The Lets Read Podcast - 209: I WAS HOME ALONE | 22 True Scary Stories | EP 197

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about being Home Alone, Halloween, & The Missing 411...   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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🎵 🎵 🎵 🎵 🎵 🎵 In the snowy mountainous wilderness of Canada's far northwest lies the Nahanni National Park Reserve. Established in 1972, the reserve consists of 11,600 square miles of wild rivers, canyons, and waterfalls. A place of such natural beauty that it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site just six years after it was founded. Yet, the park's spectacular views and unmatched serenity mask a dark and sinister past.

One filled with tribal warfare, mysterious disappearances, and gruesome murder. The Dene First Nations peoples have inhabited the lands around Nahanni National Park Reserve for thousands of years. According to their oral history, the Dene were once locked into a bitter and bloody struggle with a neighboring tribe known as the Naha. The Naha made their homes in the foothills of what are now known as the Mackenzie Mountains, while the Dene dwelled on the valley floors below. This made the Dene particularly susceptible to Naha's lightning-fast raiding techniques, while their own uphill counter-attacks proved bloody and futile affairs.

If the Dene wished to live in peace, they had to strike back at the Naha with such viciousness that they would be forever driven from their mountain homes. But since the Naha warriors vastly outnumbered their own, the Dene would have to execute an effective and decisive ambush, one that would deliver a knockout blow and end the many years of costly conflict. Before they struck, the Dene waited for a new moon, ensuring their attack took place on the darkest night of the month. Then, while creeping up the pitch black hillsides, the Dene planned to silently pounce on any Naha patrols they came across,

cutting their enemies' throats to ensure none of them could raise the alarm. But curiously, even as they got within arrow shot of the main Naha encampment, not a single enemy warrior could be seen. Silence greeted Dene warriors as they reached the perimeter of the enemy camp, and for a moment, it seemed as if though they'd caught their tormentors completely unaware. Yet as they stormed the Naha teepees, tomahawks primed to taste the blood of their foes, they realized the camp was completely deserted.

There were food stocks still remaining in the camp, fires still smoldering away, but there were no Naha tribesmen to be seen. It was as if life at the camp had just suddenly and inexplicably stopped. The incident so terrified the warband that the story has since passed into Dene legend, and it's said that following that night, the warriors dared not venture into the hills anymore lest they be taken by whatever made the Nahar disappear. Hundreds of years later the promise of gold prompted the arrival of European settlers in the area but as the trickle of migrants became a torrent of prospectors

some of their numbers seemed to vanish into thin air. Perhaps the most famous tale is from the year of 1905 and details two brothers named Frank and Willie Macleod. Frank and Willie traipsed through a brutal northwestern winter until they reached a place known as Gold Creek, and after a few weeks of panning and searching, they were rewarded with a sizable amount of gold. The following spring, the brothers returned to Nahanni to collect more gold, only this time they were accompanied by a small team of fellow prospectors. The weather was more favorable, they were in a larger group and each man was more than

capable of surviving the frigid tundra, yet not a single one of them were ever seen again. Three years later, the Macleod's younger brother led a team up into the mountains intent on uncovering the fate of his older siblings. Their only discovery were two skeletons at a creek-side camp down in the valley. Both victims appeared to have their heads torn off. From that day forth, the valley had become known as Dead Men's Valley, while the creek has earned the rather uncreative nickname of Headless Creek. Yet it wasn't just the unfortunate Macleod brothers who mysteriously lost their lives in the park during the early 20th century. At the behest of a large mining corporation,

a Scottish mining engineer had visited Nahanni shortly after the Macleods went missing. His goal was to survey a potential mining site and was being paid handsomely for his work, but for some reason, the engineer failed to return in order to collect his pay. A search party was sent in to Nahanni in order to bring the engineer home alive, but not a single trace of him could be found. Then, when the search party returned, they brought with them a chilling story indeed. In order to aid their navigation of Nahanni's hills and valleys, the search party had enlisted the help of some guides from the Dene tribe.

But when the search team asked their guides to take them up into mountains the engineer had been tasked with surveying, the tribesmen flat out refused. Later reports suggested that the tribesmen were terrified at the prospect of going up into the mountains, especially after sundown, and threatened to abandon their guests should they attempt to climb them. But when asked what exactly scared them so much, the tribesmen seemed unable or unwilling to explain. Over a decade later, in 1917, a Yukon-based prospector by the name of Martin Jorgensen wandered into the hills around Nahanni. He'd heard of many other gold hunters striking it rich in the area, and having exhausted all options in his native territory, he packed up and moved out into the hills in search of his

fortune. A few months later, Martin apparently wrote to his family, informing them that he had stumbled across the biggest gold vein he'd ever seen, and promised them that they'd soon be some of the wealthiest people in all of Yukon. The letter was the last Martin's family had ever heard from him. Another search party was sent into the hills, only this one found the man that they were looking for. Martin was found leaning up against the smoldering wreck of the cabin he'd been renting, his head having been torn clean off. Some have suggested Martin's murder was perpetrated by those envious of his gold discovery, and that the number one suspects should have been whoever came in possession of his gold claim. Yet shortly after he was murdered,

local newspaper reports began to circulate claiming that the beheading incidents were related to so-called headhunters. It's not clear if the term headhunters is a reference to bounty hunters, contract killers, or was merely a nod to the gruesome nature of the crime, but the phrasing certainly frightened those who read the article. Having firmly established a reputation as being a perilous place to explore, visits to the Nahanni National Park dropped off following the initial gold rush. Over time, it became an obscure wilderness that few

people cared or dared to visit, and by the 1940s, the legends of Nahanni were in danger of being forgotten. But by 1946, Canadian mining companies had begun to cast a greedy eye over the relatively untouched Mackenzie Mountains, a portion of which are a protected area of the park. One company tasked a Calgary-based mining expert named Frank M. W. Henderson with surveying several potential mining sites. So, accompanied by his longtime partner Jack Patterson, Frank plotted a course between the sites, then hiked up into the hills to begin his work. One day, Anderson and Patterson decided to split up in order to cover more ground, but agreed to meet at a spot near Virginia Falls when the work day was over. They agreed that the first man to arrive would carve a small symbol

into a large distinctive looking tree. That way, the other would know that they had finished their work and had headed back to camp. When the workday was over, Frank Henderson was the first to arrive at the tree, so he carved the agreed upon symbol and wandered back to camp to await the arrival of his partner. Yet as the hours went by and Jack failed to return to camp, Frank became increasingly worried for his friend and colleague. As night fell and Jack had still not returned to camp, Frank knew that something must have happened to his partner to cause him to be so late. Then at sunrise, when Jack's tent was still empty, Frank hiked off into the woods in search of his missing friend.

The search barely lasted an hour. As Frank walked, he began to feel an increasing sense of disorientation, as once familiar patches of forest started to feel almost alien to him. Before long, he was so overcome with fright that he rushed back to his campsite, packed his things, then fled the overcome with fright that he rushed back to his campsite, packed his things, then fled the area with Jack still missing. Several weeks later, he returned to the Nahanni National Park to search for his missing colleague, but like so many others who'd gone before him, there was no trace of Jack Patterson to be found. But even on that second visit,

with a veritable platoon of men in tow, Frank still felt that same inexplicable terror creeping upon him. That night, Frank and the search team were awoken by a group of First Nations men who rode into camp and warned of something terrifying. The men claimed that they had spotted pale ghostly shapes moving along the valley below, and that the search party should join them in fleeing the area. Naturally, Frank and the team obliged the young men, packed up their things, then hiked out of Nahanni, never to return. To use Frank's own words,

there is absolutely no denying the sinister atmosphere of that whole valley. The weird, continual wailing of the wind is something I won't soon forget. Over the years that have followed, there have been countless other reports of similar deaths and disappearances occurring in the Nahanni National Park. It should also be noted that plane crashes are so common among a section of the Mackenzie Mountains that the area has earned the nickname Funeral Range. So, why are such mysterious and terrifying events so common in Nahanni National Park? Aside from the fact that the place consists of such unforgiving terrain, Nahanni is home to some of the most deadly and active predators in the world. Nahanni is a wilderness in the very sense of the word, and food is scarce for all those that wander its hills. A hungry bear or

wildcat would have no issue with stalking and killing a human, and that might well account for some of the disappearances. Or perhaps there's some other reason why people keep dying and disappearing from Nahanni National Park. Maybe it has something to do with the disappearance of the Naha tribe all those years ago, and to solve one case would answer a thousand-year-old question. But maybe the answer to that question is far too terrifying for us to possibly comprehend. In July of 1971, eight-year-old Douglas Legg joined his family on a trip to New York's Adirondack Mountains. The Leggs had booked themselves a vacation at the Santanoni Estate, a large summer resort frequented by the state's more affluent occupants. The 12,500-acre estate featured around 40 large guest cabins, along with a 24-room main

lodge that boasted five-star drinking and dining facilities. The seamless blend of contemporary luxury and verdant wilderness made Santanoni incredibly popular, and securing a midsummer booking was no small feat. But the legs trip was made extra special by the fact that Santanoni was soon to be closed to the public following an impending sale, meaning they would be one of the last few families to enjoy the estate's rustic opulence before its closure. It should have been the vacation of a lifetime, something the legs would look back on with fondness for years to come. Instead, the trip was one that would haunt young Douglas' parents for the rest of their natural

lives. On the afternoon of July 10th, Douglas joined one of his uncles on what was intended to be a brief leisurely hike through the woods. It was an exceptionally warm day, even for July, and Douglas had opted to wear shorts to keep himself cooler. But as he and his uncle took their first few steps into the forest, they spotted numerous patches of poison ivy sprouting from the overgrowth. At around 3.30pm, Douglas' uncle told him to run back to the cabin and change into a pair of long pants, the thick fabric of which would protect his legs from stinging oils of the poison ivy. The cabin was only a short walk from where they were standing, a few hundred meters at the most,

and as the uncle watched Douglas disappear back down the trail, he expected his return in mere minutes. Yet little Douglas did not reappear, and with each passing minute, his uncle became more and more concerned. Eventually, Douglas' uncle became so agitated that he too traced his steps along the trail, walking all the way back to the guest cabin that they were staying in. It was there that the uncle bumped into Douglas' older brother, who told him that the boy wasn't changing his shorts in the cabin, as he was supposed to be doing, but was instead wandering around the estate's main lodge. Irritated, but assuaged nonetheless, the uncle then wandered over to Santinoni's main lodge to look for Douglas.

Unable to find him there either, the uncle asked one of Douglas' cousins if he'd spotted the young boy tottering around. His cousin had seen him, not around the main lodge, but near a steep ridge about a minute or two's walk from the main lodge. Douglas' uncle once again marched off to search for him, but after walking back and forth along the ridgeline a number of times, he was unable to find him. At that point, Douglas' uncle raised the alarm, informing the boy's parents that he couldn't be found. His parents then rushed to inform the estate's general manager, who ordered a number of his staff to aid the Legg family in their search for young Douglas. But despite scouring

almost every inch of a state until nightfall, calling out the poor boy's name as they went, not a single person was able to find, hide, nor hair of young Douglas. Only then were the police alerted, and what followed would be one of the largest search and rescues the state of New York had ever seen. Over the course of the following week, the search team was bolstered by park rangers, tracker dogs, a mountain rescue team, helicopters equipped with infrared cameras, and a thousand volunteer rescue personnel from around the country. It was a veritable army, but it was one that was hampered by rough terrain, bad weather, and poor organization.

At one point during the search and rescue effort, a bloodhound picked up the boy's scent and then took its handlers through almost 30 miles of dense, hilly forest. The scent trail seemed to end in a small pond, one which was thoroughly searched for any sign of young Douglas. Thankfully, no human remains were discovered from the pond, but that was cold comfort for the search and rescue team, who were faced with a rather terrifying prospect. It was extremely unlikely that a child as young as Douglas had the stamina to navigate the path that his scent trail was on. Therefore, it stood to reason that he had been carried or even dragged by someone considerably stronger. If this was the case, Douglas hadn't

just wandered off, he'd been kidnapped. Not only that, but since the scent trail ended at a small pond, tracking experts believe that Douglas' kidnapper had taken the time to thoroughly wash him down before moving on. Washing the boy down in the pond would have obscured his scent trail, making it impossible for the dogs to continue tracking him. If Douglas' kidnapper knew this and the act was deliberate, it meant the authorities weren't just dealing with some unhinged maniac. They were hunting a cold, calculated predator who had the skills to make his victims disappear. The search continued for six long weeks, with volunteers and professionals alike scouring vast portions of the Adirondack Mountains, but not a trace of eight-year-old Douglas could be found.

It was a search that was as exhausting as it was confounding, with many of the professional search and rescue personnel voicing their frustrations with the fruitless result. It was almost like Douglas and his kidnapper had dropped off the face of the earth once they'd reached that small woodland pond. The lack of witnesses back at the Santanonia estate was another vexing issue for law enforcement. Aside from Douglas' brother and cousin, no one remembered seeing a little boy wandering around at all, let alone did they see one being dragged off into the woods. For the Legg family, the pain and torment of that period was almost unbearable.

