The Lets Read Podcast - 135: VALENTINES DAY NIGHTMARES | 23 True Scary Horror Stories | EP 123

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Valentines Day, Texas Backroads, & Psycho Families... 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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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The On a rainy Valentine's Day evening in February of 1971, 19-year-old Jesse McBain drove over to meet his girlfriend, Patricia Mann, at her college dormitory in Durham, North Carolina. They had arranged to celebrate their most romantic day of the year by attending a Valentine's dance at the nearby Watts Hospital. Patricia was studying nursing and her practical lessons took place at Watts, so as a potential future member of the nursing staff there, she had managed to land an invitation to the dance. At approximately 11.30, Jesse and Patricia had one last dance, said their goodbyes, and began to walk back to Jesse's car.

They then drove over to a deserted housing development area that would later become the neighborhood of Crowsdale. No house had been constructed yet, but a few sections of road had been laid out in an area that was shrouded by a quarter miles worth of greenery. Those that ventured down there were likely to find collections of beer bottles, cigarette butts strewn among the trees. It was a place people went to screw around, exactly the kind of private, out-of-the-way place the two young lovebirds might need to go to get a little alone time. Patricia's 1am curfew came and went, and her friends back in the girls' dorm assumed she'd sneak back in at some point on her tiptoes,

yet little did they know that they'd never see her or her boyfriend ever again. The following morning, Patricia still hadn't returned from her date with Jesse. This was the first time the young woman had ever broken her dormitory curfew, and those close to her were quickly beginning to worry. They knew Patricia to be a deeply mature and responsible young woman who always played by the rules and took authority seriously. And to their knowledge, Jesse was an affectionate, respectful boyfriend, one that Patricia seemed very much in love with. But not even youthful romance would be able to make the young nursing student break curfew. Slowly but surely, as the day progressed,

the concern of Patricia's roommates went from mild to grave. What started with a few questions turned to them calling around local hospitals in case they'd been in a car accident. They then filed a missing persons report with the Durham County Sheriff's Department but were still so anxious that they began to physically search for their missing roommate on foot. They roamed the surrounding area, canvassed her usual hangout spots around town and on campus, until someone had the idea to go search the Lover's Lane over at the housing development. It was here that the searchers would find Jesse's empty car parked in one of the quieter spots on the development. The car was locked, and on the back seats there were two warm coats, presumably belonging to Jesse and Patricia.

There was no damage to the car. Everything about the scene seemed perfectly in order, except of course for the fact that the last two people to travel in it seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. By this point, local police have informed both Jesse and Patricia's parents that their children are missing. At first, all involved had entertained the idea that the couple's disappearance was nothing more than a misguided but romantic attempt to elope, to skip town, get hitched, and settle down somewhere new. But investigating police quickly began to realize that there was something distinctly sinister about the case.

There had apparently been no attempt by either Jesse or Patricia to inform anyone of their plans, not even close friends, and the idea that neither would at least leave a note or letter to a relative seemed highly unlikely. Over time, those closest to Patricia began to assume the worst. I just got the sickest feeling in my stomach, said a cousin of Patricia's. I just knew something terrible had happened. For two weeks after they were declared missing, a team of police officers and local volunteers mounted an intensive search of the surrounding area, combing through the wooded areas around Lovers Lane for any trace of the missing couple.

They followed up lead after lead and tip after tip, but no one could find hide nor hair of Jesse or Patricia. With frustration mounting, police decided to widen the range of the search area and enlist the help of helicopter support and specifically trained forensic divers. But in the end, it was the misfortune of a surveyor in nearby Orange County that provided the police with their most important lead. On February 25th, 1971, a full 12 days after Jesse and Patricia went missing, Robert Kirby is walking along a dirt road in the backwoods of Orange County, North Carolina, when something catches his eye. Among the trees, maybe 50 meters or so off the trail, the surveyor thinks he sees what appears to be the limb of a mannequin lying among the fallen leaves. Curious, he wanders over to check it out, but the distinct shape of a human leg he sees is not that of a plastic mannequin, it's real human flesh. He rushes to a nearby roadside diner to have someone call the police and by the end of that, forensic investigators discovered not one, but two human corpses up in

the woods of Orange County, and they turned out to belong to none other than Jesse McBain and Patricia Mann. Finding the young couple and decomposing was bad enough for the searchers, but the manner in which they'd obviously been dispatched of was massively disturbing to them. The couple had their hands tied, and then were made to stand back against a tree so another, larger rope could be wrapped around them. Once their killer had secured them in place, he began to torture them. Jesse's ear and mouth were both found to have blood in them, and a variety of large and small abrasions to his lips and forehead suggested he was beaten senseless before he was killed. At some point, Jesse and

Patricia's killer had ripped their eyelashes off before continuing to savagely beat them. Then, when whoever had tied them up had grown tired of beating them, they wrapped rope collars around their necks, using a kind of knot that could be repeatedly tightened over and over again. We can only assume that the killer used these rope collars to slowly choke the life out of Jesse and Patricia, gradually tightening the rope collars over a drawn-out period of time until neither was able to breathe. Each of the couple's bodies had all of their valuables intact too. Jesse was still wearing an expensive wristwatch

and a class ring when his body was found. Patricia was also wearing jewelry and her purse was left back in the abandoned car. Their deaths were not part of some robbery. Their killer has absolutely no monetary gain in mind when he'd taken them. Neither were there any signs of indecent assault on Patricia. She had a great deal of bruising around her face and neck, but nothing below the waistline. There was no ulterior motive.

All their killer had wanted to do was torture and kill. The investigation that followed was severely hampered by different agencies' complete lack of collaboration. For example, the FBI seemed to consider the local sheriffs as, frankly, beneath them, and a feeling of contempt quickly grew between the two groups. Everybody worked on the case as individuals, as Detective Tom Horn once put it. Not a lot of information was being shared by the various agencies, and the rivalry was tremendous. A lot of work was done, but it was individual, so there were definitely some missed opportunities. Yet even with the appalling level of disorganization that pervaded, a number of likely suspects

emerged as a result of some tip-top police work. Some had to be ruled out after taking polygraph tests which proved their innocence, but one of the men who failed was actually a doctor at Watts Hospital who had previously worked with Patricia Mann. When the police sought to question him again, he completely refused to cooperate and would only release his statement through a defense attorney he began to keep on retainer. This made him the number one suspect in the entire case, and to this day there's never really been anyone else who's garnered such legitimate scrutiny. But without the proper evidence to charge him, very little action was taken against any of the supposed killers.

No one ever really zeroed in on anyone, Detective Horn stated. And as a result, the case quickly went cold. 43 years later in 2014, Detective Tim Horn was still working for the Orange County Sheriff's Department when a cousin of Patricia's, Carolyn Spivey, contacted him with some fresh information regarding her cousin's murder. Along with his partner at the time, Detective Horn opened up the previously closed case file, poring over old statements in boxes and evidence. They reanalyzed the possibilities of former suspects, considered new ones, and began to condense as much of the multi-agency information as possible into the pursuit of one solid suspect. And they succeeded. Detective Horn then contacted almost every single one of the detectives who worked on the case back in 1971 and gathered them together for a presentation. It was one which would show them how he'd pieced together multiple pieces of a decades-long puzzle,

only to come to one solid conclusion, that it was the Watts doctor, a man Patricia had actually known, that had murdered her and her boyfriend, Jesse. When the presentation was finished, what followed was a prolonged silence. To all in attendance, Tom Horn's hard work had presented them the best opportunity yet to end a mystery that had persisted for almost half a century. They had their suspect, they had evidence, now it was time to make their move. Using what's known as MBAC, Detective Horn was able to extract a DNA sample from the knotted ropes used to tie up and strangle Jesse and Patricia. An MVAC is basically a wet vacuum DNA collection system that is designed to extract strands of DNA from difficult

to reach places. Places just like the fibrous folds in a length of rope. What came back was a DNA sample that didn't match either Jesse or Patricia, and so in all likelihood it belonged to the killer. Detective Horn then requested a DNA sample from their number one suspect, the Watts doctor that Patricia had worked with. Horn's argument was that, after all this time, the doctor would finally be able to clear his name and prove that it wasn't him that executed the young couple. But the doctor refused, having his defense attorney contact law enforcement to release a statement in legalese.

And that might just be the most suspicious thing about our doctor, because it really does raise the question of what he has to hide. Yet despite such obvious suspicion, this doctor has never been charged and whatever new evidence led to him being asked to provide a DNA sample hasn't been shared with the public. We can only assume the Durham County Sheriff's Department are in the process of putting a serious case against the man and are trying to find some way of forcing him to give a sample of his DNA. And with that DNA sample, law enforcement might just be able to end this 40 year old mystery of who could be cold and cruel enough to wrench a loved up young couple away from one of the happiest nights of their lives, only to torture and eventually execute them in a secluded wooded area, turning a romantic Valentine's night into the very last that each of them would spend on Earth. The End

Beginning on November 22nd, 1986, the life of Oscar Pistorius was unusual from the get-go. He was born missing the outsides of both feet and was also missing his fibula. The fibula are lower leg bones that extend from the knee to the outside of the ankle, parallel to the shin bone, its job being to stabilize the ankle and support the lower leg muscles. Given that he was without such support, his feet were essentially useless. So at just 11 months old, doctors made the decision to remove Oscar's lower legs entirely. At that point, if you'd have speculated that the young amputee might grow up to be a professional runner, people might have called you crazy. But in fact, that's

exactly what Oscar became, thanks to a piece of cutting-edge Paralympian technology that came to be known as running blades. Manufactured using carbon fiber reinforced polymer material, the curved design of these blades is intended to store kinetic energy like a spring, allowing the wearer to jump and run effectively. The blades were so effective that at the 2011 World Championships in Athletics, Oscar was the first amputee to win a non-disabled world track medal. And at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, despite not winning anything, Pistorius was the first double-leg amputee participant, a titanic achievement,

we can all agree. Naturally, these victories and appearances made Oscar an international sensation, and he received an incredible amount of fame, wealth, and attention. As a result, Oscar met South African model and paralegal Riva Steenkamp at a party in November of 2012. The pair hit it off and soon began dating pretty seriously. As for a while, it seems that Riva was phenomenally smitten with Oscar. Many of her more superficial friends would wonder aloud what Riva saw in him, but those close to her knew what it was. When Riva was in her early 20s, she had broken her back in a horse riding accident and was forced to essentially learn to walk all over again. It was one of the

most debilitating and humbling experiences of her entire life and she never forgot how much strength and willpower it took to conquer her temporary disability. She saw that same kind of fortitude in Oscar and it made her love him for it. The pair spent Christmas of 2012 together and after a few months more of steady dating, decided to spend Valentine's Day of 2013 together too. It was the perfect date to mark the blossoming of their new relationship and both parties must have been feverishly excited at the prospect of such a romantic occasion. But what they didn't know was that an evening that would begin with love and affection must have been feverishly excited at the prospect of such a romantic occasion. But what they didn't know was that an evening that would begin with love and affection would end in a nightmare of terror and violence that would set the world's media aflame.

According to Oscar, his Valentine's date with Reva went marvelously well. The pair shared a romantic meal, watched a movie, and then after a little too much wine, spent some time in bed together before falling asleep. Then in the early hours of the following morning, Oscar awoke to hear a noise coming from the en suite bathroom, one that sounded an awful lot like the window sliding open. Oscar continued to lie there, listening in the darkness, and in the moments that followed, he swore he'd heard someone actually trying to climb in through the bathroom window. Moving as quietly as possible, he slid off of his bed to retrieve a loaded pistol that he had

hidden nearby, and arguably, Oscar might be right to be so vigilant. Despite having a population six times smaller than the United States, South Africa has 23% more violent crime and the wealthy Pretoria neighborhood that Oscar called home had been previously targeted by violent home invaders. Approaching the bathroom door with his pistol locked and loaded, Oscar was terrified. His new girlfriend was lying in bed just feet away and there was potentially a violent home invasion about to occur and he hadn't had time to put his prosthetic legs on. He was walking on his stumps. Later, Oscar would say this made him feel utterly defenseless.

He then heard a noise that, to him, sounded like whoever was on the other side of the bathroom was about to rush into the bedroom to do god knows what with them. He panicked and fired four shots through the bathroom door. The first thing Oscar did was turn back towards his bed where he had expected Reva to be scared out of her wits, having been woken up by the gunshots. But there was no Reva, only an empty bed. It was then that Oscar realized who was behind the door. It wasn't some violent home invader. It was his girlfriend, Reva. He tried to open the bathroom door but it was locked from the inside. Oscar then grabbed a cricket bat and began to smash down the door and succeeded in creating a large hole through which he was able to crawl. He then unlocked the door, grabbed the unconscious Reva, then actually carried her downstairs in preparation for the ambulance he had called. Reva was rushed to the hospital but was pronounced

dead after attempts to revive her failed. For Oscar, it was a living nightmare. It seemed that he tried to defend the girl he loved but in doing so, had ended up killing her instead. At his trial, Oscar seemed genuinely remorseful, admitting that he had shot Reva by accident and how doing so had destroyed his life completely. It was mostly established by witness testimony that Oscar and Reva had a very healthy relationship and were very much in love. Valentine's cars were presented as evidence, affectionate WhatsApp exchanges that were brought before the court as proof that there was nothing overly sinister about Reva's death, that it was nothing more than a tragic accident. But other evidence was submitted too, evidence that suggested that there was trouble in Paradise.

