or the like, drinking or dancing or whatever, these lads seemed to be just looking around, like they were just lost or looking for someone. I never really thought much of it at the time though, like there were so many different people going in and out of the house all the time. I'd never been there before, hardly knew any of the people who actually lived

in the house, so I wasn't really to know who should and shouldn't have been there, and it's not like I was about to start playing bouncer or security guard or whatever. Then, like an hour or so later, I'm in the kitchen trying to fish one of my cans of cider out of an already overstocked fridge, when someone walks up to me with this anxious look on their face. Hi. Do you know that guy in the waterproof jacket that's been walking around? It was one of the students who actually lived in the house. Me? No, I thought you knew them. I reply, taking out a can and cracking it open. No, I thought they were with you. They reply, looking a bit more nervous as they're talking. There's a sort of awkward pause in the conversation before the person asks,

Can you get them to leave? This was exactly the sort of thing I was trying to avoid. Like I said, I wasn't up for playing bouncer and I was pretty bloody confused as to why they were asking me to do so. Uh, mate, it's not my house. It's not my party. I'm not gonna go around telling people that they can't be here. I say before wading through the crowds to find my mates. A little while later I realized I couldn't see any of the dodgy looking guys hanging around the party so I just thought it had been dealt with by someone else. But then the fella who'd asked me to kick them out comes up to me and actually thanks me for getting rid of them.

Again, there's this moment of confusion where I'm like, I didn't do anything, mate, they must have just left on their own. I really thought that that was the end of it, but boy was I wrong. I remember being pretty drunk by the time I nipped upstairs to use the third floor toilet, one that had some windows looking into the street out the front of the building. So I'm standing there, draining the main vein, just sort of blankly staring out the window when I see this car pull up. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a car with a few lads piling out. I watch them go around to the boot, open it up, and start to pull out mass. I did a kind of double take like, what is this?

They were pulling out ski mass, balaclavas, all sorts of stuff like that, followed by baseball bats, hockey sticks, knives, all kinds of blunt and sharp weapons. My brain was just slowed by the alcohol I think and I remember thinking someone's in for a rough night, only realizing it was us that was in trouble when they started heading up the pathway towards the house, the same party house which had an open unlocked door to allow pretty much anyone and everyone to just wander in and out at their leisure. The night was about to go very, very wrong for us. I don't think I even finished up my pee properly, at least I have no memory of doing so. The only thing I remember is rushing back to the room where my mates were chilling,

just in time to hear a load of screaming and shouting coming from the ground floor. I just remember saying, we need to get out of here, now. But my mates were so blitzed that they just sort of looked back at me in confusion like, why, what's up? Not even bothering to move at first. I grabbed my jacket from off the floor, trying to tell them what I'd just seen, and what I'd just heard coming from downstairs, but I think I was so scared and drunk that it all just came out as a babble at first.

I think maybe they just thought I was pulling their leg at first, that I was just playing some daft prank on them. I get it. The mood went from zero to a hundred really bloody fast and I can totally understand their confusion. But then all of a sudden this lad appears in the doorway of the room we were occupying wearing a gator over the bottom half of his face with a baseball bat in his hand. Only then did they really realize how serious I'd been. The lad just instantly took a swing at my mate who was closest to the door and he only barely got out of the way in time. The lad then just starts shouting at us to stay seated,

but to throw our phones into the middle of the room. There's a moment of hesitation and the lad decides to let us know how serious he is by smashing a stereo near to him. I mean he swung so hard with the baseball bat that he just obliterated that thing with one swing. That was all it took to get us to comply and we all tossed our phones into a rough pile in the middle of the room. We thought he'd just grab them and leg it but that wasn't enough for him. He starts asking for wallets, mp3 players, anything of any value, basically for us to empty our pockets. While this is going on I can see all kinds of chaos unfolding in the hallway outside

the room we're in. Lads are getting brave with the invaders only to get smacked in the face with brass knuckles or hockey sticks. Girls are getting pulled by their hair down the hall, falling over their high heels and getting carpet burned from getting dragged along the carpet. God knows what happened to them after they got their phones or wallets stolen. A few of us tossed our empty wallets next to our phones, but since only a few of us did, this masked guy thinks the rest of us are holding out on him. He doesn't smash an appliance this time though. He edges forward and swings the bat down onto my mate's shoulders. Jesus Christ, the scream that came out of him after the impact was just unreal.

Like I knew in an instant that he'd broken something and he just falls down to the carpet and starts grimacing in agony. The fella's all like, I told you, wallets now! Maybe one or two more wallets get tossed into the pile, but there are still lads sat around who basically haven't thrown anything in the middle of the room and the fella with the baseball bat has noticed this. He takes another swing at the lad whose shoulder he'd just smashed, bringing the bat down hard onto his side with this horrible, sickening thumping sound. It totally knocks the wind out of him and if I didn't know any better, I'd have thought the gasping noises he were making were him properly dying. One of the guys blurts out that he's got nothing on him, that all his stuff is in the living room

downstairs. I think he was one of the guys who actually lived in the house. This answer didn't satisfy the masked fella who then smacks the downed broken bones guy for a third or fourth time and gets him absolutely screaming in agony as yet another bone breaks. We're all pretty much begging him to stop at this point, but he just keeps smashing that baseball bat down onto our mate, barking at us to give him everything we've got or he'll just kill our mate. I think the only thing that saved his life was the appearance of another masked lad in the doorway who told him that they had to leave before the police showed up. And at that, the raiders were gone as quickly as they'd come. They'd ransacked the

entire house, beaten up anyone who so much as put up an ounce of resistance. The whole place was just in shock. Girls were crying or wailing over the unconscious bodies of those lads they'd knocked out with bats or brass knuckles. It was honestly like walking through a war zone as I shakily plodded down the stairs, surveying the scene while my mage tried to tend to the guy who'd had the absolute life beaten out of him. Because I'd taken most people's phones, I think only a handful of people left at the party were able to actually get in touch with emergency services. I remember a few of them sort of going from room to room, trying to give the 999 operators a kind of damage report, telling them exactly how many injured people there were. There were police cars everywhere within the hour, and I think maybe about four ambulances turned up to treat the wounded,

with another few ferrying the more seriously wounded of us off to the hospital for treatment, which obviously included our mate who'd had his bones broken by the lad with the baseball bat. Once he'd been taken away, there was no reason for us to be there anymore, so we just grabbed a load of ale from the fridge in the house and got walking home. I won't lie, we did take a few cans and bottles that didn't belong to us, but I think we just wanted to drink to forget at that stage. Like it was probably the single most terrifying, traumatizing thing I'd ever seen in my life up until that point. Like I know it's a massive cliche but I heard our mates screams for months afterwards. Sometimes when there were quieter moments in college or at night, I'd just

hear them in my mind. Like not actually hear them, just remember them so vividly that it was like I could hear them, if that makes any sense. Those screams are a sound, along with the sound of bones breaking, that I sincerely hope I never have to hear ever again. The Melbourne suburb of Packingham is one of the wealthiest areas in all of Australia. The area is home to several large mansions that house some of Melbourne's most successful business people, boasting sprawling estates with luxury amenities such as swimming pools, boating lakes, and even small-scale golf courses. It's one of these mansions that 45-year-old Michael Griffey called home.

