The Lets Read Podcast - 158: TERROR ON THE REZ | 18 True Scary Stories | EP 146

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Native American Reservations, Unsolved Mysteries, & Being Hunted In The Woods...  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

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Vernon had fought in the Korean War and had returned to a job as a truck driver for a local firm. On the other hand, Virginia was a loving stay-at-home mom who cared for Matthew and his three older siblings. By all accounts, Matthew was a gregarious child who had no problem making friends and he could often be found playing outside with his older siblings, riding around on his favorite toy, a miniature replica dune buggy. The Allred family also had a healthy and friendly relationship with their neighbors, including elderly couple Ronaldo and Mary Pace, who kept ponies in their rather large backyard. Matthew's older brother Cindy would often take him over to the Pace

household for a ride around the paddock, and it's believed that this is how Matthew developed a love of the Old West. Prompted by his fascination with the pay-as-ponies, Matthew's father purchased a gift for him, a pair of brown suede cowboy boots. Although the boots were ever so slightly too big for him, the young cowpoke was smitten with them. Sunday, January 27th of 1974, was a balmy, sunny day, but one complemented by a gentle breeze floating in from the Gulf of Mexico. The all-red kids spent the vast majority of the day playing outside with the other neighborhood kids, as well as enjoying the new swing their father had tied to a tree in their backyard. Then, in the late afternoon, they returned home to enjoy a home-cooked Sunday dinner. Once they had finished eating, all four children wandered outside again to play. Young Cindy Allred said she watched her brother scamper towards the swing set at around 5.15. Fifteen minutes later, there was no sign of Matthew, and only Cindy could recall seeing him near the swing set.

At this stage, each family member seemed relatively unconcerned, assuming that Matthew would simply reappear in due course. But the fact of the matter was that none of them would ever see little Matthew, or his cowboy boots ever again. It wasn't long before the Allred family had become deeply concerned for Matthew's well-being. They drove around searching while Vernon looked through the yard in the cab of his truck, hoping that his son had just tagged along with him on a routine errand without him noticing. Around 6pm, Vernon Allred called the Hillsborough County Sheriff to report Matthew missing Then set off with a neighbor to track down an ice cream truck that had passed through the neighborhood around the same time that Matthew disappeared The children's parents permitted them to buy ice cream from the very same truck as an occasional treat And it was entirely possible that he heard the familiar jingle during dinner and left to go look for it.

They caught up with the driver a few blocks away, discovering that a little boy who closely resembled Matthew had tried to buy some ice cream from him, but that he turned the child away because he had no money. News of Matthew's disappearance spread rapidly among the community, and by sundown, almost a thousand friends, neighbors, police officers, and volunteers were searching the palmetto thickets and small wooded areas that dotted the local neighborhood. Even the ice cream vendor helped out, cruising around the neighborhood in the hopes that Matthew would hear the music and follow it home.

His family were particularly worried about a local canal, one that happened to be just a few minutes walk from their home. There was also a number of small ponds and waterlogged sinkholes in the area, deadly traps that posed a huge risk to Matthew's safety. Yet thankfully, there was no evidence suggesting that the young boy had drowned. However, this complete lack of evidence or clues as to Matthew's whereabouts quickly morphed from a cold comfort to a wild panic. For all intents and purposes, the boy had simply dropped off the face of the earth, and that terrified all those who considered the possibility.

Hope had to be maintained. Without it, the boy would be doomed. Two days later, on the evening of January 29th, police had combed a three-square-mile area around the home, but to their boundless frustration, had failed to unearth a single clue as to Matthew's whereabouts. They had also located Matthew's double, the kid who tried to buy ice cream but unfortunately, he turned out to be just another neighborhood kid. That same evening, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department announced that they would be suspending the search for the time being, saying they were confident Matthew was not in the immediate area and that they no longer believed that this was a simple case of a child wandering away from home. This sent the boy's parents to new levels of

despair, as it slowly became obvious that something much more sinister had occurred than just misplacing their child. As a result, FBI agents were called in from nearby Tampa, but they too were completely unable to prove any kind of foul play. Much like their counterparts in local law enforcement, they also believed Matthew's disappearance to be some kind of abduction, yet proving that would be a different matter entirely. As it turned out, despite the hundreds of man hours poured into the case, there was simply nothing that could be done to find Matthew. Finding him required a clue, a trail, an eyewitness statement, yet even the all-powerful FBI were

unable to glean any pertinent information, and to the dismay of all involved, the case went cold. More than four years later, a group known as Suncoast Crime Watch aired a minute-long commercial on many Florida TV channels. The commercial was a reenactment of Matthew's disappearance, one designed to jog the memories of anyone involved. But the commercial didn't generate a single usable lead, and even Skip Pask, the lead coordinator for Suncoast Crime Watch, said, It's a case with no leads, a total dead end, and as much as it hurts me to say it, we've had to shelve the case completely. Once again, the hopes of the grieving Alred family were crushed,

and they would be forced to wait another 14 years to get any additional answers. On June 4th of 1990, the Alred's beloved neighbor, Ronald Lopez, passed away at the ripe old age of 73. The single-story home he had once shared with his wife, Mary, stood vacant and abandoned for another two years, until the couple's daughter put the property on the market and began to clear it in preparation of sale. As part of this process, the neighbor's realtor hired a company whose job it was to clear out the septic tank that had been built in the backyard. And so on the morning of New Year's Eve 1992, a 19-year-old cleaning company employee arrived at the Pays' home to begin the process of emptying

the tank, the first time this had been done in more than 20 years. When the employee cracked the concrete seal of the tank and removed the lid, he could see a small round object partially submerged by the gallons of filth. According to this employee, the small object appeared to be nothing more than a coconut, so he simply carried on clearing the tank. Yet moments later, the large hose used to clear the tank had become clogged up by something. The employee then moved to find out just what the blockage was, and it was then that he made a horrifying discovery.

Clogging up the sewage hose were a small jawbone, some ribs, a portion of a human pelvis, and some leg bones. Then it hit him. The round brown object he'd seen wasn't a coconut. It was a human skull. And not just any human skull. The size suggested it had evidently belonged to a small child. As you can imagine, the horrified employee immediately called his boss to report what had happened, who rushed over to help hose down and identify some of the objects

pulled from the tank. One of them was a tiny brown pointed cowboy boot. Matthew's cowboy boot. Those who had searched for him back in 74 must have been traumatized. They had searched high and low, and little Matthew's body had been right under their noses the whole time. Local police then sifted through hundreds of gallons of waste by hand, recovering even more bones, a flashlight, and Matthew's other cowboy boot. The fact that the tank itself was buried underground proved that it was no accident, and tragic though it was, the blame lay with someone of exceptional depravity and evil. The kid could not have put

himself in there, said the information director for the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office. Somebody put him in there. He was killed and then put in there afterward. That's what we believe. The cowboy boot confirmed everyone's worst fears, that Matthew had been abducted by a vicious predator right in plain sight, and that while they were frantically looking for him, his killer had squeezed the life from him, then dumped him in their beloved neighbor's septic tank. I never seen them since then until today, Vernon said. It's a positive idea as far as I'm concerned because them's the same boots I bought him just before he came up missing. It took until January 13th of 1993 for Matthew's death to be officially

ruled a homicide. The Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's Office explained that the ruling was not based on any injuries to the bones, but the fact that someone had clearly tried to conceal his death. It was also noted that there was no obvious damage to the bones, but the fact that someone had clearly tried to conceal his death. It was also noted that there was no obvious damage to the bones, leading them to believe that whoever had put Matthew in the septic tank had strangled him first. The news was a gut punch for Matthew's family. Old wounds were opening up, but the horror of their poor boy's body being found on their beloved neighbor's property was almost too much to bear. Back in 1974, their neighbor, Rinaldo Pais, was a 57-year-old retiree who was born and raised in the Tampa Bay area and lived with his wife, Mary. Their adult children were married and presumably living outside the house, and it is unknown if anyone was visiting or

staying with them at the time Matthew disappeared. To the Allreds, Ronaldo was a warm and friendly man who posed absolutely no threat to anyone, let alone their children. What's more, Ronaldo was particularly kind and affectionate to Matthew, what with him being the baby of the family. Ronaldo's wife Mary was also something of a pillar of the community and was extremely supportive and consoling of Matthew's mother in the aftermath of his disappearance. Vernon Allred spoke positively about the Pays family in an interview with the Tampa Times four days after he went missing. Matt considered them tops, and Pays looked on him as a grandson, he said. He would let Matt and Cindy ride his ponies anytime.

Yet it seems that Rinaldo wasn't entirely the kindly, older man he pretended to be. As in the late 90s, homicide detectives told Vernon Allred that they had evidence that Rinaldo killed his son. Vernon was then sworn to secrecy and the evidence has remained a closely guarded secret, which raises the question of what exactly they found that placed the blame squarely in Ronaldo's lap. On top of that, what motive could Ronaldo possibly have had to kill his neighbor's three year old son? Could it have been that it was simply an accident that he knew he'd been on the hook for if anyone found out? Or was it a deliberate act of murder?

And could Maria possibly known about the murder and played the doting friend to lower suspicion? If she did know, it's most certainly too late to ask her about it as she passed away back in 1983. And despite a point of such considerable interest, there's no way of categorically proving that Rinaldo Pais was the culprit. The recovery of Matthew Aldred's remains brought little comfort to his family. His older sister Cindy struggled with feelings of guilt for a long time after, blaming herself for giving her brother's killer enough time to strike. Matthew's parents, Vernon and Virginia Aldred, did all they could to move on, even moving the family to Connecticut in 1980 and having another child in an attempt to escape the bad memories. But they were plagued by unanswered questions,

slowly eaten alive by the hope that he would show up at their door one day with a Mommy, Daddy, I've come home. I live with that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for almost 20 years now, Vernon said in 1993. Just picture that you have a child, and all of a sudden he's gone. It drives you crazy. And January 16th of 1993, almost exactly 19 years after Matthew was last seen playing in the backyard of his home in Claremont City, his family held a memorial service in his honor.

They also planned to have the cowboy boots bronzed, a keepsake from the cheerful blonde little boy who was stolen from them for reasons they may never know. I'm glad it's over, Cindy said. We don't have to wonder where he is anymore. All we can do now is go on. We can't stop time. We can't wonder how it could have been. But those that are left behind can't help but wonder what would possess such a kindly old man to strangle the life out of an innocent young boy, to rob a loving family of their happiness in such a cruel and malicious manner. It seems there really are monsters in the world, and sometimes, they wear a human face. On the morning of January 26th, 2011, Ellen Rae Greenberg awoke before dawn to prepare for work.

As a Philadelphia elementary school teacher, she was used to the early mornings. But her partner, Sam Goldberg, was a high-profile producer over at NBC and was up and out of their apartment even earlier than she. After completing her morning routine, Ellen grabbed a quick breakfast and began the short drive to work. She gave her mom a call, asked how she was and as the two were griping about taxes, Ellen began to notice the ceiling of dark iron gray clouds above them. It looked like Philly was due a snowstorm, a heavy one at that. Yet that wasn't the only misfortune that was headed Ellen's way and as it turned out, January 26th would prove to be her last day on earth.