In one particular text message sent less than three weeks before her death, Reva told Oscar that she was scared of him sometimes. She said that whenever Oscar snapped, that she was terrified, and went on to describe his behavior as nasty. Riva's mother, June Steenkamp, also had doubts that her daughter's death was merely a tragic accident. She told a courtroom that she didn't believe Oscar's story at all, that none of his actions suggested that he felt protective of her. She believed that Riva and Oscar had a horrible fight or argument that evening, and that she'd fled to the bathroom because

she was scared and had naturally locked the door behind her. I think he may have shot once, and then he had to go on and kill her because she would have been able to tell the world what really happened, what he's really like. She later told journalists, asserting that there was no doubt in her mind that Oscar had killed her daughter because she had wanted to break up. I believe their relationship was coming to an end, she said. In her heart of hearts, she didn't think it was making either of them happy. As the trial concluded, Oscar Pistorius was convicted of manslaughter, having escaped the murder charge that state prosecutors were hoping for. The conviction came with a prison sentence of just five years, but a combination of cooperating with law enforcement

and good behavior in prison meant that Oscar was just released just ten months into his sentence. He was still under house arrest and had community service to complete, but the fact remains that someone was able to take a life and see the inside of a jail cell for just 10 months. Even in light of the accidental nature of Reva's death, just 10 months seemed like an alarmingly light sentence. But over the course of years, successive appeals and mounting evidence all pointed towards the likelihood that Oscar's version of events was just pure spin, and that somehow, he had actually known it was Riva in the bathroom that night before he opened fire. This assertion, that Oscar Pistorius had deliberately murdered his girlfriend,

gained so much traction that by 2017, Oscar's sentence was upgraded to murder, and he was sent back to prison for an additional 13 years. It was a strange and drawn out process, made even more bizarre by the fact that South African courts don't have juries, so any and all evidence was reviewed solely by a handful of prosecutors and judges before any fresh sentence was handed out. What exactly this new evidence showed isn't available to the public just yet, but whatever it did or did not prove, it led to a South African judge to throw the full weight of the judicial system behind one of their country's biggest sports stars. Whatever that evidence was, it must have been pretty damning indeed. And if the death of Riva Steenkamp wasn't simply

some tragic accident, then the implications are horrifying. A young model went over to her sports star boyfriend's home, not for any Valentine's Day romance, but to break up with him. This person was so enraged by the rejection that she was forced to lock herself in his bathroom. He tried to smash the door down with a cricket bat, and when he realized she might use her cell phone to call for help, he fired four shots through the wood of the door, one of which struck her in the skull. On a day of the year when couples everywhere should be getting together, romancing each other and enjoying their companionship, Valentine's Day of 2013 became one of terror, pain, and death for young Reva Steenkamp, who died scared and alone in the bathroom of a man

she barely knew. To all outside observers, it appeared that Dr. John Hamilton and his wife Susan had the perfect loving marriage. In the 14 years of blissful union, John's passionate love for his spouse had led him to lavish her with expensive gifts and luxurious vacations. A brand new Porsche on their wedding day being just the beginning of a long list of romantically motivated purchases. But John wasn't just generous with his money. He was apparently generous of heart too and spent a great deal of time reminding Susan just how much he loved her in a variety of heartwarming ways. When Susan professed a yearning for employment, for a purpose outside of being a housewife, John gave her a job at his highly esteemed obstetrics and gynecology clinic in Oklahoma City. He was there for her in every way and by all counts, they were a textbook case of romantic longevity.

But that's what makes it all the more horrifying that on Valentine's Day of 2001, Dr. Hamilton's arrival at the family home kicked off a chain of events that would turn their perfect little world into a living nightmare. As you can imagine, in a marriage as loving as John and Susan's, Valentine's Day was held in high esteem. Every single year they were married, they exchanged gifts and cards, often having planned some kind of romantic rendezvous, be it dinner and a movie or a walk around a local park. But on Valentine's Day of 2001, John was needed in the operating room of his clinic, fairly early in the morning too. Any exchange of gifts would have to wait until his lunch break, but just as he had promised, John ducked out of the clinic as soon as he was able and drove home to spend a romantic half hour with his wife, after which he would have to

return to another surgery. He called her name as he walked through the front door, but she didn't answer. John suspected that his wife might have some kind of surprise in store for him and he felt a ripple of excitement run through him as he walked up the stairs towards the master bedroom. He called his wife's name again but still there was no answer and it was then that something caught John's eye lying on the floor of the second floor bathroom. It was Susan. She was in a crumpled, lifeless heap, with blood pooling underneath her. Paramedics were called to the scene, but Susan couldn't be revived. Those in attendance noted that she appeared to have been strangled with two of her husband's expensive silk neckties. But the blood on the bathroom floor was undoubtedly from the series of bloody head wounds she had due to repeated blunt force trauma,

the wounds being so severe that parts of her brain were exposed while her face was completely unrecognizable. To his absolute horror, Dr. John Hamilton was the number one suspect in his wife's murder from the very beginning. Police have since publicly stated that there were many factors which led them to such a conclusion. The first being that there was no sign of forced entry to the home. Whoever killed Susan had the keys to the residence. It was also a crime in which nothing of value was stolen and one in which there were no bloody fingerprints left in the bathroom which had blood almost everywhere. This meant that there was a distinct chance that whoever killed Susan

was extremely professional, incredibly lucky, or had the time and privacy to scrub the scene of incriminating evidence before the body was found. On top of that, while searching the home, police got their hands on a Valentine's Day card that Susan had written to John, presumably that year, and the message inside wasn't nearly as loving and cheerful as you might imagine. I bought this two weeks ago, so I guess maybe it doesn't seem as appropriate. But I do love you. Have a great day, Susan. The contents of the card raised a lot of questions concerning the state of the Hamilton's marriage. Evidently, it suggests that there had been some kind of incident or argument, one that had caused a degree of turmoil and somewhat soured the Valentine's feeling. As it later turned out, this incident involved Susan catching John making phone calls to a woman

employed as a topless dancer. Police actually found hundreds of calls to this person on John's cell phone during their investigation and heard from close friends of Susan that she had confessed to considering a divorce. To the cops, the explanation seemed simple. John had murdered his wife to prevent her from running off with half of his money. But at his trial, much of the local community came out in support of Dr. Hamilton John had murdered his wife to prevent her from running off with half of his money. But at his trial, much of the local community came out in support of Dr. Hamilton and refused to believe that the man was capable of such a horrific crime, especially given that the victim was his own beloved wife.

But when the paramedics who attended the 911 call John made were questioned in court, the jury began to notice some disturbing inconsistencies in his story. Hamilton testified in court that after he contacted emergency services, he had gotten to work trying to perform CPR on his wife's bloodied corpse. And this appeared to be true as the paramedics confirmed that when they arrived, John had been performing chest compressions. But as people who perform CPR on an almost daily basis, the paramedics noticed something peculiar about John's technique. It was incredibly ineffective. From a regular person with no first aid training, that could

be understandable, but John was so bad that it almost looked like he wasn't actually trying to revive Susan at all, which for a medical professional is very suspicious. John also claimed that he had tried performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on his wife, but the paramedics claimed that John had no blood on his mouth or face when they arrived. There was so much blood around the victim's head that there was no way John could have performed mouth to mouth and not gotten any on him. Some of Susan's blood was also found on the steering wheel of Dr. Hamilton's car. And despite his claim in court that he had simply moved the vehicle to make room for emergency vehicles, a prosecutor was able to make use of the overall suspicion to claim that this was evidence that John had been considering an escape attempt.

At one point during the trial, the prosecution's case against Dr. Hamilton appeared to be floundering. Hamilton's defense attorney had brought a number of key character witnesses to testify in court, and all had built a picture of John as nothing but a loving husband, and he believed that the nail in the prosecution's coffin would be the testimony of a crime scene investigator named Tom Beville, an expert on blood splatter at crime scenes. Beville was essentially brought in to confirm that the blood splatter on Dr. Hamilton's shirt, the same one he was wearing during his attempt at CPR, was consistent with a man simply trying to revive his murdered wife while in a state of extreme panic and grief. At first, Tom Bevel did indeed testify that much of the blood splatter could well have been from

the doctor's attempts at CPR, but as it turned out, Bevel had noticed something that other investigators had overlooked. He had made note of the small flecks of blood that could be found on the inside of Hamilton's right sleeve, a pattern he had seen many times before on the clothing of people who had killed someone with a blunt object. In the seconds that followed, the courtroom was deathly silent. An expert defense witness had testified against the person they were supposed to be defending, and in just a few words, Tom Bevel had condemned Dr. Hamilton to prison. When later asked why he had made the decision to essentially act as a witness for the prosecution, Bevel claimed he just had to tell the truth.

He said he had sworn on oath something that override any allegiance he may have had to his client. After that, it only took two hours for a jury of his peers to find John Hamilton guilty on the charge of first-degree murder, or after a judge sentenced him to life in prison. Those that followed the case were highly disturbed by the sudden turn of events. John had, and still does, maintain his innocence even to this day, but more and more evidence points to the idea that he killed his wife in cold blood. His defense team even floated the idea that he must have been innocent because the guilty timeline would mean that John went to work and performed flawless surgeries right after murdering the love of his life. This might well be true, but in the light of the guilty

verdict, it's all the more damning. Because it suggests that Dr. John Hamilton was able to beat his wife's skull in on Valentine's Day, then remain calm and collected enough to go and perform complicated medical surgeries. And if it's true, then maybe a more fitting name for Dr. Hamilton would be Dr. Death. Wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Toyo's open country family of tires will get you through tough weather in a variety of terrains. Until May 31st, save up to $100 in rebates on select Toyo tires. Find a Toyo tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. Tread experts.ca I used to love Valentine's Day. I used to love all the cutesy displays and Valentine's themed stock items we put out in the Walmart I worked at.

And I used to love picking out something special for my boyfriend after planning a little date night with him. But we're not together anymore and I'm not much of a romantic these days either. In fact, I dread February 14th coming around each year because it reminds me of one of the single worst moments in my entire life. So like I said, I worked at Walmart when this all happened, and it actually happened in the store too. I loved the decorating and checking out the romantic stock that we'd gotten in that year, but I usually tried to get Valentine's Day off, or if I was working it, I'd trade shifts with a co-worker. But this one year, I can't get get off and no one would trade with me so I was stuck working 8 till 5 on Valentine's Day. But it's no big loss, I can wait for my presents and me and my boyfriend arranged to do something after work anyway so I took it on

the chin. Right after I finished my lunch break I happened to be walking by one of the Valentine's displays when I see this older guy staring at some of the items. I thought it was the cutest thing ever, this sweet older gentleman looking to pick his wife up something romantic, or maybe he had his eye on someone in the nursing home he was at, either way it was super adorable to me. So I saddled up to the old guy and asked him who the lucky lady is. He's all startled for a moment, again kind of super cute and has to compose himself before he gives me his answer. There was no one special in his life, he was just something of an old

romantic and seeing cutesy displays like ours on Valentine's Day made him long for lost loves of his. I remember he said that. I then asked if he had his eye on anyone new and he starts talking in a way I found kind of confusing at first. Like I thought I may have misunderstood, maybe lost the context a little, but after a minute of him just sort of babbling, I realize he's not making any sense at all. He keeps skipping from thought to thought, just like a stream of broken consciousness coming out of him. It was right about then that it hit me that he wasn't all there. That was also about the time that I realized he wasn't that old either. I mean, all his hair was gray, he had like an old man jumper on but he was so animated when he talked.

He seemed sort of spry, like full of nervous energy and at a push I'd say he was in his mid 50s. But something about him just seemed off and I was starting to think that initiating conversation hadn't been the best idea on my part. I wish him luck with who the lucky lady turns out to be then slowly make a move to walk away. But he stops me, not with a word. I mean he physically stops me from walking away. He didn't grab me or anything at first, it was just his fingers gently half wrapping around my wrist but it was enough to really put me on edge. Then he asked me in a way that

seemed both extremely childlike and extremely sinister both at the same time, Will you be my valentine? It was so surreal that initially I thought he had to be joking. Like no sane person would ask anyone that in a serious way, not like that anyway. So I just sort of laugh it off before apologizing and letting him know that I was seeing someone. And right as I do, I try to pull my wrist out of his hand. He tightens it, wraps his entire fist around my wrist and squeezes. I just froze for a moment.