His parents later said that sometimes they felt like they were so close to finding Douglas, only to have that feeling snatched away from them time and time again. That cycle of dashed hopes would continue for years on end, with the Legg family launching public appeals for information on multiple occasions, but it would take more than 20 years for the first serious developments to occur. In 1993, a woman approached by the New York State Police informed them that her relative had murdered little Douglas before dumping his body in a Lewis County lake. The woman was then interviewed for a considerable amount of time, and when she was shown a map of the area surrounding the Santinoni estate, she was able to point to the exact lake where Douglas was said to have been

disposed of. This lake was then dragged and examined by specially trained divers, but not a trace of human remains could be found. It was later discovered that the woman was a former psychiatric patient, one that just so happened to be suffering from some variety of false memory syndrome. And despite putting a great deal of faith into her statements, the Legg family were forced to disregard them. But that same year, a man from Montana came forward with some far more reliable information. He claimed that back in 1973 he had been illegally hunting up near the Santa Nonia estate and had stumbled across some skeletal remains that could have easily been those of a child. He was unfamiliar with the story of Douglas' disappearance, but as much as he wanted to report what he'd seen, he couldn't risk being

arrested and fired if the police discovered he'd been poaching. Years later, he was overwhelmed with guilt after hearing of Douglas' disappearance, and wanted to help so bad that he was willing to risk his livelihood to do so. The authorities quickly followed up on the man's claims, combing over the exact area that he'd been hunting, but again, not a trace of Douglas' remains were ever found. However, that didn't mean the hunters' claims were false, as over the course of 20 plus years, it's entirely possible that any remains would have been eaten, carried off by scavengers, or buried under the topsoil of an area too large to dig up. The most recent lead in the case came in the year 2020, when members of the New York State Police Underwater Recovery Team were training at a lake near the Santanonia State. A diver was examining the bottom of the lake, practicing techniques he'd employed for real

if he was ever tasked with recovering human remains from a body of water, and suddenly he felt something small, tough, and dense beneath his fingertips. He picked it up, cleared away some of the dirt, then discovered it was some sort of bone fragment. This once again raised the hopes of the Legg family, who were informed that the bone fragment, later determined to be a piece of skull, might well belong to Douglas. However, after a thorough analysis, it was determined to have belonged to an animal and not a person. Following the discovery of the bone fragment, there had been no other plausible leads in eight-year-old Douglas' disappearance,

and while the case remains open, it's about as cold as it's possible to get. Meanwhile, whatever or whoever was responsible for the boy's disappearance is still out there, and it might just be only a matter of time before they claim another victim. During the summer of 1975, a 21-year-old from New Hampshire by the name of Deborah Carrick decided to embark on the trip of a lifetime. A friend in California had invited Deborah to their wedding, but instead of simply traveling to and fro via bus or train, Debra decided to turn the journey into the mother of all road trips. Before arriving in California a few days before her friend's wedding, Debra planned to stop at every single national park between her and her destination on a mammoth tour of some of the world's largest nature preserves. So on August 2nd, Deborah bid farewell to her parents and boyfriend, then boarded a bus which drove off into the sunset. On August 4th of 1975, Deborah had made it all the way to Rapid City, South Dakota,

and after disembarking the bus, she hitched up to Mount Rushmore in the Wind Cave National Park. A few days later, Deborah was wandering through Yellowstone when she came across a group of similarly aged hikers. Having a great deal in common, she and the hikers became fast friends, and after joining them on the remainder of their hike, Deborah told them the story of her cross-country adventure. The group were enthralled as they were impressed and one of the girls among them offered Deborah a place to stay if she was ever in the neighborhood of Idaho Falls. We know that Deborah took the girl up on her offer, but later parted with them before continuing her hitchhike south.

Following her encounter with the Yellowstone hikers, Deborah would go on to meet a man named Vern sometime between August 9th and 16th. Vern became her new traveling partner for a while, and it's been speculated that the pair were romantically involved, but what we know for certain is that they visited a variety of different parks together. After hiking through Grand Teton National Park, the pair traveled over to Glacier, then looped back through Yellowstone before hitchhiking down to Denver, Colorado on August 16th. That same day, Debra made a note in her journal which simply read Denver, Colorado. Left V. Assuming that V stands for Vern, the curtness of the entry suggests that it could

have been written in anger, and that perhaps Debra couldn't bring herself to write Vern's name. Some might purport that it was Debra's journaling style, or that the lack of detail reflects a non-event. But if parting with Vern was so insignificant, why even mention it at all? Sometime after she wrote the journal entry, Debra called her 14-year-old sister back in New Hampshire using a payphone next to a Greyhound bus station. After some brief small talk, Debra told her sister that she had been traveling around with someone she referred to as Cowboy, but had just parted company with him. This is most likely a reference to Vern and constitutes another instance where Deborah was unable to say his name.

Deborah then told her sister that she would be traveling down to the Grand Canyon in a rented van with three French girls that she'd met in Denver and that she'd call again in a few days in order to talk with her mother and father. However, there is no record of Deborah renting any kind of vehicle in the state of Colorado, and there is no evidence that she ever met three French girls while staying in Denver. If she did, she certainly didn't check into Flagstaff's Flamingo Hotel with them on August 17th, as the hotel's staff later stated that Deborah was definitely traveling alone. The hotel's owners recalled that Debra had paid

with two traveler's checks for a $12 room and how she'd mentioned a possible trip to the Grand Canyon the following day. The next morning, hotel staff witnessed Debra leaving the hotel looking happy and healthy, dead set on visiting the Grand Canyon. We can't be sure if Deborah ever did visit the Grand Canyon that day, but we can be certain of the fact that she never returned to her hotel. In fact, following that morning's sighting by the staff of the Flamingo Hotel, Deborah Carrick was never seen again. After failing to contact them for several days, Deborah's family reported her missing to state police in both Arizona and California.

This prompted several police agencies to begin an intensive search of the region's highways and byways, but what they found was deeply disturbing. August 26th, a handful of Deborah's belongings were found discarded on a stretch of California Highway, about 30 miles west of her final destination, Sebastopol. The significance of the location was chilling, as the bodies of four murdered were found in the area right around the time of Deborah's disappearance. This has led many to believe that Deborah became the victim of an act active serial killer. Yet, if there was a serial murderer on the loose, he certainly hasn't been identified. All four cases connected to the women's corpses remain unsolved and they're unlikely to be closed anytime soon. Following the discovery of her belongings, four of Deborah's traveler's checks would be cashed at a California bank on September 2nd. Witnesses later stated that the person who cashed them was male, while the bank

tellers were completely unaware that the signature used was fraudulent. The next day, more checks were cashed at a bank in Albuquerque, New Mexico, suggesting whoever had taken them from her was fleeing the region in which she'd gone missing. The development bore grim tidings for the Carrick family, and they continued to wait in terror for the news that no parent wants to hear. Then one day, it came. On September 9th, two police officers arrived at the Carrick family home to pass on some heartbreaking news. Their daughter was dead. Her lifeless body had been discovered in a side canyon of the Little Colorado River just off of Highway 64. It appeared that she had been dead for around three weeks and that the cause of death was severe blunt force trauma to her skull.

In short, Deborah had been murdered. What the police left out of their solemn report was that the wounds to Deborah's head and neck were so bad that she could only be identified through her dental records. She had been partially stripped, but investigators were unable to determine if she had been violated prior to her death. It was a devastating discovery, and given how she had been traveling cross-country while mostly alone, the police were faced with a huge task in finding the person who'd taken Debra's life. But there was one name that kept finding its way onto their meager list of suspects. That of William F. Samistill. Samistill was a tow truck driver living in Mojave County at the time of Debra's death. He had also been convicted of four other homicides involving young women,

but was somehow out of prison and living in the area at the time of Debra's murder. Court documents state that during one of Samistill's murders, he had ordered a victim to strip before the assault commenced, but was also careful to redress her once it was over. This led many of the investigation team to believe that Deborah had been a victim of Samistil, and that her unusual state of dress was in line with his modus operandi. However, due to Deborah's corpse being in an advanced stage of decomposition, it was impossible to determine if any such violation had taken place.

Samistow was later convicted of the murder of two hitchhikers from Las Vegas. As in 1978, he had bludgeoned two siblings named Jacqueline and Malcolm Bradshaw after picking them up at a gas station in Barstow. He was also guilty of murdering the 22-year-old daughter of an Arizona-based FBI agent who was on her way to pick up her husband from Tucson airport. Her body was later discovered near Fort Huachuca, and it was determined that she too had been violated prior to her death. His two other murders occurred in similar ways and each time, Zamestil used a blunt object to dispatch his victim after ordering them to redress. This obviously made him the case's prime suspect for a long, long time. And given that he's still alive in a Wisconsin prison, there's still hope that he might still go to trial.

And even as imminent as it seems, the reality is that seeing William Zamasdil convicted of Deborah's murder in the foreseeable future is highly unlikely. Deborah's murder is now 47 years old, and the number of reliable witnesses has diminished dramatically. Her parents have now passed, and only her little sister is left to search for answers. But sadly, unless any new witnesses come forward, or law enforcement recover a previously unknown DNA sample, Deborah's is a case that is increasingly unlikely to be closed. The End During the summer of 2015, 22-year-old Morgan Hymer was working as a commercial guide for Tor West, a Wyoming-based rafting company that organized trips all over the country. The Cody native was on summer break from studying English at the University of Wyoming and was putting his skills and passion as an outdoorsman to use in order to save for some beer money. Morgan was a popular and competent employee,

and his talent for being a river guide was evident from the get-go. Within just a few weeks, he had become a trusted part of Tor West's team and was chosen to accompany a group of clients to the Grand Canyon National Park in northern Arizona. It was Morgan's dream come true. He was actually being paid to indulge in his passions, so naturally he was very excited over the upcoming rafting trip. Little did he know, it was a trip that he would never return from. June 2nd of 2015 marked the sixth of eight days rafting down the Colorado River, and it had been smooth sailing thus far. Yet around 4pm that day,

as the team rested on a cliffside near a geothermal hot spring named Pumpkin Springs, Morgan approached the lead guide and asked to talk to him in private. Then as they strolled out of earshot, Morgan asked permission to take some time off that afternoon. Since they were still in the middle of a rafting trip, there wasn't exactly much for Morgan to see or do in that area. And even though he seemed sound in mind and body, the lead guide asked Morgan if everything was okay. Morgan replied that he was fine, but before the lead guide could get if everything was okay. Morgan replied that he was fine, but before the lead guide could get to the bottom of the issue, they were called away at the request of one of their clients. After telling Morgan that they'd continue the talk after seeing to their clients, the lead guide started making his way back towards the group. He was expecting the

young college student to follow him, but when he turned around, Morgan was gone. The lead guide later said that he believed that Morgan had simply gotten frustrated and had wandered off on his own with every intention of returning. The reality was very different, as Morgan Hymer was never seen again. The lead guide and a handful of the company's clients mounted a brief preliminary search for Morgan, calling out his name wherever they went, but not a single trace of Morgan could be found. So at exactly 7.26pm, the lead guide contacted both police and park rangers to report Morgan missing. The following morning, a large group of search and rescue personnel traveled over to the Grand Canyon National Park to begin searching for the missing student.

At first, the group was hopeful. Morgan's physical fitness and his knowledge of the outdoors meant that he had a better chance than most at surviving the wilderness. But after 48 hours of Morgan's continued absence, they began to fear the worst. The general consensus among the search and rescue teams was that Morgan had suffered some kind of fatal accident. Some suspected he tripped or stumbled while walking near the edge of a cliff, but after sweeping the surrounding areas, Morgan's body was nowhere to be found. Rescue personnel then considered the possibility that Morgan had fallen into the river and drowned,

yet despite an extensive search of the lower portions of the Colorado River, no human corpses were discovered. It seems bizarre that Morgan couldn't be found after wandering off from the group as he was wearing brightly colored clothes and carried a purple water bottle. It seems bizarre that Morgan couldn't be found after wandering off from the group as he was wearing brightly colored clothes and carried a purple water bottle. It wasn't like his body would be difficult to spot if he'd fallen down a cliff and it was only so far that he could float downstream before ending up in a lake somewhere. This was also assuming that Morgan had suffered some kind of head trauma before falling into the water, as by all accounts, he was physically strong and a confident swimmer. It's an extremely rare event that people disappear without a trace while visiting one of our nation's

national parks, but chillingly, that's exactly what appears to have happened to Morgan. Even after the initial six-day search was called off, park rangers continued to patrol the river between river miles 211 and 225, and mounted almost continual foot patrols around Pumpkin Springs. Rangers and volunteers scoured the area for months, but once again, not a single thing was found. It was as if Morgan had simply dropped off the face of the earth. Most agree that the most likely explanation lies somewhere in the region of a tragic accident, and that the Colorado River played a major part in ensuring Morgan's body would never be found. But even all these years later, neither his remains nor his belongings

have ever been recovered, and this pushes us to consider other, less conventional means of explanation. Morgan isn't the only person to suddenly and inexplicably go missing while touring a U national park. But like we've already touched on, he's been unlucky enough to be part of a small group whose bodies have never been recovered. Although many like to suggest that the park's wildlife would quickly and savagely dispose of any human remains, scavengers are unlikely to consume a maroon baseball cap or a purple water bottle, both of which were in Morgan's possession at the time of his disappearance. So, if Morgan's remains aren't lying at the bottom of the Colorado River,

and they weren't recovered from the surrounding national park, where exactly did he go? It's not out of the realm of possibility that Morgan Hymer simply walked to the nearest highway, hitched a ride to the Mexican border, and started a new life for himself south of the border. But if that is what happened, he's yet to contact a heartbroken family who have publicly pleaded with him to get in touch on several different occasions. Beyond this, the only explanations are as preternatural as they are terrifying. On Friday, September 6th of 1997, 73-year-old John Devine decided to hike into Washington's Olympic National Park for a weekend's camping. The Reverend Michael Casting, John's pastor at his hometown of Squim, described him as a

quiet man, good-natured and cheerful, who has a great love for the mountains. Despite his advanced age and the fact that he was legally blind in one eye, John was an experienced outdoorsman and did indeed love the mountains. He was also in impeccable physical shape for a man in his 70s and supplemented a healthy diet with daily exercises to ensure full mobility even at such an advanced age. One of John's rare hiking partners, Greg Balzer, said John often preferred to hike alone, as even younger folks struggle to match his pace. He walks very fast, he said. Sometimes even I can't keep up with him. According to John's loved ones, he had mentioned wanting to climb all 7,000 feet of Mount Baldy,

using a tough, rugged mountain pathway known as the Maynard Burn Trail. Even more youthful hikers would have found this a challenge, but John had spent a great deal of time hiking around the park and it was believed that he'd reached the summit of Mount Baldy with relatively little difficulty. John was last spotted on the afternoon of September 7th while hiking along Grey Wolf Ridge on the park's north side. He had been camping with a friend just outside the park's boundary in the Buckhorn Wilderness area of Olympic National Forest, and after setting off for Mount Baldy in the early morning,