After a morning of grimly frigid weather, the early afternoon saw the heavens finally open and a thick carpet of snow began to collect on the streets outside. As is customary in Philadelphia area schools, a preemptive snow day is sometimes called if snow begins to fall too fast. This gives parents and teachers time to get their kids home safe before anyone becomes hopelessly stranded in the deep drifts. So, over the course of around an hour or so, Ellen made sure that all of her students were either on a school bus or awaiting a ride home from a parent. When all were safe and accounted for, she too began the short drive back home. When she arrived back at her apartment, her producer partner Sam had just gotten home after his pre-dawn start. Both were

early to bed and early to rise, and a huge part of keeping this discipline was Sam's obsessive fitness routine. He shared a pre-workout snack with Ellen, then headed out to a nearby gym to work out for a few hours. This was the last time he would see his partner alive, as upon his return to the apartment at around 6.10pm, he discovered something very unusual. The door to his apartment was locked from the inside. They only did this before they were headed to bed and never ever in the daytime. Even if Ellen was headed to bed earlier than usual, she'd leave the door unlocked so he could actually get in, right? As a precaution, Sam sent Ellen a text saying he was outside the apartment trying to get in. When she didn't reply, he began to call her and, as he heard her phone ringing on the other side

of the door with absolutely no reply, he realized something was horribly wrong. A security guard employed by the apartment building's management company was on scene to help Sam break the door down. But as the pair of them rushed into the apartment's main living space, they made a horrifying discovery. Ellen was sitting down, with her back leaning up against a bookcase. According to Sam, Ellen had a clean, white towel in her hand, and probably because of the pure state of shock he was in, he didn't notice any blood at first. That being said,

he later testified that he could tell she was dead. It was something about the look in her eyes, something about her unusual sitting position. He just knew. Despite the grim deduction, Sam rushed into action, shaking his fiancée and begging her to wake up before he commenced CPR. It's only then that he noticed the 10-inch serrated steak knife that was sticking out of Ellen's chest. By this point, the security guard accompanying him was on the line with emergency services, and once they learned the weapon was still jammed into an open wound, they ordered Sam to cease his attempts to save her life. Chest compressions would only open deep wounds and cause even more grievous internal bleeding. All Sam could do was sit back, wait for the EMTs and accept that he'd lost the love of his life in

one of the most nightmarish ways imaginable. According to the coroner's report, Ellen had been stabbed more than 20 different times, almost half of those wounds being to her neck. Two of the stab wounds were to the very rear of her neck, one penetrating so deep that knife damage could be found on the base of her skull. The coroner also noted that there were no signs of any defensive wounds, indicating that Ellen had either known her attacker, trusting them enough to approach, or that her attacker had ambushed her with deadly efficiency. Police set to work trying to find her killer.

However, none of Ellen's neighbors had heard or seen anything untoward and the only DNA they could pull from the scene was either Ellen's or her fiancé's. Homicide detectives then entered the idea that her killer had used the sixth floor balcony of Ellen's apartment to enter and exit her home. Yet upon discovering undisturbed snow where her killer would have started and ended his climb, they were forced to rule the possibility out. As you can imagine, police were stumped for an explanation, and for a while the lens of suspicion focused more and more on the grieving Sam. But then, the Philadelphia Police Department announced that they'd come to a shocking conclusion. They told the public that Ellen Greenberg,

a woman with over 20 stab wounds, two to the back of her neck, had taken her own life. Every single person who heard the news was stunned. How in the world could the police come to such a ridiculous conclusion was beyond them? And naturally, they demanded an explanation. To law enforcement, it was a simple matter of deduction. They had eliminated every possibility they could until there was one final definitive explanation. And that was that somehow,

Ellen Greenberg had become gripped with some kind of depressive frenzy. It would explain why she didn't leave a note, why a woman who had no history of mental health issues could suddenly implode in such a distressing and violent manner. The Pennsylvania Attorney General also released information which detailed Ellen's internet search history, which reportedly included the terms methods in which to take your life,

quick ways to do it, and painless ways as well. However, it was demonstrated that none of the search results listed stabbing yourself 20 times as a painless method, and one former homicide detective said it was absolutely ridiculous that a search history would be used to justify this. Despite being a pretty out there explanation, the idea that Ellen entered some kind of bizarre fugue state, that some kind of chemical imbalance in her brain had announced itself in the most destructive way possible, it wasn't completely impossible. In the past, more than one accused murderer has escaped a full sentence by successfully arguing that they were temporarily insane, or had some

kind of mental health problem that explained their behavior. The same could be said for Ellen, and as a matter of fact, that's exactly the explanation that Philadelphia PD used. And outside of Ellen's immediate circle of family and friends, the conclusion remained unquestioned for more than eight long years. But in March of 2019, the Philadelphia Inquirer released a thorough, sensationalized investigative report reviewing the bizarre circumstances surrounding Helen's death. Pittsburgh forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht weighed in on the subject, a man perhaps most famous for challenging the prevailing narrative of the John F. Kennedy assassination. He reviewed the facts of the case, determining that it was

strongly suspicious of homicide. In fact, I have no idea how these people wrote this off. I've never known anyone, no matter how distressed, to stab themselves in the neck so many times, Ciro was reported as saying. Another forensic scientist, Henry Lee, who testified for the defense in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, reviewed the case files and concluded that the number and types of wounds and bloodstain patterns observed are consistent with a homicide scene. One particular stab wound began a massive point of contention for all involved, and that was the deep wound to the rear of Ellen's neck that one doctor claimed would have caused severe pain, cranial nerve dysfunction, and traumatic brain injuries.

Therefore, unless this was the final killer blow that Ellen delivered to herself, there's no way she'd have been able to inflict such an injury then continue to stab herself. The original pathology report was apparently filed by Dr. Lucy Rorick who had apparently denied that any deep spinal wound existed in the first place. Yet when the Philadelphia Inquirer approached Dr. Rorick for a statement she denied having anything to do with it. Quote, I didn't even get a chance to observe Ellen's body, and I have no bills, no invoices,

or reports proving that I was there, she said. I have no idea who's filed this report in my name, but I can promise you, I did not perform any autopsy of Ellen Greenberg. And this is where the murder of Ellen Greenberg takes an even more frightening and mysterious turn. The more we know, the more it seems obvious that a vast, far-reaching conspiracy was implemented to cover up the fact that Ellen was murdered. And the fact that this was done so brazenly, in a manner that treats the general public as if though they're moronic, that only adds insult to injury. A person would have to be insane to unquestioningly believe that a woman with more than 20 stab wounds

had taken their own life. And the more the story came back into the public eye, the more the public demanded honest and definitive answers regarding her death. In October 2019, Ellen Greenberg's parents filed a civil suit against the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office and Dr. Marlon Osborne, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy, claiming gross negligence with a view to criminal conspiracy charges. It was through this suit that Ellen's parents learned that Dr. Osborne had initially wanted to declare Ellen's death a murder, but had at one point been visited by Philadelphia detectives who insisted he change the manner of death to her taking her own life. This was coupled with a presentation of a

new form of evidence known as photogrammetry, a form of technology unavailable at the time of Ellen's death. Photogrammetry helped create a digital, 3D anatomical reproduction of her body, one which demonstrated irrefutably that it was impossible for Ellen to have inflicted even half of the stab wounds on herself. This evidence led to a significant legal victory in January of 2020, when the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas allowed the case to proceed past the motion to dismiss stage. A fresh inquiry is due to be held in the year 2021, much to the joy of Ellen's parents and her former partner, Sam. However, whatever buried information the trial pulls up is certain to be extremely controversial,

and it will be very, very interesting to discover exactly why the Philadelphia Police Department insisted on ruling Ellen's death as her taking her own life. The bulk of the issue isn't so much why they covered it up, as it's only natural for someone to want to avoid lengthy imprisonment as the result of a murder conviction. The real question is who had them cover it up? Declaring such an obvious murder as such was obviously always bound to be controversial, and it was surely only a matter of time before the truth came out. When it does, heads will roll, and resignations at the highest levels of the police would be demanded from citizens and politicians alike. So unless they were covering for another police officer, maybe someone having an affair with Ellen who had decided if he couldn't

have her then no one would, then who were they covering for? It wasn't even a true cover up. What happened with Ellen was the equivalent of lighting a slow burn fuse on a 500 pound bomb. Like it was more to delay the inevitable than avoid it entirely. When that bomb exploded there would be hell to pay, but who was rich or powerful enough to take that kind of hit for? What seedy blood soaked cabal will be uncovered as a result of this fresh inquiry? And that's assuming any will be uncovered at all. Even a felon's death has finally ruled a murder, the person that did it has had eight long years to separate themselves from the incident,

and it might well be the case that this person has well and truly gotten away with murder. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Toyo's open country family of tires will get you through tough weather in a variety of terrains. Until May 31st, save up to $100 in rebates on select Toyo tires. Find a Toyo tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always Harriet Carr found herself stirring from her slumber. Feeling an uncomfortable dryness in her throat, Harriet rolled out of bed, put on her bathrobe, and trudged sleepily downstairs

towards her kitchen. She poured herself a glass of water, took a long, satisfying sip, then placed the glass down before turning to head back to bed. It's only then that Harriet noticed that not only was the door to her garage slightly ajar, but the light had been switched on. Not only that, but as she approached she could hear the soft hum of one of the family's cars running. Not that she thought about it, the bed that she normally shared with her husband seemed unusually empty as she rolled out of it. But what could Ted have possibly been up to in the garage in the middle of the night? Harriet slowly edged open her garage door only to be greeted by the most horrifying

sight of her entire life. Her 62-year-old husband, Melvin Ted Carr, was sitting motionless in the driver's seat of his car, keys in the ignition, engine ticking over, flooding the poorly ventilated garage with deadly carbon monoxide gas. Harriet bursted into action, wrenching open the driver's side door before hastily turning off the engine. She shook her lifeless husband with all her might, screaming at him, begging him to wake up. But it was no good. Ted had died hours before she had discovered him. He would never open his eyes ever again. As the grim reality sank in, Harriet burst into tears, unleashing a torrent of grief until she was finally able to somewhat regain control.

She had to call 911, she knew that much, but as she turned to head back into the kitchen where they kept the family phone, Harriet noticed that the trunk of her husband's car was open. Thinking that the contents of the trunk might shed some light on the reasoning behind her husband's sudden death, Harriet wandered around to the rear of the vehicle and peered inside, but when she laid eyes upon what was crammed inside, she ran screaming from the garage, pounding on the door to a neighbor's house until they invited her inside and called the cops. When the police arrived on scene, they entered the

car's garage to find that Ted's trunk was the stuff of nightmares. Crammed into the tiny space were three deceased corpses. That of 24-year-old Karen Nils, her two-year-old son Robert, and a 17-year-old girl named Sondra Harris. All three were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, and it was determined that both Karen and Sondra had both been violated before they were gassed. Ted died with a loaded.25 caliber revolver in his pocket and attached a hose to the car's tailpipe, one which was fed into the trunk of the car to more efficiently suffocate his victims. The scene painted a grim picture of the nightmarish attack as it unfolded. Ted had evidently abducted his three victims at gunpoint,

had his way with the two older women, and ordered them into the trunk of his car under pain of death. He then drove his car back to his garage, then gassed the three with the fatal dose of carbon monoxide. The uniformed officers who were first on scene told homicide detectives that it appeared the murderer had taken his own life to avoid being caught. However, after a careful analysis of the vehicle and the bodies it contained, they came to a rather different conclusion. You see, Ted not only had a revolver in his pocket, he had had a handkerchief in his hand. If Ted really did want to end his own life, he'd use the firearm. But the inclusion of the handkerchief and the fact that the trunk was open had detectives picturing a somewhat different version of events.

After gassing his victims, Ted had gone around to the trunk to begin disposing of his victims. He knew he'd get a nasty dose of gas once he popped the trunk, so he used the handkerchief to cover his mouth so that he wouldn't inhale any carbon monoxide. Yet a simple cloth face covering would only be effective at filtering out a minuscule amount of the already tiny gas molecules. And in the moment after he popped the trunk, Ted began to feel woozy. There's a chance he wasn't familiar with the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning, so when Ted began to feel nauseous and slightly achy, he might have just thought that he was suffering a dizzy spell. Because instead of actually evacuating the garage, he decided to take a breather in the driver's seat of his car. It'd be the last and most fatal mistake of his

life, as he soon found himself slipping out of consciousness, never to wake again. Harriet Carr was obviously horrified by such a shocking and terrifying revelation, but what broke her was discovering that she'd barely known the man she'd shared a bed with for the last quarter of a century. You see, Ted was no angel, and his predatory criminal behavior stretched back 30 years. In October of 1947, Ted was arrested after he kidnapped a husband and wife hitchhiker couple. They were lucky enough to escape the ordeal, telling the police that after picking them up, Ted had driven them to an isolated location before ordering them from the vehicle at gunpoint. Ted then handcuffed the husband to the trailer hitch of his truck and proceeded to violently assault and defile his wife before his

very eyes. The couple were convinced he would kill them following the assault. It made no sense to leave witnesses to such a horrific act of depravity. But once he was done, Ted simply told them to run along, laughing and gloating as the terrified couple picked themselves up and limped away. Local law enforcement geared themselves up to put a case against Ted, but suddenly, the hitchhiking couple weren't so keen on testifying anymore. Police told them they could be protected if Ted had threatened them, but they refused to even say his name. As a result, the case fell apart and Ted Carr walked free. Ted's criminal proclivities seemed to have subsided following the 1947 kidnapping, at least he wasn't caught for anything we know of. But then in early 1971, Ted was arrested and

convicted of swindling a sweet old blind lady out of her entire life savings. He somehow manipulated her into handing over power of attorney to him, draining her bank account for over $100,000 to little over $30 in the space of six months. But again, somehow Ted managed to avoid prison and was once again set free to commit acts of abhorrent criminality. Shortly after he was released, he was arrested on suspicion of forcing a young girl to perform, as the police report put it, an abnormal act under the threat of violence. But yet again, the case fell apart when the victim refused to testify.