In almost two years of working at that Walmart, I've never had so much as an issue with a customer. Maybe it's because I'm short and blonde, maybe it's because I'm just lucky. Because that whole interaction went from zero to a hundred so fast, and given my total lack of experience in any kind of conflict management, I just had no idea what to do. So I froze. The guy starts turning red in the face and he continues to squeeze my wrist as hard as he could. There are veins bulging out of his neck, he's trembling so hard his eyes are starting to water and he is strong, like really freaking strong. Then what he did next haunted me for months afterwards. He gets his face right in mine while I'm absolutely frozen in terror and starts singing. He tried to keep his voice down but he couldn't get the words out without his words trembling

from whatever weird rage fit he was going through. After two lines, I just start screeching for help, but as soon as I start making any noise, one of his hands shoots up around my throat and pushes me back hard against a shelf, and when he starts squeezing, I stop being able to scream. Then, one of his other hands goes somewhere else, somewhere I really wish he hadn't put it. But when he did, I finally found the strength to really fight back. But it was over moments later. Some other customer had come barreling down the aisle when he'd heard my scream and tackled

the guy so hard that he almost floored me too. And if the guy seemed crazy before he got tackled, afterward he turned into a full blown lunatic. He actually bit the guy who first got him down, and if it wasn't for security showing up as quick as they did, I think he might have actually gotten free. He was legitimately frothing at the mouth by the time the cops showed up. I've never seen a person look like that before. Like I was more animal than man by that point. And the fallout was huge. Walmart sent me to some trauma management thing that didn't help at all and sent emails around to the other associates promising they'd do better with security and stuff but it was all just for show. I gave statements to the police too and for a while

it looked like I'd have to go to court to testify against the guy that assaulted me. But as it turned out, he was found unfit to stand trial and instead of going to real prison, he ended up in some state hospital somewhere else. When it was all said and done, I just tried to get over it. It was one of the more horrific moments of my life, sure, but I refused to let it define me. And for a long while I worked on my overall mental health and particularly my sense of self-esteem. I thought I was good after that, I thought I was fixed, so there was no way of me anticipating

what would happen when I met a friend at this 50s diner that was our favorite place to eat. We're just sitting there, conversation on hold while we eat and the song comes on on the old jukebox. Until the lyrics started, everything was fine but then these two girls started singing some words that I thought I'd gotten out of my head completely. I know you belong to somebody new, but tonight you belong to me. I recognized it instantly from the weird little changes in pitch in the girl's voices, but it was the exact same song the guy in Walmart had sang before he grabbed me. I know I caused a bit of a scene when I got up and fast walked out of there, with my friend calling after me, but I honestly didn't care. I couldn't breathe while that song was in my ears, I just couldn't be there. I suppose trauma is weird like

that. No matter how much you think you have it under control, it's still there, bubbling away just beneath the surface. But I do work at it, and I managed to neutralize how that creepy old song made me feel too. I mean, it took a while, but I managed it. Like I said, I'm not going to let what happened define me and I'll wear my wounds with pride. But Valentine's Day is most definitely ruined for me. The End Every year, without fail, I get a Valentine's Day card. Now I might be mistaken, but most people reading this are thinking, oh lucky you, or why is that something to complain about? And 9 times out of 10 you might be right. But the thing is, I have no idea who sends them,

and have actually spent a great deal of time trying to figure out who. It wasn't something that was creepy when it started off. In fact, getting a card from a secret admirer was a pretty awesome feeling. The first card came when I was 13 years old, right about the time I needed a little confidence boost. But then when they started arriving year in and year out, I got to thinking it was just my mom sending them or something. I confronted her about it on Valentine's Day when I was 16 and she insisted it wasn't her. I mean really insisted, saying she'd tell me if she actually knew who it was. I ended up asking all my close

family and friends but none of them admitted to sending me an anonymous card. So, cut to me being in college, it's coming up to Valentine's Day and I realize that for the first time in a long time, I might not actually get a card that year. Only, I did. Same style, same handwriting, same mystery person that must have sent it. But here's the thing. I had literally just moved dorms like a week prior because of a burst water pipe in my original dorm room. But the Valentine's card is addressed to the new dorm room which was on the opposite side of campus. Literally the only person in the world who had my new address was my mom, so cue the second confrontation about the Valentine's card in like two and a half years. One that again ends with her violently assuring me that she hadn't given my address to anyone.

So, the question remained. Who was sending me those cards? It really creeped me out for a while, but it was something that I grew to live with again. I mean, it seems like such a non-problem, right? I keep getting Valentine's Day cards. People would always just laugh. I'm 33 years old in May of this year. I've moved apartments three times in the past six years. After my mom died, it got to the point where I'd move and not a single member of my family knew my address until I told them.

So the second time I ran a little experiment. I didn't tell a single person that I'd moved, only my new landlord. The utility companies and me knew I was living in this new place. I waited two months like that, having to pick up mail at the old apartment, keeping my address secret until one particular day rolled around, February 14th. Not a single other person knew my address, and I still found a Valentine's card in my early 20s, I met a girl who set my entire world on fire. She was smart, beautiful, and had passion for art. We're gonna burn together, she'd say.

Not in the literal sense, of course. It's just that romance that we got swept up in was without a doubt the most intense thing I'd ever been involved in with my entire life. It was like a wildfire just burning out of control. Nothing had topped it before and nothing has topped it since. But let's just say that neither of us were in a particularly good place in our lives, and as passionate as the relationship was, it wasn't exactly healthy for the most part. She was very, very possessive, and I'm not going to lie, I thought that was kind of hot at first. But that got really old really fast, and her behavior started to cause arguments between us. She would explode at the mention of any other girl.

I once mentioned something to do with my sister and she immediately interrupted to accuse me of being unfaithful. Even after I explained the girl I was talking about was my sister, she stayed mad. It just defied all logic but I was in love so I stayed with her. So we're together for 17 and a half months, and that time included some of the best and worst moments of my life so far. But in the end, the bad started to outweigh the good, and faced with another Valentine's Day with her, I decided I couldn't do it anymore. I made the decision to break up with her,

and as you might imagine, she did not take it very well at all. At first, she was in complete denial, saying that there was nothing wrong with our relationship and that she had no idea why I was trying to break up. Then she got angry, like really angry, started throwing around accusations and threats, none of which I thought that she was capable of acting on. Then came the tears and the final acceptance, by far the hardest part for me. She was crazy, but I didn't think she was a bad person, and it sucked to have to hurt her like that. She insisted on staying in touch, maybe staying friends or something, but I had to go no contact, it was the only way we'd really get over each other. I felt like a monster, but I had to go no contact it was the only way

we'd really get over each other I felt like a monster but I did it anyway about a month goes by and I'm sitting in my apartment alone on Valentine's Day I'm sort of over this girl but I'm also sort of not and with it being Valentine's Day I'm thinking about her a whole lot so when my phone buzzes and I see it's a text from her, I'm like rushing to see what it says. I deleted her number, but you know when you just always remember the last four digits of someone's number? Yeah, that. So all this message says is, we were supposed to burn together. And that just kind of broke my heart right there. I thought about calling her, maybe try and patch things up and in retrospect maybe that's exactly what I

should have done. But in the moment I just tried to stay strong and stick to the no contact rule. I tried to take my mind off stuff, stayed away from all the romantic movies and valentine's episodes that the tv networks were trying to force down my throat. But still, I just couldn't shake the lonely feeling I had in me. So later that night, I'm kind of intoxicated, just sitting on the couch when my phone buzzes again. I just know it's her, like knew it in my gut and surprise surprise, it was. I debated just quickly clearing the notification and ignoring the message but my curiosity got the better of me and I found myself reading it. I knew the first line said, we were supposed to burn together, again from the notification but only when I opened up the whole thread did I see that underneath the first part. It just said, but now you're going to burn alone.

Again, it hit me right in the feels. It was incredibly clingy I know, but at the same time, you can't even deny how poetic that is. Poetry, that's all I thought it was. Just that old metaphor we used to share. I didn't think that she'd take it as far as she did. I didn't think she meant literally burn. Because sometime after that, I'm on my couch and I just started smelling smoke. I go through the stages of like, thinking I've drunkenly forgotten that I'm cooking, then thinking the neighbors are burning food on accident, then thinking someone is making a campfire outside or something. Just pure denialism really, not wanting to believe that the apartment building was actually on fire. Then the fire alarm starts going off. I rush downstairs in no shoes or socks,

just a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and run off the back of the building to the fire escape point. And on the way I see smoke billowing out from under the door of the apartment below me. Minutes later, a fire truck is parked outside of the apartment building, spraying water into the apartment below me, which had been absolutely scorched. It was one of the more surreal experiences of my life. These firemen are asking me if I'm okay, if I needed one of those foil blankets. It was February and it was freezing outside. But all that could come out of my mouth is like, I know who did this. I know who did this. One of them tells me to get in touch with the police if the cause of the fire was criminal so I immediately do because like I said, I had a good idea of who set that fire in the first place.

Like I wasn't quite sure how she'd done it but having my ex-girlfriend text me like, going to burn alone and then all of a sudden there's a house fire? That was no coincidence to me, no coincidence at all. And over the next couple of weeks I had to go and stay in my mom's place while some renovation work was undertaken at my smoke damaged apartment. But I did get in touch with the police who thanked me for the tip and said that it'd get in touch with me if the cause of the fire was found to be arson. Only it wasn't. They called a little while later to say that a fire department investigator had determined that Some faulty wiring was to blame for the blaze

And so they wouldn't need any testimony from me I brought up the text messages my ex had sent me How her words seemed to precede the fire in a way that was just too apt to be coincidence But again, they insisted that no arson was to blame I even called her and texted her saying that I knew what she had done, that she wouldn't get away with it. But as you can imagine she played dumb saying things like, I don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't be contacting me. It's something that messes with me to this day and there are so many unanswered

questions that frankly I'm not sure I want to know the answers to. I just know that one moment she's texting me telling me I'm going to burn and the next my apartment building's on fire. I'm not saying my ex broke into the apartment downstairs and did something to the wiring but it's even crazier of me to suggest that she willed something like that to happen or like engineered it or something. I know how paranoid that sounds so I tend not to put that theory out much but it had such a profound effect on my mind that I still moved apartments not long after just to be safe. Because to me there's still something very frightening about that time in my life, something I can't quite explain.

And now when I remember that old, like, we're going to burn together, it doesn't set me alight anymore. All it does is make my blood run cold. 46-year-old Anessa Tarverdieva and her 35-year-old husband, Roman Podkopayev, led very comfortable lives. Roman earned a generous wage as a dentist in the southern Russian region of Stavropol, while Anessa held down a full-time job as a nursery school teacher. Their combined income was considerably higher than most Russian households and they made sure their 13-year-old daughter, Victoria, wanted for nothing. On the surface, they seemed as normal and well-adjusted as any other family,

and often went on camping trips to the nearby area of Rostov. Yet while on these seemingly wholesome family outings, something dark and primal was driving the trio, along with two of their in-laws to commit some of the vilest acts a human being is capable of. On February 17th, 2008, in Aksai, a small town in the greater Rostov region, Anessa, Roman, and Victoria pulled up outside the home of Mikhail Zlydnev, head of the Information Security Department of the State Drug Control Service. With all the efficiency of a military raiding party, the family smashed their way into the house, quickly incapacitating Mikhail and his wife with shots from firearms they had concealed in their vehicle. Once they were downed and incapable of defending themselves, the family took their time butchering the couple with knives they carried, making sure

that Mikhail was forced to watch as they carved up his beloved wife before finally finishing him off. The family then went about collecting trophies from the house, items that would serve as mementos of their first hunt together, including items of clothing and a television remote. The trio believed that such a horrendous act of violence might sate their desire to hunt and kill and that afterward, they could return to being pillars of their small Russian community. But the raid only fueled a bloodlust that would lead them to claim many more victims. It only took a few months before the family was baying for blood again, so once again they got on the road to Rostov for another one of their supposed camping trips. It was July 17th of 2008 when Alexei Sazonov and Julia Vasilyeva were traveling on a federal highway through Aksay

district. It was a routine drive for them, right up until bullets began smashing through the windscreen of their vehicle. Alexei was killed almost instantly, and Julia was seriously wounded when their car veered off the highway and crashed into an embankment. All Julia could do was watch while dazed and bleeding as Roman, Inessa, and Victoria approached the car, wrenched open the doors, and took yet more trophies in the form of a purse, a driver's license, and a passport. Evidently, they wanted something to remember what their victims looked like, but in their haste to flee the scene, fearful that other motorists would catch them in the act, they neglected to finish Julia off. She turned out to be one of the few survivors of the murderous clan. Somehow, the Podkopaev family was able to wait an entire year before they felt the inclination to strike again. On July 8th, 2009,

paratrooper lieutenant colonel Dmitry Chudakov was sitting in a parked car on the shoulder of a stretch of highway, along with his wife, their 11-year-old daughter, and 7-year-old son. They were on their way back from a family holiday and had stopped briefly to rest before continuing their journey. Dmitry was awoken when a fearful cry from his wife had him opening his eyes to see Inessa approaching their car. She was shouldering a powerful semi-automatic shotgun and pointing the barrel directly at the car's windscreen. Dimitri was no stranger to violence and immediately reacted trying to gun the car's engine and get his family out of there. But no one can move faster than a bullet,

and as Anessa pulled the trigger over and over again, scores of shotgun pellets ripped through the glass and tore through Dimitri's body, as well as that of his wife and small son. Eleven-year-old Veronica was the only one left alive. She had been sat behind her father, and his body had absorbed most of the shotgun's blasts, leaving her with only scrapes and nicks from the ricochets and flying glass. But she was also completely and utterly shell-shocked from the sudden eruption of violence and barely fought back as Roman and Victoria dragged her from the back seat, plunging a knife into her almost 40 times to extinguish her young life.

