The Lets Read Podcast - 153: I FOUND A STALKERS SHRINE | 21 True Scary Horror Stories | EP 141

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Stalkers, Hotels, & Crawlspaces... 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: INEKT https://www.instagram.com/_inekt/ PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead Update Description

Mom, Mom, did you see my race? Of course I did, darling. Look, you did your best. You tried. The thing is, it's not about winning. It's about taking part. Next year you might do better. But I did win, Mom.

You did? When it's sunny, make sure you can still see. At Specsavers, get two pairs of glasses from $149. And one can be prescription sunglasses. Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit Specsavers.ca for pairs of glasses from $149, and one can be prescription sunglasses. Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit specsavers.ca for details. Conditions apply. To be continued... Nestled amongst the beautifully verdant rolling hills of northern Spain, the sleepy province of Palencia has long been the breadbasket of the region. With the regal sight of Cantabrian mountains on the horizon,

visitors to the area can wander along fields of barley, wheat, and sugar beets, maybe even venturing into a small municipality that's famous for its delicious bell peppers, a place known to the locals as Torquemada. Torquemada might well be known for its vegetables, but it's famous for another reason entirely. For on the night of October 14th, 1420, a family of formerly Jewish Christian converts welcomed a son into the world. The boy's uncle Juan was a celebrated theologian and cardinal, and it was expected that the boy might one day follow his uncle into the priesthood. If so, it would rather be fitting if the boy were to be given a biblical name, Tomas, making him Tomas de Torquemada. But the name Tomás de Torquemada.

But the name Tomás de Torquemada was one that would fail to be associated with charity or piety. Instead, the boy's name would become synonymous with unspeakable cruelty, religious intolerance, and blind, violent fanaticism. Tomás was just a boy when he moved to the local San Pablo Dominican monastery to begin his induction into the priesthood. By the time he was a teenager, all he knew was doctrine, orthodoxy, and austerity, having rapidly developed a reputation for rabid religious conformity. As a result, he was promoted to prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz at Segovia. It was around this time that Tomás met the young princess Isabela. From the moment they met, the two immediately established a deep religious and ideological bond,

and Tomás served as her regular confessor and personal advisor for a great number of years. By the time he attended Isabella's coronation as queen in 1474, he had the ear and the favor of one of Europe's most powerful monarchs. Yet despite his immense power, there were two groups of people among the Spanish people that Tomás both hated and feared. One was the Mariscos, the other was the Maranos. The Mariscos were former Muslims whom the Spanish crown had forcibly converted to Christianity. Despite his own converso heritage, Tomas viewed the Mariscos with suspicion and contempt, but the majority of his hatred was reserved for the Maranos. These were Iberian Jews who had publicly converted to Christianity,

but merely as part of a ruse that would allow them to continue to practice their faith in secret. To Thomas, that was the greatest imaginable affront to God, and it was his opinion that the greatest priority of the church should be to rid Isabella's kingdom of these heretics. On Thomas' advice, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella pleaded with the Pope to grant them an inquisition in which to purify Catholic Spain, and in 1478, a papal bull granted the monarchs free reign to name inquisitors. Naturally, it wasn't long before Thomas himself was named the Grand Inquisitor of Spain. It seems the man's meteoric rise to power was simply unstoppable.

In the 15 years that he was in charge, Tomás de Torquemada expanded the Spanish Inquisition from a single tribunal in the southern city of Sevilla to a nationwide operation with more than 20 outposts around the country, including one in every major city. And it was under his leadership that the organization adopted a single unifying steadfast objective, to rid Spain of all heresy, once and for all. Spanish historian and contemporary of Tomás, Sebastian de Olmedo, once called him the honor of his order, the hammer of the heretics, the light and savior of all Spain. But this couldn't be further from the truth, and Tomas de Torquemada was about to be presented with an opportunity to prove

what a monster he truly was. During Tomas' rise to power, Catholic Spain was engaged with a bloody struggle with the Moors of Al-Andalus. The Islamic Moorish people of North Africa had invaded southern Spain more than 700 years previously via the Straits of Gibraltar. They quickly conquered the province of Roman Hispania, renaming it Al-Andalus, or the Land of the Vandals. During the hundreds of years that followed, the Muslims of southern Spain established one of the most advanced civilizations of the period. The city of Granada still boasts some frankly stunning examples of Moorish architecture, and at a time when Iron Age Britons were still living in huts and painting themselves blue, 9th century Granada had a rudimentary sewer system, public water fountains, and even street lights. What's more,

the Umayyad Caliph was so liberal and tolerant of other religions, some historians say that Granada was a Jewish state in all but name. Unlike other regions of the Muslim world at the time, the Jews of Al-Andalus were the ethnic majority and were therefore not considered foreigners. In fact, many were exempt from the jizya, a religious tax that was normally imposed on non-Muslim residents of Islamic states. According to contemporaries, there was an attitude of convivencia, or coexistence, among the citizens of Al-Andalus. Christians were also allowed to live, work, and start families in the region, just as long as they held a similar level of tolerance and respect.

Yet as the native Catholics regrouped in the north and began a rousing resurgence, their ire was focused solely on the heathens in the south. They remembered the conquests of so many years before, and to them, it didn't matter how egalitarian or accepting the Umayyads were, they were, and always would be, infidel invaders. Just as great civilizations rise, so too they must fall, and it wasn't long before the Umayyad Caliphate began to wither and crumble. So began La Reconquista. The native Catholics took advantage of the chaos, taking back more and more of their formerly Christian lands.

Thousands of vengeful Christians joined them and, in 1491, they marched on Granada, defeating the multi-faith army of the Umayyads and negotiating the Treaty of Granada, defeating the multi-faith army of the Umayyads and negotiating the Treaty of Granada. Ratified on November 25th, 1491, the treaty guaranteed the religious freedoms of Muslims and Jews in exchange for all lands previously occupied by the Moors. Just four months later, Spain's new Christian rulers completely went back on their promises, yet the subject of their hatred would not be the Moorish Muslims, who had mostly fled after their defeat. It would be the Sephardim, the Spanish Jews. Over the years that followed, an estimated 40,000 Jewish people were exiled from Catholic

Spain, forced to flee with only what they could carry. However, approximately 50,000 Sephardic Jews were given leave to remain, but only on the condition that they convert to Christianity. Although the ruling was a cruel one, it was at least an attempt at reconciliation. Yet it presented Tomas de Torquemada with a rather unique problem, because if you remember, in spite of his own Jewish background, the viciously overzealous Tomas hated the so-called Maranos with a passion. His hatred and suspicion of them boiled over into a venomous paranoia, and he became fixated on the idea that all of these newly Christian converts

were secretly practicing their faith behind closed doors, and as we previously discussed, that induced a burning rage inside of him. Almost overnight, he was faced with 50,000 potential heretics, and every single one of them needed to be questioned before they could carry on living in Christian lands. In the eyes of Tomas, he was faced with a mammoth of unenviable task, but given the celestial rewards involved, he was most definitely up to the task. And so began one of the single most horrifying periods of human history, one in which madness, violence, torture, and death all rode under the guise of a loving and forgiving institution. When the Inquisition first arrived in a town, they'd offer something

resembling a grace period. Those who came forward to confess their sins avoided any serious punishment and were simply let off with a small fine. But after the grace period was ended, those who came forward to confess their sins avoided any serious punishment and were simply let off with a small fine. But after the grace period was ended, those who were found to be performing heretical religious rites were publicly shamed. They were paraded through the streets of their town, forced to wear what was called a San Benito, a kind of yellow robe with a red cross on it, signifying they had sinned against the one true church. One particularly egregious offenders,

such as rabbis, mullahs, or those who own religious texts were forced to whip themselves with fine cordage as they were paraded through town. If they didn't whip hard enough, the Inquisition would do it for them, targeting the back of the knees until walking became impossible. If a penitent passed out, they would be flogged continuously until they awoke again to finish their journey. Men were said to be in so much pain after such marches that they lay in bed for days afterward, barely able to move, barely able to speak. However, those who were foolish enough to deny their so-called sins,

those who tried to lie their way out of their penitence, they were subjected to the very thing the Inquisition was infamous for. Torture. Yet despite being renowned for its methods of inflicting pain, the Inquisition would only subject a person to confirm the culpability of the accused had been gathered by other means, and every other method of negotiation had been tried and exhausted. Or in other words, a prime suspect refuses to admit their guilt. Despite the archaic legalese, the implications are terrifying. Just about anyone can be subject to torture if the inquisitor in question had it in for them.

And as you can imagine, just about anyone was tortured under the Spanish Inquisition. Secondly, the Inquisition was prohibited to maim, mutilate, or draw blood from the prisoner, meaning they had to come up with some rather horrifying creative methods of inflicting torment and suffering. Since there were inquisitions all over Europe, the Catholic Church essentially had a network of professional torturers to draw experience from. And so, some unfortunate priest was tasked with collating a list of bloodless torture methods from all over Christendom. This was then passed on to the Spanish Inquisition, who were then armed with literally hundreds of highly creative and painfully effective methods of extracting information from suspected heretics. There was also the question of how long and how often a suspect could be subjected to these methods of torture,

and it was decided that depending on the severity of the accusation, a suspect would be subject to a varying number of torture sessions, with the maximum being eight. Torment, as the inquisitors called it, could only be inflicted for fifteen minutes at a time, with a mandatory period of rest afterwards. All in all, the inquisition tried to design a method of torture that they would call humane, and assured all of their victims that a trained physician would be in attendance to ensure they suffered no serious injuries. But in reality, it meant you could be tortured on the hour every hour for eight solid hours, and the injuries weren't just serious, they were life-changing. One method of torture was known as el estrepado. The hands of the accused would be tied behind their back.

These wrist ties would then be attached to a kind of crane, one that would lift the victim into the air by the arms, causing an unbearable amount of pain. Some inquisitors even strapped weights to the victim's feet to cause more resistance and pain, and after a while, their overextended shoulders would separate from their sockets with sickening twin pops. Reports of its effectiveness were widespread, with some inquisitors claiming it produced a confession from even the most stringent deniers in less than an hour. And while Strapedo was incapable of killing its victim, permanent nerve, ligament, and tendon damage was almost unavoidable.

Another method managed to turn a basic necessity for life into a means of torture, and even murder with what was called the water cure. Victims of the water cure were strapped down and had water funneled into their mouths, some say up to 30 pints, that's 600 ounces at a time. This could cause the victim to violently and uncontrollably vomit, denying them breath and sometimes rupturing their digestive tract. Even worse, drinking copious amounts of water in a short period of time can lead to a condition known as hyponatremia, or in layman's terms, water intoxication. It causes sodium levels in the bloodstream to plummet and can lead to a fatal inflammation of the brain. The name of this torture device is entirely self-explanatory. The Head Crusher. The victim's

head was placed in a vice, the victim's chin positioned on top of a metal bar while the upper portion sat atop the victim's skull. To begin the torture, the Inquisitor would tighten a screw at the top of the device, slowly crushing the victim's skull. As the skull was compressed, the victim's teeth shattered, and in particularly extreme cases, the victim's eyeballs would pop out of the skull, which most certainly led to infection, disease, and eventually death. But perhaps the most eye-watering horrific method of torture used by the Spanish Inquisition has to be what they called the Cradle of Judas. The Cradle of Judas bears an uncanny resemblance

to a regular wooden stool, but with one distinct difference. Instead of a flat wooden seat, it has a sharpened iron pyramid. If you can't see where this one is going, I'll spell it out for you. The accused person was stripped naked, bound at the wrists, then forced to sit atop the sharpened point of the iron pyramid. Inevitably, the steel peak would penetrate the victim somewhere you most definitely do not want to be penetrated. But it gets so much worse. In the same way that inquisitors found a way to enhance the effects of El Estrapado, they found a way to enhance the Cradle of Judas. Using ropes and pulley systems, the sadistic interrogator would force the accused to sink deeper and deeper down into the pyramid. This is yet another example of

how some methods of torture both did draw blood and cause death by infection or internal bleeding. In fact, Tomás de Torquemada received so much negative press over his flagrant disregard for the rules that Pope Sixtus had to reprimand him, not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions. Yet each time, Isabella and Ferdinand rushed to his defense, saying that Thomas' zealousness was purely due to his love of Christ, and each time, the Pope dropped any disciplinary proceedings against their favorite priest. The only thing that slowed Thomas down was his ailing health, although it appears that this was used as a mere excuse to dilute his power in 1494. With his faith in his mission undiminished, Torquemada retired to the monastery of St.

Thomas Aquinas in Avila, returning to the much simpler life of a Franciscan monk. Then, after more than 15 years as Spain's grand inquisitor, Torquemada died in the monastery on September 16th, 1498. When he finally died, he did so with the blood of literally thousands of people on his hands. He was a man that believed that on his entry into heaven, he would take his rightful place at God's right hand. But in reality, if there truly is a loving God up there, one who rewards the meek and punishes the wicked, then there isn't a single shred of doubt that Tomas de Torquemada is roasting in hell. All we can hope for is that one of history's most profane and debased murderers is being subjected to the same torture methods suffered by his lesions of innocent victims. Throughout history, Europe has birthed its fair share of fearsome warrior societies.

From the warmongering Spartans of ancient Greece, to the mercenary Celts who sold their swords as far afield as Egypt, many have a right to contest the crown of Europe's finest martial culture. But as history shows, none have been as savage, bloodthirsty, or merciless as the men whose dragon-headed longships pierced the mists off the north shores of Britannia. These were the Northmen, men who worshipped a pantheon of terrifying icons, men who were said to descend into a euphoric trance during battle, men who slaughtered holy Christian monks as if they were nothing but cattle. To those they raided, murdered, and enslaved, they were the Oskamani, the Loklanik, the Dubgel,

and the Fingal. But to each other, they were the Danes, the Ossmen, the Vikings. As warlike and aggressive as the Vikings were, they weren't simply bloodthirsty savages who eschewed all forms of civilization. In fact, the works of Viking historians are perhaps some of the most extensive and revealing documents produced during the entirety of the first millennium. Known in Old Norse as the Sharr, the Viking sagas appear to have been written around the year of 1200 AD and combine epic poetry, history, and a dash of legend to form one of history's most fascinating pieces of written documentation. Arguably the most well-known variety of saga is the Islindingasar, a rather detailed account of the Viking migration to Iceland and the blood feuds that plague the emigrant families as they attempt to carve out a new life for themselves in the cold and barren steppe. As you can imagine, there are many examples of foul play,

murder, and barbarity in the Viking sagas. But the description of one particular slaying stands out among the others, and it details the ambush and killing of Thrain Sigvinsson by Kari Solmandursson and two sons of Njall Torgersson. Both had sailed to Iceland in two separate expeditions, each gaining a great deal of honor in the process. But a disagreement in their camps led to insults being exchanged and in response to the disrespect shown by the arrogant Thrain, Kari and the sons of Njall decided to ambush him at an icy river crossing. They waited weeks for Thrain to go on a journey that would involve crossing the thick ice bridge on foot, leaving him extremely vulnerable to attack as he and his party approached the opposite riverbank.

