The Lets Read Podcast - 210: WE LIVED OFF THE GRID | 23 True Scary Stories | EP 198

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about being Living Off the Grid, 4chan, & Amusement Parks...   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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From tires to auto repair, we're always there. Tread experts.ca Thank you. To be continued... please forgive any parts of this story that sound a little off. Now my uncle Jimmy was a simple man, possibly the most simple man you could ever meet. My dad's side of the family was raised in a very rural town far away from any big city. This meant their childhoods were spent raising farm animals and living off the land in whatever aspect they could. They of course had electricity and running water but they used it sparingly so as not to rack up a large bill that at the time they couldn't afford. Uncle Jimmy was one of seven kids in the household. He and my father were extremely close and a lot alike but when my dad turned 18 and graduated high school, he left to go to a university a few states away and he and Jimmy

talked less and less in the years that followed. When it was Jimmy's turn to graduate and go off to college, he decided on a different course. He liked being out in the country and fending for himself. He said it made him feel like he was living the life God intended for humans, and that it made him feel closer to the earth and ultimately to himself. So when it was time for him to leave home, he did. He moved even further into the countryside. He found a cute small cabin in the middle of the woods with no power and no running water and said to himself, this, this is perfect. My dad didn't see Jimmy much after that. He says he wasn't super comfortable visiting Jimmy in what he always called the boonies where he'd have to endure no running water and no electricity for a few days just

to visit his brother. And Jimmy absolutely refused to leave his cabin for years, until this specific incident occurred. I had just been born, it was the mid 80s and my dad was planning to ask Jimmy to come for a visit to meet his kid. He figured that he wouldn't come but wanted to ask anyways. Now it was hard to get a hold of Jimmy because of the whole off the grid thing that he had going on so the best my dad could do was send a letter. The letter he got back shook him to his core. Now the story goes like this. Jimmy had a dog. And boy, he loved this dog. Like the way a person loves and cherishes a child. It was a German short-haired pointer named Betsy. Betsy was a

very well-trained and mannered hunting dog that went everywhere with Jimmy. Every night Jimmy would let Betsy out of the cabin to run around for a bit before bringing her in at night. There had never been a problem with predators in the area that could pose a threat to Betsy, so he didn't even think twice about letting her outside. That night, after Betsy had been out for only about 30 minutes, he heard her scream, and not like a scream of excitement from playing or a scream to be let in. This was a scream of pure terror and agony. Jimmy rushed to his door and barreled his way outside when he saw his poor dog limping her way towards him. He always said the look on her face was one begging him to help her. I never understood that until I got my own

dog and realized that they are very capable of expressing their emotions just by the way they look at you. Jimmy scooped her up as carefully as possible and rushed her inside. When he set her down, he realized that his hands were covered in blood. He began to fear the worst. He started to try to prepare himself for her untimely and unfortunate death that had to have been accidental. But when he checked her wounds, he was shocked and suddenly scared himself. Betsy had a large knife wound stretching across the back of her left leg. It was deep, but not so deep that she needed immediate medical attention. Jimmy figured that he could patch her up himself and if she had issues later on, he would take the four-hour drive into town to

the vet's office. What really concerned him though was the fact that he lived over an hour from the next person's house and his dog had just been slashed by a knife. A person with a knife. He closed and locked all his doors and windows that night and as much as he needed it, there was no way that he could fall asleep. The next week went by without incident. Then the same the week after that.

Until eventually he was comfortable letting Betsy out again, with his supervision of course. She had healed nicely but still had a slight limp. As he was sitting on his porch one afternoon watching Betsy play in the small yard in front of his house, he spotted something in the forest. A silhouette of what looked to be a very large man, peeking out from behind a tree, watching his dog intently. Jimmy yelled at the man to show himself and loudly asked who he was and what he was doing there, but in one swift motion, the man ran deeper into the forest, where Jimmy could no longer see him. He called Betsy in and, like he had done before, he closed and locked all of his doors and windows for the night.

As he lay in bed, he heard a tapping on his window. Light taps, but Jimmy was a light sleeper so it took almost nothing to wake him. He slowly turned his head to the side to look at his window, and between his two curtains, through a small slit in the fabric lit by the moonlight, he saw an eye peering into his bedroom. Thankfully, it wasn't looking at him at that moment since he feared that probably would have made him even more terrified than he already was. But no, instead, this eye was looking at Betsy, just as the man in the woods had done the previous afternoon.

Jimmy kept his eyes locked on the mysterious person and for hours he noticed this person never stopped staring at his dog. As night turned to day and the sun began peeking over the trees, Jimmy watched as the person moved from the window and listened as he made his way off of his deck and hopefully away from his property altogether. The next night, Jimmy made sure that his curtains were completely closed so nothing could see in or out. He didn't want to experience what had just happened the night before. This, unfortunately, only made things worse for him. He was woken up by a loud banging coming from his front door, like something or someone was trying its absolute best to make its way into his home to do god knows what to him and possibly his dog. Of course he suspected it to be the same person who had been stalking him the past month, but he always made it very clear that no matter how many

guns or knives he had, he did not want to come face to face with this person if he didn't have to. He grabbed a shotgun, pointed it at the door, and very sternly and as confidently as possible yelled towards the door, Sir, I suggest you get off my property mighty quick. I have a shotgun pointed at the door, and I will shoot if you come into my house. The banging stopped, almost like the person was thinking about the warning, but it only stopped for a few seconds before it continued with even more force behind it.

The door began to shake as it couldn't bear that much force against it and Jimmy knew that it was about to break. He began screaming at the man to please just stop and leave and that he didn't want to kill him. Betsy was going crazy, barking behind him and for a second, it was like her barking fueled this intruder's anger. The door snapped and through the broken pieces of wood, a hand reached through. Jimmy shot at the door and with a force that knocked him back a few steps, the hand was gone. Jimmy stood in the same spot that he'd landed in after the shot for a couple of minutes and after composing himself, he slowly made his way toward the door that was now covered in blood. Only he didn't find a body on his porch like he was expecting. Instead, he saw a thick trail of blood leading into the forest.