Once the entire Chudakov family was dead at the roadside, the Podokopayevs looted their belongings, stealing an expensive laptop, a hair dryer, and a digital camera. It should be noted that they happened to cross almost $1,500 worth of gold jewelry in the Chudakovs' luggage, but neglected to take it. They were killing purely for sport, not for any kind of financial gain. This is entirely at odds with the Russian media's description of them as bandits, as they were not robbers who just so happened to kill to make their tasks easier. They were murderous psychopaths, killing for the sake of killing. The fact that Dmitry Chudakov was a high-ranking officer in Russia's elite VDV paratroopers

made this particular set of murders front-page news all over Russia, and the authorities were desperate to quickly find the perpetrator. This led to a completely innocent man named Alexei Serenko being falsely accused and convicted of the murders, which ended up with him spending two years in prison. The only evidence levied against him was the hastily gathered results of the ballistic examination, and as the owner of a similar kind of semi-automatic shotgun. Alexei was erroneously branded as the Chudakov's murderer. Alexei was also accused of killing three other people in the same area based on the same ballistics evidence, but after further examination, he was cleared and released from prison,

with the Russian government only offering him meager compensation. The following year, the Potokopayev family planned another bloody attack, and this seems to be the first that was motivated by actual financial gain. Anessa was aware that the family of her goddaughter were in possession of a number of high-tech firearms, as well as a considerable amount of cash, both of which could be used to carry on their campaign of rapacious terror. The Poltkapayevs drove out to the home of their prospective victims under cover of darkness, lying in wait for them to come home from eating dinner at a nearby restaurant. Yet the only two

people to return home after quite some time were the family's two daughters, one of which was just 12 years old. Both girls were grabbed up, held down, and tortured in order to force them to reveal the location of both the weapons and the stash. One of the girls was said to have their eyeballs gouged out before she finally broke and told them where the money could be located. After somehow finding it in herself to kill her own goddaughter, Anessa then led her family on a murderous rampage that lasted four long years. The killings mostly consisted of home invasions, much in the same style as the first set of killings that the family committed. But during that time frame, the Potkapayevs also developed a new style of attack,

one of which they would ambush those who responded to burglar alarms that they had deliberately set off. On September 19th, 2012, in Novocherkask, the family killed two employees of a private security company who responded to alarms going off at a local dental clinic. The Podkapayevs then stole the security guard's firearms, which included a Kalashnikov assault rifle and two semi-automatic pistols, all of which were used to replenish their arsenal of weaponry. Then, on April 8th, 2013, the family unloaded hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the car of grocery store employees responding to alarms that they had set off at their store. Miraculously, only one of the men died, with the driver somehow

surviving the vicious attack that should have easily snuffed him out. After five years of intermittent killing and looting, it seemed the Potkapayevs were unstoppable in their slaughter. But on September 8th, 2013, unsatisfied with shooting a husband and wife couple who were out on a stroll in Askay countryside, Roman and his daughter Victoria decided they would rob the home of a former military officer. They didn't find any cash in the residence, and so they made the rather bizarre decision to steal candles and chicken drumsticks, apparently being completely unwilling to leave empty-handed. The father-daughter hit squad fled on a scooter that they had previously stolen that day, but were soon pulled over by police officer Ivan Shakovoy. Ivan was investigating the shootings that the Potkapayevs had committed earlier on, and demanded to see some identification from the pair.

Instead of showing any documentation, Roman pulled out a pistol and executed Officer Shakovoi at the roadside. What followed was a run and gun battle that ended up with Roman being shot dead and Victoria arrested, while Anessa was later taken in custody whilst guarding a huge cache of stolen weaponry, which included silencers, grenades, and dozens of ammunition cases. Police also found dozens of items belonging to slain victims among the weapons cache, proving that the Potkapayevs were responsible for their murders. During the interrogation that followed, Anessa told an investigating homicide detective that she hated police and lamented that her family was not able to kill more of them

during their murder spree. A shocking revelation also brought to light the fact that the Potkopayevs were being assisted by Anessa's sister and brother-in-law, who happened to be a former policeman. Since he was connected with law enforcement, the brother-in-law was able to pass on inside information regarding police operations and movements which enabled them to escape justice for such a long time. But what would drive a former nursery school teacher, one that was apparently capable of such nurturing instincts, to describe herself as a gangster by nature. What could possess her to view herself as something of a hero for having targeted military men and police officers? She was

certainly worshipped as one by a handful of anonymous sadists. As not far from the site of the Chudakov murders, police officers found three homemade knives on which were written the phrases to my beloved bandit girl and to my beloved Amazon, a reference to the warrior woman of legend. It's clear that some are driven to violence and thievery out of a desire to simply survive, but what's absolutely horrifying about the case of the Polkapaya family is that they chose to kill because of some hideous, evil desire to dominate and destroy. Because hunting, ambushing, and killing human beings was what thrilled them more than anything else. They didn't need of Pittsburgh. It's a really nice neighborhood, really leafy and green with some really nice old houses, and I won't deny that I've been immensely privileged to have grown up there.

But at the same time, there was a huge downside to living there too, and that came in the form of the Ward family. The Wards were an absolute nightmare to live near to, and they made pretty much every other family's lives unbearable at some point for a variety of different reasons. Individually, they were bad enough, but collectively, they were like a horror movie level of nightmarish. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some budding horror filmmaker who writes or directs the next Hereditary, and it all comes out that it was inspired by the Wards. The patriarch of the family was named Winston, or Wyn for short, but being one of Wyn's

neighbors was nothing short of a serious loss. Now, for reference, I had most of my encounters with Wynn when I was a teenager, and being a girl, Wynn always took a certain liking to me that he just didn't show to other people. He was always sickeningly polite with me, the kind of polite that verged on weirdly flirtatious. To other people, it probably just seemed like he was overly nice, maybe a little socially awkward. But being alone with Wynne or in situations where there weren't close observers, that was a different situation entirely. There were a handful of occasions where I caught Wynne looking at me in a way that made my skin crawl.

He had a hunger in his eyes, like this beastly, ravenous look, like he wanted to eat me alive. His eyes would glaze over and his lips would curl up ever so slightly in this horrifically perverted way that always made me feel stupidly uncomfortable. There was one time when I bumped into him in a convenience store near to downtown Pittsburgh. After he said hi and made a little small talk, he seemed to follow me around the store for a little while. He acted all innocent, making out like he was just browsing stuff in the aisles, but at some point, he got way too close to me. I think I was just too nervous to actually do anything about it. I didn't want to make a scene or cause any unnecessary conflict.

After all, what would I tell people? Mr. Ward stood near me in a store. Anyways, when he was standing close to me, I heard him sniffing the air, like taking these big inhalations of breath through his nose, almost like he was trying to smell me. I couldn't walk away fast enough, and in the end, I left the store without even picking up what I went in there to buy. Like I said, he was overly nice to girls and women but an absolute monster to any boys or men who happened to catch him in the wrong mood. He once ran out of the house with a baseball bat when my big brother used their driveway to turn around once and The way he told it, if he hadn't driven away as fast as he could, Mr. Ward probably would have done some damage to his

car. Then there was his wife, Maggie. Maggie always wore way too much makeup. I mean, so much it looked really jarring and she plucked her eyebrows really, really thin. I'm pretty sure she was a good few years younger than Wynne, but the way she made herself up made it seem like she was 20 or 30 years older and was just trying to look younger. Maggie was famous for sitting out on their porch and knitting, which I think contributed to the whole old person vibe she gave off, only she didn't really ever seem to be knitting anything. I remember walking our dog around the neighborhood and getting a look at the tangled mess of yarn

she just seemed to be poking needles into. It was like a lime green spider web, just a tangle of thread she stared at like she was in some kind of trance. She also had this talent for turning super happy sounding innocent nursery rhymes into the creepiest sounding things Singing them all slow and deliberate in a sing-song voice that sounded like a combination of a creaking door and nails on a chalkboard I remember one time when we got some of their mail delivered to our house by mistake and my mom made me go over to drop it off. Mrs. Ward was sitting on their porch, poking these dirty looking knitting needles into a tangle of yarn and singing, ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. When she looked up to see me standing there with the mail in my hand, she acted all scared, which was nuts because I think I was way more freaked out to be over there. But she thanked me for bringing the mail over anyway.

Yet before I turned to leave, she asked me if I knew what nursery rhyme she was singing. I nodded, and she asked if I knew what the origins were. I said no, and she went on to explain to me that the song had its roots in some old plague that had swept across England. I think she meant the Black Death, but I can't be certain. She said the ring around the rosy part was a reference to a rash that was a symptom of the disease, and a posy was a collection of herbs that was carried to mask the scent of rot that the dying people were said to have given off. Then she tells me that the all fall down part was a reference to people dying

from the plague. I don't know how true any of that is but Jesus, it freaked me out to have her tell me that in her weird scratchy voice with her face all painted up like some circus clown. Their younger son Jacob Ward was a total freak. He was obsessed with Native American culture, which I'm not saying is a bad thing at all, but Jacob was totally toxic about it. It was rare that you'd see that kid and he didn't have his face painted or have this grim homemade headdress on or whatever. He also liked to run around with a bow and arrow that his parents insisted was totally harmless and used those cartoony sucker tip arrows.

But there are a lot of people, myself included, that swear that they'd seen him using actual sharp tip arrows on a handful of occasions. He'd aim them at you, pull the drawstring back to the point that you'd actually run for cover, but he never seemed to fire any and you could never catch him using them whenever there were any grown-ups around. They actually got a social worker called over at some point because a few people had seen Jacob walking around with dead squirrels or pigeons. I'm not sure if he'd shoot them himself with his bow and arrow or they were just roadkill or something, but it was alarmingly enough to enough people that they actually had a visit from someone. Although whether or not that actually came to anything, I don't know.

Then finally, their older son was this kid named Johnny. Johnny was the kind of kid that growled at people in high school when they got too close to him and before he got expelled for fighting, did something seriously messed up. Apparently he asked this girl to go out on a date, some super pretty but super nerdy girl who happened to be his lab partner. She says no and Johnny doesn't take it very well at all. He made things difficult for her during chemistry by not talking or looking at her, and eventually she had to basically beg the teacher to switch partners so she could even get a passing grade. Not long after, she was driving back from school in her seemingly empty car when she looks in the rearview mirror to see Johnny just sitting in

her back seat, grinning at her. He'd apparently broken into her car and hidden in the footwell in her back seat under some blankets or something, or at least that's what we all figured he'd done. She was so scared she crashed her car and had to spend a week in the hospital. All Johnny got was a visit from the cops and a warning to stay away from her, and somehow it was all just blamed on teenage hijinks. I think maybe because the girl's family were too scared of the Wards to press charges or whatever. I'm sure there's more to that story, but that's all I know of that. When the for sale sign finally showed up from the ward's house, I think Dark

Hollow was about ready to throw a big party to celebrate them leaving, and after they did, they became something of an urban legend, basically a campfire tale that only a handful of people really knew was actually true and not something we made up to scare people. Look, I still think it's a miracle that there wasn't any bigger drama to happen involving the wards, something like a murder or whatever, little Jacob shooting someone with an actual arrow. I know Johnny basically almost killed his lab partner in that car crash, but somehow they never actually went through with seriously hurting anyone.

But who knows, maybe a couple more years and there would have been a fatality. And who knows what they've been up to, wherever they move to. Maybe it's only a matter of time before they seriously hurt someone. To be continued... Before I moved across the country for college, I lived with my mom in Fresno, California. I love her, and she always did her best for me and my sister with what little she had, but I think she'd be the first to admit that we live in a terrible neighborhood with little opportunity to improve our situation. But I guess that's just how life is when you're a teenage pregnancy with a father who just disappeared in the thin air. But growing up, I always thought my mom was kind of terrible. She rarely let us play outside, wouldn't ever let us

go to the store on our own. She acted like an all-around control freak whose goal was to make our lives as boring and uneventful as possible. Later in life, we had a major heart-to-heart where she leveled with me about why she was so strict with us when we were growing up. After that, I understood why she was the way she was. The family next door were heavily involved in meth and gang activity, but they weren't just partying and dealing out of the family home. They were a group of seriously sadistic psychopaths who did things to the local community that could pretty fairly be described as pure evil. They got raided by the cops in the end, but not before they'd done some pretty irreparable damage

to the neighborhood, and my mom opened up by telling me about one particular incident that had been the catalyst for her being so strict with us. Apparently, they used a little recruitment tactic on more than one occasion. One that involved inviting a young girl over to party before forcing her to smoke meth. They'd keep her there for days, just feeding her meth and loaning her out to party goers. That's the least obscene way I can phrase it, but you get the idea. Then they'd threaten to tell her parents or tell the call of cops on her, some kind of blackmail method to keep them coming back and bringing their friends and siblings, etc. From what I understand, it was kind of a vicious cycle of like brainwashing girls which in turn attracted more guys which then allowed them to sell considerably more meth since lewd activity was involved. My mom also said that more than once

she saw two guys carrying unconscious people out to a car, throwing them in the back seat then driving them away and then on a couple of occasions she saw missing posters for these people tacked up around the neighborhood. I asked her why she didn't go to the cops about the family and she actually broke down crying. She said she was constantly terrified and had multiple encounters with the family members next door who told her that if the cops ever showed up, they'd make sure that she suffered. She told me that they once warned her that they were heavily armed, had all kinds of automatic weapons inside their place, and that if the cops ever came, they'd rather all die in a shootout than be taken alive. Apparently they laughed about how they