Finally, Kari's spies passed on the news that Thrain was on the move, so he and his allies rushed to the ambush site, patiently waiting for their enemy to appear. Slowly but surely, Thrain and his bodyguards came into view and began their careful trek across the ice. It must have been agonizing, watching as your sworn enemies make their way towards you at a painfully slow pace. According to the sagas, the ice bridge crossing wasn't just a few steps across a frozen stream. The river in question is thought to be at least 150 meters wide, so given how slippery and treacherous it would have been, we can be sure that it wouldn't have made for a quick journey.

The impatience of Kari and his men must have been stretched to the breaking point, so much so that one might say they were biting their shields in frustration. As it turns out, the term shield biter was a familiar one to Viking warriors, and it was perhaps a less than respectful nickname for those they called Uffadinar, literally translating as those who wear coats of wolfskin. The Uffadinar did as their name describes, intended to wear nothing but a wolfskin when charging into battle. And I really do mean nothing but a wolfskin. Because at a time when most Vikings made the tactically intelligent decision to wear mail and helmets, the Ulfðanar eschewed any kind of protection, often taking two one-handed weapons instead of an axe and sword and shield

combination. This level of disregard for their own safety struck terror into the hearts of those that faced them. To their enemies, the Ulfhedanar were not soldiers, they were madmen, and the word used to describe their behavior in battle was Hamask, which means to change forms. They were men who turned into wolves during battle, the foundation on which the modern werewolf legend could well be built on. Yet despite the Ulfedenar being terrifying in appearance alone, there was something else at work in them that made them considerably more frightening, something that begins with a rather creepy looking flower. With its pretty looking cream and purple petals, you'd be forgiven for thinking the henbane looks rather benign.

But henbane had been used as far back as ancient Greece, where it was combined with other plants to create a natural anesthetic potion. It was also known for its psychoactive properties, with some Arabian sources describing the plant as a key ingredient in what was called a magic brew, a phrase which seems to be nothing more than a euphemism for an intoxicant. Such psychoactive properties are said to include visual hallucinations, a feeling that the user is flying, and short-term memory loss. But ingesting henbane can also have another rather distinct effect on the user, sudden and uncontrollable anger. This anger effect can range from agitation to full-blown rage and combativeness depending

on the dosage and the individual's mental state, wrote Karsten Fartru, an ethnobotanist at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. It was this full-blown rage that led to Viking warriors biting their shields in delirious frustration before finally charging their enemies with a fury unmatched by any before or since. It made for a horrifyingly savage display, and it even unnerved the Ulfdinar's own comrades, who apparently held them in such contempt that one nickname wasn't even enough for them. Men called them shield biters, but they also called them bear shirts, or in Old Norse, berserker. Consider that for a moment, being attacked by a semi-naked man wearing nothing but wolfskin, and slowly becomes obvious that he's

too high to care about dying. In fact, he thinks dying is the best possible outcome for him, second only to killing you and every last one of your friends. Not only that, but the anesthetic effect of the henbane means he can shrug off wounds that would easily fell a sober man. Starting to see why Iron Age Britons feared the Vikings so much? So we have every reason to believe that on the day of ambush, to further enhance their combat prowess, Kari and his men were at least partly under the day of ambush, to further enhance their combat prowess, Kari and his men were at least partly under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs,

and when they struck, they did so with terrifying ferocity. What follows is without a doubt the most dramatic account of combat in all of Njall's saga, as Kari and his men chase a fleeing Thrain Sigvinsson across the ice bridge, slipping and sliding all the way, one of Kari's men surges ahead of his comrades and catches up to Thrain, who turns just in time for the man to bury his axe into the top of his skull. According to the sagas, Thrain's skull was split perfectly in two, from the top of his skull to his jaw, and the man who killed him said he heard Thrain's teeth tinkling on the ice as they fell from his cleaved skull. We can only imagine the steam that rose

off the contents of Thrain's skull, hot flesh exposed to the icy air, and how his blood seeped into the ice, melting it slightly before cooling again so that seeping blood and brain froze, sealing the dead man's skull to the ice. When the battle was over, Kari Sulmunderson had to chip away the frozen gore before removing what remained of Thrain's head from his shoulders. To him, it was a trophy, evidence of an insult avenged. Even by Viking standards, the ambush was widely condemned by Kari's contemporaries as he had chosen to ambush Thrain whilst he was unprepared, rather than face him in open combat. But further violence was avoided when Njall married off one of his daughters to Thrain's brother whilst adopting one of the dead man's son as his own. According to the sagas, the orphaned

boy was well cared for, and they all even went on to grant his foster son both chieftaincy and a wife. Yet the sagas rarely have happy endings, and not only did this orphan boy die in a fire intended to kill Kari Solmunderson, the man who'd murdered his father, Kari Solmunderson also goes on to marry the orphan boy's widow So essentially throughout the course of his life Kari takes the father's life, takes the son's life All before he marries the son's wife It appears that when the Vikings had blood feuds There were no half measures

And the amount of justice received was entirely proportionate to the amount of blood You were willing to spill. Picture the scene. It's June of 1462, high summer in Valachia, the southern province of modern-day Romania. You're a soldier in the Imperial Ottoman Army of Sultan Mehmed II, part of an invasion force sent to subdue a local lord, one unwise enough to have made an alliance with one of your sultan's enemies. Valachia is a small and insignificant fiefdom, merely a stepping stone on the road to the greater prizes of Budapest and

Vienna. Subjugating the locals should make for a quick and easy task, you and your comrades think. The Wallachians are backed by a small defensive force. Us Turks have the weight of the empire behind us, not to mention the favor of Allah. But the Wallachians prove more tenacious than first expected, and a nighttime ambush of your encampment leaves many dead on both sides. To your horror, you learn that a dedicated squad of Valahian soldiers had attempted to fight their way to the center of the camp, no doubt intending on assassinating the Sultan himself. You and your comrades are furious at such a despicable display of dishonor. To you,

such a disgrace must not go unavenged. The Sultan only feeds your anger and bloodlust as he promises an immediate march on the regional capital, a city known as Targovista. Only, as you gather your things and prepare to depart, you hear the news that the Valahians sent a team of soldiers to butcher as many of the army's horses as possible. As a result, unless you can pillage one on the way, you will be without a trusty mount for the remainder of the invasion. By the time you and your comrades reach Targovista, you're parched, starving, and utterly exhausted. The entire journey, Valachian archers picked off your brother in arms from hidden vantage points. And what's worse, the sickly-looking beggars, minstrels, and ladies of the night you met on the way, they weren't just chance encounters. They were walking biological weapons.

The Valachians had rounded up as many walking sufferers of bubonic plague as they could, disguised them, then sent them wandering at your advancing ranks to spread the deadly pox. Over the past few days, men have been dropping like flies. The huge bursting pustules under their armpits invite sepsis and rot. You're terrified, paranoid, and running on empty, but you're still up for the fight. One last push and it will all be over, the sergeants say, and for now, you will leave them. You and your brothers have been prepared to storm the defenses of a well-defended city. You have grappling hooks, rudimentary explosives, bladed weapons of varying sizes,

and a wealth of experience in plying your blood-soaked trade. You're prepared for any and all eventualities, all except one. For as mounted Ottoman scouts report back to their commanders, word spreads around the camp that the gates to the city have been left wide open. In fact, the entire city is deserted. Not a single Valachin has remained behind to defend their home. It's hard to imagine the cheer wouldn't have echoed around the camp. Cries of God is great and God save the Sultan erupting from every direction. You've seen too much death already. Too many friends have been lost along the way. A prize taken without a fight was just as valuable.

You and your brother's soldiers marched toward the city gates, the Sultan and his royal guard at the head of the column. It feels like a victory parade, the beginning of your unstoppable march across Christendom. But little did you know, it's not a victory march, it's a funeral procession. As you watch the first section of troops march through the gates, the first screams rise up from the head of the column. The entire way you can hear more and more of your comrades crying out in horror. You just can't see what they're reacting to. But then, passing through the huge wood and iron gates, you see what horrified them so, and it's an image that will stick with you for whatever time you happen to have left.

Bodies. Thousands of them. The main thoroughfare of Targovista is lined with dead bodies. All are Ottoman soldiers, all your brother's soldiers, and they've been killed in one of the slowest and most torturous ways imaginable. Each man has been impaled on an 18-foot wooden stake, and from the looks of things, whoever had done so had made sure to impale them whilst they were still alive. Even more grotesque is the method of impalement, as the dead men have been pierced vertically, not horizontally, before being mounted at the side of the road. You walk down the city's main drag for almost thirty minutes, and every inch of it is lined with impaled corpses of your compatriots, twenty thousand of them to be exact. Most of you are veterans, even the relatively new soldiers had been seasoned by

the march through southern Valachia. But for some, the site of what became known as the Forest of the Dead was simply too much to bear. Some of the younger, less hardened troops simply lose their minds there and then, and have to be restrained by their comrades. One might expect some of the greenhorns to snap at such a site, but even the old salts are ashen-faced and shaken. Men are vomiting in the roads beside them, some are crying, many are praying. One or two even talk of deserting at the first available opportunity. Remember, it is June, high summer in Valahia, a place where daytime temperatures have been known to reach 112 degrees Fahrenheit,

the stench must have been absolutely abominable, a miasma to match an apocalyptic atrocity. Yet on and on you march for mile after mile, breathing in the reek and the rot and the ruin. Once you reach the open country on the other side of Targovista, the Sultan, obviously shaken by the forest of the dead, orders a huge spike-lined pit to be dug around the camp to prevent the infiltration of the evidently savage Valahans. Few of you sleep that night, those of you that manage to get some wake up screaming. But even if you did manage to catch some shut-eye, you'd probably only be woken up moments later anyways. The sentries are jumpy that night. They keep seeing ghosts in the distant darkness,

phantom Valachins that are mere figments of their imagination, and every time they do so, they raise the alarm. They're scared, just like you are. The following morning, the Sultan orders a tactical withdrawal from the area, citing difficulties in your supply lines. You're not retreating. You've not been defeated, don't worry. You'll sack a small town on the way back to Turkey, grab some loot, grab a few slaves and call it a victory. No one will talk about the Forest of the Dead, not by order of the Sultan. No one must ever know what a crushing display of cruelty was inflicted on the mighty Ottoman. And all by some small fried Balkan, who just

so happened to have an insatiable appetite for abhorrent acts of villainy. But who is this monster anyway? One of your fellow survivors asks. He calls himself the son of the dragon, one of the sergeants say. Son of the dragon? The fear in another survivor's voice is palpable. Aye, his father was a knight of the order of the dragon, a Dracul, the sergeant replies. So his son, Vladislav, is of the dragon, you see. That is why they call him Vlad Dracula. Dracula. You might be a lowly Ottoman soldier, but you've heard that name before, and it's only now that you begin to understand why a man might have such burning hatred and evil inside of him.

Because this isn't the first time Vlad Dracula has encountered Turks. In fact, he's very familiar with them indeed. You see, a young Vlad had once accompanied his father and young brother on a trip to Gallipoli to meet with the Ottoman Sultan. It turned out the reason for this summit was to secure the loyalty of Vlad's father to the Turkish Sultan. But the ruler of Wallachia was struck between a rock and a hard place. He had the Turks on one side and the comparably powerful Hungarians on the other. If he pledged allegiance to one of them, the other would surely march against him.

Vlad's father made a reasonable point, but the Sultan had a better idea. Instead of playing the diplomat, the Sultan simply had Vlad and younger brother thrown into a Turkish prison. If their father's loyalty to the Ottomans wavered, it was heavily implied that the boys would be tortured, executed, and mutilated. It is believed that Vlad spent around 10-15 years of his life as a prisoner of the Sultan in the fortress of Ergrugos, but not in the sense you might think. He wasn't kept in a cell constantly, not as time went by anyway, and as his behavior improved, so did his standard of living. But his early 20s,

Vlad's life was relatively comfortable. He became a kind of illegitimate son of the Sultan, enjoying the freedom of the fortress and the surrounding area. It didn't matter if he ran, after all, where would he run to? He'd be caught within a day. Befitting his fortress prison, Vlad developed a particular interest in the martial arts. He taught himself to fight with a variety of bladed weapons and since the Turks had some of the finest archers on the planet at the time, he was in no short supply of archery teachers. Vlad also showed an interest in military tactics and spent a lot of his time poring over old military stratagems, studying maps and soaking up dispatches. He was preparing for something, readying himself for the storm that gathered on the horizon, and in November of 1447, it struck. Vlad's father and his older brother, Mircea,

were murdered after the Hungarians invaded Valahia. In response, the Sultan sent the Imperial Army to meet them and foolishly allowed Vlad to ride in the vanguard after he begged to avenge his father's death. But it was all a ruse, and after crossing the border into Volosia, Vlad disappeared. You're not sure what happened to this Vlad Dracula after he escaped the custody of the Sultan. All you know is that he reappeared in Wallachia at the head of a Hungarian backed invasion force in 1456. He kicked out the puppet ruler the Sultan had installed, then went about purging all of his enemies, which included a small group of Saxon settlers who happened to offend him by taking back the goods some Wallachian merchant had bought from

them. It was daylight robbery, a high offense for sure, but to respond the way this Vlad Dracula did was just inhuman. You remember hearing about how some Balkan madman who impaled men and women on stakes then burned their children in front of them while they were still alive? People said it took days for them to die, that whatever psycho was responsible had a way of impaling you as not to pierce any vital internal organs. That way, you'd die of the pain, or the thirst, or the exposure before you ever died of blood loss. Then there was the rumor you heard, at least, you pray it's just a rumor. That Dracula had a huge copper cauldron built, one with a huge wooden lid with human neck-sized holes cut into it. He'd then fill it with water,

secure a couple of his enemies in there by the necks, then light a huge fire underneath. That way, he could watch as they felt the water getting hotter and hotter, watch as they begged, watch as they cried, watch as they felt the water getting hotter and hotter, watch as they begged, watch as they cried, watch as they screamed and screamed and screamed in agony, and then he could watch as they died. Then there was the stuff about him impaling people. He seemed obsessed with impaling people. What is wrong with a person when they're so fixated on something like that?