Jimmy had no phone to call the police and the closest phone was an hour away at a small market. When the sun was up, he loaded Betsy into his truck after locking up his house as best he could and headed off. He called the police from the market and after waiting for about an hour for one to show up, he led them to his cabin. When they got there, Jimmy told them everything. They followed the trail of blood until they couldn't see it anymore, but they found nothing. They told Jimmy that they'd be opening up an investigation into the matter and told him that it would be probably smart to stay with family until they got everything sorted out and made an arrest or at least found the guy. They were sure that the person was bound to show up at a hospital with a gunshot wound to the hand. Jimmy, being the

stubborn man that he was, patched up his door and decided to stay. The nights were getting colder in those winter months and he figured if the guy wasn't already dead, that he would be from the cold eventually. And for the next few weeks, Jimmy would hear scratching on his door at night. In the morning, he would wake up to scratch marks deep in the wood on his door. And he swore that he would hear whispering outside his window, just saying his dog's name over and over again. They never tried to break in again though and although Jimmy was still freaked out, he didn't really feel threatened by this presence anymore. In an early January, four months after Betsy had been slashed by that knife, Jimmy woke up and made himself some coffee. He unlocked his front door and opened it,

just about to take a step outside when there, leaning against one of the posts on his front porch, was the man. Only he wasn't moving. He was making zero attempts to get to Jimmy. And that's when he noticed that he wasn't not only moving, he wasn't breathing either. This time he wasted no time in driving down to the market with Betsy to call the police. They showed up in droves and now surrounded the now crime scene.

And it didn't take long to rule out Jimmy as a suspect when it was painfully obvious this man had died from being exposed to such freezing temperatures. It was also obviously the man that he had shot since this person was missing several fingers on one of his hands. Jimmy had written back to my dad telling him all this and at the end of the letter also telling him that he'd be moving into our neighborhood in the next month. He'd already bought a house and was looking forward to spending more time with his family and getting out of the woods for a while. As I was growing up, I heard that story almost twice a year,

every year until Jimmy passed in the late 90s from lung cancer. He never married or had any kids of his own, but he always insisted that he didn't mind since all of his siblings had so many kids that visited him all the time. Betsy passed when I was only 7 years old and something in Jimmy died along with his dog. I can only hope that they're together again. Best friends in life and death. My mom and dad have raised me and my brother in the same house throughout both of our childhoods. It's what some would call off the beaten path and man, I hated it. Me and my brother both went to school in the city and hearing about the lives all my friends had that I just couldn't relate to only made me angry about the life I lived. A life full of shoveling cow manure and slaughtering the animals I always got way too attached to. My brother never seemed to mind it though.

He was my dad's favorite. Still is. Especially after what happened. For context, this happened when I was 15 and my brother was about to turn 17. My dad had asked both of us to go on a hunting trip with him to hunt bear and I had absolutely no intention on going until my mom told me that I had to. She knew I wasn't close with our dad and she wanted that to change. She was hoping this trip would be the bonding experience we both needed. Unfortunately, I'm pretty stubborn and having her make me go only made me hate it even more. It was a five day trip in the woods with my dad. He had a satellite

phone in case of emergencies and that was all the technology that was allowed. He thought it would be fun to build our own fires and catch our own food while we were out there and I was dreading it. The day came for us to leave and the whole morning I was just begging my mom not to make me go. The begging did nothing, absolutely nothing of course, and I found myself walking behind my dad and brother only a couple of hours later. Thankfully, it wasn't too cold and I wouldn't have to cuddle my dad and brother for warmth like we had to do on our last hunting trip. That was humiliating. It didn't take long for my dad to find bear droppings. I will say that even though I hated hunting and tracking animals for days, my dad was great at it.

He actually led other people on hunting trips during the season so I knew that we'd be coming home with something for my mom to cook up. We tracked the bear for the rest of the day and by nightfall we found a good enough clearing to make camp. My dad always insisted on sleeping in hammocks far off the ground so no predators could reach us. I didn't like it. My fear of heights didn't allow me to be comfortable enough to sleep like that high off the ground. It may have only been 12 or so feet, but still, it felt terrifying up there. I don't know what time it was when I began to hear the grunting. At first, I just thought it was my dad's insanely loud snoring, but something was different. It wasn't as loud and annoying as usual.

It was more of a deep snarl of some sort, and as much as I didn't want to peek out of my hammock and look down, my curiosity got the better of me. I moved the fabric of my hammock only a few inches to the left, just enough for me to see it down onto our makeshift campsite. It was dark, but the fire was still somewhat lighting the area. I looked toward where the grunting noise was coming from and almost gasped when I saw a bear, bigger than any I'd ever seen before, standing on its hind legs, just under the hammock my brother was in. I felt my eyes widen as I started to panic.

I didn't know what to do. Well, I did know what to do. I just didn't know how I was going to do it. I needed to wake up my dad. He would know what to do. I had brought a granola bar in my hammock with me and I figured if I threw it hard enough, I would hit my dad with it,

wake him up and distract the bear all at once. But the only problem was, I only had one chance. I took a deep breath and as hard as I could, from the awkward position I was lying in, I chucked the bar at my dad, hoping it would be enough to wake him. In the silence of the night, the sound of the granola bar hitting my dad sounded like a motorcycle starting up Thankfully, it was enough to wake him, only he woke up annoyed and loud I shushed at him and pointed to the bear now making its way to the granola bar that had fallen to the ground His eyes widened as he quickly looked back at me, realizing the dangerous situation we were in. All hopes of him saving us went away when he pointed to his gun leaning up against the tree on the ground

beneath him. He threw something at my brother, who quickly woke up, and it took a second to make him aware of the whole situation too. With all of us awake, we knew the only thing that we could do was wait it out. And for hours, we sat in our hammock and waited as the bear stared at us, grunting and sniffing in our direction. My dad whispered that he was confused why it had begun climbing one of the trees to reach us, but of course, he was also thankful that it hadn't. Apparently it's a myth that bears can't climb trees, which only made me question my dad's hammock logic even more. I was grateful for them in that moment though, better to be up there than on the ground with

the bear. We heard my brother begin to squirm in his hammock and I watched my dad try to get him to calm down, but instead of calming down he just pointed to the rope that tied the hammock to one of the trees. It had begun to rip away from the fabric of the hammock and we realized that we had to act quickly. My dad whispered to me and told me that we had to figure out a way to distract the bear long enough for my dad to climb down and get his gun. My brother and I didn't think that it would be possible since the bear had been focused on

nothing but us for hours but we had no other choice. We decided our best option would be for my brother to climb out of his hammock and sit on the nearby small branch of the tree that he was tied to, rip his hammock off of the tree and throw it on top of the bear. It was a stupid plan but it's what we came up with. We couldn't spend the rest of our lives in that tree after all so we did just that. My brother carefully climbed out of his hammock and onto the branch, and I cringed as it began to bend downwards. From there, he pulled on the hammock as hard as he could until it came loose. He then untied the other side until it was free.

We all counted on a three. My brother threw the hammock onto the bear, and I guess my dad thought jumping straight down was his best bet. He fell slightly on his impact, but thankfully the bear was somewhat distracted. It took only a few seconds for the bear to get the fabric away from its face and notice my dad on the ground. It started to charge at him, but it didn't get far since my dad had already had it in his sight and shot at it over and over again. Finally, it was down, and that nightmare of that hunting trip was over. My dad used that satellite phone to call his buddies to help him haul the bear out of there, and he and my mom butchered it at home like they usually do after he goes hunting.