had guns so powerful that they'd rip through the neighborhood and that our family would probably die in the crossfire or something. That was something that absolutely terrified her. We were all she had in the world, and she wanted to protect us at all costs, so the idea of us losing our lives to some horrific drug-fueled shootout... It was unimaginable. My mom was a quarter Mexican too, and she knew a few things about something called Santa Muerte, a kind of pagan figure that some Mexican people worship as like a personification of death. She said she could sometimes hear people in the backyard of the meth house invoking her name,

possibly even making sacrifices since she heard chickens squawking and goats bleeding. And according to her, a lot of people who worshipped Santa Muerte were connected with Mexican cartels and were not to be messed with. She didn't want to take the chance. It took her years before she was able to afford to move and by that time I was a sophomore. But I can't even describe the relief I felt when I heard she was moving away from Fresno with my little sister. For the first time in years, I was actually excited about going home to visit. We were finally away from that psycho family of meth-addicted death worshippers. Alexander Bean was born in the Scottish county of East Lothian sometime during the 16th century. His father was employed as a laborer with duties mostly consisting of ditch digging and hedge trimming. Alexander tried to follow his father's footsteps and take up the family trade,

but realized rather quickly that the hard work and measly pay did not suit him. He is also said to have attempted to train as a tanner and become proficient in the process of treating the skins and hides of animals to produce leather. The modanity and paltry wages caused him to become fed up with the profession, but it seems he learned skills that he carried with him into later life. Skills that would not just provide a means of living, but a great deal of infamy too. Alexander was not like other people. He was rough, ill-tempered, and violent, and felt he simply did not belong around regular folk. So when he met a girl of similar inclinations named Agnes Douglas,

nicknamed Black Agnes, due to her shock of black hair, as well as her distinctly dark personality, he knew he'd found a soulmate. Alexander's mother and father strongly objected to their union, having heard rumors that Black Agnes practiced witchcraft. So they told their son that he would be forbidden from living in the family home with his new bell should they choose to wed. The couple then chose to elope, leaving East Lothian and traveling across the Scottish lowlands, moving from place to place and surviving on what little work each of them could find. But the couple quickly grew contemptuous of their employers,

as well as the work they were doing, and one night they hatched a plan to earn some easy money. They lay in wait at a crossroads near to a tavern, ambushing, murdering, and robbing wary travelers as they trudged towards what they assumed to be a safe haven for the night. The couple's dark deeds then took an even darker turn, when at one point during a robbery and murder in Ayrshire, they decided on an easy way to cut their costs. Instead of using the money they stole from their victims to buy food, they would simply turn their victims into food by dragging their corpses before butchering and eating them. Alexander was used to dealing with

the corpses of animals, and found that human corpses were all too similar to the ones he'd worked with during his tanner training. After one such incident, Agnes and Alexander dragged off the body of their victim to a coastal cave in Benain Head, between Gerven and Ballintrae. It was there they made a fire in which they roasted the poor soul's limbs, feasting on the flesh once it was properly cooked. The cave was almost 200 meters deep and the couple discovered that during high tides, the entrance was almost completely blocked off to outsiders. They had managed to find themselves the perfect home, a subterranean lair from which they could launch raids into the nearby countryside, and one they could retreat to after their grisly crimes to avoid being apprehended by the law.

The couple lived in the cave completely undiscovered for more than 25 years. Agnes and Alexander raised a family there, producing eight sons and six daughters, who in turn birthed 18 grandsons and 14 granddaughters, all of which were products of inter-family breeding. What began as a small family grew into something that more resembled an actual clan, and as time went on, the Bean family turned their bloody work into an industry of robbery, murder, and cannibalism. They began to strip all remaining scraps of meats and organs from their victims, pickling the leftovers in barrels so they could more easily survive during the harsh Scottish winters. They also employed the rather shrewd strategy of tossing the skeletal remains of their quarry into the sea. The bones then would be washed up on beaches far from the coastal cave they called home, leading terrified villagers to believe that it was in fact animals that were attacking and eating travelers at completely different locations,

effectively throwing them off the bean family's scent altogether. Naturally, the frequent disappearances did not go unnoticed by the local villagers, but the Bean family remained hidden in their cave during the day and only ever ventured out under the cover of darkness to claim their victims. Their methods were so furtive that the villagers were completely unaware that there was a group of murderous cannibals living right under their noses. As the years went by, more and more villagers seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, and the more that did, the more the local population seemed to take note.

Eventually, several organized searches were undertaken in an attempt to find those responsible for the vanishings. During one such search, it is said that a group of men noticed the coastal cave that the Bean family called home, but were unable to believe that anything human could survive in it, and thus failed to properly explore it. But if they had, they would have discovered horrors beyond their imagining. Unable to locate the culprits, the local townsfolk became incredibly frustrated and volatile in their quest for justice. They actually ended up lynching several innocent people, brutally executing them in spite of their pleas for mercy and totally ignoring their insistence that they were guiltless. They often suspected local innkeepers since they almost always happened to

be the last people to see the victims alive. Several were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night and hung from the branches of large trees nearby, yet still the disappearances continued. Then one night, as a married couple were returning from a local county fair on horseback, the Bean family spied their approach. They ambushed the couple, dragging the wife from her mount and savaged her as she lay in the road. They then tried to do the same to the husband but found he was not so easy to be overpowered. Little did they know, he was a former militiaman who was skilled in combat and carried a sword and pistol whenever he was out riding. The husband was able to hold off his attackers, but as he did so, he was forced to listen to the blood-curdling screams of his wife as the Bean family tore into her with knives and hatchets, carving her up while she was still alive. Eventually, after the husband had dispatched a fair few of Bean family himself, a group of travelers who were also returning from the very same county fair appeared on the same

trail and were horrified to have stumbled on the grisly scene that lay before them. They ran to assist the former militiamen, chasing the Bean family away with their superior numbers before escorting the newly made widower to the local magistrate to tell them of what he had experienced. Upon hearing of the pure animal veracity of the attack, and how the poor murdered wife of the former militiaman had been carved up and butchered while she was still alive, the magistrate seemed convinced that those responsible for the many disappearances over the years had finally been discovered. With local authorities sounding the call to arms, it wasn't long before none other than the Scottish King, James VI, heard of the horrifying atrocities. He subsequently made the

decision to personally lead a search team of over 600 men and several bloodhounds on a quest to find and eradicate the Bean family once and for all. Using clothing from the bodies of the slain Bean family members, taken from the site of the recent county fair ambush, the bloodhounds were able to track a scent trail which led all the way back to the previously overlooked coastal cave at Benane Head. Using flaming torches to illuminate the cave's dark interior, the king's men found the bean family surrounded by the spoils of their blood-soaked pillaging. Piles of stolen heirlooms, jewelry, clothing, and gold coins littered the ground around them. But what lined the walls

of the cave made the king's men's blood turn to ice in their veins. Chunks of meat, human meat, hung to dry from ropes that were strung above their heads. Barrel after barrel was stuffed with picked human organ meat. The smell was enough to turn a man's stomach, but it wasn't nearly as disturbing as the inbred features of the clan that cowered before them. The majority of the family, mostly women and girls, were captured alive and without a fight, and were dragged wailing from the cave by the furious king's men. But many of the men and boys ran into the depths of the cave and refused to come out, barking out that they'd kill any man that tried to take them. Instead of risking their lives to root them out, the king's men placed gunpowder at the cave's entrance,

blowing the opening sky-high and ensuring that any that remained inside would surely suffocate. Those that were captured were initially taken to Tollbooth Jail in Edinburgh, before being transferred to Laith or Glasgow. There, their captors were extremely disturbed by the family's lack of humanity, both in their physical appearance as well as in their morality Seeing them as no better than animals, the King's men subjected the Bean family to summary executions Believing they were too inhuman to even warrant a proper trial Alexander Bean, the family patriarch, was subjected to a terrible retribution for the crimes he had

masterminded. The king's men cut off his private parts and burned them before his eyes, a visual metaphor that he would never again pass on his rotten seed. He then had his hands and feet severed and was made to bleed to death, a slow and painful end to a truly evil man. Yet as he died, he supposedly screamed out, It isn't over. It will never be over. Hinting that some of the family had actually survived the raid by the king's men. After this, Agnes and the rest of the women, along with a number of the bean children, were tied to stakes and burned alive. There may have been some truth to Alexander's claims that some of his ilk had survived the raid, as in the nearby town of

Gervan, there are those that speak of a woman who appeared among the populace not long after the raid of the Bean's coastal cave home. Apparently after being interrogated by the locals regarding her origins, she admitted to being an escaped member of the Bean family, who were by that point infamous for their murder and debauchery. She was reportedly taken to a nearby tree and hung from a bough while a baying mob roared in approval. Over the years that followed, truth passed into rumor, which in turn passed into legend.

And these days, there are many who dispute that Alexander Bean and his cannibalistic family even existed. The fact that Alexander earned the nickname Sonny Bean during the time that followed, a derogatory name given to Scots by their English neighbors, there is quite a flimsy argument that the whole story was concocted by Englishmen, simply to give Scotland a bad name. But a remarkably similar account can be found in a book by Nathaniel Crouch, a compiler and popular history writer who published his work in the year 1696. In it, he tells the tale of an incident which supposedly happened in 1459, the year before King James II's death. A passage from it reads as follows,

A thief who lived privately in a den with his wife and children were all burned alive, having made it their practice for many years to kill young people and eat them. Only one girl of a year old was saved and brought up to Dundee, who at twelve years of age was found guilty of the same horrid crime. When great multitudes witnessed her execution, wondering at her unnatural villainy, she turned toward them, and with a cruel countenance said, What do you thus rail at me, as if I had done such a heinous act contrary to the nature of man? I tell you that if you did but know how pleasant the taste of man's flesh was, none of you all would forbear to eat it. And thus with an impenitent and stubborn mind, she suffered deserved death.

What's clear from this testimony is that even if some of the details have gotten confused or twisted over the course of the centuries that followed, there was indeed a family of cannibals up in Scotland, maybe even more than one. A family that didn't just eat human flesh because they were forced to do so out of poverty, but because they actually enjoyed it. I feel like every neighborhood has a family of absolute psychos. Almost everyone I've spoken to about this sort of thing seems to remember one group of absolute wrong-uns, be it from their childhoods or from their current lives. And if there's one thing I've learned from their collective memories and stories, it's that whenever there's a family like that around, it's only a matter of time before something comes to a head, or something finally boils over.

And that's exactly what happened with this insane family that lived in my neighborhood when I was a kid. Only the thing is, most of the people I've spoken to said the breaking point came when some kind of family argument or confrontation with neighbors spilled out into the streets outside. Police were called, arrests were made, usually a for sale sign or two went up in the aftermath, but I almost wish my story was that simple or ended that relatively amicably, because what happened in my case is something that haunts me to this day with possibilities and ramifications that I find genuinely terrifying. I grew up in the 70s Britain, in a pretty small town in a place called Wiltshire. We were quite a small community, everyone knew everyone and consequently, everyone knew everyone's business too.

There was this one boy called Louis and he was the only child of the Prestige family. A very peculiar family name if ever there was one, but that's not the reason, I'll never forget it. The Prestige family were peculiar by name and peculiar by nature too. But then peculiar seems like entirely the wrong word to use. Peculiar makes you think of something quaint and adorably abnormal, but there was nothing adorable about the Prestige family. They were just weird, scarily weird too, and mean. I think one of the earliest memories of Lewis is during an assembly in primary school. It's about 8 in the morning and all the kids in school are sat in the main hall,

and it's deathly quiet apart from our headmaster making announcements and the soft sobs of young Louis. He didn't stop crying for the whole of the assembly and it didn't just remain this quiet weeping either. His tears built in pitch and intensity until he was wailing so loud that a teacher had to remove him altogether. I remember feeling really sorry for him but as time went on, it was just something you sort of got used to. They were the weird family in town and since they didn't get into any serious confrontations outside of their own family unit, people just sort of let them be. The next serious incident I remember was years later in secondary school when the schoolyard suddenly became abuzz with people gossiping over something. People were crowding around the school gates, looking at something, some of them laughing, some of them just gawping at the sight of a lad

dressed entirely in a school uniform except for one crucial piece of it, his trousers. And it turned out to be Louis. From what I heard, he had been basically pushed out of the car by who we assumed to be his dad, and rumors went flying around that Louis hadn't quite been ready to leave the house when his dad was ready to take him to school that morning. Instead of waiting for him to put his school trousers on, Louis' dad had just dragged him to the car and taken him to the school with no pants on, basically to teach him a lesson to be ready on time. I'm not entirely sure how true that reasoning was, but I do know that I witnessed Louis having to walk into school in nothing but a school jumper, his shoes, and his underwear with my own eyes.

I'm also not entirely sure how Louis was still allowed to live with his evidently abusive parents either. Again, rumors went around that they'd had a visit from social workers, but this I believe because for a while, there seemed to be little in the way of serious incidents coming from the prestige household. Obviously, the visit from child welfare services has been enough to shake them up into changing their ways, or so it seemed. Now this all came to a head when I was 15, maybe just over a year before we left secondary school and bid farewell to compulsory education for good.