He lived with estranged wife Diane, along with children that Michael hardly saw due to his busy work schedule. He would often spend long periods of time living in an apartment he owned in Melbourne itself, using it as the kind of base of operations for his many business ventures, including the parent company D&M Plaster Transport. On December 31st of 2004, Diane and the children were hosting a huge party to celebrate the coming of the new year. Scores of guests swarmed around the grounds of their stunning estate, eating canapes, drinking champagne,

and looking back over a year that had brought many of them great financial success. But Michael himself was nowhere to be found. When asked, Diane replied that he was home but that she had not seen him and was probably milling around somewhere in a drunken haze, socializing with business associates or eyeing up the young cocktail waitresses that floated around with silver trays laden with luxury food and drink. But the reality was something far more disturbing, because although Michael was indeed on the property, just not in the state his loved ones imagined him to be.

Because on the evening of January 2nd, 2005, his wife Diane, along with their 17-year-old daughter Cassandra, walked into one of the second floor office spaces to find Michael lying dead in a pool of his own blood. The mansion was vast, with so many rooms that Michael was found to have been dead for days, simply lying in a room that none of the family had been in for quite some time. The investigating coroner determined through tissue analysis that Michael had been bludgeoned to death at around 3pm on December 29th. Whoever had murdered him had then wrapped his bloodied corpse in a striped bed sheet before attempting to hide it under a tarp. There were three large and seemingly fatal wounds on

his head and one obvious defensive injury to his wrist, indicating that he had attempted to fight off his attacker before being overpowered and killed with a blunt object. Police discovered that Michael's wallet and cell phone had been stolen from the property, and that a thousand Australian dollars had been removed from a safe that only three people, one of which was Michael, had the combination too. They also found that two pages had been torn from a journal that his family said had a meticulous record of his movements and business dealings. Given that Diane was the beneficiary of both of Michael's life insurance policies, which were valued at almost two million dollars, she was one of the first people to be considered as a suspect. Police discovered that not only had she written bad checks in the time before he was killed,

but that in the short time before his death, Michael had complained to his friends that his wife was mishandling money, and that he could use this fact to gain the upper hand when it came to dividing up the family finances in the event of a divorce. It was also discovered that Michael was having multiple affairs and financially supporting other women, and that the main reason he was staying in central Melbourne so much was not because of business dealings, but because it afforded him time to indulge in his extramarital affairs. However, he had not done a very good job of keeping this a secret from Diane, and text message exchanges made this very evident indeed. However, Diane's lawyer prevented her from commenting on how this made her feel, and this, along with the other evidence of her financial misdealing, made her the number one suspect in her husband's murder. She was arrested

in 2007 and preliminary hearings began shortly after, yet the case was not to be a simple one by any stretch of the imagination. Not only was there simply not enough evidence to really charge Diana with Michael's murder, but a number of other twists and turns in the case meant that pinning down a definitive suspect became almost impossible. Bizarrely, during the preliminary hearings of the case against Diane, her and Michael's daughter Cassandra, the very same one who had found his body on that fateful day in January of 2005, actually attempted to confess to his murder. Despite her insistence that it was she that beat her father bloody in the days after Christmas before attempting to hide his body with a sheet, police noticed a

series of inconsistencies in her story and dismissed it as a false attempt to implicate herself in something she had nothing to do with. But the question would cast a shadow on the entire affair for the duration of the investigation. Just why exactly would Cassandra want Felice to believe that she was the murderer? Felice also investigated Michael's son, Kenny, who was something of a playboy, living a fast lifestyle with fast cars and even faster women. There was every reason to believe that he too needed money, but again there was very little evidence to suggest that he had even had it in him to plot the murder of his own father, let alone go through with it. Police managed to secure

an interview with one of Michael's mistresses, a woman by the name of Jillian Gold, who had apparently been engaged in an affair with Michael for the better part of five years. She knew that she was not the only woman who Michael had been seeing, but since he had essentially funded her lifestyle and was not written to his will, there was absolutely no reason to believe that she was the one who had killed him. However, there was a chance that since Michael was known to partake in sugar daddy style relationships, that breaking it off with one of his so-called sugar babies had resulted in an argument, an argument that may have resulted in a kind of revenge killing.

But since Jillian was completely ignorant of these other women's identities, she couldn't point police in their direction, and the investigation into being an affair-related murder floundered. Police then got in touch with Katrina Fitzpatrick, Michael's sister, who told the police of a rather worrying encounter she shared with her brother in the time before her brother's death. Around a month before he was found dead, Michael got in touch with Katrina in an attempt to arrange a meetup with her. She had dithered over a time and place citing her busy work schedule, but Michael had almost violently

insisted that they meet as soon as possible. They met in a high-end cafe in downtown Melbourne, and from the get-go, Katrina noticed that Michael appeared to be acting extremely shadily. She had apparently tried to confront him on the reason for his off-behavior several times, but was rebuffed on each occasion, with Michael insisting on reminiscing about happier times, including their childhood together. By the end of the conversation, Katrina, admitting to be extremely worried for her brother's mental state, impressed him for one final time about the reason for their meeting. Michael barely said another word, instead opting to present her with an expensive piece of jewelry,

beginning to cry as he told her he loved her. Michael then departed the meeting and Katrina never saw him alive again. There happens to be another interesting aspect to this case, albeit one we might struggle to fit into the bigger picture. In the year 2008, almost four years after Michael's murder, it was discovered that his plaster transport company was facing dire financial difficulties in the run-up to his killing. Michael owed over a million dollars in taxes to the Australian government, as well as owing $100,000 in loans to other creditors. A lot of this loan money could be accounted for, but some of it could not,

and it's possible that Michael owed money to some people that it might be extremely dangerous to owe money to. The kind of people that, if it appeared that the debt might not be repaid, might simply have Michael killed as a warning to others. So the question remains, just who killed Michael Griffey, and what exactly were their motives? There is no doubt that Michael seemed to know he was in danger. The teary encounter with his sister is a testament to that. There's also the possibility that he believed or knew that he wasn't safe in his own home, which is why he stayed so often in a downtown Melbourne apartment.

The fact that he seems to have been murdered in his own home is all the evidence we require to back this theory up. There's every chance that Michael was murdered as a result of his debts, but the fact that his daughter tried to confess to his murder throws a huge wrench into the works of such a theory. She was obviously trying to cover for him, but whether or not she was trying to cover for her mother or her brother is another question entirely. I think we can all agree that this is frankly terrifying, and that those that are supposed to love and cherish us are just as capable of snuffing out our lives in the name of greed or malice. Whether or not answers will finally come out regarding his death is anyone's guess, but for the time being, Michael's death will remain yet another unsolved mystery, and his killer is free to walk the streets. To be continued... insurgents or western militaries that make Afghanistan such a dangerous place. Even the land and the weather itself seem to be out to kill you.