We even heard he impaled pregnant women in a way that they... But, by God, that doesn't bear thinking about. All you want to think about now is getting back to Turkey. Back to your family and your fields. Back home. Many years go by. You survive another campaign with the Kapakulu, the Imperial Army. But that one will prove to be your last. You take an arrow in the knee, some lucky shot by a rebellious Greek,

and your adventuring days are over. You retire to your farm, to your wife, to your children, and for the first time in many, many years, you are content. One day you're browsing plowshares in the local marketplace when you hear news from the northwestern frontier of the empire. Valahya is once again independent and has been for a few years now. The Turks leave Dracula B and in turn, he leaves the borders untouched. You hear that as a show of respect, the Sultan sent two emissaries to convey his respects to the son of the dragon. Dracula told them they must take off their headwear when in his presence. The emissaries replied that their turbans denote that they are Syeds, descended from the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and that they would have to

respectfully refuse to remove them. Dracula was said to have respected their custom in his own special way by having their turbans nailed to their skulls with three iron bolts. They were reportedly still alive when Dracula sent them back to Turkey on horseback. They were discovered a week later, carrion crows picking at their rotting corpses, which had in fact been tied to the horses. It's stories like that which made you glad you got out of the kapakulu while you still had the breath in your lungs. Men like Dracula remind you that the semum, the djinn, the demons, they sometimes take human form. And then no matter how much time goes by, no matter how much Dracula's legend gets twisted and embellished,

he was real, very real. And once, you almost met him. Born on February 11th of 1860, Karl Denke grew up as the son of a wealthy German farming couple and part of what is now modern-day Poland. Little is known of Karl's early years, but it seems he was a quiet and soft-spoken child who fared poorly in social situations. It's unclear why, but at just 12 years old, a young Karl left his childhood home, never to return. In nearby Munsterberg, he became an

apprentice gardener for a while. But after deciding that outdoor work didn't suit him, he quit and worked a variety of odd jobs before receiving a sizable inheritance following his father's death. It was with this inheritance money that Carl purchased his first plot of land, having bizarrely decided to take up farming. As you can imagine, given the amount of outdoor work involved, Carl found that farming didn't suit him either. So he sold his land for considerably less than he paid for it, then continued working odd jobs around Munsterberg whilst living in a small house there. Carl did okay for himself.

He was a popular figure in his local community, and even played organ down at his local church. As a result of his staunch piety, generosity, and friendly demeanor, Carl was nicknamed Papa Denka by the local townsfolk, and he became something of a surrogate uncle for some of the town's more wayward youth. If you were in need of something to eat, go see Papa Denka. Need a bed for the night? Go see Papa Denka. Late on the rent? You get the idea. By age 66, Carl would become a pillar for the night? Go see Papa Danka. Late on the rent, you get the idea. By age 66, Carl would become a pillar of the community. Everyone knew his name, everyone knew his face. There wasn't a soul in Munsterberg that didn't know his rosy red cheeks and wide,

warm smile. But the same face that everyone had come to love so much, it was nothing but a mask. A mask Carl wore to hide his true nature. Papa Denka wasn't the man that everyone thought he was, and his mask was about to slip. It was the night of December 21st, 1924, just a few nights before Christmas, and befitting the time of year, Papa Denka's house was seeing increased traffic from the city's most vulnerable people. It was such a good service he provided, what with the streets being so dangerous. More and more of the homeless were going missing every year now, vanishing from the recesses they'd been banished to, never to reappear.

Some said the last place their missing friend had been seen was Papadenka's house, but that made all the sense in the world. He was a charitable man. Many of the homeless darkened his door on a nightly basis. Besides, such a man of faith wouldn't have it in him to hurt anyone, would he? But that same festively frosty December night, a passerby heard something as he walked past Papa Denka's house, something that made his blood run cold. It was the cry of a man who knew he was about to die, a kind of blood-curdling mortal lament, the final sound they might ever make. The passerby burst into Denka's house, terrified that the man himself might be under attack from one of the very people he was trying to help. But instead, the passerby quickly encountered a young vagrant, still on his feet for a moment, despite his head just about being cleaved in two.

When asked who'd inflicted such a terrible wound, the dying man managed to utter two final words before he expired. Papa, Denka. Realizing he had stumbled into the den of a sinister and surreptitious predator, the passerby immediately fled Denka's home, headed straight for the nearest police station. Once Denka had been arrested, a search of his house revealed the hidden identification papers of a dozen missing people, plus various items of male clothing that were so small they could be categorically ruled out as belonging to Denka. But by far the most disturbing and incriminating discovery was to be made in Papa Denka's kitchen. Police located two large vinegar barrels, each containing large chunks of what looked a lot like pork. Denke seemed to be in the process of pickling some gammon for the winner.

At least, the police were hoping it was gammon. Yet when they discovered the butchered corpses of up to 30 of Denke's victims, it became clear the Munsterberg police had a cannibal on their hands. What's more, Denke had made the mistake of writing down the names and ages of his victims in a small notebook, along with the dates of their murders and the parts of their corpses he was pickling. The scope and scale of his operation was horrifyingly clear, and it's obvious that the pickling process was intended to allow Denke to savor his victims for months to come. But the questions of what made the man so deranged in the first place, and why he was compelled not

to only kill, but consume the bodies of his victims, those police were anxious to answer. Unfortunately, they never got the chance, as Papa Denka would use a secreted handkerchief to hang himself in his cell on the very first night of his arrest. He was obviously deeply ashamed of his actions and was unable to face the backlash and consequence of those. But just how much Denka had to be ashamed of was only revealed after his death. It had turned out that not only had Papa Danka pickled and eaten his poor, vagrant victims He'd also fed other people their remains The vast majority of the homeless folk who visited Papa Danka were given small jars of what he called pickled pork

Small, highly nutritious chunks of protein that could last Munsterberg's hungry for a considerably long time But it wasn't pork. It wasn't ever pork. Papa Denke, Munsterberg's happiest, holliest, friendliest citizen, had been feeding the homeless to each other, and had been doing it, for years. Needless to say, it wasn't a very Merry Christmas that year in Munsterberg. Not for those who knew the taste of Papa Danka's pickled pork. Born in 1404 as Gilles de Montmorency-Lavelle in Brittany, France, the young Gilles would

grow up to inherit his father's title as the Baron des Rés. More commonly known as Gilles des Rés, he was once a respected chevalier, what the French called their knights, and rose to prominence as none other than Joan of Arc's military chief of staff. His was a sort of celebrated career, at least until some profoundly disturbing proclivities were discovered. Soon, a web of lies, deceit, and predatory murder was unwoven, until it was clear that Gilles Deray was one of the most monstrous individuals to have ever walked the earth. The family that Gilles belonged to was the core of House Montmorency, one of the oldest, most respected, and most distinguished aristocratic houses in France at that time. From an early age, Gilles seemed to live up to the high expectations his family had for him. By his teenage years,

he had distinguished himself militarily during the wars of secession that had been the bane of the Duchy of Brittany. He also gained additional honor by fighting at the Battle of Anjou, fighting for his duchess against France's historic enemy, the English, in 1427. By the time Joan of Arc emerged on the scene in 1429 to challenge the pesky English, Gilles de Ré was already one of France's most celebrated generals. The citizenry didn't care about how young he was, he won battles, and that was all that mattered to them. As a result of his esteem and martial prowess, Gilles was assigned to Joan of Arc as one of her personal bodyguards and fought at her side in several battles. He particularly

distinguished himself in her arguably greatest victory, the breaking of the English siege at Orleans. He then accompanied her to Reims for the coronation of King Charles VII, who made Gilles de Réve Marshal of France, a distinction awarded to generals for exceptional achievement. Gilles was also exceptionally wealthy. Not only had he inherited significant land holdings and estates from both his father and maternal grandfather, he married a rich heiress, a match which brought him even more extensive holdings, and made him one of France's richest men. He was so rich that he could afford to retire from military life in 1434 at the age of just 30. But it soon became clear that Gilles was not clearly

as good at managing his finances as he was at commanding soldiers in wartime, and it didn't take him long to squander his mountains of riches with an expensive taste that rivaled that of the country's monarch. Within just 18 months of his retirement, Gilles had been forced to sell off most of his extensive estate, and his worried family members rushed to secure a decree from the king which forbid him from piddling away what was left. Then, in a bizarre and misguided attempt to recoup his holdings, Gilles turned to alchemy, hoping to discover a way in which to turn common-based metals into the most precious of metals, gold. But that's not all. Gilles also turned to Satanism, hoping to gain knowledge,

power, and riches by summoning the devil himself. Shocking as that may be, the Satanism was just a small and benign component of Gilles' great and malevolent evil. As it turned out, he had a taste for the torture, carnal violation, and murder of children. In 1440, it was clear that an increasingly erratic Gilles was losing his mind. One day, he got into a dispute with local church figures and the disagreement escalated until Gilles ended up kidnapping a local priest. Such a reckless act against a man of God triggered a general ecclesiastical investigation until Gilles ended up kidnapping a local priest. Such a reckless act against a man of God triggered a general ecclesiastical investigation of Gilles, which in turn unearthed some frankly horrifying things. It turned out that the once celebrated

general had been murdering children, mostly boys but also the occasional girl, by the hundreds. His method of choice was to lure children from peasant or lower class families to his grand countryside chateau by offering them gifts such as candies, toys, or clothing, things they would have been otherwise unable to afford. His fame, kind demeanor, and generous treatment would quickly put his young victims at their ease. He would then continue to feed and pamper them, before finally leading them to a bedroom where Gilles and accomplices would seize their victims. As he confessed in a subsequent trial, Gilles got a

sadistic kick out of watching their fear when he explained what was in store for the kid. And what was in store was none too good. Suffice to say that it involved torture and ended with the children's murder, usually via decapitation. The victims and their clothing were then burned in the fireplace and their ashes dumped in a moat. After Gilles confessed to his crimes, he and his accomplices were condemned to death. He was executed on October 26th, 1440 by burning and hanging simultaneously. Gilles was so infamous that his story would go on to inspire the fairy tale of Bluebeard, a tale of a wealthy serial wife-killer who was as charming as he was depraved. This happened after I went to university, so I was 18.

I made an effort to make friends after I moved onto campus, and ended up with a few groups to hang out with out with including a new girlfriend and plenty of people from my classes that I liked well enough. There was one class before lunch where it was traditional for people to go to the cafeteria afterwards to eat in pairs or threes. I wasn't very discerning about who I'd have lunch with because I got on fine with most people from the class and we're all trying to make an effort to be social. So when one girl, Lily, asked if I wanted to get lunch together after that class, I didn't have any reason not to. We talked about school and that kind of thing, nothing noteworthy, but she did ask me to get lunch with her again the next week. It became a pattern and there wasn't exactly a way to start

saying no suddenly. It was fine but it did mean I lost the chance to eat lunch with anyone else on those days. In hindsight, I suppose that was the point. One day in class, I asked someone if I could add them on social media. This happened in front of Lily. I saw her face jerk towards me from a couple of seats over. It was such a sharp reaction that it was hard to ignore, and I still remember it. By the time I got home later that day, Lily had sent me a friend request. No friends in common, I don't know how she knew my last name. I was a bit surprised, but I guess she just dug through the university's social media pages and found me through there. It gave me a bad feeling but surely it was fine, right? She ended up messaging me a

lot and commenting on anything I posted. I told myself that she was just awkward and we became friends if not close. I'd known worse people. She still always got me to go eat lunch with her after our one shared class. Other than that, we rarely spent time together in person. I saw her around sometimes, but I never went out of my way to hang out with her. So it was mostly online messaging and seeing each other in group settings. Coincidentally, my girlfriend was also named Lily. This was something that clearly bothered Lily, not my girlfriend, who couldn't. This was something that clearly bothered Lily, not my girlfriend, who couldn't have found it less interesting, it's a common name. She occasionally hinted that she wanted my girlfriend to pick a different name,

or joked about her not suiting it. She clearly didn't like my girlfriend at all, and I had an idea of why. It was hard to ignore it by this point. Lily was starting to unsubtly hint that she had a crush on me. I tried not to address it because what was I going to say? I never know what to do when a friend makes a pass on me. I was also not interested in the least. Even ignoring the weird stuff she pulled, Lily was not my type at all. She tended to dress and act in a way somewhere between a 50s housewife and one of those adults who was still obsessed with Disney princesses, if you can picture that. Things took an uncomfortable turn on the day of our last shared class of the year. Instead of asking me to lunch like she

usually did, Lily asked if I'd go for a walk with her. Again, I didn't exactly know how to refuse, so I said alright. Our campus was bordered by a large patch of woodland. Lily led me into the woods and the sounds of our fellow students slowly faded away. She sat down in the log and I joined her. She started talking about how she was going to miss me over the summer. I tried placating her, but I didn't want to be there, especially because she seemed almost on the verge of tears. I think I tried to make an excuse about having plans with my girlfriend but before I could leave, Lily chose to kiss me without warning. It was uncomfortable

to say the least. I got out of there and was happy to think I wouldn't see her for a while. I came back to university after the summer, moving into a house with my friends. Without going off topic, there were some serious issues in my friend group, a lot of petty arguing and worse. I broke up with my girlfriend around the start of that school year as well, and basically the whole mess made me recontextualize things with Lily because it suddenly didn't seem as bad. That said, I didn't want to be alone with her. We mostly talked online. She was still constantly messaging me after all. One upside of everything was that I started dating a boy. Lily was not pleased to hear that news.

I think she hoped to sneak in after I broke up with my girlfriend but as I said before that was never going to happen. There wasn't a big gap between my break and this new relationship so she must have thought she missed her chance to be with me. This is where the story gets bad. At this time I was fairly active on Tumblr. I occasionally talked about my life and mostly reblogged photos and stuff. I was there one day when something odd happened. One of the blogs I'd followed had received an ask with some phrases I recognized. It took a second to recognize that it was taken from my about page. That made me freeze. I read the message properly. Someone was asking this completely random person to analyze a section of text from my page, asking for their opinion on the type of person who could

write it. I cannot stress how messed up it was to see people talking about me like I was a character in a book that they were trying to study. The reply was basically, I don't know, sorry. But the important thing was that the question hadn't been anonymous. It linked to someone's blog. Obviously, I wanted to know who had taken such a bizarre interest in me. As far as I knew, no one in real life other than my boyfriend knew about my page. Well, sorry, no prizes for guessing who was behind it. What I found was like a shrine.