John assured his friend that he would return by the late afternoon. However, as the sun set on September 7th, and John had failed to reappear at his campsite, his friend began to worry. The following morning, when John had still not returned from his hike, his friend was concerned enough to contact John's family, who swiftly reported him missing to local authorities. A dozen search and rescue personnel began to comb the area of Mueller Creek, a region believed to be John's last known whereabouts. But as darkness

began to fall and no traces of John had been uncovered, the first day's search was called off. 23-year-old Jason Berry, who had been a Park Service volunteer for two years at that point, told local media outlets that the terrain was steep and rugged, with bushes that were so thick that it's tough to walk down the drainages. Sergeant Don Kelly of the Clallam County Sheriff's Office, who helped coordinate the search with the National Park Service, was quoted as saying, If he was walking around up there, we would have found him by now, same if he had fallen down and hurt himself. Although if that were the case, there's a chance that we're not going to find him alive. After park rangers conducted initial search of the park

and failed to discover any trace of the missing John, more expensive assets were co-opted to aid in the search. One of these assets was a Bell 205A1 rescue helicopter, piloted by a 35-year-old Kevin Johnston of Springfield, Oregon. He was joined by 52-year-old Rita McMahon, a search volunteer who trained dogs to help with rescue missions, and 31-year-old Taryn Hoover, a seasonal park employee who could help Kevin navigate the proposed search areas. On one flight, they were joined by a trio of other passengers and took off from the mountainside before flying up to the 5,000-foot level of Mount Baldy. Then, about halfway through the proposed flight path, the helicopter's pilot thought he'd spotted someone walking through a snowdrift who fit their missing person's

description. Those in radio contact with the helicopter and its pilot noted that after spotting the person they believed to be John Devine, the crew attempted to gain their attention while flying a little lower to the mountainside. Then suddenly, the pilot somehow lost control of the aircraft and the helicopter went careening into the mountainside. The crash killed three crew members and severely injured the remainder, who were rushed to the Olympic Memorial Hospital in nearby Port Angeles. Once they were lucid enough to be questioned in relation to the crash, the survivors had chilling stories to tell.

One claimed that after gaining the attention of the person on the ground, the helicopter was suddenly struck by something which sent it into a tailspin and caused it to crash. Another survivor claimed that it was a freak gust of wind that downed the chopper, but the fact remains that the only two people who really knew what caused the crash had been killed when the aircraft smashed into the mountainside. There were no prior reports of mechanical troubles with the helicopter and the crash was such a mystery that a National Transportation Safety Board investigator and representatives of Bell Helicopters, Helijet, and the engine manufacturer were sent to the crash site. To this day, the exact cause of the crash has never been fully established,

and with the only real clue being the unintelligible screams of terror that preceded it, it's unlikely that we'll ever know what the true cause was. At the request of his loved ones, the larger search effort was suspended just a week after John's disappearance. They were still reeling from the news of the helicopter crash deaths and argued that John would be devastated that lives had been lost in the search for him. He wouldn't want these people putting themselves at risk for him, said a close neighbor of his. He would have said, back off, I know that.

But in spite of the wishes of his family and friends, Olympic National Park personnel promised to continue looking for John through routine patrols of the Mount Baldy area. The case isn't closed until Mr. Devine is found, Park spokeswoman Barb Mayen said. But it was the consensus of the search team that, with bad weather setting in and six days without even a clue as to where he might be, the chances for survival are really quite slim. Sadly, John Devine was never found, and he was declared legally deceased just a few years ago. But disturbingly, he wasn't the only experienced hiker to become lost in the Olympic National Park that year. Back in June, 21-year-old Port Angeles resident Chris Wurzler became lost while on his first solo overnight backpacking trip. A lot was made of the fact that it was his first solo trip, as it implied that Chris was an inexperienced amateur.

However, Chris had been on many backpacking trips prior to getting lost, and was by no means incapable of fieldcraft and navigation. He entered the park in early June and was expected to return home on the evening of June 6th, but it took Chris almost two weeks to re-emerge from the woods. Just like John Devine, an extensive search effort had failed to pinpoint his location, and following his re-emergence, search and rescue teams were very interested to know exactly where he'd been. Yet when Chris was asked to describe how he'd gotten lost, he had few memories of his time in the park and described feeling disoriented for several days. He only seemed to remember his first and final few hours in the park, and had somehow survived for almost two weeks on a small amount of food and water. Whatever happened to Chris might well be to blame for John Devine's disappearance too, as aside from a freak accident, there aren't many

other explanations for why such an experienced and hearty hiker might disappear. In the aftermath of John's disappearance, a wave of shock and grief crashed over his family, friends, and neighbors. It's like lights have gone out in the neighborhood, said one person who knew him. But as the grief passed, questions remained. Who or what took John Devine that day? And could it be responsible for the many other disappearances that have occurred in our nation's national parks? that day, and could it be responsible for the many other disappearances that have occurred in our nation's national parks? On the morning of July 24th, 2019, 32-year-old Jordan Murray walked into a convenience store in his small hometown of Coombach in Wales. Jordan was a soft-spoken, introverted man with a passion for the great outdoors,

and he took full advantage of the nearby Brecon Beacons National Park with regular hikes and runs. By all accounts, Coombach is a safe, quiet, and pleasant place to live. But that summer, the village's serenity was shattered when a small-town police inquiry became a national media story. Because after purchasing a bottle of water at exactly 11.26am, Jordan walked out of the convenience store, and simply vanished. Since Jordan was such a frequent camper, with some of his trips lasting a week or so at a time, his absence didn't alarm his parents until at least eight days after he disappeared. By the eighth day, his parents had noticed that several of their texts to Jordan had remained unanswered. This was unusual as Jordan not only conserved his phone battery during his trips, but often carried a small portable charger with him to ensure that

he could contact emergency services in the event of an accident. After failing to return their calls for eight full days, Jordan's parents drove over to his apartment to perform a welfare check. They gained access to his building, found his room, then noticed something extremely concerning. The front door of their son's apartment was wide open. When they walked inside, John's parents discovered that his PlayStation was still switched on and that his mobile phone was plugged into its charger. It was as if he'd intended to leave his apartment for a few minutes, then suddenly decided to never return.

Following the arrival of two South Wales police officers, Jordan's parents helped them sort through their son's belongings in an attempt to determine if anything was missing. And this is how the police discovered that a black rucksack, a camping burner, a head lamp, and a pair of black trainers were all missing from Jordan's apartment. This changed the narrative slightly. Jordan had indeed fled his apartment suddenly, but it had been with a kind of bug out bag, along with a head lamp to help him see at night. Police determined that there were no signs of any

struggle and a DNA analysis of the property showed that only Jordan's was present at the scene. So, what had prompted him to flee his lodging so quickly? Law enforcement began to canvas Jordan's neighborhood but none of them seemed to know anything regarding his sudden disappearance and with a lack of any other information, the police began to theorize that Jordan had suffered an accident after heading out on an impromptu camping trip. With that in mind, search and rescue teams were called in to scour the surrounding areas, with a particular focus on the Brecken Beacons, since Jordan had been known to frequently visit the area. An extensive array of search and rescue assets were deployed to aid the search, including thermal imaging drones, tracker dogs, and night vision equipment.

But unfortunately, strong winds and torrential rain hindered the team's attempts to mount an effective search. With steep hillsides turning to mud, the terrain became too dangerous to traverse, and efforts were consequently postponed. However, the lead search officer was steadfast in his belief that Jordan was not living rough in the area because he probably would have taken his phone, wallet, and a wider range of camping equipment. The search recommenced as soon as possible, but even after extensive patrols of the surrounding countryside, no trace of Jordan could be found. A whole year went by,

and Jordan remained a missing person. Yet in January of 2021, the investigation was reinvigorated after a possible sighting was reported 120 miles away from Coombach, in a West Midlands town named Stratford-upon-Avon. A person claimed that back in September of 2020, he had spoken to a man in Stratford who had been living rough. In their conversation, this man stated that he was living off the grid, that he was homeless, and interestingly, that he used to live in Wales. It was only months later, after seeing an online post that detailed Jordan's disappearance, that he realized that he'd been speaking to the missing person. Jordan's family has since made regular trips to the area in order to search for him,

but so far, they'd had no luck. There are two prominent theories regarding what may have happened to Jordan on that day. Perhaps the most reasonable of the two is that Jordan simply chose to go on a hike and suffered some sort of accident. This theory is even more likely when you consider that Jordan had made no contact since he disappeared and is not used as bank account. However, the scene at Jordan's flat is odd to say the least. If Jordan had decided to head out for a camping trip, why would he leave his phone behind, the PlayStation running, and his front door wide open? This raises the question of could Jordan have sought to disappear and start a new life elsewhere? The reported sighting in Stratford would support this,

but if this were the case, why did he decide to leave his wallets and cash behind, money that would be useful in kickstarting a new life? It also seems very unlikely that Jordan would neglect to contact his family in any way. This forces us to consider the idea that Jordan was either murdered or that he had taken his own life, but there is very little evidence to support either of these ideas. The police found no sign of intrusion at the flat, nor any forensic evidence to suggest that there had been any kind of assault. There is also nothing to suggest that Jordan was depressed prior to his disappearance and that he had any idea of taking his own life either. In conclusion, it seems more than likely that Jordan met his fate on the nearby Brecken Beacons,

but if that is the case, why have search and rescue teams been unable to recover his body? The Brecken Beacons are vast, but they still constitute a limited area and are nowhere near as large as national parks over in the US. They also lack the forest cover that might hide Jordan's tracks or potential campsites, meaning that locating him by air should have been a relatively easy feat. So, if Jordan really did just disappear, what was the cause? Perhaps like so many other cases of people going missing in national parks, science just isn't quite ready to explain what has happened or where he's gone. And the truth of Jordan's disappearance may have terrifying implications for our collective reality. Back in 2012, I sat down with my girlfriend and after 18 months of dating, I told her my family's deepest, darkest secret.

Three weeks later I came home from work to find all of her stuff gone and a breakup letter sitting on the kitchen table. I learn not to talk to anyone but my sister about it, but I also feel like if I don't get the stuff off my chest from time to time, it'll just eat me alive from the inside out. I've survived this long by talking to therapists, but at this point, I view therapy like atheists view confessional booths. They're a nice novelty, but they're inconsequential. The internet, on the other hand, is an altogether different beast. Not only can I remain anonymous, but you can too. And just like it allows me to say things I'd never tell a person face to face, it allows you to give me your full and unfettered opinions,

as brutal as they may be. But I'm okay with that, and that's why I'm writing this, because I don't want absolution. I want judgment. I was 12 years old at the time of my discovery, and all summer, I had this one all-consuming obsession. Pokemon Red. I put hours and hours into catching and training all original 150 Pokemon. Then when I beat the Elite Four and completed my Pokedex, I just deleted my save and started all over again. But in showing that I loved playing Pokemon so much, I gave my parents a way of punishing me whenever I misbehaved. They were great parents to me for the most part and my frequent misdeeds were mostly harmless,

but whenever I failed to do my chores or was rude to my sister, their go-to confiscation item was my Game Boy. It'd go like this. They'd hide my Game Boy somewhere, but I'd always find it. Then I'd get caught playing it and have it taken away again. This meant that I spent a lot of time snooping around their bedroom in my dad's office. And since it was still summer vacation, I had plenty of time to do it. But it was during my little searching sessions that I discovered that my dad had a secret space, hidden away in his office. He normally kept it locked but then during one afternoon snooping I found the key. In his office my dad had this big old antique cabinet that he kept all kinds of junk in and I knew he sometimes hid my gameboy in it. So after having no luck elsewhere I began to search it. I remember sticking my hand into one of the bottom cabinets, leaning in just a little too hard. Then I heard a dull crunch of

wood as the rear wall of the cabinet suddenly gave way. Then when I looked, hoping I hadn't broken it, I saw that there was a small hidden compartment. Due to the dim light, the only thing I recognized at first was the gun, but there was also something that looked like a letter and, more importantly, something shaped like my Game Boy. I reached out to grab it, but as soon as I touched it, I realized it's not my Game Boy. It felt leathery, not the plastic I was used to and as curiosity got the better of me, I pulled it out of the hidey hole to see what it was. It was a journal, this old looking leather bound journal and when I opened it up, I recognized my dad's handwriting. I might have recognized his handwriting but I definitely didn't understand most of what was written.

The entries were clearly dated, but what followed was an unintelligible mess of abbreviations, words, and phrases. There was also these little hand-drawn diagrams of what looked like beds along with stickmen that had their limbs contorted into unnatural positions. I didn't 100% understand what I was looking at, but I just knew from the fact that it was hidden that it was some part of some secret side that Dad didn't show us. I was so filled with grim curiosity that I felt compelled to check the other stuff out too. First came the gun. It was much heavier than they looked in the movies and it was much scarier too. I held it like it was made of glass, not even daring to touch the trigger. I then put it back as slowly and carefully as I could.