Despite being thought of as a scorched and arid country, the average temperature in this far eastern area of Afghanistan during the winter time is just above freezing point, and at night, temperatures have been known to dip as low as minus 25 degrees Celsius. And it was on a freezing cold New Year's Eve up in forward operating base Matar Lam that U.S. Army Sergeant Anton R. Phillips found himself feeling terribly lonesome. It was yet another holiday season away from his beloved daughters, 13-year-old Lexus, 8-year-old Antoneth, and 5-year-old Alina. And being stuck in a support fob in eastern Afghanistan, when all he wanted in the world was to hug his family and sink a few beers to welcome in the new year, Sergeant Phillips felt

like he might as well be on another planet. Forward operating base Matar Lam was, by that time, home to a few hundred soldiers, most from the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Red Bull Division. It was one of the larger FOBs in the province of Lagman, and was well on its way to attaining a built-up status, which means that base officials were planning on having a post-exchange store constructed, as well as several other amenities normally associated with larger operating bases. There was even a small recreation ground which the soldiers had christened Pease Park, an area of the base that functioned as

a kind of workout or hangout area. Soldiers would go over to Pease Park to either smoke up or bulk up, depending on whether or not they felt the urge for self-improvement or self-destruction, and missing one's family could definitely bring on a longing for the latter. So it was this area of the base that Sergeant Phillips decided to wander off to in an effort to kill some time and take his mind off of how much he missed his family. As we've established, Afghan winter nights can be incredibly frigid, and Sergeant Phillips' platoon mates did not expect him to hang around Pease Park for very long, not unless he was planning on freezing to death. Yet when almost an hour and a half had passed by, and Sergeant Phillips still hadn't returned to his living quarters, his buddies started to grow a little

concerned and decided to go looking for him. He had mentioned to them that he was going to head up towards Pete's Park so his platoon mates headed right in the park's direction in the hopes that they would find him safe and well. It was about halfway into the walk to the park that Sergeant Phillips' platoon mates saw him lying in the dirt bleeding profusely from multiple stab wounds. They tried to get a response from him, calling out his name and slapping him around the face in an attempt to rouse him from his unconsciousness, but it was no good. Phillips was pale and cold to the touch. His platoon mates screamed for a medic, and it should be noted that those that tried to save

his life did so speedily and efficiently, but it was no use. Sergeant Phillips had no pulse and no amount of blood transfusions or shock padding could bring him around. Shortly afterward, his platoon mates were heartbroken to hear that their friend and fellow soldier had lost his life. Forward operating base Matar Lam immediately went into lockdown as it was initially believed that the wounds had been inflicted by Taliban fighters that had somehow snuck past the base's secure perimeter. The base was searched from top to bottom by the FOB's quick reaction force, but no Taliban fighters were found and the preliminary assumption was, as was previously

stated, that there had been some kind of sneak attack undertaken by the enemy. But as the weeks went by, there were a number of seriously unusual things to note about the investigation into Sergeant Phillips' death. Usually speaking, when an American soldier is killed in a foreign country, there is an immediate communications ban imposed on soldiers so that news of the death doesn't somehow make its way to the American media. The last thing the military wants is for the soldier's family members to hear rumors or speculation of the death from a news outlet instead of from representatives from the armed forces. Then, when definitive answers can be secured as to the reason and circumstances behind the death, the family is notified. Then and only then are details released to media outlets. This process can take anything from just 24 hours to a

couple of days, but in the case of Sergeant Phillips, the US Army took a full three weeks to announce his death, and even then, refused to release any details on exactly how he had lost his life. Obviously, this was highly unorthodox in terms of military procedure, and Philip's family, who were already heartbroken by his untimely death, were left with even more anguish as they struggled to get straight answers on just how he had died. As time went on, the army made a series of decisions that appeared to shed some light on the circumstances of Sergeant Phillips' death. Army command saw fit to posthumously award Sergeant Phillips the Purple Heart Medal, an award that is only given for wounds sustained during combat with the enemy,

and one that is not given in the event of a non-combat death or a homicide within the ranks. He was also awarded a Bronze Star, a medal that is awarded by any person who distinguishes himself or herself by heroic or meritous achievement, or service in connection with military operations. And to top it off, Sergeant Phillips was posthumously promoted to Staff Sergeant. Obviously, this suggests that Army command had discovered that Sergeant Phillips had undertaken some act of bravery of heroism that ended in the loss of his life, and that it had potentially involved combat with enemy forces, be they Taliban or otherwise. Yet even after these accolades were awarded, there remained many unanswered questions regarding Staff Sergeant Phillips' death.

Answers which the Army seemed to possess but were unwilling to divulge. Yet even the military seemed only too willing to admit that they didn't have all the facts surrounding the case. The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command announced that they were offering a $25,000 reward for any information that would lead to the arrest of those responsible for Staff Sergeant Phillips' death. They also leaked information that they believe there may be a link between Phillips' death and a service member based in the area of the National Training Center outside of Barstow, California. Army CID also stated that they were interested in talking to service members and bases around the area of

Colorado Springs. We have reason to believe that someone who knows something about the untimely death of this soldier and we are not giving up and determined to bring those responsible to justice, said CID spokesman Chris Gray. We strongly encourage anyone with information to contact us immediately. These statements raised many questions. Do the Army suspect that whoever murdered Sergeant Phillips were actually a serving member of America's armed forces? Were investigators lied to in the aftermath possibly by the murderer themselves? Did they tell investigators that Phillips had died as a result of a Taliban sneak attack?

And was this what led him being awarded the Purple Heart and other accolades? These are just a handful of the questions that have so far been unanswered, and that means Sergeant Phillips' death remains shrouded in secrecy and mystery. The only thing that's clear is that the whole episode leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. The US military clearly doesn't know everything about his death, but has also decided that what it does know is most definitely not fit for public consumption. Whatever happened to Sergeant Phillips that night is either so terrifying or ominous that neither the general public nor his fellow soldiers can

be allowed to know the truth, or so outrageous that it would cause mass protests and resignations among the general staff. Was his death a result of a Taliban sneak attack? Or was some other nation-state involved in the surveillance or infiltration of American military bases in the region? It is entirely possible that if discovered, a Russian or Iranian special forces operator would resort to deadly force to ensure their presence remain undetected. Or it may be a simple case of murder in the ranks. That's always a possibility. Yet given the CID investigated the case thoroughly and decided to award medals normally associated with a combat death,

it definitely seems as if something else is at work here. Something horrifying enough to be kept a closely guarded secret by the US military. Either way, Sergeant Phillips' death is likely to remain yet another chilling unsolved mystery that professional and amateur sleuths alike are bound to ponder over for many, many years to come. In In late 2008, I came one night to find my mom sitting in the kitchen all alone and in floods of tears. When I asked her what was wrong, her answer made my jaw drop. My dad had left her. There was absolutely no indication that anything was wrong with their marriage or that he was remotely unhappy. But that afternoon, while I was out, he had apparently packed a few things into his suitcase, told her he was leaving, and just disappeared.

I only mention this because it explains why my mom and little sister just didn't want to be in the house over Christmas and New Year. That kind of family-oriented time of year would have just been way too hard on them, so they basically buggered off to Mexico for a month to just decompress or whatever. Point being, I was all alone for Christmas and New Year's. Christmas days sucked, and I realized that they were seriously right about not wanting to be alone in the house at that time of year. So for New Year's Eve, I decided to throw a little get-together for me and a load of my mates, hoping that a little party might take away some of the sadness I felt as a result of my dad leaving us. So on the night itself, it ends up being about 20 to 30 of us getting together in my parents' place,

getting drunk, listening to music, playing xbox, just a big hangout among some of the people I was closest to. It was a really good night to start off with and it really did help take my mind off of things for a little while. We did the whole new years countdown thing, set off a few fireworks, generally having a brilliant little night together. But the drunker we all got, the messier things became, until it was just a medley of people throwing up, hooking up in the spare bedroom, or arguing amongst themselves. Two of the people who ended up fighting were my mate Chris and his girlfriend at the time, a girl named Katie. And when I could gather, Katie thought Chris had been flirting with a mutual friend of ours and had taken issue with it.

