The Lets Read Podcast - 170: FISHING FOR SCARES! | 36 True Scary Stories | EP 158

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about South America, The Subway, & Fishing... 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

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 Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexperts.ca. To be continued... I seem to be a magnet for creeps and weirdos and since I got such a positive response in my last experience I figured I would share a few more with you all. These all took place outside my home at the time which was on the literal last block of a major city right across the street from the beach. The building was framed on four sides by the beach, the woods, a construction site, and a few other sleepy houses, as well as the Mooney line. Think like the subway but above ground. It's the very last stop on the Mooney so unless you catch it at the

right time of day or at the height of tourist season, the area is basically empty on the sidewalks. The house itself has an initial patio door, which doesn't always fully close if you don't slam it, and then an entry area with a staircase and leading up to a second locked door that leads to the apartment. Now, for experience one, I got home from work one day at about 9pm and immediately get into a small spat with my roommates. After about 30 minutes I decided to leave the house to cool off. I had planned on sitting on the porch outside but as I looked across the street at the ocean I decided it would be more peaceful there. I had never been to the beach at night for safety reasons but

as I looked at the well lit parking lot and no one in sight I decided it would be all right. In the one block span from the beach to my home there was a little wooded path that started on my street and dumped you out at a crosswalk for the beach. It also intersected with another pathway that took you down the coast. I sat for a bit, everything was fine and after a while I started the less than one minute walk back on the little path. All of a sudden I look up and see a man walking briskly on the intersecting path looking right at me. I speed up a bit and try to ignore him and as we hit the section where the two paths intersect I end up being about a foot away from him. He calls out to me, hey, I want to talk to

you. I ignore him and after a few more steps, he reaches out his hand and grabs part of my hair, saying, hey, come here. I immediately yank my hair out of his hand and book it to the last block, sprinting to my house and I can actually hear him running behind me. I turn the corner sharply and am briefly out of his sight. Luckily, the initial entryway to the patio had been left open by accident and I run in through the door and slam it shut. I hear his footsteps stop outside, followed by silence. As I go upstairs and look through our front window, I see him walking away into the construction site. Experience number two. I had a friend that lived a couple of blocks from where I was along the same stretch of beach. After hanging out one day, I decided to head

back home at around sunset. I've walked this route many times and it's just barely light outside still, only a five minute walk so I figured I'll be home before dark. As I cross the intersection from their house, I notice a white van parked on the corner that is not usually there, covering a little garden I like to look at on my way back. I can just barely make out two people in the front seat. I think, odd, okay, whatever, and I pull out my pepper spray just in case. I cross the street, passing the van and now have my back to it. As soon as my foot hits the pavement on the other turning onto the street where I'm now walking. They creep the van beside me slowly, just behind me but within my peripheral vision. I decide to stop and let them pass. I pause and pretend to be looking at my phone and see them stop driving immediately.

This was an immediate nope for me and I broke into a run, with the van in pursuit. I went to a small, vintage motel about one building away that I know has an open entrance courtyard. And so as I approach it I turn quickly into the yard and run up to an archway entry for a unit. I stop at the first few steps, catching my breath, and I open my phone's front camera to use as a sort of mirror to see what the van is doing. They had backed up to the entry of the motel and sat there for a few minutes. Then, one of the passenger's sides opened the door and started walking towards the motel, his phone flashlight on, and I immediately pulled my own phone back, listening for his footsteps and readying myself to start banging on the motel door, hoping that someone is inside.

I wait in the silence for a long time, long enough for it to get dark. I finally look out again and both the man and the van are gone. I call an Uber to take me the last two blocks home and I never saw them again. Experience number three. I have a friend over and we want to take a dab. It's about 10pm. My roommates don't like dabbing in the house because of the smell so he and I go to his parked car out front. We're in there having a good time when I notice a person walking down the block, pulling on car door handles.

I notify him and we watch as that same person comes up to his car and yanks on his back door. He honks his horn and they back up for a minute, then walk up to his driver window and knock on the window, making a motion to roll it down. Just as I'm about to tell him don't, he rolls down the window a bit. The person is clean and normally clothed and asks what day it is, and then what time it is, to which my friend answers. They then stand there and stare at us as he tries to usher them away, even offering them money. Without saying anything, they walk away down the block and once they reach the intersection between the construction site and woods, they roll their head back up to the sky and just start screaming at the top of their lungs as they back away out of sight.

I take this opportunity to dart back inside my house as my friend watches, making sure to close the patio door. A few hours later one of my roommates comes home very drunk and as we figured later, they failed to make sure the patio door shut all the way. Morning time comes and I wake up in an empty apartment. I open my phone and have a singular message from my roommate from three hours ago, stating that when they left for work this morning, there was a person they didn't know sleeping inside the patio area. They thought it was a drunk person who lived in the neighborhood and entered the wrong house by mistake

and evidently did not find it enough of a reason to call me or wake me up. I immediately go to the entry of our apartment, pulling the door open fast. To my surprise, the person who had been talking to us in the car the night before is laying casually across my staircase, fiddling with something. I scream hey loudly and they immediately hop up and run out of my patio door. I run down the stairs after them and open the door. They're standing across the street just smiling at me and giggling. They then give me a little wave and run off. I close the door hard and go back to the steps to see what items they had left. Sitting on the steps was a few coins, some weird wire-type objects, think a bobby pin after you've bent it into a straight line, a lighter,

and a pocket knife. Thankfully, I never saw them again. To be continued... It all started on a normal weekend evening. I was hanging out in my room when I suddenly got a text from my friend. He worked as overnight security for a large bank and regularly had time between rounds to check his phone and play Pokemon Go. The message he sent me was that I needed to lock my doors. I asked why and he explained that only a block from me was a shootout and the offender had yet to be apprehended. Something you should know about my neighborhood is that this is not a bad part of town. My house is in a nice neighborhood just down the street from a local high school. We have a large military family presence due to the base in the area.

I'm only telling you this because it's easy enough to find this all out if you were to research the event I'm about to tell you. So after my friend messages me this, I head upstairs and do what he says. As I'm doing so, I open Facebook and I suddenly see that everyone on my timeline is sharing the local police scanner report, and it goes as follows. Fire, active shooter. Sonic, street name. U-Haul full of fireworks on fire by the building with an active shooter inside. Dispatch on the phone with two shooting victims inside.

Male suspect in an army helmet still shooting. Police giving local hospital a heads up that they have an active shooter with multiple code 3 traumas that will be coming. I'm sitting on the steps in front of my front door reading this and constantly refreshing the page when I suddenly recognize the sound of a helicopter above my house. The sonic drive through this incident is happening at is like I said only a block from my house. I tell my parents and my mother and I can't help but stick our heads out only to see our neighbors are doing the same. It was night time and off beyond the tree line you could clearly see the orange glow of what I knew was a U-Haul the shooter had set on fire in the parking lot of the Sonic. We close the door and for a few hours I'm refreshing the

scanner feed and watching Snapchat videos people have took of the U-Haul in question, on fire with dozens of police cars flashing lights around the area. The shooter was soon apprehended and my mother and I felt relieved and I headed to bed, still buzzing from the excitement. That excitement was quickly extinguished when I got a call the next day from a friend of mine who told me that our mutual friend and his roommate were killed in the shooting the night before. I was stunned into silence. It wasn't until I got the invitation to his memorial that everything crashed into me at once. Here's the story behind that awful night. A few days beforehand, a Sonic employee reported a man trying to buy $44 of food with a stolen

credit card. The man was arrested and spent a few days in the local jail. The day he got out, he rented the U-Haul, filled it with fireworks, grabbed his military grade weaponry and drove back to that sonic. He set the U-Haul on fire in order to cause distraction and walked into the building of the sonic where my friend and two of his co-workers were and opened fire with a semi-automatic. In an interview with the only survivor he said, I watched as my friend died next to me. There was blood and I just watched. At his memorial I listened and watched as so many family and friends spoke about him. I knew I wanted to say something. I was shaking and crying as I stumbled to the front of the room in front of the microphone. His mother and stepfather were sitting in front of me as I

began by describing that night, then went into detail about how I first met him. How he looked so strange at this midwestern high school with long, flipped hair, band t-shirts and dark skinny jeans. How he said I looked beautiful in my homecoming dress the night he took me as his date. It was the first time in my life I've ever been so affected by something. My already bad drug addiction completely spiraled even deeper. My friend didn't deserve to die. He was originally from Texas and when his family moved back to Texas, he chose to stay here to explore his independence.

He loved his family but especially his older brother who he looked up to. His brother always affectionately called him Nano and would always call and text him to make sure my friend was doing okay. My friend also had an amazing natural talent for music. His guitar was his safe place and he only ever shared his playing with his friends and family. His biggest influence was Jimi Hendrix who he admired and would talk for hours about how amazing his stage presence was and how his hands were so big he could wrap it twice around the neck of his guitar. But my friend never really got a chance to pursue music, despite each and every person who ever heard him sing and play him tell him he was extraordinary.

Not only that, he was so kind, and he was also so unhappy. It was a few days before Thanksgiving when he died. I learned that his family was already going to be driving up here to pick him up and take him home to Texas with them. He was scheduled to finally get his license that Monday after spending years after high school not being able to practice or have the time. His family did make it up here to take him home, but in a casket. This all happened only a year ago. The Sonic has been reopened and a memorial has been erected in the sitting area. But just across the street, next to a parking lot, is a small memorial made by friends and family of not only him, but the other boy that died that night.

His picture is framed by Mexican prayer candles, fake flowers, and during the holidays the tree is hung with stockings with his name on it. I drive by it every time I go to work, and it's just another reminder that he's gone. All over $44 of food. I'm living in a very rural area in a small village with maybe 10 to 15 houses, but close to the highway. You can drive there within maybe 5 minutes, and also about 10 minutes away from the town. If you cross the street, it just takes you about a 10 minute walk to reach the forest. Now, it was Christmas day.

In the afternoon, my partner and I decided to go for a little digestive walk as we were really stuffed from all the food. It was about 5pm and already dark when we left and we had a big and bright LED flashlight with us. I also took my camera and my flash as I love taking pictures of nature at night. We decided to walk on a little country road towards the forest and then turn right, following a small graveled cycled track close to the forest border which connects our village and the next, maybe 15-20 minute walk between villages. In the middle part of the track

you have to walk through a small bit of forest. It's rather dark and the trees are very high and quite dense. When we entered I saw a flashlight reflecting on something and recognized a car being parked there on the side of the track close to the trees. This struck me as odd as cars are not allowed to drive there and the path is very narrow and hidden so I was a bit cautious. My partner pointed to the light inside of the car and it seemed to be empty. I also noticed the windows were frozen so it must have been parked there for a while. A bit in front of the car I spotted a tree with an intriguing structure and I asked my partner to point the flashlight up towards it so I could focus better and photograph it with my flash. I just took a few images my partner told me.