Yet perhaps the most chilling crime Ted is thought to be responsible for is one that remain unsolved to this day. In February of 1967, a 35-year-old divorcee named Lois Williams disappeared without a trace, along with her 17-year-old daughter Karen. Lois' father had last heard from his daughter in January of that year and had called local police with a request to perform a welfare check on her, just in case anything was wrong. They complied, calling over at her house and ringing the doorbell, yet they received no reply. As is standard practice in such an instance, police then sought to peer through the home's windows in the hopes of getting an idea of what was going on inside. But at first glance, the house appeared to be spotless. Nothing seemed to be missing, nothing seemed to be amiss. Yet regardless, a missing persons notice was issued and local law enforcement were advised

to keep an eye out for the missing mother and daughter. As it turned out, Lois Williams' car had quite a few mechanical issues, and she frequently had to take it to the local service station for repairs. This service station was owned and operated by none other than Ted Carr. On the evening Lois was last seen, a neighbor and co-worker of Ted's named Calvin Campbell witnessed Lois and Karen leaving the gas station together, and they just so happened to be in Ted's car, with the man himself in the driver's seat. A few hours later, Ted returned alone and irritable, telling the co-worker that Lois had gotten hammered in a bar he'd driven her to,

and refused to ride home with him. The two men talked woman troubles as they closed the shop, then the pair went home for the evening. The following morning, as this same co-worker was arriving back at the garage, he was met by none other than Ted's father, who was yelling that Ted had been beaten up and robbed. Ted's father had apparently found him lying on the ground, seemingly dazed, incoherent, and bloody. Ted told him a story of how someone had mugged him outside of the service station, yet for some inexplicable reason, Ted insisted that nobody call the police. The men went inside to check if anything had been stolen from the business. Nothing was amiss, but Ted's car, the same one he was driving the night before, was on one of the mechanic's lifts.

It had been cleaned with a pressure washer inside and out, with the co-worker noting that particular attention seemed to have been paid to the trunk. The same co-worker, a man named Calvin, quit his job at the service station shortly after, citing his fear that Ted was hiding something terrible from them. Calvin's wife, Maureen, had publicly stated that she too believes that she was almost a victim of Ted Carr. According to her, Ted informed her that he was going to the hospital one evening because he was having trouble breathing. Later that night, and while Calvin was working the night shift at his new job as a janitor, Ted apparently called her from his hospital bed, requesting she check

to see if he had left the garage door open. Maureen and Calvin had been informed of Ted's past, not to mention the suspicions that surrounded him, so she decided not to go. It was later discovered that Ted had indeed been at the hospital that evening. However, a nurse discovered that he had vanished from his room, never bothering to check out, hours before the phone call to Maureen was made. Another neighbor reported seeing his car parked a block away that evening. Maureen thinks Ted used the landline he had had in his garage to call her and believes it was a trap set to both give Ted an alibi and to lure her to her doom. In the early days of Lois and Karen's disappearance,

the police launched a general search of Ted's service station, locating a bunch of paperwork with Lois' name on it. However, given that the pair were said to have had a personal relationship, the eye of suspicion soon moved on from Ted, but it was suspicion that ramped up again once the bodies of Karen Nils and Sandra Harris were found in his trunk. And after something of a legal battle with Harriet Carr, police began excavating Ted's backyard. They found nothing of import but some investigators believed the police were not allowed an adequate amount of time to fully search the property.

Ted was well known as an experienced craftsman and had completely remodeled his basement shortly after Lois and Karen had disappeared. For all we know, the girls' remains are now part of the ornate wooden fixtures that now make up the basement. Their bones forever interred in beams and supports or perhaps even in a wall. For a long time now, Lois' father had believed that Ted is responsible for his daughter's disappearance. He once wrote to Ted in a letter that may or may not have been delivered. One section read, I never did trust you. Those poor girls never harmed a soul on earth. The suffering for them has passed.

They are in God's heaven. But what about you, Ted Carr? Have you thought about your own death and what lies beyond? I can't imagine what your punishment will be, can you? Tragically, he passed away without ever getting any real closure, as Lois and Karen's remains have never been found. The old car house over at 940 North Olney is still standing even today, even after all that's occurred there with the police never fully inspecting Ted's basement for any other human remains. So it's entirely possible that another family is living there today, all these years later, totally unaware that their blissful family home is actually nothing more than a charnel house. A home where the dead rest in the very walls that support it. On the afternoon of May 8th, 2008, 18-year-old Joshua Maddox of Woodland Park, Colorado, left his parents' house to take a walk.

Josh was very much an outdoors kind of person, so it wasn't unusual for him to head out into the woods for a few hours of decompression. That evening, Josh still hadn't returned home, but his parents didn't exactly lose their minds with worry. Josh was a free spirit and a legal adult. He was free to come and go as he pleased. Yet five days later, when they'd still not seen, hide, nor hear of him, Josh's parents called the Woodland Park Police Department to report their son missing. A week went by, then a month, then a year, and over time, the Maddox family had to accept that Josh might never come home

And that the best they could hope for is that he wasn't suffering in any way That seems to have been the prevailing attitude that Josh was an intelligent, streetwise young man who had Simply decided to leave town and start a new life somewhere else They had no reason to believe he got himself into any trouble. He was a clean living kid who was perennially polite and respectful. Nevertheless, it was extremely worrying that he hadn't bothered to leave any kind of note behind. As to his parents' knowledge, they had always shared a healthy and loving relationship.

But still, all they were left to do was wonder at the fate of their beloved son. Seven long years after Josh's initial disappearance, Chuck Murphy, a builder from Colorado Springs, decided to demolish an old wooden cabin in order to make room for a new one. The cabin, which was less than a mile from Josh's family home, sat on a large patch of land surrounded by dense, coniferous forest. The cabin had been abandoned for years by the time it came to dismantle it, and the group of workmen toiled away until nothing was left but the cabin's stone chimney. Since the old brick would take considerably longer to demolish, the workmen took a short break before resuming their labors.

They were in high spirits, almost done for the day, yet little did they know was the chimney that they were about to knock down contained something that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Because inside the chimney was a skeleton, one which belonged to none other than the missing Joshua Maddox. He had been crammed into the tiny, cramped space whilst upside down in a kind of fetal position. The county coroner's report surprised no one when it found zero evidence of illicit drugs in Joshua's system, and confusion only set in when he discovered that there was no hard tissue damage, nor were there any broken bones, knife marks, or bullet holes. On further analysis, Colorado State Police detectives made a horrifying deduction. Josh wanted to get in the cabin, yet with the doors locked there was only one other way in

that wouldn't damage the place. Then, like some kind of insane Santa Claus, Josh had attempted to climb down the chimney, gotten himself stuck, then died of hypothermia. To them, without any conclusive evidence that he'd been murdered, the Santa Claus hypothesis was the only logical explanation. However, Chuck Murphy, the owner of the cabin, later testified that it would have been impossible for Joshua to climb down the chimney due to the thick wire mesh that he had installed some years prior. The very purpose of this wire was to prevent animals from climbing down the narrow brick tunnel, meaning that if Josh had found his way into the chimney, this mesh would have had to be removed first. Unless, of course, he was jammed up there from inside the cabin itself, in which case, how did he manage that? On further investigation, more and more evidence pointed towards Josh being murdered. For example, when he was found, he had removed all of his clothing and was found only wearing a thin thermal shirt and his clothes had been found inside of the

cabin, neatly folded up next to the fireplace. Even his shoes his clothes had been found inside of the cabin, neatly folded up next to the fireplace. Even his shoes and socks had been removed. Not only this, but the position that Josh's body was found in was highly unusual. The coroner said that in order to have gotten into that position, Josh would have had to have entered the chimney head first. It is also said that it would have taken two people to put Joshua into that position. In 2015, an anonymous user on an online forum claimed that they were a person named Andy, who just so happened to have started hanging out with Joshua around the time he went missing. This Andy supposedly fled to New Mexico in the aftermath of Josh's disappearance, where he ended up stabbing someone in a violent incident in which the victim almost died.

Andy had also been heard bragging that he had put someone in a hole back in Colorado as a way of intimidating and impressing his new circle of friends. They always thought this Andy character was just making stuff up, spinning yarns to earn clout. Yet it seems his weird flexes were more than just mere posturing, and it appears the number one suspect in this case has completely gotten away with murder. Apparently, this same common thread ended with people claiming that Andy was a hoax, concocted by someone in the secure unit of a mental hospital. This is feasible, but it also sounds an awful lot like Josh's killer wants

to throw people off the scent. We can only hope that law enforcement can one day bring Josh's murderer to justice, and at the same time, answer the almost 20-year-old question of who put Josh Maddox in that chimney? Almost 30 years ago, a small coastal cargo ship known as the Bearbowl set off from London, bound for the German port of Rostock. On Sunday the 15th of August 1993, 50-year-old Captain Heinrich Telkmann called his wife at approximately 7pm, telling her that the ship had reached the mouth of the River Thames, and that they should be back in Germany by the evening. When he did not arrive home on the scheduled date, Captain Heinrich's wife tried to contact him via the ship's satellite phone, yet there was no response.

It was entirely possible that Heinrich was simply delayed, and that some kind of malfunction had occurred with the ship's satellite phone. Yet as the days went by, Heinrich's loved ones grew more and more concerned for his safety. It wasn't until the night of Wednesday, August 19th, that Danish fishermen found two life rafts floating in the North Sea. One was deserted, while the other contained the ship's sole survivor, a Russian sailor named Andrei Lapin. The bearable itself wasn't located until some time later, and when it was,

the sudden loss of communications became horrifyingly clear. The interior of the ship was drenched with the blood of those that sailed on her. It also appeared that in some places, someone had attempted to wash the gore away, but there was simply so much of it that it would have taken hours of work and for some reason, they had evidently given up on trying to conceal whatever crime had occurred. Three fires had apparently been started throughout the ship, deliberate acts of arson using the ship's diesel fuel, but none of them had managed to take hold. Chillingly, the interior of the ship showed that there had been fierce fighting between two apparently warring parties. The captain's quarters had been ransacked and damaged, the ship's money safe lay empty on the floor,

and pieces of hair, skin, and a scalp fragment were found scattered around the ship. Police also noted that the ship's crane was used to retrieve the dead from below deck before dumping them unceremoniously into the sea. The only trace of any of the missing was a picture of Heinrich's daughter left on a desk. Until the 14th of September 1993, when Captain Heinrich Telkmann's body was found by a Dutch fisherman. None of the other missing men have ever been found. It's believed that André Lappin, the sole survivor, weighed them down with

scrap iron and threw them overboard. At first, Lappin refused to board the rescue helicopter and was reported to have been seemingly unconcerned regarding his situation, which we can safely say is extremely unusual given what he must have just been through. Is it possible that he really had witnessed a horrifying raid by some unknown attacker and was traumatized as a result? Or was he too busy formulating his cover story for when he was finally found, because he was the mass murderer in question? Lappen told Danish investigators that he had saved himself from a fire whilst the other crew members were drowning, yet he had later switched his story up to one of a pay dispute between Heinrich and the sailors. Lappin alleged that two mutinous sailors had used an axe to kill Heinrich and two other

sailors before threatening him. In response, Lappin killed them both in self-defense. As he feared no one would believe his story, he decided to dispose of all the evidence before taking the ship's purse to give to the families of the missing men. Needless to say, the authorities didn't believe his story, and André was charged with five counts of murder. Yet on February 3rd of 1995, Lappin left the courtroom a free man due to lack of evidence against him. He was allowed to keep the 60,000 Deutschmarks that he'd apparently looted as he managed to convince the court that he'd made it selling traditional religious Russian icons during his travels. For Andrei Lappin, the story was over, but for the families of the missing crew, their wait went on.