Chris was insisting that they were just being friendly and it was nothing to worry about but Katie was adamant that something was going on. That he was cheating on her, blah blah blah. You know how it is, teenage drama. Now I know Chris really did love her so it wasn't like a stand up argument. It was more like him begging her to see reason and not go mad and dump him over some perceived bit of flirting. He swore he'd never do anything like that, that she was the only girl for him, how much he loved her, all this romantic theatrical stuff that he might expect from two young lovers. It wasn't really anything in my business though so me and the other party guests just sort of left them to it while we got on with trying to have fun.

Then a little while later, I find Chris sitting in the back garden, swigging off a bottle of raw vodka on his own. I go up to him to ask him if he's okay, only to find that he's crying, rotten drunk, saying that Katie had dumped him and gone home. I tried to be a good friend and console him as best I could, saying that she probably was just drunk and over emotional, how there was a good chance that they'd just get back together over the next couple of days when she'd realize she'd made a mistake. But he was insistent, she was gone for good and they wouldn't be getting back together. All I could do was get him on his feet and hug it out with him. The poor guy really was in one heck of a state and I managed to convince him to hand over the vodka, drink some water and then get some sleep in my bed so he could maybe sober up a wee bit before heading on home.

He agrees, I tuck him in and then leave him to get some rest. About an hour or so later the party is winding down and the remainder of us are just chilling in the TV room when someone goes off to use the toilet. They return like seconds later, saying someone's in the bathroom throwing up, then asking if they can go and take a pee in the back garden. Of course, I tell them now I didn't want them peeing all over my mom's flower beds and that I'll nip upstairs to see if I can get whoever is out of the bathroom. So I get the toilet upstairs and I can hear someone gagging and retching on the other side of the locked door. My friend Julia joins me, a wee bit concerned, and starts trying to help me talk to the person who's locked themselves in the bathroom. It's sometime then that I notice that two doors are open, the first being my bedroom,

the second being a little cupboard on the first floor landing. I check my bedroom and see that the bed is empty, so it's obviously Chris that's in the bathroom, puking his guts out because of all the vodka he drank. I shut the door to the bedroom then go to close the door on the other room which happened to be a little cover that my mom kept cleaning supplies in. My first thought was that Chris had opened up that door thinking it was the bathroom in his drunken haze then legged it to the right bathroom in his desperation to puke. But I noticed something that at first I didn't really understand the significance of. The cleaning supplies that my mom usually kept all neat in a little plastic box were spilled all over the floor. Not like open fluids spilling out, they were just all out of the box like someone had been rooting through them.

As I'm wondering why someone would do something like that, Julia calls out that the person who'd locked themselves in the bathroom, presumably Chris, had gone quiet all of a sudden and that they weren't responding. That's when I put two and two together. Violent vomiting, cleaning supplies missing, deep drunken depression. Chris was trying to end his own life. I absolutely pegged it to the bathroom door and started trying to kick the door off the hinges. Julia screams in shock at what I'm doing and people from the living room start piling out towards the bottom of the stairs in utter confusion. I've been really protective of the house all night, not wanting people smoking inside,

not wanting people peeing anywhere they shouldn't, trying to stop spillages and all of that kind of stuff. Then there I was, booting down my own bathroom door. It was way too heavy to actually kick off the hinges, but I did manage to kick a hole in the wood paneling, and that's when I got a look inside. Chris was laying there, a bottle of bleach next to him, and there was like pink puke all over the cistern, the floors, and his clothes. It was pink because he drank the bleach and it had corroded or burned the inside of him so much that he had vomited up blood. We were distraught, terrified, almost sure that he was dead, but we were quick to call an ambulance.

Chris had his stomach pumped and he survived but it took a long time for him to be back to normal. Because he puked the fumes had damaged his lungs or something. I'm not a doctor so don't have a go if I get the details wrong. So he had trouble eating, drinking and breathing for at least a month after that. Twelve years later and I've never forgotten that and I'm pretty sure neither has he because as far as I know Chris never drank vodka again because of the smell of it makes me think of that night. God knows what horrible memories it brings back to him. Before I start telling the story, I have to say that this happened over three and a half years ago when I was between the ages of 15 and 18. All the people in this story have been changed for privacy reasons.

I grew up in a pretty good sized town. High school grades are always between 800 and 1000 students. The town was about 45 minutes to an hour from the second biggest city in the state which is known for three rivers and many bridges. I have two older brothers which means obviously I am the youngest of three boys. Our mother was the general manager at my grandpa's golf course by no means were we well off in any way but we were far from poor and our father was in the state police a lieutenant at the time of everything happening cop dad was hard on us when needed but we all three learned to always be respectful no matter what unless extreme situations call for not being it. I will say that due to a very dark

history I've never had a close relationship with all of my brothers or parents. Even with all of that I'll admit this made my dad and I be slightly close even for very short periods of time and that we only had one thing in common that we'd each protect the ones we love at all costs even if it meant our lives. Him with my mom and family and I with my girlfriend and nieces and nephew. When I was 15, I went to the downtown area to get food and ice cream with friends at a place about half a mile from our high school football stadium. Being that we were only 15 years old, going into our 10th grade year of high school and almost 16, we all rode our bikes to meet up. My hometown was split up into six wards. The restaurant was one to two miles away and I lived in the first ward. When we came back outside to leave to do

something else, I realized that my bike was missing. As soon as the group and I checked the immediate area, I called my dad knowing that he was home from work and he flew down to where I was. We all figured that he'd be livid at us, which he wasn't at all. All of my friends got on their bikes to go off in different directions towards their homes to look for the bike. towards the part of town we lived in, we saw a group of three, two males, one female, walking down the side street towards the street we were on, one and a half miles from the restaurant. The group was pushing my bike as they walked, causing me to snap to attention and say loudly, they have my bike. My dad stopped immediately and put the car in park in the street. We jumped out and I laughed and sighed due to seeing my dad go from usual to cop dad.

Well he had the girl and one guy stand at the wall with their faces touching it and he slammed the guy with the bike to the ground. I grabbed the bike and put it in the bed of the truck. Since it was only two of us against three my dad told me to get in the truck so they don't see your face and I said, screw that. And it wasn't until years later that I came to regret that. The cops came and arrested all three of them. Now fast forward two and a half years later, I was 18 years old and home from my freshman year of college which was spent at a military college across the state from home, which stuff I learned during my time at school will help out. I was out jogging at around 6pm one night on the sidewalk next to the road when a car flew past me, sat at the stop sign until I passed them. Luckily I was close to home and memorized the car's details or as much as I could.