She was using a fake name, but I recognized Lily all over that thing. It was this cutesy pink and red page. There were a few posts about her interests, but most of the content was focused on her primary interests. Me. Most of the posts were about me. There were accounts of things I'd done recently. He told me about such and such, he went to a nightclub recently, etc, etc, as well as references to things from as far back as I'd known her. It was clear she had been keeping tabs on me both online and off, gathering up every scrap of information she could about my life and hoarding it here in her

little collection. She talked about us eating lunch together and how special our dates had been to her, as if it was anything more than acquaintances getting food after class. She talked about the time she had forcibly kissed me in the woods, but she wrote it as if it had been mutual. She quoted some lyrics from my favorite song and talked about how she'd always be there for me, no matter who else came into my life. Lots of references to loving me just the way he is, quote unquote,

which answered another mystery about an anonymous love letter I'd received earlier that year with the same wording. But it got worse. There were a lot of posts about my boyfriend as well. These weren't so nice. They got vicious, talking about how he didn't deserve me. He didn't know what he had. If she was with me, she'd be jealous of anyone else who came near me, so my boyfriend not being a jealous person meant he didn't love me. It was angry and hateful. I didn't like to think about the sort of person

who could write so obsessively being fixated directly on me. One thing that didn't make sense at first was that the blog also made plenty of references to Lily's best friend, Steven. She had never mentioned this person to me. Her post talked a lot about Steven and how great of a friend he was and how much fun they had together, how he looked out for her, etc. I was trying to work out whether this was an online friend when one specific post made it all click. She had posted a photo and a caption in it with, Steven sent this to me, he knew I would

like it and love it or something like that. The problem was, the photo was taken from my own page. I hadn't sent it to her. She took it from my page and then claimed this fictional best friend of hers shared it with her because in her head, she'd split me into two people. In her messed up fantasy life, I was both the perfect best friend who was always looking out for her and her soul mate who was bound to end up with her when I finally got over my boyfriend and all the other easy girls I hung out with that she made dozens of posts complaining about. Who was she complaining to? Oh, Lily had an audience.

She asked open questions about me and her relationship with me and got messages back from her followers, people who took what she had said at face value. I saw a bunch of random people agreeing with the stalker that my boyfriend didn't deserve me and we were bound to break up soon so I could be with Lily, the person I was clearly supposed to be with. She had this fake fanfiction version of my life up for anyone to share their opinion on and she'd made herself out to be the hero of it all. I went maybe a month back into the page's history. I didn't look at everything that was there, it was too much, so I'm not sure how long this had been going on to be honest. I sent Lily a message confronting her about the blog. She said nothing, and I cannot stress how weird it was to have found pages and pages dedicated to me, with her talking about how she was in love

with me and would make sure we ended up together, slamming my boyfriend and building up a fantasy life with two different versions of me in that she clearly believed to be real, then acting like it all didn't happen. She said nothing. She didn't address it. She just changed the subject even after I pushed and it was like she hadn't even registered what I said. I've never seen anything else like that. She deleted the page of course, or at least changed the name and hid it so I never found it again. It wasn't the end though. I wasn't going to hang out with her anymore but we were still shoved together in classes and she had started

to actually scare me with what she might do next. I'm kind of a paranoid person. Knowing someone was obsessively keeping track of me for who knows how long freaked me out. The next thing she pulled was trying to seduce my boyfriend. It was an absolutely useless attempt that only made him uncomfortable. He told me about it right away. What was her plan there? Did she hope to tell me he cheated and wait for me to break up with him? Why would I want her after that? When that didn't work out for her, she tried hitting on three of my other friends. None of them took the bait. She ended up dating one of my former housemates for a while but

made sure to send me messages while they were together letting me know she'd rather be with me. No thanks. Lily made sure to stay in my life the whole time I was at university. There was a time when I tried to pull away from her and she ended up starting rumors about me and damaging a career opportunity I put a lot of work into. I don't know what else she did behind my back but it made me realize it was safer to let her think that she was a part of my life while ignoring her rather than doing something that would cause her to get angry. After I graduated, Lily still wanted to spend time together, but I knew I didn't have to now. I made excuses about work and barely talked to her after that point. I almost entirely

stopped posting on social media that I knew she knew about. Of course, she didn't give up that easily. She would try to start conversations, ask me to meet up with her, attempts I usually ignored. I didn't like to think that she was still tracking me online, but she probably was. I don't know how, but she'd occasionally reference things I mentioned online somewhere, somewhere she shouldn't have known about. The last time we had a real conversation, she sent me a message out of nowhere. We hadn't spoken at all in months, and we haven't talked about anything serious in much longer than that. Thinking about that conversation still makes my skin crawl, but I'll summarize what happened here.

At first she asked me questions about how long I had known that I was bi. I told her some basic stuff, the kind of thing I tell anyone who asked. Then she changed the subject. She started talking about how I would feel about her if she was a boy and wanting to be a boy for me. The messages quickly became very, very weird. She went into plenty of detail about fantasies that she had of the two of us. Again, we were not friends at this point. We'd never been especially close, at least not from my perspective, and we had barely spoken for years. I can't imagine sending messages like that to even a close friend, let alone someone who barely knows you now. I tried telling her not to pull

this with me, but she decided to change tactics. She sent photos of herself, followed by a bunch of messages, maybe four or five a minute, way too fast for me to reply to before the next one arrived, basically quoting back what I'd told her about myself and my past earlier. She was telling me these things as if they had happened to her. She was roleplaying as me. The worst part was that she seemed to believe it was real, that those things actually happened to her even when she was quoting me word for word. Things I told her only hours before were now her life. It was like she was trying to absorb my history. To take it over. To make my life part of her. Yeah, I didn't talk to her again after that.

I ignored future attempts she made to contact me and I eventually silently deleted her from the inactive social media which was her only way of contacting me. I really thought she might finally move on. A few days ago she sent me a friend request. It's sitting there unanswered because I know if I delete it she'll only send another one. Lily and I met nearly 12 years ago. The story is just the highlights and even then, it's only the stuff I know about for sure. A lot happened behind my back. I know it did. So I'm from Hawaii and this day took place on the night of Veterans Day. I was at my boyfriend's house that day and I usually stay there until very late as my dad doesn't get off of work until 10pm.

So when 10pm comes around my dad tells me he's outside that house and that we had to go to my mom's job on the way home because we needed the keys. Then we were at my mom's job. Everything seemed normal. There are very few cars left in the parking lot as all the shops closed for the day. I had to use the bathroom but there was still nothing unusual about anything. My mom's job isn't located in a sketchy area and in fact it's actually located by a really popular hotel on the island. Now as soon as I exit the restrooms, I walk to my dad's car as he was already waiting for me. As I walk there, I pass a guy. He was white at around the age of 60 and wearing a veteran's hat and lei, so I assumed nothing of him because I just thought he was coming out of the restaurant nearby. As my dad and I exit the parking lot, I notice the man starts backing up the same time we did. I thought it was odd and didn't say anything to my dad until we got to the part

where the road divides into two different roads as it's going to different cities. I told my dad that I thought the car was following us and he just brushed it off as he was probably just going to the same area as we were. I didn't say anything else and just kept watching the car as we made the turn. The man was very close to the car which didn't make any sense because the roads were very much empty. I decided that I would tell my dad again and it didn't seem to bother him and said that we were going home. I told him that was a bad idea and he needed to try and lose him. I've listened to so many scary stories about people being followed and I honestly wasn't going to take any chances. My dad kept an eye on the car and I told him to go straight ahead instead of turning onto our road.

At this point, all we've been doing is going straight. We haven't made any turns or even tried to lose him. My dad thought it was a good idea to go through a dark unlit back road to see if we could lose the guy. And guess what? The man followed us the whole way and even passed our house trying to get away from him. My dad and I were already arguing because I told him he wasn't listening to me and that we were being followed. I was really frustrated at this time because all I wanted to do was go home and sleep. We got stopped at a red light and I tried to get an idea or some sort of indicators from the man's front plate but it was really hard to read because he kept getting closer to the car.

I asked my dad if he could see them but he couldn't see them either and you're probably wondering why we haven't called the cops yet and I honestly didn't even think about calling them because the first thing that you want to do is get away and calling the cops wasn't a priority. It's already around 11pm and this man had been following us for almost over an hour. We went from Waianae to Kepolei to Eva Beach and back to Kepolei finding places to lose this guy but every time my dad sped up he would speed up to keep the space between the cars very small. We even went as far as to going close to where my dad picked me up earlier. It just seemed like nothing would work. My dad and I were still arguing about losing him and that he needed to start making random turns. My dad is really

stubborn and didn't want to listen to me. I get that it could be stressful from these types of situations, but I was trying to help with everything I learned from hearing similar stories. We entered another city, but we were 10 minutes away from the police station and that's when we decided that it was best to call 911. As I made the phone call, this guy speeds in front of us and my dad was able to get the guy's license plate and I told the operator everything that happened from the beginning until now. I told her that we were near the police station and she told us that there would be two officers waiting for our arrival. This man is still following us even to the police station and we didn't see the officers that were waiting outside but we did see other officers just getting out of their car. My dad quickly got out and told them that the man was still following us. Keep in mind my dad parks and this man actually pulls up and

parks next to us after all this time after chasing us through three different cities. The police officers went over and did their whole procedure. My dad filed a police report as it was considered stalking. I don't think the guy even knew what he was doing because they asked him why he followed us but he didn't give an answer. After the whole ordeal they arrested him and told my dad that he could possibly have some mental issues and will be sent to the hospital for further investigation and someone will be in contact. After that was done we left and we already had to go back to pick up my mom. Until this day no one has ever contacted my dad about the situation and he gets really paranoid like me when the same car starts to follow us for a while. I told him that if it ever happens again,

to listen to me. I'm glad we made it safe through and you never really think that it would happen to you until it does and it's terrifying. So a bit of context, I'm a 15 year old girl but at the time this happened in April I was 14. I'll also add that I look my age so he definitely couldn't have mistaken me for someone older. Ever since online school started I've become a bit of a couch potato. Sure I play sports but I'm not nearly as active as I prefer to be. So I decided I was going to ride my bike around more often. I live in a pretty safe area, other than the occasional cat callers and creeps I never really worried about someone

approaching me, and that was until this happened. One day after my last class had finished, I collected my small backpack which had some money, my phone, and a mask in it and went out to grab my bike. I let my brother know that I was going and jokingly told him that if I wasn't back by 2 that I'd been kidnapped. I joke like this all the time. I hopped on my bike and rode out in my neighborhood and then took a back road to some abandoned golf courses. Now the way they're laid out is there's 3 that all connect and go through 2 different neighborhoods. At the end of the furthest one there's a CVS right across the road and an intersection there too. Think of it

as if though it's a T. The intersection is at the top of the T and the road separating the golf course and the CVS is the main body. So after I finished biking the last course and reached the incline where I would ride down to the sidewalk to that road that I had mentioned. I stopped to check my phone and that's when I heard someone calling over to me. Hey, hey Maddie! I looked up because that's just what I do whenever I hear something. Now, my name isn't Maddie, nor is it close to it, but there was no one else around. The guy calling out was on a bike and

he was on the sidewalk around 10 feet away down the incline. I couldn't get a good look at his face because he had a baseball cap on and sunglasses but from what I could see he'd looked to be about in his mid-20s. He was comparatively tall, I'm only about 5'5". He was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap and this didn't strike me as weird because it was pretty hot out, but it was pretty weird that he'd biked over just to talk to me. He kept calling me Maddie though. Now it should have been a red flag that a man who looked to be in his mid-twenties was talking to a 14-year-old girl as if she were some sort of old-time friend, but I kind of smiled awkwardly and told him that my name

wasn't Maddy. He asked what it was and like the dense rock that I am, I told him. He was just like, oh really? Can you come here? I can't really see you from up there. Mind you, I couldn't have been more than 10 feet away and I could see him fine. He seemed to be able to spot me fine from over 20 feet just moments ago. I declined and said I didn't want to crowd him because of the whole global pandemic thing, but he kept insisting that I just come down so he could get a better look at me. Finally, after what felt like an hour but was only about 5 minutes, he gave some half-hearted goodbye and biked off across the intersection, but the whole time he kept staring at me.

I waited until he was out of sight before I rode down the incline and across the street to the CVS and I went inside to get a drink. When I got out, there was no sign of him and my ride home was peaceful. When I told my mom about where I went, I got chewed out big time for going alone. It was only worse when I told her about the weird guy. Now, I wouldn't have typed this out if that was all that happened, so of course, something else did happen. Not to me, but to some other girls. A few days later my mom told me that there was some guy on a bike who had been biking up to girls around my age and ramming his tire into their back tires in an attempt to make them crash so he could abduct them. He ended up getting chased off by one of the girls' dads before he could hurt any of them thankfully.

When I asked for his description, my mom told me that he was tall, male and looked to be in his mid-twenties. He also had a baseball cap on. description, my mom told me that he was tall, male and looked to be in his mid-twenties. He also had a baseball cap on. I asked where he'd done this and it was in the same area where I'd encountered that guy. Now I'm not saying for all certainties that these guys are all the same people, but the comparisons are eerily similar and how dead set he was on me coming down to where he was really put me off. I guess just knowing the fact that if I had come closer to him that day,

that I might not be typing this, and that my little kidnapping joke may not have stayed a joke. The End This story takes place in the biggest little city in the world. It was back when I turned 21 in 2003. Who just googled the biggest city in the world? It's Reno, Nevada by the way. It was two weeks after my 21st birthday in September and the night was a little cooler than those hot summer nights. But still good enough to be roaming around downtown and to all the casinos and bars. It was me and my homegirl Jen, yes we'll use her real name, she also loves and follows Let's Read, and we're out and about on Saturday trying to get a good buzz on before we hit the club.

Normally we would park in a parking garage, have a few drinks then walk to the club. Normally we would park in a parking garage, have a few drinks, then walk to the club. This time we wanted to explore more of downtown's other places. We had just come out of the old Fitzgerald Casino, pretty buzzed and ready to take on the night. We walked down the main street towards 4th to see about the other places that look lively. Well, we came up to Douglas Alley, which my buzz butt had the great idea to cut through because it sounded like fun. Facepalm. Don't judge me.