Um, there's someone standing behind us in the middle of the road. He's looking at us. Nobody was following us the whole way. I kept looking around and behind us occasionally because at this time in the evening and close to the border of the forest there are boars sometimes and it's mating season so they are more aggressive than usual. Indeed, there was a man standing behind us, staying out of the flashlight's reach. He wasn't saying anything, just standing there and facing us. At first I thought he might be startled as it may seem a bit weird if someone's just taking photos around your car. It wasn't even legal to drive on

that path with your car by the way. I decided to get up and confront him from a distance, explaining to him that I was just taking photos of that tree. He didn't react and still just stood there. I then went on to ask him if he needed some light and he replied that it wasn't necessary. It was odd but I was still calm, sure about there being a normal explanation for his behavior. Nonetheless, my partner and I decided to just get out and follow the path leading to the next village. It was maybe 5-7 minutes until we reached it. I remembered the letters on his license plate, not the numbers though unfortunately, and googled it,

and it turned out that he was from a city about 6 hours from our village. Mind you, the country I live in is in a very strict lockdown right now, so you are only allowed to travel, even by car, if you have very urgent reasons. After we reached the first lantern of the next village we looked back and observed the car driving a bit out of the forest, turning around and going back inside. I was able to see that he parked there again and turned the lights off and he didn't leave the forest. We then went home on a much longer way than initially intended as I didn't want to go back there for obvious reasons. Our flashlight battery died on the way and my phone battery is low so I didn't want

to call the police back then but I called them as soon as I arrived home and gave them all the details. This is a big regret that I didn't memorize the whole license plate but it was just so surprising that I seriously didn't think about it. Also it only occurred to me as really strange when I thought about the frozen windows and that he couldn't have possibly have walked behind us. Plus him having no light and not responding at all. He did seem to be sneaking up on us when I sat down to take the photo. I think I was very lucky to have my partner, the camera, and the bright light with me. I don't want to imagine what he had in mind being so far away from where he was,

and what could have happened to me if I was alone. This happened probably around 2002. I moved to Belfast from London. I would have been like maybe 11. I'm 30 now. Anyway, I lived in a new area. A lot of houses, etc. were being built and they were all massive and beautiful houses despite being a terrible area. And I thankfully no longer lived in. I'm with a friend called Dave, we're looking

for my sister and we go around the corner from my house down where they're building a bunch of houses and it's pretty dark. I'd probably say it's like 10 or 11pm. I don't really remember why we were actually looking for my sister, I don't even think she was around. Anyway, we're walking past houses that look pretty much finished. We're chatting and a guy randomly shows up out of the blue behind us and grabs hold of me. Dave by this stage is completely petrified and runs away crying and climbs over a fence, completely ditching me. The guy is very casual despite being creepy and I'm not as freaked out as I should be. I assume he's a pro-v which is someone who watches the streets in West Belfast.

He's got a hold of me and it's like when you've been caught in a place you shouldn't be in. I expect to just be like, you shouldn't be here at nice while we're patrolling the streets or something like that. But suddenly we go to a house which isn't completely built yet and nobody lives in it. Well, I think. I'm literally standing inside the basement looking house whilst he's outside phoning the cops. I assume he's fake calling the cops. The conversation just sounded fake and he sounds like he's just trying to scare me and he is. I get really freaked out though cause upstairs there's

like this constant tapping sound and it can't be a builder by himself at like 11pm surely. It sounded like someone locked in something trying to get out and that terrified me. It was the speed of the sound and as if they knew I was in the house. It sounded like they were trapped upstairs or something. Suddenly he's off the phone and he's like, Okay, the cops are coming to your house soon. Get out of here. I'm thinking, no, not really. I didn't give you my address.

But at the same time I was freaking out because maybe this guy knows the streets and maybe he knows where I live. So that entire night I was just looking at my window hoping no cops would come. They didn't in the end and he obviously did all of that just to scare me but why? This situation for me is scary because a guy randomly grabbing a hold of you in the street in pitch black darkness is freaky regardless of whether or not it's a building site and I probably shouldn't have been there. He could have put me in a room and locked the door, had someone torture me or something. I've always wondered like why was he there? What was he doing? Afterwards I was

scared to go out at night in the area unless I had someone with me. Truth be told there were a lot of issues in the area and I'm guessing that guy and a bunch of other guys were acting like undercover cops since the cops weren't usually comfortable coming up to where I lived since they'd usually get bricked. It comes from the troubles and looking back though I think the entrance was blocked off and we weren't actually allowed in there. Considering the situation I was actually pretty calm compared to my friend and I do have terrible anxiety I think I just assumed that this guy wasn't bad but again on any given day he could have been something much more sinister I really don't really know how to fully digest what had happened obviously nowhere near as freaky as some of the stories here, but the sound of stairs, I just can't shake the fact that it sounded like someone was trapped up there,

begging to be let out. This happened to me in the summer of 2015. I was dating a guy who lived in the city and I was living at home at the time in the suburbs. Neither of us had a car and since I lived at home with my bedroom right next to my grandma's, I always went to him. I'd take the subway to his place every week and stay for the couple of days I had off from work. To get to his apartment required taking two trains. One day I was headed to see him. It was super hot out and I was wearing a skirt with straps, a crop top and knee-high socks.

Hey, I wanted to look cute. I guess I feel this is important as I probably stood out in this outfit and unfortunately I probably should have been more careful about what I was wearing, which sucks. I'm on the first train and after a few stops I notice a man get on. It's kind of hard not to notice him as he chose to stand right in front of where I was sitting and stare at me, rather than take an empty seat. It made me feel weird. The man in general gave me a very creepy vibe. He was probably in his early 40s, look unkempt, but

otherwise kind of just a basic looking white dude whose face I can't even picture right now. So I get off at the last stop and head through the station to where I need to catch the second train, but I notice this guy is following me, which at first I figured wasn't a big deal. He could have just been going to the same place. So to get to the platform I needed to be at, you had to go up some stairs and I realize he's right behind me. I decided to turn around and go to a different platform which happened to be packed with people, thinking if he's following me then this is bad but maybe I could lose him in the crowd. He continues to follow me and I try to duck out of view before going back to the actual platform I need to be waiting on. I get there and for a few minutes I feel better, until I see him again.

He must have known that I'd be there after I'd gone up there and then turned around. Plus it was the only other platform and most likely he saw me the whole time. There weren't too many people waiting compared to the other side but a few trains came that were so full that I didn't bother to try to get on and neither did he. The whole time I'm texting my boyfriend who was not taking me seriously at all. I asked that he at least meet me at the station when I got to the stop by his apartment which was a five minute walk and was being reluctant but he finally agreed. At this point though I'm still waiting for a train. One does come but it's very full.

I'm getting restless and want to get to a safe place so I squeeze on. But so does the man and now he's right next to me with now his arm over me. I can even feel his fingers starting to caress my shoulder. It was disgusting. I decide that even with all these people around I'm not safe so right before the doors close I hop out and the train leaves with the guy on it staring at me with this look of hatred as it pulled away. I waited for a few more trains to come and go,

worried the guy would be waiting for me at the next stop or something. I got on a train finally, paying attention to everyone who got on at each stop. He never did and I made it to my stop, greeted by my boyfriend who seemed frustrated by having to walk over. He is my ex-boyfriend and was just generally kind of terrible. I'm really proud of myself of getting off of that train at the last second. I don't know how much danger I was in but I know that man was following me and definitely wasn't for any wholesome reason. And despite being in public, I feel like if he had tried anything, no one would have done anything.

And I'm a this story currently at my workplace. I work in the garden area of a home improvement store. I don't work the cash registers and my manager doesn't even let me water the flowers so a lot of the time I have nothing to do. This results in me taking extremely long bathroom breaks where I just scroll on my phone. I know it sounds bad but it's better than standing around trying to look busy. Today was the same as any other, with me wasting time in the bathroom. Nothing of interest happened until my work phone buzzed at the same time as the stall next to mine, and this becomes important later. A few seconds later, I see that the guy in the next stall has his hand stretched to the ground with his palm facing up.

At first I thought he had run out of toilet paper and was asking for mine. He just stayed silent for a while so I ignored him after that. Then he started moving that hand uncomfortably close to my leg so I immediately scooted away and prepared to leave. Once the man noticed that, he hurriedly got out of his stall before I could leave. Another few seconds of silence. I took a peek out from the gap of the stall door to see what he was doing and just like a scene from a horror movie, our eyes connected. He was barely an inch away from the door trying to peek inside. My blood ran cold and if you're wondering why I didn't immediately

open the door and cuss the guy out, I really hate confrontation. I avoid it whenever possible, and I do my best not to draw attention to myself. I stood sideways by the door so he wouldn't be able to see me, and that's when the whispering started. I don't know what the first thing he said was, but it sounded like moaning. The next part was a bit more audible. He said something along the lines of wanting to see more of my unflushed toilet paper and I was just thoroughly disgusted. This guy was a complete creep and I was alone in the bathroom with him. My heart was beating faster by the second. I had to stay there until another person came into the bathroom

No way was I going to confront him alone Probably a minute later someone finally arrives and I take this as my chance to wash my hands and get out of there Thankfully the presence of the other person made the old man quit his creepy behavior As I was about to leave he blocked my path for a quick second before stepping aside. The weird thing was, I don't even think he works at the store because he wasn't wearing any vest. My store is extremely lenient about uniform, but most workers at least wear a vest or something connected to the store. He just looked like a regular customer. I'm certain I heard a phone ding echo in that bathroom. The phones have a certain signature ring to them that it couldn't have been a coincidence. Either way, he only started

creeping on me once the phone ring made it clear that I was an employee. The situation really creeped me out and I've been totally unfocused on my work since then. I kept prowling the garden area to look out for any old man wearing a similar outfit to that creeper, and I have an incredibly hard time distinguishing faces, so I don't even know if I would recognize this apparent creepy co-worker if he showed up again. So to start off, I'm 16 and haven't had a job yet. I really want to work. I need to get out of the house. I got an interview at Popeyes in my city.

I get there around five minutes before my interview and I have really bad social anxiety and struggle to speak in certain situations. By the time it was my turn to be interviewed my nails had been gnawed off. I was very shaky and I could hear it in my voice. I had been listening to what the previous girl had said. I like examples of what to say and do and so I thought I was ready. No masks were worn, mid-covid, and this man did not put on his mask. Red flag number one in my mind. He was also looking towards places where I was trying to maintain eye contact. I had one of the mom cardigans on so I crossed it over my chest. When I did get his attention it finally

fell back on my face where it should be, especially since I'm a minor and he didn't know that. He bit his lip a lot and would sigh weirdly like it was a moan. Obviously uncomfortable I'd try to take his attention from me onto some random questions. I started to ask about the restaurant and things like that. He answered very dismissively. In the end, I got the job. I was told an email was going to be sent to me within the next day or two with my login info so I could get started on training. This was an important detail. I gave it two days and I received nothing. I call and they tell me to call back in the next day at 3 because he's out of town

I go to high school full time and I don't get out until almost 4 but by the time I called he had gone I called multiple more times to no avail I call that Saturday and he finally answers He starts telling me how I was supposed to stay after the meeting and get my login info from the assistant manager And that's when I'd had enough. I'm already very short-tempered and I had given this man every ounce that I had. Listen man, I applied here and you said I was hired. You also said I would receive an email with my info. I was not given that or any other way to contact you urgently, not to mention how unprofessional it is to lie to a now employee.

You are an unprofessional man and a creep. I suggest you start focusing more on... Excuse me ma'am, but I... No, you listen to me. Focus on hiring people and not the chests of obviously underage applicants. I told him to take my file out of the system and to screw off. I hung up before he could say another word. Multiple emails were sent afterward, belittling me in some extremely unprofessional behavior. I blocked the sender's email and still continued to receive more. Multiple calls were made to my own mother by this man, and we reported him and we had heard back that he had since been fired. So a note to all hiring managers.

When you make a mistake, own up to it. Don't lie to new employees. We're not stupid. To be continued... I was living in Berlin, Germany and my boyfriend at the time lived about a five hour drive away. So I had planned to go see him, like I usually do every two weeks on the weekend, and I used the carpooling site Blah Blah Car, which I had used so many times before. I see that a young man is heading down that way and that there is already one seat taken by another girl, so I reserve my seat and wait for this person to come and fetch me. We meet at the spot we had agreed to and he explains to me that

the other girl had to cancel last minute, which is totally fine. Odd, but I mean, it can happen. Anyway, I jump in. The driver, his name is Ben, he seems very nice and talkative. Just before leaving Berlin, he turns to me and asks that he had forgotten his driver's license at home and that we must go fetch it. Which is already a bit of a pain because it's on the other side of town and Berlin is huge. And let's be honest you know you were going away for the whole weekend and that you have a really big journey and somehow you forget your license. Weird. But moving on we get to his and he parks up and turns me and says, would you like to come with me and visit my place?