The vehicle drove and went a lot slower and I walked into the house when they were passing. I didn't think anything was wrong with the situation other than someone driving fast and slowing down upon realizing someone was jogging. Fast forward one week and I just finished up another jog, walked into the house through the front door which leads right into the kitchen, which has a big window that looks out to the driveway, front yard, the street and stop sign. As soon as I walked to the sink by the window to splash some cold water on my face I heard a loud boom from outside, sounding like an M-80 exploding, then

one second of silence, then three loud booms and quick secession which, thanks to being a hunter, I knew was gunfire. I dropped down, crawled to the door, grabbed the baseball bat my brother and I used before and ran out of the door even though I knew a bat had zero chance of winning against a firearm but I was hoping that I'd surprise them. When I got outside they were driving away and I recognized the vehicle from a week earlier that sat at the stop sign when I was out jogging. Thankfully no one was at home at the time since who knows where they'd be standing or what would happen. After the police came I had given my statement and we waited. Since the town was

big for a town it was also small enough that a lot of people knew everyone. The town's police and my brothers all joked with me asking things like, did you try being a hero when no one was around? Or would ask if I was crazy due to running outside towards gunfire without a gun. Well two or three days had passed when we had received a call from the cops saying that they had caught the guy who shot the house. As it turns out, it was the same guy who stole my bike two and a half years earlier. After finding that out, my dad and I looked at each other without saying anything. We didn't tell my mom about it, being the same guy, and that he had

seen me finish up and walk into the house, luckily by chance. The guy had received 10 years for attempted murder with a weapon, attempted assault, but due to not a single person being injured in any way, no assault charges of any kind were charged towards him. So we went on with our lives and I became an EMT during college working on weekends and finished school. When I was 26 years old, I had stopped by my parents' house when I was in the area. I walked into the kitchen and on the kitchen table was the town's newspaper, which the front page read something along the lines of,

local woman missing, vehicle found abandoned and burned. As I started reading the article for a second I almost immediately ripped the kitchen table off the frame with rage. The article said the missing woman's boyfriend for some period of the time was the same guy who had stolen my bike and shot at my parents' house with me in the front window. He wasn't arrested or charged with any crime related to the missing woman at the time. I left and went back to my apartment an hour away and made sure I was always carrying a pistol, except when I was working on the ambulance. Even through all of the rage that I was feeling, somewhat paranoid thoughts entered my mind, maybe about him following me, even if it

was still unlikely. My parents left their house for a week to stay at my grandparents' house, which was empty due to him living at the golf course. Life went on from there. I still work as an EMT in the second biggest city in my state. The guy who shot at my house is currently in prison on charges of crimes not related to the murder of the lady in my hometown. This experience took place four years later after my time at the all-boys school and I was back in Boston. I was 20 years old and I was gearing up to go off to college in another state. Before I left, I made it a priority to spend as much time with my friends before our respective journeys into college life drift us apart, as they always tend

to do. A friend of mine invited all of us high school friends to a bonfire in Lemonster, Massachusetts. For those of you who have never been to Lemonster, it is basically the countryside of Massachusetts where farming life and skiing resorts are plentiful. My friend, we'll call him Chase, family owned a plot of land out there in the countryside that has been in his family since the early 1920s. I was excited to go because I used to live out there when I was very young, about 5 years old, and haven't been out there since then. A few other friends, we'll call Kendrick, Sophie, Talia, and Kane, decided to carpool up there, since Talia's mom owned a minivan that she scored

for us to travel in for that weekend. About 15 minutes away from our location, Kane asked Talia to pull over at a liquor store to buy some drinks. Keep in mind, some of us were only 18 to 20 years old, but Kane just turned 21, so obviously we stayed in the car while he went in to get the drinks. My excitement went up another level as up until this point, I never had alcohol before and this would be my first time. After Cain returned with drinks, Talia drove us the rest of the way to Chase's place. When we arose, it was just about sunset and Chase was standing outside waiting for us with his arms extended in the gesture of, what took you guys so long?

Talia parked and we poured out of the van as Kane showed Chase the alcohol and Chase's frustration quickly shifted to a smile as if all things were forgiven. Chase ushered us to the back of the home saying that he had already started bbqing and food was practically done and getting cold. Later as it was dark outside now and my friends and I were sitting around this bonfire which was stacked with broken pieces of the family barn that was located a few yards from the actual house with hay used as kindling laughing and carrying on about high school memories. I was on my second beer at this point, drinking slowly as I didn't want to get drunk,

as this was my first time drinking and I was afraid that I'd pass out and miss the festivities, but I did have to pee. I announced I was going to take a leak. Chase reminded me to turn on the generator before heading in so you can turn on the light since this place lacked electricity for some reason. I assured him that I would as I stood up, but a sudden head rush overtook me. I was buzzed as I stumbled back. Kane laughed and called me a lightweight and the rest of my friends laughed. I gave Kane the finger as I turned and started toward the house. Right as I was in the middle of the bonfire in the house, I felt compelled to look over at the dark barn. I don't know why, but I did, and I studied it for a moment, and just as my eyes were completing its scan of the barn, my eyes instantly were fixed, and my jaw dropped as panic took over me. Through the orange glow of the bonfire,

illuminated the barn partially. standing in the doorway of the barn there was someone standing there staring at my friends like this person was just glaring at them at first i thought it was one of my friends over at the barn just wanting to check it out so i looked back at my friends to see which one of the guys was over there but all five friends were standing around the fire having a good time. My eyes widened at this point and I looked back over at the barn and just when I did the person who was once glaring at my friends was now glaring dead at me. He noticed I spotted him. I stood still in panic and shock as there was an intruder on my friend's property and I needed to inform the others so we can run and get to safety and phone the police. But I felt goosebumps radiating through my body as it did before a long time ago, forcing me to remember the silhouetted man from my school four years ago.

This prompted me to fully study this intruder in case I needed to give a description to the police later but when I did I noticed the man was standing there but his lower half was faded due to the glow of the bonfire and his solid state was visible in the shadows. It was then that I realized what I was seeing. I mentally tried to calm myself as I fixed my eyes on this ghost who had not broken his glare at me. I muscled up the courage somehow to glare right back at him. I was now locked in a stare down with this figure for what seemed like minutes but it was more like a few seconds. Just then I heard Sophie yell, Hey, did you pee yourself or something? Her words pierced my ears as I heard my friends laughing and asking why I was just standing there but my eyes never broke from this figure. Just then I felt this sudden burst of anger take over me like a fiery wave

as I was flung into the inferno of our bonfire. I felt sweat beating down my cheeks as I glared at this ghost who was glaring back at me. Just then the ghost sort of smirked at me as if he was taunting me. This enraged me even further as I could hear footsteps approaching from behind me. It was Kendrick coming to check up on me as I heard him say, dude what's up? Just as Kendrick asked that I bolted. I charged towards the ghost as if we were about to go to war. The ghost stood for a few seconds, never breaking his glare on me. I felt my heart beating against my chest as each step I took. I became hotter and hotter. I felt like I was a man on fire. As soon as I was a yard or two away

from this ghost, he stepped into the barn out of sight. Get back here, I remember shouting. I got to the barn doorway where the ghost stood and flung the door open and stood there expecting to see him waiting for me, but nothing. I was staring into pure darkness of the barn. I remember my heart beating hard against my chest. My sweat-drenched shirt clung to my body, heavy breathing ready as adrenaline coursed my body as I was ready for a fight. A fight that would never come. The next thing I knew Kendrick, Kane, and Chase ran up to me and grabbed my arm, knocking me out of my daze. My body instantly felt normal, so I no longer felt like I was on fire. Completely confused, I didn't know what came over me. I never felt such anger before as I am known for my buds as being a very chill guy but I was truly ready to rip this ghost guy's head off of his body or lack thereof.