My mom wasn't happy about what happened and said my dad should have been more responsible and kept the gun with him, but she was proud of my brother and I for being so brave and for helping my dad bag a bear as big as that one. Apparently, he was the biggest he'd ever gotten. I didn't and still don't feel very brave though. I was just glad that I made it out of there alive. Thankfully now my mom doesn't make me go on any more hunting trips with my dad. He doesn't mind though. That trip only made him closer with my brother and he never asked me to go again. He tells everyone how my brother was a hero for throwing his hammock over the bear and how I just sat there. It made me feel bad for a while but I don't mind as long as I get to stay home during hunting season. I didn't know much about living in the wilderness when I bought a house with my best friend,

but it was a really good deal that we just couldn't pass up. My friend Julia and I were going to school about a half an hour away, and buying a house for the next four years actually turned out to be cheaper than the rent would have been at the end of it all. Plus, this meant no landlords and we could do whatever we wanted with the place. The house was technically considered off-grid since it wasn't connected to our city's power grid, which of course helped us with the price. Thankfully, the previous owners agreed to sell us their solar panels as part of the overall price, which was actually super lucky. The house was also on septic and we had a well, so even though it was off-grid, we still had all the luxuries of living in a house in the city.

Julie and I both had pretty well paying jobs and I'm not ashamed to say that we both come from families who helped us with the mortgage from time to time. Anyways, the number one rule that I made with Julie when we agreed to buy this house together was that we wouldn't give our address to anyone but family. No friends, no boyfriends and especially no random guys. We were out in the middle of nowhere and I didn't want to risk the wrong person knowing that we, two 22 year old women, were living 30 minutes outside of town, miles from the next house. This just didn't seem smart to me. Julie always said that she was fine with the rule and for the first year we lived together and she respected it. At least I think she did. Then one day, in our second year of being housemates,

I came home to her making out with some random guy on the sofa in the living room. I was livid. I screamed at the guy to get out, which of course only made Julie mad, but I really didn't care. I had boundaries and my reason for not wanting men over to the house seemed pretty fair. After he left, she yelled at me that I was being stupid and having a guy over from time to time wasn't going to do anything bad. I tried telling her that it just wasn't smart letting people we don't even know into our house and letting it be known that we live alone with basically no means to protect ourselves, but she still didn't get it. She just kept saying, this isn't the movie Taken. A guy isn't going to come back

and kidnap and sell us. Calm down. Live a little. Her making fun of the situation made me feel like I had made a huge mistake buying this house with a person I thought I knew so well. She had been my best friend for four years and I never got the impression that she would be so careless. I called my mom that night and told her what happened. She agreed with me that it was dumb of Julie to invite a guy over that she didn't even know. I also told her that it made me uncomfortable staying there, knowing this guy knew where we lived, who we were, and that we lived alone. I mean, it was obvious no guy lived with us.

Every picture in the place was just two of us and I'm pretty sure Julie probably told him that she only had one roommate. It wouldn't have been a shocker if she did. She brought him back to the house after all so telling him about her life wouldn't have been a big deal. My mom told me that if I was uncomfortable that I could just stay with her for a few nights and if I wanted to go back after then I could and if not I could stay however long I needed. I appreciated the offer and decided that I'd go to school the next day, go home, pack some things and then head off to my mom's for a bit. Julie thought that I was being dramatic but I didn't care. I went to school the next day as planned and made my way back to the house that afternoon.

I decided to wait until Julie got home to let her know how long I'd be gone and just to make sure that she'd locked up. Clearly she wasn't the most responsible person so I couldn't rely on her to secure the place after I left. At around 8pm I decided I was done waiting and began making my way to the front door with my bag in hand. When I reached the hall that led into the living room, I stopped in my tracks. Thankfully, the darkness that filled the house hid me as I watched two men in black masks standing at the door behind the frosted glass. They were talking to each other when I heard one of them say,

I'm telling you, man, the girls who live here are all types of fine. Now get the door open before they hear you. My heart sank and I didn't know what to do. I just had to hide. I guess now I realize that I probably should have slipped out the back door but I really wasn't thinking. Instead I slowly walked back into my room, shot and locked the door and started trying to find some places to hide. I watched a movie the previous night that gave me the idea of opening my window to make it look as though I'd gone out that way so I did that and climbed into the back of my closet and hid under a couple of thick comforters I'd shoved back there after last winter.

I heard the sound of the glass and the front door shattering and I felt tears beginning to streak down my face. I wasn't going to be one of those girls you see in movies and TV shows who can't keep quiet though. I was barely breathing so I wouldn't make a sound. I listened as they made their way through the house, loudly arguing with each other that they hadn't found us yet. I silenced my phone so it wouldn't give up my hiding spot if it were to go off and I texted Julie not to come home, that people had broken into her house and to call 911 immediately. I also texted my mom and told her what was happening and for her to call 911 too. Of course they both started blowing on my phone, but when I heard the

men try the handle to my bedroom door, I couldn't focus on anything but staying hidden and staying quiet. She's gotta be in here. Her car is out front. I'm gonna be so pissed if she's not and you had me breaking into this house for nothing. They argued back and forth like that for a couple of minutes until one of them must have gotten tired of it and kicked the door in. I was relieved when the window trick seemed to work and they screamed at each other that I'd gotten away. The relief only lasted a minute though when one of them told the other to look around for anything they could take that might have been worth something. I started praying that they wouldn't look too far into my closet, that they wouldn't pull back the comforters I was under and do what men do to women whose houses they break into.

I heard one of the men leave my room, but I could tell one of them stayed. I heard him begin to go through my drawers and throw things across the room. He seemed frustrated, which was probably due to the fact that I don't own super nice things. No expensive jewelry, nothing designer. I could never justify spending that kind of money and clearly this guy didn't appreciate that. My breath stopped in my throat when I heard his footsteps get closer to the closet doors. I didn't move an inch. There was no way that I was going to give this guy any reason to believe I was in there. It felt like

I was going to have a heart attack when he opened the closet doors. I could feel the vibrations of him moving things around off the shelves overhead and just when I felt him grab hold of the blankets I was under, his friend burst into the room, yelling that they had to go. Apparently they heard sirens down the road and got scared. They ran out of the house and I stayed in my spot. I had every intention of staying there all night. I was terrified of the possibility that they were still there. And that was until I heard my mom's voice, calling for me from inside the house.