I saved the thing that looked like an envelope until last. I figured that it'd be sealed but after retrieving, I saw that it wasn't an envelope at all. It was one of those plastic wallets that one-hour photograph developers give you, the kind that has all your photos and negatives tucked inside. I figured that it might be pictures of my family, since those are the only kind I've ever seen come out of a wallet like that. But the only member of my family present in the pictures was my dad, and this version of him was unlike any I'd ever known. The first few pictures were of a bed somewhere I didn't recognize. It didn't look all that remarkable at first, but then I noticed the

rope tied around the bedposts, and that bad feeling I had started to intensify. The next few pictures were of a bunch of tools all laid out on a wooden table, but I noticed a few other things mixed in with them. There was a hammer, a hand drill, a pair of metal pliers, all home improvement stuff, but there was also a scalpel and other surgical looking tools that looked so sharp it made me wince. The next photographs I saw were of my dad but like I said earlier, there was something really off about him. He'd taken some pictures of himself but he seemed to be particularly interested in the way his eyes looked as some were close up shots of them. I don't know why he didn't just take a look at them in the mirror, but then again, I had no idea why dad was doing any of this stuff, let alone why he wanted to hide it from us. But when I saw the next picture, I got this intense feeling of dread, and I knew

that I was looking at something he'd never want me or mom to ever see. I figured the first person in the selfie was my dad but the face was covered by a kind of cloth sack made of black wire mesh so I couldn't be 100% certain. Assuming that he could see out of it there was no good reason why my dad would want to cover his face up like that. There was also no good reason why he'd want to use it as a blindfold and the thought of him doing something like that filled me with dread. But then, when it came to the next few pictures, that feeling was replaced by one of confusion. The picture showed a young Asian man smiling as he posed next to an art installation somewhere downtown. The next picture was of my dad smiling next to the same art piece. I didn't recognize the guy but I did think it was odd that he looked

way younger than my dad. The happy vibe continued for a few other photos. There were pictures of them drinking together at some bar. Pictures of the Asian guy looking like he was dancing. He was all smiles in all of the pictures, and suddenly, the vibe of the photos changed dramatically. In the next picture I saw, he was standing awkwardly with his arms by his sides with a look of slight fear on his face. The next few showed him tied to the bed. He was looking up at the camera and the terror on his face was even more pronounced. The final picture showed a man in that cloth mask leaning over the guy. I couldn't see what they were doing, but the guy's legs were all tensed up and pulling on the ropes that bound them, almost like he was in an intense amount of pain.

I remember having an incredible visceral reaction to that last picture. So after shoving the photos back into the wallet, I tried to put everything back into the little hidey hole exactly as I'd found it. After that, I abandoned the search for my Game Boy, locked up my dad's office, then spent the rest of the afternoon in my bedroom, swinging back and forth between thinking about what I'd seen and trying to forget about it altogether. When my dad got home from work, he just figured that I was so angry at him for confiscating my Game Boy. Only my mom realized that there was something deeper going on, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her what I'd seen. If I did, it would be the end of my family as I knew it. So, I just kept my mouth shut.

It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to someone about the pictures. I just didn't know how to do it without some kind of familial apocalypse. Besides, I wasn't even 100% sure what I'd actually been looking at. I tried to pretend that I hadn't seen anything, but my relationship with my dad was never the same afterwards. All I could do when I saw his face was picturing him in those photos, wondering what the hell he was doing to that poor, unsuspecting guy. I assumed mom knew nothing about what my dad had been doing in those photographs, and I felt incredibly sorry for her.

But at the same time, I was burdened with the horrific guilt of being the only one who could warn her of not being capable of it. But then the day came when he walked into my bedroom and asked me the one question I'd been dreading for almost a year. When he asked if I'd been in his office recently, the words sent a chill through me. Thankfully, I'd learned to hide my emotions very well, so without looking up from playing Sega, I just flatly told him no. After that, I hoped to God that he wouldn't question me further, and I prayed to hear the sound of the door closing behind him. But the seconds went by and the door didn't close. He just stood there, staring at the back of my head, saying nothing, doing nothing. When he asked me if I was sure, I just kept my eyes locked on the screen, then gave him the most nonchalant denial I could muster. Those were some of the

scariest food moments of my whole life, and even when the door finally closed, I was terrified that he'd be standing there, waiting to have a private talk with me. He wasn't, which was obviously a huge relief, but as I got back to my game, I started to wonder if he'd actually taken me at my word. Then, like a bullet between the eyes, it hit me. Some minor detail from almost two years ago came rushing back into focus. After the dread got too much for me, I'd just shove the photos back into the wallet. What I hadn't done was rearrange them back into their original order. Someone who really knew those photographs, someone who'd pored over them time

and time again, who knew exactly which order they were in. This was obviously a huge problem for me, but as I continued to think on it, I realized something. He couldn't actually accuse me of looking at the pictures. He couldn't just outright accuse anyone because if they weren't the guilty party, they'd know that he'd been hiding something. That little detail was the only thing that saved me from God knows what for years. And with time, the whole thing kind of faded into the background. It was always still there but the idea of my mom finding out about the pictures, of seeing all the heartbreak and the shame in her, I just couldn't let that happen. Don't get me wrong, I was in almost

constant terror of my dad hurting us but with each day that passed it grew easier to reassure myself that he wouldn't. The next time the photos seriously weighed on my mind I was in my second year of college. I was on the opposite side of the country, studying at USC, as far as my grades could take me though. But moving away came with a fresh helping of guilt. I felt like I abandoned my mom and sister to whoever my dad truly was, or at least used to be. I just couldn't do it anymore. I'd spent six years swinging back and forth between anxiety and depression, and it's been years since he'd found out someone had found his little hidey hole, as I call it. If he was going to murder us all in our sleep, I figured that he'd already done it.

But then, without all that stress in my life, my mind started to compulsively focus on finer details. I ended up spending hours at a time poring through news articles that detailed missing persons or dead bodies that had been found from all over the northwest. I didn't know what my dad had actually been doing to that guy. And sometimes I wished that I'd looked at the rest of the photos so I actually knew for certain. But I knew the guy's face, and I knew I'd be able to recognize him if his pictures were included in some missing persons or murder news piece.

On multiple occasions, I considered how utterly futile it was, spending hours at a time reading through random articles that listed the victim as having an Asian-sounding second name. It must have been hundreds from the past decade or so, and when I realized that I didn't actually know when the incident in the photo had taken place, I realized that I was trying to find a needle in a haystack. But then one day, on some rainy Thursday afternoon, I found my needle. I don't want to tell you the poor guy's name because I don't want any of you reaching out to his family, they've definitely already been through enough. But like I said, I found them. I recognized the guy's face from a webpage and it was a smile. I swear I'd have recognized it anywhere, burned into my brain after having stared at those secret photos. The article gave a few details regarding his last known whereabouts but

mentioned that the guy had talked about visiting a friend in the weeks before his disappearance. They went on to plead for any information, basically saying that the police had no idea what had happened to the poor guy. But I knew. I'd known for years. I just didn't quite realize it. Incidentally, the answer to my fixation brought up a whole new question. Just what was I going to do with this information? The answer was simple. Nothing. There was nothing I could do that wouldn't have a devastating effect on my mom and sister.

My sister was still pretty young back then, definitely not the age to process the fact that her father was, at the very minimum, involved in the disappearance of another human being. There was nothing I could do right then, nothing I was okay with, but now that I had my answer, I could at least plan to do something in the future. I didn't quite know when that might be and I wasn't quite sure how I'd go about it, but I knew I was going to confront him about it, at least before he died. Yet as it turned out, it wasn't my dad's impending death that prompted me to put my plan into action. It was my mom's. Two years after I graduated college, I was living and working in Charlotte, North Carolina

when I got a phone call from my little sister. Mom had cancer, terminal cancer, and it was aggressive. She had a few months tops, and that's what the doctor said anyway, and I planned on spending as much time as possible with her during that time. When she finally passed and the truth of what my dad had done could no longer hurt her, I made my move and did something I should have done more than ten years prior. I called my dad, for the first time in what felt like forever, and I gave him an ultimatum. I told him that I knew what he'd done, that it was me that had found the pictures all those years ago. I told him the only thing that stopped me from saying anything was not wanting to destroy our family, and that I wanted mom to live a life of blissful ignorance before I finally tore apart his legacy.

I gave him two choices. He could turn himself in to the police and do the right thing, or I'd tell them everything I'd seen, and how I could link it to the missing persons case from the late 90s that I'd found. And the next day, I got another call from my sister, marking the second time she'd been the bearer of bad news in less than six months. My dad had taken his own life. It came as a shock. I considered the possibility that I might take his own life before I'd put my plan into action, but decided that he just wasn't the type. I figured he'd go on the run, try to move up to Alaska and change his name or something, maybe even leave the country. I guess it showed how little I really knew him, even up until the day he died.

The only thing was, the whole thing didn't die with my dad. There was still more work to be done. I went back home to check his office for the pictures, intent on handing them in to the police police but they were gone. I turned the house upside down, even checked the trash for ashes or things of that nature but I found nothing. He must have destroyed them or disposed them somewhere but that wasn't good enough. He must have known that sooner or later the cops would get him for whatever he'd been a part of. So he just decided to end it all and rob his victim's family of the justice they deserve. I went to the cops anyway, told them everything I knew, and eventually received a call back from two homicide detectives.

They called a handful of times over the course of the next few weeks, a few questions here, a few questions there, but then through answering them, I realized how difficult a task they were faced with after DNA swabs of his office yielded no matches for their victim. There was very little they could really prove, and even if I did manage to turn over the photographs, the only person they showed committing a crime is a man in a mask. All they could do was speculate. Yet, I know it was my dad under there. In my mind, there's no reason why he'd take his own life.

He'd cultivated such a wholesome facade over the years, having successfully concealed a past blackened by sadism and death, that no one thought him capable of such things, and he was far too proud to watch it all crumble in front of him. But even now, it's still not over. My dad's since been considered as a suspect in the disappearances of multiple young men throughout the 90s and early 2000s. I've still yet to hear anything from the police or FBI regarding it, but it's still something that's being actively considered. So now, all these years later, I'm faced with the possibility that my father was an actual serial killer,

and that my silence following the discovery of the photographs enabled him to continue killing. I could be responsible for an untold number of unsolved murders all over the Northwest, and when I tell people that, it's not enough to hear platitudes anymore. So judge me, pour your scorn upon me, I promise you I can take it. Because as far as I'm concerned, I deserve far, far worse. I'm a single dad to a wonderful daughter who has been the light of my life from the very moment she was born. It would be an understatement to say things weren't easy after her mother passed, but we made it through the grief together and that had strengthened our family bond. My daughter had since grown and

flown the nest and we've always had a great relationship, but when she was growing up I found myself gripped by fear that I'd end up losing her too. Sometimes that terror of loneliness was just background noise, something I managed to ignore by busying myself Other times it was overwhelming and I'd become so overly cautious and protective of her That sometimes I feel like I failed her as a father She missed out on a few field trips, a handful of her friends' birthday parties and a whole lot of playdates All because I was just too nervous to leave her alone in a place that I wasn't familiar with. It got to the point where, around the time of her 13th birthday, I realized that I'd never left her home alone before.

Even when it came to short grocery store runs, I'd insist that she'd hit pause on whatever she was doing to join me on whatever errand I was running. That worked when she was younger, but then the older she got, the more she appeared to resent being attached to my hip. The whole thing culminated in a small argument one day, when she was insistent on me leaving her at home so she could finish off some homework while she was still feeling studious. My words, not hers by the way. I won the argument, and she had a face like

thunder during the ride to the grocery store but I started to wonder if I should be relaxing my policies as she got older. A few months later, after a long period of reflection, I walked into her room and told her that I was making a quick run to Target to pick up a few things. She groaned, slumped off her chair, and moved to put her shoes on. Then, with theatrical timing, I told her that I would be going alone. She smiled, the kind of smile that brings a lot of joy as a parent. It was a smile that marked a milestone in both of our lives. She was growing up, and it was time to start giving her some space. I know it might sound pretty dumb but I actually got a little emotional while climbing into the driver's seat and edging

out of our driveway. The whole kids growing up so fast thing is for sure overused but it's overused because it's true. By the time I got to Target I'd fought back all the tears and after repeatedly telling myself everything is going to be fine, I actually began to feel a semblance of calm. Then, as I'm walking up and down the aisles, picking up odds and ends, I feel my phone start to vibrate in my pocket. I pull it out and see it's my daughter calling me, probably to ask me to pick something up for her. I press the green button and bring the phone to my ear and before I can even say anything, all I can hear is screaming and crying. I just left the shopping cart where it was, sprinting out of the store and back towards my car. Then as I was driving back to the apartment, I tried calming her down and getting her to tell me what was happening.

She just kept saying, I don't know. I don't know. I think someone shot a gun. My next question was, are you hurt? And when she replied, yes. I just tossed my phone down, got both hands on the wheel and then started speeding back towards our apartment. Minutes later, I was only two blocks from my apartment when I saw flashing lights in the rearview mirror. I felt sick as I realized that I was faced with two distinct choices. Run from the cops to get to my daughter and risk getting myself

shot or something when I jumped out of my car to run inside, or pull over, try my best to explain the situation, and temporarily condemn my daughter to her fate. To some, that might seem like a real conundrum. But to a parent, absolutely zero thought is involved in the decision making. You help your child, there are no other options. I never thought that I'd ever get into an actual police chase in my life. Aside from a few parking tickets, I've always walked the line and stayed firmly on the right side of the law. So the fact that I was gunning it away from a cop car, praying they'd understand my reasoning, it was surreal in the extreme.