My friends figured that I must have been drunk or high on something to rationalize why I acted like that. They began escorting me back towards our bonfire, where Sophie and Talia were sitting, looking at me with concerned eyes. Still trying to rationalize what I had just done as my friends guided me away, I turned my head to look at the barn's door, which was still wide open once more, and I kid you not, deep into the dark barn, I saw him. More specifically, I saw his floating head as his eyes were staring straight at me with a devilish grin. Nobody. Just his head. I turned and faced frontwards as we neared the bonfire and my friends began to calm me down. Sophie spoke up and asked what happened. I remember

saying nothing as I didn't want to appear to be crazier than I just made myself out to be. I still had to go take a leak but I figured that I would just hold it until we all went back inside together to prevent myself from acting out like that again. We did eventually return back into the house. I took my leak and ended up passing out on the couch. As far fetched as this story must sound, trust me, I know it does, but it really happened to me. The fact that I was ready to go to blows with a spirit, absolutely insane. Kane eventually confessed to me a few months ago, yeah we do keep in touch, that I must have taken

his LSD blended drink as we were drinking the same brand of bottled beer and we were just putting it down randomly and picking up on what we thought was our own beer. He knew that must have been the case because he didn't feel the effects of the drink that entire night but when he saw me act like that he figured that was the reason why. I honestly don't know if I was drunk or tripping off my friend's LSD but I truly felt that there was a ghost in that barn, taunting me, angry that Chase took pieces of his barn to burn in our bonfire that was his way of getting back at us. That was my assumption, of course. I have a few more encounters that I would share in time, but this one still gets to me. To be continued... A few years ago, thanks to some corporate restructuring in my company, I found myself

losing stable employment and picking up whatever seasonal jobs I could get for a few years until I got back on my feet. The only regular job I had during that time was driving a groomer at a large ski resort way up in the mountains. A friend of mine knew the operations manager there and was able to get me in, meaning that I did have a stable job from November to March every year which took away some stress. On top of that I actually really enjoyed my time there, well except for one night in particular. What a lot of people don't realize about ski hills is just how steep they really are. I know that seems obvious, especially on the double black

diamond runs, but most people can comfortably ski or even walk on much steeper slopes than any vehicle can handle. You don't realize how difficult the terrain is until you try and get a 10 ton machine up there to try and groom it. For the really steep runs, we used what's called a winch cat. As you probably guessed, it's a special snow cat with a winch mounted on top of that that can spin 360 degrees around. You'd find a less steep route to the top of the mountain up one of the blue square or green circle runs, and then once you were at the top top there would be an anchor point that you could connect the winch cable to and then essentially repel the machine down the ski slope to groom it. Once you were at the bottom

you'd winch yourself back up and repeat the process until the hill was finished at which point you'd go back up, unhook the winch cable and then drive back down the less steep runs. It's pretty scary going over the crest of the hill the first few times but eventually you get used to the fact that you are attached to something that's stopping you from sliding down the hill and you can turn off that part of the brain that tells you not to do it. The scariest hill of all to groom though was a run called Thunder. It was an extremely narrow double black diamond that pretty much went straight down and had a sharp bend at the bottom where you'd cut under the chairlift and rejoin the sane people skiing on a nice easy blue square run. It never took long to groom since it was only maybe four widths of the tiller wide

but to give you a picture how steep it was you'd have to put your feet on the windshield to keep yourself in the seat when you were grooming downhill. One night when I was assigned the run the winch cat I decided to get thunder out of the way first since it's my least favorite run and I wanted to get it over with before I got tired. It was snowing hard that night so it was slow going getting to the top since I couldn't see all that well and when I did finally get up to the top of Thunder it took me a solid five minutes of walking around outside to even find the winch anchor and the tree line. The first pass down went off without a hitch and so did the first pass back up however it was

slightly unnerving watching how much the one inch thick steel cable was swaying around in the wind. I took another pass down and turned around and started to ascend again and got about three quarters of the way up the hill before the machine began to slip on an icy patch. I noticed the track starting to slip so I gave the winch a bit more power but it did nothing. The groomer stopped dead in its tracks slowly spinning in place. I tried the winch a bit more power, but it did nothing. The groomer stopped dead in its tracks, slowly spinning in place. I tried the winch again, but that didn't do anything. The cable also didn't seem to get any tighter, it just kept swinging around in the wind in front of me. I decided to back up and try again, so I slowly put the machine into reverse

and let the cable take a bit of the strain before releasing it again. Just when the cable went tight it felt like the whole machine had fallen out from underneath me and my brain didn't even process what was happening at first. This 10 ton tracked monster of a machine that's designed to climb the steepest of slopes was now sliding backwards down the hill incredibly quickly. When I finally came back to reality I immediately remembered what they had said in training about getting turned around and using the blade as a handbrake. I mashed the track control levers in opposite directions, spinning it around to face downhill and drove the front blade into the ground as hard

as I could. I lost track in the process since the sideways momentum of the machine in mid-spin derailed it from the idler wheels and it was sucked under and went into the tiller on the back. Putting the blade down didn't seem to slow my descent at all either and had only succeeded in bending several hydraulic cylinders and now the tree line at the bottom of the hill before the turn was fast approaching. With only one track I also didn't have a whole lot of steering capabilities either so I accepted what was about to happen and just hoped the windshield would stay in one piece when it did. First I went through a line of snow fence meant to keep skiers out of

the trees. Then the blade hit a tree on the right hand side and sent the machine spinning sideways into another much larger tree that brought the whole ride to a violent end and smashed out the driver's side window. Moments later while I was still trying to process what had happened there was another crash and the passenger side window smashed out. I figured the cable had all piled up against the machine or something since it had now finally occurred to me that the cable must have broken. I managed to climb out of the cab to assess the situation and I was amazed I could even walk at that point. In fact, I was pretty much fine other than a few bruises. It wasn't until the next day when the snow had died down and I was able to go up on the snowmobile that I really got to see the extent of the damage. The snowcat was pretty much destroyed and it had almost taken the tree it had hit down with it as

well. The most shocking thing for me though was what had caused this whole thing in the first place. The cable wasn't broken at all. The large 8 inch metal pipe that the winch anchors to had somehow broken free of the concrete that it sunk into and ripped its way out of the ground. The second crash I had heard that night before was the pipe hitting the remains of my snowcat after flying down the hill behind me. Needless to say, after that experience, I spent the rest of the winter on the less steep runs where you don't need a winch cat, and after that season I decided that enough was enough, and that this job was a bit too extreme for me. Plus, the night shifts were starting to get to

me anyways. Driving a snowcat is still something I'm proud to say I've done, and other than that, I did actually quite enjoy it. I know this isn't one of the usual horror stories that you're used to hear but I firmly believe that was the closest to death I had ever been and it scared me more than I think any ghost encounter or creepy stalker would. I'm just grateful that I got out of that situation alive. I live in the UK and in autumn it gets dark at around 4pm. There was a school autumn break that week so all the kids were at home, so that means my girlfriend's brother was home too. I'd been with her for about a year at that point so her family knew me pretty well and her brother enjoyed my company. She'd recently been pretty stressed out. Her

parents were going out across the country for the day so she had to look after her brother but I thought that I'd give her a day to herself so she can just cool off. I asked her parents if I could look after their son for the day instead and they agreed. So I came in around 8am and they let me in before they set off. My girlfriend's brother woke up about an hour later and she followed shortly afterwards. We went off for breakfast at a local cafe together and went back to our house when we were done. And once I dropped her off I took her brother to the park. We got there at about 2pm and the place was pretty packed. Eventually the sun started going down and the place was

completely empty by 4pm. I texted my girlfriend and told her that we'd be home in a bit and she said okay. I'm gonna be honest, I completely lost track of time. Me and her brother were having fun being the only two in the park. Me and her brother were stood on top of this really tall climbing frame with a slide on it. It was almost pitch black at this point so I was using my phone as a flashlight. A notification popped up on my screen and it was my girlfriend asking where we were. I responded, oops coming home now and told her brother that we had to go. He sighed and asked if we could go down the slide and I said yes. Before I went down I knew what the park looked like. There were streetlights all around it, benches everywhere, some trees,

and places for the kids to play. When I came out of the slide there was something weird. A man had appeared out of nowhere and was stood beneath one of the streetlights. He had a trench coat on and a beanie hat. I immediately got my girlfriend's brother behind me and called out to the man with a friendly, hi there. I got a response. I guess he started groaning. I noticed he was swaying back and forth in the light and had his mouth open, drooling with a blank look in his eyes. This man made me feel really uneasy and I picked the little brother up and kept checking on this guy the entire time. There was an exit to my left that led to the path back home so I left out that

way and kept checking behind me every few seconds. The guy was still stood there. The path where the guy was stood merges with a big main path if you walk out through some bushes, and so does the one I walked through. I was walking down the path for about two minutes, periodically checking behind me and thought that I was in the clear. I wasn't. I was on a straight stretch of path with lots of streetlights when I saw him again. He was stood beneath one, looking up at it and he was playing with something in his hands. I looked closer and realized that it was a knife.