And even if we presume that Lappen was lying about acting in self-defense, there are numerous issues around the case that are too pertinent to ignore. The timings of the ship's intended journey, and the fact that Heinrich did not answer Barbel's call on Monday, means that whatever happened to the crew probably took place on the 15th of August. Although it seems most likely that Lappen was responsible for both the disappearances of Heinrich and the crew, as well as the attempted arson, this timeline for his plan makes little sense. Why take on five other sailors and the captain of the ship when the ship has barely left port, rather than waiting until the ship was nearer the destination?

On top of that, why not rob the ship while it was docked in England and escape with the cash? It's clear Andrei lied about his reasons for taking the money, but that doesn't mean he killed five other men in order to get it. It should be noted that Lappin came from Kalingrad, a small Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea bordering Poland and Lithuania, so it's possible that he thought he could sail the ship through the North Sea, through the Danish Straits and closer to home with no training. Although he claimed in court that he tried to navigate the ship, surely it would make sense to learn to sail a ship of barbel size before trying

it, even if that was Lappin's plan. It would rely on him being able to kill five men without one of them fighting back enough to injure or kill Lappin and prevent him from escaping. After his acquittal, Lappin applied for a job on the barbel through Heinrich's wife, who now owned the ship. As you can imagine, she was both horrified and disgusted by the application, and Andrei did not get the job. Ironically, he went on to work in a sea rescue station back in Russia. You might be surprised to hear that the barbel itself still operates today, under various names and owners since 1993, and I wonder if those who currently sail on it know that the decks on which they tread are that of a modern day ghost ship.

A ship whose grim secrets will forever remain a hauntingly unsolved mystery. I I have been camping and solo backpacking and hunting my whole life in Oregon and felt comfortable in the woods and have a deep respect for nature. A few years ago my wife, daughter and two German shepherds went camping north of Mount Jefferson, Oregon. I have included the coordinates of our campsite which we found to be the perfect setup for us and our two dogs who need the privacy since they are intimidating to other dog owners and can be loud when spooked. It was not an established campsite, just a nice horseshoe off a USFS road that had flat ground,

full trees, and a fire pit. The first night my daughter wanted to sleep by herself in a two-man tent right next to ours. It was maybe two feet away from me and my wife's tent. We made the male German Shepherd sleep, Guts is his name, with her in the tent. This whole first night neither my wife and I could sleep. We both heard footsteps and they were heavy, not like typical forest creatures scampering around the night. I was well armed because I was paranoid from reading recently before departing about a dad in California who was shot and killed in a tent next to his two infant daughters. Needless to say, both my wife and I had two pistols and my rifle with me. The dogs are great

at detection and that is why I felt my daughter could sleep alone because Guts is completely fearless and nothing would lay a hand on her without a battle to the death. All in all, nothing but bad vibes and loud footsteps occurred that night which I ultimately decided was deer or maybe some elk. Day 2, morning. We go for a walk down the road and maybe 300 feet away see the circle area in the photo. I see an abandoned road where a rusted gate post, the gate was missing, was covered in vegetation. Something of blue color caught my eye and Guts immediately takes off running down this abandoned road. My heart begins to race because I think it's another family camping like us,

and he is going to get himself shot or scare some innocent people to death, so I chase after him as fast as I can, and the rest follows. He stops about 20 feet into the road, and me yelling his name, but I have covered just enough distance to see that there is nobody there, and something is off about the site. I yell, Hello? Is anyone there? Sorry about the dog. I got no response.

My curiosity gets the best of me and I have to see what the site conditions were. As I get closer, I know something is wrong. It had all the necessities for a campsite including a cooler, propane burner, tent, blankets, folding table, but every single item had been completely destroyed, smashed, and torn from what appeared to be claw marks. We walked around in circles, puzzled why anyone would leave all their camping gear behind including an expensive REI tent. I figured well someone left in a hurry and animals got to the rest is the only logical explanation. Still a propane tank and cooler were flattened by something and it certainly wasn't snowpack with the tree coverage in that

spot. As the afternoon rolls in me and my daughter are playing bocce ball at the campsite and my wife goes walking maybe 70 feet north to do her business. I do not have a direct line of sight of her but all of a sudden I see guts make a mad dash straight towards her. Normally he would always be with me unless he is called over and she didn't call for him. His speed and focus caught my attention and I knew something weird was happening. So I ran over there and my wife starts jogging at me and I immediately drop my pistol. Guts has completely continued running into the forest another 100 feet before I call him and he stopped.

My other dog, Leah, who never misses the opportunity to be the pack leader, is not taking point. I have had her for 7 years now and this was the first time in her life she refused to leave my daughter's side. She was full hair raised and attached to us at the hip. Again, anytime we hike or play, Leah is up in front bossing around everything in her path and pauses to look to see where we are and continues. I asked my wife what happened and she said, I was trying to pee and all of a sudden I felt all my hairs raise and I knew someone was watching me and then I saw guts running towards me and I got up and moved towards you. We spent 10 minutes looking for signs of anything and saw no trails, broken branches, nothing to point to what and where something went.

We decided to spend one more night since it's too late to pack up and drive but we will all be in the big tent together this time. Before we go to bed I put a rope with a makeshift coin alarm around the perimeter of our campsite. I used a mint can and some coins and keys from our truck and zip tied it so anything hitting the rope gave a little jingle. Very unsophisticated but it put my wife at ease. As I go to tie my last corner off at a tree near our tent, our third mystery item unveils itself. It looks like someone has done the exact same thing I have done with the rope that it was so old and brown I didn't see it at first.

It was broken and only a few pieces remained but sure enough it was tied at roughly the same height, 8-10 inches off the ground and even had a few rusted washers on it. I immediately felt someone has stayed here before and put the same makeshift warning system on the same tree I am maybe 10 to 15 years ago based on the condition of the rope. Perhaps the paranoia has now reached a new height but I had to make sure the girls felt that we were safe and at the time the only thing I could think of was when the evening came around. I made them sit in the truck and I fired a clip of my.45 into the dirt as a signal to whatever was out there that we are armed. I reassured the girls that anybody listening to that now knows that we've got two dogs and are armed and we are too risky of a target so we can sleep safely. That night we heard no footsteps

and the dogs never perked up and barked. We left early the next morning. Fast forward to today and I watch the Amazon missing 411 hunted documentary and I notice the cluster of missing people smack dab close to where we camped that weekend and a flood of dread rushes over me as I think of that mysterious abandoned campsite with the ripped tent and smashed cooler and cooktop. We have been camping since and have enjoyed the beauty of the northwest, but there was something there at that place that possibly took or harmed someone else less than 300 feet away from where we camped, and we all thank our lucky stars that Guts was doing his thing so well that afternoon. will get you through tough weather in a variety of terrains. Until May 31st, save up to $100 in rebates on select Toyo tires.

Find a Toyo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca This happened when my sister and I were around 6 and 8. We're now 43, my sister and 45, me, and it is something that still haunts us occasionally. We had an amazing municipal swimming pool in our neighborhood. South African summers in Johannesburg are hot and long, and the swimming pool was the ultimate destination. Fred was that adult that was always at the pool. He would swim lengths, practice diving, and tickle our feet under the water, and just typing this makes me feel nauseous. To this day, I still have issues with my feet being

wet. Specifically, I am unable to leave cream on my feet. This sliminess makes me feel claustrophobic. I only realized the connection last year. Whenever we would sit on the edge of the pool with our feet hanging in, he would swim past all of us and tickle all of our feet in a row. I can't remember all the details 100% but someone playfully screamed, oh no Fred, and Fred did it again and sang, oh no Fred, not again Fred. We all laughed as kids do. Then he tickled our feet and made us sing his new song, oh no Fred, not again Fred. And it became, as he put it, a game. He would grab us under the water and we would sing.

He went from feet tickling to chasing us and grabbing our waists under the water. Oh no Fred, not again Fred. And the song never goes away. One day at the pool Fred tells us that he has this amazing farm just outside of town. He would like to take us to see his animals, his mealies, or his corn, in his own swimming pool. It sounded like heaven to all of us. He was talking to several children, boys and girls. He told us to be at the swimming pool on Saturday but not to tell our parents and we'll go in his car. As soon as we get home, we tell our dad everything. We're so excited. This farm sounds amazing. Our dad says absolutely not. Who is Fred anyways?

We tell him that Fred is our friend at the pool and plays with our feet and chases us around the pool. My dad says that actually, maybe we can go, but he wants to meet Fred first. Yay, I thought. The next day we go to the pool and we tell Fred we can go with him but our dad wants to meet him first. Fred is upset that we told our dad but we tell him not to worry, our dad is cool. So Fred walks home with us, we only lived about 5 blocks from the pool and comes to meet our dad. Fred's about 5'6 or 1.7 meters and my dad is 6'7", just over 2 meters, the personification of a gentle giant. My dad is super polite to Fred. He asks him loads of questions about the farm. Where is it exactly? How many kids are going? Has he spoken to other parents?

Fred was cool as a cucumber. He answered the questions smoothly and confidently. My dad ended by saying, Fred, I look forward to seeing you on Saturday at your farm. I think we'll have a great time. I'll bring my girls though and we'll meet you there. The next part is a bit of a blur to me. I'm not sure how we ended up driving in a convoy with about three other dads and their kids from the pool. It was so exciting.

My dad had the map book leading the convoy to the best farm in the world. We drove about an hour out of town and we arrived at the derelict farmhouse. No animals, no corn, no swimming pool, just this run down, isolated, scary looking farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. I remember being really confused. My dad must have read the map book wrong I thought. All the dads huddle together. We have no idea what they are saying but they seem angry. We are also angry. We are obviously lost and it's our dad's fault. Everyone gets in their cars and then I start screaming at my dad about how he deliberately got us lost because he doesn't like Fred and he doesn't want us to have fun. My dad is silent and pensive.

After my tantrum he says to my sister and I in a very calm and deep voice, Fred is a bad man. He was going to hurt all of you. He is the bad man your mom is always warning you about. My mother is obsessed with true crime. There's no farm. I'm so happy you girls told me what was going on because something bad could have happened to you."

His strong voice broke in those last words. The gravity of his tone and break in his voice made my sister and I realize immediately that he was right and we were in danger. We cried and apologized. He made us promise to tell him if we saw Fred again. Fred stayed away from the pool for about a month and as soon as we saw him come through the gate we quickly got dressed and ran home. When my dad came home from golf we told him Fred was at the pool again. The next day we went to the pool with our dad. We were swimming and my dad came home from golf, we told him Fred was at the pool again. The next day, we went to the pool with our dad. We were swimming and my dad was sitting on one of the benches to the side. In walks Fred.

He comes to the edge of the pool and is calling us. We refuse to go to the edge. He's getting frustrated. My dad gets up and comes up to Fred. Hey buddy, can I chat with you outside quickly? Fred physically shrunk. My dad had his hand on Fred's shoulder and was guiding him out of the pool. And I can only imagine what my dad did and said to Fred.