I tore the comforters off my body and as quickly as I could, I ran toward my mom's voice. The second I saw her, I burst into tears. All the emotion I'd held in that whole time was being let out and I couldn't control it. I wish I could tell you that they found the men who broke in, but they didn't. They left behind no evidence and the police didn't find anyone in the woods surrounding the house. The guy Julie brought over the previous night had a solid alibi too, so they ruled him out. He also denied telling anyone where we live, but I don't buy it. I moved out the next day. It took a while, but Julie eventually agreed to take my name off the mortgage. One of our other friends moved in with

her and I moved back in with my parents. I feel safer with them. I just wish they'd caught the guys who terrorized me that night. My husband and I aren't really the outdoorsy type. We both grew up in big cities and never really felt the need to move anywhere smaller. But for our honeymoon, my husband decided that it might be fun to get out of our comfort zones and rent a vacation rental in the Montana wilderness for five days. I wasn't too excited about it considering I was hoping for a lavish Hawaiian honeymoon or something similar, but any time with my husband was bound to be a good time. We drove from our home in eastern Washington to the quaint little cabin a few hours away in Montana. When we got there, we were quickly made aware that

there was no electricity in the cabin. There was running water, but no toilet. If we needed to go to the bathroom, we had to walk about 20 feet from the cabin to the outhouse. And I was quite upset, to say the least. When my husband said that we'd be staying in a cute house in the woods I was expecting there to at least be power supplied to the house. He swore the ad said nothing about there being no electricity but I was so mad that I didn't even know if I should believe him or not. Maybe he thought that it would just be fun to go without while we were there. My husband was definitely the more adventurous type and that wouldn't normally have been something that would have stopped him from picking this place.

We brought our bags to the door and my husband pulled the key from the under mat where the host said it would be. He opened the door and brought our bags inside and when we went to sit on the sofa we noticed a very large binder sitting on the coffee table labeled rules. My husband and I had stayed in plenty of vacation rentals and had only come across an actual physical rulebook a handful of times and when we had they were usually only a page or two. When I say this rulebook was a binder I mean it was a literal binder. At least 50 pages of very in-depth rules about staying in this house. My husband and I laughed it off and made quick comments about how it was a little strange, but we weren't going to let it stop us from having a good time.

My husband set the binder back down and only 10 seconds later his phone chimed. It was a text from the host that read, Please make sure to read all the rules. We honestly just thought it was a weird coincidence. We had just put the binder down without reading anything and they texted us to make sure to read it. It was almost like they knew. That night, my husband went around the house lighting candles to give us some light and he locked all the doors and windows, something we were accustomed to since living in the city. We left our bags in the living room and changed into our pajamas and read for a bit in bed before

blowing out the candles and going to sleep. The next morning, we woke up and when we went into the living room, I noticed our bags were open when I was sure that we had closed them the night before. I looked everywhere for my sundress. I knew I packed it, but it wasn't there. When my husband joined me in the living room, I mentioned to him that our bags were open when we had closed them and he had brushed it off and said that we probably left them open and I remembered wrong.

I knew though, something was wrong here. My husband got himself a glass of water and sat down, setting his glass on the wood table in front of him. Another chime on the phone came seconds later. This time it simply read, Rule 5, page 3 of the binder. Always use a coaster when placing a glass on any surface. And this is when my husband and I started feeling extremely creeped out.

How did they know he wasn't using a coaster? How did they know he got something to drink? My husband texted back and asked if they were watching us and they said no. They said they always remind guests of the coaster rule the morning after they arrive since apparently that's when people are most likely to sit at the table with a drink. We didn't really know what to think but they had really great reviews and we just chalked it up to another coincidence. Thinking about it now, we probably should have seen the writing on the wall and left, but my husband reassured me that everything was fine and that we should stay.

That day was spent mostly hanging around the house, doing what newly married couples do. It was nice and we didn't get any more texts from the hosts which eased my nerves a bit. The day after, we decided that we wanted to go on a hike to the nearby lake to take a swim. We got our hiking gear on and packed our backpacks with what we needed, locked the door and headed off down the trail by the house. The hike was amazing. It was so beautiful and the water down at the lake was crystal clear. By mid-afternoon, we were ready to head back. When we got back to the house, my husband was about to unlock the door when

he realized that it was already unlocked. When we entered the kitchen, there was a note on the counter from the host that said that they had left us more towels and extra sheets and to please make sure all love making was kept in the bedroom. My husband was immediately angry and both of us started to believe these people were watching us. My husband told me to pack my bags and that we were leaving. After we were packed we made our way to the front door and when we opened it, there was a man and a woman standing in front of us. They introduced themselves as the hosts and they wanted to know why we were leaving. This just confirmed it to us. These people had been watching us and who knows what they had seen.

The real shocker here was that this woman had shown up wearing my dress. My missing son dress. She had actually stolen it from me and had the audacity to show up wearing it right in front of me. My husband had noticed too and mentioned it and of course they denied everything. When we were on the road out of there, we contacted the vacation rental company and filed a complaint against the host. We also filed a report with the police for the theft. Unfortunately, the woman was somehow able to come up with a receipt for the dress, and apparently it is completely legal for a vacation rental to have cameras up in their

rental properties. They had erased all footage from our stay, saying that it was customary to delete whatever was recorded after a person's stay had ended, but we knew the real reason they erased it. When we complained about there being no power to the property, and it not being mentioned in the listing, the host actually supplied proof that the house did have electricity, and they said that it was mistakenly turned off for the duration of our stay. We feel like our whole honeymoon was ruined by this total invasion of our privacy and we haven't been able to stay in a vacation rental since. My husband did make it up to me though with a week-long Hawaiian vacation like I originally wanted which I was extremely

grateful for. The last time we checked about a month ago their rental property was still up. Honestly I just feel really bad for the next unsuspecting person who stays in that house. To be continued... But I did win, Mom. You did? When it's sunny, make sure you can still see. At Specsavers, get two pairs of glasses from $149, and one can be prescription sunglasses. Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit Specsavers.ca for details. Conditions apply. When you want to bet on sports,

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Must be 19 plus available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. This story is about my mom and dad. It happened when they were newlyweds and had bought their first home together. My mom was so excited to be living on her own with my dad. They were both in their early 20s and she'd lived at home with her parents up until that point. The house they bought was more of a fixer-upper but the style of home was exactly what my mother wanted and the location was exactly what my father wanted. It was more rural and in the

country than my mother would have wanted but they both got something that made them happy and compromise was important. They moved in late August and everything was great. The weather was still hot, but they knew cooler days were ahead with fall just around the corner. By early October, mom and dad had been hearing around town that storms were to be expected this time of year. By the sounds of it, they could get really bad. Heavy winds and rain. And one Thursday afternoon in late October, there was a weather warning for their area. They asked people in town what they were expected to do for a storm like that and everyone said the same thing. Board up all doors and windows and just in case, cut off all power. They didn't understand that part of it but

it really didn't matter anyway since my dad was still in the process of getting a permit to run electricity to the house. The storm was coming very early the next day and that night, both mom and dad spent hours boarding up all the doors and windows. By the time they finally finished, the storm had begun to roll in. They closed the front door behind them and sealed it from the inside as best they could and headed to their bedroom, their path lit by small candles that they were holding. My mom and dad waited most of the storm out in their bedroom, reading their books and playing board games. They had tried to sleep, but the noise of the wind and rain kept them up. At around three in the morning, the wind seemed to pick up.