One morning, Lewis turns up to school in his own clothes, a pair of pumps and a colorful jumper. He gets pulled aside by a teacher who, I think at that point, was well aware of the situation at home, and Louis says something quietly to him before the pair of them disappear into the building which housed the main office. The next thing I know is that, apart from the shoes he was wearing, Louis has an entirely new school uniform. New blazer, new tie, new jumper, everything. And from that day on, he seemed like almost an entirely new person. He didn't get dropped off at school by his parents anymore. He seemed more confident and open, more talkative with the other kids. He even started playing football with us at lunch times, something he'd never done before. We actually got quite pally with him for a while and on more than one occasion he invited us back home with him to play.

We politely declined of course, thinking of some made up excuse not to have to go around the prestige house but still, things seemed to be making a vast improvement. Emphasis unseemed though because after a long bank holiday weekend, Louis failed to turn up to school at all. This didn't have anyone talking about it too much, kids were routinely off on the odd one or two days with illness but Louis went an entire week without showing up for school and that really did get us talking. I don't know if it was because I was so young and naive or I just didn't connect the dots, but I didn't think that there was any link between all the police activity around our town and Louis not being in school. One Saturday afternoon,

my mom and dad called me into the kitchen and asked me if I had been around to Louis' house at all recently. I told them no, but that I'd been invited at one point and when I said that, my mom gave my dad this look that seemed to be a weird mix of horror and relief, like I'd dodged a bullet or something. Not long after that, I got word through some friends of mine that there had been a brutal double murder in the town, that someone had been arrested for it too. Our little town barely had any crime at all. I think the most serious thing that happened for decades at that point was a car theft committed by some out of towner. The idea that there had been a single murder, let alone two, just set the town alight and there was much speculation over who the killer was and

how the killings had come about. Looking back now, I can see why the adults might want to shield us from the whole thing and it was only a few years later that I actually realized why the police had made such an effort to keep the identity of the murderer a secret. It's like that when a murderer is under the age of 18. When they're a minor, their identity is kept secret for as long as is able. And that's only really possible with the media because it didn't take long before the residents of our town figured out what had happened, and it was bound to trickle down to us sooner or later. The reason Lewis' parents didn't seem to be around anymore, the reason he was so happy and confident and carefree, was because he had killed them.

He'd finally rid himself of the people that made his life torture. I get that, but the fact that a kid killing their own parents could make them so happy, that's something I've never been able to truly understand. The horrible thing was looking back on the events later and sort of piecing together the puzzle. For example, the day he came to school in his own clothes was probably the morning he'd killed them. And since he'd gotten blood on his school uniform, he had to dispose of it. All the times he'd invited us back to his place to watch TV or play football, his parents would have been dead in the upstairs bedroom, assuming that's where he'd killed them. If we'd gone around, maybe we would have been able to smell them, or see flies buzzing around the bedroom

door or something. We were all just one little spur of the moment yes from finding out, finding their bodies. Maybe if that was the case, then Lewis would have killed us, too. For the longest time, me and my family lived next door to these absolute insane people that made our lives a complete living hell for like an entire year. They were pretty well behaved for the first few months after they moved in, but after a while, they started absolutely blasting music in the middle of the night. I'm not just talking about that gentle kind of bass thump that passively is annoying, I'm talking the kind of loud where you couldn't get a wink of sleep. The police had to be called out a few times to get them to turn it down, and even then, they confessed that they couldn't really do anything other than issue fines.

They got progressively worse though, and it turned out half the reason the music was so loud was to mask the sounds of the mom and dad having these legit fistfights in the middle of the night. It wasn't even a case of it being a one-sided domestic abuse either. The dad sometimes had worse black eyes than the mom, and scratches all down his face where she'd obviously clawed him to death. They used to knock the seven shades out of each other but we didn't think they were too dangerous to anyone outside their own family. Once or twice my dad had gotten into confrontations with them about the smell coming from their backyard or the fact that they used to blast music. The dad of this insane family had threatened to kill my dad once or twice but none of us thought that he would actually go through with it and thank god they didn't. Then for some reason it went really quiet

over there for a few weeks and it got to the point we thought that they'd actually moved. Only they hadn't moved at all, they were just keeping their heads down because they'd straight up killed their own daughter. Apparently she tried to run away from home and ended up in a shelter somewhere. They tracked her down, dragged her into their car one night, taken her somewhere secluded and then beat her to death. I'm not sure they even meant to kill her. They just beat her up so bad that she ended up dying not long after that. That's why they'd been so quiet. They didn't want to bring down any attention on themselves

when they were dealing with disposing of her body. We had police basically camped out on our street for like a week after they'd been arrested. All kinds of forensic vans with people in those full body white fabric suits going in and out all hours of the day. They were obviously looking for traces of the girl but whether or not they found anything I'm not really sure. I do know it was in the paper though and like I said I thank God the guy never did anything to my dad because he did actually go on to murder someone.

His own daughter, at that. This happened on Halloween of 2019. My friends and I were feeling the spooky vibes of the month and wanted to do something fun and exciting to satisfy our thirst. Being the dumb college students that we were, we decided on exploring somewhere allegedly haunted in the hopes of seeing some genuine paranormal activity. Since we're from Illinois, the popular destination of Bachelor's Grove Cemetery immediately came to mind and it was settled upon. Once the sun had set and night had fallen, we were to make our move, sneaking into the cemetery after it had closed to get the full experience without having to worry about any other visitors.

I must admit, I always wanted to do something like this before but I was genuinely afraid of what might be waiting for us in that cemetery so late at night. Stories always circulated around the various apparitions people had encountered before, the different sounds that chilled them to the bone, and so on. Anyway, all of this was festering inside of me well before we actually started driving over to the cemetery sometime in the evening. It was a pleasantly long drive, but I wasn't really in the mood to think about anything else except for the potential horrors that roam the cemetery for all eternity, or so they say. Couple in the fact that we were going to be trespassing in order to get through in the first place and I was a nervous wreck.

My friends were apparently doing a much better job at keeping their fears in check though. For the sake of the story, I'll call them Logan, Paul, and Eddie. The entire car ride there, they were laughing and joking around, not worried about what we would be getting into or what we might see. Looking back at the whole situation, I should have known that their optimism was a bad sign. No way would we have been able to explore this place without them being the slightest bit nervous, but what's done is done. A little past 7, once night had finally fallen for real and darkness went on in every direction for as far as the eye could see, we arrived. Parking in the main parking lot was out of the question because we did some looking into it and found that in previous years, local law

enforcement liked to wait there and catch any would-be explorers before they could even get inside. So, we had a backup plan. Since the actual cemetery was located in the center of a dense forest on all sides, essentially forming a square where all the roads would go around it, we were to park at some restaurant that was open super late and had a huge parking lot, all the way in the back, furthest away from the restaurant itself and closest to the road. This was in the exact opposite direction from the front entrance of the cemetery, so we figured this was our best chance of getting in while avoiding any cops in our way.

From there, we'd cross the street on foot and have a bit of a walk before arriving at a somewhat hidden path leading into the forest. Taking this back path would take a bit more to get to the actual cemetery itself since there were trees particularly thick and dense, but it was well worth it when considering the alternative. After everything was said and done, we found ourselves beginning our trek onto the path, unsure of how far we'd actually have to go before we'd find what we were looking for. It was a windy night, and even though it wasn't especially cold or anything, I still remember my teeth chattering and my skin going cold. Aside from the occasional sounds of leaves being crunched under our shoes as we

walked, there was absolute silence. My once cheerful and energetic friends were now all of a sudden quiet and subdued. Logan in particular had this odd expression on his face, it being illuminated by my phone's flashlight as we walked. It was some sort of cross between fear and pain, like every step he took was causing him physical harm. Before I could question him about it, we found ourselves at our destination. Here we were, in the heart of Bachelor's Grove, with graves all around us and a certain chill in the air. Everyone split up to cover more ground, promising to call the others over if they were to encounter something. I didn't want us going too far away from one another, but I also didn't want to seem like a complete baby, so I kept my mouth shut and began exploring.

Most of the graves I looked at had withered away from time and the elements, so I couldn't really make out anything that was on the tombstones. The few dates that I could read went back to the late 1800s, and a sinking feeling in my stomach started once I realized these people had been dead and decaying in the ground for over a hundred years. Feeling extremely uncomfortable with this realization, I began to back away from the graves and start to look for my friends to see if they had found anything supernatural, yet when all of a sudden, I heard it. Not just me, either. All of us did. It was a low, almost unnoticeable if you weren't paying attention, but with the way our senses were heightened, there was no way we would miss it.

It appeared to be some sort of chanting, and it sounded like it was coming a little bit north from our direction, further in a clearing. I couldn't make any of the words being spoken or if it was even in English, but there was something creepy about the tone, like it was religious and the chanting was some sort of prayer. The voice that was doing the chanting was deep and gravelly, belonging to some man that we couldn't see The four of us shone our lights on each other to see our expressions and at that moment, we knew what we were going to do Despite every fiber in my being telling me not to go any further and see what the source of this chanting was My curiosity got the better of me and I couldn't resist. Eddie whispered to us to turn our lights off completely while he dimmed his just enough to where it wouldn't attract too much attention but we would still be able to see with it.

The next few moments we spent creeping towards the noise, the more and more I started to lose it. My breathing was uncontrollable and it felt like my heart was beating a million miles an hour. I was so afraid of what we would find, and yet I still had to know. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we had entered the clearing and were a mere few steps away from this chanting. Eddie shone his light in the direction ahead of us and for just a brief moment, we saw a cloaked figure bent over something in the grass, still chanting in that unrecognizable language. The thing in the grass looked like some sort of circle with a mark in the center and I swear to god, I wish I could tell you I'm lying about this, but when I realized what the symbol was,

I felt like throwing up. There was no mistake, It was a pentagram, made of some strange material. For the moment that Eddie had illuminated the site in front of us, I had been able to get a glimpse of the pentagram's material being bright red, and I shouldn't have to say any more about that. Once the light from Eddie's phone hit the back of the man's head, he immediately stopped chanting and stood up, still facing the direction of the pentagram. I can only describe the next few minutes as truly unadulterated terror. Before we knew it, he screamed a blood-curdling scream that rattled us to the core and turned around,

beginning to sprint towards us. Everything happened so fast, I couldn't even make out the man's facial features except for deep sunken eyes and an expression that radiated pure hatred. He really did want to bring us harm, and not wasting any time, we all fled the direction we came from and ran faster than I think any of us had ever ran in our entire lives. I couldn't even scream while running. I was too petrified to make any noise. Maybe it was a miracle, but we somehow managed to retrace our steps all the way through the path we took to enter the cemetery and forests and eventually came out the main road which was devoid of any traffic for the time being.

Afraid of what I would see if I looked back, I made a beeline for the car along with the others and hopped into the back seat, not wasting any time to lock the door and roll up the window. We peeled out of there in no time flat and didn't stop driving 20 over the speed limit until we were at least 10 minutes away. Honestly, I have no idea how far or how long that man chased us, but I do know this for sure. We weren't supposed to be there that night, and we must have been interrupting something important of his. I'll never know what it was, and honestly, I don't hope to ever find out.

We never did talk about this experience again after that night and we never went on another trip to somewhere abandoned or haunted ever again either. I think that fright we felt is enough to satisfy us for the rest of our lives and I'm thankful beyond words that we all managed to get out together, alive. When I was 15 I lived with my grandmother. She has a really big nice house and always lived alone so I volunteered to live with her. I enjoyed her company so it wasn't a big deal. Around Christmas break my grandma decided to let a friend of hers from work stay with us. My grandma was a psych

nurse, by the way. When she told me a lady, her husband, and their son were moving in, I assumed that they were young and the son was young. Kind of stupid that I didn't ask, right? I know. Well, when they moved in, I was introduced to him. We'll call him B, and B was 36 years old. It struck me by surprise, but I was still polite to all of them. This is when it started to get weird. For the first week I hardly ever saw them which was fine by me. I would have my cousin, we'll call her K, over a lot around this time. So one night my grandmother and the friends went out to the casino and B stayed home. K and I were in the kitchen making cupcakes when we heard heavy stomping going on upstairs for a while. Then I heard a door slam.

I ran to the bottom of the steps and seen my room door had been slammed shut. I could have sworn I had closed it. I assumed the guy checked to see if we were home or something and closed it for me. I wasn't that mad about it so I went back to cooking with K. I assumed the guy checked to see if we were home or something and closed it for me. I wasn't that mad about it so I went back to cooking with K. As we were icing the cupcakes someone ran downstairs and into the kitchen and of course it was B. He leaned on the kitchen door frame and stared at us for a moment. We were getting uncomfortable so I spoke.

Hi. He gave me a huge creepy smile. Hello beautiful. His voice was so incredibly raspy, like he was in a serious need of water. I ignored what he said and continued to ice the cupcakes. He then started going on and on about how he had seen my pictures around the house and always thought that I was sexy. My heart jumped. Kay quickly snapped back to him before I could. Uh, she's 15. We thought that he would leave us alone after that, but no.

He only smiled more. Young girls are the best to have my way with them. Then he just walked out. This shocked us to our core. We stood in the kitchen thinking if we should tell our grandmother. I felt bad that they were homeless, but their son was a freaking perv. And we decided we would. After finishing some cupcakes, we made our way upstairs and he stopped us.