I raced the two blocks back to my apartment, skidded into my driveway, then got out of the car with my hands in the air as the cops raced in behind me. I remember them jumping out too, taking cover behind their open doors, then pointing guns or tasers at me as I screamed at them, I'm so sorry, my daughter's in trouble, I couldn't stop, I can't stop. I kept repeating my story as one of the cops approached with his gun drawn and I don't know if it was the tone of my voice or the look in my eyes but all of a sudden he stops and asks me where my keys are. Recognizing that he was giving me the benefit of the doubt I told him that my front door keys were attached to my car keys and that they were still in the ignition of my car.

He told his partner to keep an eye on me, then he grabs my keys after shutting off my engine then basically runs into my apartment to look for my daughter. That was a truly terrifying few minutes for me because I had no idea what the cops were going to find. I didn't know if it was an intruder still in the apartment or if all they were going to find was my daughter's body and waiting for the answer with a gun pointed at me felt like an eternity. When the cop emerged moments later, leading my daughter out of the apartment, it was probably the purest, most overwhelming sense of relief I've ever felt. But when I saw that she had blood all over her,

I begged the cops to call an ambulance to get her to the hospital. And the one cop who went inside said that he'd wait with her until the EMTs arrived, but the other guy was going to have to arrest me for fleeing a traffic stop. The cop was just doing his job, I know that. There's no way that he could have just let me go for starting a car chase, no matter how small it was, but he gave me dignity of just sitting me in the back seat of the squad car while I was parked across the street. Me getting arrested like that obviously made the situation even more distressing for my daughter who had no idea why I was being held in

the back of that squad car but after she calmed down a little one of the cops checked her injuries and came over to tell me that she'd be okay and that all her injuries were basically superficial. I asked him if it was 100% sure because my daughter had mentioned something about a gunshot when she called me but the cop was able to assure me that she had no gunshot wounds, just a bunch of glass cuts to her upper arm and lower cheek. Again, I felt this overwhelming sense of relief and for the second time that day, I found myself fighting back tears. A few minutes later, the EMT showed up. Then after a quick examination of my daughter's injuries,

she was driven to the hospital to get stitches. That was my cue to be taken to jail, but I was out in bail just a few hours later after being given a court summons for fleeing the traffic stop. I immediately drove over to the hospital to pick up my daughter who by then had a line of stitches along the worst of her wounds which ran along her jawline. On the way back to our apartment I got her to tell me exactly what had happened to cause her, as obviously I still didn't understand how a gunshot had caused glass injuries. She said that she was making a sandwich and getting a glass of water and had just placed the glass of water down in front of her on our little breakfast nook when it suddenly exploded. The explosion of glass was what caused the cuts on her arm and face and right around the same time,

she said that she had heard a loud bang coming from the apartment next door. Now without boring you with too much detail, the layout of our kitchen is such that there's no way someone could have actually aimed a shot at her. But when I got back home and spoke to the cops who were still there, all became clear. They had already arrested our neighbor in the apartment next door as the angle of the bullet holes in our kitchen showed exactly where the shot had come from. Apparently, the guy was drunk, or at least some other kind of intoxicated, and had decided to clean his guns without checking if they were actually loaded or not. He admitted to the whole thing

and apparently broke down crying in the cop car, thinking he'd seriously hurt someone after hearing all the screaming. He caught a reckless endangerment charge, which he was eventually convicted of, but he didn't see any jail time for it. He only has his guns confiscated after receiving a suspended sentence in mandatory substance counseling and call me biased, but I think that he should have been handed a whole lot more. Me on the other hand, I pled no contest to the traffic stop thing. But after the judge learned of the circumstances and how they were related to the other guy's reckless endangerment charge, I only had to pay $500 mandatory fine instead of having my license suspended for a year on top of that. According to my attorney, it was about as good a deal as I was ever going to get as obviously no one is above the law and the cops take fleeing

traffic stops very, very seriously. In the end, it was clear to both me and my daughter that we had both dodged a major disaster and it was something that I was very thankful for But just as I'd gotten comfortable with giving my daughter some space and privacy in her life the anxiety of losing her somehow came back a hundred times stronger and it wreaked havoc on my mental health For the first time in my life, I actively sought out therapy on my sister's recommendations, and I have to admit that weekly sessions put a serious dent in my paranoia and overprotectiveness. I never turned out to be one of those hands-off, carefree parents.

I'm still not, even now that she's moved out and living in some fancy apartment downtown. I'll always be her father. Not a thing in the world is going to change that, but this also means that until the day that I'm in the dirt, I'll always be scared. On the evening of December 8th, 1977, 25-year-old Nancy Fox pulled into her driveway after a long day of working at a local jewelry store. She'd lived alone in a modest duplex in Wichita, Kansas, but maintained regular contact with her friends and relatives by phone. After walking through a front door, Nancy put down her things, then attempted to call a friend that she planned to have dinner with that evening. Yet when she picked up the clunky plastic handset and put the receiver to her ear, there was nothing. Nancy then pressed a finger to the phone's switch arms, hoping that a simple line reset would remedy the problem.

But still, there was silence. It was a silence that was only broken by the sound of a man's voice coming from the room behind her. Hello, Nancy. When Nancy turned, her heart was pounding from the sudden fright, and she didn't recognize the face that greeted her, but she did recognize that the stranger held a pistol in his hand, a pistol that was pointed at her. The man told her not to bother trying to call anyone,

as he'd personally cut the phone line before breaking into her home. Then, when Nancy asked who the man was, he promised to tell her if she helped him with something. With his pistol still trained on her, the man explained to Nancy that he had a certain medical condition, one alleviated by some very unorthodox methods. The man went on to assure Nancy that if she cooperated, she wouldn't be hurt, and then he ordered her into a bathroom and told her to take off her clothes. After doing so, Nancy was tied up and forced to watch her captor disrobe and turn. Then, in a horrifying exhibition of bloodthirsty deception,

the man kneeled down beside her and began to strangle her. As the man choked the life out of Nancy, he told her that she wasn't the first vulnerable young woman he'd killed, adding that he'd slaughtered an entire family before she finally caught his eye. Nancy bucked and writhed in the man's grip, but he only squeezed harder, telling her to stop fighting and accept her fate. Minutes later, Nancy Fox was dead. The following morning, the local police department received a call from a nearby payphone. After picking up the phone and greeting the caller, an officer heard a man's voice saying, you will find a homicide at 843 South Pershing, Nancy Fox. Then when the officer tried to gather more information, the caller swiftly

hung up. Uniformed officers rushed to Nancy's address, finding her nude and lifeless on her bedroom floor. Then after informing her family of the heartbreaking news, the police issued a public statement regarding her murder. Among the torrent of tips and information that came flooding in from the general public, the police came across a handwritten letter from a man claiming to be Nancy's murderer. He titled the letter, O Death to Nancy, and described how he was driven to kill by what he called Factor X, the same preternatural compulsion to kill which fueled the likes of Jack the Ripper or Son of Sam. The man finished the letter by confessing to the murders of Catherine Bright, Shirley Vian Relford, and three members of the Otero family before signing off with three little letters that would come to haunt police departments both local and national.

B.T BTK. BTK stood for Bind, Torture, Kill. Suggesting the killer's method of inflicting terror was his absolute identity. Yet despite his ravenous urge to kill, BTK managed to keep his bloodlust under wraps following the flurry of media attention that his letter received. For eight long years he remained silent, but on May 5th of 1985, the discovery of a woman's body near Wichita's North Greenwich Road signaled BTK's grim return. 53-year-old Maureen Hedge had been murdered at home, before being tied up, terrorized, and dispatched. But before disposing of her body, her killer transported it to a nearby Lutheran church, where he photographed Maureen's lifeless corpse after posing it in a number of suggestive positions. It was quite obvious the work of BTK, yet the authorities were no closer to identifying him as they were eight years prior when he committed his first murder.

Following the murders of the Wichita-based Fogger family, the police were forced to turn to the public in the search for information, and once again, BTK responded by taunting them with a handwritten letter. Although the murders were his handiwork, BTK commended the killer, stating they had performed admirable work. He also mocked investigators for their apparent inability to catch him and assured them that their continued ineptitude would result in a cold case. For a while, BTK was right. In his late 2004, law enforcement believed that there was very little chance he'd be brought to justice. Yet BTK had reveled in the media attention he'd received, and the idea that his work was on the

verge of being forgotten about was unbearable to him. To rekindle some of his infamy, BTK wrote a letter to the Wichita Eagle under the name Bill Thomas Killman. In it, BTK claimed to have murdered Vicki Wegerle on September 16th of 1986 and enclosed photographs of the crime scene as well as a photograph of her stolen driver's license. This essentially confirmed what the police already suspected since Vicky's murder bore all of BTK's hallmarks, but a lot had changed since 1986. After extracting the DNA from a skin sample taken from underneath Vicky's fingernails, law enforcement took their first real step towards unmasking

one of the most brutal serial killers in American history. 2004 also saw Wichita television station KAKE receive a letter with chapter headings for the BTK story, along with a word puzzle which BTK seemed to have personally created. A few weeks later, a package was found taped to a Wichita stop sign. Then, after making its way into the hands of police officers, they discovered it contained graphic and detailed descriptions of the Otero murders, along with a sketch which was titled, The Thrill is My Bill. BTK also claimed that he was writing an autobiography called The BTK Story and teased that chapter one 1 would be entitled A Serial Killer is Born.

Another package was later found in Wichita's Murdoch Park, containing Nancy Fox's driver's license. An attached letter consisted of the same unhinged ramblings as the last, but the package's contents were markedly different from those that had been discovered previously. In addition to the driver's license and letter, the package was found to contain a Barbie doll. Its hands and feet had been bound with chicken wire, and a small, thick sheet of plastic bags had been placed over its head. It was evidently a recreation of how Nancy Fox had spent her final few hours on this earth, and the media's reporting of the package brought a great deal of distress to her friends and loved ones. At one point, BTK contacted the police with a rather unusual question. He wanted to know if floppy disks could be traced to a particular computer,

as due to his increasing fear of DNA identification, he intended to start using them. The police answered his question in a newspaper and posted in the Wichita Eagle and assured BTK sent a purple 1.4 megabyte floppy disk to a local TV station, the police immediately analyzed the metadata it contained. One piece of data was pulled from a Microsoft Word document that BTK must have thought he'd deleted, and appeared to contain the words, Christ Lutheran Church. Police also noted that it was last modified by a user who called themselves Dennis. A quick Google search revealed that the president of the Christ Lutheran Church Council was named Dennis Rader, a man who drove the exact same vehicle as BTK was believed to possess, a black Jeep Cherokee. The overwhelming suspicion led police to test a

pap smear taken from Rader's daughter at the Kansas State University Medical Clinic. When compared to the DNA taken from underneath Vicki Wergerle's fingernails, the test showed a familial match. It was all the evidence police needed to place Dennis Rader under arrest, and he was later apprehended while driving near his home in Park City shortly after noon on February 25th, 2005. According to the arrest report, a police officer asked Rader, Do you know why you're going downtown? With his reply being, Oh, I have suspicions why. Once Rader was in custody and a sizable amount of evidence had been stacked against him,

detectives were so certain that Rader was guilty that they excitedly announced simply, BTK has been arrested. Rader was then formally charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder in February of 2005, and his bail was set at a jaw-dropping $10 million. At his arraignment, Rader refused to address the courtroom, and a judge was forced to lodge a plea of not guilty on his behalf. However, at the scheduled trial date on June 17th, Rader changed his plea to guilty and confessed to each of his murders in detail. He offered no apologies for his actions, and witnesses later stated that he was incredibly cold in his recollections. At his sentencing, Rader was handed ten consecutive life

sentences by a judge that described him as pure evil, and he was later housed in Kansas' El Dorado Correctional Facility. Rader is now kept in solitary confinement for his own safety. He is permitted only one hour of daily exercise and just three showers per week, as he is so loathed by the rest of the prison population that officials cannot guarantee his safety outside of these constraints. These procedures are more than likely to remain until the day he dies, as just like Rader intended, the name BTK continues to live in infamy, and has become a byword for the brutal torture and murder of innocent young women. I grew up in a shotgun house down in Louisiana. They're shaped like rectangles with doors at the short ends and they're called shotgun houses because you can fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would fly out the back door. They were small homes

built for low-income families and my mom worked hard to be able to purchase it through a rent-to-buy scheme. But working so hard meant that I grew up a latchkey kid. Sometimes I'd have to get myself to school in the morning because she was working crazy hours and most of the time when I got home afterwards there'd be a hungry man frozen dinner in the freezer for me to eat and a note saying that she'd be back at whatever time. I didn't see her nearly as much as I wanted to and I'm thankful for all the work that she put into keeping us afloat but her being out of the house so much opened the door for one of the creepiest experiences of my whole life. It all started when I got home

from school one afternoon. I walked through the door, got my food, and then sat in front of the TV while I ate. I'm just sitting there, finishing off my hungry man when I see something moving in the corner of my eye, right near the front window. Immediately I turned my head to see what it is and I noticed a white man just standing there looking through the window at me. For a few moments after we made eye contact he just continued to stare at me then his lips started to curl into this creepy looking smile. I remember how his face looked all those years later. How the lower half seemed to be smiling, but his eyes were cold. I was so nervous that all I could think to do was look away. I was a shy kid, and I still deal with a degree of social anxiety in my adult life,

but back then I barely engaged with anyone, let alone complete strangers. I just waited there, watching TV and trying to ignore the guy until finally, his face disappeared from view. I waited a few more minutes, too scared to close the curtains in case his face suddenly appeared again, until eventually I plucked up the courage to walk over and close them. I think I've been sitting down again for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, thinking I was rid of the guy when I heard someone pressing the buzzer to our house. My mom always told me never to answer the door to anyone I didn't know, and that anyone I did would always announce themselves when they called over so I'd know

it was safe. So, when I heard the buzzer but no one hollered, I just stayed there on the couch and carried on watching TV. The buzzer sounded a few more times but I still didn't move and I remember praying that it wasn't the guy with the creepy smile at the door. But when I heard the voice that called out to me, I just knew that it was him. Somehow, the voice matched the face, and my skin crawled as the sound of it reached my ears. Little girl, I know you're in there. I just locked up, barely breathing as he continued to push the buzzer. Little girl, I'm a friend of your mommy. Now come and open the door because we need to have a little talk.