It was getting louder and louder, even making the house shake. They heard trees falling in the forest surrounding their house as they landed with a loud bang. The crunching and snapping of the branches had started to really scare my mom. She was worried about a tree possibly falling on the house and them not knowing when or where it would fall. They heard the sound of a tree breaking from its base for what seemed like the hundredth time that night, only this time when it fell, they heard the crunching of metal and their car alarm went off. Now even if they wanted to, there really was no escaping that storm, not by car anyways. Then it happened. A tree fell right into their

bedroom. Debris was flying everywhere, and the force of it falling launched my mom back several feet. It was pitch black apart from the occasional lightning strike lighting up what was left of the bedroom walls. My mom was scared and confused as she called out my father's name. Wind and rain whipped through the now gaping hole in what was once their safe haven. My mother's face was covered in her wet hair and she tried desperately to move it out of her eyes so they could find my father. He wasn't responding to her shouts for him to come to her. My mom had begun to believe the tree may have crushed him. The grief she felt in that moment was immense and till she heard a groan come from next to the fallen tree.

There on the floor next to the bed was my father. His arm was wedged under the tree and he was almost being drowned by the downpour of rain on his face. My mother grabbed a nearby raincoat that used to be in the now torn apart closet and shielded both of their faces She couldn't exactly tell because of everything going on around them but my father was losing blood fast He was completely out of it and didn't really know what was going on or what had just happened He kept asking my mother to help him up over and over again And she had to tell him that he was stuck and that they had to wait for help to come. They had no power so no landline and this was the time before cell phones

and my mom felt hopeless. She thought that she was going to lose the man that she loved. She had only one option. It was a fleeting thought in her mind that only lasted a second but it was brought to life when my father thought of the same thing and told her to do it. He was starting to gain full awareness now but thankfully his body was in enough shock to ensure that he felt no pain. He told her that she had to get to the neighbor's house and try to call for help, but my mother told him that there was no way that she could leave him. She could never forgive herself if she left him and came back to his lifeless body where he would have died alone. So instead he suggested what she was silently thinking. They needed to cut off his arm. The seconds felt like hours in the time that passed after he suggested something that she wasn't so prepared to do. He kept reassuring her

that everything would be alright. He instructed her to get his axe from next to the bed. He had kept it there in case of intruders during the night. Then he told her to tie something very tight to the top of his arm to decrease the blood flow to the area. My mother had told me multiple times that moment was the scariest moment of her entire life. Scarier than childbirth and way scarier than being a first-time mother. She lifted the axe and he begged her not to hesitate. Hesitation would only possibly result in more injury for him and even maybe for herself. He slowly counted to three and as the wind and rain seemed to slow

in that one second, she drove the axe down into his arm. He screamed and she cried when she realized that it hadn't gone all the way through. She was now certain that she may have given him his death sentence, but my father was as calm as he could have been in that situation and told her to go again. She was scared and it was taking her a second to compose herself, but she didn't have a second. He told her that she needed to do it immediately or he wasn't going to have a chance. She lifted it once more and in one more blow he was free.

She grabbed a nearby shirt that was relatively dry and wrapped it around the stump that now replaced his arm. They both, holding onto one another, climbed over the now broken pieces of debris that was once their house and began making their way down the long driveway to hopefully reach their neighbor's house in time to get some help. My father had begun leaning against my mother for support as he continued to lose blood. The mud was basically just slopped and slowed them down in a situation where they needed to go as quickly as possible. By the time they reached the bottom of the driveway my father had begun to go limp and my mother was practically carrying him, dragging him. She wasn't ready to give up as she begged him not to.

A point came where she finally couldn't carry him any longer. She laid him down under a tree in a spot she thought was drier than the rest, and slowly and sadly said her goodbyes to the man that she thought she would grow old with. He was conscious enough to let her know that he loved her and that he would always be with her even if it wasn't in person. Early morning came and the storm died down. My mother was found on the side of the road when their neighbors were driving into town. She was still clutching onto my father and crying into his chest. Police were called, but of course, nothing could be done to save my father. My mother never really fully moved on from his death and how traumatic the whole night had been. She found out that she was pregnant with me only a month later and she always said that

I'm the greatest reminder of the man she loved so deeply. She hasn't remarried and I've only heard this story once when she thought I was finally old enough to understand why my father had never been in my life and what happened to him. It's too traumatic for her to think about. Our house is still full of pictures of them together and every year we celebrate his birthday. And of course I feel for her. I can't imagine how hard it must have been to start a life with someone, only to have it torn away from you, so quickly. I'm in my late 20s now, but the story I'm about to tell you takes place when I was 12 and my brother was 14. We lived with our parents in a small cottage in the countryside.

We had no electricity and only had running water in the warmer months from our gravity-fed hoses off of the seasonal creek. Most people probably would have hated it, but when you're raised in it and know nothing else, you have no reason to dislike it. I didn't know a lot about the world outside of our property. My dad hunted, and that is how we got most of our meat, and my mom grew a huge garden from spring to early fall. We also raised pigs, chickens, goats, and had a dairy cow named Della. My mom canned all the excess food throughout the year so when winter came we would have plenty to eat and live off of. She cooked on our wood stove even during the warmer months and she homeschooled us and taught

my brother and I everything we know. One fall it was exceptionally stormy and my mom had told me to go milk the goats. I was mad about it since it was early in the morning and all I wanted to do was sleep but she was adamant that I help out. Apparently she'd been up all night trying to secure the animal's pens. Our dad had been away on a hunting trip for a week at that point. I slowly and sluggishly made them my way outside and to get to the goat stalls you had to pass by the pig pens. They had their own little structure out there that kept them out of the wind and rain in the early mornings my mom would let them out. Only this time when I walked by the pig pen I noticed one of our pigs,

Chunky, wasn't there. I climbed over the fence into the pen and made my way into their small structure. I saw Corrine and Freudus cuddling like they usually do, but no Chunky in sight. I started panicking a little since Chunky had always been my favorite. I ran back up to the house and asked my mom if she'd seen Chunky this morning. She told me that when she let the pigs out only a couple of hours before, Chunky was with them. I told her she was missing but my mom wasn't really worried. Chunky was a troublemaker who got out from time to time but she always came back and we treated her really well and she knew where her home was. She was actually very smart. I told

my mom I was worried and that I was going to go around the property looking for her once I was done milking the goats. The whole time that I was milking them, all I could think of was Chunky out somewhere in the property, alone, wet, and cold. After about an hour of milking the goats, I was finally done. I brought the milk to my mom and kissed her cheek before making my way back outside in my rubber boots and raincoat. I spent the rest of that day looking for Chunky, but I just couldn't find her. My brother Tony even came out to help me look, but he didn't like the pigs so much, so he gave up after joining in the search for about an hour. As it got dark, my mom told me to come inside.