I was on one that night, meaning I was thinking I was king of the world. So Jen agreed to go down the alley. It was dark, damp, and smelly. There was only a few lights up ahead that were flickering on and off like a strobe light. As we walked about 20 feet or so in the alley, I noticed ahead that there was a dark shadowy figure moving in a weird motion next to what looked like a dumpster. Normally I would brush it off as someone dumpster diving, but what made this seem out of the norm was the fact I could see candlelight flickering off the alley wall. Jen turned to me and said, are you sure we should keep going this way? It looks kind of creepy up ahead.

I looked at her and kind of taunted by saying, are you scared? Come on, we got this. Looking back now at my remark to her, I think that was kind of a douche thing to do. She reluctantly started walking with me ahead slowly and as we got closer, the sound of what I can describe to you as a very sinister, evil and malicious laugh was coming from the dark figure. This was so putrid it made my skin crawl. And it was at this point I said, Shh, do you hear the other noise? It sounds like a drill or something.

She nodded and looked at me with confusion in her eyes. If it really was a drill, what would that figure be drilling? A rat maybe? We were behind some big crates at this point to where we could see ahead but couldn't be seen as we were both ducking behind the crates now. The sounds of that laugh were getting more and more deranged every time the drill noise got louder, like it enjoyed doing whatever it was doing. You see, this alley was like a T. We entered it from the bottom, working our way up to the top part of the T. The right part of the alley was where we were with the crates,

and the left part was where the dumpster and the shadowy figure was. I hope that helps to imagine the way we were going. We need to get out of here. This is enough creep show for me for the week, she wailed. And had I listened to her, none of what's about to happen would have. I was feeling like a champion though. I blame the Jäger bombs for that, so I said proudly, will you stay here? I'll check it out. Who did I think I was thinking like that? Yes, the booze made me feel tough, invincible, adventurous. Well, back then, freshly turned 21, booze did make me feel that way. She rolled her eyes at me. Fine, she whispered, but if something happens to you, my only weapon of defense are my heels. I chuckled softly to her, gave her a hug to reassure her it would be okay, so I slithered my way ahead alone. Both sounds were getting much

louder and even more gut-wrenching. I got close enough to finally see what I had been hearing, but still in the dark behind a few boxes and crates mixed together. I stayed down so I wouldn't be seen, but I could see when I lifted my head up and to my horror, I saw a man crouching on the ground over something and candles all around him. He was wearing what I could tell were dark torn clothing and a mask on his face that I'll never forget. If anyone's ever seen Hellraiser, well, the mask was like the combination of Anubis and Pinhead's pins. One of the flashing lights were shining on that mask. It looked so terrifying to me, even buzzed. He clenched the drill in his hands, drilling down with vigorous force while

cackling some more. I turned back to throw Jen a look of pure terror. She wasn't there anymore, to my surprise. She was crawling her way up to where I was. Oh my god, what is he doing? She whispered to me. I don't know, it looks like some sort of ritual or something. You see that mask? Maybe some kind of cult stuff. I replied. I was curious about what he was drilling into, but at the same time I was very reluctant to know. I'm going to go quickly up there to where the dumpster is and find out what he's drilling into. I'll go up to the right side of the dumpster so he won't be able to see me. I told her. It was at this moment that I knew my curiosity was so strong it overtook my brain telling me to stop and go back. But I couldn't help it. That's just how I'm wired.

So without wasting any more time, I took a few steps ahead, hugging the alley wall as I moved forward to the dumpster. His attention was distracted by something to his left, so he faced the other way. I then rushed forward quietly to the dumpster. My heart was racing so hard I thought I was going to pee myself. From here, I was inching my way behind the dumpster to his direction. I got as close as I could so I wouldn't be seen. To my utter horror, I saw what he was drilling into. It was a human's upper torso. I couldn't believe my freaking eyes. It was a female's upper torso covered in blood. There was other stuff too, however I couldn't tell what because I couldn't see that closely. He cackled again as the drill went down

into her again, now realizing that there was a blade attached to the drill. Good god man, really, who does stuff like that? But I knew I had two options and I had to think fast. One, I could go back to where Jen was and we could get one of those cops on the bikes over that we saw earlier. or two, I could scream at this guy and threaten him in hopes that he'll stop, tackle him down, and then get the cops. I wasn't looking to be a hero or anything, but my gut instinct said I needed to put a stop to this. I know the person is dead, but this disgusting dude needed a stop. Whoever that is deserves better than this and

I didn't care who you are. And I made up my mind I was going in. YOLO right? It's the right thing to do. My good deed for the night even if something does happen. You got this Harlem I told myself. And with that I came out from behind the dumpster and yelled to the man. Hey freak what do you think you're doing? The man arose from kneeling slowly to standing and snapped his head over to my direction looking right at me, his eyes glowing from the mask and the flashing broken light above him, which he raised the drill into the air and pointing it at me as if it were a gun. His clothes were dark, stained with blood and holes and rips in them.

It looked like he was walking right out of Tales from the Crypt. I can't let you leave, man. I'm calling the cops. You need to be punished for what you did to that girl. I yelled. Looking back on that now I realized how stupid I was for even thinking to take on a guy with a drill in his hand, and me, well, with just fists. I was raised to understand that fighting with your fists was the only way to be truly tough, not hiding behind a weapon. I rushed after the man with my fist clenched ready to pounce like

some sort of wild tiger, but as I was about to leap at him, he suddenly dropped the drill and turned around and ran to the left. I hauled it after him, dodging all the crates and boxes that were along the way. He came up to a chained fence, jumped onto it and up. I leaped onto the fence also and grabbed a hold of his right foot only to be kicked in the head and I fell down the fence onto the ground. I then heard a loud cry of pain that sounded so deep it echoed down the whole alleyway. I looked up only to see the man's legs sticking out along the side of the fence that I was on and his upper body along the other side. I felt wet droplets hit me as if it were raining, realizing very quick it

wasn't rain. Harlem, what the? Are you okay? Are you hurt? Jen came yelling. I nodded to her yes that it was okay, and I felt the droplets on my face touch them only to have smeared blood on my face. What was going on, I thought. I looked up again at the man who was now wailing in agony. This idiot was stuck in barbed wire and a small part of the fence was through him. I couldn't believe it. Oh god, Jen, look. He got impaled when he was trying to jump the fence. I said with a shaky tone.

He's still alive. Call 911. She roared. Now just as I was reaching into my pocket to get my phone, I heard a loud scream of some woman walking by on the other side of the fence. Oh my god, there's blood everywhere. Someone do something, the lady chanted. I'm calling them now, Harlem, Jen stated. Yo man, you okay?" A male's voice said on the other side of the fence. Now we were forming a crowd of people all freaking out on their phones and a bunch of talking over others.

Don't move bro, wait for the paramedics," another said. At this point I was totally sober and wondering what to do. This guy might have been the one to butcher up that poor girl's torso and deserve what he got, or he just butchered on her after someone else killed her, or he found her dead and decided to do that. Now he's up on a fence stake, bleeding and moaning. Should I feel sorry for him? He's obviously a nasty, vile soul. And who was the girl whose

corpse was used for some sadistic pleasure? I had all these questions running through my head as I was still recovering from a kick to the face. And with that came the sirens. It was only a matter of time, and here I am, faced with bloodstains, standing next to a half-dying man with half a body just down the way. I was practically pooping my pants. I turned to Jen and said, This is where it's going to get ugly, Jen, so hold tight. She put her hand on my shoulder, telling me it's going to be okay, not to worry. Get your hands where I can see them. Move them up slowly, screamed the RPD out of nowhere. There's so many more minor details that I could go into, but this has been pretty long,

and I'm sure you're all mildly tired of how insane all this sounds, but I swear to God it's 100% true. Fast forward to about two weeks later, and I'm sitting in this detective's office for the third time, and this time was because she wanted to share some information with me about that case, what she could share of course. She tells me that, for one, I've been cleared of all charges involving the girl and this deranged man and that she really appreciated my cooperation through everything, as if though I had a choice. I told her thank you, I could maybe start getting some sleep now and not having this hanging over my head. Two weeks of waiting to hear if I

was implicated in this was torturous on my mental state. She explained to me that they were looking into a different individual for the murder of, who I'm going to call Hope. Yes, the psychopath man survived the unpaling but with major injuries and claimed that he wasn't the one to have killed this girl Hope. He said it was his friend, only to have cut her already dead body up as a form of some sort of sadistic sacrifice for purification or some insanity. Honestly, who even knows if that's true or if he just said that as a cop out. I have my own opinions about those kinds of things. I know there are some sick freaks in this world and I don't doubt things humans do to others but this was beyond brutal.

If that is the case, that explains the candles we saw around the body and come to learn that there was a pentagram under her body as well. They were charging him with desecration of a human corpse along with some drug charges. Apparently he was high on something when it all happened, but is trying to use this as his defense to label him as mentally ill. Good luck there buddy. I was also told that he was paralyzed in some areas and could no longer move his right arm. As for the girl Hope, turns out she was a cocktail server in one of the casinos that was located only two blocks away from where her body was found. She had left work three hours prior, only to end up dead with some guy that she had been serving drinks to. No one knows who it was, only the description of

the guy on surveillance. Weird, it was confirmed by the detectives that it wasn't the friend of the deranged dude. Her name tag was found attached to part of her uniform that was found in another dumpster in the adjacent alley. Her real name will always be kept secret. As for the rest of her, sadly, there were no parts of her anywhere to be found in the area even after having the dogs try to sniff more of her out. They scouted for a few nights only to come up with nothing other than half her uniform, upper torso, and apparently a pair of ruby red heels that one of her friends at work told the detectives she was wearing that night. I don't know about the rest of her. I was only told either what the detectives only knew

or only what she wanted to share, which wasn't much. There was nothing in the papers about her either, or rather, very little information as the news only reported her as being a Jane Doe. My only thought process is that maybe she was some sort of undocumented from across the border and just found a job here and ended up how she did. It made me sad then, and sad even now writing this, that for me, 19 years later, there's still no justice for Hope. No more of her was found, no purse, no ID. Who knows even about her family or if she even had one? Maybe kids, maybe not. I hate all of these questions in my head. The case was never solved for all I know and it still remains a mystery in my mind.

Every year around my birthday I always light a candle for her to hopefully bring her killer to justice and give her peace so her soul can finally rest. And as for the deranged piece of garbage, it turns out he didn't make it in prison. Apparently he was shivved by someone for drug related reasons, stabbed multiple times till he bled and died. And I have to say it's not a loss in my mind. I know he was someone's kid at one point and a human being too but there's some kind of relief knowing he's down for the count. Sorry if that makes me sound cruel, I promise I'm not

but I just have my own description on what justice means to me. And for whoever really killed Hope, karma will come for you. It'll come for you, chew you up and spit you out if it hasn't already. I just pray that Hope and her family, whoever they might be, get the peace they so greatly deserve. The End I live in a small town in Canada. Most everyone knows each other, but that doesn't mean the community is the most safe. There are tons of addicts and alcoholics roaming the streets, and if you don't live on one of the safer parts of town, there's a good chance you could be robbed or worse. A kid a few years back had his pot laced and died of an overdose within 20 minutes,

so not the best place to live I suppose. When I was in 8th grade I was a pretty lonely kid and I only had two friends that I spent 24-7 with. And with these dear friends of mine, we decided to have a sleepover that we would go get slushies at 10pm on a winter night. Not our smartest decision, but we were dumb 13 year olds who wanted an adventure. The shop that sold slushies was no more than a 15 minute walk across a football field behind our school, so we figured we'd be fine. But boy were we wrong. As we were walking towards the football field, there's a hill that you have to walk over to get to it. So there we were, walking about to get to the field when we spot a guy, maybe high school or age, with a bag that had a blueberry design all over it. He seemed lost but we just kind of smiled and continued walking. He stared at us as we walked along but we didn't think much of it. We were used to creep staring as we all dressed very

alternative and had pretty bright colored hair as well. But as we kept walking and were just a few feet into the football field, he started following us. Again, we didn't think much of it, small town. The spot was where people usually went as it was smack center of town and people had fun back there all the time, so we continued on. Halfway through the dude walking across the football field had just stopped and kept staring at us. At this point we were kind of freaked out but still trying to keep things light hearted. So I take out my phone and start recording with the flash on as it was incredibly dark outside and we're just joking around as I'm recording when suddenly my friend, Clara, looks behind us

and whispers, oh my god, he's following us again. My other friend, Caitlin, looks in the same direction and looks horrified as he was walking through the snow, bag still in hand, and smiling at us. At this point, we were just trying to look casual and not panic as we knew that it would give away that we knew that he was following us. It'd probably change from a follow to a full out chase if you catch my drift. And this goes on for a while as we're trying to get to the shop for our slushies. The dude would follow us for a while, stop to not look suspicious, wait about three seconds and start following us again. We were all terrified. Three middle school kids, the biggest of us being only 5'7 and in the middle of a sketchy town at 10pm. I was so sure I was never

going to see the light of day again. Once we eventually arrived at the stupid shops, one of my classmates, Cindy, was in there in her friend's car, intoxicated with some sort of substance and wasn't sure what exactly. When I told her the situation and begged for a ride back to our friend's place, she basically said, lol don't get kidnapped. Wow thanks. We got our stupid slushies and started heading back to our friend's house, deciding to walk on the side of the busier street rather than across the field again. I was holding on to Caitlin's arm. I was crying from fear and she was a lot braver than I was. It felt as if she was protecting me, even as ridiculous as it may

have been. Clara was behind us when she suddenly flops onto the concrete and starts sobbing and is covering her head, saying, he's still following us, he's still following us. Caitlin and I tried to shush her and continue on walking, but she wouldn't budge. She was starting to have a panic attack. Eventually, Caitlin and I basically had to piggyback her until she stopped crying. It was truly a horrendous scene. We eventually made it back to the house at around 11, deciding to go to bed, with the doors and windows locked, of course. Now, you would expect this to be the end of this, and I thought perhaps it was all just

some strange overreaction, and when I rationally thought about it, it truly was. But it wasn't. Because the following weekend my dad called me downstairs. I was confused and he asked me, is this bag yours? Saying he found it on our front porch. I had no idea what he was talking about until I saw it and my heart sank. It was the exact blueberry design bag that man had. I told my dad everything related to what we knew about that guy and he decided to rummage through the bag. All that was inside was just duct tape and a screwdriver. I was confused but my heart began to sank even further and I felt almost

paralyzed with emotion. Based on what I told my dad, he called a friend of his who was a police officer but his friend said that there was most likely nothing law enforcement would do if nothing criminal had truly occurred. I honestly don't know how to process what any of this could mean, but I knew my gut that day was telling me that that man with the blueberry bag had far more nefarious plans for us than meets the eye. This didn't happen to me, but my dad. When my parents were still married, my dad would leave Thanksgiving night to go to the Poconos for deer hunting. This was out here in Pennsylvania. Him and his friends went for a few years, but after this year, things changed.