My dad is a gentleman, but don't mess with his girls. Fred was never seen at our swimming pool again. So I'm 23, male, and live in California. Last year I decided to use Tinder for the first time. I had previously used Hot or Not and Plenty of Fish but mostly just got bots and scammers so I already wasn't very big on online dating. However, I was feeling bored on Friday afternoon so I decided to install Tinder and just see what happened. After creating an account I began swiping people and it wasn't more than like half an hour after I had gotten off the app that I got matched up with someone. For a little context, I'm what you might call somebody that

goes both ways. And I matched with a 25 year old dude named Aiden. Aiden was what I would call attractive and he had similar interests in gaming and coding as I did. I decided to go and send him a message but before I could even type a single letter, he sent me a message. The message read, Hey, saw you're new to Tinder and thought I'd reach out and say hi. I said hi back and the two of us began talking about our love for video games, movies, and coding. He told me he's a full-time coder and makes a salary only working four hours a day. He asked me if I'd be down to come chill with him. I then offered to have him over to my house because I was alone and he lived with his parents. He seemed very excited all of a sudden

and said he'd love to come over. We agreed on him coming in an hour so I could tidy up my room and get my PC ready for gaming. After about an hour or so I sent him my address and he said he was on his way. Now normally I wouldn't have invited someone to my house that I'd never met but this guy seemed harmless and he was attractive so I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I heard a knock at my front door and I looked out the peephole and saw it was Aiden. He had a bottle of red wine in his hand and a smile across his face. We hadn't discussed drinking wine together but I did in fact love red wine and the brand he had with him just so happened to be my favorite

brand. I opened the door and greeted him. I told him that that wine was my favorite and asked him if he's a mind reader. He laughed and said I just strike him as a red wine kind of guy. I asked him how he planned to get home if he ended up drinking too much and he said he Ubered to my house. We ended up having a couple of glasses of wine on my back patio, just talking about life, work, and shared our coming out stories. After the wine, we went back inside to play PC and had a blast. After the gaming he showed me his laptop which he had brought with him and showed me his work. Eventually I had to use the restroom so I excused myself to pee. I then heard him approaching the bathroom door and even turning the knob. Because I didn't lock

the door behind me he just came right in completely unannounced and without any warning, just starts grinding on me from behind while forcibly grasping my shoulders. I shoved him off of me and just kind of jokingly said, that's a bit intrusive. And he just smiled at me and said, I just wanted to see how you'd react. I left the bathroom and walked into the kitchen with him walking right behind me. I asked him if he wanted more wine or maybe some water but before I could grab the water bottles from the fridge, this dude pushed himself up against me and groped my private parts while smiling at me super creepily. This time, I was completely taken aback.

I shoved him off me forcefully and yelled at him. I told him that we just met, and that I didn't think it was the right time to just jump into something like that. He said I was just a waste of time, and said that I had no idea what I was doing and that I give gays a bad name, then said I was being homophobic. I told him that if I was was that way that I wouldn't be hanging out with him and talking about the way we were. I told him I found him attractive but that he was crossing major boundaries. He just laughed and said, in the LGBTQ community, there are no boundaries. And then just like that, he said he had to go. Thank God, is what I thought to myself.

I walked him to the front door and he walked out without saying goodbye or anything. I didn't think anything else of it and decided I needed to take a shower. I got in the shower and about five minutes into my showering, I kept hearing this tink tink sound coming from the other end of the door. I peek out through the sliding door of the shower and look down toward the bottom of the door. To my shock, I see Aiden holding a freaking spoon to the bottom of the door looking in at me while I was showering. I could only see this because of how high off the floor the door sat. Not knowing what to do, I just pretended not to notice him and

slowly turned the shower off. I got out, wrapped a towel around my waist and prepared to confront him by yanking open the door. Before I could do that I heard him snap a picture with his phone. I flung the bathroom door open and he flew down the hall and out my front door. I saw him get into a white Honda Civic and drive away. He had lied about taking an Uber for some reason. I have no idea what in God's name he took a picture of or why he took it in the first place, but I can imagine that it wasn't for anything good. I immediately blocked him on Tinder and was paranoid that he'd return. So that's the story of my first Tinder date that turned out to be a complete nightmare. This happened about 8 years ago in my local supermarket.

I'm a female, 36 at the time, and am in the queue to pay. It is a Saturday morning, super busy and I'm second in line. In front of me at the till is a family of three, mom, dad and daughter. Mom and dad are unpacking the trolley and daughter is sitting in the trolley seat facing me. Behind me are two men and they are making me super uncomfortable, standing way too close to me. You know when you feel someone before you see them, it was kind of like that. I was facing the daughter and she looked super uncomfortable, making herself smaller and kept looking over her shoulder to the dad.

I turn around and these men are waving and smiling, trying to get her attention. Then the one guy reaches around me and touches her foot. He did it in such a familiar way that I thought he must know the family. She flinched away, he does it again. She quietly says, daddy. Dad swings around and says in a booming voice something along the lines of, what are you doing dude, don't touch my daughter. This weirdo is like, but we want to be friends. Dad is like, I don't know, you back off. I realize they don't know each other at all and instantly go into mommy mode. Dad goes back to unpacking the trolley and I position myself between the two guys and the daughter, completely blocking access. Believe it or not, he tries to get her attention again.

So I say really loudly, You're so lucky that you have such a brave and strong daddy. Look how he's protecting you from these bad men. The dad looks at me and we have a silent conversation with our eyes. They pack up and leave quickly. I thought it was over. The girl is safe. As I'm unpacking my trolley I suddenly notice that one

of the men has moved around and is standing at the end of the till, where you pack your groceries into bags, staring at me with this face of pure malice. The other guy was still standing behind me in the queue, my trolley between us. I won't lie, in the moment I felt intimidated, even terrified. I'm not a small woman, I am tall-ish with very broad shoulders and quite strong. Side note, someone told me the other day that I am definitely not fart dust, translated from Afrikaans but super funny, i.e. I am not small. Anyway, in my trolley is 15 kilograms of dog food. My adrenaline is pumping. I need to show this guy that I'm not an easy target.

I make eye contact with the aggressor at the end of the till and I lift this bag of dog food up like it's a roll of toilet paper. My facial expression doesn't change. No strain, no tension, just deep and dark. He keeps eye contact with me and now I'm angry. The fear was gone. I pay and he blocks my exit from the till. I bump him light with my trolley. He even laughs menacingly and moves out of the way.

I decided not to go straight to my car. I walk around the mall a bit and every time I turn around, they're there, now with a third guy. They're not even hiding the fact that they're following me. The one guy makes a motion of cutting my neck. Screw this. I start making my way to the security desk. When I get there and turn around, they're gone and I tell security everything. They recommend I let the supermarket know as well, give them my till number so they can review the security tape above the till. A guard escorted me to my car. I drove home the long way, checking my rear view mirror constantly.

I never saw them again but to be honest I stopped going to that supermarket, partly because of that but mainly their prices are not competitive and my dogs became fussy eaters. To be continued... of people who were almost kidnapped and I have decided to share something that happened to my father when he was 9 years old back in 1971. Although he doesn't live there anymore and I have never visited this country, my father was born in Iran. He lived in Tehran in a good zone of the city. One day, he was sent to run some errands, nothing big. He only needed to leave the apartment building where he lived and walk around 200 meters to get to the shop. He finished buying whatever he was told to buy and was in front of the portal of this building when suddenly a man who was next to the portal and that had been staring at him when he came back saluted my father and then asked if he

could do him a favor. It was something like, I have a friend who lives near here, but I'm too shy to go alone. Could you go with me and maybe ring the bell? Of course, the excuse was pathetic, but my father, being nine years old, at that moment didn't see anything wrong with it. He went with him to the apartment building where supposedly his friend lived. It was next to his own after all. They went inside, up to the second or third floor. Before continuing, you have to know that there were windows in every floor of the building so you could look outside.

They arrived in front of a door and my father was getting nervous because the man had never stopped staring at him since they had met. He was ready to ring the bell, but suddenly the man stopped him and told that he had made a mistake and that wasn't his friend's house. He pointed through one of the windows that I mentioned before to another apartment building, which was much further away. And at that moment my father became really anxious. There was something telling him that he was in danger. He apologized, said that his parents hadn't given him permission to go there and that they were waiting on him. Before he could go back, the man grabbed both of his arms saying that he wanted to give him a kiss.

Now, this part, it's a bit of a blurred memory. My father doesn't remember if the man managed to kiss him or if he was able to get free of his grasp. The only thing he remembers is running all the way down the stairs back to the street and back to his own portal, going inside his house and asking his parents for help. When my grandfather left the house to look for that man, he couldn't find him, he had already left. Now this had a huge impact on my father. He left his country 40 years ago when things got nasty in Iran, but he didn't leave behind this memory. I remember back when I was a kid, I could hardly go anywhere or do anything without being accompanied by any of my parents in every moment. Even when he drove me to school, leaving me and my brothers just in

front of the gate, he wouldn't leave until we had passed the gate and going inside the building. And from the gate to the main building there were only 20 meters and it was a school territory. Being older and after reading so many cases of kids being kidnapped, I really can't blame him, especially because now that I'm older, I tend to do the same things for my children. This was 1992. My mother was going through a bad patch in her marriage and chemotherapy for breast cancer. We lived in a very quiet town where residential areas only had small markets. For everything else including pharmacy and public calls, we had to go to the main market which was almost three and a half miles from our house,

one and a half miles from our apartment block to the main road and then two miles to the market, either by walk or by public transport. My mother who was going through some tough time given my father's complete disconnect with us. She used to call her brother, my uncle, for advice in catharsis and he lived in another city. For those calls, she had to go to the public call office or the PCO which was run by two weird men. The same market had the pharmacy where my mother would buy her medicine. I was 11 and my older sister was 17. One evening, my mother along with my sister went to the PCO to talk to my uncle. I don't remember why but I think my father asked her to leave the house and she wanted to discuss her options. She was in distress and didn't realize it was

already late when she finished the call. The market was closed and so was the public transport. My mom and sister paid the bill and started their walk home on the path next to the main road. The two PCO owners closed the PCO and started following them, one on foot right behind them trying to offer a ride and the other on a bicycle next to them on the deserted main road. My mother strictly refused, held my sister's hand tightly and started walking as fast as she could when a white van appeared on the service road and started driving slowly next to them. The PCO guys had already arranged a ride with some really bad intentions and didn't seem to go away. They were probably waiting for them to get off the main road to strike.

On the next turn, two men came from the opposite side on the footpath, and to my mother's relief, it was the pharmacist and his friend who were returning to pick up his car from his shop's parking lot after a walk. They saw the men in the van and immediately realized what was going on. They stopped, said hello and asked if she needed help. They agreed to walk them home. The PCO men fled upon seeing the guys. The kind pharmacist saw my mother and sister to that PCO again. Yesterday, while I, a 23-year-old female, was on my way to work, a random dude approached me and asked for my mobile number.

I told him no. He tried to argue with me and we just went in that circle a couple of times. When we got to the train station he finally seemed to get my very subtle hints at me not wanting to talk to him so he left. I thought it was it and went on my more or less merry way. And then today he turned up again. Different time, same train station. He stopped me while I was on my way back from work, initially blocking my path with his bike, asking for my number again. I told him no, went around him and he followed. Great. Anytime I told him I had no interest in getting to know him, he went on about how he sensed love coming from me and he just knew that I would feel the same if I only gave him a chance. For some inexplicable reason, that still didn't convince me.

When we got to the corner of the street I lived at, I stopped. I definitely wasn't going to let this stranger walk me to my home. He noticed and told me, oh don't worry, you can go home, I'll come with you. As if we weren't still in pandemic times and as if it was totally normal for someone to invite themselves into other people's homes, not even knowing each other's names or anything. I again told him that was not going to happen, getting louder and angrier at this point. He said okay and turned around to leave, or so I thought. When I started walking home again, he suddenly rode his bike up next to me, once more giving me his sensing love shtick. So, standing there, we went back and forth several times, including his urging for me to just go home. Only after had I threatened him with the police did he leave. Whether it is for good or for today, we'll see. Either way, I asked my flatmate to come and

walk back home with me. We took a detour just to be safe, and now I need this whole disgusting thing out of my mind. In May of 1921, 36-year-old Anna Brown was walking through the woods in Osage County, Oklahoma, with a friend and a few acquaintances of his. Anna happened to be a member of the Native American Osage people, and the land they were walking on was designated as their sacred tribal homelands, or as it's now called, the Osage Nation. The men Anna was with that day were not of the Osage, but there were generally good relations between the Osage and their neighbors of other ethnicities. Intermarriage, commerce, and other forms of socializing were common between the Osage

and those who had come from other continents in years gone by. At the time, America was in the grip of alcohol prohibition, so when Anna's new companions told her they were in the business of brewing and selling moonshine liquor, her ears perked up. She too liked to tipple from time to time, and when the men offered her a free bottle's worth of moonshine from their secretive woodland still, Anna jumped at the chance. They walked into the woods for almost a half hour before reaching a steep ravine. The men told Anna that their moonshine was still at the bottom of it,

but when she looked, she couldn't see a thing. It would turn out that the view of the ravine, rocky and dotted with skeletal trees, would be the last thing Anna Brown would ever see. One of the moonshiners walked up behind her, placed a small Derringer pistol to the back of her head, and pulled the trigger. She was dead before she hit the dirt. Her body was then kicked into the ravine where it lay until it was discovered, horribly decomposed by a group of hunters. The bullet wound to Anna's head was so incredibly small and her body so badly decomposed that initially the cause of death was put down to complications resulting from alcoholism or death by misadventure. It was only much later that the bullet wound was found, and what at first had been put down to a simple accident turned out to be just the first of many deaths that mark something much more sinister. It was the beginning of what became known as the Bloodland Murders. In October of 1897, 24 years before Anna Brown's murder, the Phoenix Oil Company were drilling a series of oil wells in the Osage Reservation.