He started apologizing, saying he was drunk and was just begging for our forgiveness and our stupid selves did forgive him. We agreed not to tell and just went into my room. After that we hadn't heard from him and we went to sleep. I had woke up to use the bathroom and it was pretty late. I wasn't sure what time it was but the house was pitch black. The bathroom was right across from my room so I rushed in. When I sat in the toilet half asleep I heard another room door open. I could hear someone's footsteps.

They weren't far so I could tell that they were in my room. I heard whispering and then someone stomped off and I heard the front door slam. Weird. By then I was done. When I left the bathroom my room light was on and Kay was sitting up looking really uncomfortable. I asked her what was going on and she told me B came in and asked if we could go to the store with him because he hated being lonely. She told me she said no and to get out and he got upset and just left. I was creeped out by now. As soon as the son came out we told his parents. They told us their son has some severe mental issues and won't cause us any harm.

They apologized for his behalf and that was it. Here's our next encounter with this creep. It wasn't until about another week since I decided to stay at K's house for that time being. We were in my room playing Xbox when B poked his head into the room and asked could he please talk to me outside the door. So I went. He proceeded to tell me how I was so pretty and he loved my hair. He kept trying to touch my curls as he spoke. What are you mixed with? He kept asking while still keeping this weird smile. I would tell him I'm only African American and he would just stare at me like I was lying. And this is where the conversation got worse. At first he

asked me about some of my interests and then just changed completely. He started saying inappropriate things. He said what he would do to me when he got the chance. Not if, but when. And he said what he dreams about and all this disgusting mess. I was done with this and I tried to go into my room. As I turned, he grabbed my hair and groaned a bit. I turned back to him and his hand was in his pants. God, it was disgusting. When I went back in, I told Kay everything even though she had been listening herself and we told my grandma that night. She was absolutely livid and told the family that they were leaving tomorrow morning and that was it. When they left I was happy. Extremely happy that I wasn't sneaking around my house anymore with a kitchen knife

out of fear that he would pop up somewhere. Even though he was gone I had found something in the room he stayed in that seriously grossed me out. It makes me shiver and gag just thinking about it. He had left a plastic bag behind, and I look inside and found pictures. So many pictures of me. My grandma kept hundreds of copies to give away to the family, and he had somehow stolen a lot of them. There were pictures when I was a baby, a child and even more recent ones all in the bag. Most of them had white material on them. It looked dry but the ones I had seen at the top were still somewhat wet.

My stomach turned as I figured out what that white stuff was. But one picture scared me. It was a picture of me when I was about six. I had a swimsuit on and was lying on my stomach in the water. The waves were hitting hard and you could see that I had a massive wedgie and my bottom was showing a little bit. He had written something on the back of that one. It said copy number 32 and had his name under it. 32? This was the 32nd copy? But it was no more of that specific photo in the bag. This disgusting freak had the rest of the copies. I shuddered at the thought of him having all those pictures of me and what he could be doing with them. I had never heard from Bea or this family again. My grandma got the police involved but apparently

her friend had stopped working due to the embarrassment that was involved. I'm 19 now and still hate to think about it. I've submitted it here because my cousin brought it up a few days ago. I don't know where B or his family is, but I truly hope that he's in prison, or anywhere my leg in a nasty bicycle accident. I ended up in a plaster cast from my hip to my ankle for 8 weeks. As it was coming up on Christmas my younger brother wanted to go to the theater to see the Christmas show. I was 13, moody and accompanied by a bright pink cast everywhere I went. I was not feeling it.

My dad, never one for going to the theater, offered to take me to Pizza Hut instead. It was a rare opportunity to spend time with my dad who was often working very long hours. He worked as a police officer which at the time I didn't really take any interest in what he did. We had a great evening at Pizza Hut and we got back in the car to go home with full bellies and some leftover pizza. I remember babbling away at my dad as I had been the whole night, enthralled I had my dad's undivided attention. After a while I noticed he wasn't really responding anymore.

We were fairly near home but still on a main road before we turned off towards our housing estate. At first I thought he just lost interest but I glanced over and noticed he was permanently looking in the rear view mirror. I asked him what was up and he said, The car behind us has been following us all the way from Pizza Hut. I glanced behind and commented that we were still on main roads. I couldn't see that this was an unusual route for this guy to take. He said I need to see whether

he is. I don't want to lead this guy to our house. I rolled my eyes. My dad was always paranoid about stuff like that. We couldn't even tell friends we were going on holiday because he was convinced the house would be broken into while we were away. We were coming up to a residential area before ours that I knew from doing a newspaper route. I suggested the street coming up on the left as it looped around in a horseshoe shape through a housing estate and brings you back out on the same road we were on just further up. Nobody would take this road to come out onto the same road we were on, just further up. Nobody would take this road to come out onto the main road again. My dad turned off, and so did the car. I will never forget that feeling, that sinking feeling as I watched the car sharply turn behind ours.

The car placed its high beams on, and I let out a gasp and looked at my dad. He'd gone into work mode. He had completely shut me out. He accelerated down the street and as we came to the main road I saw that there were many cars still on the main road. He pulled straight out onto the main road, meaning the car coming on the main road needed to brake sharply and held down their horn and us. I kept my eyes on the road, breathing deeply as my dad weaved in and out of lanes. A part of me was completely terrified and a part of me was still convinced that this was not really happening. That he had exaggerated or mistaken this. He wasn't really following us. I dared to look in the side mirror and saw it was a different

car behind us. I felt myself relax a little. We turned left at the coming roundabout, giving very little room to anyone in a few moments of holding my breath thinking we were going to hear the sound of metal on metal. The street we had turned on was slightly quieter than the roads previous. I slowly glanced into the side mirror. It was still a different car behind us. I sighed relief and thought this had really been my dad's imagination. Suddenly, the rearview mirror became completely illuminated again and I awkwardly turned in my seat to see a car pull out sharply from behind the car behind us and pull in quickly behind ours again. I look at my dad again. He grabbed his phone from his pocket

and told me to call someone in particular in his phone and put it on speaker. My hands are shaking. I could barely press the buttons. A cheerful voice answered and before he could say anything else, my dad quickly summarized what had happened. There was a pause and I could hear voices speaking in the background. Radios beeping and answering through radios. My dad barked at me to keep naming the streets we were on to the guy on the phone as my dad randomly turned down streets, trying to keep to the main roads. I'm randomly calling names and trying to remember to say the direction we were heading. The car was so close behind us and completely

blinding any view behind us. All I could think was, please don't hit us. If we crash, I can't run. What can I do? My leg had only just been plastered. I knew I stood no chance. I suddenly wondered if they were getting close enough to take a shot at us. This for me was unthinkable. It was in England. That is not the norm. Why would someone want to shoot us? We continued to weave down the streets in random turns as I was tossed around in the front seat, clutching onto the mobile in my trembling hands. The voice on the phone shouted, turn into the Tesco car park that's coming up on the left and we have three response vehicles coming from the other direction. My dad sharply turned into the car park, skipping the red light. I shut my eyes, again waiting for the sound of metal on metal. As we swung into the near empty car park, the car behind us is

in close pursuit. Blue lights surrounded our car from what felt like all directions. The sounds of sirens were deafening. My dad got straight out of the car and ran behind the car. I screamed still thinking someone could have had a gun and tried to look over my shoulder to see when my door swung open and a police officer was crouching into the car to help me get out. My arms were completely jelly and I could not even use the crutches to help me stand. Another police officer came and between them they helped me as I hopped to the back of the police car. They were kind and tried to distract me as I was trying to see what was going on and where my dad was. I couldn't really see from my angle and I also couldn't turn properly due to my leg. They did their best to reassure me and one had clearly

just been through the nearby McDonald's drive-thru and they offered me his tea. I just sobbed, begging them to tell me what was going on. My dad after some time came over to the car and told them to take me home. He had checked and my mom was back home with my brother. As the police car turned around in the car park back towards the entrance, we could see the police surrounding the vehicle, and three men in what looked to be their late twenties were handcuffed, leaning over the car whilst a sniffer dog and two police officers were taking things out of the car, one of which was a baseball bat. When my dad got home later that night, I asked him what it was about. Who were those men and why were they following us? He was very reluctant to tell me anything. He did admit it was because of him that they were following us. He explained that he was in a drugs

team that dealt with, how I understand this as an adult, the interception of large shipments of drugs that were being transferred across the country and sometimes people lost a lot of money when they were caught. I just stared at him, I had no idea what to say. He just shrugged and said, sometimes people get upset about that. I've always been bothered by this experience and to this day still have dreams about it. I'm now 38 years old but this story begins when I was 21. Back in 2003 I was living with two roommates in an apartment in Minnesota. They were friends of mine from high school.

Our lives were usually pretty boring, just three guys hanging around playing video games, that kind of thing. One day I come home after work, a long shift at the grocery store I was employed by and my roommates had a Ouija board set up just on the living room floor with their respective girlfriends. They excitedly informed me that they had contacted a spirit. They were asking all sorts of dumb questions like, what kind of car do I drive and does my boyfriend love me? Just really mundane stuff. A non-believer, I jokingly remarked that the spirit was probably

angry with their questions and the board said yes. It felt as if my friends were just messing with me so I decided to run a little test. I sat down with the group and asked its name. The spirit said its name was Mike. I asked it to prove that it was a real spirit and not my friends just dinking around by telling me something only I would know. The spirit Mike responded by spelling out Sue which is a sister I had not and still have not met and never told my friends about. While this was indeed odd, I still wasn't convinced.

I next asked the spirit who I would marry. The board spelled out Kelly Anderson. I didn't know anyone by the name so I laughed it off and said I didn't believe Mike was real. One of my roommates then mentioned that he read somewhere that if a spirit counts backwards from 10 to 0 they can escape the board. The planchette began to spell out 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 which freaked out the girls and they threw the planchette across the room and put away the board. I didn't think anything of it and went to bed. A month later I was trying to fall asleep one night but couldn't because I felt like something was watching me.

I swore I saw a shadow creep along the wall behind my TV that was humanoid in shape but I just wrote it off as a trick of the mind because I was tired. I finally managed to doze off a bit and woke up to a feeling of being dragged off the edge of my bed. When I regained my sense, I was right on the edge of my bed about to fall onto the floor. Still in denial I thought maybe I just slept funny. Fast forward to 2007, I'm still working at the same grocery store and I meet a woman named Kelly who had recently gotten a job there.

I didn't think anything of it because her surname was not Anderson. I got to know this woman and we started dating a few months later. In 2009 we got engaged. One night I was sitting with her in the living room of our apartments and I was thinking about the Ouija board incident from six years earlier. I told her the story of Mike and how the spirit informed me I was going to marry a Kelly Anderson, but I scoffed because her last name was different. She got really quiet and just stared at me. I asked her what was different. She got really quiet and just stared at me. I asked her what was wrong and she told me that at one time she was thinking of asking her stepfather, who I had not yet met at that time, to adopt her. If she had done this, her last name would

have been Anderson. It freaked me out a bit. In 2010, we got married and moved into a small house in Wisconsin. Strange things started happening around our new home immediately. I would hear whispers in the night as I tried to sleep. Kelly never heard anything. Sometimes I would wake up and see the shadows of little creatures moving about outside our bedroom door. Eventually, I started to wake up to a feeling of something sitting on my chest. I would be unable to move and I would see this horrible being staring down at me as it pinned me. It was wispy and malevolent looking. I would eventually regain my ability

to move again and fight it off and it would disappear. I know this sounds like sleep paralysis but under the circumstances I don't believe it was actually that simple. Not to mention this continued to happen all the way to 2012 when my son was born. For two years I fought off this entity that would come multiple times a week to try and, what, possess me? Kill me? I have no idea. I was constantly tired and worn out. Throw a newborn into the equation and I was exhausted. The attacks continued until my son turned three months old. Then one night I heard a strange voice say something in an unfamiliar language on my baby monitor. I ran into my son's room but no one was there. Not a thing. After that night the attacks on me continued but became more sparse.

Eventually it would maybe happen a couple of times a month. Unfortunately in 2014 things did not work out with Kelly and we got a divorce. She moved back to Minnesota and I started to see a new woman a few months after our divorce was finalized. The second Kelly moved out, the attacks stopped completely. I got remarried in 2016 to my second wife. I have been attack free for six years now but I still think about Mike and the Ouija board. Was this a spirit that was always attached to my ex? Did it attach to me because of the Ouija board and now has attached itself to my son? I ask him if he's ever experienced anything unexplained but I never really get a direct answer.

And I fear I'll never have that answer. I live in a smallish town in Arizona with very little violent crime. It's mainly drug busts, assaults, domestic abuse cases, very rarely extremely violent crimes like murders or something. We're more known for our retirement and rehab communities. I know not the greatest thing for our town to be known for, but it's absolutely beautiful here and an amazing place to raise a family, but back to the story. Like I said, this story happened a couple of years ago. I'm 20 now, going on 21, and I think I was maybe 15, 16 during this. The neighborhood I lived in was pretty quiet for the most part, mostly retired old people

and young families with little kids. I think we were the oldest kids in the neighborhood, me and my sister. So one peaceful summer evening, me and my mom are home alone just enjoying the day. My sister was away and my dad was at the store or something. I was in the living room on the couch messing around on my phone messaging my girlfriend at the time or something like that I don't quite remember, just standard teenager things, trying not to die of boredom and my mother is in her room catching up on bills or something when all of a sudden we get a sudden knock on the door.