I kept walking and walking, checking behind me constantly. Girlfriend's little brother was so scared that he had his head tucked into my chest. I noticed that the guy seemed to be moving to new streetlights whenever I turned around. Initially I thought it was my eyes playing tricks on me but I started counting them and realized two streetlights behind him had definitely turned into five. I could faintly hear the groaning noise and he was occasionally moaning as well. I picked up the pace a bit and turned a corner, getting into the last stretch of street before I got to my girlfriend's house. That was when I heard him behind the row of bushes. That moaning noise sounded angry and I heard his heavy footsteps bounding down the path. The man was running. I immediately broke into a

sprint and didn't stop until I turned an alleyway at the front of the street and got behind my girlfriend's house. There's a big bush there so I crouched down behind that and spammed her phone with messages to open the back gate. I hugged her brother close until she opened it for us and got us in quickly. It felt like years. I went to the front of the house and had it confirmed that I'd managed to shake him. He was now in the street, circling where I'd been outside of the alleyway just moments ago. He was still moaning. He had that knife in his hand. He started kicking people's bins over and I called the police immediately but he was gone by the time they

arrived and as far as I know they never found him. There was a similar incident near the area a few months ago that I saw on a local Facebook group but I don't think anything came of that either. Her parents thanked me for keeping their son safe and didn't hold any ill will against me for the situation. He went back to normal pretty much the days afterwards but he still has nightmares about the event. When my country isn't in lockdown I'm still allowed to look after him with my girlfriend funnily enough but we haven't been back to that park ever since and I still check over my shoulder and break into a cold sweat every time I'm alone in the street. My house used to have strange occurrences on a somewhat regular basis.

We had a bedroom that dogs and housekeepers would refuse to enter and I had many terrifying experiences in this room. I'd be happy to share them later if anyone finds this post interesting. However, the strange experiences I had in my childhood home were not limited to that room alone. On this particular occurrence, I was home by myself in high school or late junior high, and I was in the living room at around 6pm. I have ADD, so I was reading and had the TV on and had both of our dogs in the living room with me. I made the habit of using all of these different stimuli and shutting all of the doors inside the house when I'm home alone because it eases my anxiety. The kitchen in my house is

behind the living room and when you're sitting on the couch facing our TV you have to turn all the way around to see only the entrance to the kitchen as well as the back door. You can't see the inside of the kitchen from the living room hardly at all. So I was sitting and reading and all of a sudden, I heard creaking from the floorboards in the kitchen, which always happens when someone is walking or moving around in our kitchen. I couldn't hear any footfalls, but it was unmistakably the sound of someone or something walking on the creaky water-worked wood floors. Then a cabinet door slammed. My dad always slammed cabinet doors and intentionally makes super loud noises in the

kitchen in order to annoy us. I thought it was my dad and maybe he had come home from work very early without me knowing. So without looking up for my book I called out, dad when did you get home? No one answered. A few seconds later a couple more cabinet doors slammed so I turned around on the couch to see the entrance to the kitchen and called out for my dad again. No answer. Then I heard repeated slamming of the cabinet doors over and over extremely loud. They started to slam faster and faster, louder and louder. My pulse picked up and I could feel my heart beating in my ears. Suddenly the dogs stand up in the living room and face the kitchen and started barking. I can see the hairs along their spines rising up and despite the menacing nature of their growls they actually look scared. I started to panic and I quickly moved to the carpet to sit behind them in the living room hoping that they would protect me I suppose.

I was facing the kitchen, my arms wrapped around both of my dog's growling bodies. I was scared lifeless and my heart was beating out of my chest. All of a sudden, the insanely loud slamming stops. For a while, all I could hear is the blood rushing in my ears and my own scared breathing. Then I hear the same creaking coming from the kitchen. The sound of something shifting its weight or walking started to same creaking coming from the kitchen. The sound of something shifting its weight or walking started to move from the middle of the kitchen where the sound originated and towards the entrance to the living room. I was paralyzed in fear, unblinkingly

staring at the source of the sound as it came closer and closer to entering my view. As the situation became quieter and more tense, the dogs suddenly stopped growling and started whimpering. They were shaking violently and their hair was raised all over. At this point, I'm essentially having a heart attack and preparing myself for the absolute worst. Then suddenly, my mom walks into the house through the door closest to the kitchen, arriving home from the grocery store. Everything stops. The creaking. The dogs.

Everything. My dogs started wagging their tails and went to greet my mom. I stayed sitting on the carpet of the living room, bewildered and adrenaline still coursing through my veins. Just to explain the situation and demonstrate that I'm not making something out of nothing, it couldn't have been sounds my mom made from coming into the house. The sounds were nothing like the dull rapid thumps that came from a person walking along our back porch to enter the house. These sounds could have only come from the kitchen, specifically the floors and cabinets. I knew these sounds well as I grew up in this house. I tried to tell my mom what was happening right before she got home but

she didn't believe me or seem to care. I haven't told many people but no one has ever believed this story however I can promise you that I know the house I grew up in well. I can also promise you that the fear and panic was very, very real. So this happened about 10 years ago in Manitou Springs, Colorado. I was living in a friend's trailer on her couch and there was very limited space and I was looking for a place of my own. I ran into this guy that lived a few trailers down from her and he was telling me that he was looking out to rent part of his trailer so I went over to take a look. This guy seemed really off in a creepy sort of way but at the time I was really desperate to give my friend her living room couch back and get out of there so I was willing to go

pretty much anywhere. When I went over there he told me that he'd rent out a small space inside of this ridiculously small trailer or he was willing to rent out a small cubby that he had underneath his trailer that he also showed to me. It looked like to be about 10 by 10 crawl space under his trailer. This alone should have been the red flag that made me turn him down flat but like I said I was pretty desperate and that red flag was one of many to come so I hesitantly and very reluctantly agreed to rent this small space inside and move my stuff over that night almost immediately he started going on about a curfew I'd have to abide by if I was to live there and a bunch of other nonsense that I wasn't

about to sit and listen to so I left. When I came back I found him sprawled out on his front porch mumbling about how he'd just taken a bunch of pills and holding half empty bottle of booze in his hand. I had to step over him to get in the door as he began screaming about how I hadn't minded his warning about my new curfew. At this point I flat out told him that if I was going to be paying him money to stay there I would be coming and going as I pleased since I'm an adult, not a child, and certainly not his child. To this he reacted by having quite the outburst of rage at which point I was sure that this was not going to work. He then gets up and starts flinging my stuff out into the street, and this is all happening at like two in the morning.