I stayed still like a statue on that couch. I'd never seen that man before in my life, and to my knowledge I knew most of my mom's friends, at least by their faces. I think if anyone else had said that, maybe even dropped my mom's name, I'd have opened the door to hear them out, but the guy's smile, the tone of his voice, even at such a young age I knew that he didn't have good intentions. I was terrified, but I just kept quiet, didn't respond, and eventually the buzzing stopped. Again, it took me a little while to settle down again, but when I did, I picked up my hungry man tray and walked into the kitchen to throw it in the trash.

As I walked in, something once again moved in the corner of my eye, and this time, I just about jumped back and dropped my tray when I saw it. I ran over to the window and peered out into our small backyard. I didn't see anything but that doesn't mean I didn't know something was there and I strongly suspected it was the guy who had been trying to get me to open the door. Then, right as I was looking outside, I heard a low rattling then squeaking sound coming from the hallway. I backed up to try and spy where it was coming from and it was definitely coming from the back door, I just couldn't figure out where until one of the screws holding the door handle

together fell out of its socket. I noticed as it fell and hit the wooden paneling, and then I watched as one of the other tiny screws started to turn, unwinding from its socket, loosening with every turn. Someone, and I bet I knew who, was trying to break into our home, and it was only a matter of time before they were inside. I just ran for the front door, bursting out into the street and rushing towards a neighbor's place, the same neighbor that mom had always told me to contact in case of an emergency. I started hammering on their door, praying they were home, and the whole time I was looking over my shoulder expecting the creepy smile guy to appear from behind our house. To this day, I can still remember the rush of absolute terror

as he suddenly appeared at the side walkway, that same grim smile curling his lips as he began to walk towards me. I started screaming, smashing my fists against the door of my neighbor's place, begging them to come to the door. I hear a voice on the other side just before it opened. Then there stood my neighbor, a towel wrapped around them asking me what I was crying for. I begged them to call the cops because a man was trying to get me. When they asked who was trying to get me, I turned, intent on pointing at the man with a creepy smile who, just a few moments ago, had been walking up the side of our house. But when I looked, pointing at the place that I'd spotted him, he was gone.

When the cops showed up and my mom had arrived home, they confirmed that someone had been trying to take the lock off of our back door. Mom was distraught, and kept apologizing to me for not being there to protect me. After that I always stayed with one of our neighbors until she got home from work. The guy never showed up again and I didn't see him around the neighborhood anymore which was obviously a good thing. But I've always been haunted by the idea that he still thinks about the time he almost got a kid. And how if I hadn't noticed what was happening to the back door, he was maybe just minutes away from being able to do whatever he happened to me was when I was about 15 and my mom and

dad had left me home alone while they were into some work dinner related to my dad's job. I was just chilling, watching some TV when I heard a knock at the door. I got up, opened the door and this total stranger basically falls onto our porch face down. I leapt back as he fell, thinking the bloke must have been drunk or something, but as I started shouting at him to go away before I called the police, he just started saying, please, please help me. I took another step back as he turned his face up and I saw this huge slash running through his nose and lips, splitting both of them

in two. I don't know why it happened, but he'd been attacked in the street by someone with a knife, someone who'd both slashed his face and stabbed him in the stomach. Within an hour or so, the fella had been taken away in an ambulance and my parents were back home, comforting me as the police extracted as much information as possible for me. I couldn't tell them much at all, and they left shortly afterward, but that wasn't the end of it for me. I saw that bloke's face in my nightmares most nights, for months on end. In my dreams, he had two full noses, each with their own twin nostrils that dripped blood down to two different mouths. I ended up painting the face for my nightmares a few years later, and although the painting itself didn't survive the years that have passed, I still have a photograph of it that I might upload to Reddit sometime.

Let me know if you guys are interested in seeing it, but I'll have to mark it not safe for work because it definitely isn't something for the faint of heart. Back when we were teenagers, me and a few mates of mine used to go hang around in the woods near this lock about an hour's walk from the small town we grew up in. We'd only really head out there to get some privacy from our parents, somewhere that we could drink and smoke and look at page three models. But then as we got older we found ourselves returning to our old haunt to unplug with a few days of nostalgic camping. We'd just rock up, switch off our phones, crack open a few tins, and just detox from all the filth and grime of big city living. At some point during our few days camping, we'd head into this wee village close by, pick up a wee bit of square sausage and some bread rolls, go to the pub for a bit, then wander back in the early evening before we were too drunk to walk. But on this particular occasion, we ended up trying to take a bit of a

shortcut through the woods instead of just sticking to the road. So as we're walking through the woods, belting out 90s bangers, I spot something colorful through the trees, something that looked a lot like tent fabric. I hushed the lads up and started making my way towards it with the intention of apologizing for the racket. I could smell a campfire burning, so I assumed someone was still there, and I started calling out, Hello there. Sorry about the racket. Hope we didn't disturb you too much. I waited for a second, but no reply came back. After a quick nosy I noticed some used cooking utensils laid out on a bit of a tarp next to the campfire. Someone had obviously been there fairly recently and had probably recently finished eating and had probably just wandered off for a slash. We waited for him

to come back just to be friendly and say hi but a good few minutes went by and no one showed up at all. It wasn't long before we got tired of waiting around and as we were leaving the campsite, headed down this trail we didn't even know was there that ended up coming out on the lock. We started noticing things among the trees lining the trail. We saw a box of matches, an odd slider, a fishing hat, and one of my old pals says something snobby about them having a messy campsite. But then, a thought occurred to me. It looked almost like someone had dropped or lost all those things while being chased away from their camp by something. When I suggested it, my pals thought that I had gone mental for a second, and they started to see it too,

and the closer we got to the water, the more clothing we'd spotted. It all looked like clothes from one person as well. One t-shirt, one pair of hiking shorts, and then out of nowhere, one of my pals starts laughing his head off. We all ask him what he's laughing at, and he points off to the lock and keeps saying, look, look. I turned to face where he was pointing, and maybe two to three hundred meters away, right at the edge of the lock where some long reeds were growing, we saw something pale splashing in the water before disappearing into the reeds.

They took off all their clothes and went for a wee swim. My mate laughed. Now they've heard us and they're hiding somewhere in the nude, just terrified of being spotted or something. I burst out laughing too. By the looks of things, he was dead right. We ended up shouting sorry mate a few times and just making sure whoever it was could hear us, then we wandered back to our own camp, still laughing as we went. After that, we made ourselves a wee bit of tea, had a few drinks, and then went off to sleep. That night, I got only about an hour or two of decent sleep at the most. Sleeping in a tent isn't the

most comfortable thing in the world, but it wasn't that. The problem was that whenever I drifted off, I kept having these really vivid dreams about my granddad. He died of cancer back when I was nine and the battle had been a rough one. My last memory of him was going to see him in hospice when he was on his last legs, and I just knew that it'd be the last time that I saw him alive. He looked awful. He'd lost a ton of weight, could hardly move, hardly talk, and it was just heartbreaking to see him like that. The next thing, my mom starts telling him, look, Francis is here, say hi to Francis, and then starts asking him all these questions about how he is and how the nurses are treating him. He doesn't answer any of the

questions, not really, all he did was sort of groan in response. But then when she asks him, are you sleeping okay? He shakes his head and just groans, it hurts. And that was all I could think about after I had gotten home from the visit, how he just said, it hurts, and that got me wondering if it really was painful to die. Dark thoughts for a nine year old, I'm sure you'll agree, but that memory has continued with me into later life. I don't think about it often and if I do, it doesn't particularly upset me anymore. But that night, in my dreams, I felt just as frightened in the face of the mortality as I had as a nine-year-old looking at my granddad. So, now you know how shaken up I was when I woke up that night in the pitch darkness of my tent with a little bit of that childhood dread still lingering

in my chest. The next morning all my mates looked like they were hanging out of their butts and after breakfast we were all still really narked. I asked if any of them had some of the hair of the old dog and that's when I find out that none of them are actually hungover. What's got them in a bad mood was the complete lack of sleep. The conversation then touches on why none of us slept well, and one by one, we all mention how we had bad dreams and how they kept us up. We all just stood there looking at each other until we Davey broke out into nervous laughter while saying things like, Is this a joke? Are you all trying to play a prank on me? Is that it?

One by one, we all confirmed it was no prank, and that it wasn't just him that was a bit freaked out. We were all a bit freaked out by that point. I say freaked out, we weren't terrified. Only Wee Davey was into all that supernatural stuff so he was definitely feeling it more than us but then after a few jokes about up being stuck in the twilight zone episode we just cracked on. Now later that afternoon we're chilling down by the lock and I start looking across the water to where the skinny dipper's campsite must have been. I asked one of the lads if they'd reckon we might spot him going for a dip

since the weather was behaving. We just kind of laughed at first but I couldn't move on from it. I kept wondering if he was actually alright and if there was anything to my initial gut feeling that something was wrong. After a few minutes of thinking it over I just couldn't sit still anymore. I asked if anyone wanted to come with me to check on the campsite that we'd seen the day before. None of my pals could be bothered, but I felt like I couldn't relax properly until I'd walked over and had a look. So off I go through the woods, tracing my way around the lake to have a look for the other camp. But when I found it, I noticed that not a single thing had been moved since the day before. The tent and all the stuff around it were in the exact same position, and all the stuff

leading up the trail to the lock was still there too. Definitely not a good sign. I had a little mooch around the campsite, poked my head into the tent too, and that's when I saw a mobile phone just lying on a sleeping bag. Seeing that phone, something people don't go anywhere without these days, was when I came to the conclusion that something really bad had happened to the campsite. It wasn't just some innocent case of a skinny dipper. Someone had fled the area in a hurry and yeah, they might have run towards the lock but it wasn't for a dip. When I walked back around the lock I kept my eye on the surface waters and shorelines looking for any signs of a floating or drowned body. I didn't see anything but the whole walk back I felt really panicky and the first thing I did was call the police to the bemusement of my pals.

They thought that I was just overreacting, but the way I saw it, it was better to be safe than sorry. If someone needed help and later died or something and we'd all seen the signs and done nothing about it, I was going to feel like an absolute idiot. The police thanked me for the tip, told me they'd check it out when they had a chance, then we hung up. After that, I actually started to relax a bit. It was no longer my problem, and I had been a good citizen, done my part, and that was that. That night I slept like a baby, and everyone else did too, and our last day of camping was actually quite a good one. Only notable thing was when we were doing some fishing on the loch, and we spotted two police officers walking around the trail that had the clothes lying around it.

They got us talking, but it wasn't like I was fixated on it. They were doing their job and I could just relax. Once again, we go back to camp and sleep like babies. And then the next morning, we get up, pack our gear away, and start hiking off back into town where we'd parked our cars. It was me that suggested that we walk by the abandoned campsite on the way back just to check if there were any updates, but I honestly wish I hadn't now. Because when we got there, saw a police officer standing guard over the site, and asked them what the score was. The response wasn't good. The policeman told us that we couldn't come any closer to the campsite

as a gentleman had lost his life down by the lock and his belongings were being considered evidence. We just spilled our guts and told him everything we knew, including the part about how we'd seen him skinny dipping the day after we arrived. The Bobby thanked us, but made it clear that he knew next to nothing about the investigation, and that they were still waiting for forensics to arrive to start putting together clues. It was only after we were on the move again that someone raised the possibility that we'd watched the fella drown, and that's how he'd lost his life. It was a horrifying prospect, the idea that we all just laughed and shouted sorry mate as he'd been drowning. But to us, it was impossible. We'd seen the bloke splashing

around the reeds near the edge of the lock, which was hardly deep enough to drown in. That meant that he'd been hurt another way, possibly even murdered. Maybe we hadn't spotted the dead man, but rather the person that had killed him, and we'd been this close to stopping it or getting hurt ourselves. As you can tell, there were a lot of questions and we didn't actually find out what had happened for another week or so, but when we found out, we were devastated. Someone dropped a link in the group text that we'd shared to plan the camping trips. The guy had drowned in maybe two feet of water and we'd actually watched it happen. But then, he must have been injured in some way that he couldn't stand up, and we didn't hear any cries for help or anything.