Immediately I say no thank you and off we go. He's talking away and all of a sudden he starts touching my thigh and explains that he's a personal trainer and masseuse and I just respond with something like cool for you. I made it quite clear that I was heading to my boyfriend's and I was not comfortable. He continues touching my hands, my thighs and my neck and to the point that I actually considered, do I jump out? I mean, I'm on the motorway, already about two hours away from Berlin and it's traffic jam-packed, so five hours ended up being seven hours. My plan was to pretend to be asleep. I thought that that way I don't have to interact with him and he might leave me alone. The thing is, I really did fall asleep and when I woke up, I realized I was in the middle of nowhere,

like on tiny roads in the middle of the forest and the guy turns to me and says, you know, if I wanted to, I could kidnap you and take you anywhere I wanted in those woods. I put up a tough exterior and said, you don't scare me and I've planned for all situations, just know that. He took notice and my boyfriend gave me a call at that exact moment and I explained what was going on and kept him posted. So as we drove out of these woods he decides that no, it's time to eat so we lose another 45 minutes while he does his own thing getting food i basically tell him that i'm fed up and want no more stops and he tells me that he's tired and then in order to do so and to keep him awake i must massage him i felt totally stuck so just to briefly entertain him, I touched his neck as to say, okay, now move. He did so and we arrived

finally. My boyfriend was not there waiting for me because I didn't want him to fight. I got out as quick as I could. I felt disgusted with myself, but I reported him to the carpooling site and as far as I know, he was banned. This happened just a couple of hours ago. I'm currently in bed trying to sleep off the bad feeling from this encounter. At around 11 I was watching TV and playing on my phone just waiting to feel tired. My boyfriend was upstairs asleep in bed. The lights were all off on the house, just a lamp on in the living room with me. Someone flicked my letterbox on the front door. It was loud so I assumed my partner would have

heard it and came to see. We live in a pretty unsafe area in a poor city in England. I'd been followed, charged at by mental drug addicts, attempted mugging, catcalled, found a drunk man hiding in my back garden, found a man loitering in my front garden, all that kind of weird stuff, so I instantly was on edge. I went to look at the front door. It was textured glass panels so I was able to make out two silhouettes out by the door. I just stood and watched and saw that one of them was looking into our front room, trying to see what was inside. They must have been there 30 seconds, then I flicked the hall light on not wanting them to think the house was empty and they instantly scarpered from looking on my front room to the street. A few seconds later they started knocking on my door so I ran upstairs and had to wake up my parents because I did not want to open the door and was so scared they would bash it in. I looked out the bedroom window and there was a man in the street. He looked up at me

and held eye contact without blinking or looking away even for a millisecond. He was speaking slowly. I mouthed what once or twice hoping he would shout but he didn't. Thinking back I wonder if he was looking at me but talking to the other person he had with him. I rushed down to confront them. My partner came down and started to put some clothes on. By the time I had grabbed my keys and opened the door they had gone. No sign of them at all on the road. This isn't the first time someone had tried messing with my letter flap at night. Last time I answered with my partner and they had some nonsensical reason which seemed made up on the spot. So now I'm thinking they're testing houses to see which ones are empty for robbing.

But whatever the reason, the way that man looked at me was incredibly unsettling, and I really extent it lives by its own rules I grew up in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. Rio is a city that lives by its own rhythm, and to an extent it lives by its own rules too, meaning there are many favelas or slums in the city where the police have no power. Instead, authority is held by the local drug traffickers. It's gotten better since I was a boy. The traffickers used to control more than half of the city, but now they control less than a third.

But unfortunately, neither me nor my family were around to witness the improvement as we moved out of Rio when I was a teenager. And our move was prompted by one of the most tragic and horrible events in our family's history, the death of my older brother Lucas. Lucas was always the smart one of the family. Even when he was just a little kid, all the people in our fafella called him little professor because he always wore his glasses and white school shirt even on Saturdays. He was good at all of his school subjects, but it was science, and particularly chemistry,

that set a fire in him. He was obsessed. Day and night he read his science, and particularly chemistry that set a fire in him. He was obsessed. Day and night he read his science books and he would always tell me about how one day he was going to go to university and make us all very proud. You can only imagine how proud we really were when his acceptance letter arrived all those years later. He was headed to the state university in the Maracana district to study chemistry, the first in our family to ever attend college. He was our family's ticket out of the favelas, I know that sounds like a lot of pressure but it's true, and unlike some kids who might not feel comfortable with that sort of responsibility, Lucas relished it. But

his family, friends and neighbors weren't the only ones who noticed how intelligent and talented my brother was. Like I said, the narco traffickers held almost complete and total control over the favelas. Police would come and go, maybe shoot a few traffickers every so often, but it was like fighting guerrilla warfare for them. Many of the favelas are built onto hillsides, so the whole way the police would be fighting uphill against a well-armed and highly motivated enemy. They always used to try to surprise the traffickers, ambushing them in helicopters and sometimes like special

forces. But the traffickers had lookouts and they paid them well, so there wasn't a single time the police tried to come into the favela without all the neighboring kids shouting, coxinas, coxinas. The nickname for the police in my area, Brazil. So, you see, there was almost nothing they could do. In many places, the government simply abandoned people to the mercy of the narco-traffickers and my area was one of those, and the gang in control was named Comando Vermelho, or in English, the Red Command. Comando Vermelho, or CV as I'll just call them from now on, they didn't just deal in drugs either. They were like a paramilitary organization at one time, more interested in politics than making money. But over time I think the riches

that came from trafficking narcotics corrupted them and soon they were a criminal gang much like any other. But my god, they were entrepreneurs too. They sold tickets to big street parties called Ballet Funk, produced their own music and clothing merchandise, and not only did they traffic drugs, they made drugs too. Commando Vermelho was in the business of making ecstasy and other party drugs, which was mainly sold at the ballet funk parties. And so they needed people with the skills to help run their parties. They needed organizers, DJs, sound and light technicians, all kinds of different people were on CV's payroll. They also needed someone smart to manufacture their party drugs such as ecstasy, GHB, and 2CB. And that's where Lucas came to their attention. Although he lived in a dorm over near the

university, Lucas would come back to the favela every weekend in order to spend time with us. Normally he would arrive in a great mood, full of stories about his new friends and his exciting new studies. But one time, Lucas came home troubled and when our parents asked him what was wrong, he made some excuse up about having too much late night study sessions. But I knew that wasn't the issue, because the very same people that were causing lucas problems were the same people that had approached me just a few days before i had been walking home from school when i was approached by a guy called cabacion not his real name just a nickname meaning big head because cabestion really did have such a big head, everything he did was a masterpiece. Every move he made a genius stroke of strategy.

He was always right and god help anyone who tried to tell him he was wrong because he was one of C.V.'s top guys in our favela. Cabecion and his friends wanted to talk to me and so I had no choice but to answer their questions. When's your brother in town? He asked me. I told him the weekend. If I'd have lied, they'd have beaten me. They didn't stop there either. They asked me what bus route he'd take, where his dorm was. I answered everything as best I could, but you can bet I answered I don't know for most of it. But still, it was more than enough for them to find him, and when they did, they demanded he drop out of university to work for them.

When they told him he'd be better paid than any civilian laboratory, I believe that to be true, but joining CV reminds me of something I heard in the United States. Gangs only lead two places, the jail cell or the grave. And that's exactly how it was with CB2. So naturally, Lucas didn't want to join and negotiating with Cabecion, such as telling him that he would only work on weekends, well, that didn't fly with a guy who was always right. In the end, Lucas showed bravery that few people could find within themselves when faced with the brutality of CV, and so, he told them no. The next weekend that Lucas came home, he wasn't just unhappy,

he was beaten to a pulp. He walked into our home with bruises and cuts all over him. Mother and father asked what had happened and he just told them some boys mugged me. They believed him and begged him to be more careful when traveling home but us brothers knew the truth. Combation had him beaten up as a warning for his disobedience. That night as we tried to sleep I told my brother not to come home anymore. It wasn't safe for him. Nothing was stopping us from traveling to visit him at his dorm or around the university campus. Sure, it would cost us money when it was tight,

and sure, it meant he wouldn't be able to eat fresh home cooking, but it would at least protect him from being beaten up again. That worked for a while, but then Cavacion just started targeting me instead Having his crew beat me up and demanding I summon my brother back to the favela When he heard what they were doing to me he was determined to put a stop to it I begged him not to come home, pleaded with him not to fall for their trick But he had it in his head that he could buy us some time by lying about working for them That was the thing about Lucas but he had it in his head that he could buy us some time by lying about working for them.

That was the thing about Lucas. Once he got something into his head, once he had made up his mind, there was no stopping him, no talking him around. So after weeks of not visiting our mom and dad, he called them to say that he'd be home at the weekend. All my relatives were very excited and I had to fake being happy about it so that they wouldn't question what was going on. I remember he was due home on a Friday at around 6pm, but then thanks to Rio's terrible public transport system, it was always a little later than his stated time. 7pm went by, 8pm went by, and there was still no sign of Lucas.

The next morning, when he still hadn't turned up, we all started to get very worried. My mom and dad called his dorm room, but his dorm mates said that they hadn't seen him since the night before. And that's when I broke down crying and I told them everything. All about how CV wanted him to make drugs and that he hadn't been mugged that time he came home with a swollen face and how I hadn't gotten in the fights in school. It had all been Cabezon and his crew. Mom and dad went into overdrive, calling all the family and asking if they knew anyone inside CV. An uncle of ours knew a guy who was closely associated with them and together they set about looking for Lucas. We'd assumed they had kidnapped Lucas to make drugs for them and that raising some ransom money might secure his release.

The reality was worse than we could have ever imagined. The Tuesday after Lucas disappeared, my uncle and his friend arrived at her house to tell my mom and dad that they'd found Lucas. But the way they said it, the sad looks on their faces, it told them all they needed to know. My mom started wailing and my dad had to restrain her. I didn't cry, I was just numb and and thinking back on it all these years later, I think it was because I knew he was dead already. He died the moment he told Cabecion and Comando Vermelho no. Lucas had a closed casket funeral, but for years, I didn't question why. Then a long time later, years after we'd moved to Sao Paulo to get away from the favela,

me and the same uncle were still drunk after Carnival, sitting on the roof of our home while the sun rose over the mountains. We had something of a heart-to-heart and it was only then that I found out how Lucas had died. The final weekend he came home, Cabezon and his crew met Lucas at the bus station. When he told them they need to talk, Cabezon told him, fine, but we need to talk somewhere more private. Cabezon and his crew then walked Lucas up to a very high place in a favela, one of their hangouts that had an amazing view over the whole favela. Cabezon explained to Lucas that he has accepted that he would not work for CV. They could find other chemists. That was not the problem.

The problem was that if word got out that one young man had defied CV, that all sorts of people would decide to be brave and also tell them no. And that could not be allowed to happen. So, as a warning to everyone in the favela, they beat Lucas up, tied him upright to a pole, and began to stack tires around him, threading him like a needle through the loops. After that, they poured petrol over him and set him on fire.

Everyone in the favela who was looking out their windows that night could see my brother burning and I thank God that me and my parents either weren't awake to see it or were ignorant of it going on. And I also thank God that my parents had the strength and courage to move us away from Rio, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but one with far too many bad memories for us to stay. To be continued... serial killer is quintessentially American. The mythos built up around Ted Bundy and his ability to endear and disarm is perhaps the most well-known of any serial killer, while the dissonant perversity of John Wayne Gacy and his child-friendly clown persona are enough to give nightmares to even the hardiest of true crime aficionados. The concept has also been explored in countless movies, be they American Psycho, Dirty Harry, or the cult classic Halloween.

But you may be surprised to know that the world's most prolific serial killer, the oneonso López was exposed to things that no child should ever see. The seventh child in a group of 13 siblings, Pedro was not only hideously neglected, but he and his family lived in an area stricken with extreme poverty. As a result, people selling their bodies was rife and Pedro apparently witnessed several incidences of perverted depravity while still of a single digit age. This had a profoundly negative effect on his psyche and after being caught violating his younger sister when he was just 8 years old, his mother threw him out of the family home, forcing him to fend for himself. The 8 year old-old exile was forced to travel to the Colombian capital Bogota in order to look for work, and it's there that he was taken advantage of by several older men, many of which abused him. This only worsened

Pedro's psychological condition, making him extremely volatile, distrustful, and depressive. By age 12, Pedro was fortunate enough to be taken in by a U.S. immigrant family and enrolled in a school for orphans. By all accounts, the family was kind to him, but Pedro ran away after just two years at the orphan school. According to one account, it's because he had been subjected to abuse by one of the male teachers. However, several other sources state that he actually ran away with this teacher, and the relationship was a consensual one. Whatever happened from the ages of 14 to 17,

by age of 18, Lopez was making a steady living by stealing cars and selling them to local chop shops. It earned Pedro a decent living, at least until selling them to local chop shops. It earned Pedro a decent living, at least until the law caught up with him. After a hasty trial, Pedro was sentenced to a brief but brutal jail term, during which he was repeatedly assaulted and violated by other inmates. Pedro claimed that he took revenge on his attackers throughout his time there, murdering the majority of them in attacks that remained a mystery to prison officials. However, it's not clear how true this is, as Pedro neither named nor gave details

on these revenge killings. But what's clear is that upon his release, Pedro decided he was finished with Colombia and moved across the border to neighboring Peru. He also spends stretches of time in Ecuador claiming that, I like the girls in Ecuador, they are gentler and trusting, more innocent. And it seems Pedro took advantage of their gentler, more trusting nature by murdering them. By the year 1978, Pedro had apparently murdered more than a hundred women and girls throughout

South America. He would normally lure them into his car before driving them out to a secluded location, where he would strip, assault, and strangle them before ditching their bodies in places they'd have little chance of being found. Pedro also had a habit of hanging around marketplaces, buying food for those who needed it as a way to earn their trust. But you can bet it was a trust he soon abused, as the person in need made their last, deadliest mistake. Yet perhaps Pedro's most favorite group to target were the region's indigenous people. Social injustice had meant

that these people had been ignored or denied agency for years, and local authorities were not nearly as keen to investigate disappearances or crimes against them. But that doesn't mean that the local Ayachucos Indians were prepared to take the abuse lying down. And when Pedro attempted to kidnap a nine-year-old tribal girl, the Ayachucos captured Pedro and prepared to execute him. Yet in a bizarre twist of fate, a nearby Christian missionary organization heard of the capture and managed to convince the Ayachucos not to execute Pedro and to hand him into the authorities instead. Yet to their utter dismay, the Peruvian authorities released Pedro back to Colombia, who somehow failed to prosecute on him for any crime whatsoever.

It's then that Pedro moved on to Ecuador, where he claimed he killed three girls a week for almost two solid years before his luck finally ran out. In March of 1980, Pedro attempted to abduct a girl in a marketplace in Ecuador, but was rumbled by an observant citizen and cornered by an angry mob. Word is he was just minutes from being lynched when the police finally got involved, arresting Pedro and taking him into custody before the mob could burn him alive. It was while in a jail cell that Pedro confessed to an astonishing 103 murders, 53 of which had been positively identified. However, despite the police confirming he'd killed 53 women and girls, they didn't quite

believe the scale of his crimes. Many serial killers embellish their kill counts when captured, possibly as one last act of malice, robbing victims' families of their chances at learning the truth. However, less than a year into his incarceration, a freak episode of flash flooding revealed a huge mass grave of his victims, and the police were forced to accept the horrifying magnitude of Pedro's crimes. He described himself as el hombre del siglo, or the man of the century, and made the outrageous claim in a press interview that he would soon be released on good behavior. Coming from a man who deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison, this was a preposterous boast, but you'll no doubt be horrified to learn that Pedro was eventually proven right. On August 31st of 1994, Pedro was inexplicably released from prison

by an Ecuadorian judge and was then immediately re-arrested as an illegal immigrant before being extradited back to Colombia. Thankfully, he was instantly detained and charged with murder upon his arrival at the Colombian border, but he somehow managed to dodge the hefty prison sentence he deserved. Colombian authorities declared Pedro to be clinically insane and sent him to the psychiatric wing of a Bogota hospital, the security of which was shockingly under par considering what a dangerous individual he was. Then, just four years later in 1998, a team of Colombian psychiatrists convened to analyze Pedro's case, and after an indeterminate period of study, declared him legally sane. Yet instead of seeking to actually punish him for his murderous past, Colombian authorities released him from prison on nothing but $50 bail and a set of relatively lax conditions. This is a man who

confessed to the murder of literally hundreds of women and young girls, a man who didn't deserve to feel the sun's warmth on his face for the remainder of his miserable life, and the authorities saw it fit to set him free. Unsurprisingly, Pedro soon cut off contact with his parole officer and absconded from the halfway house he was residing at following his release. One of the most dangerous men in the world had completely dropped off the police's radar. It was a display of incompetence so shocking that the International Criminal Police Organization, commonly known as Interpol, was forced to step in and issue a warrant for his arrest. It took them almost four years to find a pertinent murder to charge him on. Owing to the dire disorganization of the Colombian justice system and as of 2002,

he is wanted in connection with a number of unsolved murders. If it isn't obvious by now, there is no end to Pedro's story yet. Most of who we might assume are the worst serial killers are either dead or in prison. Yet Pedro Lopez, a man thought to have murdered more than 300 people, could possibly be alive and well, and living freely somewhere in either Colombia, Peru, or Ecuador. I don't know about you, but I don't believe for a second that a man who once killed three

people a week could possibly kill the rest of his natural life without indulging his one true passion. So remember, if you're planning on visiting rural Colombia anytime soon, just remember that there is a monster in the hills, but not one of folklore or myth, one of flesh,

of blood, and unimaginable evil. Evil. My first time out of the States was as an 18-year-old volunteer to a children's charity in Guyana. I don't even think I can accurately put how excited I was into words, and that goes for the country's natural beauty too. It was indescribable in the very sense of the word. Yet although I wouldn't say I regret going to Guyana, the trip included one of the most traumatic and terrifying experiences of my entire life, and it's one that a lot of travelers at that time could relate to. So before my trip, I had to get a bunch of shots at the doctor's office,

and while I was there, I was given a few packets of shots at the doctor's office and while I was there, I was given a few packets of anti-malaria pills to take when I was there. The doctor told me that it was super important that I take them every day at certain times, all that stuff. So what does stupid me go and do on the third day there? I lose the freaking anti-malaria pills. It's not even like we're in the city or on the coast either where the mosquitoes aren't so bad. We're right in the middle of the jungle. And I'm not kidding when I say that. In some wetter places, the mosquitoes were literally like a black cloud

floating over the creek or the lake or whatever. It was so gross and without my malaria pills, I was in serious trouble. Naturally, first thing I do is head over to my team's leader's hut to tell him my problem. He tells me not to worry because he was making the two hours round trip to the nearest large town that afternoon. The town had a small clinic that could provide them with anti-malarial pills and were really cheap too. Problem solved, right? All the guy told me was, the pharmacist said these might make you feel a little woozy in the first few days. But hey, that was much better than getting actual malaria, which is an awful disease by the way. But anyway, I take my pills, carry on with the program, and kind of forget about the whole thing for a while.

Until that is, I start feeling way, way worse than just woozy. At first I just sort of felt off. It's hard to describe. Not sick so much as just anxious. I just didn't understand why either. Everyone was so nice and friendly to me and the program itself was running really smoothly and efficiently. The kids were amazing, the food was beyond good. Think Caribbean food only with way more African influences. And the place we were staying was shockingly well maintained for what was basically just a camp in the jungle. But still, I just felt all wrong and after a few days it really started to mess with me. By the end of the first week things had gotten really bad. I was waking up every single night, drenched in sweat, having just suffered through the most vividly horrifying nightmares I've ever had. It was hell on my bunkmates too, like I'd literally be screaming and they'd have to shake me awake.

Then I'd be crying and that would keep them up too. I just felt like a total idiot out there, just making everyone else's life difficult but that's only when I was lucid enough to actually think properly. The rest of the time I was just gripped by this feeling of pure dread, like that's honestly what it was. That feeling you get when you know something bad is about to happen. Not think or suspect it. Know that something bad is about to happen. That's what was so hard to articulate to people at the time. It wasn't just worry. It was pure terror. Terror that I just wasn't going to make it out of Guyana alive. And what was legitimately brain-breaking was that I had no idea why I felt that way.

In the end it got so bad that I honestly didn't want to be there anymore, but I also knew that something was wrong with me. Like seriously wrong. Our team leader Ryan didn't want to take me back to the little clinic in the nearby town, but he had heard of a French medical charity that was in the area, and that we'd probably have better luck there if it came to psychological issues. So, get this, we drive out to where they're based, and we manage to find a doctor there who spoke English.

This guy is an actual Disney prince, and there I am, sweating, having barely slept in days. Just like, kill me now, this is the worst time of my life. In his gorgeous French accent I tell him what my problem is and he's as confused as we are. He asks me if I have a history of mental health problems which I don't. He asks me if I've been unhappy in the teaching program, I tell him no. But then I mention how the whole thing seemed to start after I lost my malaria medication, like that kicked off

a head spiral of negativity that I just couldn't shake off. It was almost like since one bad thing had happened, then all the bad things could happen. But as I'm saying this, the dreamy French doctor just raises a hand, stops me talking and asks, What's the name of the malaria medication you're using now? I had no idea, but I remembered it began with an L. The doctor instantly said, Larium? Which yeah, he nailed it. That's exactly what it was.

The doctor then goes on to explain that his charity refuses to stock or distribute larium because it causes paranoia, psychosis, and heightened aggression. He told me he had no idea how the drug made it onto the market as it's been responsible for some literal horror stories involving soldiers going crazy and stuff. It was a drug that made you literally go crazy and I'd been taking it for almost 9 days at that point. The doctor told me to stop taking malaria immediately and provided me with some alternate medications that wouldn't have the same horrible side effects. My symptoms disappeared within 48 hours and I was able to continue the rest of the teaching

program without a hitch. All that because of some anti-malarial pills. It's hard to even fathom that they could have that kind of effect on me. Like I get that if they make you feel sick, like some anti-malarial pills do, but to make it feel like you're literally going insane, that's like something out of a Stephen King novel. Last I heard, whatever evil pharma corporation that produces it was about to take it off the market, but I mean, too little too late, right? I'm pretty sure there are people who are owed a lot of money over that stuff,

maybe even myself included. Just be careful what you're putting in your body, people. If something has been proven to be a benefit, I'll be the first to take it. But just taking some random doctor's word as gospel was a huge mistake, and I think I almost paid for it with my Spanish. I found languages to be kind of boring in high school and I was surprised as anybody when I found myself with a sudden burning passion for Hablo Español. I know it sounds incredibly corny, but it was the song Despacito that sparked the whole thing off. I just thought it would be so cool to understand what the guy was singing about,

then having the lady in my bodega smiling and complimenting me, even though I only said how much and gracias. It was such a rush and it gave me something to occupy my mind with whenever I was doing housework or going for a run. But soon I wanted to test my Spanish out where it really mattered, not down in a local taco truck, but where I'd have to rely on it to get by. Latin America. I started off in Mexico. Everything was fantastic, the people were wonderful, and I heard of very little cartel violence during my travel south. But I'm sad to say that the further and further south I got, the sketchier things seemed. Please don't get me

wrong, the people I had problems with were a tiny minority and every time I got into trouble, it was the locals who'd come to the rescue of the gringa, treating me no differently than they treat a neighbor or a guest in their own home. But it got to the point where I had a couple of really close calls the worst of which was probably in Guatemala. So one night I'm out exploring the capital Managua when I started to get pretty tired and wanted to head back to my hostel. The way it works is that outside all the bars and cafes especially the ones gringos tend to visit,

there are all kinds of taxi drivers lined up outside with their cars, waiting to ferry them around. So I walk out, ask a guy if he's a taxi driver, then start negotiating price with him. When he says 20, I take him up on it because 20 guatemalan quetzal is only about 2 bucks and 50 cents. But then when we arrived at my hostel and i offered him the money he locks the doors and tells me he wasn't talking about guatemalan currency at all he was talking us dollars it was an obvious scam he tried to play dumb saying i always negotiate with people in their own currency. Quetzals are complicated. I was doing you a favor. And then accused me of being the scammer and threatening to call the police.

In retrospect, it was a total bluff on his part. And he probably wasn't even a licensed taxi driver. But it totally worked. I was terrified. I just took the path of least resistance and he cleared me out of about 150 quetzals, the equivalent to $20, so basically a few days wages for this guy in one short fare. I felt dumb, thinking all my friends catastrophizing about being a female solo traveler were basically proven right. But in reality, it could have been so much worse. I kind of trudged into my hostel, feeling terrible, when one of the staff members asked me if I was okay.

I told them, no, soy estúpida. Then basically poured my heart out as best I could about how I'd just fallen for what my limited vocabulary could only describe as a bandido. That's when the girl started to talk really really fast about something, using words I didn't always understand. But I remember catching the words, another girl, attacked, and dead, so I knew it was serious. In the end she explained the situation to another guest whose Spanish was much better than mine and she relayed the info to me. Basically about two months before my travels, another North American, she turned out to be Canadian in the end, had been staying in another hostel across town. A taxi driver had tried the exact same scam with her, claiming he'd been

talking about US dollars when he'd led her to believe he was referring to Quetzals. But instead of just giving in and paying up, this girl refused, then put up a fight when the guy had tried to lock her in his car. She sounded brave, really brave, but the driver was strong and once he'd beaten her unconscious, he drove her out into the middle of nowhere and violated her. When he was done, she was unconscious and wouldn't wake up,

so thinking she was dead, he tossed her in a stream and then fled the area. But she wasn't dead, and a few school kids found her the very next morning on their way to class. It was horrifying to hear and so bizarre to think that I wished so hard that I put up a fight too. Only if I had. If I had listened to that voice that said, don't stand for this, don't let this idiot scam you, I might have never made it home. So I suppose this is a really long-winded way of telling people that if you do travel to Guatemala and you're going to take taxis,

only ever travel with guys who have a red stripe on the top and the bottom of their license plate. Everyone else is a fake. The End Every year it is estimated around 200-300 people lose their lives on a stretch of road less than 50 miles long. This road, running from Bolivia's capital city, La Paz, to a region known as the Yungas, was constructed by Paraguayan prisoners of war back in the 1930s and is an astonishing 3 miles above sea level. Many of those same prisoners of war perish during the effort, but now it is mainly Bolivians who die on the road, and they do so in their thousands. In 1995, an organization known as the Inter-American Development Bank named the

Yungas Road is the most dangerous transport route in the entire world. If you're unlikely enough to be traveling on the road as you start your descent, your driver whispers a quiet prayer, and it's not long before you begin to see why such an experienced driver might be so terrified to traverse it. A gargantuan vertical crack appears and soon you find you're driving on little more than a cliff's edge. Far below, more than half a mile beneath your passenger window, you can see a thin silver thread cradled between canyon walls. It looks like little more than a trickling stream, but in reality, it's the huge Coroico River, rushing to join the even greater Amazon. On the opposite side of the half-mile drop, there is a sheer rock wall

rising up hundreds of feet into the air, meaning the threat from landslides above is almost as great as the deadly fall below. Only the bravest or most foolhardy of drivers ever take the road, and with the road being barely three meters wide, there is no margin of error. Bolivia is an overwhelmingly Christian nation, but it seems their fear of the Yungas road leads them to seek solace in much more ancient deities. It's not uncommon to see drivers sometimes stopping to pour beer into the dirt at the side of the road, an act intended to beseech the goddess Pachimama for safe passage. Following their tribute to the old pagan goddess of fertility, drivers will often shove a wad of coca leaves into their mouths,

chewing on it relentlessly in order to absorb the stimulating chemicals which keep them awake and focused. It's at this stage that we learn something as confounding as it is horrifying about those that drive the Yungas Road. You'd think that such a dangerous stretch of highway would warrant low and careful driving from those that travel along it, but for some reason it's almost customary to drive at breakneck speeds in vehicles which should not be on any road, let alone one as perilous as the Yungas Road. Yet their reason is horribly rational, given that it's better to risk death by speeding than to be caught on the road after sundown, for almost 70% of all Yungas Road deaths occur after nightfall, when a broken headlight or an

overtired bus driver might mean a death sentence. Without a doubt, the worst time to drive is at the beginning of the rainy season, when huge waterfalls will drench the road and turn its surface to a deadly, slippery slime. Then will come those heart-stopping moments when wheels skid and brakes fail to grip, and even the best drivers fall to their deaths regardless of their skill or sobriety. There are stories told of truckers too tired or too afraid to continue, who pull over for the night, hoping to wait out the darkness so they may travel more safely by day. Yet some of these drivers have parked too close to the edge, and as they sleep in their

cabs, the road is washed away around them. In one year alone, almost 30 vehicles of all shapes and sizes plunge off the road and into the ravine. That's one vehicle, sometimes full of whole families every two weeks. It's still the brave and the foolhardy continue to drive along the Yungas Road, and still, they're taken in their hundreds. So, a whole bunch of my extended family lives down in Columbia, and every couple of summers we'd pretty much pack up our life here in California to live with them for a few weeks. I say pack up our life because on this one occasion, my mom insisted on bringing her entire wardrobe, my dad brought his power tools, you'll see why in a minute, and we even brought the family dog. I mean, I get it, we were staying out there

for three, maybe four weeks at a time, and in this case, our relatives had moved into a new ranch out in a place called Cauca, so my dad brought his tools to help my uncle fix the place up, as there was still a lot of work to be done. So, we flew down to Bogota with an embarrassing amount of luggage, hired a van which took us down to Popayán, the regional capital of Cauca, then made our way out to a place called El Platiado, which is where our relatives had moved. Well, we tried to drive out to El Platiado because my dad managed to get us spectacularly lost thanks to his hopeless outdated Colombian roadmap. We were due to arrive at my cousin's place around midday, but we were still on the road in the early evening and it didn't

look like we'd make it until after sundown. It would have been way worse if we didn't have Pepper with us, that's our dog, but Pepper also needed to stretch her legs and pee much like we did, so there came a point where we stopped to take a rural bathroom break. Pepper practically bolted out of the van when we slid the side door open, running into this big open field while she barked with delight. I was excited to run around and play with her, not so excited to clean up the mess she'd make, but seeing her all excited to be in a far away place was just so freaking adorable. Right up until I saw a big red and white sign that had been staked into the field. It had this huge skull and crossbones on it and the words peligro minas on it, which for those of you that don't speak Spanish means danger, mines. I just about soiled myself

and started screaming for Pepper to get off of the field. She just kind of looked up for me a second with this huh look then carried on sniffing around for a place to do her business. Every single second that went by was one in which I thought I was about to watch my beloved pooch explode in a shower of flesh, guts, and fur. I used to seriously not be able to talk about this for a long, long time because the trauma would just have me bawling and incoherent. I know that might sound pretty lame, but it's more the fact that Pepper was okay. She just squatted, took a pee, then made her way back to us without getting so much as a scratch. Mom and Dad were just about having a fit by the time she was safely out of the field, and same as I was.

Like I think the shock of being faced with an actual minefield just hours after leaving the relatively safe Sacramento, I think that's what really had us freaking out. For those of you that are like, what is a minefield in Colombia for? There's been this crazy civil war that went on for generations and has only just ended in the past 10 years or so. Some of Colombia is the most heavily mined land on the planet and although the government and various NGOs are still in the process of clearing them out, there are still a whole bunch of mines left over from the war. We ended up getting to our family's ranch safely and the rest of the trip was amazing, but you can bet my dad bought a new road map after nearly getting our dog

blown up. I was backpacking in the Andes a few years back when a fire started just outside the camp early in the morning. Chile gets some real bad forest fires at certain times of the year and it's just something you have to work around if you're going to hike during those times of year. There was a small fire when we set up for the day and we intended to do about 10 miles with a big 3,500 foot of elevation gain. Our guide thought the fire was moving at a rate of about 5 miles a day in which case we'll be well out of danger by the end of the day's hike. But about 2 hours in there's so much smoke from the fire that it's almost just about blocked out the sun. Then we turned around to see an

absolute massive wall of smoke blowing up the hill behind us and you could almost feel the tension pick up as we realized we were in a lot of trouble. We couldn't turn around because the fire was behind us, the wind was increasingly strong and pushing the flames of the valley but it looked increasingly unlikely that we'd be able to make it up the steep side of the valley without the flames catching up to us. The only relief we got was seeing a huge number of helicopter and planes flying right over our heads, conducting fire suppression runs over a wide area. It was like they were warplanes providing us with air support, dropping bombs on our enemy as we fled up the side of the valley. Every single time I saw one I was filled with the

hope of survival. We spent the next five hours walking and running uphill in an increasingly dark and red-tinted sky, with thicker and thicker smoke around us, the sound of the fire raging in the valley below, and the sound of helicopters and other aircraft could no longer be heard. It was an actual nightmare come to life, and I saw things that day that I'll never get out of my mind. When we finally reached the camp we were heading toward, we were told they were evacuating and anyone capable of doing so should keep walking another 10 miles to the nearest government highway. They ended up rescuing over 200 people by helicopter before the day was over because people just kept dropping from exhaustion and dehydration

and the section of the trail we were on was burnt out less than three hours after we were there. When it was over, I was absolutely destroyed, emotionally and physically. We ended the day in the dark with headlamps by the time we got to the road. There were some people ferrying hikers from the trailhead to the campground and I completely broke down when I saw them. That whole experience gave me a new lease on life, it really did. I came home to America so grateful for all that I've got, grateful to even be alive. This happened way back in the 90s, but I was backpacking Colombia and was stunned at the number of homeless people in Bogota. It was honestly awful. I think at the time that almost a fifth of Colombia's population either didn't have adequate housing or didn't have anywhere to stay at all.

It was crushingly depressing and, as harsh as it sounds, the only way for me to cope being around it was to just ignore it altogether. Ugh, just typing that made me feel gross. But as a blonde American girl, they all assumed you just had money to burn. But if you give money to one homeless person in central Bogota, then forget about it. You just get mobbed with people asking you for pesos. The only way to get around was like if someone asked you for money, just power past them. Don't make eye contact. Don't talk.

Just keep moving and they get the message. Then one night I'm walking down the sidewalk when I see this guy stumbling around like he's drunk. The whole time he's got his back to me and he's reaching out to passers by, but they're just playing the ignoring game, not looking or talking to him. That's when it's my turn to pass him. I do so kind of close, close enough to see the guy had a freaking steak knife sticking out of his chest, like one of those wooden handled ones. He wheezes out a weak,

I oothe me, as I got close, then just collapsed into a heap on the sidewalk. Seeing that handle just sticking out of his chest was one of the most frightening things I've ever seen, and I know I let out a blood-curdling scream when I saw how much blood was oozing onto the concrete. I don't know who stabbed him, and I don't know if he survived his trip to the hospital, but people were acting like it was an everyday thing for them, which honestly was even more horrifying than the dude's stab wound. Back when I was a student, I went traveling around South America during my gap year, ending up in Colombia and Bolivia for the better part of my stay.

Colombia is pretty wild, but Bolivia even more so, and saving a few Bolivianos by traveling around the countryside by bus proved to be the single biggest mistake of my travels. The worst bus I traveled on was named something silly and feminine like La Cristabel or whatever, or it was more accurately should have been named the Vomit Comet because it lurched and shook for four hours straight whilst going up and down these winding mountainous roads. Then at one point, and bearing in mind we all see out the big front window of the bus, we come around this tight corner way, way too fast only to see a bus coming down the mountain at us at breakneck speeds. I remember thinking, that's it, we're dead.

Because if it had hit us, we'd have been sent crashing down the mountainside, literally hundreds of feet down below. Everyone was screaming, bracing for impact, but somehow, the other bus managed to slow down enough to come to a complete stop, just feet away from us. It was the one true near-death experience I've had in my life, and I honestly wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. But even more surreal, when the drivers got out all aggressively, presumably to fight each other, they must have recognized each other because they were hugging and shaking hands just moments later. I was just about at my wits end but the Bolivians around me were back to whining about how humid it was within minutes like we hadn't almost just

plummeted down the mountain in a fiery bus wreckage. It did make me feel grateful that all I have to worry about in the UK is expensive train fare. I was traveling on the train alone in Argentina, just out to see some of the more suburban sights and after a long day I caught the train back alone. It was past sunset but the train was still pretty busy, I guess with commuters and such so I was forced to stand. I was reading My Little Pony Planet Guide, just minding my own business. Then when the train was approaching a stop, a bunch of people got up from their seats to get off the train. Because I wasn't quite

paying attention I found myself stuck in a mini press as people prepared to get off, and when the doors opened, three pretty rude guys just tried to push past me all at once and almost succeeded in pushing me off the train in doing so. I scream at them like, hey watch yourself, but they just ignored me then out of nowhere I hear this young voice shouting at them and all of a sudden she's grabbing me by the arm and pulling me back onto the train. It was only then that I realized what was happening. They weren't just rude train passengers pushing to get off. It was a concerted effort to push me off the train before they were going to do god knows what with me at some barely lit,

mostly abandoned station. It all just happened so fast and I can see why at my work if there wasn't someone savvy watching to recognize what was going on. The same girl then explained that in a mix of Spanish and broken English, that it's something that happens a horrifying amount in Buenos Aires and other big Argentine cities. After that, she helped me get back to hostel safely while warning me not to be out in shorts in a tank later at night, especially if I was alone. So about ten years ago now, I was just some rich kid spending summers on my friend's dad's boat out near Catalina. Then during the summer before college, we were just out cruising when this huge freak wave hit the boat. Everyone except me and this

random girl I didn't know were drowned including a bunch of my really close childhood friends and their parents. The whole incident completely ruined my life. I was a total wreck and I don't mind admitting that now but at the time, there was all this denial and anger. I basically stagnated for years, became really antisocial, took up fishing, and it was only a weird encounter while on a fishing trip that actually brought me out of a depression that I honestly think might have killed me if it wasn't for the aforementioned encounter. So I was up in the Pacific Northwest, out on my own just killing time. I'm doing some lake fishing, then out of nowhere this dude appears out of the woods behind me. I'm a little nervous at first as the guy seems overly friendly and since I was in the absolute middle of nowhere, meeting some jumpy looking older man in dirty hiking gear is just too like

the start of some low budget horror movie. He turns out to be kind of harmless, but he was definitely getting on my nerves, asking me why I was out there on my own, asking me if I'd been catching much. I didn't want to be rude or anything, so I kept giving him one word answers, but then he suddenly says something like, you're in a lot of pain, huh? The question kind of caught me off guard and I remember turning to look at him, trying to think of some smart answer than not being able to think of one. Then before I could say anything at all,

he started telling me how I reminded him of a younger version of himself. I'm about ready to start rolling my eyes when he says, I lost some of my closest friends in a fishing accident when I was a teenager Freak wave out on the Atlantic in the middle of the night Knocked a bunch of them overboard Left me in a real bad way for a long time I didn't say a word in response I just pretended to do something with my line So I wouldn't actually have to engage him

And show how hard his words had affected me. You want to know the thing that got me through it? He asked me and I think that was the only point in the conversation I actually talked back in a way that prompted him to carry on talking. Mushrooms. Magic mushrooms. Just brew those things up and it'll help you rationalize all kinds of bad stuff. Now, that really did prompt an eye roll. The drugs and alcohol had only ever made me feel worse in the long run, so the idea of going back to them after like a year clean was just

out of the question. I know, I know, I sound like some dumb hippie. He laughed, but I promise you, it fixed me. It'll fix you too because whatever it is that's eating you, son, you need to bury it before it buries you. That last line hit me hard, and as I was struggling to hold it together, he just thanks me for the conversation and apologizes if he seemed intrusive. Then he just wanders off back into the woods. For the longest time I told myself he was just some crazy old man and what that little encounter was was just some random run in and didn't really mean anything. But something about the way he spoke really stuck with me, especially how much we related on how he lost his friends, obviously, and especially the part about mushrooms. And that's pretty much what started me on the road of trying mushrooms like six months later in an Olympia hotel room.

And you know what? He was exactly right. It helped me realize that I didn't have to feel guilty for surviving, and how those that were lost wouldn't hurt me to live my life like a perpetual funeral march. I had to move on. I had to get over it. I wasn't picked to survive, it was all just a horrible accident with no rhyme or reason to it. It's no one's fault, no one was to blame, and especially not me. But I had another weird kind of revelation during that trip, not necessarily the most terrifying one, but one that still kind of freaks me out even today.

I think that guy's life and my life were like echoes of each other. I know that doesn't quite make sense, but put it this way. I don't think that little fishing encounter was random at all. I think me and that random guy are actually in some ways the same person. He's just got a few years head start on me. And I wonder that in the years that follow, I'll find myself walking through some woods somewhere and I'll come across another version of me. Someone who's suffering just like I was. And I know it'll be my job to help them. Just as the older version of myself helped me. About three years ago now, me and a few buddies all found ourselves with some time off on the

same day. We all work fairly erratic hours, so on a whim, we decided to bomb it down to the Keys with two of our kayaks. We'd heard that there were some serious bonefish just outside a Hillsboro Inlet out near Pompano Beach, and for those that don't know, those bad boys can be absolute units. The world record is like 16 pounds and trust me, that's a lot of fish considering you're only a stone's throw away from the sand. So anyway, we get up before first light, load up the truck, then head off towards Pompano. Then I don't know if there was some kind of accident ahead of us or if we were just unlucky, but the traffic on the way down to the beach was terrible. So right as we were coming up to an exit, we just say, screw it, and decide to head over to the Bonefish Flats so we could make the most of our time off.

It was the right call because by the time we rolled up to the flats, the sun had only just started to peak above the horizon. I don't say this about a lot of stuff, but it was actually breathtaking. It had been a while since I'd been fishing that early and as much as getting up early sucks hard, it's always worth it when the weather clears in South Florida. We're greeted with this falling tide dumping off of the flat, but it was still nice and high so we'd have at least a few hours of fishing ahead of us. So I climb into one of the kayaks and start paddling out, just kind of enjoying the ebb and flow of the tide for a while.

You got to remember it's still like 6am and I barely had time to grab coffee or breakfast before we headed out, so I swear I could have just dozed back off there and then. It was super relaxing, right up until I started to get this real prickly feeling. I'd been out on the water for maybe 15 to 20 minutes at that point, just chilling. And like I said, the whole time I'd been as relaxed as could be. Then you know that feeling of unease you get that one feels like you're being watched. I get that really bad. But when I paddle myself around doing a 180, all I see is my buddy on the beach getting each of our rods ready. He owed us from last time, so don't hate on me. It's only then that I catch a glimpse of something moving in the water below me, and when I get a good look, I see it's way, way bigger than a

bonefish. It was like 10 feet long, the size of a freaking fridge, and it's just silently gliding underneath my kayak in about 8 feet of water. It was a bull shark, easily the biggest I'd ever seen, and definitely the closest I'd ever been to one. I start paddling back to shore as fast as I could, like it was almost an involuntary motion. My brain didn't even give me time to figure out if I was really in danger or not. It just went, shark, time to leave, and my body did the rest. By that time, my buddy is out on the water too, and he does the same thing as me. Looks up like, what's going on? Then looks down into the water. Only he lets out a, oh my god,

before he starts paddling like he's got an engine attached to his kayak. We'd seen sharks before, but usually way further out and from the safety of a boat. Seeing one that up close was like a shock to the system that I can only barely describe. I've never felt that kind of base, primal fear before, and it's something I never want to feel again. The single most horrifying moment of my life was working on a sport boat in the Gulf of Mexico. This was way back when I used to get work here and there as a hired deckhand, which didn't pay very well, but it allowed me to spend much more time in the water than I would otherwise. Anyway, the guy who owned the boat ended up pulling this giant thresher shark on board,

easy to recognize because their tails are huge. Don't ask me how he managed it, but there's this giant freakout. The thing is thrashing around on deck and there's basically nothing we can do about it. We just have to wait around for it to die before we can toss it overboard. A real shame, I know, but there really was nothing we could do for it. You don't exactly go giving an apex predator CPR unless you're not a fan of your face. So I'm not kidding. About an hour goes by while we're making sure this thing is dead, then we head back out onto deck to try to push it overboard.

Once we're pretty sure it's safe, we all start relaxing, taking pictures of the thing and discussing how we're going to get under the thing without hurting ourselves in the process. See, sharks have super rough skin, I mean it kind of feels like leathery sandpaper in a way, so without the proper protective gear, we could have done some pretty serious damage just trying to get rid of it. Then right as we're gearing up, this one guy stood near the dead shark's head when the dead shark suddenly rears up and just locks its jaws around the dude's calf. I hadn't heard anyone scream like that since my little brother broke his leg. Only in this guy's scream, there was pure terror in it too.

The shark started thrashing around and all of a sudden, I watched blood start gushing onto the deck as the shark tore off a piece of this dude's leg. How it wasn't dead I have no idea. Maybe it was just its death throes or whatever you want to call it and it wasn't truly alive. But it sure had enough in its tank to turn that dude's leg into chum. Huge props to the coast guard guys who got a fast boat out to us in like record time and if it wasn't for the tourniquet we got above his knee, I think he would have bled to death right there on the deck. Turns out sharks don't die for quite a while if you take them out of water. Sometimes they just wait. After that I was always way stricter when it came to any kind of shark and

during blacktip season we worked out a clear process that was always the same. Gaff them, then brain them with a Louisville slugger until they aren't fighting anymore. After that you gut them and clear out the urine glands. The meat becomes inedible unless you get rid of those pea glands, then tie them off with rope and continue bleeding out in the water for an hour or two. The real scary thing was seeing them trying to swim away for like an hour or two just on pure reflexes alone. Sharks have been here for 130 million years for a reason, dude. They are truly the apex predators. My dad used to go underwater spearfishing a bunch down in Mexico and as much as I'd like to join him sometime I think I'll avoid the night dives. According to him it wasn't strictly legal

to hunt fish with lights at night as the dumb fish just swam towards whatever you shine at them and just kind of stare at it all dumbstruck. It makes for easy fishing, but he said it can be incredibly creepy sometimes, and it turns stuff that'd be cool and interesting in the daytime into stuff of nightmares. You see, you're just kind of suspended in a total void and aside from the moon, your lights are the only thing to see by. So one minute there's nothing and the next, you shine your light and boom, scary fish just right there in your face. Like this one time he was swimming in the darkness and he was vaguely aware of someone swimming next to him. Not exactly unusual since they went down in groups and at the time,

there were several people in the water. But still he's thinking, why is there light off? Is everything okay? If they were swimming that close it probably is his dive partner in which case it was his responsibility to make sure that they were all good. Before he could shine his light on them to check if they were okay his dive partner taps his arm from the other side and gives him the A-OK sign. In which case either whoever was next to

him was separated from their dive buddy or wasn't a person at all. He's feeling pretty nervous by the time he moves in to shine his light and when he does, he sees he was right to be nervous, because this huge barracuda is just feet away from him. Some barracudas can grow to be almost 6 to 7 feet long. They're really fast and they're absolutely ferocious. They're not scared to attack humans either and they've been known to attack surface snorkelers thinking they're just big wounded sea animals. On top of that, probably the scariest thing about barracudas is the little hook tooth in the center of their jaw. That little doozy enables barracudas to rip out whole chunks of flesh, probably most useful when attacking a larger prey, like a night diver, just like my dad.

Obviously, he's filled with anxiety so he moved back a bit, but the creature just kept near him. He wasn't gunning for barracudas, but my dad is getting ready to defend himself and he waves his spear gun in this cuda's direction to try and scare it off. It doesn't attack him, it just backs off, but then it carries on maintaining a steady distance while swimming parallel. After a while it becomes obvious that this barracuda isn't interested in attacking them, so my dad and his diving buddies just carry on with their spearfishing. It didn't take long for the beam of his flashlight to illuminate a fish, so my dad started slowly swimming over to it while aiming his speargun in its general direction.

Then suddenly, in an explosion of brutal, predatory speed, the barracuda shot out of the darkness and intercepted the fish. My dad said it was lightning fast. Just wham. The cuda's jaws were like laser guided, clamping around the fish before it retreated back into the inky black waters. Seconds later it shows back up again like, thanks my guy, where to next? This kept up for as long as the dive did. The barracuda stayed close, using my father's light for hunting. Every so often my dad or his buddies would go get a fish and sometimes the barracuda even kept his distance, almost like it wanted my dad to get a few himself. And since they're natural pack hunters, that's probably exactly what was happening. When at last the

time came to return to the boat, the barracuda remained by his side until they reached the boat then spun in the darkness and quickly swam away. My dad said they're like the velociraptors of the sea, absolutely terrifying to encounter, very dangerous, but obviously smart as heck to boot. And if it hadn't realized that it could take advantage of my dad's light, it might have decided that it was him on the menu. In which case, I think he'd have been in a boatload of trouble. I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, the only daughter of a man who basically lived for fishing. See, as you can imagine, we spent heaps of time out in the water or on the beach

while my dad waded out into the surface and cast his rod out. On this one occasion, me and my mom, who grew up in Scotland, were walking up and down the beach while dad focused on his fishing. Suddenly, she reached down into a rock pool and picks up this little cone shell saying, look how pretty this thing is, look at the colors. I walked over to look at it, just in time to see this tiny little tentacle emerge from a crack in the shell. It wasn't empty, no. The sea snail that calls those things home was just that, still home And suddenly I realized what it was In Aussie schools there isn't a great deal of time dedicated to teaching us all about the thousands of dangerous animals that live here

Honestly, it's definitely something we play up for tourists So it's not like every Aussie kid is terrified to go outside after a health and safety at the beach class. But we're definitely taught not to go sticking our hands into cracks or crevices and there's one or two animals we're explicitly told not to touch. And the conus textile is one of them. More commonly known as the cloth of gold cone or just gold cones. They're a kind of carnivorous sea snail that eats other sea snails, only the way it catches them is totally metal. Remember I mentioned that little tentacle thing? Well, it's basically the thing's tongue. It uses it to eat mostly, but at the very tip is what essentially is a single, needle-sharp tooth. It jabs this tooth into its prey,

injects a bunch of toxins into it, then bobs your uncle. Dinner is served. It also has a bunch of tiny little fibrous at the end of its tongue, and they're basically taste or smell glands that can help find the right kind of prey. Honestly, look up a video of this thing's anatomy. It's literally the stuff of nightmares and makes every creepy alien film look like Mars attacks, I'm telling you. Only trouble is, this very same toxin is one of the most powerful in the world and it's actually strong

enough to kill a human. So when that little bugger's tentacle came out and started probing for my mom's skin, it was literally about to do her a serious mischief that she might not have survived. There was this moment after I slapped the snail shell out of her hand where she was all angry with me like, Gemma, what in God's name do you think you're doing? I remember her saying. Then, in the time it took to tell her exactly what that bloody thing she was holding was, she went from angry as anything to eternally grateful in mere seconds. Like you'd think she'd know better after living down under for the better part of twenty years, but no, old bird still walks around like she's in Leith. Dad always used to laugh saying we'd come home one day to find her cuddling a

brown snake, but that might just be a bridge too far. To be continued... I think it's probably the single most beautiful and powerful force on the planet. Like I get why people are so interested in space, UFOs, or life on other planets. But for me, there's this whole alien world that's easily explorable and it's right there in front of our noses. But that bizarre alien world isn't just fun and fascinating. Sometimes it can be straight up frightening. And to me, the fact that you're totally out of your depth both figuratively and literally makes certain encounters all the scarier. So this one time I'm in the Atlantic and the tide is pretty rough. I'm about 30 or 40 feet down just exploring all these pocket reefs but since the waves are so rough and it's

churning up the seabed, visibility is down to like 40 feet at most. I'm swimming along, I look up and right at the edge of my visibility I see this huge creature swimming above me. It has to be at least 2 or 3 foot thick and maybe 8 or 9 foot long. I can't see any kind of head or tail but it just leads me to believe that it's even bigger than I first realized. The thing's skin is like a light silver with somewhat darker golden or brown stripes. It was only there for a second. It must have been turning to go the other direction and I only saw a part of its body, but I'd never seen anything like that before at any of my usual diving spots.

And instead of being intrigued and curious like I'd normally be, I started swimming away out of pure instinct. It was an undeniable feeling of absolute dread and horror. My body was telling me that whatever that thing was, I needed to get out of the water as fast as I could. I stopped swimming towards it and immediately pivoted back to the boat. I swam on my back so I could keep looking behind me in the direction that that thing had been. But the worst part was knowing that it didn't matter if I kept an eye on it or not. Because if it was the worst case scenario, and it was a tiger shark, I'd be a dead man if it even thought about hunting me. I used to work on commercial fishing ships out in the Atlantic, like these huge things

with like 50 or 60 dudes on the crew. Being in the middle of a storm can be real exciting at times, but some pretty hilarious stuff goes down during rough seas. For example, if you time a jump right as the ship hits a wave, you can basically float in mid-air for a second or two and you can almost film yourself defying gravity in your quarters or trick your friend into thinking you can pull off a legit smooth criminal lean because you've been doing ankle yoga. You're an idiot Ty but I love you anyways. Anyways, once you've been on a few trips you don't get too nervous when crazier stuff happens but

the first time you see certain things, it honestly kind of feels like you're about to lose your mind. Take lightning for example. First time you see it strike the ocean, the kind of light it gives off is almost impossible to compute. It's not quite as light as daytime, but let me tell you, it's close. And then the sea starts to boil in that area. Well, not technically boil, more like frothing in the immediate area the lightning strike occurred. But you want to see something that'll make you start believing in a vengeful and powerful god? Check out a lightning strike on the open ocean in the middle of the night. But even scarier than that is being on the ship's bridge in a trough between two swells. It's bad enough in the daytime, but again, at night it's like a hundred times worse, because all you see is these two huge walls of darkness

just blotting out the stars on either side of you, until it looks like you're about to be lost to some void forever. The ocean is actually way more terrifying and powerful than I ever could have imagined, and working on those boats taught me to fear and respect it in a way that landlubbers like you just can't comprehend. Back when I was a teenager, me and my brother were absolutely obsessed with fishing. We still enjoy the occasional trip all these years later, don't get me wrong. But back then we lived and breathed river fishing. So much so that we used to participate in fishing tournaments and therefore had to take part in training sessions every other day. Spoilers, but these training sessions were just an excuse to get some time in by the river and I won't bore you with how

fishing tournaments work, so just take our word that we fished an awful lot. Anyway, I was like 13 years old, it was September, and me and my brother were fishing down at this river bend out in the sticks. Now you gotta keep in mind that in river and lake fishing, you gotta be quiet as a mouse unless you scare the fish away. So as the skies darkened and this low rumble of thunder echoed around the sky, well you can imagine how creepy that was. Obviously we're expecting rain, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop fishing.

It'd have to take much more than that to scare us off. And cue the appearance of some creepy stranger who walks out of the woods on the other side of the river. He doesn't have any gear with him besides a rod, but he's got a fishing hat on, one that has all this scraggly gray hair tumbling out from under it. We try to wave hi, but he just gives us this look as if to say, you're in my spot. And me and my brother are getting ready to pack up if he asks us, because God knows people can get real territorial about their favorite spot being creeped on. But the guy doesn't say anything and he just walks about 100 yards

upstream and starts fishing up there. Alright, he was kind of choking off our spot but we were never ones to back away from a challenge so we stayed put. As we're fishing, the thunder and lightning gets louder and louder and the gaps between them get shorter and shorter, meaning it's slowly traveling right above our heads. I end up looking upstream to see if the grumpy older dude is still there and he is, but then I notice how his rod is bending and it doesn't sit right with me. It looked nice and strong but way too flexible to be anything other than carbon fiber or at least that was my guess. But here's the thing, although you don't think of carbon fiber or at least that was my guess but here's the thing although you don't think of

carbon fiber as being metal it is super conductive to electricity meaning if this guy really was using a cf rod it wasn't so much a fishing rod as a lightning rod i remember whispering to my brother like i think that guy's using a carbon fiber? To which he replies, Nah, he's old, he's not dumb. Look at the way the thing's bending though. I remember saying, My brother looks again, and that's when he sees what I'm seeing.

Then out of nowhere, this huge crack and flash let us know that we've just been within about a hundred yards of a lightning strike that impacted real close to our grumpy fishing guy. We get up and just hightail it over to where he was standing and there's this guy's rod lying there in the dirt, smoking. We start looking around for the guy to see if he's okay but we couldn't find anything Not a single trace of this dude But then my brother finds one of the guy's boots lying near the roots of a tree and that's smoking too And that's when he looks up and we finally find where the guy went The lightning had blown this poor SOB right up into a tree. We bailed to the nearest gas station to call the EMTs but by that time the guy was long dead and there was no saving him.

This was a long time ago and a memory that stuck with me for a long time and it was truly very hard to get back into fishing after that but out of all the freaky occurrences that kind of came out of that the one thing that really stuck with me was the smell in the air when we finally found him it honestly smelled like barbecue pork I'm a fisherman in Greece. Sorry for my English, but Reddit helps me learn more every day, so I'll tell my story. In a way, it's kind of a ghost story, but with no real ghosts in it. But to me, it's more haunting than any story of evil spirits that throws things around the room or appears in the dark of night, and I hope you understand why very soon.

So we're headed out to sea and it's a very beautiful day. The sun is shining, there is very little wind, the sea is nice and calm. During rough sea there's a lot of work to do but when it starts to calm down there's not as much work to do. Some me and a crewmate are leaning over the edge of the boat, smoking cigarettes and talking football. And that's when I see a child's backpack floating on the water, one with a little cartoon character on it. It's not unusual to see such things floating on the sea from time to time but

a minute later I see a child's shoe floating on top of the water. Then my friend moves to the front of the boat and points off into the distance. More and more bags and backpacks and shoes, all kinds of personal items are floating on the water's surface in a big collection. At first I think that someone had just dumped a lot of trash into the sea which starts to make me angry. I'm sure many of you would be angry at seeing that. But then picture yourself seeing the first body floating lifelessly on the water, then the next body, then another, until you see the fourth body is much smaller than the others

and you realize you're looking at a child. Apart from a few murmured curse words and crossing ourselves while we pray, we were totally silent as we passed the bodies. Only the sound of the waves lapping against the boat could be heard and seeing how some of the bodies were bloated and discolored made me feel like I might vomit. You see, this is in the summer of 2015, when a lot of people from Libya were trying to cross the Mediterranean in small dinghy boats. The traffickers who they paid a lot of money to only cared about getting paid, and they didn't care about if the migrants actually landed in Greece or not, they just cared about money. So lots and lots of them were dying when their boats sank and they can't swim. The worst thing though, it wasn't just one floating graveyard that I encountered.

It was three, and we even saw one dinghy being turned away by a Greek coast guard when their boat was already full of water. I never found out what happened to them, but I pray that they're all safe and okay somewhere. I understand it's a complicated politics situation, but innocent children lost their their lives and I see these children with my own eyes. It's easier to forget the faces of my childhood friends than to forget these things. And when children are dying like that it's hard to understand why we don't help them. But I'm just a simple fisherman. I do my job. I come home.

I try not to think too much. But I am a fisherman that has been haunted by ghosts and not the kind from storybooks. These ones are very real. This was back when I was about 15, but me and my family used to go over to Spain every Sunday to a place called Mallorca. My dad was always huge into fishing, but I absolutely hated it. It's the most boring thing ever. But we reached something of a compromise. If I went fishing with him, I could snorkel around the rock pools and stuff while he cracked on with his fishing. That meant hours and hours of uninterrupted snorkeling and apart from getting occasionally sunburned shoulders, that arrangement suited me

just fine. Anyway, so on this one particular occasion I'm snorkeling around this little lagoon type thing which had all these cave-like rocks at the bottom. I say cave-like because they weren't exactly big tunnels or anything, just concave surfaces from where the tide worn them away over the years. But still, there's enough room for me to have a little explore before coming back to the surface for more air. Then at one point, I go back down to explore a new one when I see this weird shape. I get a little bit closer only to see the distinct shape of a human body just floating against the roof of the rock.

Hard to describe, but there we were. I let out this pure bubble scream then proper myself back to the surface screaming, Dad! Dead body! Dad! as loud as I could. It takes me a minute to collect myself and I'm glad I was in the sea because I swear I actually wet myself. But as soon as I clearly tell him what I saw,

he puts his rod down then throws on a pair of goggles and then jumps into the water to see what I'm on about. We swim all the way back down and the closer we get, the more scared I am because I realize I really don't want to be seeing the state this poor person is in. If they'd been floating down there in the little mini cave, they could have been there for weeks, months even, in which case they'd been in a horrifying state of decomposition. But with my dad being the hero, he sees it, gets a bit closer, then suddenly reaches for it and grabs it. Then he starts pulling it out of

the cave, and I'm just like nope, nope, nope, and just fly back up to the surface. I'm thinking I can make myself useful by calling an emergency services or at least grabbing someone who can speak Spanish to the police for us or whatever, but really I just don't want to have to look at that body. And as I'm trying not to look, my dad resurfaces and I just hear, you absolute bloody pillock Harry. Then he actually starts laughing. I turn around and my dad has what we'll call a naughty adult doll in his grip. One that's totally deflated.

And I guess I'd mistaken an adult doll for a freaking dead body. I'm not even joking. It was one of the scariest moments of my entire childhood and I ended up looking like a right nunce over it. Dad thought it was an absolute riot and he insisted on taking it back to the villa to show my mom. She thought it was disgusting but my sister laughed her head off and kept reminding me of the whole thing for the rest of the summer.

Then about a week after we got home I woke up and it was in my bed with me. I let out this proper girl scream, immediately hearing my dad peeing himself laughing in the hall outside. Sometimes I think he was the least mature one in the house but he still managed to put food on the table and pay all the bills. So despite mom saying he had the sense of humor of a 12-year-old, he was one of the finest men I ever knew. Rest in peace, Dad. We miss you every day. About eight years ago now, me and my dad and a few of my cousins were fishing down in southern Maryland one summer.

We were out at a particular spot where there are these things called target ships. These are old decommissioned navy ships that have been mounted on top of concrete pillars so they can float no matter how much the navy tests munitions on them. They get shot at by all kinds of vehicles with all kinds of bullets, bombs, and missiles. But anyway, we're all on my dad's Grady White, fishing for croaker and flounder right near these target ships. If they're actually being used for military exercises, you can't even get near them. So, since there was no one out there to wave us away, we're out near the target ships with about 20 other boats

in the water. But then sure enough, about an hour in, some guys from the coast guard sail up to us. They're on a big old CG boat with about 15 trainees on board and the officer in command asks a favor from my dad. He wants to know if he can practice a little inspection drill with a few of his trainees. Being the good guy he is, my dad gives him permission. Then right as they're coming on board, I feel my rod getting all heavy all of a sudden. I call it out and the Coast Guard officer stops his inspection and says, Go ahead son, reel it up, let's see what you got.

So I reel, and reel, and it's really obvious how heavy whatever I've caught is, so naturally we're all getting mad excited. Then, to all of our absolute horror, I pull the thing from the water, and we all see what it is. An unexploded bomb. exploded. Bomb. It was a cylindrical diamond shape with neon green stabilizers, about 12 to 14 inches long and before inches in diameter at its thickest part. Well now the officer, the trainee and the entire boat of coast guards have just witnessed what I'd pulled out of the water, and I'm not kidding when I say that I watched the color drain from all of their faces. They went from pink and healthy to skeletal white in the time it took to say uh oh. The trainee on our boat literally leaps to his boat and they all hollered away with their sirens on. This leaves a very rattled coast guard officer on our boat who promptly orders me to not move a single muscle.

The coast guard gets on our VHF and tells all the boats in the area to leave the target ships, and I'm telling you, you ain't never seen fishing boats move so fast. After about 20 minutes of me sitting there, with this bomb on my line, the area is finally cleared away. The officer orders my father to put his boat in drive, achieve a good bit of speed and then don't stop. So my dad does as he's ordered, puts the boat in gear and in seconds we're rolling about 15-20 knots away from the ship. The officer brings out a knife, cuts my line and orders my dad to just throttle the boat and get away as fast as he can. Needless to say, it did not detonate when it hit the bottom of the bay. We took the officer, who was pretty clearly shaken, back to his ship. I know it's hard

to believe this story without proof, but in this situation, we didn't have time to get a picture of it. We tried, but the Coast Guard officer was adamant about us getting out of there as quick as possible, but take my word for it, it's easily the scariest thing I'd ever had happen to me during a fishing trip. To be continued... place called Prestatyn in North Wales and because of the pier, fishing is quite popular among the residents. My dad and brother were proper anoraks about it when I was a lad but the idea of standing out in the horrible weather was just unbearable so only once did they ever manage to convince me to go. In classic beginner's luck fashion, I'm the first to feel a tug on my line. So following their careful instruction, I managed to reel the thing in and get it out of the water. I was feeling really proud of myself. My first fish on my first ever attempt, but right as I'm about to try and grab the thing off my hook, I

hear my dad shout, don't touch it. It's only when I notice the rather freaky looking black spines on the thing's back and, as it turns out, they're not just sharp as needles, they're actually poisonous too. You see, I'd hooked what's called a lesser weaver and they have poisonous spines on their back. We had to get it off the line really quick too because if they die, they can wash up on the beach with their spines still very capable of delivering their poison. Then get this, not only does the bite hurt, but it can spread up your arm and leg until the entire affected limb is just on fire. Only way to get rid of the poison and stop the whole thing from getting worse is to basically put the wound in boiling water. Well, not exactly boiling, but hot enough to hurt because it's got to basically cook the proteins that the poison is made of. And after I learned that, I never went fishing again. If Britain is the land of nothing poisonous,

as they say, why in God's name would I go looking for poisonous stuff in the sea? Sod that, I'd rather watch a rugby match in a warm pub any day. To be continued... Only her thing is catching catfish. She makes the best fried catfish, by the way. While mine is catching bass. If you're expecting a great recipe out of me, there are none. She can't stand the bass trips as they bore the life out of her. I know, she's crazy and she's from Shreveport and that's like a double whammy. But every so often, she's nice enough to accompany me on the odd trip. Especially the overnight kind because she loves camping and night fishing.

So one night I decided to pay her back for being such a darling about the whole thing and take her night fishing for catfish. Sometimes our work schedules made it hard to have any quality time together and since her birthday was coming up, I figured I'd make it a part of the whole birthday package. Anyways, we're fishing and we have a nice little campfire going. It's a warm and peaceful night. But out of nowhere, I just start getting this really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I've been an outdoorsman all of my life and don't get freaked out too easily about the woods or the night or anything like that. So I feel off but I ask the fiance if she's having a good time and she said that she wasn't getting any bad vibes or anything so we just get back to trying to relax. Only a few minutes later I noticed that there was not a single sound to be heard. No owls, no crickets, no nothing.

It was dead out there. And that's when I knew that there was some kind of predator in the area. One that could probably very well see us, but there was no way we'd ever be able to see it in time. So, I tell my wife it's time to pack up and to do so quickly, but not in a panicked way. She knows the deal, so she just helps me get the RV together, only just as we're about to drive off, I hear something large step on a branch and made a loud crack. I don't know what it was, but I had seen bear droppings near there a time or two, so it could have been that, a coyote, or it could have just been our minds playing tricks on us. Certainly nothing that

I think was supernatural, but those kinds of things would definitely make you feel squishy and vulnerable. During the summer of 1986, I was working on a fish packer for BC Packers. It was usually just myself and my skipper and there's supposed to be a crew of three on the small packers. So although it was harder work than it should have been, I was collecting two guys paychecks at the end of the month. Anyways, right at the beginning of the summer we motored up the inside passage past a place called Butte Dale. Butte Dale used

to be a canary town of about 10,000 people, but industry there collapsed in the 70s, so by the time we were there, it had been mostly abandoned for at least a decade. Even in the middle of the day, the run down post-apocalyptic feel made the whole place look incredibly creepy. Like I'd wish I'd taken a photo at some point because it was legitimately one of the most eerie looking places I've ever laid eyes on. Butte Dale is also only accessible via boat or flat plane which probably contributed to its decline but it also gave the place this weird cut off from the world backwards aesthetic to it. I don't really know how to put it into words, but there

you go. Fast forward to the end of summer and we're headed back down the passage. Only this time it's about 3am and I realize my boss is headed right towards Butte Dale in the dark. Obviously I'm a little nervous about this, but I don't want to let him know that I'm scared of nothing more than some old abandoned canning town. So I just keep my mouth shut and prepare to tie up. Now we could have just dropped anchor and kept away from the town but when I suggested this he looked at me like I was crazy and said, No, we're tying up. What are you scared of, an old abandoned town? I tell him no, a straight up lie but I'm still real nervous as I go out on deck to grab the bowline

Skipper has the floodlight fixed on the dilapidated dock we were to tie up to I got the creepiest vibe just looking at it on the approach Once we tied up, I headed straight for my hole and locked my hatch The first time I'd ever, ever done so while out on a trip. Not only that, but I grabbed my galley knife and put it under my pillow, just in case anything actually happened during the night. A couple of hours later at daybreak, I untied the boat. All is well, nothing went awry. As the boat is slowly motoring away from the dock, I'm in the stern fetching some eggs and bacon out of a couple of coolers we had tied back there when something caught my attention

and I looked up to see two figures standing about 30 feet away, looking out from the ruins of one of Butte Dale's abandoned buildings. Now this is where people call nonsense on the story but I swear to god, they both look like cavemen. I'm talking long hair, barely any clothes on. I mean their skin looked grey, like they were either real dirty or real malnourished. Either way, the way they just stood there and watched us scared me something fierce and they basically let us know that whoever they were, they weren't friendly. We pushed out from Butte Dale as quickly as we could and you can bet your bottom my boss never had us tied up there again. Way back when I was a kid, I used to kill time fishing on a small lake not far from my parents

house. One day I was alone on a rowboat in the middle of the lake, which is about a mile or two long, by no more than 200 yards at its widest. I was mostly just enjoying the nice weather when I dropped a lure into the water expecting nothing, almost as an afterthought, because I was mostly out there just to get away from my seven younger siblings, and having always been something of an introvert, my lake escapes became an increasingly common occurrence as the years went on. Then out of nowhere, something huge grabs hold of my bait and pulls my line hard enough to send my little rowboat about 180 degrees into the water.

I'm holding on for dear life, praying I'm not about to be pulled overboard by whatever monster fish had a hold of my line. Me and my rowboat then get dragged about 10 feet across the water, before crack, my line snaps. Prior to this, my friend who lived on the lake had told a few other friends and me that one morning, waiting for the school bus, he saw a huge living thing in the lake. He described it as being the size of a car and brown. He refused to swim in that lake from then on. The thing is, he wore mild prescription glasses so of course we teased him mercilessly about being blind that he thought he saw a freaking lake monster. But my god, whatever took my lure that day was big, real big and I never had anything happen like that on the lake before or since. I like to think that it was just a huge carp but sometimes I wonder if it wasn't something else that snapped my line that day. To be continued... p.m. Eastern Standard Time. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash let's read official, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video.

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