My dad and his friends were on their way there on what I think was I-95. Little did they know, they were coming upon a gruesome scene that they would hope to never encounter again. As they made their way down the highway, there was a car accident that had just occurred. No police or rescue were on scene yet, so, being the decent human beings they were, they sprang into action to help. The car was starting to catch fire, and while the other girls who were in the car were able to be taken out, the driver was still trapped inside. My dad was able to open

the passenger door and realize that the girl may have died on impact but he still tried to free her, sustaining a deep cut on his hand from the twisted metal of what was now inside the car. My dad is your typical small jersey Italian guy and this girl was of larger size so with the combination of the mangled car and the heat from the now lapping flames, my dad could not free her from the wreckage. At this point, the flames were now coming from the broken windshield and were starting to burn her face. My dad tried to shield her face from the flames, but it was pointless. He and his friends tried to pull the door off with a wench that was attached to one of the other trucks, but it was too twisted to come off,

and they only managed to pull the entire car. My father realized how bad the flames were and got out of the car to save his own life. He did realize that he still had a wife and young daughter at home. During this time a doctor came upon the scene and was trying to lend aid to the other girls. All the while everyone was forced to watch in horror while the driver was burning before them. My dad said her face melted like candle wax. His friend, out of some sort of stress reaction, ate almost a week's worth of food from the cooler out of shock and once they left, he just immediately threw it all up. It was strange. Now my dad is not a sensitive man and would be what we call now the epitome of

stoic, but this left him devastated. They tried everything they could to save her but the fact of the matter is, the girl did in fact die on impact. I think my dad just wanted to give her parents closure by being able to say goodbye to their daughter for the last time and see her. My uncle actually died in a car accident the year before I was born so I think this was his way of trying to prevent what my family went through. We found out later what happened. A guy was driving drunk the opposite way on I-95 and hit a car full of students on their way back to college from visiting family head on. The other girl survived with minor and moderate injuries. Later my dad was installing an alarm in a woman's home and asked her about her son when

he saw his marine photo. She informed him that he was permanently injured from an accident one Thanksgiving night. Turns out, there was a third car involved in the accident but the car was pushed so far away from the others by the collision that no one noticed the man was injured for 45 minutes after the EMS and police arrived. My father's not a perfect man in the least and has a non-violent criminal record but despite all this, he's still a hero to me. I lived in a dorm converted from a hotel. There were many problems associated with this.

The neighborhood was questionable and some people still believe the dorm was an actual hotel. So while I can mention this now, the residence assistant took turns at the front desk. In order to enter, you had to have a keycard. This will be very important as it was something of a lifesaver for myself and a friend. On Saturday night at around 11pm, the RA, a 19 year old female friend, asked me to join her down at the front desk. We popped popcorn and watched a movie but had to keep an eye on a monitor in case someone needed help. We were just settling in when we heard a thump at the door. We looked up and saw this homeless guy trying to open the door.

He pressed the button on the door intercom demanding to be let in and wanting his usual room, he said. The guy was dressed in a dark shirt with white pants stains and pants that desperately needed a belt, uncombed brown hair and holding a trench coat in one arm. Let me in. I have money this time. Uh, we're not a hotel. I'm sorry. This is a residential property for students. It's a college. The RA told him in a shaky voice. Shut up. This is a hotel. He was glaring at us. We were getting a little weirded out and he started to demand that we better let him in or else Now this dorm, as I said before, was converted from a hotel and clearly the guy didn't understand this He started to make threats if he wasn't let in and decided to try and break in by ramming himself into the door The RA was pressing the button for security who was clear on the other

side of the building. His patrol wouldn't get to him where we were for at least 30 minutes. I kept asking if I should call 911, but of course the RA said no that she could handle this. The crazed man kept ramming himself into the secure door and suddenly I saw a bloody smear. The coat fell away to reveal his bloody arm. Let me in, he screams again. My RA friend screamed and was about to call security when sure enough, security thankfully came out of the bathroom to see this. He rushed over to open the door and removed the guy, led him away. This incident had led to the electric gate in the parking lot to be installed as the guy just crossed the parking lot to get to our door. To be continued... During the summer of 2017, my wife and I moved into our first real family home, along with our five-year-old daughter Emily. It was an absolute dream come true.

Getting onto the property ladder here in the UK isn't exactly easy, especially if you're living in a major city. So the fact that we actually managed to land a place we liked, it was like all our Christmases had come at once. And just when I thought our luck couldn't get any better, the first few years living there was completely hassle free. The pipes survived the winter, the plumbing was reliable, and all the appliances that came with the house were built like tanks. We were living the dream. There was just one thing that really bothered me and my wife about our new home, and that came in the form of the pictures my daughter started to draw one day.

It was a weeknight, and I had not been home from work too long when my wife called me down for tea. Emily is five and a half at this point, and ever since her nana bought her a load of paper and colored pens, she'd revealed something of an artistic side. At first, me and the wife were just happy she was sticking to paper and not getting back into her old graffitiing habits. But when she started to show some actual talent, we started to wonder if we had a budding Tracy Emin on our hands. Like most kids she just drew what she saw around her. She drew me and her mom, that cat from next door, flowers from the garden, that sort of thing. That progressed to what amounted to diagrams of whatever room she'd be in at the time. Then she'd draw rudimentary diagrams of the whole house. Whenever she rocked

up with a new picture, we did what any proud parent would do and whacked it straight on the fridge. All except one picture, which caused a bit of a stir. Emily had drawn a picture of herself sitting in her room. The way she'd draw a room was to first draw a box, then fill it up with whatever objects there were, labeling them things like bed, teddy, me. But in this case, she'd draw another much smaller box that sat on the very top right hand corner of her ceiling, one that contained a small horizontal stick figure,

with two dots for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. And unlike pretty much everything else, he wasn't labeled. Wow, I remember saying. Rach, come look at what Em drew. I was a bit unnerved by the little addition, but I didn't make it obvious, I just sort of motioned to my wife when she turned to look at it. Emily, my wife spoke in that sing-song way that grown-ups talk to kids while she pointed to the boxed up stick figure. Who's this person here? Emily just shrugged. Why did you draw him, Emily?

Because he's there? This bristling tension comes over me and the wife and we shoot each other a look while Emily just cracks on drawing another picture. She's not acting moody or anything and she's just happily cracking on with drawing another picture but needless to say, me and Rachel weren't in the least bit happy. Emily, my wife continued, does this person do anything? No, she replied. He's only a little boy. Does he watch you from the window or something?

I asked. It was a probing question, but I honestly was just trying to make sense of it. He doesn't watch me. He's just there. She shrugged again, obviously unable to explain it any further than that. But Emily, my wife leaned in to talk to her. Where is the little boy?

In the ceiling. Again this wave of tension washes over me and my wife, but we really didn't act on anything she was saying. Kids say all sorts of things, sometimes things that are horribly offensive, accidentally hilarious, or in this case, alarmingly creepy. We asked Emily a few more questions about the boy, but she just kept shrugging them off and telling us she didn't know. In the end, me and the wife just put it down to her imagination. Maybe she was lonely. Maybe it was time for us to start thinking about getting a cat or something.

Heck, maybe it was time to start thinking about giving her a little brother or sister to dote over. Either way, the weird picture was just sort of forgotten about after a while. Emily got to drawing other things, started asking us about painting, and we all just moved on. About 18 months go by, and by that time, Emily is seven. We'd continued to nurture her artistic side, buying her a paint set, a kid's encyclopedia of artists and all their styles, and she was just mad about it. She was particularly enthralled with this one Monet painting, A kid's encyclopedia of artists and all their styles, and she was just mad about it. She was particularly enthralled with this one Monet painting, saying she loved how pretty the colors were,

and after that, all she painted were these colorful outdoor scenes. Her little pot of black paint went almost untouched, until one Sunday afternoon, when it was the only color she used. She blacked out this huge section of an A3 piece of paper leaving only a small rough square untouched in the center. In this little blank spot, she painted what looked a lot like a little boy with a very sad expression on his face. I had a good feeling I knew what, or rather, who it was, but I still asked. And who's this sad little boy, Emily? I don't know. Emily, is this the boy who lives in the ceiling? I asked. Yes, she replied. Why is he so sad? Because he wants to get out? Why don't you let him out then? Why don't you draw a picture of him playing with Kit, our new cat, outside? I suggested. He can't come out. He's stuck in there. I want to help him but... Emily's voice began to break up as her eyes filled with tears.

I tried my best to be the supportive dad that I was. I gave her a big hug and told her it was all okay, that I was proud of her for caring. But in reality, I was actually absolutely terrified. This was absolutely so much more than just a childhood phase. And whether it was loneliness, anxiety, or something else to blame, my daughter was suffering and that just broke my heart as a father. We arranged for her to see a counselor that a friend of ours had recommended. Their kid had taken it hard when their friend from school

passed away, that's another horrible story on its own, and they said weekly visits to this particular professional had quickly caused an upward curve in his mood. I know people might complain that we should have just parented our own bloody kid, but we were young parents, we didn't have a freaking clue what we were doing, and no one else seemed to know what to do about Emily's sad little imaginary friend. She just wouldn't drop it. After three weeks of visits to this woman, she gave me a call one day with the last thing I expected to hear.

Sir, have you actually checked if there's any kind of crawl space above your daughter's bedroom? 600 pounds in fees, and that was her line of inquiry. I don't know if I was angry at the insinuation or just embarrassed that well no I hadn't checked but why would I? If your kid says that there's a monster under your bed you don't toss a grenade under there do you? Kids say all sorts of things. The counselor knew this and apparently she had the experience to understand when a kid was just making stuff up and when there was some substance to what they were saying, which I suppose is exactly what we were paying her to do. I was so confident that there was no crawl spaces that I remember saying, just hold the line and I'll go check. It would be a 30 second job, stick my head in, see no hatches, walk back and tell the woman no. Just me doing my due diligence, trying to help my kid. So I march upstairs, walk into Emmy's room,

she's out with her mom at the time, and take a short pointless glance at the ceiling. Nothing. But just as I'm about to walk out, a thought hits me. Check the cupboard. Emmy had this big tall cupboard built into the western facing wall and she used to keep her toys in it. And that day for the first time since we moved in, I noticed it had a much higher ceiling than the rest of the room. Lo and behold, I poked my head in, looked up, and there it was. A hatch leading to a crawlspace above my daughter's bedroom. My mind is blown. I mean, I'm not freaking out or anything, but still, you can imagine how surprised I am that my daughter seemed to know more about the house than I did. But regardless, me and the counselor finished up the call by agreeing that somehow Emmy had been playing in the cupboard and had just so happened to catch sight of the hatch.

Sound logic told her that something was obviously on the other side, yet it was her imagination that brought out all the trapped boy stories. I hang up the phone, thank the counselor. I'm talking genuinely thanking her though, it was a stroke of genius gambling on there actually being a crawlspace. And then I'm alone, in our big quiet house. It's then that it occurs to me that not only did I not even know about that crawlspace, I still don't actually know what's in it. I stopped giving a toss about horror films when I was about 16. Last thing I actually remember watching from start to finish was the remake of The Ring.

So it's not like I myself had an overactive imagination. I wasn't obsessed with ghosts or anything and I certainly didn't believe in anything remotely paranormal. But in that case, why was I fixated on the idea of finding human remains in that crawlspace? Why was I so bloody terrified to actually open up the hatch and shine a light inside? All of Emily's fears and sadness, her apparent conviction that someone was up there, I'm ashamed to say that it had somehow rubbed off on me. So much so that I was actually incredibly nervous by the time I was clearing out some toys, stepping into the cupboard, and peering up at the hatch.

I reach up, unlock the little hatch's lock, and then opened it up. It was the perfect jump scare moment. Absolutely textbooks, switch my light on and there's a little horror child's rotten evil face kind of shot. But as you can imagine, there was none of that. No ghosts, no bodies, no malevolent spirits whatsoever. But I did see something sitting on the wooden boards gathering dust. I thought it was a tiny bowling pin at first, but it wasn't. It was one of those little Russian dolls. And the image painted on it wasn't that of some colorfully clothed babushka. It was of a little boy with a distinctly blank expression. It was covered in dust. No one had put it here recently, and no one had opened up that hatch

since we'd gotten here, especially not four foot tall Emily. I showed her the little Russian doll when she got home, but I didn't tell her where it was from. She didn't really react to it, gave it a curious once over before putting it down, but I didn't see anything resembling a flash of recognition in her eyes. And funnily enough, after finding the doll, she didn't mention there being anyone in the ceiling anymore, which we were obviously all too glad of. I know the simplest explanation is the most likely one, that it was nothing more than a vaguely creepy coincidence. It just sticks with me because I don't know how to explain it. Why Emmy stopped talking about the boy in the ceiling.

I mean, she was fixated on it, on and off for quite a while. Then I show her a dusty, moody looking Russian doll and it all just stops. And no point in my suggesting that it was a ghost, a spirit, anything like that. But is it possible that Emily was just of a certain age where she could feel things that others couldn't. That she somehow, I don't know, picked it up like a bat uses radar or something, not knowing what it was, just knowing it's there. That might sound absolutely mental to some people, and I'll take it on the chin if you want to call me a nutbag or tell me how wrong or stupid I am.

I'll take it. Anything to be a step closer to understanding exactly how my daughter knew that there was something above her room, something she couldn't see, but that was definitely 100% unequivocally there. I grew up here in Quebec, Canada, and I'm proud to say that I'm every bit the French-Canadian stereotype. I love hockey, beer, poutine, and maple sugar pie, and there's an embarrassing number of plaid shirts in my closet. Back when I was a teenager, I didn't care what happened about politics or history, not unless it was entirely quibecois. I know that might sound ignorant or insular, but I wasn't malicious about it. I just felt my eyes glazing over when anyone talked about stuff that didn't affect me personally.