Prospectors had determined that there was a huge reservoir of crude oil underneath the land, and it was just a matter of finding the right spot to drill. It took the oil workers months to do so, but by October, they managed to drill their first successful oil well in Oklahoma territory at a place called Butler Creek. Then in 1901, the Phoenix Oil Company absorbed its competition, becoming powerful enough to lobby the Borough of Indian Affairs into subleasing the eastern part of the Osage Reservation to them until 1916. But another clause was written into the contract too, stating that despite the eastern portion of the Osage Nation being auctioned off,

the lion's share of the subsurface mineral rights, including oil, were to be owned by the Osage Nation and held in trust for them by the federal government. The history of the United States government's dealing with the Native American peoples is objectively one punctuated by betrayal, pain, and death. But the Osage mineral rights decision seems to be a relatively rare example of the U.S. government conducting themselves in an honorable and benevolent manner. So much so that, by the early 1920s, the Osage Nation were receiving incredibly lucrative revenues and royalties from crude oil sales, making them some of the richest people in the entire United States. Look at it this way. By the time royalties peaked in 1925,

a family of four who were all in the royalty allotment role earned $52,800 a year, which is just under $600,000 a year in today's economy. Think of it like a miniature Saudi Arabia. Families are stricken by historical poverty or suddenly flush with cash, so much that they had no idea what to do with it. But the wave of wealth that swept over the Osage reservation did not go unnoticed by those of European and other non-native heritage, and what in the past had been a rather cordial relationship with the indigenous people turned sour, with greed and

jealousy replacing peace and harmony. As it turned out, Anna Brown was one of those in receipt of royalties. Since she was a divorcee, Anna's probate awarded her estate to her mother, Lizzie Kyle, who had inherited the head rights for her late husband and two daughters, and was collecting thousands of dollars a month in royalties. Next in line to inherit Anna's royalties was Anna Brown's cousin Charles Whitehorn. But Charles hadn't shown up to Anna's funeral a few days after her death, and when his kinsfolk went looking for him, they found something horrifying. Charles had been shot in the head, much in the same way that Anna had,

and doctors put his date of death around the same day Anna was killed. Then, just two months later, a friend visiting Lizzie Kyle's home found the place to be eerily quiet. When they entered her home, the smell of death greeted them, with Lizzie's moldering corpse showing distinct signs of foul play. The Kyles and their extended family were dropping like flies, and with all the royalties and rights changing hands, it didn't take a genius to work out why. For a time, the violence on the Osage Reservation ceased almost entirely, but the investigations into the three murders already committed were floundering. Although the motivations for the murders was all but clear, the sheer number of suspects and those potentially motivated by greed was astronomical. By 1923, it was obvious

to all who bore witness that non-osage Oklahomans were slowly trying to encroach on the mineral rights of the indigenous people, and it seemed that some people were more than willing to resort to violence to get their hands on the proverbial pot of gold. With Lizzie Kyle dead, the sole recipient of the family's oil royalties went to a man named Henry Roan Horse, another cousin of Anna Brown's who suddenly found himself rich as Croesus upon his aunt's death. By all accounts, Henry was well aware of the threat to his life And the fact that that threat came from shadowy, faceless forces made it all the more terrifying Friends said he became incredibly skittish Eschewing most social interaction in favor of holding up in his home with a shotgun close at hand He also took to conducting most of his business after sundown

Citing the darkness that shrouded him from those who wished to do him harm. But the same shroud of darkness would in turn provide concealment for his assassins, and when Henry failed to return home after running some routine errands on the night of February 5th, 1923, his family feared the worst. The following morning, a neighbor was driving down an old dirt road near Henry's home when he spotted a banged up Model T that had run off the road and crashed into a tree. On inspection, he found it was Henry's car, and sitting in the driver's seat with a bullet hole in his forehead was Henry Roan Horse. Once again, although the motive for the murders was

slowly becoming clear, authorities were at a loss to who the killers might have been. Yet it was during their investigations that they discovered that Henry Roan Horse had owed a whopping $1,200 to a county cattleman by the name of William Hale. It might have been purely coincidental, but given the police had no other line of inquiry, they decided to pursue the Hale connection. Lo and behold, they make another significant discovery that Henry Roan Horse's $25,000 life insurance policy had been changed less than a year prior, making the sole beneficiary of the policy none other than William Hale. It still wasn't entirely clear what was going on in the Osage Reservation,

but it was clear that Hale was inextricably involved. The police urgently shared the information with the Osage Tribal Council, who attempted to aid them in questioning the people of Pahuska, the largest town in the county. The citizens were generally cooperative, but whenever the subject of William Hale came up, the cops were met with a wall of silence, time and time again. Those who didn't appear to have some personal reason to defend Hale were simply too scared to speak out against him, and police began to piece together a web of bribery and intimidation, whiched to Hale rolling over Pa Huska with an iron fist. Police knew they'd have to act fast and put together a case against Hale before he could make another move,

but tragically they didn't act fast enough, and the Bloodland murders continued. About a month after the murder of Henry Roan Horace on March 10th of 1923, Bill Smith was relaxing at home in the small Osage town of Fairfax. The house was most definitely an opulent one by contemporary standards. Bill was a businessman who did rather well for himself, But the family was in receipt of a sizable secondary income, stemming from his wife having inherited the oil royalties of her deceased relatives. You see, Bill was married to a woman whose maiden name had been Rita Kyle, Anna Brown's sister, and Henry Rowan Horse's cousin. She was next on the list, heir to the family's fortunes,

and we can only assume she was all too aware of the massive threat to her safety The Smiths were so wealthy that they were able to afford the help of paid servants And we can also assume that they had the will and the way to hire armed guards to protect the family home This might well account for the change in the assassins' methods In the previous murders, the victims had been betrayed or ambushed and then shot Whereas in the case of the Smiths, a much deadlier and more volatile weapon was used For on that day, all was quiet as Bill relaxed in the drawing room While his servant girl, Nettie Brookshire, aided Rita in the kitchen

Suddenly the entire floor seemed to rise up around them. Fire and flame licked their faces, then everything went black. Moments later, Bill Smith awoke among the rubble of his home, coughing and spluttering, his body almost torn apart by shrapnel and falling debris. He had just survived a bomb attack on his family home, an attack that had killed Rita and Nettie instantly. Investigators determined the device was made up of around 5 US gallons, that's 19 liters of nitroglycerin.

A bomb that size could have leveled a structure three or four times the size of the Smith family home. Whoever had planted it wanted them dead, but they obviously wanted to send a message too. As he lay in his hospital bed, slowly dying as a result of his wounds, Bill Smith gave a statement implicating the men he believed to be behind the bombing attack. Unsurprisingly, the name William Hale came up, along with several of his close henchmen. Just four days later, Bill passed away from his wounds. He was the latest victim of the Bloodland murders, but he most certainly wouldn't be the last. It seemed word had gotten back to Hale and his shadowy associates that

cops were sniffing around his businesses, and from what followed, we can only conclude that he wished to accelerate his nefarious schemes before he could be arrested and charged. On June 28th, 1923, William Hale and his associate of his helped an Osage man named George Bighart onto a train bound for Oklahoma City. Bighart had purchased some counterfeit liquor from Hale's associates the night before, and after drinking his fill and passing out, woke up feeling like death. He complained to Hale, who apparently sent him on his way to an OC hospital after promising to pay his medical bills. Indeed, on his arrival at a hospital, doctors told George Bighart that he appeared to have ingested bad alcohol, but it appears that Bighart had his own suspicions. He asked the doctor if it was possible that the whiskey had been poisoned,

and in light of Hale's associate being an experienced moonshiner, he would have had to have been very unlucky to have been given the one rare batch of bad alcohol produced. But Big Heart knew more than just bad luck was at play. After all, he too was in receipt of mineral royalties, and he was worried the open suspicion around him made him a target of the cattle baron's increasing paranoia. Whilst at the hospital, Bighart requested the services of renowned Pawhuska attorney W.W. Vaughn. Vaughn accepted Bighart's request, and the two men met that night to discuss William Hale's involvement in the murders, not simply as the mastermind either, but as a front for a large and shadowy network of greedy corporate usurpers.

Yet Big Heart's words were not just wild claims, and he claimed to know where and how to access incriminating documentation. W.W. Vaughn hurried back to his offices, and there's evidence that he boarded a night train back to Pawhuska that very same evening. But the following morning, when the night porter came to wake Vaughn from his berth, he discovered the attorney was nowhere to be found and that the berth had not been used at all. To those expecting him in Pawhuska, it appeared that W.W. Vaughn had never boarded the train in the first place. In reality, his lifeless body was lying by railroad tracks near Pershing, Oklahoma, just five miles south of Pawhuska.

His skull had been crushed by repeated blows from a blunt object, and round about the time his corpse was discovered, George Bighart died as a result of the counterfeit liquor he'd ingested, liquor that we can safely assume was poisoned. Over the next few months, 13 other full-blooded Osage men and women turned up dead around the Osage reservation. All were either in direct receipt of oil royalties, or were the guardians of those too young or infirm to properly manage their finances. And to the horror of the entire county, the bodies just kept piling up. By 1925, a grand total of 60 wealthy Osage had died in suspicious or outright murderous circumstances. And it wasn't by happenstance that the inheritors of their wealth were their local lawyers and businessmen, marshaled by the bloodthirsty kingpin himself, William Hale.

A spattering of murders had turned into an outright slaughter, a privately funded genocide intended to rob Native Americans of their birthright wealth. And what was worse, those at the helm wielded power and influence that rivaled the local government and police, so going after them on a purely local level would be near impossible. But enough was enough, and in 1925, Osage tribal elders met with local law enforcement to discuss reaching out to the Bureau of Investigation, which would later be renamed the FBI. After only a preliminary investigation, Bureau of Investigation agents heard that some anonymous syndicate was offering a bounty of any member of the Osage Nation

and receipts of mineral royalties. This no doubt accounted for the sharp rise in murders during the period of 1923-1925. In light of uncovering such a vast conspiracy of murder tantamount to genocide, the BOI sentenced some of the best agents available to them, and it's worth noting that this crack investigative team included some rather interesting characters. It included a former sheriff of Las Cruces, New Mexico, rumored to have been a gunslinging outlaw before his proficiency at killing banditos resulted in him being offered a marshal's badge. Joining him was a former Texas Ranger, similarly more suited to scouting and guerrilla warfare than the intricacies of detective

work, but making up for the Ranger's shortcomings would be veteran BOI agent Frank Smith, pistol in one holster, red tape in the other, along with John Wren, an American Indian of the Utah Nation, who had cut his teeth being a spy for Mexican revolutionaries. After a few months of investigation, the team came back with their findings. It was discovered that Anna Brown and Rita Smith had a sister, one by the name of Molly Kyle. And as the team built a picture of the social network that ran through Osage County, they made an alarming discovery. Molly Kyle was married to a man named Ernest Burkhart, who happened to be none other than William Hale's nephew. The blood-soaked chess game was revealed. Hale

intended to marry his family into the Osage, then kill off all who stood in the way of his nephew's wife gaining the maximum amount of oil royalties. Only a handful of Molly's relatives remained and the threat to their lives was massive. As a result, the BOI swept in, arresting Hale, his nephews, and one of the ranch hands they hired, charging all of them with the murder of Molly Kyle's family. They were also formally charged with the murder of Henry Roan Horse, and since he'd been killed on the Osage Reservation land, it's allowed prosecutors to bring the full weight of the federal government down on the man who called himself the King of the Osage Hills. Yet despite the apparently airtight case against Hale and his henchmen, attempts to condemn them to prison floundered time and time again.