So was he being held down, or did someone actually drown the guy after attacking him? We had a lot of questions like that, and one by one, we agreed to contact the police in East Lothian to make statements on what we'd seen. We didn't hear anything back from them, and despite scouring the internet, we didn't read about anyone being arrested and nor was the man's drowning ever really explained. Now years later, we Davy brought up the fact that we all had terrible sleep-stirring nightmares on the same night the guy died. I don't believe the two things were connected and I really don't bind to any of the spiritualist

guff, but that doesn't mean I'm not terrified and haunted by what had happened that day. A man lost his life while we were laughing, and even worse, he might have been murdered while we were laughing. I know I can't blame myself, and it wasn't any of our faults that he lost his life, but I just dread to think that some of the final seconds of his life would have been soundtracked to the capital city of my country. It's also the biggest city. I was living in a the capital city of my country. It's also the biggest city. I was living in a flat with two of my friends. They're both female, Tina and Laura. They shared a room while I had my own small room. My bed was directly under the only window in the

room. The apartment was on the ground floor so if you walked past the building you were on eye level with the windows. This however was never a problem as there were no paths walked past the building, you were on eye level with the windows. This, however, was never a problem, as there were no paths leading past the building on that side. It was just around 20 meters of grass and some trees, and then the road. At this point, it is also worth saying that I am a sword enthusiast, and own several swords, and this will be relevant for later. All the swords are battle ready quality for those who want to know and as I like using them in cutting practice and therefore wall hangers are not an option. Now to the point of the story, my roommates and I are hanging out in their room one afternoon.

As we're talking, Laura mentioned that she thought that she had heard some knocking on the window the night before and also thought that she had saw someone on the other side of the window. Tina and I didn't really take that too seriously as Laura often had wild dreams and could be a bit of a scaredy cat sometimes. Now it is worth noting that all of us enjoyed playing pranks on one another. So in the evening of the same day, as we were returning from the shops, Tina and I decided to knock on Laura's window as a prank. Of course, we scared her a lot, so we apologized, she laughed, said we got her good, and we all went to bed. At around 3 o'clock in the morning, I woke up

and heard knocking. I was convinced that Laura is trying to exact her revenge so I just looked through the window and to my surprise I saw a strange man on the other side. At first I completely froze and just stared at him. He looked like he was in his 40s or 50s and had blondish grey hair. I didn't see him too well in the dark. The staring contest must have lasted about three seconds, but it felt like an hour. Then all of a sudden, he broke eye contact and reached down and pulled up his pants. I didn't realize it before, but he had his pants down the whole time. At that moment, I also thought that I saw a knife in his hand. That unfroze me and my first thought was that I had to defend myself. In retrospect I find this silly as there was still a window between us and he presumably only had a knife.

Now I'm quite large, 190 centimeters and 100 kilograms so I have every confidence that I can take this guy. But since I thought that I saw a knife, I grabbed one of my swords and went to open the window and all that took me about a couple of seconds. The creepy man was gone but I was in a bit of an adrenaline rush so I opened the window and jumped out. I started looking left and right, trying to see where he went. After about a minute there was no sign of him and my adrenaline wore off. I stood there still as a stone for a couple of seconds with my sword still in hand. All of a sudden I hear a scream. It came from the road that was approximately 20 meters from the building. It took me a couple of seconds to realize what had happened but I

finally realized that a woman, probably in her twenties, saw me standing there from the road. If the sword in my hand wasn't scary enough, I must also add that I sleep naked and didn't have time to put on any clothes before jumping out. I tried to scream sorry and I can explain but the woman ran away. I crawled back in and put on some clothes. I went to wake up my roommates but they were already awake. Apparently they also heard knocking on their window but decided to ignore it since they thought it was me. They completely woke up when they heard the scream

and looked through the window to check. They just saw me trying to climb through the window. We stayed awake since we were all too shocked to sleep. We were talking about calling the police when we saw the police actually drive up the road. They got out of the car and started walking up and down the grass in front of my window. As they approached the window, I opened it. They said that they got a report about a naked man climbing through this window. Luckily, no mention of the sword. I told them that it was me and the entire story. They only half believed me since I'm pretty sure it would not end well

for me if my roommates didn't back me up, and we later fired our own report. We never saw this man again and never really heard anything back from the police. For those of you who frequent this sub, the fight or flight response is one that is discussed frequently. Later, this term was updated to fight, flight, or freeze to better encompass the range of human responses to acute stress. Luckily for me, I have never been a freezer. However, that doesn't mean that I always choose one of the other two responses either. Instead, when I am under stress, my brain goes into overdrive, rapidly throwing up possible solutions to my current problem. The more stressed I am, the faster it ticks. In my first post on the sub I told of a creepy encounter where I chose flight.

In the second, I chose fight. This is a story when my brain decided on a different direction. It was early in the evening in the late 2000s. I was in college, walking home from class along a busy street in the crappy neighborhood that was all I could afford to live in at the time. Out of nowhere, a car pulls up next to me and slams on the brakes. Get in the car! The driver yells out the window at me, immediately aggressive. What? I thought to myself. I take in the scene. Old, small, beat up red car. Four passengers, all young guys, relatively fit, and I'm badly outnumbered. Not good. The two up front are leaning forward in their seats staring at me. Agitated, most likely on

something. Can't see much of the guys in the back except they're crammed in there. Front two are not wearing seatbelts. Really not good. On top of that, despite other people being around, I'm in a neighborhood in a city where people don't stop to help. Don't call the cops. Don't get involved when they witness violence or crimes. No one walking past is slowed down or even turned our way.

Really, really not good. In the couple of seconds it takes me to soak this in, the driver decides to fill in the silence. Get in the car. I said get in the car, now. We're going to a party, and you're coming with us. Even more aggressively than before. Oh boy, there goes my brain. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. This tone, this manner, this guy is expecting me to refuse. He's expecting me to get angry. It's like he is just waiting for me to escalate the interaction. And this was before I was active online. I had never heard of incels or MRAs or any of that stuff but this guy is acting like a guy who is sick of girls refusing his advances. He's had enough and this time he's

going to put his foot down. My brain is throwing up every possible response I can make, playing out the most likely outcome and knocking them back down one by one. And finally, it lands. Though I would not know what it's called until many years later, I had just discovered fawn mode. My face cracks into a huge smile. Oh my god, that sounds like so much fun. Suddenly, I drop the smile to a look of devastation. Oh no, but I can't today. I've got dinner with my family.

This sucks so much. I'd rather go to a party, but thank you for inviting me. I start slowly walking up the street, not breaking eye contact, smiling and waving, but trying to close the distance I'd have to dash if stuff goes down. The car creeps along, keeping pace with me. The driver sighs. Just get in the car. Far less aggressive. Oh my god, I can't believe this is working. I lean into the ditzy persona that I've now adopted.

I'd love to, really. I want to go so much, but my family's waiting for me up the street. But you guys are so nice. I hope you have such a good time. Next time for sure I'll go. You guys are super fun, right? Yeah? I can tell. The driver's posture is becoming less tense. His grip on the steering wheel is more relaxed. And is that the beginning of a reluctant grin lifting to the side of his mouth? He likes the flattery. Dang girl, you might just be able to talk your way out of this one yet. Yeah, you guys look super fun. A party with some

cute fun guys. I mean, I'm so there. Call me for the next party, yeah? Promise me you'll call me. I stick out my thumb and pinky on the side of my head and start nodding at them. You just have to call me, yeah? Passenger starts nodding back first and finally slumps back in his seat. Yeah, yeah. I keep chattering. Well have so much fun though. Have extra fun for me. I hate that I can't be there, but promise me you'll have a great time and promise you'll call me for the next one.

The driver finally leans back in his chair and smiles back. Yeah, alright. Yeah, yeah, next time, next time. And finally drives off. Those dozy idiots seem to have forgotten that they don't know me from Eve and don't even have my number. I wave at them, wait for them to be out of sight and finally breathe a sigh of relief. I power walk the last few hundred meters home, go upstairs and tell Matt and Lisa all about what happened. So about a month ago, in mid-August, my dad wanted to bring me, a 16-year-old female and two friends, also 16-year-olds, to the beach for a short vacation.

We couldn't afford a really expensive place, so we stayed at a really crappy motel. My dad had his own room downstairs and my other friends and I went up the stairs to our room. He gave us an air horn and field hockey sticks, just in case. The first two days went really well, no problems at all. Until the final night, we were there. We had gotten home from the boardwalk at around 11pm and we were just hanging out in the room. I decided to go outside of our room for a second. Since we were on the second floor, leaving the room was just immediately being on a balcony where you could see out into the road. Across the road there was a parking lot and I saw a car and about four younger guys standing near it. I then decided to go back in and I told my friends that I saw some

people outside so one of my friends then went out onto the balcony and shouted, hey, and waved at them. We all went back into the room now and about two minutes later we hear a knock. It's the guys from the parking lot. There was only about three of them there though as they said the fourth friend was on the phone with his girlfriend. All of them are 18. They were really nice though and I could tell they had no bad intent. After about 10-ish minutes or so of them being in our room we hear another knock. We open it and it's their fourth friend, but someone else was with him. All of us were confused and after I started asking the four guys that I willingly invited in if they knew this man, they said no. The one friend who was

outside brought him in because he had alcohol or something. We started asking questions and came to find out that this mystery man was 32. So now, in our room were not only four 18-year-olds, but a 32-year-old man as well. At this point, I decided that they had to go, so I kindly told them that we needed to head to bed and that they all needed to head out. Finally, they were all gone, including the 32-year-old man. However, one of the younger guys, who was really interested in one of my friends, so he came back up and asked her to go in his car with him. We didn't want her to, not because he didn't seem trustworthy, but because we had already decided that it was time for them to go. She refused, however however and went to his car with him.

So now one of the other guys was back in her room talking with me and the other two were down in his car trying to get my friend to come back up. The 32 year old man as well was still around and he referred to my friend, the one in the car, as Pearly Whites because of her teeth. At one point me and my friend were out on the balcony talking to two of the boys while the others were trying to get my friend and we saw the 32-year-old man down by the curb and he shouted, where's my pearly whites? We all got freaked out at this point and I urged the two other guys to please go get my friend.

She finally came back but the guy who originally invited the 32 year old man in our room was now arguing with him because they, like us, were also getting freaked out by this man. Saying things like, they're way too young for you, you need to go. And he kept saying, nah, I'm not about that. We now closed our door not wanting to be involved. We got one of the guy's snapchats, and he kept updating us on how their friend was still arguing with the 32-year-old man, and how the man apparently pulled a knife on his friend. They finally told us that they got in the car and left, but when my friend told me that the guy had said that, I knew that meant that the 32-year-old was probably still around

our place. So I go up to our door to make sure it's locked and the second I do it, I hear a knock and a voice saying, hey those guys stole something from you guys, I want to give it back. At this point I know this older guy most certainly did not have good intent because clearly none of those boys stole any of our things. So while my friends were sitting on their bed, I had talked to him, and I replied, That's okay. We don't need whatever it is. We're going to bed, okay? He kept saying that he wanted to give us whatever was stolen from us, and I kept refusing and

saying that it was time for us to get some sleep. He finally gave up and walked away at this point. But now I picked up the field hockey stick and was sitting on my bed shaking and honestly afraid. My friends kept saying it was fine and he wasn't going to come back. However, about ten minutes later, he did come back. I heard the knock and got up very reluctantly and I heard him say something along the lines of sorry about tonight. So I just kept calm and said it's okay, I just really need you to go now, we need to go to bed. Finally, it was the end and he left and this whole charade probably ended around 1.30-2 in the morning. Needless to say, my friends fell asleep shortly after, but I honestly couldn't.

I kept thinking that he would come back, and I was afraid for my friend because of the creepy comment he made about her. I was wide awake probably until 4am until I was finally calm enough to fall asleep. Long story short, I'll never be letting anyone into any hotel room of mine ever again, even if they're my age. To be continued... child. I've been keeping this story inside for a very long time. I'm going to be completely honest. I have never even spoken a word to my mother before. At first, it was fear of getting social services involved. Then after they got involved anyways, I guess too long had passed and I just figured that she never really would benefit any from knowing. This all happened when we were 11 years old. I'm 29 now and it all sort of feels like a surreal dream. This feels like the appropriate place to get it out. Names changed,

of course. When I was in elementary school in Canada, that's K through 6, I was an awkward child. I have high functioning autism and while my grades were great, my social functioning was lackluster, still is if I'm being honest, and this left me with a fairly small, very colorful group of friends, two of the closest being Jessie and Katie. I came from a fairly overprotective household, my mother watched me like a hawk and thus I was a naive kid. I didn't really understand that a lot of the oddness and dysfunction that would come out of my two friends had to do with problems at home.

We were never allowed at Katie's house. I think her mom was extremely overweight to the point of hardly being able to move, and she was embarrassed of it. Jessie's house, however, was only a few blocks away from the school. We ended up there a lot. Her parents were divorced divorced and her mom was deaf and mute. My mom and her would communicate through notes when I would go over and while she at first would always seem slightly erratic, there was no real red flags. When we first started going

there, Jessie's mom was living with her boyfriend as well as her boyfriend's parents. Everyone in the household was deaf, with the exception of Jessie and her younger brother, but both of them had limited hearing. I think for the first year or so that we were there, the boyfriend's parents kind of kept everything from getting too out of hand, but it was pretty clear that it was a dysfunctional household. After they moved out of the household, it was just Jessie's mom and her boyfriend. They would often lock us in the basement when I would spend the night. It was a full apartment, so we saw it as sort of fun freedom.