My mom peeks her head around the corner looking at me confused cause we weren't expecting any company and my dad would have just opened the door. We dismissed the confusion cause we thought maybe it was a student going door to door like they do in the evenings and we lived extremely close to one of the local elementary schools and about a 15 minute walk from the high school so we didn't put it past us. Now brief description of my mother and I at the time, I was still coming into my height and body, I'm male and I was about 5'8, 5'9, dark hair and starting to get very broad in the shoulders, you know, typical puberty things it does to a guy. But my mother is 4'11, long blonde hair and very stout, not very intimidating but definitely knows how to handle

herself. So my mother opens the door and to our dismay, it was not a student or a possible neighbor. Instead, my mother is greeted by a scruffy looking man with beady eyes and longish blonde hair about my height and nothing too alarming about him, almost pretty innocent looking. He was wearing from what I can remember a white button up with a blue tie and jeans, you know business casual. As soon as my mom opens the door, you can visually see his surprise turn soon pleasure to see my short mother answer the door. She asks him if she can help him and he starts going on this random spiel about how my mom

has a very large crack on her windshield of her jeep that's parked very clearly and very obviously in our driveway in front of our front door with no crack and that he can fix it for her and keeps trying to coax my mother out of the house to show her the crack on her windshield. Now my mother is a no nonsense kind of woman, doesn't put up with anyone's bulls, so she immediately knew the man was up to something and refused to follow him out, telling him that she doesn't need his services and that her insurance covers all glass and body work. The man, not seeming to listen, just keeps trying to convince my mother that she just

needs to come out of the house to see and he needs to show her what she can't see. Now up until this point he hadn't noticed me standing a few feet back to the side of the doorway. As soon as he noticed me, his entire attitude changed. He seemed to get intimidated by the fact that I was there and was trying a bit more aggressively to get my mother out of the house and he also started asking questions like if we're home alone, where everyone was. While my dad wasn't home now, this is where even I was starting to get irritated with this man. What kind of mobile windshield repair service tries such an aggressive sales tactic, I thought. So, as this thought is running through my mind, I see some movement from

behind the man and all of a sudden another man pops out from behind my mom's car as if he was crouching behind it just out of sight to pounce the first opportunity given to him as soon as he saw me. He started to pretend to be interested in my mom's crack and bent down to inspect her tires or something. Now at this point me and my mom knew we were in more danger than originally thought and needed to get him and his buddy to leave. During all of this, the man is still trying to BS my mom outside and his story is starting to slip and change. So me being the protective and cautious person I am, go to my parents room to grab my mom's.380 handgun and my dad's.45 and suddenly place her.380 on the small of her back which she immediately gripped ready to reveal the weapon at any sign of danger and I stood behind her staring daggers at the man.

At this point he starts getting the point and decides he wasn't getting anywhere with this potential victim and her son, so he eventually just gives up and makes some remark about how it's our loss and walks off, and my mom shuts the door. We both look at each other in total disbelief. This kind of thing has never happened before, and we weren't too sure how to process it. So back in 2015, a colleague and I were on a business trip in Girona, Spain. We were going to be there for a couple of nights, so on the first night we decided to go for a walk. It was pretty late by now, and maybe at around 11pm, and all the bars and nightclubs on the strip were full. To really picture this, I need to tell you that the hotel we were staying at was not on the strip itself, but you had to go through a narrow alley to get there. Not your stereotypical dark alley,

this alley was pretty well lit with liquor stores and the like on either side. Anyway, me and my colleague decided to walk back to our hotel after a period of time observing the sights and sounds of Girona at night. But we had a problem. No matter how much we tried, we could not remember where that exact alley back to the hotel was, so we kind of started freaking out. By now, we are at the end of the strip and it seemed kind of sketchy to say the least. A bunch of male teenagers approached us with one carrying an empty bottle of vodka asking for information in broken English. We just ignored them and moved on.

As we keep walking, we notice another well-lit alley, but not the one we needed. I noticed a really nice looking classic style car parked on the side as a man is just getting out of it. His windows were really tinted too so we couldn't see in. We decided to approach him praying that he can speak good English and ask for directions. He does speak English but right away I can tell something's off. I tell him the name of our hotel, but as soon as I speak, he stops. Hearing my American accent, he loudly exclaims, Are you Kevin? By now, I'm really shocked at what he just said.

He goes on, Kevin, you United States? Motorbike driver? Motorbike? I explain that we're just Americans here on business, but this makes no difference. He seems to be holding himself up in his car, seeming either high on something or just very intoxicated. He then says, Kevin, yes Kevin, very good. Rich, rich motorbike driver. We felt his demeanor change right then. I again explained that I'm not Kevin, nor do I know him as my colleague and I prepare to walk away. This frustrates the man as he begins saying something to us in Spanish in a threatening manner,

and we just got out of there as fast as we could, hoping that he wouldn't follow us. Eventually we did get back to our hotel, but that was the end of our late night walks on the strip in Girana. I was in the 7th grade going from my school in the downtown area of my city to my house. The buses usually are composed of a certain constant demographic, the teenagers coming home from school, the working class adults, and single mothers with their children trying to save a buck by using the bus. In addition to this demographic, there are the two types of disturbances, drug addicts or alcoholics that are loud and disruptive, usually begging for a dollar and the middle-aged man or predator preying on middle schoolers or young women, both of which I have had my own encounters with but today's story is not my own experience.

I did have a front row seat of this crazy encounter though. Now that we have the exposition, on to the story. I find a seat near the end of the bus by myself. Because of the way the buses work, there is one row on each side of the bus with each seat has two sitting spaces, but there's also a twisty area in the middle of the bus. Two seats are directly across from each other in this area. On the opposite side of me is a working class man. Some teenagers behind me and in front of me are the main characters of this story, a dingy unshaven man and three teenage girls. The man being directly in front of me and the girls in the twisty seats in front of the man. Being that there's only two

per seat, one of the girls decides to sit on one of her friend's laps to stay close to and not have a sit beside a stranger. Upon seeing this, the man begins to sort of creepily laugh to himself before obnoxiously adjusting the way he's sitting in a suggestive manner, rubbing his thighs and staring the girl down. As the ride begins and the girl notices him, he starts to pat his thighs as if to suggest she sit down there, then leading to verbalize these actions saying things like, come here girl, come sit here instead, you belong right here. Everyone in sight of this disgusting behavior catches on and they're all watching him.

The girl simply scowls at the man and turns away, her friends throwing light insults at him. He attempts in vain, he turns to the working class man who's watching what's going on. He then says something along the lines of, Why is she sitting there? She needs to be on my lap instead. Further commenting on this high schooler's body and doing the buddy-buddy arm nudge with him as if the two were pals. Just a note, she is visibly a high schooler. Our district requires standard school attire, so she had khaki shorts and button-up short-sleeved shirt with a backpack, so there's no way that this man couldn't have known that she was underage, but I digress.

Anyways, hearing these outrageous statements from the man, the working class man replies with something like, Hey, don't you ever associate with me whatever you think this is. This is a child you're talking about. I come from Detroit and we put people like you in the dirt. The man, not at all deterred, scoffs and does this hand flinging motion as if to blow him off. The working class man's stop is coming up and as he stands he tells the girl that he apologizes for what she's going through and leaves. The girl tells him on his way out, thank you but I'll be able to handle it, just gotta wait. The gross man turns back to her and says, Handle what? Me? And laughs to himself. I was appalled at his gross statements, but even angrier than me were the adults and male thugs who started standing in the area where the situation was, all witnesses to this atrocity.

I remember hearing the gang members all start to get riled up behind me, in defense of the girl. Now this guy starts to get a bit scared. He's now stopped talking upon seeing how many people are against him. The girl again goes on to assure the crowd that she's got everything under control and things calm down a bit. That is, until he pulls the string to notify the driver that he wants to leave at the next stop. In a split second, everyone's eyes were back on him. The thugs begin standing up again, lingering near the doors just in case he plans to run. The bus begins to arrive to the stop and as the man stands up, so does the girl.

He attempts to walk past her, but upon approaching her, she pushes him back, not to get him off his feet, but to get him back from the forming group of people. She does this because as he stumbles backward, like Jango, she swings her belt off her waist and yells, you like to prey on little girls? You like flirting with little girls as a grown man? And starts beating the brakes off this guy with it, and yes, she was using the metal side. My ears filled with the clinking of metal on his body and head, the slapping of the leather on the skin, and the moans and cries of this fully grown man who is now on the ground in tears attempting to escape from his well-deserved beating. The bus ends up completely stopping, the driver running

back to separate the two. The girl is still beating the man with all her might as the bus driver rushes over to pick her up and pull her away from the man. The man ends up crawling hands and knees off the bus where he then laid on the concrete moaning and crying in pain. Everyone was escorted off the bus and the police were soon called to get the man medical attention. The police ended up detaining the girl and I couldn't find any information about her charges, but I hope wherever she is, she's having a good day. As for the man, all I can say is just don't be a creep and bad things won't happen to you. I admire that girl's bravery and the passengers that bonded together for the safety

of the girl were the best demonstration of what a community should be that I'd ever seen. The End lived out in rural Michigan and every October they would throw a big party called the Hayride. Friends and family would all come over. There'd be a bonfire, hayride, food, music, basically a big country party with a hundred people or so. The hayrides were one of the few times I could stay up super late. After one hayride I was in the second story of the house getting ready for bed. I remember hearing a loud noise outside so I went to the window. It was completely dark out, maybe 10.30 or 11pm. I heard my parents talking outside so I wasn't too concerned. About a football field's length down the road there was a sharp 90 degree turn. I started to see a glow coming from that area. My parents saw it too and were

obviously alarmed. I heard my mom come inside and I went to find out what was going on and she sent me back to bed. Years later I found out what had really happened. My parents had been cleaning up from the hayride, going back and forth between the house and the barn. They hear a car crash at the sharp turn in the road which happened maybe once every two years or so. They left the barn. My mom was going to the house to call 911 and my dad was going to check to make sure that people were okay. By the time they got to the house they realized the car had flipped and caught fire. They heard people laughing and yelling and then one of them said that there was a house up ahead and that they should go there. My mom said it was the creepiest

thing that she had ever heard, the laughing and how the distance distorted their voices. My dad loudly yelled for my mom to get the rifle from the house and call 911. They had to have heard him but they kept walking. Shortly after my mom got my dad the gun, another car came screeching around the corner towards the people walking. They got in the car which took off the way it had come, not passing by our house. The fire department eventually came and put the fire out, which thankfully hadn't spread. We live in a small rural community with not a lot of strangers. It should have been easy to learn who these people were, but we didn't. We never found out who crashed the car, or who picked them up. Around every start of the summer me and my family go on a three week vacation around the US.

It's always a blast and I have very fond memories of the trips, but I will always be more alert on them next time. We were more than halfway done with our vacation so we had to head home. That meant that we had to go through the whole state of Texas. My dad wanted to drive through the night instead of stopping so I got some rest. I woke up at around the middle of the night and noticed the car had stopped moving. I sleepily rose from where I was sitting and looked out of the dash window. I saw my dad with a random dude under the hood.

I thought, no big deal deal until something caught my eye. There was a ditch beside the road and in that ditch, barely, just barely I could see the top of a couple of dudes holding weapons of various types. My blood ran cold but I had to warn my father because he hadn't seen them yet and he had his back turned to them. I thought as quickly as I could and kicked my door open and yelled, Hey dad, the gun fell out of the holder and I don't want to touch it. This is a lie of course as we don't own a gun and both the man and my dad look confused. I waved for my dad to come to where I was. I then explained the situation and for the first time in my life, he actually looked terrified. He said to the man that I'm going to

move the car closer. The man said that's fine and we both jumped in. My dad immediately floored it down the road. We did notice the car's headlights in our back window but after a while it disappeared. We drove the rest of the night and into the morning, we weren't tired at all. My mom then woke up and we had fun but kept a lookout. We made it home safe and I did a little research in the area. It turned out that a few months before a couple were actually kidnapped and are currently still missing in that area of Texas. I have no idea if what happened to those poor people could have happened to my father and our family if I didn't see those men. To be continued... This happened only about 20 minutes ago at 11pm at night so a lot of this is still fresh in my mind.

I'm driving home from my boyfriend's house and in this rare instance I drive myself home. My drive home is a straight road for the most part with only two intersections I need to cross to get to my house from my boyfriend's and very little turns except maybe two to three right hand turns. I drive a bright red Volkswagen Beetle which makes it stick out like a sore thumb to many other cars and I know a lot of people assume a female is driving it. I am at a red light at the one of two intersections waiting for the light to change when I noticed this white Cherokee Jeep pull up on the right turn lane. He immediately stopped and parked right next to my car and I know he's staring at me but I ignore him. 30 seconds pass and he's still sitting there staring at me and I stare back at him awkwardly now realizing he's staring at me still.

This older man, probably in his late 40s, intensifies his stare at me as I try to process what's happening. He then waves at me to then almost immediately gesture to give him my number. I blankly stare in shock before he again gestures for me to call him and I try to figure out how he recognizes me although I had never seen this man before. I shook my head at him and before he could react, the light was green and I sped off. The whole rest of the time I spent checking if he was behind me. Thankfully, he never resurfaced. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. And if you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit r slash let's read official and give and receive feedback from the community and maybe hear 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 remember, this is a certified hood classic.

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