I hated not knowing where she was. My mom kept reassuring me that Chunky was okay and that she'd probably be back by morning, but I knew that there was something wrong. I didn't sleep much that night and the second the sun peeked through my curtains, I was up and out the door. I didn't make it very far before screaming at the sight in front of me. There on the front lawn was Chunky's lifeless body, torn to shreds by some animal. I fell to the ground in tears as my mom and brother ran outside to see what was going on and I couldn't take my eyes off her as I sobbed. That whole day all I could think about was Chunky and how she didn't deserve to die that way.

My mom was more concerned about the fact that one of her animals had been attacked so close to home. She knew it meant that whatever had done this would probably be back for more now that it knew that it was somewhere to find something to eat. For the next week we kept our animals in their houses. It worked for a bit until one morning we woke up again to one of our goat stalls torn open by something and all four goats dead. My mom wouldn't let me know what it had done but by the look on my brother's face when he came back from helping mom clean up I knew that

it was bad. My dad came home a few days after the goat incident and he helped to secure the other structures and stalls as best he could. We were hoping that that would deter whatever was attacking our animals but of course it didn't. Next, our whole flock of chickens was massacred. It was a bloodbath in their coop. We had no idea what was taking the lives of our animals, but we had no choice but to figure it out. This wasn't just our pets it was eating, this was also our source of food, and we couldn't just keep letting it kill our animals. My dad and brother decided that night that they'd sit up in the hunting blind by the goat stalls and hopefully

they'd see whatever it was that was preying on our animals at night. Unfortunately for them, what they weren't expecting to see was a very large mountain lion making its way onto the property. My brother told me the second our dad saw it, he threw his hand over both their mouths to not make a sound. You see, mountain lions are very good at something that my dad hadn't counted on, climbing trees. Of course, in a moment of panic, my brother gasped and the mountain lion locked eyes on the both of them. My dad had his rifle in his hand and although he didn't revel in the thought of killing this creature, in that moment, he knew that he would have to do it.

My brother started to cry out of fear even though he was trying his absolute best not to. He'd never been in a situation like that, and he just couldn't hold his emotions in at all. In one quick motion, the mountain lion sprang onto the base of the tree and quickly started climbing its way up toward my father and brother. And that's when my mom and I heard the screaming. We rushed out into the porch, but it being the middle of the night meant that we couldn't see anything, only hear the screams of pure terror coming from my brother, then the gunshot, then a thump. My mother began running towards the tree that she knew that they were in,

but we heard my dad call out to us to go back inside and shut the door. After around ten minutes they came inside and my dad told us what had happened. As the mountain line was making its way up the tree toward them, my dad knew that he had one chance to shoot it before it reached them. His eyes had acclimated to the low light and with only light from the moon to help him, he made the shot. Then he watched as the big cat fell to the ground with a loud thump. He told my mom and I to go back inside in case he hadn't killed it, and he was worried that maybe it had enough fight left in it that

if it saw my mom and I that maybe it would come for us next. But by the time he and my brother climbed down the tree he knew it was dead, straight shot between the eyes. The next morning he reported the killing and animal attacks to local authorities and game management who came by and collected the mountain lion. After that we didn't have any more problems with large predators except for the occasional chicken being killed by a hawk. I moved off the farm when I was 20, but not too far away. I visit often with my husband and daughter, and about once a year, my dad just loves to tell the story about how he saved my brother's life. I'm a 38-year-old female and I live with my husband and 4-year-old son. We decided that we wanted to live off the grid about a year after our son was born.

The world's been going in a weird direction and cutting ourselves off from it seemed like a good idea at the time. We bought a small house in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and apart from the story I'm about to tell you, we loved every second of it. We have a family dairy cow that produces a lot of milk, about 6-7 gallons a day which is way more than a family of three can drink. More than anyone can drink in a day actually, but where we live, people love to drink raw, unprocessed milk. It's a controversial topic that I won't get into right now, but with the excess milk we constantly had, my husband suggested that we post a Craigslist ad to barter our milk. You know, trade the milk for other items we may need or want like fresh fruits and veggies or farm equipment.

We figured it couldn't hurt and that it would be fun to meet new like-minded people in the process. We posted our ad and we didn't get any responses for a while. I started feeling a little defeated about the whole thing and that's when I got an email from a woman named Christina. She told me that she absolutely would love to trade for some milk and I won't lie when I say that I was a little excited too. We emailed back and forth for a couple of days and she told me that she grew organic berries that she would want to trade. I thought everything was going great until she suddenly just stopped emailing back. I emailed her again four days later to ask if she got my emails but again got no response. It was like she was purposefully ignoring me but my husband told me that sometimes people get busy

and I shouldn't take it personally so I didn't. I moved on and continued to wait for another person to see the ad. Over a week and a half later I finally got a response from Christina. She was angry that I had emailed her in the middle of the night and it was my fault that she hadn't seen it. She said that it was very irresponsible of me to email so late and that it wasn't a good way to run a business. And I was shocked. I looked over my previous emails to her and was confused when I saw that I, in fact, hadn't emailed her in the middle of the night but in the afternoon. And I didn't understand her comment about this, not being a good way to run a business because I wasn't running a business, it was a Craigslist ad. I chose not to respond to her because of her

obvious problem with me and her incapability to take responsibility for her own actions. I thought ignoring her would have meant that I'd be done with the situation. I was wrong. Instead, she continued to email me multiple times a day for the next two days, reminding me of her emails and telling me to email her back. Finally, two days later, she wrote to me once again, this time saying something that genuinely terrified me. She said that she was tired of me ghosting her. She was offended and was very angry that I would do that to a sweet old lady like her, and that if I wasn't going to give her the milk, she was just going to take it herself. I didn't really understand what she meant by that.

Was she going to find where we live and milk our cow? I showed my husband and we laughed about it together and again I didn't email her back. Why would I? Clearly this woman had some serious issues. That night we heard rustling outside of her house but that was something that we were used to. There were lots of animals in the area that weren't afraid to come up to the house throughout the night. Our son came into our room really early in the morning and swore to us that he was hearing footsteps outside of his window. My husband and I tried to reassure him that it was probably just a deer, but he was sure that

it sounded like a person or monster walking back and forth just outside his window. He was scared, so we let him sleep in our bed until it was time to wake up. That morning my husband went outside to check for footsteps and to our surprise he actually found some. Whoever it was wore a very small size shoe and definitely was pacing all night based on the deep footprints that went back and forth in the mud outside his window. It's pretty strange seeing footsteps outside our house that aren't ours. We live so far outside of town and own the property surrounding our house, 30 acres of it. My husband searched the forest surrounding our house but found nothing.