Two of the henchmen died before BOI investigation was completed, thus escaping justice. And in spite of Hale and associates being convicted in state and federal trials from 1926 to 1929, federal prosecutors were plagued by changes of venue, hung juries, appeals, and overturned verdicts. So, even though they had been sentenced to life imprisonment, William Hale and Ernest Buckhart received parole after just 18 years, to the fury of the Osage Nation. Following the conviction, the citizens of Pawhuska petitioned the governor of Oklahoma to conduct a full investigation of the deaths of Charles Bighart and his attorney, William Vaughn. The governor assigned a man named Herman Davis to the

investigation, but shortly after the assignment began, Davis was convicted of bribery. Although Walton later pardoned Davis, the investigation of Bighart and Vaughn was never completed, and Davis' reputation never recovered. In the end, many had escaped justice, and the Osage's rightful ownership of the mineral rights had been irreparably damaged. One of the only pieces of comfort we can take from this case is the 2011 settlement reached between the US government and the Osage Nation. For 11 years, the tribe had fought to receive just a fraction of the money they believed they were owed, and in 2011, their hard work paid off. They were awarded $380 million by the federal government, the single largest trust settlement with the Native American tribe in U.S. history. But perhaps the payment, no matter how large,

is simply too little, too late. The Kyle family was almost wiped from the face of the earth, and countless others suffered due to the greed of not just one ruthlessly greedy cattle baron, but also all those who took his blood money to murder members of the Osage nation. All in all, the Bloodland murders make for a morbidly fascinating tale, so much so that Martin Scorsese is making a film on the topic, with Robert De Niro starring as William Hale and Leonardo DiCaprio supporting as his nephew Ernest Buckhart. Some might say that the Osage murders are criminally underreported pieces of American history, and seeing the story portrayed on the big screen by such high-profile actors

will no doubt give the case the attention it deserves. Every citizen should learn of the injustices of the Osage bloodlands, as well as the evil and greed of William Hale, so that it may never, ever, happen again. My name's Brian. I'm 20 years old from the UK and I've been into hiking and backpacking and camping for as long as I can remember. But as much as the UK has some great places to go trekking, my most memorable trip by far was one to the North Carolina section of the Appalachian Trail. That thing is like the mother of all trails.

It just goes on and on and on. In fact, I'm pretty sure you could walk up and down the UK like four times and you still not walk the equivalent of the Appalachian Trail. I'm not going to lie and tell you I walked the entire thing. In fact, I don't even think I walked half of it. But the section I did trek through was around the western portion of North Carolina. It made for some great hiking, mainly because one of the guys we were with knew that section of the trail like the back of his hand. I think maybe he'd grown up around there or maybe he'd mentioned going to college around there but either way he happened to mention that we'd be passing a Native American reservation. Hearing this my ears prick up.

I ask him which one it is and how far. The moment he said the word Cherokee, my heart just about skipped a beat. You see, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Native Americans. Every Sunday, my mom and dad would take me and my sister round to our granddad's house, and every Sunday, me and him would sit down and watch an old Clint Eastwood western film. My mom used to kick off whenever there was any gratuitous violence or swearing but I loved it and granddad would just tell her to bugger off and so I could learn something from history as he was fond of putting it. My little sister wanted to be a cowgirl and I think that might have played a part in her working with horses in her adult life. But me? I wanted to be an Apache Brave.

Whooping out my war cries, I bore down on the European invaders. Granddad used to playfully tell me off for sticking up for the baddies, but I think deep down, he understood the attraction. The Native Americans were the underdogs. Portrayed quite cruelly sometimes, but the underdog nonetheless. Of course, you'd get angry if people took your home like that. And it's not an indictment against America or anything. That's just how I saw it as a kid.

Even when I was at uni studying history, I picked three modules which focused on Native American history or US westward expansion. One of which was all about the Trail of Tears. Those of you that don't know, it was mostly Cherokee that were forced out of their homes and the forced migration known as the Trail of Tears. There was a time in uni when I felt like I knew and understood the Cherokee more than my fellow Brits, and so faced with the fact of actually visiting their tribal homelands, mate, I jumped at the chance. I asked our guide if there would be any issues with us taking a little detour onto the reservation, telling him I was beyond interested in paying it a visit.

He told me that reservations are private land, just like anything else, and if we were caught trespassing then we would be arrested by tribal police. However, he also explained that if we were respectful and maybe even called ahead, we might be able to get ourselves an informal pass to hike through the reservation and maybe even spend the night there. I did everything just shy of begging him to make that call, and I crossed every finger and toe I had as he managed to get through to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Police Department. I think I'd have crossed my bollocks too, had that been physiologically possible. In the end, it was good news. An officer at Toinita told our guide we were more than welcome to stop by the nearby town.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee are apparently very welcoming to tourists, and there's even a little museum they have where visitors can learn a bit of Cherokee history. As for roaming the hills east of town, as long as we didn't tread on anyone's metaphorical toes, she didn't think there'd be any problems. So since we were all seasoned hikers in our 30s and therefore very unlikely to tread on anyone's metaphorical toes, it was game on. We were headed down into the Eastern Cherokee Reservation. Although the scenery wasn't all that different from that of surrounding Appalachia, stepping foot onto a bonafide Native American reservation was like a dream come true for me.

I mean, I wasn't too elated about it, as obviously I was reminded of some pretty sad periods of history. But finally being somewhere I'd spent so long reading about was most definitely a weighty experience. We passed a few Cherokee churches on our way south, then found ourselves a decent place to camp since evening was drawing in. After we'd all eaten, our ad hoc guide excuses himself for a toilet break and when he gets back he makes a rather chilling announcement. Something is definitely watching us. The way he said it was weirdly chill, like it was a minor inconvenience instead of a looming threat.

By his account, he didn't quite know what was watching us, only that he'd heard something moving through the trees during his toilet break. Someone asked if he thought it was a person and he said no, that something on two legs sounds different to something on four. Not that it reassured us any, because the follow-up question was that if that thing might be dangerous. Again, he said he didn't know. To this day, I honestly don't know if this was just a very subtle way of trolling us because the tension in camp skyrocketed as we all started looking over our shoulders wherever we went.

It also kicked off a discussion over whether or not it was a bear and that in turn kicked off some intense double bagging of all the food rations we were carrying. But after hiking the hills all day, the adrenaline spike of thinking there might be a bear in the area still wasn't enough to keep us from craving our sleeping bags. And once we had a rudimentary lookout system in place, we all felt comfortable enough to get some rest. Then, in the middle of the night, I wake up with a bladder fit to burst. So I clamber out of my sleeping bag, shove my boots on, and then head out into the darkness with my head torch on the lowest setting.

I head over to the guy who's on lookout for their assigned hour, asking him in the lowest voice possible if he'd seen or heard anything sneaking around out there. He tells me no, and I'm dancing off through the trees, trying to keep from wetting myself as soon as the word left his mouth. I didn't even go that far away from the camp before I pulled the John Thomas out and began to relieve myself any further and it would have gotten a little touch and go. Then literally right as I'm putting everything away I hear something rustling in the woods behind me. Now remember, I've got my head torch on, albeit a pretty low setting so wherever I'm facing gets lit up.

As soon as I hear the noise I don't turn all the way around for obvious reasons but I turn my neck maybe 100 degrees to try and look over my shoulder. I can't see exactly what was behind me but the ambient light of my head torch was enough to light up the thing's eyes. It's actually kind of tough to describe the pure hit of fear I felt, seeing a literal set of glowing eyes staring at me in the midst of almost complete darkness. And sure, glowing eyes are the stuff of nightmares on the best of occasions, but it was where exactly the eyes were that was so completely and utterly terrifying.

I'm about 5'11 on a good day and these eyes were higher up than my line of vision. If I had to hazard a guess, it seemed like the glowing eyes belonged to a creature maybe 8 or 9 feet tall. Again, I'm not sure words can even broach the crushing terror I felt when all this registered in my head. Like in the microseconds that followed seeing the eyes, the rational side of my brain is like, sorry mate, we've absolutely no rational explanations for this one. While the irrational side of my brain is like, you're about to get ripped apart by Bigfoot. I still need to actually turn around to see what it is, but at the same time, the last thing I want to do is turn around and actually lay eyes on the nine foot tall monster behind me.

So, there were these few horrible seconds when I was just completely frozen with fear. Finally, I spin around, not even half ready to take on whatever ginormous beast is waiting patiently to attack. The spin is accompanied by this weird yelp, a noise I've never made before or since that was a mix between just get it over with and please don't kill me. I'm silently prepared to face something less than natural, at least something that's going to tear me limb from limb while I scream for the assistance of my hiking buddies. But nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to see. Because when I spin around, the first thing I skin itself was made of stone, which I suppose is why it made so much sense when I realized I was looking at a large boulder set into the hillside.

Atop this boulder, the thing with the glowing yellow eyes was nothing more than a mountain goat. That thing was twice as scared of me as I was it, and as it scampered off through the trees, bleeding as it went, I found myself breaking out into this kind of manic laughter as the result of the tsunami of tension suddenly broke. I'd literally never been so scared in my life. I thought I was about to die in the worst bizarrely supernatural manner possible, and it was all because of a bloody mountain goat

deciding to stand on a rock whilst watching me have a wee. My hiking buddies were freaking out at first because I was beyond hysterical, and I just couldn't get any words out to explain what had happened. But when I did, they cussed me out for about 15 minutes straight for having scared the living daylights out of them. I get that some of you are going to find this ending somewhat underwhelming, and as much as I'm sorry that I couldn't have ended this like, yeah it was Bigfoot and now I'm a spooky ghost, those things just don't happen, do they? But I'm telling you now,

there hasn't been a single moment on any of my hiking trips that managed to top that moment in terms of raw fear. Yeah, there have been some sketchy moments on some steep slopes, but I count being startled, unnerved or anxious as different emotions or feelings than actual pant-wetting fear. And my advice to hikers everywhere remains the same. Don't panic. There's always a logical explanation for things, even if they do seem absolutely petrifyingly scary. To be continued... Y'all heard of the Wendigo, right? I grew up on the Isabella Indigenous Reservation in central Michigan,

tribal land of the Saginaw Chippewa Nation, so trust me when I say I've heard plenty of Wendigo-based campfire stories in my time. For those that don't know, a Wendigo is basically like an evil spirit, although I see them depicted these days as being like humanoids with deer skull heads and antlers. That's not exactly how they're described in Native American legend, and people get it twisted and think you'd turn into a Wendigo if you eat human flesh. That's not quite how it works either, and the real legend is much worse, I assure you. Now don't get me wrong, Wendigo attack people in a few different stories I know, but the main thing they do is like physically manipulate humans into killing and eating each other. Like there you are, with your buddy, and you slowly get this deep clawing hunger.

And it gets worse and worse until you can't think of anything else but killing him and eating his flesh. Then afterwards you come to and you're all like, no, having killed and eaten your childhood friend. That's way, way worse than just getting attacked by some dumb deer skull if you ask me. But as it turns out, there's actually a weird kind of truth to the whole Wendigo story. One that was told to me by an uncle who thought all that supernatural stuff as a bunch of bull. But as it turns out, there's actually a weird kind of truth to the whole Wendigo story, one that was told to me by an uncle who thought all that supernatural stuff as a bunch of bull. So because of the nature of my parents' work, they were both shift nurses at two different

medical clinics, I'd often spend weekends with my uncle Eddie. In some ways he was the best uncle a kid could wish for and in others not so much. Like if one phrase summed him up it was no BS, but that proved to be a double edged sword. A perfect example would be how he'd let me have one beer during dinner once I turned 17 on the condition that I didn't ever tell my parents. But then the time I tried to crash at his place when I was 19 and blasted, he kicked my butt and called my mom first thing in the morning. I mean I know it was tough love I get it, but I was grounded for a month and I was not his biggest fan around then.