Look, the point is, there was a time in my life when I was just happy, naive, and dumb as a rock, and the only thing I ever had weighing on my mind was my GPA. I was happy. But all that changed when mon grand-père passed away. My grandpa was like my favorite person ever, and I was absolutely devastated when he died. He was the only grandparent I ever had the chance to get close to and with me being his only grandson, I guess that special feeling was mutual. Every visit to his house was an adventure. Every time he visited ours, he brought me a gift.

But grandpa also was pretty strict. He always had me say please and thank you. I always had to be in bed and no lights for a certain time if I wanted to do fun stuff. I had to do chores, stuff like that. He wasn't a tyrant by any stretch. I guess he wanted to impart a little discipline into me. It was pretty normal when you think about it, but he was tough. You see, Grandpa used to be in the military. In fact, he'd fought during the Second World War and gotten medals for bravery. After the war, he moved to Quebec, married my grandma, and the two raised a wonderful family together. He didn't talk about it much.

I asked him about it a few times, but he always gave me the same old answer. It was a terrible time. Life in Canada is much better. He didn't have any pictures, no keepsakes from his time in the army, at least not to my knowledge. It was the only piece of history or whatever that I cared about, and it was out of bounds, so the rest I could care less about. But anyway, about a week after the funeral, me and my mom went over to his place to start clearing it out. About three days in, we'd worked our way all through almost every room in the house. It had been an emotional affair to say the least, trying to decide which were the precious heirlooms

and which to donate to a little charity store my mom had her eye on. And keep in mind that basically everything was a precious heirloom and you have no idea how tough it was. Mom was clearing out some of the stuff in my grandpa's bedroom while I had the unenviable task of clearing out the dustiest room in the whole place, the attic. I don't think anyone at all had been up there going on 10 years. Everything was covered up in a layer of dust so thick it was actually kind of impressive. I actually had to cover my face with a t-shirt to stop from inhaling so much gunk as I began to move stuff around. It took almost a full hour to

sort the boxes of newspapers from the stuff worth keeping, then another hour of sweeping and dusting before the small attic room looked somewhat fit for human habitation. On top of that, there was so much dirt on the ceiling that it obscured a little opening in the painted ceiling. So, being the curious, innocent soul that I was, I gave it a push to see if it would open up. Lo and behold, it did. But at first I had zero intentions of sticking my head into a dark, dusty crawlspace. Best case scenario, I inhale a bunch of dust. Worst case scenario, I get my head bitten off by some sort of monster living up there.

But like I said, I was an innocent, curious soul. Because of how low the ceiling was, I could basically look up into the crawlspace if I stood up on my tippy toes. First time I poke my head up, there's just darkness and dust. But when I try with my flashlight, hoping it's all clear of wasp nests or whatever so I don't have to spend like another hour battling filth, I see that something's up there. It's a burlap sack, fairly small, just sitting there in the middle of the crawlspace. It might as well have been screaming out,

what's in me dude? Don't you want to know what's in me? Because yeah, I really did want to know. We already found some old South African gold coins, like a bunch of them too, and if grandpa just had those sitting in an old office drawer, God knows what he actually is choosing to hide. I jump up there, flashlight between my teeth and give the sack a nudge to see if there's anything inside. Indeed, there was. Something heavy and metallic, so immediately I'm thinking, more gold coins. Let me tell you, my heart was racing as I climbed back down into the attic where there was a little bit more light. I emptied the sack out, and out falls an old tin box that turned out to be a tobacco tin, a piece of dirty looking red

cloth, and a small leather bound book. Obviously I go for the tobacco tin first, thinking it might have more of those gold coins in it. Opening it up, I don't see any coins, but I see ribbons, like military ribbons, and I realize I might have come across something a little bit more valuable than just a couple hundred bucks in precious metals. I realize that leather-bound book that fell out might just be my grandpa's war diaries, or at least an account of his move from post-war Europe to Canada. Either way, I was hooked, so I opened the diary near the opening pages to start checking for dates. Like I said, I was pretty uninterested in history, but I at least knew that most of World War II took place in the early

40s so when I see dates like 2nd July 1942 I know I'm on the money for it being some kind of war diary. Here's once again where I need to emphasize my ignorance of world history and I imagine what I read would have been confusing for someone with actual knowledge of it. But even then, if I'd have read up on a little bit more of World War II, if I'd been like my buddy who was like an expert on that stuff, all from video games of all things, I'd have known something was up a little bit earlier. Most of the diary entries were pretty mundane stuff.

He was on a guard duty, the food sucked, he was looking forward to leaving. Every so often he'd mention how a prisoner tried to escape, which I obviously assumed was a German prisoner, and they had to shoot him. That was generally about as harsh as it got, and it was clear his duties kept him away from the front lines. I did catch a couple of mentions of Sovietik e Rus, but they were our allies, right? No big deal. Keep in mind that I'm not reading the diary cover to cover, I'm jumping around, skipping back and forth, too excited to really sit there and study it. So it was only when I read an entry from 1944 that I started to get real confused as to what exactly I was reading.

It said, I killed a Russian today. I wandered away from our position to relieve myself. He had the same idea. Once I finished him off, I unbuckled his belt to find out if he was Jewish or not. He was, so I cut off his head and the other thing to take back to show the men. I thought my French was failing me, or that grandpa was using some kind of old slang. He definitely used an old French slur for Jewish folks, which is why I was so confused at first, but once I did a little research, the terrible truth became clear. My grandpa had fought during World War II alright, but he hadn't fought for the French army, or any other allied army for that matter, and I can't even express the gut wrenching feeling of horror I felt when

I unfurled the piece of red cloth and saw what it was. It was a swastika. A Nazi flag. Right then, I hear my mom calling for me and my first thought was, I can't let her see this. She was no historian herself, but I at least knew she had the abstract pride about him having done his part. I mean, I did too, I suppose. So for her to find out her pop was a Nazi, and she was such a bleeding heart liberal herself, I think. So for her to find out her pop was a Nazi, and she was such a bleeding heart liberal herself, I think it would have killed her. So before I go down to meet her, I throw the stuff back into the bag, toss it back into the crawlspace, and tell myself I'll go back for it under the guise of wanting to spend a little time at the old house before it got sold. It was the weirdest feeling. Ding reading what else was in that

diary but also barely being able to eat or sleep until I'd finally burned through every word. I mean, how else does a normal person react when they find out that their grandparent fought for the Nazis? It was maybe 4.30 in the morning when I finally gave up on getting any sleep. I got up, put on some clothes, and rode my bike over to my grandfather's place. I left a note for my mom on the table explaining where she could find me, then set off to face the music. It was the longest ride of my life. Somehow 10 minutes stretched out to feel more like an hour, and by the time I actually pulled up outside the house, I was honestly debating just burning the contents of that burlap sack and never thinking about it again.

But that was a dumb idea, a coward's idea, a surefire way to ensure that I slowly went insane from wondering what happened to my grandpa to turn into such a, and I don't even have trouble typing this out today, such a monster. I retrieved the diary and tobacco tin from the burlap sack, dusting myself off before I took a seat at the kitchen table and began reading. If I typed out every passage where something of note happened, I'd be writing this out for weeks, maybe even a year. It might even make for an interesting book if it hadn't been such an infinite source of shame for me. I imagine people might want to learn a thing or two from my grandpa's experiences. I certainly had no idea that any other nationalities fought for

the Nazis other than the Germans, not ones that you'd traditionally think of being against them. So, to save us all the time, I'll just type out a little extract to give you an idea of how utterly horrifying it was, and this isn't even the worst bit. Every day the Russians get closer and closer to Berlin, and every day the German people show how weak they are. Every one of them that I see fleeing the city makes me want to pump someone's air This just means angry When the Charlemagne division was ordered to set up checkpoints to catch deserters I decided to take the initiative Any woman or man who was old or fit enough to fire a rifle

We took them off to the side to sign some papers Before sending the rest of their group on their way We enjoyed killing the cowards with our bare hands off to the side to sign some papers before sending the rest of their group on their way. We enjoyed killing the cowards with our bare hands and the women we kept around to keep us company. Shooting people is very impersonal. Using your hands gives a much greater feeling of power. And what else does a man need after a kill but a woman? It was all so much fun being behind the lines for the first time in months. One girl decided to spoil all our fun by cutting both her and her little sister's throat. Then, not only had we lost two girls, but the others were suddenly of bad hair,

which means upset. So that was the end of that. After reading, the idea came back to me to burn it all. It was something I never wanted another living soul to know about my family. But then again, I kind of figured I'd be doing the world a disservice, and maybe myself. Maybe I considered this some type of confession. I also figured people might be able to figure out where someone's long-lost loved one was on the back of what the diary included. If I did that, maybe I'd be balancing the books somehow, even if it was just a little. But if I do end up sending it into a museum or something, it won't be until after my mom passes.

I imagine it'll be quite the big news for her, especially in today's political climate and the last thing I want is her getting any of the backlash. So for now, I guess I'll just keep my grandpa's secret and just keep on trying to slowly accept that there's no real bearing on my life or my mother's. But I still think I'll do some type of volunteer work this summer. Maybe balance the books a little more, in my mind. Some sort of penance. All for the people in Berlin that day, who tried to get away. Okay, so this whole thing might just be me being completely and utterly paranoid, so if it comes across that way, whatever. But I know something weird is going on. Last night I arrived back home after being in work all day to find that my exterior garage door keypad was left open.

It was weird, but I assumed it was more of a malfunction with the equipment than anything else. I sigh, roll my eyes, and make a mental note of calling their customer service line as I go grab the remote to close it over again. Boom, the remote's not working. Every time I hit the close button, the light of the garage door flashes three times as usual but there was no movement. However, the door did close when I used the actual wall mounted control system. So you can see why I just figured this was a malfunction at first. Electronics malfunction and that's what they do.

Annoying but it's no big deal. But this new thing just so happened to be the latest in a long list of weird things that have happened in my town over the years. Like I said, maybe I'm just being overly paranoid and I should just follow my ex's advice about getting a dog or something, but either way, I'm starting up my own little investigation and after about a month or so of mulling it over, I've come to a rather chilling conclusion. That someone has been living in the crawlspace up in my attic. Ironically, I've never been up there. I've been living in this townhouse for coming on six months, and I just put it off and put it off.

I tried opening the crawl space in the attic shortly after moving in. I even got a step ladder so I could really try and force the thing open but it seemed I just couldn't get the leverage to push it open. That or maybe it has been sealed with paint or something. I planned on using it for some extra storage space but since that proved to be impossible I just may do elsewhere. Obviously my main theory as to why the garage door was open was that there had been some kind of break-in but it was only when I was trying to work out what had been stolen that I saw the three distinct scuff marks on the ceiling where the opening to the crawlspace is.

I was almost certain they hadn't been there before, like the whole place had been refurbished and redecorated by the time I moved in. I tried the hatch again, but it's impossible to get into. Only this time, it felt more like it was weighted down by something above it, as opposed to just being sealed shut. This is really rustling my jimmies, but aside from bashing the thing open and causing a butt ton of structural damage, there really wasn't all that much I could do about it. So, I just head to bed, telling myself I'll lock up all the internal doors I can before I head off to work. Then, that same evening, I come home to find the door handle of the door between the

garage and the kitchen had been messed with, like it was actually loose where it hadn't been before. By this point, I'm convinced that someone is regularly breaking into my house whenever I go off to work. It's not like I don't give them ample opportunity either. During the week, I pour 14 hours into every work day and I tend to work around 8 hours over any set weekend too. That's just what it takes to run a successful small business these days, I'm not complaining either, I love my job, but to whoever is doing it, my house is mostly empty so it must seem like fair game to them. During the weeks that followed this little revelation, twice I heard weird noises coming from the attic at night, and on both occasions, I grabbed the biggest, sharpest knife

I could find in my kitchen and went to investigate. On both occasions, all was silent when I ventured up there. Silent, yes, and this is going to sound crazy, but I know that there was someone else there with me. I could just feel it. It's honestly quite surreal. I was in this mess in the first place because I'd basically been too frugal to pay someone for a full home inspection. That and the whole purchase has been really quick because it had been off the back of a tax credit. Ah, so about the previous resident. This might be nothing, but the weird financial situation they seemed to be in had my spidey senses tingling.

The property itself was a short sale and the previous occupier was actually renting it for the shockingly low price of $100 a month. How they managed to haggle the owner down, I don't know. But when I went on tour of the house before I moved in, I saw a sleeping bag and only a bag of clothes in the bedroom after being told the tenant hadn't moved any of their stuff out yet. I'm thinking there's a distinct possibility that they were forcibly removed from the house so it could be sold, in which case, maybe they felt a sense of ownership over it, maybe they couldn't or wouldn't find a new place. Maybe before they moved out, they made themselves a handy, secretive place to sleep. And I've been sharing a house with a total stranger for more

than half a year without ever knowing they were there. Just typing this out has me convinced. I haven't even posted to read any comments or DMs yet and I've already made up my mind. I know it might sound crazy if I call the cops or whatever but at this point I really don't care. I also check out small wireless cameras that I can hook up to my smartphone and bought them pretty much instantly. I'm going to try to get footage of whatever's going on, then use that to back up my reports to the cops. I'll post updates when and if I can.

Update. Well, I called the cops and filed a report. I'll have to finish work early today so I can go talk to them at the house and show them around, but it's all good. I'd rather just get this weight off my mind and I can catch up with work another day. Update 2. I felt like some kind of paranoid maniac telling the cops my conspiracy theory but they were surprisingly nice about the whole thing. They listened to what I had to say, took everything seriously and they were great.

They did seem to dismiss my whole crawlspace theory as neither of them were able to get the hatch open, but they did say I should replace all the locks and that installing the cameras were most definitely a good idea. They also recommended changing the garage code and if I actually continuously felt unsafe that I should invest in a handgun for home defense. I don't think I will get a gun. I'm just not a gun guy, but I will pick up a baseball bat that I'm going to hide under my bed. Update number three. I've set up my defenses. Well, not so just defenses as detection systems. I got some tape on the crawlspace entry point. I put some boxes up against the attic door. I changed the garage door code. I set up the cameras. All of it. I got the baseball bat under my bed too so if there's

any sneaking around tonight, I'll know about it. Update number four. I heard the boxes tumble and I just ran. I can't bring myself to actually face whatever psycho had been content to living in that crawlspace for like 7 months now. I'm ashamed. But I just ran to my car with my baseball bat and my PJs and now I'm at my work office. It's just gone on about 2.30am and I plan on going back to my house with my co-worker first thing in the morning. I asked him if he'd bring a gun. He said yes. I'm going to try and get some

sleep for the time being though, but fatigue is hitting me hard. Update number 5. I'm sorry this one's so late, but it's obviously been a busy morning. My coworker has arrived with his weapon and he also had the foresight to bring along his kid's old selfie stick. We've agreed to just bash the little hatch open, shove the phone up there with its flash on, and find out once and for all if there's been someone living in the crawlspace. Wish us luck, we're going in. Update number seven. It's done. We bashed open the hatch, took a recording of what is up inside, then watched the video back. Although there was no one up there, there were all sorts of signs of human habitation.