When I went out to milk our cow, I was horrified to find her covered in black spray paint. Her back was littered with it. When my husband came out to help me, he was just as shocked as I was. I still had to milk her though and honestly I felt a little bad doing it. Cows are very sensitive animals and I could tell that she was scared and probably in shock just as much as we were. Only when I went to milk her and was massaging her udder, I noticed her bag seemed a little small, almost like how it feels after being milked. Then, when I went to clear her teats of the first few squeezes of milk, there was almost nothing coming out. Someone had literally milked our cow, and sometime throughout the night also spray painted her back.

I thought back to the crazy email the woman had left and I knew it had to have been her. We knew no one else would do something like this. While my husband and I were trying to clean off her back, we heard our son scream from inside the house. We both dropped what we were doing and when we got inside we saw a jug of milk on the counter and muddy footprints leading to our son's room. We rushed to his bedroom door and when we looked inside, we saw a woman sitting on our son's bed with him on her lap.

She was holding him tightly, smiling at us with this eerily emotionless look on her face as he squirmed in her grasp. I was going to tell her to let him go, but my husband had other plans. He'd always been the no-nonsense kind of guy, and so he just walked right up to her and punched her in the face. She let go of our son as she brought her hand up to her nose, and my husband took the opportunity to grab him and pull him away from her. He grabbed my arm on the way out of the room and led us out of the house and put us in his truck and locked it. He went back inside and the next thing I knew he was physically carrying this woman out of the house and forcing her to sit on the porch. Every time she tried to get up he just shoved her right back down. She was no match for him. He made sure that

there was no way she was leaving. I had already called the police the second we were in the truck and they arrived about 30 minutes later. While we waited for them, the woman only said one thing. You shouldn't have ignored me. To be continued... My husband does everything for our family. If we didn't have him, there's no way our children and I would have survived out here by ourselves. For context, my husband leaves for a few months out of the year to work on the railroads while my children and I stay on the farm taking care of all of our animals and tending our garden. When my husband comes back, it is honestly such a relief since he's able to do work on the more hands-on, bigger projects around the property.

Well, our family had been lacking something for the first year on the property. We have no water running to the shed that we currently live in. Yes, shed. We converted a 12 by 30 foot shed into a small cabin for the kids and my husband and I. It's fine, it does the trick. Keeps us dry during the wet months and keeps us warm during the cold months. But what has always bothered me has been the lack of a toilet. For the first year we'd literally just been going out into the woods with a roll of biodegradable toilet paper and I was so sick of it. Ever tried getting a two year old to go to the bathroom where everything around them has their attention and not you? It's impossible. So to remedy this situation,

I asked my very handy husband to build us an outhouse. Nothing fancy, just a small building where we could go to the bathroom in peace. He was absolutely on board and positive that he could do it. Our shed fortunately had electricity powered by our diesel generator just outside so my husband spent a whole week researching exactly what he needed to build the outhouse and how he was going to do it. He even bought a new very expensive chainsaw just so he could cut down one of our trees himself to use the wood. I didn't really like the sound of that since I thought it sounded dangerous but he was so sure that he could do it because he loved to remind me that he's cut down plenty of trees before so this time shouldn't be a problem. I decided to trust that he knew what he was doing. The day came for him to cut down the tree and to say that I was nervous would have been an understatement. I stayed in the shed with our daughters and patiently waited for him to come inside and tell me that the tree was down and that it was done and over with. I heard his chainsaw roar

to life and the awful sound of it cutting through the wood. I took comfort in knowing that one of our neighbors had come by to help him so at least he wouldn't be alone. The loud thump of the tree heightened my anxiety for a second and when I looked out the window and saw the big smile on my husband's face and a thumbs up, I knew it was okay. I decided to stand out on the small porch just outside the door of our shed to watch him chop it down. For about an hour everything seemed to be going fine. Now I know nothing about chainsaws or cutting down trees so I can only describe to you what I saw and the way that I saw it. My husband and our neighbor were both chopping up the tree on different ends when I noticed my

husband was having a hard time getting through the specific part of the tree more towards what used to be the bottom of the trunk. I watched in horror as I saw him prop his leg up onto the trunk of the tree to get more leverage and I screamed at him to stop. Of course they couldn't hear me since both my husband and our neighbor were wearing ear protection. I started running towards them to hopefully stop my husband from possibly hurting himself but there was nothing I could do. I was at least a hundred feet away and I just wasn't fast enough. As I was running and screaming for my husband to stop, I watched him place the chainsaw against the bark once more, only this time when it kicked back, there wasn't just an

open space for it to go into, there was his leg. The chain ripped through his shin and blood immediately sprayed and oozed from the wound. He screamed in pain and threw the chainsaw to the ground. Our neighbor just looked at us with wide eyes and I screamed at him to get help. I rushed to my husband's side and I honestly had no idea what to do. I was panicking, he was panicking and it was pure chaos. I looked at his leg and through all the blood, I could just see mangled flesh. My husband had begun to scream. There was literally no stopping the wailing coming from his mouth and I wasn't going to ask him to stop. I could only imagine

the fear and pain that he must have been feeling. I thought for a second and remembered a YouTube video that I had watched on how to make a tourniquet out of a piece of your clothing without thinking twice, I used a knife to cut a piece of cloth from my flannel. I positioned it above the wound on my husband's leg and tied it tight. I used a nearby stick and tied it to the piece of cloth and twisted it over and over as tightly as possible to hopefully cut off blood circulation to the lower half of his leg. He'd already lost so much blood, and I was scared when I realized his screams got quieter with each breath that he took. Our neighbor came back with his wife, and she was carrying what looked to be a first aid kit.

They informed us that they had called 911, and an ambulance was on its way, but wouldn't be there for another 30 or even possibly 45 minutes and the number one thing they said to do was to make sure it bled as little as possible. From what I could tell, the tourniquet I had made was working but my husband wasn't doing any better. His screaming had stopped and he was finally able to talk to me. They said that he felt numb and his body was cold. We brought him blankets and all I could do was sit with him and wait for the ambulance to get there. He was telling me over and over again how scared he was and I was trying to be brave for him but my god I was terrified. I needed him. Our kids needed him and I should have never let him cut up that tree.