So I gather what belongings are still left in his house, and take them outside with me while I continue to gather what he's already thrown out, and go begging my friend to let me come back into her trailer. And she let me, but that's not where this bizarre story ends. A few days after this happens, I see a young girl at his house and they're both getting drunk and I didn't think much of it but about a week after that once I had found another place to stay my friend that lived in that trailer park called me panicking asking if I was okay. After I got her to calm down some and assured her that I was fine, I asked her what

made her even ask to begin with. She tells me that they had just pulled a human body from the little cubby under that guy's trailer that had been there for several days. She told me that the guy that lived there had been arrested for trying to rob a convenience store with a machete, and the girl's body he had stashed under his trailer had begun to smell so the landlord called the police. The young girl I had seen him drinking with just a few days beforehand was found wrapped in a quilt under his trailer. All that was running through my mind as she was telling me all of this was that would have been me had I not left when I did. I didn't step foot in that trailer park again. Even going anywhere

near it gave me the creeps so bad I couldn't stand the thought of going anywhere close for years afterwards. And as badly as I felt for that young girl, I was still very thankful that I walked away from there with my life. This incident took place about 40 years ago, a few months after my grandfather and my mom's dad passing. Here in Sri Lanka, we give alms on the day that marks seven days and the subsequently three months and then yearly after a person's passing as a way to add merit to their account, so to speak, with hopes that they'll pass on to the afterlife and have a peaceful one from thereafter. This is done regardless of religion but mainly practiced by the Buddhists. So this was the day of my grandfather's three-month almsgiving and my mom, her eldest sister, and youngest brother out of the family of seven children along with my grandmother decided to give lunch to the less fortunate in hunger and then visit their father's grave in

the evening to pay their respects. Everything went as planned for lunch and then in the evening as they all got into my father's car to leave my mother's eldest sister's house to head to the cemetery the car just wouldn't start up. So my uncle and dad got out as the ladies remained in the car. They popped the hood and took a look at it and then my dad got back in and gave it a go and the car started up just fine. So my uncle closed the hood and got back in but as soon as he shut the door, the car died again. Since it didn't seem to be any clear engine trouble, my uncle got back out, called upon a few guys in the neighborhood to give the car a bit of a push, and the car started, but as before, as soon as my uncle got in the car, it died again. This repeated twice more,

and everyone felt odd because the car that gave no trouble all day was suddenly acting strange, supernatural even if you will. Finally my uncle gave the car a third push and told the others to go ahead without him that he'll come on his own and all agreed. So as my dad, mom and mom's eldest sis and grandma drove to the cemetery still feeling odd and as they took their turn towards the cemetery the car suddenly went very cold and right side car door where my mom's sis sat flew open and my mom's sis screamed as if though she was in unbearable pain suddenly while grabbing my mom who sat next to her and the car came to a sudden stop everyone was shaken up my, my mom's sis mostly, and as everyone took a sec to gather themselves, my mom's sis screamed again, holding her right knee in pain.

It was bleeding, and there were three distinct claw marks that clearly were fresh. They got her cleaned up with a bit of running tap water at the moment and tied a handkerchief to stop the bleeding and continued with her planned evening events. After they got out they all tried to figure out what had just happened and all agreed that the car not starting up. The incident that happened at the cemetery turn and the scratches were all connected and they were surely something very evil, and for some unknown reason it didn't want my uncle riding with them in the car, and because my mom's sis is kind of a magnet for the paranormal, it chose her to hurt and send a message. To be continued... home from Universal Studios in Orlando. We were rerouted a way home we've never went before and we're traveling in basically the middle of nowhere. My boyfriend's speedometer is broken in his car and he has to press the button to reset the miles after he gets gas and this will be very important

soon. We were driving on a deserted road in the middle of absolute nowhere with not one car in sight. My boyfriend realized we hit the 130 mile mark on his odometer. We needed gas but there was literally not one gas station in sight. I put search gas stations nearby and we found one. It turned out to be closed. In a hurry we found another gas station 5 minutes up the road and this is where the story gets weird. My boyfriend thought that he closed his gas cap and we were once again driving along this deserted road. We heard a loud bang and he realized he forgot to put the gas cap back on so we were driving around this dark road looking for the gas cap. He finally pulls over and realized somehow the

gas cap is still attached to the car. We get back on track to the other gas station. Out of nowhere I had this horrible thought about something going wrong at that gas station. I pushed it aside because I knew we needed gas and AAA is not an option where we were at the moment. We get to this gas station, the lights are kind of on. This road literally leads to a dead end and with a gas station on it, the only way to leave this area was to turn left or go straight out of the gas station. My boyfriend got out of the car to see if we could get gas and the feeling intensified. I have literally never felt like that in my life. My stomach dropping into my butt.

I've been in very disturbing situations such as almost being kidnapped twice, being followed home, watching someone being taken away in a body bag after being hit by a car, and even a paranormal situation. I can talk about these sometime in the future, but I had never felt like this before. I saw a white car pulling up the road to make a left. Keep in mind there is literally no one on this road. He pulls up and notices my boyfriend and backs up with his windows down. I found this very strange because my boyfriend has a very nice sports car and my mind immediately went into panic mode. I started screaming his name and the man realized that someone else was in the car, myself, and turned left and sped off.

Sadly, I didn't get his license plate because of how dark it was. This situation frightened me more than you can even imagine. It may not seem too scary, but it was easily one of the most terrifying things to watch because I didn't know if I was going to witness my boyfriend being robbed at gunpoint or something like that. The feeling and thought I had just ten minutes earlier is what also made the situation even worse. I found a gas station with actual human life around and we made it home safe and sound. Once I got home my dad told me that the road we were driving on was famous for the many bodies being found on it. I hope no one ever gets put into the situation and to the man who was planning to do something to my boyfriend,

let's hope you never get away with it. To be continued... I was probably around 6 or 7. My brothers and I shared a room in our little duplex home. Now just so everyone knows, even though these duplexes are old, I've lived in a few and my family and I have never experienced anything paranormal in one before. So this is the only real time I've ever experienced anything that scared me like this. I woke up in the middle of the night sometime. I've always had trouble sleeping, so for me it was just another normal tossing and turning session late at night. Well, at least that was what I thought. As I laid in bed trying to get comfortable, I suddenly heard a child crying. This did not alarm me at first because, like I said, I shared a room with my two brothers.

They are younger than me and at times I would have to remind them that it was just a bad dream when they would wake up. But I looked down to the bottom bunk to check on them and they were both sound asleep. I looked towards the hallway to see if there was a light coming from the living room. Nothing. Everyone in the house was asleep. Now I was scared. The voice was that of a child. The child's voice suddenly spoke through its tears. Let me in, please. This scared me beyond all recognition at this point.

It sounded like it was right there in the room with us. No one was making a sound, it was just a voice, a voice of a scared child begging through tears to let me in please, and it went on for hours. I was so scared that I used my blanket as earmuffs to muffle the sound, and I eventually fell back asleep, but I never remember the voice stopping. After that I slept with my blanket wrapped around my ears to block out sound and eventually a fan as well until I moved out of my parents house at 16. So I'm not sure if anyone else has experienced anything similar or if anyone has their own theories, but I'm willing to hear them all in the comments because

this was the scariest moment in my entire life. To be continued... your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast where you can hear all these stories in long compilation form and save huge on data, located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the bio. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon. We'll be right back.