Anyway, me and uncle Ed are sitting out on his porch, talking about this and that when somehow the subject of wendigos comes up. Ed would normally roll his eyes and nod whenever Saginaw myth and legend came up, and to be fair, he was the same with Christianity and all other religions. Pie in the sky stuff, he called it. But then for some reason I mention Wendigos and he just sort of tuts and shakes his head. He starts telling me how some myths and stories and legends or whatever are frightening because there's this kernel of truth to them. Some things are just made up to teach a lesson,

while others are true stories with the fabrications being just muscle on a very real skeleton. I ask him what he means by that, and that's when Uncle Ed turns to me with this deadly serious look, and was like, Wendigo's a real kid. There's a science behind it. Obviously my jaw is just on the floor at this point. Here's no BS Uncle Ed telling me that Wendigos are real, so I'm very, very much inclined to believe him. I figured there's some twist coming though, because there's no way Ed was about to tell me that evil cannibalistic spirits were real. And boy was I right. So, Uncle Ed tells me that a lot of the reports of cannibalism among Native Americans are just ridiculous BS. The only

ritualistic consumption of human remains occurred with certain southwestern tribes who used to drink the ashes of their dead. And despite being a little weird, there's no danger of getting sick from drinking a little ash. But that doesn't mean that there were zero incidents of eating human flesh by Native Americans, and evidently the Wendigo myth is partially a cautionary tale against doing so. My uncle says that it all stems from a particular disease you get as a result of eating human flesh, a disease that's called Kuru in some areas of Southeast Asia. Basically, there's a special kind of protein in human bodies, and if other humans ingest it, it can really mess them up. But it's the symptoms of this

Kuru thing, and that's where the Wendigo stories come from, and they come in three distinct stages. The first kind of make the cannibal look like they're drunk. They can't walk straight or talk right and they tend to sway back and forth on the spot. The second stage is where people must have gotten the idea of a monster from, because this involves some pretty serious mood swings and outbursts of involuntary laughter. Seriously, imagine that. One minute a person is all sad and depressed, next they're angry at you for no reason while they're laughing their butts off. Kind of reminds me of that Joker movie, you know? Laughing even

though you don't feel like laughing. But it's the third and final stage that I think is the basis for some of the Wendigo imagery. The condition gets so bad that after a certain amount of time being infected, the person can't actually move properly anymore. I mean, they can drag themselves around, but not for long. And it's around that time that they also lose the ability to swallow anything other than water. So, no feeding yourself, no moving around. You're basically a skeleton within a few weeks. A living skeleton that can only groan and maybe even lash out in

confusion at those that try and help you. All of a sudden, the connection between starvation and cannibalism and the imagery and lore of the Wendigo becomes pretty clear to me. People just build up a myth around the idea and over time, the raw truth behind the monster became lost among legend. I remember just sitting there, kinda dumbstruck, thinking like, if that's true, if Wendigos are true, what else is real? Thankfully, Ed didn't have any other stories about how vampires or werewolves were real, but did say he suspected just like the Wendigo, there was a horrifying tidbit of truth to most other seemingly fictional monsters,

and it was just a case of using science, history, and basic logic to figure out what those things might have been. But honestly, I don't know if I want to figure them out. The world would seem far too scary if I somehow found out that all the monsters in it were somehow real. So, first off, technically this isn't my story, it's my grandpa's. But since he's not around to tell it anymore, and a good story dies when it doesn't get told, I'm sure I have his posthumous permission to tell it. Second thing, I can't be too liberal with any of the details here, because people actually still might go to prison for this. Yeah, it happened in like

1980 but a couple of the main players are still alive and well, if the truth got out, they'd probably spend the rest of their lives in prison. So I'll try to be as anonymous as I can. Now we're a real close-knit community here and we won't have our elders separated from us during the time they need us the most. That and if the media got wind of what happened, they'd be all over our little town like flies on a cow turd. So, what happened had remained a closely guarded secret. Until now, when I'm going to share it with all of you. Don't get me wrong, I feel kind of like a snitch writing about it, but I also feel like if I don't tell someone that my head will explode. It's just too crazy a story for me not to tell someone.

So, we live in a small Navajo nation town. At a split of about 70-30, it's mostly white European, but there are a fair few of us full-blood Navajo around and my family is one of them. According to my grandpa, nine full-blood Navajo guys from our town ended up getting drafted for service in Vietnam. Four of them got killed, one went MIA and ended the four guys that came back. Only two stayed around town and tried to settle back into life again. One was my grandpa, and the other was a guy we'll just call Cody. So both grandpa and Cody both start families at around the same time. Both have two kids, they work in the same place, they basically have like parallel lives. And having both served in Vietnam, albeit in different outfits, you'd think they'd have had more of a bond, but no. Cody didn't talk to grandpa about Nam, or anything else

for that matter. In fact, Cody didn't talk to just about anyone at all. He just went to work, went home, and spent time with his family. He must have run a strict enough household, as his kids were apparently always polite, and the few who ever gained access to his home said it was perfectly ship shape. So apart from Cody being generally anti-social, there were no warning signs about Cody. Grandpa said plenty of vets just kept to themselves after they rotated back to the world. It wasn't anything special. But even if they're tight-lipped about them, vets still have their problems, especially when it comes to marriage and family. Which is why people weren't all that shocked or surprised

when Cody's wife and kids stopped showing up to work or school. They probably just got tired of living with a robot and just moved on with their lives, or so everyone believed. Because after a little time goes by, some group of hikers are walking through a nearby ravine when they start smelling something awful coming from one of the cliff walls. Shoved into a little nook and covered up with rocks of varying sizes, with the bodies of Cody's wife and two kids. The last anyone saw of Cody before the cops declared him a person of interest was a neighbor of his who saw him walking out of his backyard and up into the hills, which is basically one big forest when you get out there far enough.

Apparently he had this big army issue backpack on, like he was looking to be out there for a while. That and the fact that the way the family's bodies were disposed of is a traditional Navajo burial, and that was all the cops needed to go looking for him. Only it wasn't the FBI or some big city police force going after him. This was just some small town sheriff and one of his deputies. They didn't think Cody had actually killed his family, not according to grandpa. They just wanted to know if he thought he was in danger, hence why he just bugged out like that. So, the sheriff and his deputy go out into the hills looking for old Cody. One day goes by, two days go by, and by the third

day, it becomes obvious that the two tribal police officers just aren't coming back. But instead of actually calling in some actual support, a deputy just gathers up a group of volunteers and they wander off in some poorly organized search party looking for the missing officers. Only here's the thing, they went in armed and my grandpa was one of them. Grandpa had been in motor pool during his tour of duty, but Cody had been in another outfit entirely. He was LRRP, a long range reconnaissance patrolman. These guys were like hardcore thousand-mile stare, out in the jungle for weeks at a time kind of guys. Cody was capable of living up in those hills for months at a time, and the little search party, which soon turned into a hunting party,

was definitely not ready for the task at hand. According to Grandpa, out of the 20 or so guys that went to the woods looking for him, Cody only killed three of them. The sheriff, the deputy, and one of the search party. But as to the things he did to the bodies that were responsible for the rest of the casualties, he butchered them and strung them up in such a way when the search party came across them, their trigger fingers were itching something fierce. When it came to it, Cody only shot at the men with an old.45, but the fear and the ensuing firefight killed two more guys and injured a handful of others. People were terrified, bullets were flying,

and those that weren't outright shot had wood splinters in all kinds of nasty places. They did get Cody in the end, but they couldn't bring him in alive, and they paid a high price to do it. If it had gotten out, a whole bunch of people would have gone to prison for murder, manslaughter, or for breaking gun and hunting laws. Not to mention how the media coverage would have buried us, tainted our name, and finished off what Cody had started for us Navajos. So like I said, people covered it up, and now we just keep quiet about it, especially with outsiders. And I'm happy enough to tell this story in that way because it doesn't really give anything away. And if you think you can narrow down Watanaman

just from the Navajo thing, good luck. You're gonna need it. A A few years back, I was driving through the Pine Ridge Reservation over in South Dakota. I'm half Sioux myself, and although I don't actually live on the reservation, my commercial freight takes me through Pine Ridge and Rosebud a whole lot. So one night, it's pretty late, and I just pass through a small town called Ogalla on the way to Pine Ridge. I've been holding in my bladder since Ulrich's, telling myself I could hold it until I got to Pine Ridge and the gas station I'd usually stop at when everywhere

else was closed. But nope, all of a sudden my bladder starts hollering at me and I'm at that age where I can't really be rolling the dice on those sorts of things anymore. So I do what anyone else would have done and pull over to answer nature's call. Now I'm on a stretch of dark road and I just so happen to pull over the only stretch that's flanked by trees on both sides of the road. I'm about to pee my pants, but the last thing I want to do is cause an accident, so I flick on my hazard lights just to let people know I'm there, and then hop out of my truck to do my business. Right as I finish up, and I'm about to turn back

towards the truck, I hear something moving through the trees to the left of me. Then, right before my eyes, the shadow emerges from the tree line. The hazard lights are only partially illuminating him, so I can't see his face or make out much detail about him. But there is one thing that I can see, thanks to the sliver of light flashing off of it, and that's the big old butcher knife in the man's grip. I shift a little in place to face him, and he hears this and turns to face me. I'm slowly backing up, telling the guy to take it easy, and the whole time I'm hoping he's not just about to rush me, but boy am I expecting it.

When I finally spoke, it wasn't in the least bit reassuring. I'm going to need you to call the cops, he says, and a combination of context and fear has me thinking, it's for me, isn't it? He's telling me that I need to call the cops to protect myself from him. Now, I'm already searching for something, but it's not my phone, it's the gun in my glove box back in the truck. I'm slowly but surely edging towards the cab whilst also saying, Sure buddy, I'll call the cops for you.

Just take it easy with that knife, okay? I just gotta go back and get my phone from my truck, and I'll call the cops for you. Keeping in mind to say the cell service is patchy out there would be an understatement. I guess it's improved in the time since this whole incident happened, but at the time, I'd have no more relied on a cell phone on those roads than I'd rely on a chocolate coffee pot. But I most definitely could rely on that.38 special, and that's all that was on my mind. I get this brief moment of relief when I'm able to get the gun out of the glove box, all without the guy seeing. Or maybe he did, and he just didn't react, because I show him my phone before asking why he needs me to call the cops. If he said anything remotely creepy, I was ready to put

every bullet into him at that roadside, knowing not a jury in the land would convict me given the circumstances. But his answer wasn't creepy. Harrowing, sure, but not creepy. And when I heard it, I put the gun back in the glove box and got out of my truck again. He told me he'd gone into the woods, intending to cut his own throat with the knife, but when he got there and actually went to go through with it, he couldn't do it. He said all he could picture was his young daughter hearing the news that he'd died and how he couldn't do that to her. Then he just broke down. I didn't know what else to do, so I got him my whiskey flask and gave him an awkward masculine there there. When he calmed down a little, I told him if he tossed the knife, I'd drive him into Pine Ridge, the hospital there,

so he could maybe check himself in and get some help or whatever. Initially he just refused and when I said next almost didn't come out because I was still worried he might just start stabbing me. But I felt the fear and said it anyways, do it for your daughter man, do it for her. At that he tosses the knife into the woods and walks around to the passenger side of my truck. After I dropped him off at the hospital, all I knew about the guy was his name was Jacob, so it wasn't like I could just go look him up or whatever, which sucks because I would have liked to have seen him again, just to see how he's doing.

But no, that's not how life works, is it? You just don't get the storybook endings you want all the time and sometimes you're just left to hope and wonder. I hope Jacob is okay, but sometimes in the darker moments, I wonder if he finally found the courage, or the despair, to go through with it. To be continued... I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 7pm EST. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash letsreadofficial, 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.