But the one time they forgot to lock it and we walked in on them shoving needles under the table. Again, we were too young to understand, but we did understand that we walked in on something bad. From this point on, we would be designated to spend our sleepover nights in her garage as it was furnished with carpets and couches. The issue with this was Jesse's mom always kept the door locked so we wouldn't interfere with their activities again. So when one of us had to use the washroom, we would have to knock on the basement window until Jesse's little brother would hear and let us in through the basement window to pee. Another issue being, he was hearing impaired, thus sometimes it would take a literal hour of absolute banging on that window. We were young, and this felt as close to freedom as we could get. We didn't understand why or that it was wrong or dangerous for Jesse's mother to do this, so

I never told my mom, and it kept going on. One night we were doing our normal sleepover, playing Pokemon Gold, trading and battling with link cables, and waiting for Jesse's mom to bring out the oven pizza that she said she was cooking us literally hours ago. It was about midnight, no bedtime in that household, and Katie said that she really had to pee. She was trying to wait for Jesse's mom to bring in the pizza so she could go through the door, but she couldn't hold it. She goes out by herself to try to rouse Jesse's little brother Aaron. We were expecting it to take her a little while, but to our surprise, she comes back extremely quickly, locking the garage door behind her and latching the lift door and she looks really startled.

She tells us that she was knocking to try to get Aaron's attention when she hears a rustle from the bush next to the gate going to the front yard. It takes her a minute to realize what she's looking at but standing about 5 feet from the gate, 15 feet from the window Katie is at is a tall man dressed completely in black. She said it seemed like he was just appearing out of the darkness or like he was waiting for something. He asked her if she'd managed to lock herself out while slowly taking a step towards the gate. As she gets up and takes a step back, his pace quickens towards her and she sprints back to the garage. At first we thought she was just messing with us.

We laughed and told her to stop messing around. Then we heard it. Hard twisting of the locked doorknob. Then worse. The sound of scratching metal against the doorknob. He was trying to pick the lock. We stood in absolute fear for a moment, then grabbed the only pathetic things around that we could use to try to defend ourselves.

Then it just abruptly stopped. There were no windows in her garage and no peephole on the door. We couldn't see what was going on. And we waited for about ten minutes, having no idea where the man was, if he was still out there, where her mom was, or where that freaking pizza hat got to. But we were still sitting ducks in there. He had clearly failed to pick the lock, but who knows if or what he would try next. No, this was stupid, but we were stupid scared children. We grabbed our

weapons, which consisted of glorified sticks, and we left that garage. At first, there was no sign of any man. We moved towards the downstairs window and started slamming on it, screaming and pleading for Aaron to open it again. And again, that's when we heard it. It was an almost sing-song mocking voice that rang out. Well, hello again. Three men, all in black. The one in the middle had spoken. They made a move forward and we once again sprinted back to the garage. This time they just straight up tried to kick the door in, all three of them stomping and kicking, and it seemed like it was close to giving in and then everything stopped. Jesse's mother had come out the back door, pizza in hand, and startled them. She ran back inside and got her boyfriend and his two other friends, users, travel and packs,

I guess, and they were able to chase them off with some actual weapons I'm guessing. We were still inside the garage and we could honestly just hear it. The adults stayed in the backyard all night, weapons in hand. One person even sat on the roof with a compound bow. Yes, you read that right, a compound bow. And night turned to morning and it all settled down. We never stayed at Jessie's house for sleepovers after that. She was put into the care of her grandparents shortly after. It took me a really long time to actually grasp what happened that night,

but considering they never called the police, I'm fairly sure we almost got literally murdered over some drug debt Jesse's mother had. I can't even imagine the evils that could have gone on that night if fate wasn't on my side. Something tells me those three men were way too happy to find children to take as penance, and it would hardly have just been a straightforward murder. It still makes me shudder. A while ago, I was living in an apartment complex in Tom's River, New Jersey. I lived in a complex where there were doors facing the street and when you went through the doors, there was a set of stairs going up to the top apartment and to the side of the stairs was a small hall leading to the bottom apartment. I live on the top apartment and my downstairs neighbor was a woman, probably 10-12 years older

than me. We had a very neighborly relationship, saying hi when passing, chatting for a bit when we bumped into each other, etc. etc. After I had been living there for three months, I could tell that she kind of had a crush on me because it seemed that she would go out of her way to be outside of her apartment when I was and she would get really flirty with me. It got to a point where I knew if I left my apartment that I'd bump into her and I'd have to do mental preparation for these encounters and come up with a plan to be able to move on quickly because she would want to talk for long periods of time.

Anyway, I was dating someone at the time, and I made sure to mention this to my neighbors since I thought that it would make her back off, but it didn't. Me and my then-girlfriend had only started dating shortly after I moved into this complex. So three months into our relationship, we decided to finally take our relationship to the next level and begin to get intimate for the first time. So we made plans for her to come over and she would plan to spend the night. I am really cheesy and try to do romantic things, so she was coming over at 10pm that night and I was vacuuming and cleaning at like 8pm. All of a sudden there's a knock at my door. I see through the peephole that it's my

neighbor and I thought maybe she was going to tell me that I was being too loud with my cleaning but I am pretty considerate and I didn't think that I was being too loud. So I open the door and she has a smile on her face and she just starts making small talk with me. Things like, so I hear you're cleaning up here. You expecting company tonight? Is he your girlfriend? Are you guys gonna do it? Like it felt like she was interrogating me and asking me things that she didn't need to know. I told her that I was having company over and that we would keep it down and that she didn't need to know who was coming over. She responded by saying that she felt that she should know who was coming over because the noise would impact her.

I don't remember how I got her to leave, but I finally did. My girlfriend came over and we obviously were intimate. And like I I said I'm a considerate neighbor. I kept things down but there are some things you can't exactly prevent like the sound of the bed moving as you're doing the deed so to speak. Anyway the next morning my girlfriend had work so she got ready and I walked her down to her car. I had the day off so I was going to get some gaming in and reflect on the incredible evening that I had had. When I got back to my apartment, there was my neighbor waiting at my door. She told me that she had heard everything last night and that it had sounded incredible. She didn't hold back telling me what she was doing to herself while she was listening to me and my girlfriend.

She would go as far to say things like, At about 11, I heard this noise. I can only imagine what she was doing to you, or you were doing this thing to her that I heard. And I was so creeped out. I told her that she needed to stop, or else I would have to tell management that she was invading my privacy. Needless to say, my girlfriend and I never did it at my place again unless I knew my neighbor was out of town. I told my girlfriend about it and she was furious, understandably. She even confronted my neighbor and told her it was not okay that she did that and

was talking to me so much. Since we never did it in my apartment again during that year that I lived there, I just had to put up with running into my neighbor and her insisting to have long conversations. I was very happy when I finally moved to another town. I'm sorry. Last weekend me and my friend decided that we would go out to the pub for a few drinks after a tough week at work. We got ready and left the house at 10pm. We decided to walk as the pub was not too far and we definitely weren't going to drink and drive. After 20 minutes later we arrive, take a seat and order drinks. Everything was completely normal until I noticed two men staring directly at me and my friend. They were dressed in jeans and Nike hoodies with tattoos on their hands and neck. I thought nothing of it at first

and just figured the men were a little drunk but time passed and it was continuing to happen. My friends also picked up on it and told me that she found it quite unsettling. It was a very busy night at the pub however and there were lots of people around. One hour had passed and there was no change. Me and my friend had only had one or two drinks and we were still very sober at this point. We started to get freaked out and thought it was probably best that we just leave. When we got up and headed to the door, the two men approached us and made a comment on the dresses me and my friend had on. I'm not going to say what was said as it was rude and inappropriate.

And that's when we really started to panic. My friend called her dad as my parents were away on a holiday. He told us that he would come as quick as he could and told us to try and get away from the weirdos. It was pretty dark out but we thought our best chance was to try and get home. We had been walking for about three minutes and looked back to see that both men were following us. We both called the police and started to sprint as there was not a single soul around. We ran into our apartment and they started sprint as there was not a single soul around. We ran into our apartment and they started banging on the door. I had never felt so scared.

We ran into my bedroom and locked the door, absolutely petrified. They continued shouting and threatening us to open the door. And luckily the police arrived and both men were arrested. My friend's dad came shortly afterwards and because me and my friend were so shaken up, he took us to stay at his place for the night so we weren't by ourselves but we were still trembling after the experience and I think that it was safe to say that neither of us had gotten much sleep that night or for the past week. Now I am aware that this was probably caused due to the influence of alcohol, but I certainly do not believe that it should be an excuse to make up for what happened,

and this, in my opinion, was a very creepy and disturbing event. I'll never forget the thoughts running through my head as I sprinted home. I'm sorry. My grandfather, Jim, died when I was 17, so around five years ago. And his last months were rough on the whole family. He had advanced brain cancer and he spent most of his time at home under hospice care. One afternoon, it was about two weeks before Jim died, I was alone with my grandpa waiting for the hospice nurse to come check in on him. A man who I'd never seen before, Dave, knocked on the door.

He was wearing hospital scrubs, but he hadn't brought any equipment with him, which was odd. I asked him if he worked for the hospital, and he nodded. He said that this was his first shift with Jim, but that he'd reviewed my grandfather's file and that he wanted to speak to whichever family member had the legal authority to pull the plug, as he put it. Jim wasn't even on life support, so I guess Dave was using plug as an expression on my grandfather. I should say that I live in a right to die state where euthanasia is legal so it's not like that option had never occurred to us but as far as I know no member of my, had specifically said to prolong his life indefinitely unless he was crying out in extreme pain, which he wasn't.

Dave put his hand on my shoulder as though he was consoling me, and he talked about how old people become burdens that their families need to let go of. Then Dave pulled out a bottle of pills out of his pocket and said that they were barbiturates that would trigger a peaceful death. He said the coroner would determine that Jim died naturally from his cancer. I started to panic, and I firmly told him that under no circumstances would we be euthanizing my grandfather at this time. But he started to untwist the bottle as he'd walked towards Jim's bed. I tried to wrestle the pills from his hand and he seemed startled. He played innocent and said that he just wanted to show the pills to Jim. Dave knew perfectly well that my grandfather had

almost no idea what was going on. I called 911 and rapidly explained the situation to the dispatcher. Dave suddenly became very scared and bolted out of the house. The cops arrived within five minutes, and Jim's actual hospice nurse arrived a few minutes after that. Based on the physical description, the police and hospital staff were able to identify Dave as a recently fired hospital orderly. Dave was charged with making a criminal threat based on my testimony, but unfortunately he was acquitted. So Dave, wherever you are, please leave us alone. I write this as a 36 year old man. You'll have to bear with me as the details of the story are vague and a bit of a blur. But I will share what I remember. Now in the summer of 1993 I was in first grade.

My parents had been divorced for many years with my mother having sole custody. As a child I barely remembered my father but he would make his brief appearance or send gifts on Christmas or my birthdays. Seeing my dad always made me happy as I was far too young to comprehend the complexities of a battered relationship or marriage. After school one day, I was shocked to come outside and see my father waiting for me. My grandma usually picked me up from school, but never my father. He had a small black car, a beater. He always seemed to dress nice, suspenders and slacks, hair pulled back and a tight ponytail. I remember

getting into his car and smelling what I now know as an adult, to be Clove. I later gathered that he had a habit of rolling his own cigarettes and gained that he must have been in a Clove phase. There is a gap in time and now it's night time and I'm watching the fluorescent lights from miscellaneous stores fly by my passenger seat window. A gas station I can't remember, Brahms ice cream at an intersection, and more time loss.

I'm now running around with another kid in and out the yellow-lit apartment corridors. Some doors are open and we go into one. There are kids in the back bedroom playing Sega. I watch as Sonic zips through loops and listen to familiar music that momentarily makes me feel safe. I suddenly realize I'm very alone with complete strangers and I find my way back outside. Another gap in memory. My belly is full from bean burritos and I'm looking down a very dark hallway in my father's apartment. I'm standing next to an aquarium giving blue ambient light that sits on my face. I want to go home. Something doesn't feel right. In an attempt to comfort me, my father gives me a toy flashlight that projects the Batman symbol. I shine it down the black

hallway. The cheap plastic of the switch fidgets and stubbornly slides, clicking on and off. My father is on the phone and he's upset, voice raised. I apologize for not knowing what happened next but I can confidently say that I was safely returned by my father. My mother had no idea where he lived and we would sometimes drive around at night in efforts to find the mentioned landmarks to trigger my memory. I haven't thought much about this until tonight and it really made me feel wrong and uncomfortable. As you may have guessed, I don't have a relationship with him anymore. You need to know some key information that'll be shown in about 20 seconds. I and my brother and girlfriend all play airsoft on the weekend and I also sleep with

no clothes on. I was home alone as my mother was at her parents house for the night. I was 14 at the time and I was living in a weird and not so good neighborhood. Surely not the type of people who murder people but the type of people where you'd have to check everywhere to make sure that it's locked twice to feel like you're safe. Luckily for me, when I came back from Airsoft, my brother and girlfriend and I locked the doors and window, but I forgot that I had burned something in the oven earlier and had to keep one of the kitchen windows open. I live only with my mother and my German Shepherd, who is actually a monster, and around three in the morning I hear my dog bark viciously near my kitchen window and what I've known over the years,

if my dog's barking that viciously, I knew that it was something bad. I put on some underwear and I got my gun off the wall and walk into the kitchen and turn on the light to find that there was a man wearing black clothes and night vision goggles, blaring a green light glowing at the ceiling and he was half in and half out of the kitchen window, almost wiggling like a worm. And it's a tough window to get into, the window was about eye level. I cocked my gun back ready to fire and screamed at him to get out of my house. He stared at me, completely confounded considering that he's been caught by 14-year-old me wearing just underwear and aiming a rifle towards him.

He looked panicked at the fact that the rifle was aimed straight at him. He quickly rolled out of the window and ran into the nearby woods. I called the police and made a report with every detail that I could remember, and a week later, a girl actually went missing. She was home alone and there was no sign of forced entry, and the man had been caught for assault and the murder of two children just two streets away. In this police investigation, he confessed to stalking the children by watching their houses at night as he used night vision goggles with green lights

to see their every action. To be continued... 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. Thank you.