There was a dirty mattress, piles of dirty clothes, and all kinds of food wrappers too. So I think it's conclusive. It was never my imagination. It was never just a break-in. Someone was actually living in my house without me knowing, and that's as terrifying as it is depressing. Thanks to everyone who's been supportive. I don't think I've been nearly this brave without all of your kind words and advice. And if there's one thing I can add, it's please, please don't make the same mistakes as me. Obviously this guy wasn't violent or anything, at least not proactively so, but this whole thing could have been so much worse if this guy happened to want to get me out of the way or whatever.

I'm hoping because we crashed his little party up there, that maybe, maybe the squatter won't return. But I'm in contact with the police and we're filing a report as we speak. It's baffling them as much as it is me, but there's not much they can do if they don't have a perpetrator. All I can say is that I promise that in the future, I'll be a man of action and not one of inaction. I worked in pest control for over 20 years of my life, and let me tell you, crawl spaces put my kids through college. Why in God's name any architect in their right mind would design or implement what's basically a built-in home for vermin and other little beasties, God only knows. But needless to say, those things have been a major source of revenue for me over the years. But one crawlspace

in particular almost took everything from me. And after that, I viewed them much more like potential tombs than dusty old cash cows. So about ten years ago now, we were treating this one big old house for termites. The entire thing had had a crawlspace built right on top of its foundations, and the thing was evidently just a breeding ground for a variety of invasive pests. I mean, it was huge, dark, damp, and there was ample access to all kinds of wooden beams and floorboards that became a straight-up feast for the termites. The only entrance was this tiny trap door that was built into the floor of a closet, but the area I actually needed to inspect was way on the other side of the house. So basically, I'd have to crawl maybe 50 or 60 meters across a dark, filthy, potentially termite-infested

nastiness to check if one particularly infested area had been fully gassed out. If it was, no problem. If it wasn't, I'd be shaking the termites out of my hair until lunch. Not necessarily scary, but it turns out it wasn't so much the termites I should have been worried about. So right away, first thing I notice about this particular crawlspace is how humid it was. It turned out the family had someone stuff insulation all around the edges, and I'm almost certain these were designed to help keep the home's occupants cooler in the summer. I suppose it'd work in theory but the family must have just wanted to save on heating bills. As a result, it was like

a freaking sauna down there. Not only that, while I was down there, I discovered a leak on one of the big old cast iron pipes, like there was an actual damp spot just helping saturate the area with moisture. Granted, it turned out that I didn't actually have to crawl through any of that mess, as someone had the foresight to install a mechanics creeper right beneath the trap door, but still, it was a real mess down there. Anyway, I lay down in the creeper, tuck my tool bag underneath me, then push myself over to the problem area. I figured it must have been somewhere underneath the kitchen because there are a lot of the same ancient looking pipes running here and there, but that's where I saw a whole bunch of termite

damage to some of the sill plates and all the floor joists. No signs of any termites, but the family was looking at one heck of a bill to get it all torn out and replaced. So, I get finished up with my inspection and I'm ready to start wheeling myself back towards the trap door. I reach up, grab a hold of two sister joints to give myself some push, and I feel them just crumble in my hand. I mean, those things just crumbled like cigar tobacco. It was frankly amazing they still existed given their condition. Then it hits me that pretty much the only thing stopping the ground floor from collapsing altogether is a bunch of other sister joints like the ones that I was in the process of dusting off

my fingers. And if they were anything like the ones in question, all that stood between me and getting buried alive were a few pieces of rotten wood. I start calling out to my guys upstairs for everyone to walk out of the house one by one and to tread very, very lightly as they did so. Obviously, it was perfectly evident why I was asking them to do that and now I'm not just sweating my butt off from the rainforest-tier humidity, I'm also sweating bullets because I'm convinced that I'm about to die or at least suffer serious injuries at the very minimum. When the last man was out, I slowly wheeled myself back over to the trap door, not touching anything, not saying a word. Heck, I didn't even look at any more of the crumbling wooden joints just in case they thought that I was giving them

the stink eye and decided to collapse on me. Obviously, I got out of there okay, and no one else was permitted from going down there without first tearing up the floorboards and completely restructuring the thing. But my god, I've never been one of those people who are particularly scared of being buried alive, but you can bet your butt I am now. That horrid, crazy panic. You get the idea of being trapped, of not being able to move or breathe and all you can do is just scream for help as you slowly expire. Ugh, it makes my skin crawl just thinking

about it. So please, if you have a crawl space in your home don't let your kids go playing around in it and make sure it's blocked off but not just sealed up with plastic or whatever so some poor neighborhood kitty cat crawls inside, gets trapped, and ends up stinking up your digs. To be continued... was 16 years old, and part of my job involves doing full house inspections. These are by far one of the most annoying parts of the job as they can be awkward, drawn out affairs where homeowners bark at me to do my job whilst also making it as difficult as possible. But I'd take a hundred moody homeowners over one crawlspace. They're my nemesis. I absolutely hate them. They're dark, dank, dusty, and can be really bloody dangerous. Generally speaking, the worst you're going to get are a few spider webs and a lung full of dust, maybe some kind of horrible looking creepy crawly if you're really unlucky.

But if your luck is particularly abominable, as mine happened to be one day, you'll come face to face with something considerably worse. Obviously, I only go into a crawlspace with some kind of flashlight, but something the absent-mindedness with which they're constructed means they're full of little nooks and crannies that A. you can't see around and B, cause some pretty creepy shadows that might conceal a huntsman spider until it's too late. I've lost count of the number of times I've rounded some dark alcove only to find some massive hairy spider staring right back at me. Better than a kick in the teeth, sure, but still not pleasant in the least bit.

So on this one occasion, I'm in this really old house with not one, but two big crawl spaces. One between two internal walls on the ground floor and one beneath the ground floor itself. I get the ground floor done nice and quickly, but I'm dreading the first floor. I'm not saying I had a sixth sense moment or I had a bad feeling about it or anything. I just couldn't be bothered. Crawl spaces are bad enough on their own. Two in one day is just rubbing salt in the wound. So finally, right before I'm due to finish for the day, I head into the room with the carpets removed to start pulling up some floorboards. I'd expected some cobweb infestation, but at first, the underfloor crawlspace didn't

seem that bad at all. There were hardly any spider webs and there actually seemed to be a bit of daylight getting in from somewhere which would make my job considerably easier. The only trouble with there being no spider webs in there is there's nothing to catch some of the smaller and usually deadlier creepy crawlies down there. But a preliminary flashlight inspection showed it was pretty much empty. Lucky me, I remember thinking, happy that I had gotten off lightly with a relatively clean crawlspace. But the lack of insect life and the sliver of daylight I was seeing, those should have really keyed me into something that I was honestly too dozy to anticipate, because when I

crawled down into the opening and shuffled along the ground to inspect the timber down there, I heard something that made the hackles go up on my neck. I shined my flashlight around in a panic, trying to find the source of the noise, and in one particularly shady corner, I saw this huge brown snake, all curled up and ready to strike. I'd always wondered if I was ever going to find a snake on the job like that, and that was one way to get an answer. It's no further than ten feet away from me, obviously having snuck into the crawlspace using whatever hole was letting the daylight in. Just so you know, untreated brown snake bites can kill

you in about 30 minutes. And guess what? They're one of the most commonly encountered snakes here in Australia. I don't think there's a single snake on earth that's killed so many people over the years, and it's purely because of how bloody aggressive they are. I'd only had one other scary encounter with a snake back when I was a kid and guess what, it was a bloody brown snake wasn't it? But anyway, so back to my life and death moment in this crawlspace. I should also really add that this whole thing happened in February, a time of year when people all over Australia are warned to be extra vigilant in their gardens because of

it being mating season for snakes. They get doubly bloody aggressive during that time, and my complete foolishness in throwing myself down in that crawlspace without a proper prior inspection, well, that was probably now going to cost me my life. But like I mentioned, I used my little torch to find the angry little bugger, this little pen torch thing that I could clip to my shirt. I very, very slowly placed the torch down so I can use both hands to start backing away from the snake, and it just so happened that my little pen torch saved my life. It was a really powerful little thing, and I'm guessing the snake was picking up the heat and light of its little bulb and thinking that was the thing that disturbed its horny slumber.

Right as I'm about to escape, the brown snake lunges for the pen torch and tries plunging its fangs into it. To think that if I'd frozen up, or if I'd moved a bit too hastily on my way out, that could have easily been me. But it's not even necessarily the bite that's so terrible when it comes to Aussie snakes. It's the treatment. A mate of mine's uncle was bitten by a taipan years back, and he said all the jabs and the pills were worse than the bloody bite itself. That's mainly what I was afraid of, not so much not getting to a hospital in time, but the months of therapy afterwards where I could lose out on work or have some kind of permanent nerve damage. Needless to say, I decided to invest in some little fiber optic cameras.

They're the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a Mission Impossible movie or something. And they've ended the need to be climbing into small spaces altogether. Needless to say, I love them. They save me time and effort, and there's a good chance terrifying experience of my entire life. When I was 8 years old, I found a monster in the crawlspace beneath our house. It was without a doubt the most terrifying experience of my entire life, and something I pin the blame of my generalized anxiety disorder on. There's an almost direct thread that runs between the one incident and all of my major phobias,

and my therapist even said that my struggle with being intimate with men all stems from associating the dark with horrifying discoveries. I guess by this point you're just anxious to hear about this monster, so I'll get on with the story. According to my mom, I used to be quite a brave kid. Kind of a weird little loner kid, but a very explorative one. I don't know if that's just relatively speaking and I certainly don't remember being brave. I just know it accounts for me being dumb enough to want to explore the crawlspace like it'd lead us to some fantastical new world, like Narnia but

for rednecks. I remember filling my backpack up with a bunch of random stuff from the fridge, like not even stuff I could actually eat, just stuff I assumed to be able to cook just like my mom did. Toss some stuff in some hot water, wait a while, then boom, pizza. At least that's just how I thought it worked. The one thing I did get right was a flashlight and like a ton of batteries. So if there was one thing I wouldn't run out of, it was light. But being naive and in my haste to remove all the batteries from all the TV and sound system remotes, I forget to do something pretty crucial, as you'll see in a minute.

So I head out into our backyard, over to the spot where there was a slight gap in the boarding under our house. I'd already discovered that it was almost perfectly kid-sized, and I'd come back with all my supplies now that I was ready to explore. Whatever it was I thought was under there. I clamber back into the crawlspace, switch on my flashlight, then get crawling over to the center. It was slow going, because I had to obviously hold my flashlight with one hand and support myself with my other. But slowly and steadily I make my way further and further

underneath the house. Then suddenly, of all the things to happen, my flashlight starts flickering. I have like a total panic moment when I'm shaking it around and tapping at it, trying to keep the bulb from dying. I had a buttload of batteries with me, and I'd forgotten to actually put fresh batteries in my little flashlight before I ventured into the crawlspace. Talk about top 10 anime betrayals. Only the one that had betrayed me was me. Super Meta.

So I'm freaking out, crawling around trying to figure out which direction I came in. But because it's all that lattice style of boarding, I'm looking for light to recognize where I came in, only there's little specks of it all around me, and it was a nightmare. But after about a minute or so, I keep telling myself I have all my batteries tucked away and if I can just get one out of my back, I'll be able to change the batteries over using what small amount of light I have already. I'd already practiced changing the batteries on my flashlight a bunch. I was obsessed with the thing since I used to use it to read my storybooks after mom and dad had called lights out.

So as much as it might have been a challenge for any other kid to do something kind of complicated in low light conditions, I was like a freaking navy seal with that stuff and managed to get them all switched over even though I thought I was practically vibrating from the sudden fright. I screw the top back on, flick the flashlight on, then shine it around myself to see if I had left any loose batteries. And that's when I see it. It was the single most horrifying thing I'd ever seen, before or since. It had those huge, jet black eyes, presumably because it didn't get any light down there, along with a row of bony, dagger-like teeth that seemed only loosely set in its jaw. As for a nose, it just

didn't seem to have one. There were these huge, cavernous gaps that I'm assuming acted as its nostrils. I didn't stick around to analyze it any longer. I let out what my dad later described as the most ear-splitting screech he'd ever heard from man or beast, and then scrambled out from that crawlspace faster than a jackrabbit. I'd left everything behind under there too. Backpack, flashlight, every single AA battery I think in the entire house. So when I told my dad I'd almost been eaten by a monster, and that there was like 20 A's under the house, he had more than enough incentive to go deal with it. He pulls back a bunch of boarding, crawls under there himself, but I don't hear the monster attacking him or anything, so I just ask like, Daddy, is the monster still there?

He responds, no sweetie, no monster, and I got your backpack, now let's get cleaned up, okay? It's nasty in here. I didn't find out until quite a while later that the monster I saw under there was actually a dog skeleton. And not just any dog skeleton either. It was our family's dog that had gone missing less than a year before. I'd been absolutely heartbroken that she'd gone missing. Me and dad had plastered the neighborhood with missing posters, but obviously we didn't hear anything back and by then, we knew why. My therapist thinks that, even though I was so young, that it still somehow

registered that this was Lulu, the dog's name by the way. But instead of just confronting the fact that it was her, I told myself it was a monster. But I did this for literally years, convinced of the existence of otherworldly beings right up until I started youth counseling, where I was advised to actually talk to my dad about it. We talked, there were tears, but it was definitely something I needed. And if you haven't guessed right now, it was never really about seeing a monster. It was about confronting mortality, my own at that. Finding Lulu was definitely the scariest thing that happened to me when I was a kid.

But play stupid games and win stupid prizes, I suppose. To be continued... Eastern Standard Time. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash let's read official, and maybe even 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. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon.