The Lets Read Podcast - 195: I HIRED A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR | 25 True Scary Stories | EP 183

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Private Investigators, Hiking & Camping... 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 & Bonus Content!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. After After I retired from the Metropolitan Police back in 1997, I decided to take up some private detective work to pad out my retirement fund. In the run-up to getting the proverbial gold watch and handshake, I honestly thought I was ready to kick my feet up and start relaxing with the wife. But then the closer I came to the day itself, the more I realized that retirement seemed less like the long rest I'd earned and more like a slow decline of boredom and purposelessness. I knew a bloke that I used to work with that had started his own firm and he always said that I was

welcome to take a few jobs with him whenever I decided to step away from the police. So that's exactly what I did. I had a long holiday in my with the wife then gave him a call on the day I got home. On my first visit to his offices he warned me that PI work would be considerably more tedious than the stuff I'd be doing for the Met. The difference was I could make in a week what had previously been a month's wages. It all depended on who the client was and what the job entailed. I'll be honest, the prospect of boredom did bother me as that's exactly what I was hoping to avoid. But the idea of tripling my earnings for considerably less work than I was putting in for the Met, that was a very appealing proposition indeed. Little did I know, the very first job that I would be given would involve me biting off a lot more than I could

chew, and although it seemed like some pretty standard PI work on the surface, it turned out to be far darker than I could have possibly imagined. At least 50% of all the jobs my old colleague took involved suspicions of infidelity, and that's exactly what my first job entailed. A woman had called into the firm and told them that her husband hadn't been home one time in weeks, and after being a bit of a homebody for most of their marriage, now spent almost all of his weekends claiming he was at work. She called his boss when she'd first started getting suspicious, only to be told that he'd never work a weekend in all his time there. She didn't have the wherewithal to actually

follow him about all weekend, as he took their only car wherever he left the house. So instead of playing at being a detective herself, she decided to bring in the professionals. The first thing I worked out after tracking the bloke following the end of his shift is that he always visited this one particular two-story house in a particularly rough area of Croydon. At first I took an educated guess that this was his mistress's home so I staked the place out for an evening to check out who was coming and going. I honestly expected to see just a younger woman living there, maybe even with him paying the rent on the place so he had a place to conduct his

affair in private. But as the evening progressed, I noticed that lots of different men were coming and going from the place. Now if you're thinking, sounds like a brothel, then you'd be right. That's exactly what it was. But I didn't know it was a brothel, not in terms of having concrete proof. And that's exactly what the bloke's wife needed so she could properly rinse him during the divorce proceedings. This meant I needed a kind of taped confession, an actual admission of what he was doing or photographic evidence of him entering or leaving the property. The latter meant I needed proof of what the place was too, but that would be much easier to come by than pictures of the bloke doing the property. The latter meant I needed proof of what the place was too, but that would be much easier to come by than pictures of the bloke doing the deed. So that's the angle I started with,

trying to get a connection so I could secure an invite to the brothel. It was relatively easy to be honest. I just followed one bloke to the pub after and got chatting to him in the smoking area outside. I told him I was new to the area and that I was recently divorced, and although I won't make your skin crawl with the seedier aspect of our conversation, he eventually gave me a number to ring if I ever wanted an hour or two with a girl considerably younger than my wife. I thanked him, gave the number a call that same night, and had a little chat with a Scottish bloke about visiting the brothel that weekend. It took a bit of convincing and I had to drop my contact's name about five or six times before he actually believed that I wasn't a policeman or anything. But in the end,

I secured myself an appointment at a time I believed our client's husband would also be there. I was very, very confident that he'd be there too. But that was something I found particularly confusing. Most visitors stayed for 15 minutes to an hour, then departed using the house's rear entrance that led into an alleyway around the back. Yet our client's husband usually stayed for up to 3-4 hours, and I wanted to figure out why. We'd been assured by the client that the more information we secured, the more money we'd get as a kind of bonus payment, by the client that the more information we secured, the more money we'd get as a kind of bonus payment, as the seedier the details, the more easily she'd be able to

get his signature on the divorce papers. I'm not sure if this was her intending to blackmail him into signing, as well as parting with a sizable amount of money, but I wasn't exactly in the position to complain about getting a fatter wage packet than I was already expecting. So on the weekend in question, I drive over to the brothel, give the woman on the door my fake name and the little password we'd arranged, and was led into a room where all the girls were all sat around. The idea was that I picked one I wanted to spend some time with before chatting her up a bit and talking prices. Some of the girls were

definitely using drugs, you could just tell by their demeanors, and I was willing to bet that the brothel was keeping them dependent on crack, heroin, or a combination of the two, in order to keep them client and loyal. That was just a side note for the initial phase of my arrival though, as all I was doing was keeping an eye out for our client's husband. The idea was that using the little micro camera I'd fitted into the chest pocket of my jacket, I'd pretend to recognize him from somewhere, approach him, get him on film, then apologize for mistaking him from someone else. My method was to pretend to be horribly indecisive about picking which girl I wanted, so I could spend the maximum

amount of time in the one room I was bound to bump into him, which was a little reception area that I'd been guided into by the person I assumed was the host. Yet after about 45 minutes of dilly dallying with the girls, I knew I had to pick one before I started arousing suspicion. The bloke had to be in the building somewhere, as I had already spotted his car parked a few streets over from the brothel. It was just a case of placing myself in a position where I could bump into him and make it look accidental. Eventually, I resigned myself to going upstairs with one of the girls, spending a bit of time with her, then apologizing for my lack of performance and asking if I could visit again sometime when I was feeling a bit more up to it. So off I go upstairs with one of the girls, but when we get to the second

floor landing, who walks across the hallway with one of the girls in his grip but our client's husband? It was so fast that I didn't have the time to put the old mistaken identity part of my plan into action, but I did spot which room he was headed into. All I had to do was think of a reason to go into that room and bingo, I'd have my footage of him with one of the girls. So then, as I'm on the third floor with my girl of choice, I apologize and tell her that I needed to use the toilet. She hazily gives me some directions for a small toilet that was also on the third floor, but I then used the opportunity to head down onto the second floor

so I could accidentally walk into the room my target was so I could get him on film. I mentally prepared myself for seeing something I'd rather not, and if that sounds a bit too squeamish for an ex-police officer, just know I always found sleaze to be far more disgusting than any kind of violence or gore. So like I said, I crept towards the door that I knew my man was in, turned the doorknob, then opened up the door with a rather innocent sounding, is this the toilet? I knew I'd see something grim, I just didn't think it would be nearly as grim as what I actually saw.

Our client's husband wasn't even doing the deed in there, but what he was doing had my jaw tickling the floor all the same. In a chair near the back window was the girl he'd pulled into the room, and I do mean pulled. She's sitting in it with her arms stretched out, while our target was in the process of shooting up a vein with what I can only assume was heroin. He wasn't just visiting the brothel, he bloody well worked at the brothel and his job obviously involved doing something that I can only describe as pure evil. The girl was obviously too inexperienced a drug user to shoot up herself so he was doing

it for her, acting as an integral part of getting the girls hooked on drugs so they wouldn't just run off somewhere else. I was so shocked that I didn't even give him the I'm so sorry I thought this was the toilet line. I just stood there for a second, genuinely stunned by what I was looking at. I appreciate that makes me sound a little bit of a wuss but I've gotten the whole thing so wrong that the reality hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn't even think to lean into the room to get him on camera so I'm lucky he actually got up and physically pushed me out of the room so I could at least get an image of his face. I didn't even bother going back up to the girl. I had already paid my money and I had my footage. The job was done and by then it was just a case of providing the footage

to the client. Given that it was my investigation, I had to be there when she was told the news and when she watched the footage herself. When she learned what her husband was actually doing, I think it made her wish that he was just having an affair. She still wanted a divorce alright but I think she wanted it a thousand times more than she had before. Knowing your husband as being unfaithful is one thing, but then knowing he's an evil creep who gets young girls addicted to drugs so they can be sold, that's another story entirely, isn't it? I've never taken Ebola during my time as a private investigator, but I've been darn close on a number of occasions.

This is the story of the time I was probably the closest to getting shot, and I still don't quite know how I managed to keep from getting hit. The job was to track down this junkie kid who dropped off the map on behalf of his parents, who were naturally deeply concerned for him. Sad thing was, they'd just gotten him through rehab and his reward for kicking his addiction was a brand new car. I think he lasted about three days before he sold the car at a dealership for cash before plunging back into his addiction. Thanks to several interviews with some of his closest friends and a few ex-addict associates, I managed to track him down to the East LA home of a person he'd met in rehab,

and I knew he was in there, because I saw him through the window. I knocked on the door, a guy answers it, and I ask if my missing kid is there. He asks if I'm a cop, and I said no, I'm a PI working for his parents who are extremely worried about him and he'd do well to tell the kid to come to the door so we could talk before I called his parents. Now I know the kid is in the house because as I said already, I saw him through a crack in the curtain, sitting in a computer chair with a blanket over his lap looking about as spaced out as I'd ever seen a person get. I think the job is pretty much over, but to my surprise the guy who came to the door said no, he hadn't seen the kid.

I just level with him, and as much as I'm polite enough to apologize for snooping, I let him know that I've seen the kid through a crack in the window. I remind the guy that the kid is in a huge danger of overdosing as well as those who relapse with heroin are and that he'd be doing a heck of a thing for his karma if he just did the right thing. The guy pauses, looks positively impressed for a second then says, sure, I'll go get him. He then shuts the door and again disappears from view. I figured he knew the game was up and there was no point

hiding or anything but just in case he was about to give the kid a heads up so he could escape through the backyard, I head over to the window just to make sure the kid isn't going anywhere. Not only does the kid not move and just carries on staring into space, but the guy doesn't even try to get him to come to the door. You gotta keep in mind, the room has that dimly lit attic ambience to it, so it wasn't like I had the best view of the kid. From all the pictures I'd seen of him of his best and worst, I knew enough to know it was him for sure. Only right at that moment, as I'm looking at him through the window a second time,

I realize there's something not quite right about the way he's just kind of staring at the wall. And instead of feeling that sense of smoke satisfaction that I've done my job, I started to get majorly worried. So worried in fact that as I walked back to the front door to knock on it again, I didn't even stop to think about where the kid's buddy had gone or what he was doing. All that was on my mind was the idea that I hadn't found the kid alive and well as I'd intended to. I'd found a corpse instead. Then raise some thinking that, the door in front of me just explodes in a shower of splinters as I hear a burst of automatic gunfire coming from behind the door. I did exactly as I was trained as a cop. I hit the dirt, pulled out my sidearm,

and returned fire through the door at least to try and suppress whoever had just tried to cut me in half. I was so certain that I was hit, I mean, how could I not after so many bullets had ripped through the wood in front of me? If I wasn't hit, it was nothing short of a complete miracle. But after crawling out of the driveway and taking cover behind my car, there wasn't hit, it was nothing short of a complete miracle. But after crawling out of the driveway and taking cover behind my car, there wasn't a drop of blood leaking onto the ground. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I actually couldn't believe it. As I was on the line with the 911 dispatcher, I kept expecting to pull my hand back from somewhere under my clothes to find blood all over it, but it just didn't happen.

Lucky for me and because I was able to report a burst of automatic fire, three or four cop cars all arrived on the scene like lightning, and all within just a few minutes of each other. Even luckier, the shooter had run out the back of the house and escaped while he could, opting not to come out of the house and open up on me again. A second burst of whatever he was firing at me and I don't know if I'd been so lucky. I wasn't entirely lucky though, nor was my timing particularly perfect because when I thought something was off about the kid's face when I looked at him through the glass, it was because he was dead. The kid had indeed OD'd just like his parents feared that he would.

It looked like he was scouring the entire city for the best age he could find and for his sins. He found it. Only instead of just fleeing the scene when his junkie buddies realized they had a corpse on their hands, they went about trying to dispose of it. The kid didn't have a blanket over his lower half because he wanted to stay cozy. He had a blanket on his legs because the person who had just cut them off didn't want to have to look at the stumps. His parents were devastated the whole thing was just so tragic but as selfish as it sounds, I just still couldn't believe that I hadn't been shot. In the days that followed, when I wasn't just walking around in a dumb stupor still struggling to compute how lucky I'd been, I was experiencing a kind of elation that usually only comes in powdered form. I don't mean that to sound insensitive and I understand how horrible it was for the family. I guess I'm just struggling to put into words how a person

feels after they go through such an intense, near-death experience. And after that, I tried to be more selective over which jobs I took. I feel like every person had a little jar of luck that runs dry over time, and I used up an awful lot of that luck with such an incredible near-miss. I still think about that kid sometimes, though, and I feel horrible for his family. I wasn't the one that had to tell them that they lost their son and soon after they thought that they got him home and healthy again. But I can only imagine how painful it was for them to have to hear the bad news. I've been a private investigator for the past 14 years and today I'd like to tell you about one of

the most unsettling jobs I ever worked. It involves what appeared to be just a tragic case of a sudden and devastating heart attack, something that happens to far too many men around the world every single day. When the family of the man contacted me about the job I almost didn't take it. You get a lot of folks that just aren't satisfied with being told that their loved one died due to an accident or just a twist of fate or something and their grief causes them to look for answers that just aren't there. I very delicately explain this to the man's family when they asked me to investigate the possibility that his much younger girlfriend had either killed him or arranged to have him killed. Unless she was a master poisoner who induced the heart attack with an untraceable compound, then I was reasonably

certain that that was an innocent party. Yet they insisted I investigate her, offering a sizable daily rate to do so, so I made an arrangement with them. I'd take the case for a week and if I couldn't find anything remotely suspicious, then I'd move on. I'm not the kind of man to turn a grieving family into a cash cow simply because they can't accept an uncomfortable truth. So after they agreed to that, I got to work. Now I could understand how the dead man's relationship with this girl might arouse some suspicion. He was almost 60 years old, thrice married and divorced, and had an amount of wealth stashed away in various bank accounts after many successful years as a stockbroker.

She, on the other hand, was a 22-year-old fitness model who made her money posting pictures of her butt on social media. They had been dating for about a year and had a fairly tumultuous relationship. Then one day, he just drops dead of a heart attack. The only thing was, she didn't appear to have benefited from his death at all. She wasn't named in the will, she was certainly making her own money, and she seemed genuinely grief-stricken by his sudden loss. The only real discrepancy was the fact that in the months before his death, Mr. Deadman, excuse me if I obscure the names here as a professional courtesy, had made a series of quite large payments in a Panamanian bank account in the months leading up to his death. But with the account being sheltered from the prying eyes of the IRS, there was no way

of knowing who this person was or if they might have presented a threat to Mr. Deadman's life. I asked Mr. Deadman's younger girlfriend if she had any idea who this person might be and she said she had no idea. According to her, she didn't know of any debts her boyfriend had and couldn't think of any reason as to why he was sending large amounts of money to a sheltered account. To this day, neither myself nor Deadman's family can say who this account belongs to exactly. But after doing a little more digging into his death, I think I can make an educated guess. I won't bore you with all the nitty gritty details of my investigation, which actually took a week longer than I'd promised due to a few details which emerged around days 5 and 6 of my work. I'll just tell you the one thing that made me think that Miss Fitness, what I'll call Dead Man's girlfriend, was either the owner or very close to the owner of the Panamanian bank account. Eventually I was able to get my hands on a copy of the 911 call which Miss Fitness made on the night of Deadman's fatal heart attack. I was still

exploring the possibility of it being some kind of hit and since Miss Fitness told me that a lot of what happened that night was just a blur to the overwhelming trauma she experienced, I figured that I'd take a listen to the 911 call to check if there was anything she mentioned to dispatch or EMTs that she either couldn't remember or had compartmentalized due to the trauma. That's when I discovered there was definitely something she wanted to keep quiet regarding the events of that evening, something that might implicate her in ways that, while aren't strictly illegal, could certainly open her up to some kind of civil suit which the family is now pursuing. Like I said, Deadman and Miss Fitness had been dating for the better part of a year,

and at least 80-90% of their rendezvous had been at the downtown apartment he was residing in following a very messy divorce. Miss Fitness must have visited the place a hundred times, and that's a conservative estimate, so imagine my surprise when she starts acting as if it was her first visit when the 911 dispatcher started asking her for Deadman's address. She did eventually provide the pertinent details to the EMTs, but when they arrived, they were unable to revive him. But for the 24 minutes and 37 seconds of that call, Miss Fitness was unable to provide any details regarding the location of dead man's apartment. She seemed to know all too well what

was happening to him and described his symptoms to a T. Chest pains, numbness in his left arm, profuse sweating, all very recognizable as a heart attack, but when it came to his address, even down to the apartment number, she seemed completely unwilling to pass along the information. I could understand if she was in a state of inconsolable panic, if she was wailing and weeping and begging Mr. Deadman not to leave her. But she wasn't. In fact, she sounded alarmingly level-headed. Then when it came to the EMTs asking her to perform CPR on Deadman, it didn't sound like she even attempted it.

I've heard 911 calls where a person is asked to perform CPR and without fail, their voice goes quieter as they put down the phone and begin administering chest compressions. Fitness's voice was at the exact same pitch the whole time. She counted the compressions along with the EMT who was talking her through them, but unless she performed them with one hand and very little effort, I'm not sure she performed them at all. I was able to get a copy of the call via Freedom of Information request and when I played it for dead man's adult children, we came to the same conclusion. Fitness hadn't murdered their father, but what she had done was take advantage of the fact that he had suffered a heart attack and

simply let him die. This is what makes me think she's connected to the Panamanian bank account and dead man's children agreed that not only was the motivation financial, but Fitness let their father die because he had threatened to take back whatever he had funneled to her. He may have well done this to conceal assets, and although the account might well be in her name, she was never intended a permanent recipient of the money. It's not uncommon for people to conceal their assets prior to divorce proceedings, but few people go to such extreme lengths to do so. From what we could tell, there had to be over a million dollars stashed away in that account, and again, that's a conservative estimate. And when it comes to dollar amounts I've known people to kill for,

some have been far less than a million dollars. Since Miss Fitness had no legal obligation to save dead man's life, even if the family do manage to prove she acted maliciously, there's no legal recourse for them. However, I'm certainly no expert in civil or financial cases, and there might be grounds to sue for the suspected amount if they can prove the money funneling was done to conceal their father's assets. I'm not saying this case was the scariest or most frightening of my career, as I've certainly dealt with far more seedier and far more violent cases.

But what gets me is the betrayal, and imagining the moment where dead man realized that one of the people he trusted the most in the world, someone he once trusted with upwards of a million dollars, was just going to let him die. There's no way in God's name she suddenly forgot the address and apartment number of the man she'd been dating for a year, or that she was panicking so bad that she couldn't even check the number on his door. If she was, I'd have heard it in her voice on that 911 call. No, instead she was strucken by a sudden predatory urge to simply play dumb, all when a man's life was at stake. Men die of heart attacks every single day, all over the world, but I know for a fact that only around 10% of them are actually

fatal. With a quick response and right treatment, most men survive them, and they serve as something of a warning to change lifestyle or cut out a certain substance. There's a good chance dead man knew that too, especially if a doctor had previously informed him that he was at risk of one. So I don't really want to imagine what it was like for him to go from, I'm gonna be okay, to, this is my last night on earth, as his little piece of arm candy started to look less like a trophy wife and more like the Grim Reaper in yoga pants. Working as a private investigator isn't nearly as exciting as you might think. I speak to some people who seem to assume that everything I do is right out of a noir detective story from the 1940s.

They think I spend half my time in mortal danger, tracking down victims of human trafficking, or trying to catch some gangster sleeping around after his sultry cigarette-smoking wife traipses into my office in the dead of night. Yet, I take the odd job that ends up being a bit of a thrill, but 90% of the time it's kind of the thing that's just too boring or inconsequential to go to the actual police with. For example, I occasionally get jobs from companies who employees are playing at being too sick to work. They need me to prove that they're actually just telling fibs so they can give them the sack and cut off a massive drain on company resources. The only exciting thing about that is employing the classic stalking techniques and sniping

pictures of them playing five astride or going to the gym, all after they claimed to be too depressed to go outside or they pulled their backs out or something. But I did take this one job, trying to catch a guy playing hooky from work that ended up almost being the end of me. Not only that, but my end would have been one of the most excruciatingly painful deaths imaginable, and there might not have been a trace of me left for the police to find. Long story short, I ended up trafficking the fellow's movements until I noticed something very unusual about his routine. Two nights a week, always random nights, he'd leave his house and drive down to a warehouse on the dock road, one that I was almost certain was a derelict. He'd stay for a few hours, then sometimes

emerge with what appeared to be a lot of cash stuffed into a brown envelope. I couldn't know this for certain, but I had my suspicions and all I had to do was prove he was possibly moonlighting at another job so I could provide the evidence to his employer. So one night, I follow him into the warehouse, climbing over walls and scrambling under fences, all at an age where I was far too old to be doing anything like that, so I can catch him in the act of doing whatever it was he was doing. I'd reckon that I'd just use the old excuse of, sorry I'm a bit lost, could you point me in the right direction to get out of here, and obviously if the business was a legitimate one, I'd just be escorted off

the property. Even if I snapped a few pictures of the guy at work or what have you, they couldn't confiscate my camera and I couldn't be charged with trespassing if I simply claimed ignorance and agreed to leave when told to. Except the business wasn't legitimate and the blokes running it definitely didn't want anyone to know what they were doing. As I approached the warehouse building, I could hear the occasional bark and yelp of what sounded a lot like dogs, as well as some whooping and cheering from the blokes inside. I walked in, snapped a few pictures of the interior, and immediately recognized that I'd made a huge mistake. Inside was what looked a lot like a makeshift arena, constructed of chest high metal barriers that the blokes were crowded around. And although I couldn't see them, the

sounds of the dogs coming from inside the little arena thing told me all I needed to know about what I'd stumbled into. It was a midnight dogfight. The blokes had seen me snapping pictures and by then, getting out of there with a few nimbly worded excuses was the least of my problems. They chased me, grabbed me, and dragged me back into the warehouse. I was beaten, had my camera taken off me, then picked up and taken to the edge of the little fighting pit they'd constructed. It was an absolute horror show. In the middle of the blood-soaked arena was a dead pit bull of some kind. It might have been some other breed, but I don't really know dog breeds, so forgive me if it was actually something else. And standing over it was the

obvious victor of the fight that had just occurred. And to my horror, I realized that they wanted to literally feed me to the victor. The fighting pit was thankfully cut into the floor of the warehouse, which I suppose it had to be to prevent the dogs from jumping out, so as they hoisted me up and threatened to throw me in with the dog, it was only a few feet from being able to literally bite my face off. Along with taking my camera off me, they emptied my pockets and had obviously had a good look at my drivers license to find out who I was. Having my wallet also meant that they've gotten hold of my PI business cards too, so not

only did they know who I was, but they knew why I was there too. At first, I was threatened with being thrown in with the dogs and I'm ashamed to say it, but I think I soiled myself a bit when I begged them not to. I think that actually might have saved my life, because upon smelling what I'd just deposited in my trousers, they dropped me onto the concrete with grimaces and a chorus of disgusted noises. After that, I got a few more kicks and punches, to my head and shoulders only I might add, before the bloke that I assumed was in charge came over with my driver's license in his hand. He told me he was keeping it, because if any police were sniffing

around the area in the weeks to come, they'd know whose house they needed to visit to make things right. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I'd be killed if I told anyone what I'd seen, or who I'd seen doing it. But after that, the most shocking event of the evening occurred. The ringleader started playing good cop, if I can put it that way, and started apologizing for the way they treated me when they'd first spotted me snapping pictures. I was told that they thought that I was a police officer, in which case I'd probably never have left the warehouse alive. But since he knew

I was a PI, he knew that the only real motivator was cash, and he seemed to have plenty on hand. He asked me who I was working for, as well as how much they were paying me and, since I'm not exactly some hard case, I just fessed up with it and told him. He then counts out a few hundred quid in fifties, puts them in my pocket, and tells me that I'm to cease working for the clients as, in his words, he worked for me now. However, he did reinforce that since I'd been paid, I'd be doubly buggered if they caught wind of any police hanging around the site, and that he'd, and I'm quoting him directly here, iron my chest if he thought I told anyone what I'd saw.

In all my years as a PI, I'd never heard anyone threaten to do something as horrible as that. I mean, can you even imagine the evil creativity of someone who'd think to use a frigging clothes iron as a method of torture? I'd already had one of the worst nights of my life. I didn't want anything to top it anytime soon so again, as much as I'm ashamed to say it, I did as I was told. I cancelled the job with the client, which also meant that I didn't get a penny for my hours, but I honestly wasn't too fussed since I had gotten to walk away with my life, as well as a bit of dirty money to cover the hours. I know that makes me just as bad as them in a way, knowing about

something as horrible as a dog fighting ring and not doing a thing to stop it. But what could I do? They'd have known it was me and I'd have to flee the city of my birth with only about 30 grand in savings. And yes, I was also terrified that by some coincidence the police would end up investigating them anyway, in which case I'd have a hard time proving that I'd kept my mouth shut. I lost a lot of sleep over that one, I can assure you, but no one ever turned up at my door in the middle of the night so I'm assuming they're still going into that makeshift fighting pit down on the dock road. Note how I've chosen to leave out a lot of details here and I've actually gone as far as obscuring the actual place I found the fighting pit just in case any overzealous blog readers decide to phone this in with a lack of regard for my safety.

And that's my story of the most terrifying incident of my PI career and it's one I'm in no mind to have repeated anytime soon. I keep myself at arm's length from cases now, at all times, and I don't do anything that might put me in a similar position of danger. I'd say this to anyone wanting to get into PI work too. Money is money, but no amount is worth losing your life for. In my career as a private detective I worked some very, very unusual cases, but the one I'm about to share with you today is by far the weirdest and creepiest of them all. From the moment I had the person walk into my office, to the moment I presented them with the file containing everything I'd learned, the whole thing was just a trip into madness

that got darker and darker until I couldn't believe what I'd learned, the whole thing was just a trip into madness that got darker and darker until I couldn't believe what I'd been charged with finding, even when it was staring me in the face. The PI firm I worked for hired me as their IT guy. Mostly investigation specialized in fieldwork, which is like your standard following of unfaithful wives or husbands, finding missing people, and that kind of thing. The only thing they were lacking when they hired me, though, was someone who knew how to use the internet. I'm not just talking Google searches and social media lookups. I'm talking about breaking into private networks, using Tor browsers, all kinds of hacker-related and dark web stuff that the average internet user just isn't familiar with. Anyway, this one morning, I get a

text from my boss asking me to come into the office. I hardly ever went into the office as I could do most of my work from home, but my boss said that I had to talk to a client in person and in private, which was part of her conditions for hiring us. So I got into the office, where I'm guided into one of our meeting rooms where this girl is sat with my boss. She's really pretty, strikingly so, so naturally I'm only too happy to sit and talk with her for a while as she goes over the job with me. It seemed like a pretty standard piece of internet sleuthing at first. I had to scour the internet for anything I could find on a person and present everything I dug up to the client. Only the person the client wanted

me to look up was her. In all my years working for the company, I'd never ever gotten a job like that before. I'd taken plenty of them that involved looking other people up, missing people, exes who'd ghosted on their partners, stuff like that. But no one had ever asked me to look up their own self before showing them everything that I'd found. Like I said, this girl was really, really pretty, so trawling through her various social media accounts, as well as little mentions of her in high school newspapers or whatever, it was barely work. I know that might sound creepy, but it is what it is. After a few days, all I can find is some fairly innocuous stuff. Nothing remotely seedy, nothing that might jeopardize her reputation as an elementary school teacher,

which I'm pretty sure was the goal of the whole exercise. But still, something didn't sit right with me. I know that most people who take up a career in education have to purge their social media accounts of them ripping bong hits or partying on the Jersey Shore in a micro bikini or whatever. But this was the first that I'd heard of someone paying a lot of money to a PI firm to dig through their own personal history. I suppose that's why I'm paid what I'm paid though, because I don't just scratch the surface with my work. I dig deep, really deep, and I always find what I'm paid though because I don't just scratch the surface with my work. I dig deep, really deep, and I always find what I'm looking for. And since I hadn't found anything that might warrant a

really deep dive, I decided to go the extra mile to find something worth presenting to the client. One of the tools I use in my searches is kind of like a highly advanced Google Lens. It's a computer program that can feed photographs into it and scours the dark web for similar or identical looking photos. It can also find faces, items of clothing, backdrops of rooms a picture might be taken in. It's honestly very impressive. I procured it from the same guy who created the program that finds deleted tweets and Facebook statuses. And if you didn't know that was a thing, let me assure you, it is. The concept of nothing on the internet ever really being deleted might be something

of a cliche, but the average user has no idea how true it is. Think of it like the Wayback Machine, the tool which means you can essentially time travel through digital space to see how webpages looked in the past. Then tie that to the whole concept of the military or government possessing way more advanced tech than is available to the public at any particular period. There are data traps and executables out there available for purchase for the right price and from the right people. That put your run-of-the-mill duck-duck Google searches to shame. And it was through using one of these programs that I came across a tour webpage that belonged to our client. Now it's pretty easy to code a website that basically becomes an unlockable subscription service. You can even code it to only accept

cryptocurrency in a way that obscures the personal data of its subscribers. This is the kind of website that belonged to our client, and since I'd probably bored you enough with the technicalities of this case, I'll get to the juicy stuff, or rather, the stuff that was so creepy it made my skin crawl. One thing you need to know about this girl is that, despite being very pretty, she looked young. I know she was in her mid-twenties, but given how short she was, not to mention, and I phrased this delicately, how underdeveloped she looked, I'm not sure she could get into PG-13 movies without someone

getting mildly suspicious. I'm not one to pry into medical histories and whatnot but I'm pretty sure she had some kind of condition and it meant that although she was most certainly a grown woman, she looked no older than a girl in her early teens. If you haven't guessed where this is going already, allow me to elaborate while putting things as much in layman's terms as I can. Our client has basically set up an OnlyFans, and was lying about her age, doctored ID and all, so that she could extract payments from those who are physically attracted to those that aren't of age. To put it bluntly, she was scamming creepy older men by pretending she was underage. She wasn't just posing nude either. She had managed to construct an entire persona of a

girl no older than 13, one who was living in a very broken home and one who was ripe for exploitation. I don't even want to recall some of the comments I read on her pictures and videos and some of the photoshoot setups were nothing short of nauseating. After browsing for a little over five minutes I realized that this was the thing she wanted us to find. Only she didn't just want us to find it, she wanted us to know how we'd found it. And that wasn't something I was comfortable sharing either with her or with you. I like to keep my tricks firmly up my sleeve, otherwise I might well be out of a job.

I'm very good at what I do, and I'm well aware that it's not so much what's in my head as the tools I use, and since my boss pays me very handsomely to do what I do, I'd have to be a moron to share the names of files, programs, or the sources I used to find them. She wasn't happy with that, as she obviously wanted to keep her page away from the prying eyes of those who didn't wish to patronize it. But since the terms of her contract with us were clearly laid out, and we only had to present with the what and not with the how, she walked away a few grand short nevertheless. However, before she left, I wanted to make it clear just how much she was playing

with fire. Although I was unable to dig into the lives and personas of those who subscribed to her site, which was actually something of a consolation to her, I wanted to warn her that they were undoubtedly some very, very dangerous people. She didn't care for my warnings, however. She was just angry that she'd end up in court if she refused to pay for the information we provided her with. In the end, I got paid, and she walked away unhappy, and I moved on to my usual affair of looking up exes, finding secret bank accounts, and everything else my boss pays me to do. But I'd never forgotten that girl, or what she did for money. And I sometimes wonder if it's caught up with her yet.

Or if she's going to continue enabling some of the most hideously criminal people in our already messed up society. Following my discharge from Marine Intelligence, cue the oxymoron jokes, I ended up getting a job working for one of the top private investigation firms in San Diego. And because of my background in electronics, my usual affair was anything involving bugs, as in hidden surveillance devices, not the creepy crawly kind. Anyway, one day we get a call from a client who believed that his office was bugged, the office being in a trailer that sat in the backyard of his home. My boss suggested that he might just be a little paranoid, but when I found out that he was a subcontractor for a big oil field

construction company, I advised my boss to take the job. I have a cousin who works in that field and I know exactly how competitive it can be, so it didn't seem like the craziest thing in the world that they might be installing listening devices which would help them steal contracts from each other. So we drove out to visit the guy, I performed a full electronic sweep, but we found absolutely nothing. There were no devices implanted in his phones, nothing giving off any burst transmissions, nothing to give any reason to believe that he was being monitored in any way. But still, he insisted on a full physical sweep of the trailer, inside and out, telling us how he wasn't crazy and that

he was sure that he was being spied on somehow. We actually ended up crawling under the trailer, checking out the whole roof of the trailer and still found nothing of note. When we just about exhausted our patience, we thanked him for the opportunity but tell him that we'll be on our way. Then he says something along the lines of, I know I might sound crazy, but just pick up my phone, press 9 to get an outside line and you'll start hearing all sorts of clicking sounds. Lo and behold, we do his ass, and there's a clicking sound on the line. We then check the phones in his actual house and the same clicking sounds can be heard. They were definitely very faint but

I could definitely hear them. This was without any kind of bug being detectable anywhere on his property or on the phone lines outside and in all my years of working for marine intelligence I'd never heard of any kind of technology that could listen in on someone's phone without being detectable using the right investigative techniques. He wasn't happy to hear it but in the end I actually advised the guy to move. What I wanted to say to him basically was, whatever you're up to, you angered the wrong people. Because my clearance wasn't exactly up to CIA level but I knew someone with some seriously advanced tech was using it to tap into the guy's phone. I don't know what the guy was up to or who was listening in on him, but it had to be seriously high up in government for them to be able to run a tap without being detectable by someone like me.

I then advised my boss, in private, to just take the two grand we'd agreed on and put as much distance between us and the guy as physically possible, because whatever he'd gotten himself into, it was way, way beyond our pay grade. About two weeks later I see a report on TV that the guy had gone missing. His family had thrown a bunch of money at a newspaper to get the guy's picture in on their pages too, as my boss showed me when we went into work the following day. I still have no clue what that guy had going on in his life or who might have been watching or listening to him, but whoever they were, they had the means to make a very wealthy, very important man just up and disappear without a trace. I don't know. Ever since I was a little girl, geology has always been my one true passion. It started when I was seven years old, when my dad took me and my brother on a family

camping trip to Mammoth Cave National Park in my home state of Kentucky. We didn't go specifically to see the caves, but since it's a huge attraction in the park, enough so that it's named after it, we decided to go along to see what all but since it's a huge attraction in the park, enough so that it's named after it, we decided to go along to see what all the fuss was about. And it was a visit that would have a lasting impact on the rest of my life. At first, even though we were on a guided tour accompanied by a park ranger, I was genuinely frightened. We were walking down into this dark, dingy space,

unfit for human habitation, and to seven-year-old me, it could have been home to any number of terrifying subterranean monsters. It wasn't until I realized that we were just as safe below the earth as we were on the surface, and there were no trolls or ogres living down there, the fear mellowed into a tingling excitement that had a profound effect on me. It felt like we were treading into some hallowed forbidden space, with the stalactites and stalagmites giving the place an otherworldly, alien feel. And from that day forward, I was hooked. I was that kid in high school who waxed lyrical about their collection of geodes and every single accessory I owned was bejeweled with either rose quartz, azurite, amethyst, or pyrite.

God forbid you complimented me on any of them because you'd always get an earful of what kind of stone it was, where it came from, or how it was formed. Naturally, I had my heart set on getting a degree in geology before I had even entered into high school and, a few blissful years of immersing myself in my favorite subject, I decided I didn't want to leave. That's how I ended up becoming a research fellow at the University of New Mexico's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, with my special being field research. However, it was through my field research that I ended up going on the second caving trip that ended up changing my life. And unlike my first, which undoubtedly changed my life for the better, the second ended up changing it for the worse.

In 2011, I was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance at conducting research in the Lechogilia cave system near Carlsbad, New Mexico. To understand why this was such an amazing opportunity for me, I have to give you a little bit of backstory regarding the cave's history, and since I feel like I've already given you my life story, I'll try to keep it as short and sweet as possible. Up until the mid-80s, geologists believed that Lechogilia was just a small, insignificant cave full of nothing but dry, dead-end passages. But in 1984, a group of cavers discovered that not only was Lechogilia actually the eighth longest cave system in the

world, but it was the deepest in the entire United States. So far, geologists have mapped over 150 miles of caves and tunnels that extend almost half a mile beneath the earth, and it's still not completely explored. Access is limited to approved scientific researchers, survey and exploration teams, and it can sometimes take literally years for the Bureau of Land Management to grant permission to conduct a research assignment. Knowing that, I'm sure you can imagine my excitement when I hear that not only is it our department that's been granted permission, but I'm one of the first researchers to be chosen to conduct research. But even so, all was not set in stone and I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to guarantee my place on the team. As some of you might know, caving can be extremely dangerous, even to experienced field researchers

such as myself. With that in mind, each potential member of the field team was subjected to a rigorous medical examination to ensure that they were fit and well enough to be chosen. Obviously, this was for both insurance and security purposes, as no one with any underlying medical conditions could be allowed to potentially jeopardize such an important field trip. So, not only were we some of the brightest and best in our field, we were also some of the fittest and most mentally sound researchers

in the entire United States. And we felt like the SEAL Team 6 of geologists or something, like we were the best of the best. But being the fittest and most competent couldn't stop what would happen to us down there in Lechogilia, and the events of that field trip had haunted me for almost 11 long years now. The field team consisted of myself, a fellow UNM researcher and long-time mentor named Nestor, and two other field researchers, one from LSU, another from UT Austin, both of which shall remain nameless for reasons that will become obvious. We met twice before our eventual drive over to White City, and each time I remember walking

away thinking verily highly of the two researchers from Texas and Louisiana. Both guys were true field geologists, had both passed the medical exams and both seemed like they could handle the outdoors enough to camp in the Sierras for a week. So by the time it came for us to all meet up in White City, I felt very confident that the field trip was going to go off without a hitch. The plan was to hike from White City to the entrance of the Lechogilia cave system, set up camp just outside of it, and use the camp as our field HQ while spending several days working our way in and out of the cave, gradually getting deeper as the days went on.

For the first few days, it was one of the most incredible field trips I've ever been on. The research was electric, the subject matter titanic, and the people I was with were all the very best at what they did. I think I soaked up more knowledge and experience from them in a few days than I had over the past 18 months. It was nothing short of heaven. Until the fourth day, when it all became a living nightmare. I should explain that on the third day, our colleague from LSU went back into the caves after the day's work was done. We were all absolutely exhausted from the day's caving,

but for some reason the guy from LSU wanted to head back into Letrogilia to head a little deeper into the tunnel that we hadn't explored yet. Generally speaking, solo caving is extremely frowned upon. It's seen as irresponsible and overly dangerous, as if you get stuck or trapped somewhere, there's no one to help you or report that you're missing. But since this guy was easily one of the most experienced cavers any of us had ever worked with, we figured he'd have the sense not to get himself into any dangerous situations. So off he went, down into the caves to do a little extra research. He said it'd be two hours at the most and that he'd be back well before sundown.

But those two hours came and went without any word from him. Like I said, he was very experienced, but after two hours became three, and almost four, we started getting pretty worried about him, and right before we were gearing up to head down into the cave after him, he suddenly reappeared, looking extremely pale. We asked if everything was okay, expecting to hear some story about a close call in a tunnel, something of that nature. But to our surprise, he told us that he was fine, and that he'd found something after exploring one of the caves that was very pertinent to our research. When we asked him what it was, and if he'd taken any pictures or video, he shook his head, saying if he knew

he was going to run into it, he'd have brought a camera. We asked him again what it was that he'd seen and after struggling to find the words, all he'd tell us was, you guys gotta see this to believe it. For the final few hours that we were awake, we pressed him on exactly what it was and the more he refused to put it into words, the more I found a deep suspicion growing inside of me. From my perspective, the idea that an experienced geologist in Caver was simply incapable of describing what he saw as nothing short of impossible, and at the time there was only one explanation for his behavior. He wanted to guard what he'd seen so he could gain personal prestige from the find but there was also something very unsettling about his behavior

and that was how frightened he seemed to be as a result of his discovery. It was like he didn't want to show us because he was afraid of what might happen but at the time I simply dismissed this as a kind of selfish, greedy, glory-seeking. But how wrong I was. That night, I woke up to the sound of a struggle in the tent that the LSU and the UT Austin researchers were sharing. At first, it just sounded like they were engaged in heated but hushed argument of some kind, but seconds later, I heard a yelp of what sounded like pain. I quickly woke Nestor from his sleep and told him what I was hearing, and when he heard some horrific sort of wheezing sound he ran out of our tent and over to the

other. When he pulled open the flap, he saw the LSU researcher strangling the guy from UT Austin with his bare hands. It took all our strength to separate them, but by then, it was far too late. The UT researcher has since suffered irreparable brain damage as a result of oxygen starvation, and it's more likely that he'll never walk or eat unassisted for the remainder of his life. The LSU researcher was impossible to restrain, even once we pulled him off the other researcher. We tried everything we could to restrain him, but in the end, Nestor was left with a split lip and my nose was completely shattered after he'd slammed his

forehead into my face. After he broke from our grip, we're almost certain that he ran back into the cave without any food, water, or protective clothing. And that is the last time we ever saw him. We were in no rush to pursue him, after all, we didn't think that he could just up and disappear in there. Even if all the tunnels are unexplored, there's still a limited amount of space where a person might try to hide themselves. Our focus was getting the UT Austin researcher the medical attention he needed, but even so, we just couldn't get him to a hospital in time.

As for the LSU researcher, his body was never recovered. At least, I'm assuming they were looking for a body as there's no way that a person could survive down there for long, not without ample supplies of food and water, neither of which he took with him when he ran off into the night. To this day, we don't know what he saw down there, or what happened in the run-up to him strangling our colleague from UT Austin. The cops interviewed him when he woke up from the coma, but using some of the most advanced communication devices available, none of what he communicated made any sense. What happened that night has haunted me for years, but mainly because it remains an almost

complete mystery. There's only one thing I'm certain of though, and that's whatever caused the violent outburst, it was caused by something the LSU researcher had seen down in the Lechegilia cave system. And whatever it was, despite all my collegiate curiosity, I sincerely hope it stays buried forever. Born on November 22nd of 1946 in Atlanta, Georgia, Gary Michael Hilton grew up to hold one of the most prestigious positions in the entire U.S. Army. At just 18 years old, he was assigned to a Davy Crockett platoon, a special experimental unit that was equipped with the Davy Crockett missile, the smallest and lightest nuclear weapon ever developed by the United States military. With a maximum range of just over a mile,

the platoons would form a seemingly impenetrable perimeter across West Germany and would unleash a devastating conflagration of nuclear fire on the orders of none other than the U.S. President. With such powerful weapons in their hands, members of the Davy Crockett platoon had to be some of the most mentally stable soldiers in the entire military and were regularly screened for psychological fitness. Which begs the question, how in God's name was Gary Hilton selected? When Gary was just 13 years old, resentment for his stepfather boiled over in spectacular fashion when Gary shot him with a small caliber pistol. He believed that Nilo de Bag was attempting to take his mother away from him, and this

marked the first time that Gary attempted to take the life of another human being. It seems Nilo had the patience of a saint because, for some reason, he decided not to press charges and gave his violent stepson a second chance. Gary didn't completely get away with the attempt on Nyla's life, however, and briefly spent some time in a mental hospital so his violent tendencies could be addressed. Upon his release, he meandered through the remainder of his mid-teens until finally joining the army. Being a member of the Davy Crockett units came with considerable bragging rights, but it also came with some serious mental stressors. In all likelihood, a full-scale Soviet invasion of Europe would be preceded by the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons. And given that the Crockett platoons would be on the very front lines

of the Cold War if it turned hot, it was more than probable that they would be some of the first military personnel to die. Many suffered full-on mental breakdowns as a result of this stress. Gary was no different. By the time he was 20, he began to hear voices which seemed to originate inside his own skull. By 21, Gary had been officially diagnosed with schizophrenia. For the second time in his life, Gary was confined to a mental hospital, where army doctors began to dose him with Thorazine, a powerful anti-psychotic

medication. It soon became clear that Gary was no longer fit to serve in the military, but instead of giving him the proper Section 8 discharge, the army instead gave him an honorable one, meaning no record of Gary's medical conditions followed him into civilian life. Gary was a handsome, athletic, and intelligent young man, but readjusting to civilian life was something he found incredibly difficult. It was hard for him to build or maintain personal relationships, and holding down a job was almost impossible. As a result, Gary moved around the southern states for the better part of 20 years, and after a series of failed marriages, he moved back to Atlanta at the age of 54 and found work as a roofer.

To say that Gary was dissatisfied with life would be an understatement, but to alleviate the stress and melancholy of the daily grind, he took solace in his love for the outdoors. He'd often hit the road in his Dodge Astro with his dog, Dandy, in tow and head up into North Carolina, specifically to the Pisgah National Forest just outside of Asheville. It was there, in 2007, that Gary first encountered two senior citizens by the name of Irene and John Bryant. And it was there, among the ancient, old-growth oaks of the Appalachian wilderness, that Gary decided to kill them. Shortly after the Bryants went hiking on October 20th of 2007, they seemed to drop off

the face of the earth. In late October, someone used the couple's ATM card at a bank more than 75 miles away, which initially threw investigators off the scene. However, Irene's bloated corpse was discovered three weeks later on November 9th, with her skull being fractured in multiple places. Her husband's corpse was found roughly a year later, the discovery delayed by its rapid state of decomposition. After killing them, Gary stopped to set up a camp on a private hunting preserve in Georgia's Cherokee County. Given that it was private, his presence was reported to local police and a deputy soon arrived and asked Gary to move on. It was a matter of protocol to run a potential offender's license through a state database,

but not the federal one. And if the deputy had done this, he'd have discovered that Gary had an outstanding warrant for a 2005 unanswered citation. He'd have been arrested, and there's no doubt that lives would have been saved as a result. After leaving Cherokee County, Hilton headed south into Florida and entered the Apalachicola National Forest outside Tallahassee in mid-November. It was here that he encountered a 46-year-old nurse named Cheryl Dunlap on December 1st of that same year. Standing at 5'4", Cheryl had thick, wavy brown hair and deep brown eyes. She was a mother and a devoted member of

the Evangelical River of Life Church, But none of that mattered to Gary. Shortly after her disappearance, her car was found parked on Crawfordville Highway, just outside the Apalachicola Park's entrance. Since it had a flat tire, it speculated that Cheryl had been attempting to flag someone down when she came to Gary's attention. But instead of offering her assistance, Gary gave her only death. A few days after she disappeared, investigators' attentions were drawn to some security camera footage which showed a man in a rubber mask attempting to use Dunlap's

bank card at a nearby ATM. Then, on December 15th, the presence of circling buzzards allowed park rangers to pinpoint her lifeless body. There were gaping wounds in the torso and legs, both hands had been cut off, and Cheryl had been decapitated. Gary was back in Georgia in time for New Year's Day when he and his dog set out for a hike on the aptly named Blood Mountain outside of Atlanta. This is where he ran into 24-year-old Meredith Emerson, a University of Georgia French graduate who was also enjoying a New Year's Day hike. Meredith initially resisted Gary's attempts to abduct her, but despite her martial arts training, she was unable to fight off her formidable opponent for long. Once subdued, Meredith was frog-marched down the mountain to where

Gary had parked his van. Once inside, she was tied up and held prisoner for days on end. Yet the abduction was not without witnesses, and those who saw the suspicious sight of a young woman being forced into a van swiftly contacted the relevant authorities. As news of the abduction swept the nation, it quickly caught the attention of a man named John Tabor, Gary's former employer. Shockingly, Gary actually called John Tabor in the aftermath of Meredith's abduction, asking him for an advance on his upcoming paycheck. Tabor reported the call to the police almost immediately, allowing them to trace it to a pancake house off of Blood Mountain. But by the time they arrived, Gary and Meredith were long gone. A few days later, in Georgia's DeKalb County, Gary was spotted in a parking lot,

removing items out of his van and tossing them into a dumpster. Seeing as his picture was all over the news, a member of the public quickly recognized him and they contacted the local police. Sheriff's deputies rushed to the scene, lights and sirens blaring, giving Gary no time to escape. He must have known the jig was up as he offered no resistance as police put him into custody. Within an hour or so Gary was in a police interview room giving full and frank confession almost immediately and seeking to make a deal with investigators.

In exchange for his confession as well as leading police to Meredith's body Gary would swap the death penalty for life in prison without the possibility of parole. In exchange for his confession, as well as leading police to Meredith's body, Gary would swap the death penalty for life in prison without the possibility of parole. A few days later, while under heavy police escort, Gary led authorities to a remote road in Dawson Forest, just over 30 miles south of Blood Mountain. There, he showed them to Meredith's shallow grave. Just like with Cheryl

Dunlap's corpse, Meredith had been decapitated. When asked why he committed such an obscene act of mutilation, Gary answered that it was simply to obscure identification. Yet just as police in Georgia were piecing together the murder of Meredith Emerson, Florida law enforcement were doing the same with Cheryl Dunlap, and through shared information, they determined that the woman's killer was the exact same man. But unlike authorities up in Georgia, a deal was most certainly not on the table in Florida. In fact, they had a fast track on the death penalty at the time of Cheryl's murder. There was no question that Florida would seek to execute Gary Hilton for his crimes, but the question remained over whether or not Gary

was simply evil or if his life experiences had twisted him into one. A journalist met up with a childhood friend of Gary's named Dino Sclafani. Dino spoke of a band that Gary had played in during his high school years, and how he had showed genuine talent and thoughtfulness. One of Gary's former girlfriends was also contacted, but she had a far darker tale to tell. She told the journalist that Gary once confessed to having an incestuous relationship with his mother while he was just a child, and how that could have contributed to his apparent hatred for women. In February 2011, after two years of pre-trial hearings,

Gary was convicted of first-degree murder and officially given the death sentence. Yet unlike his victims, who were condemned to death at the very moment Gary lay eyes on them, the universe would find a perverse judicial way in which to show him mercy. In January 2016, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor declared Florida's death sentence fast-tracked to be unconstitutional. Suddenly, all executions in Florida, including Gary's, were put on hold. The Florida legislature is currently drafting a new law in accordance with the U.S. Supreme Court decision and, until then, Gary Hilton simply has to sit and stew in vicious uncertainty, just as Meredith Emerson did during her time in captivity, when she wondered if the hike on Blood Mountain would be her last. Long time listener from Wales in the UK here and honestly I actually hope I'd never have to have a reason to write you. For a long time I haven't and I suppose that was only a good thing. But that all changed this past week when I took my dog, Arth, on a hike in Carn Angley, here in my native Pembrokeshire. Because I'm a nurse, I work very odd hours, so I don't get to spend enough quality time with him

as I'd like. So whenever I get the chance, I drive up to Carn Angley to go on what I like to call a mega walk, which is basically just a hike. Just a bit of explanation, Carn Angley is one of the more dominant summits of the Preseli Hills, and is well known for its Iron Age fort. Also, local folklore has it that a local saint used to climb Carn Inglis to commune with angels. It makes sense that someone would climb the hill for a bit of peace and quiet, but some people used to claim that the saint used to literally talk to the spirits up there, as it's a place where the barriers between our world and the hereafter are at their thinnest. I used to think that was a load of dually, which is a Welsh word for nonsense, and that

there was nothing remotely spooky or dangerous about the place. But after mine and Arth's hike last Monday, I'm not so sure anymore. So last Monday after working a 14 hour shift, I got home from work at about noon. I had a few hours sleep then my mom drove over with Arth as she had been looking after him for the weekend. I'd missed him so much but my crazy shift pattern meant that keeping him at home would have been downright neglectful. So as exhausted as I was, I was just dying to get some quality time in with him. He was so excited to see me too, like he was yapping and almost doing backflips in the boot of my mom's car

when I met them in the driveway. So that sight alone was the equivalent of about 20 cups of coffee for me. After that, me and my mom had a chinwag over a cup of tea, then I had Arth hop into my car and we drove the 40 minutes or so up to Carnigley. It was about half seven by the time we got there, but the sun had been setting at about half nine in the evening over the past few weeks, so I knew we had a few hours of daylight left before we'd have to start walking back to the car. Plus, because you get a really nice look at the Irish Sea to the west, the sunsets are nothing short of amazing up in Carnigley. The sky gets all pink and orange at first,

then the sky fades to a baby blue, then to a navy blue, before getting darker and darker until it's night. So maybe that's the reason I decided to spend a little too long up there when we should have been heading back. There was no danger of us getting lost either, as I must have walked the trails back to the car park at least a dozen times during the daytime. So between my knowledge of the area and the torch on my phone, I knew that we'd get back to the car safe and soundly. But then, about halfway back to the car, Arth starts barking at something on the other side of a hedge. Arth barks at pretty much everything and every time he does, I just put his lead on him to make sure that he doesn't go chasing it. Could be a squirrel, could be a rabbit or a cat or even

another dog, but it usually results in a few barks and then Arth starts to calm down again. I couldn't see what it was that he was barking at, but they just didn't die down after a few seconds. They actually got more and more intense and loud. It got to the point where Arth was pulling on the lead so hard that he was choking himself, trying to get to whatever was on the other side of the hedge so he could attack it or what have you. I got a bit worried that he'd end up breaking the lead. He was honestly pulling that hard on it, but then out of nowhere, he stops pulling and actually darts behind me,

like he was the one who needed protection. Arthur isn't afraid of anything, so the fact that he suddenly started acting like that was very, very unsettling to me. I started asking him what was wrong, kneeling down and trying to comfort him. I mean, I was so confused as to why he was acting that way that I actually thought that he might have stood on something sharp that was concealed in the grass or something. That maybe some teenagers had been drinking on the footpath and smashed a glass bottle. It wasn't completely dark yet, so I started to check his paws to see if there was blood on any of them or if he'd yelp if I tried to touch them, but he didn't. He just kept lying

there whining. Then when I was checking his back paws I noticed that he was actually weeing on himself, not cocking a leg like he normally would, just weeing on the ground as he was laying there with his wee soaking into his fur. I've never seen him act like that before, ever, and I've had him for almost four years at the time of writing this. Something was absolutely scaring the life out of him, something he could smell or hear, but something I definitely couldn't see. And that's when it occurred to me that if it was scaring him, then it definitely should have been scaring me. There was no rustling bushes, no growls or anything coming from the other side of the hedge, but there honestly didn't need to be for me to be bloody certain that I wanted to get away from there. So we did, and as soon as I gave Arth's

lead a tug to let him know that it was time to leave, he just about bolted back in the direction of my car, dragging on the lead the whole way. I ended up jogging just to keep up with him and so the lead wouldn't choke him so much. The noises he was making were so distressing, these horrible wheezing noises like he didn't care if he passed out from the choking, just as long as he could get to a safe distance from whatever had scared him so much. By the time we got back to the car, I think I'd run about a mile and a half non-stop, more than I'd ever run since I did cross country in school, and I was honestly ready to throw up. Arthur was scratching at the door of my car,

begging to get in so he could get out of there, and believe me, I was in no mood to hang around. The whole drive back home I kept wondering what it was that could have scared him so much. And the moment I got home I started looking at what kind of wild animals could have been in those bushes that would have made him freak out like that. When I looked it up online the only thing that could have possibly been any threat to him is a buzzard. We don't get any wild cats or anything like that around here but then what in God's name could have a buzzard been doing don't get any wildcats or anything like that around here, but then what in God's name could have a buzzard been doing sitting in a bush? And I honestly don't think Arth would have been that scared of one even if he'd seen it up close or in the daytime. I'm still shaken up about the whole thing a week later and I thought writing all this down to send

to you might help me A. work out what was happening and B. help me to calm down about it but it doesn't seem to have done any good on either point. The only thing I'm certain of is that I don't want to go around Karn Ingli anytime soon, especially not after dark. I'm not saying that it was some weird monster or anything remotely supernatural, but whatever was happening, it scared my poor Arth enough to make him completely freak out, which I feel is a pretty good indicator that we were definitely in some kind of danger. But that's what makes me unable to get it off my mind, and what keeps me going back to Google to look what could have happened.

As crazy as it sounds, a woman claimed to have been chased by a wolf in North Wales in 2013 and since 2011, there have been 10 different reports of people spotting big cats that look like panthers, puma, or lynx. An article from this year says that there have been puma sightings in Wales as recently as January, and that people have been hearing roars at night when taking their dogs for walks. I'm convinced I had a close encounter with that exact same type of big cat. There's literally no other logical explanation for it. I know what people say about Carn Ingli, how weird things happen there all the time, but I'm not naive enough to believe that it was anything supernatural when there's actual photos of some giant black puma thing roaming around.

Just google big cats and whales and it's the first thing that comes up. So how close was I to getting attacked that night and if I did get ambushed by some hungry puma, I don't think Arth would have been in any position to defend me. If you ask me, someone needs to do something about it before someone gets hurt and the fact that people are dismissing the whole thing as just silly rumors is literally going to get someone hurt or get their pet killed. To be continued... Me and my buddies are huge into hiking and although we don't go so much anymore, we used to get at least one or two trips in every summer, heading out to various bucket list hiking spots all over the US. For the most part, the scariest thing to happen to us was having to take those outside poops,

which, believe me, can be truly terrifying sometimes when you don't have the right kind of tree to balance yourself on. But this one time, we did find something that seriously creeped us all out and that I find myself thinking about every so often. Even all these years later, it still sends shivers down my spine whenever I think about it. This happened in Yellowstone about 8 years ago, and after setting up camp on some lower terrain near a lake, we decided to hike up the mountains

at almost 10,500 feet above sea level. The views were incredible, but when we were up there, one of my buddies calls out to come look at something he'd found, and when we do, we see that he's found the horse skull. There was no meat left on it, like the thing was totally bone dry, so we take some pictures of it, joking about how spooky and old west it looked, then headed back down to camp. We get back to camp, and we're all sweaty, so we decide to head down to the lake to take a dip so we could get clean. We didn't want to see each other all naked and stuff sweaty so we decided to head down to the lake to take a dip so we could get clean. We didn't want to see each other all naked and stuff so we decided to really spread out along

the shoreline. It was all ridgy and was dotted with the trees so if we spread out far enough we all could get a little privacy so we could strip down and actually get washed properly without worrying about each other seeing our junk. You know how that goes. Then, no sooner had I actually gotten down to my undies, I hear one of the guys shouting like, you gotta come see this. We all put our books down and even though some of us were in nothing but our underwear, we all went to check out what one of us had found. I remember having to climb up this little ridge so I could get to where he was calling from but when I did, the thing was big enough that I didn't have to walk any further to see what he had seen. It was a horse, a dead one, and it was missing its

head. As you can guess, we instantly started thinking that the horse skull that we'd found was the one missing from our dead horse. But we basically had to dismiss that idea based on one big reason. Like I said, the horse head was completely clean of any meat, and it was totally dry, whereas the headless horse we found was still rotting. I don't know if there's a way of stripping all the meat from a skull and drying it that fast, but it seemed kind of unlikely that the two were connected. Besides, there's plenty of wildlife around Yellowstone that might rip a stray horse's head off, right? Then suddenly, as we're all stood around gawping at the dead horse, one of us is like, dude, is that film? It was. Near the headless horse was all this old school camera film half buried among the pebbles.

And when our buddy picked up a piece of it and held it up to the light, he just let out this slow, freaked out, dude. Me and this other buddy of ours scrambled down the ridge to check out what he was seeing, and when he handed me a piece, you could clearly see the negatives were of the headless horse. We spent a whole minute just passing the negatives around in silence, each wondering who would take pictures of something like that, especially with an old school camera when almost everyone under the sun has a zillion megapixel camera phone.

Then we started to wonder if the person responsible for taking the pictures was also somehow responsible for actually cutting the horse's head off or something. In which case, how did they get the skull like that? Or maybe they'd done it before and the dry skull was from a completely different occasion. Then it dawned on us. The film had some pebbles over them and it sure made it look like they were half buried and had been there for a while. But then again, there was hardly any damage or wear or tear to them, so it was more than likely that whoever had left them there had deliberately weighed them down to stop them blowing away or something.

But that meant that they had only been placed there recently, which meant whoever took the pictures might still be around somewhere, maybe even somewhere close. That's when we started to get really spooked because it was all one thing to find something so weird out there in the middle of nowhere, another thing entirely when we might run into the person that did it. We got out of there pretty fast after that. Even though we were exhausted, we knew better than to hang around the area and take a chance when it'd be much safer to just suck it up and relocate. I don't think that I've been able to sleep knowing some kind of monster was even within a few miles of us. It was definitely the weirdest and creepiest thing we'd ever ran into

while out hiking, and although it was just the one time anything like that happened, it certainly made a huge impression on us. After that, we were always very much aware that national parks don't just attract wholesome hiker types, they can attract some pretty messed up people too. A few years back, me and an old hiking buddy reunited to try and complete one of the scrambles on the Hart Mountain Horseshoe Trail here in Alberta. It had been a while since we'd been out together and sadly we found we weren't nearly as fit as we used to be. So after hitting the wall fairly early on, we decided that we'd stick to some of the easier trails and give some encouragement to the other climbers we passed on our way. Anyway, so after walking for a few hours, we settled in for lunch, then decided to head back while we still had daylight on our side. Then on our way back, I remember seeing a climbing

shoe in the creek and thinking, dang, someone's having a bad day. I picked it up to show my buddy, only when I looked over to him, he's as white as a sheet and looking a little further downstream. I have to climb a little to see what he's looking at, but when I get eyes on it, I suddenly understand why he looks so frightened. Further downstream, there are two hikers lying in the shallow water, rope and harnesses still attached but very obviously dead from how broken and twisted up their bodies were. The worst thing was, I suddenly realized that I'd seen the exact same couple climbing maybe two or three hours before. They were having the best time, making their calls, scaling parts of the rock face that

me and my buddy could only dream of at the ages we were at. It was surreal, horrifying, and heartbreaking all at once. They must have slipped and fallen while we were having lunch, so while we were all busy filling our stomachs with the sandwiches and donuts that we'd brought, they were tumbling to their deaths just a few hundred meters away. I remember wondering, why didn't you scream? And having that question haunt me for weeks afterwards. I always figured that I'd be so scared that I'd scream the entire mountain down if I ever felt like that, but the pair of them somehow managed to stay totally quiet

for the whole fall. Maybe they hit their heads early on the way down and were unconscious or something, but I don't know. Another part of me thinks that it was just acceptance or something, or pride that made them shove their fear down so they could die with dignity. Then right as I'm totally absorbed by the horror of what I was looking at, I see this young family heading up the trail behind us. I rushed up onto the path and try to compose myself as I approach, greeting them warmly before asking if I can talk to them for a moment. They seem a little confused and the kids are asking, who's that mommy? But I managed to give the dad a look which told him something

was horribly wrong without freaking the kids out too much. I then invite the guy to walk up the trail with me while he has the good sense to keep his wife and kids back in safety and ignorance. Then as soon as he sees the bodies, he tells me he'll make a stop at the ranger's cabin on the way down to let them know what's happened, while me and my buddy stayed with the bodies to guide the rangers and when they showed up. The dad I ran into must have jogged down the mountain as quickly as he could because I heard the sound of an ATV getting louder and louder within a matter of minutes. The ranger had a radio and whatnot, way more powerful than any of our phones,

which were basically no good at the altitude we were at. And with that, he was able to call on the relevant authorities before telling us that we were free to leave and thanking us for our time. I sometimes wonder if there was ever a chance of saving them, that maybe if we had been in a certain spot a certain time, we might have been able to at least stop some bleeding or call in help in time to actually save their lives. Or maybe with all our experience, we'd have been able to spot them the moment they started pushing themselves a little too far, telling them to slow it down or take a different route or something. But as my buddy said, you can't

think in those terms. If you do, it'll drive you crazy. And I already felt on the verge of a nervous breakdown after seeing the condition their poor bodies were in. After that, we took another long break from hiking and when we finally got back to it last year, after a lot of the restrictions were relaxed, we certainly didn't go back to Heart Mountain. Way too many bad memories there to go back anytime soon. A few years back, I was on a hiking, camping, canoeing trip up near the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada. And trust me, these aren't your normal backyard ponds. For those that don't already know, the boundary waters are these thousands of huge lakes that are all interconnected with each other, and they're basically the holy grail if you're canoeing.

About a week into our trip, we were still pretty much playing things by ear and we didn't really have an itinerary. We just planned to go wherever the wind took us, fishing for our food and otherwise live off the land for about two weeks. We had a GPS and a sat phone to call a helicopter for pickup whenever we were done, which cost us quite a bit of money, but was worth every freaking penny for those wondering if they should arrange it. Anyway, we're about a week in and we're set to canoe a few hours to the next lake. An hour or so in, we're in the middle of this long, narrow lake and to our horror,

we see this storm starting to form on the horizon. Someone pulls out their binoculars and they call out that the waves on the lake are easily hitting 2 feet plus high, which is way, way too much for our dinky canoes. To avoid getting absolutely destroyed by the storm, we pull off to some random clearing on the shore and set up a quick camp so we don't get ourselves and our supplies totally soaked. We then eat some cold food before being forced to stay in our tents for what turned out to be a pretty boring rainy night. Thankfully, by the next morning the whole thing had blown over, leaving us with a pretty serene day of

sunshine to enjoy. In light of that, we figured that we'd take the opportunity to get a little fishing done while we had the best chance of catching some lunch for that day. With that in mind, we gather up our fishing gear and start walking down the shore to find ourselves a good fishing spot. We walk for maybe half a mile before, out of nowhere, we come across yet another campsite, one we had no idea was there the night before. They had a similar setup to ours, a few tents and a campfire in the middle, with the canoes being used to store supplies with the seat covers over them.

Only, unlike our camp, this one was absolutely trashed. There was torn up garbage strewn everywhere, the tents were all ripped up and collapsed, spare clothing was all soaked and just lying there on the ground. Our first thoughts were, who leaves a camp like this? Absolute jerks. Because good outdoors folk never ever do stuff like that. Leave nothing but your boot prints, as the old saying goes. We started looking around for anything to ID the people that had done it, but then the more we looked,

the more we noticed that something was kind of off about the whole scene. Firstly, their garbage was still hoisted into a tree to keep it safe from bears, which is Camp Craft 101 out here. But these guys had it like 20 to 25 feet up in the air, which is actually maybe going overboard a little. It showed that they were way more responsible than we first thought, but then the whole bag had been ripped open. And unless a black bear climbed a tree, the ninja jumped out to the branch, we couldn't see how a bear could have done that at all. Second thing was that literally everything except the canoes were still at the campsite. It looked like all their clothes, packs, food, rope, and pans were still there,

enough for at least two or three people. Half of it was trashed and torn open, mostly the packs, tents, and clothes. The other half was totally untouched but thrown on the ground. To us, it looked like whoever was camped there had just bailed in the middle of the night for some reason, freaked out enough to just ditch hundreds of bucks worth of gear without so much as a second thought. But then, what in God's name could have happened to make them get so scared? I mean, we didn't hear or experience anything during the previous night, so what happened only half a mile away in the middle of that storm, and how close were we to it happening to us instead? Needless to say, we're all thoroughly creeped out at this point, so we call into our helicopter crew. They had access to some pretty powerful radio equipment,

and they monitored the emergency frequencies too, so we were pretty sure that they'd have known if someone had a serious emergency out there. We were all pretty surprised when they said that they hadn't heard anything. But then again, if people at that campsite had just bailed like it seemed that they did, there's a chance that they left their radio, their satellite phone, or even cell phones behind with them too. Besides, if something really bad had happened that night, something life-ending, then that would explain why no one had called it in. Eventually, we just left everything and moved camp. Everybody was pretty upset by it and a day or two later, we ended the whole trip early because it seemed like nobody wanted to be out anymore. I mean, myself included, there was no way I wanted to be out there with stuff like that going on.

Every single one of us was extremely unsettled and we just couldn't seem to focus our minds on anything else. It was without a doubt the single most creepiest thing I'd ever seen on a camping trip before, and what's just as messed up is that we didn't get a single ounce of closure from it. To this day, we're all still in the dark about it, and there's a number of things that still weigh on my mind. At first, we all thought it was just a bear attack. I say just a bear attack, and I know those are obviously really bad, but stuff just didn't make sense enough to line up with that theory. For starters, bears tend not to leave any food uneaten. Even black bears,

the smallest kind, have one heck of an appetite when it comes to free food, so it makes absolutely zero sense considering that there was so much untouched food left over at the camp. On top of that, bears are actually super easy to scare away during the time of year our trip was. When they have cubs with them or just after hibernation, that's when things get nasty, but we deliberately timed our trip not to coincide with either of those times. Then why were all their clothes and stuff torn up? And how did something get high enough to reach the garbage strung up in the tree like that? I mean, it's not impossible that a black bear could have ninjied its way out to a branch, but it'd have to be the most desperate, rabid black

bear in the history of black bears. I've done a lot of other camping and hiking, rafting and biking all around the country, and although I've definitely seen and experienced some crazy, adrenaline-pumping stuff, nothing I've ever seen or experienced has left me so completely creeped out before. I hope I never run into anything like that again, but more importantly, I hope whatever did that to that camp stays far, far away from anywhere I am. When I was younger, I met a man. He was my brother's friend, and he started living with us after his parents had done some despicable things and he was left practically alone and a minor still attending school, though I can't remember if he was emancipated or

supposed to be under someone else's care. I was an annoying little sister then, seven years younger, but I remember him saying to my brother, I don't mind at all, she reminds me of mine. What really gets me about this story, this experience was that I somehow didn't realize until about a month ago how important these events to transpire just might be. For me, there's only two events that are unmistakably him, things that he did to me. The first being one night when I was coming down for a glass of water. I began by opening my heavy bedroom door and continued down the creaky hallway and stairs without at all being silent. Just as I got to the bottom platform, I saw him sitting at the computer. I looked at him,

he looked at me, and I heard an old news report playing of the arrest of his parents. I felt like I was invading his most private moment, a time where he was obviously emotional and raw and I felt horrible. I paused in that moment because it was such an awkward situation. I just wasn't sure how I was supposed to respond next. But in that moment where I was in my own head, he must have closed the tab and reopened another. He had to have hit play, as I imagined it wouldn't have started on its own, and I heard moaning. He just stared at me, and I'm now even deeper in my own head, thinking like, is this happening? It must have been an accident. And it finally got

the sense in me to go back to my room. I can't remember if I ever told anyone that at the time, and I just dismissed this as an accident. The second one happened just as I got out of school. I went up to my room to find my bubble back TV was missing. My brother took it all the time either as his own perceived punishment or because he wanted to use it for whatever reason. So I started by storming into his room and demanding where it was. The prong in my screw on cable cord was getting bad and it was such a hassle to set up again and again and I was aggravated. He tells me he has no idea and he couldn't care less. So confused, I'm now wondering who else would take it.

I'm not grounded. My brother doesn't have it. Could it be his friend? I go up to his room and I knock. He sounds angry and I ask if he took it. Through the door he said he did, and going back to my aggravated state I open it up to see it sitting on the ground, seemingly unused. I then angrily say, why did you take my TV? And before I know it, he's bum-rushing me into a wall and lifts me higher up by my throat. I start yelling at him, yelling in general, trying to fight back and my mom runs up the stairs and screams at him. She tells him to let go of me and to get the F out as my brother comes up out of his room with the most puzzled look on his face asking, what are you doing? His friend

then leaves and I can't remember him coming back and living with us after that. A while later, my brother moved to a new house in the same neighborhood, and for years, he would on and off allow that friend to stay with him. He felt bad for him, thought he was given an unfair start in life, and wanted to help him out. It was before or around this time a man in all black would begin terrorizing me. I've written a story about that on here before so you might possibly recognize it but it all started on All Hallows Eve when I was in 5th grade. It's exhausting to go through all of this again truthfully.

It was something that apparently my mind tried to downplay, dismiss and forget for a while. But recently in therapy I was forced to really face it, to realize it was the origin of who I am today. So I'm going to try to briefly explain what happened without leaving too many details out. There was a knock on the door while I was home. It was the middle of the night and I grew up watching forensic files, law and order, SVU, etc. So I was just naturally like, ugh, yeah, I don't want to open this. But like all the dumb characters in horror movies who die in the beginning, I did. I opened the door and no one was there. So I stepped out onto the porch to look and see if

they were leaving because of the moment I had taken to the side. But there was no one there. At first I thought nothing of it. One of my brother's friends or something, but there was no one there. At first I thought nothing of it, one of my brother's friends or something, but sometime later I was sitting on the couch and from there I saw something dark flash past the kitchen window. It was quick, but I kept thinking, you know, it's probably just my brother or his friends playing a prank or maybe it's just nothing. I had no idea, but I was definitely creeped out. As I sat there, I just had this feeling of being watched, like my senses were telling me something was off.

But that didn't prepare me for when I looked up, and amidst the slight glow of the backyard, I saw the outline of a man in black standing in the window. In the case of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, I froze. That was when I watched as he lightly knocked on the window and did a closed finger wave like he would to a child. Then he just disappears. And to summarize what happened when my family came home, it wasn't my brother, and they were more than convinced it was a prank. There are more details surrounding these more important events and what had transpired between them in my previously written story, but what really matters

is that it never really stopped after that. Anytime I was home alone or it was late at night, he was there, dressed entirely head to toe in black so I'd never be sure of his age, race, nothing. There were phone calls that started at some point but they would only be silenced or a quick breath. And even though I live in a house of people it seemed that it only happened to me. My mom had picked up the silent phone calls but they or she would hang up quickly and she assumed nothing of it. Then the next real event happened. I was again home alone. It was a Friday, I remember, because my friends were at a school football game that I didn't have a ride for. Around that time,

things had kind of slowed down with the man. It seemed like he was coming around and just staring at my house from the backyard far less often. So I was actually feeling pretty relaxed at the time, considering everything. I was watching the TV show House and out of the corner of my eye I saw a dark sudden flash. My stomach dropped, my heart was pounding like a drum. Everything went quiet, I had muted the TV and it was almost like a who blinks first scenario because whoever or whatever it was was making no noise. An eternity had passed in a series of seconds to minutes, until reality came back with the sound of a doorknob. I heard it jiggling. From deafening silence to hearing the unexpected sound of the figurative pin dropping,

my stress response chose correctly for the first time, and I ran. I grabbed my phone, left everything else, and went right out the door. I didn't stop until I reached the outside of town. Then I remember laying underneath the streetlight thinking that this was it, the day it was all building up to. I had been sleeping with a knife under my pillow being unbelieved for years at this point and it all led to this. It was either an attempt or he wasn't done with me yet. He could be coming at any moment or at his very next opportunity. I took those seconds to try to gather my thoughts, catch my breath and then I called my mom. She was out at the bar with

her boyfriend at the time so they picked me up and we went back home. Her boyfriend made us stay in the car and the only thing different than how we left it was that the back door was wide open. It was a complicated antique door and not easily opened even when it wasn't locked, so that should be a huge worry in itself, but of course, they dismissed that too. They said it must have been the cat. Seriously. The most concerning thing for me, though, was that nothing was taken. Most people would naturally first assume it must have been a burglar, but no, nothing was taken at all. And at the time, there was just a basement full of expensive tools and equipment as my mom and her boyfriend would flip houses, and yet not a single thing was gone. There was more than enough time though. From my leaving

the house to coming back had to be about 30 minutes or so. Sometime after that event my neighbor then experienced something too. While sitting on his patio with his girlfriend a man in all black started approaching them from the yard of an abandoned house. My neighbor told him to stop and he didn't. Then he pulled out his gun, said to stop, and he didn't. So my neighbor then fired at the ground, and in that moment, he must have decided it wasn't worth it because he ran off, tripping over a branch on his way out. That was around the time he stopped coming around. But now, as I previously mentioned, therapy has forced me to face this and try to process

it. During the time of those events, naturally, I spent so much time wondering who it could be and why. To kidnap me? To kill me? Do something unspeakable? But I never got any answers from the world, time, or myself until possibly now. My brother's friend, after these events had all transpired and while

sleeping in my brother's car, did something horrifying. He set himself up along a levee, at first just himself in a notebook and would watch people as they walked by. They went along with their day unsuspecting as he would make a record of everyone he saw. Hair color, what they were wearing, race, gender, age, range, how long they were there, how often, was someone or alone. And then one day, with a knife in hand, he pulled a woman off the levee and into a nearby wooded area. She was able to fight him off, and she got away, but not unscathed. He slashed her arm, and I can't even imagine the horror she went through in those moments.

Following that, I'm not sure how they found him or how they knew about the notebook, but the only known address they had for him was my brother's and ours. State and local police, as well as I believe possibly a US Marshal, it was a branch of law enforcement I remember being higher up than usual, came to my door in a sudden swarm. They banged on my door and as I opened, a cop slammed me against the door with his forearm and told me to stay back. I was absolutely clueless as to what was happening,

but it started to click when I saw my brother's friend being walked out in handcuffs from my brother's home. They sat him upon the stairs, feet away from police canines and I could hear them asking where his backpack is. A man said, if you don't tell us where it is, we're going to search both of these houses. I think he sincerely cared about my brother as my brother did for him for all those years and so I assume that's why he then divulged that it was under the dining room table at my brother's home. They then went, collected it, and simply left. I don't know what happened to him, but now years later I wonder if everything that happened to me was because of him. The way he wrote down those people's every movements

terrifies me, yet almost solidifies, in a way, my suspicion. What if the only reason he knew when I was truly home alone, our routines, was because he has a notebook on me, too? My mom's dog, Punky, was a very sweet, loving dog. She was an ESA dog, but trained to be a service dog for PTSD before she lost her leg. I had never seen her get aggressive with anyone in the entire 12 years she lived. She never growled or nipped at anyone and she had no sense of smell so she loved all animals and people. A real gentle giant among our little terriers at 60 pounds. What I'm getting at here was that her barking at something and being aggressive was so wildly uncharacteristic that I only saw it once.

I, an 11-year-old female, was at home with my siblings, a 2-year-old male and a 6-year-old female. My then-stepdad is at work and my mom ran up to the gas station to grab a pack of cigarettes. It was only a mile or two away from us. For reference, we lived in a two-bedroom trailer in the middle of the woods, on a dead-end road at the time, and you had to really make an effort to get down our road, find our house, navigate down our rickety driveway, and find the door. I'm sitting at the computer, having a grand time watching YouTube videos, when all of a sudden all of our dogs, about two Boston Terriers and one Chihuahua, perk up, bark a few times, and start investigating down the hall. My siblings were napping in the bedroom at the end of the hall at the time, so

I figured they just stirred and scared the dogs. But then Punky sits up suddenly, stands up on the couch, and puffs her chest out. Her ears are perked up, her fur standing on end, herunky sits up suddenly, stands up on the couch, and puffs her chest out. Her ears are perked up, her fur standing on end, her tail straight up, and then she barks. Loudly. I mean, the bark booms through the living room and echoes around, and all of a sudden, she lunges off at the couch and goes tearing down the hallway. I'm already on edge because I don't think I've heard her bark, ever at that point. She's a Basenji mix so her bark is more of a baying sound but this was a big loud alert bark. I stand up and go to look down the hallway, ready to fight off what I'm assuming is a shadow monster in the hallway based on how the dogs are acting but then I hear it. Knock, knock, knock. We didn't get visitors because of how weird our

house was location-wise, so my 11-year-old mind had no clue what to do here. The only people who showed up were family, and they didn't knock, so I slowly walked towards the door. The knock drew the attention of the dogs, and they came running back down the hallway, all except for Punky, and I felt better with our three liappy dogs in the room running back down the hallway, all except for Punky, and I felt better with our three liappy dogs in the room with me, even if they all were the size of New York City sewer rats. I open the door just a bit, and standing on our porch is the sketchiest man I think I've ever seen. I can still picture him perfectly, and he was really thin, a taller man with dark hair and a sunken face, bags under his eyes, and this half-managed hair, sort of like he just gave it a quick brush and then figured it was

good enough. Everything about him seemed just a little too thin, a little too shallow, and his clothes were all off too. They were nice, but fake nice, you know? Like a clean, newer looking t-shirt and new jeans, but he had what looked like a suit jacket on. All his clothes were dark, too, despite the fact that it was summer in Texas and the weather was definitely into the hundreds that day. He also had this plain unlabeled bottle in his hand. It looked like the label had been covered up and taped over. I stared up at him in confusion because I definitely don't know this man, and I asked what he wants. He smiles at me in this way that was way too fake, like this exaggerated and forced grin, and he spoke in the same voice retail workers do.

Hey there, kiddo. I'm just trying to sell this here carpet cleaner. And he shakes the bottle at me. Mind if I come in to show you how good it works? Alarms are going off in my head because he just seems so off. Looking back with an adult perspective, the fact that he didn't ask if my parents were home is unnerving because he probably knew they weren't and that's why he was here in the first place. I should have told him to get off our property, that I'd have to go get my mom. Something except what I did say. But I didn't. Instead I just shook my head and said, no, we don't have carpet.

Well, it works on other things. And he took a big step towards the door and shook the bottle at me. I started to freak out and think to close the door but the thing is, our front door didn't even lock. Small town, hard to access home, we never needed a lock and so that's basically useless. I'm sure there's something very wrong about to happen and I'm terrified as I think about what to do in the few seconds I think I have before it does happen when all of a sudden, I hear it. Punky is crept up from the hallway, lower towards the ground with her teeth barred and snarling like she was feral.

She had slobber just dripping down her mouth, her ears were down and she was ready to pounce. The guy hears it too and as I look towards Punky, she tries to lunge past me and I just barely catch her with my leg as she tries her hardest to duck past me and attack the guy. He freaks out and runs off the porch without another word, booking it down the driveway as I let Punky out along with the rest of the dogs and they start chasing him. Our small dogs chase him down the driveway and stop about halfway, barking and jumping about, but Punky stops just on the porch and watches him with her ears perked, just staring in the distance until he disappears. I swear I saw someone join up with him running when he got into the road. The second he disappeared, Punky's entire body

language changed and she went back to being the sweet dog that I knew, no barking or growling, just laying around, mouth and throat covered in slobber still. I realized my siblings are still down the hall and run to check on them, and when I got to the bedroom, my siblings were sleeping soundly still. But the bedroom window was wide open, the curtains pushed all to one side and the items on the dresser in front of the window all shoved around. Someone had tried to climb through the window and no doubt in my mind about it. And from what I can gather, the bedroom window was visible from the couch where Punky was sleeping, so I think someone was trying to climb through the window before Punky went after them and scared

them off and the man at the door was meant to distract me. They definitely didn't expect Punky, a bigger dog, because most of the time she was with my mom inside while our small dogs were the ones that saw public eye more often. I don't know what they intended to do, but after my mom got home, she took all of us to my aunt's house, and on our way there we saw the men walking up someone else's driveway. Men, plural, because we watched a second one split off to wait by the road. Back when I was in middle school, I used to take the bus home from school, but the stop was like

three blocks away from my house, so I used to have to walk a few minutes after I got off the bus. Summer was approaching and I had just turned 13 when I started to notice this guy hanging out in his front yard almost every day at the same time. Looking back on it, I think he was the grown up son of one of our neighbors, maybe only 19 to 20 sort of age, but back then he just seemed as grown as every other adult. Anyways, as the weeks went by, I noticed him smiling at me every time I walked past, but having someone smile at you is hardly the creepiest thing in the world, so I didn't put much thought into it. Then as time passed, he started to wave and say hello to me every time he saw me, and since I was brought up to be cautious but polite to our neighbors,

I always said hi back but always kept my distance. Then this one time, he actually got up from his lawn chair, walked up the driveway, and started trying to talk to me. I just figured he was being friendly when he asked me how school was, and I always answered stuff like, fine like fine thanks as I kept on walking. He obviously wanted to talk more but I was painfully shy at that age so I just moved on by while trying to be as civil as possible. Then finally one day he walks up and asks me how school was and stuff but then as I

went to keep on walking he says something about how he always hated high school and was glad that he dropped out. I was like, I wouldn't know and once again tried to keep on walking. But then he hits me with, wait, you're not in high school? I politely explained that no, I wasn't in high school yet, that I was a 7th grader. He then asks me, well then, how old are you? Which I thought was a dumb question because 7th grade obviously meant that I was either 12 or 13, maybe a little older if I'd been held back or whatever. So I tell him, I'm 13.

And that's when this really, really creepy smile curls on his lips and he responds, 13? No, I don't think so. I was actually kind of offended, thinking that he was accusing me of lying or whatever, so I told him when my birthday was, like that it was going to convince him otherwise, I guess. But that wasn't really the issue at all, and even after I told him, he just kept smiling, then said, well, you sure don't look 13. Here, give me your number, and I'll take you down to Willow Creek sometime for some beers.

I think I felt every inch of my skin on my body trying to crawl off my skeleton when I heard those words, and as the penny finally dropped that his interest in me was far more from neighborly, I walked away faster than I ever had before. I know this might sound a little overly sensitive as he didn't actually touch me or say anything too explicit, but I was still so creeped out that by the time I got to the front door of my house, I was practically on the verge of tears. I was young, but I knew enough about the world to know what he had in mind for me, along with how wrong it was that someone of his age was approaching 13-year-old girls and offering them beer. Upon walking into the kitchen, my mom instantly recognized that something was wrong,

and as soon as she asked me what it was, I just broke down and told her. I remember how she was just so calm about the whole thing, telling me that it's all going to be okay, sweetie. You did the right thing by telling us. I also remember how as I traipsed upstairs to my room, she picked up the phone and started to call someone. Dad wasn't home at his usual time and when he finally did get back home from work, he seemed a little more flustered than usual. I'm guessing it was him

that went over to our neighbor's house to tell them what their son did. And although I don't know exactly how that all went down, the neighbor guy didn't bother me again. He just sat there like a scolded dog whenever I walked past their house on the way home from school. Didn't stop him from staring though, and it gave me the creeps every time I walked past because after accidentally making eye contact a few times and seeing the way that he was looking at me, I knew I wasn't exactly his favorite person anymore. I was always scared that he might just snap as I walked past, that he'd stomp up the driveway and do something in revenge for me telling on him, but thankfully he never did.

Then one day, he just wasn't there anymore. The lawn chair was still there, but it was empty. I can't even tell you dreading that particular stretch of my walk that it was actually a little jarring to think that I was suddenly just free of him. I never saw the guy again after that and honestly, I hope I never bump into him. Ever. Again. To be continued... This happened to me when I was about 10 years old, but even now as an adult in my 30s I remember it like it was yesterday. My parents had taken my sister and I out to a movie and then to get ice cream in celebration of my older sister getting straight A's on her report card. I remember my

dad had gotten off of work later than usual, so by the time the movie was over and we had our ice cream it was well past our bedtime. It didn't matter though, my parents were happy and proud of my sister and we had a great time and we took our time getting home. If it wasn't for what happened when we got there I would have always looked back fondly on this night. We got home at around 10.30. Bedtime was usually 10 so I went straight to my room to put my pajamas on while my sister went to brush her teeth. I remember thinking that it seemed a little more chilly in the house that night but that's the only thing out of the ordinary I can recall from when we first walked in. I barely had a chance to change when I heard my

dad yell our names from what I thought was the kitchen. I didn't know what was wrong but I knew it was bad because I heard fear in his voice for the first time ever. It scared me really bad and I bolted out the door and into the kitchen as fast as I could. My sister was already there and her and my parents were standing very close. My mom looked like she was on the verge of panic and she motioned for me to come close. She wrapped her arms around my sister and I and my dad was already dialing on the house phone. Then I noticed some glass on the floor. I asked what was wrong, but she didn't want to tell me. She said we needed to go outside right away.

As we headed out the front door, I heard my dad talking to a 911 operator and telling him that when we got home, he found our back sliding glass door shattered and objects strewn about the kitchen. We went to the neighbor's house and waited for the police to come. After a few minutes, my dad joined us. He seemed to be well shaken up, which was a new sight to me. The police arrived and searched the house extensively. It was a big scene with all of our neighbors outside and flashing lights illuminating our entire street for hours. They never found anybody in our house. Whoever had been there had come and gone. The thing that gets me is that nothing was stolen. Whoever it was didn't want any

of our possessions. What they did want was to take our canned food out of the pantry and stack them into small pyramids on our kitchen counter. They also turned on the TV in the basement and moved a few random objects to different parts of the house. Very creepy. It was like an insane person had been in our home and did things for reasons that only made sense to him. As the police were finishing up and ready to leave, I heard one of them ask my mom a question. They talked quietly and I'm sure they thought I didn't hear. I pretended not to be listening, but I heard everything. You see, we kept magnetized letters on our fridge. I think I had gotten them for a birthday present a few years before and we used them to leave each other messages for fun sometimes.

The cop was asking my mom if the messages on there that night were done by any of us. It wasn't. I watched my mom turn pale when he told her what it said. It still makes my skin crawl to this very day. It said, Always watching. The police didn't find any fingerprints. They said the intruder had been wearing gloves and for the next few days, the entire family was extremely uneasy. I was absolutely positive that the intruder was still in the house somehow,

that there was a hidden place nobody knew about where he could hide and listen to us. I never shook the feeling that somebody was there and within a few months we decided to move. It was just all too scary for us to stay in that area, and we moved to a house several miles away. We were never bothered again, but I do still think about it. Was it kids playing a prank? Was it some insane person that wanted to torment a random family? Or was it someone that truly had it out for us and who really was always watching? Could it have been a neighbor or someone we knew? These questions still keep me up at night sometimes.

This happened many years ago but the hairs on my neck stand up sometimes when I'm alone at home and I have to check the house to make sure that no one is hiding. I was 14 at the time of the incident. I was home with my brother, grandma, and my baby cousin. My brother had invited some girl over. Please remember that part because it is key to the story. And my brother then introduced us to the girl. She looked normal but seemed a bit nervous. My grandma asked her some questions and told her if her and my brother needed anything to let her know. Anyways, my grandma told me to

stay upstairs and to allow my brother and the girl privacy downstairs. Of course, me being the nosy little sister, I wanted to know everything, especially this new girl my brother brought home. I snuck down the hall quietly and looked over the banister. I saw the girl looking outside the backyard and asking my brother questions like, Who all lives here? Is this your guys' house? It's so nice. Hearing the conversation, I decided to listen to my grandma and go back inside my room. I began to listen to music and felt the urge to look outside my window. I then saw a 2000 Chevrolet Impala parked outside our driveway.

The door was wide open and it appeared to be a man leaving our home with all of our tech items from our home and packing it inside the car. And this feeling of dread came over me. Yo, what's going on? I said. Then the sound of loud talking was heard downstairs and my brother said, please, you don't have to do this. Just let us leave if you know what's best. The girl responded. I hurried and ran to my grandma quietly as I can to let her know what I saw downstairs and what I heard. She didn't understand the severity of what I was telling her and began to laugh, which made me kind of upset because our life could be actually in danger at that moment. I heard tires screech and saw the Chevrolet Impala

speed down the street. I called out to my brother and he said, huh, in a distraught voice. What's going on? What was that man outside? I asked. And he didn't reply. I walked downstairs and saw my brother shaking his head in disbelief looking at where our TV used to be. The police came shortly due to my grandma calling them, and we were later informed that my brother and the girl met for the first time that day off of a dating app. And of course, they met at our home. The girl of course set up the entire robbery. She was just the decoy until her boyfriend came to rob us. But this part I'm about to say makes my blood run cold. The guy who robbed us held my brother at knife point and said if he didn't

comply he would stab all of us upstairs as a punishment for him getting in the way. The cops asked my brother to give him a description but he didn't. Later on the same day we then heard a truck park on the side of the house. And whoever was in it yelled and threw a glass bottle down and drove off. I'm not sure if it was the same man who robbed us but it terrified me nonetheless. I'm grateful nothing happened to my brother though or my family. It just goes to show you that you can't just trust everyone. To be continued... This will be a little long, but it still gives me nightmares. I'm a 21-year-old female. I drive from Miami to Daytona Beach near Orlando almost every other week.

I make sure to fuel up before I start off, but this one day, this one unfortunate day, I didn't. I left Daytona around 12 a.m. driving back to Miami. I drive a black Mustang 40th anniversary here and there. I was jamming to some good music, not paying much attention to what was going on with my fuel tank and around 2.30 to 2.45 AM, the low fuel warning came up. I saw it and started looking for the nearest exit which happened to be Boynton Beach. I'd never been there and had no idea, still don't know how the area is. I took the exit and saw that there's a circle K right off the exit. I was a little relieved because now I at least wouldn't run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. Now with barely any fuel left in my car, I pull up to this gas station. It's totally empty and I cannot even see a single car inside or even outside on the road. There were

no people other than one tall man in a red colored jacket walking around near the side of the gas station store where all the parking is, but he was not very close to the pump that I was at. I was a little scared, but I usually try to shake my fear off by telling myself that it's nothing. This man at this point is looking at the ground but kind of walking in the general direction of my car. I'm still inside the car contemplating whether or not I should get out or stay in. Usually I would have just gotten out and fueled and not feeling scared at all. But that day something in my gut told me to lock the door and wait inside until he either goes away or walks past my

car. At this point, this guy is just a few feet away from my car, still not looking at me. I'm trying to tell myself, it's okay, he doesn't even care that I'm here, I should get out. But then, my worst fears come to life. This man looks straight at me and dashes towards the driver's side door and tries to pry it open. At this point, it's around 3am with no other people in the general vicinity. I literally froze for a second and thought that I was going to die. He pulled on the door handle several times trying to get it to open, but then I somehow got my senses back, turned the car on and floored it.

He didn't let go of the door handle until I started the car and hit the gas pedal, and I'm so thankful that despite the low fuel my car still started up and drove off. I had nothing on me to defend myself, nothing at all other than a plastic fork I got from Panda Express earlier that day. I still can't get over the whole experience, and it still scares the life out of me to that day. I still can't get over the whole experience, and it still scares the life out of me to this day. I'm a 22-year-old woman. This morning I was waiting near, but not quite at, the bus station I always use.

I was minding my business, talking to my friends via text on my phone and regularly looking to see if my bus was coming. Suddenly, I heard someone calling my name. I looked around and saw no one I knew, so I went back to what I was doing. Ten seconds later, I hear it again. This time I noticed it was coming from a white car a few feet away from me. First red flag. I don't know anyone that owns a white car. I went to see who it was, making sure not to get too close to the car and it was an old man that I'd never seen before in my life. Hey, I'm your Uber driver, they said. I looked at him and asked him to repeat what he'd said because I thought I heard him wrong, but I didn't. I gave him a

confused look and told him I wasn't waiting for an Uber, and when I did, he sped away. I didn't get the chance to check the license plate. This was scary in its own right, but the worst part is that I think I have an idea of who it was. You see, about two weeks ago, I received a very, very long text message from someone I didn't have in my contacts. It started with, hello, my name, you don't know who I am, but I see your posts on Facebook every day. It detailed things I posted on there months ago, and he also complimented really weird parts of my body, my ears for example. He also gave me the number of moles I have on my face which I didn't even know myself, demonstrating he had spent a long time examining me. It was obvious he was trying to be romantic but it absolutely came out as creepy instead. I must mention I don't have my

phone number on Facebook either. I double checked because I thought that I never had registered it there and in fact I didn't. I have no idea how or where he got it from. He had other private information that I didn't post either. He didn't even reveal his name or give any information that could lead me to finding out who he was. While this was creepy, I just didn't answer and ignored it because he wasn't threatening me. I didn't consider it that serious. I still told all my friends just in case anything else happened and nothing did, thank god. Not even another text. Until today. I really hope I'm just paranoid and these are two separate incidents but I can't help

but think that if this person was able to get all that information so easily, he could have gotten my home address or routes I take daily too. I have started sharing my live location at all times with my friends who are all worried about my safety since these incidents. I might go to the cops with this, but I'm not too sure if they'll take me seriously. Justice is trash here anyway, so even if I did, I doubt anything would come of it. I'm a 29 non-binary partially deaf and have terrible anxiety, CPTSD. My roommate, a 27-year-old female, has a beautiful American bully. He's a bit skittish due to an abusive background but he's overall a good dog. I have a super comfy couch that I often choose to sleep on over my own bed.

The dog, Rover, barks anytime he hears someone near the door or knocks. It can be annoying but it can also be helpful because often I don't hear it. This night Rover stayed downstairs with me because I was anxious but too lazy to go downstairs into my room. We have a deadbolt that has a keypad and auto locks after 30 seconds. It's about 2am and I wake up to him growling. I've heard him growling before when delivery people come by and what not, but this, it was almost primal. I open my eyes and roll over to see Rover standing between the end of the couch and our front door, hair standing on end and hunched over like a wolf about to take down a deer.

Then I heard it. Someone was banging on the apartment door about three houses down. I was absolutely frozen with fear. I felt the blood leave my face and my instincts were screaming at me to run. This wasn't a let me in, I forgot my keys, it was more frantic I suppose. I had the window open about two inches but used the lock on the bottom to keep it from opening more. I could hear this person mumbling to themselves and shuffling their feet around, then I heard the chirping of my keypad being used.

It was rhythmic, so they were definitely trying actual codes and not just randomly punching buttons. At this point, Rover had backed up and placed himself directly in front of me, still facing the door. Then the doorknob starts to move. Thankfully they entered the wrong code so it was still locked and that's when Rover went into a full frenzy. He rushed the door, body slamming it while barking and growling.

I'd never heard a dog make such a noise. I heard the person stumble back, pause, and then giggle. And that's what scared me the most. It was like I had been submerged in ice water. I had goosebumps and I felt sick. At this point, my roommate had woken up and rushed down the stairs. She saw me frozen on the couch and Rover trying to bust down our metal door to get at whoever was trying to get in. She broke the silence and screamed,

My husband is a cop! We're armed and willing to shoot! A total lie, but it seemed to work as we heard footsteps running away and Rover clicked back to his normal, doofus self. I never sleep with the window open downstairs and have yet to sleep on my couch since. For some background, I'm a man in my late 20s, living in northern Canada. Last weekend, I got a call from a friend telling me that while on his ski-do ride, he went by my cabin as it was on his route and that it looked like someone broke into and smashed out all the windows. Devastated, I went to my shed to load up my ski-do and sled with boards and tarps to repair the windows, hopeful to keep some of the snow out of my cabin until I can properly replace the windows in the spring.

Just as I was about to leave, I got this gut feeling that something was wrong and that I should take a rifle just in case, better to be safe than sorry. Just as I started my ride into the woods, I noticed the sky getting darker and thinking to myself, great, now I have to deal with a storm as well. Luckily it wasn't a snowstorm but a thick fog that rolled in fast. There's nothing more unsettling than being alone in the woods, encased in a thick fog, especially with god knows what around you. I finally get to my cabin and sure enough all of my windows are smashed.

I unload my gear and get to work, trying to get my cabin secure as fast as I can to get out of there. At some point I feel like I'm being watched, which gives me a lump in my throat because I can't see anything in this fog. I hear something moving through the trees and automatically grab my rifle and put my back to the cabin, hoping that if something comes out of the fog that I'll be ready for it. My first thought that it was some idiot who broke into my cabin, coming back under the cover of fog to see what else they could take.

But then I realized that no Ski-Doo approached me, as I would have heard one from miles away as it was so quiet out there. After waiting a while with no more noises coming from the woods, I go back to work, get my windows fixed, and return back to my Ski-Doo to get out of there. After a short ride, I noticed something that looked like potholes in the middle of the trail. It turned out to be polar bear tracks leading directly towards my cabin. That creepy feeling of being watched and the noises from the woods was a polar bear stalking me and was the actual culprit of the break-in at my cabin. What disturbs me the most is that I would never see it coming with all that fog that day and my rifle would be practically useless against such a massive predator.

And to this day, I feel lucky to be alive. To be continued... narrations. I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm EST. 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. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data, located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon. you