Wind had started to roll in and dirt started getting in the wound. I didn't really know what to do, but it seemed like a good idea at the time to at least cover his leg with something. I grabbed a clean towel from the shed and told him to brace himself for me to place it on his leg. I very gently wrapped the towel around what was left of the lower portion of his leg, and surprisingly, he said that he didn't feel much down there anymore. His face became white and he got colder and colder. By the time the ambulance arrived, he had been in and out of consciousness for about ten minutes. I called my mom to come pick up the kids and our neighbors watch them until she got there. I rode with my husband to the hospital. He had lost so much blood and at first doctors weren't sure if he was going to make it. They did end up having to amputate his leg below the knee. Unfortunately, he developed an

infection post-surgery and needed a second amputation two weeks later, and this time above the knee, and he was devastated. He thought life as he knew it was over. To him, his purpose in life was doing activities he thought he could no longer do without his leg. He's still going through his journey of recovery, but is doing much better mentally. He's determined to do everything he once did before the accident and for now we're staying with my mother in the city while he heals. I'm just glad that day didn't end with the loss of my husband and my children's father. We'll be a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRiver Sportsbook. Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. I grew up in this little place called Pruitt in northern Arkansas. Growing up, all my friends lived down in Jasper, so if I wanted to see them, my mom or dad used to drive me down there for playdates. When I was old enough, I'd ride my bicycle down there, but our bikes also gave us the freedom to explore for miles

and miles in every direction. And that's how we rediscovered Dogpatch. Dogpatch is this abandoned amusement park up in a place called Marble Falls. It closed sometime when I was a kid and I remember visiting when it was still in business but we just kind of forgot about it over time until we rediscovered it one day while out riding our bikes. It definitely wasn't your typical amusement park. There were no roller coasters or anything like that and I think the owners were going for a more wilderness camp kind of feel to the whole thing. I remember there being a big water slide which wasn't so wet when we started hanging out there, a bunch of abandoned log cabins with these big red brick chimneys. It definitely wasn't a safe place to be hanging

out but I think that just made us want to hang out there all the more. And that we did, for almost four years and each summer mother nature claimed more and more of the park until it was as wild as we were. I spent some of the best days of my childhood in that old abandoned theme park, but for reasons that'll become obvious, those memories are all tainted for me now. I know that's something I need to work through, but it's difficult to prevent what I'm about to tell you from bleeding through. Like I said, I spent most of the happiest times of my teenage years at the dog patch, but I also endured the worst few moments of my entire life there too. The third summer we spent hanging out on the dog patch marked a big change for me and my buddies,

and it was one I'd never have expected. In Pruitt, there was a family that had a real bad reputation. They were real poor, so I guess it wasn't their fault in a lot of ways. But they for sure seemed like they were crazy mean to their kid Noah. Noah was real weird too. I remember one time in middle school all the kids started pointing and laughing at him because he was eating cat food for lunch. You'd think that'd shame him into throwing it away or at least trying to hide it or something, but Noah didn't seem to care. Either he was so hungry that he didn't care if people were laughing or he just couldn't hear it.

There were a bunch of wild rumors flying around about his family too, some saying that they were all on drugs, some saying that they were serial killers or kid snatchers. Even my parents told me to stay away from their place and that he didn't even have a bad word to say about anyone. Noah was a real loner, and we didn't figure that was by choice either. He didn't hang out anywhere we knew of, we didn't know of him having any friends, and we never saw him outside of school. So imagine our surprise one day when we sneak onto the dog patch to find that we have ourselves some company.

Someone was just sitting on the edge of the little pit where the old water slide was supposed to splash down and as we got closer, we realized it was Noah. We didn't approach him right away, the four of us just huddled together then wandered aloud what he was doing and how he'd gotten in. Seeing Noah out in the wild like that was like seeing Bigfoot or something, and while we didn't exactly want to chase him off of our territory, we weren't too keen on hanging out with him either, or even approaching him. At least until he pulled something out of his pocket, put it between his lips, then sent it alight. It was a cigarette. Now I know some of you that might not seem like a big deal,

but to us, it was no small thing. We were all pretty much freshly 14 at that time, and where we lived is still very, very conservative, so the idea of anyone our age smoking or drinking was pretty wild. I think Noah knew we were staring. Maybe that's why he lit up in the first place, to get a reaction out of us. Either way, it worked. One of my buddies steps forward then calls over to Noah asking if it really was a cigarette. That's the kind of state of disbelief we were in. That and Noah was definitely weird enough for us to think he was just pretending to smoke with a piece of rolled up newspaper or something. Noah then invited us to come over and see for ourselves. Then lo and behold, he is actually smoking a cigarette. That wasn't even the craziest thing though because when we asked where he got it, he pulls out a whole unopened pack then tells us that his grandma bought them for him.

We immediately called bullcrap on that but Noah says he can prove it by bringing us all an open pack of cigarettes the next day. We obviously didn't believe him, but then the next day, he showed up with a whole bunch of smokes, along with a little flask of whiskey for us to try. We still didn't believe that he was just getting the stuff off of his grandma, we were convinced that he was stealing it from somewhere. But as time went on, we started actually believing him. Slowly but surely over the course of a few weeks, Noah started to ingratiate himself into our little group. Noah, it turned out, was an okay guy. He definitely warranted his reputation for being weird and he definitely smelled a little funky. But if you kept your distance and accommodated his weird sense of humor, Noah was actually a pretty fun person to hang out with.

We even brought up that whole cat food incident in middle school. Noah just laughed it off saying it was all just to provoke a reaction, before adding that cat food actually wasn't all that bad if you ignored the smell. I honestly couldn't tell if he was serious or not, but I honestly didn't care. Noah was our ticket to a whole world of forbidden excitement that summer. Booze, smokes, adult magazines, Noah seemed to be able to get his hands on just about anything for us. For a long time we just didn't question it. I mean, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, right? But then the time finally came when curiosity outweighed our apathy and we started probing. The moment coincided with Noah bringing along some old copy of Hustler, then as he was flicking through the pages, one of us finally asked if it really was his grandma who was getting all this stuff for him.

Noah insisted on it, like it was the most normal thing in the world and that's about the same time we found out that he didn't actually live with his parents, but rather with all really wanted to know by that point was, why did his grandma buy him booze and smokes, or more accurately, why didn't she see anything wrong with it? I didn't know what kind of answer I expected, but at the minimum I expected a straight one, so it was deeply unsatisfying to hear Noah say something like, she buys me stuff when I'm good. Take it from me, Noah must have been very well behaved around his grandma because he brought stuff with him almost every day. But aside from the moral question, the other thing we did understand was how his grandma was able to afford all that stuff. From what we could gather, his grandma was at home most of the time so she didn't seem to have a job.

Noah said different guys came over a couple of times a week to give her money, but other than that, he had no idea where she got all of her cash from. I remember my buddies giving each other looks as if to say, this is the luckiest guy in the universe, but didn't share their thoughts. Instead, I noticed something come over Noah, and afterwards, he went real quiet for a while. I remember how a thought occurred to me while we were all still hanging out. It was related to Noah's grandma, and given the nature of it, I didn't bring it up right there in front of him. But then, on the ride back south, I told my buddies I thought I knew where Noah's grandma was getting her money.

When I told them, they all just laughed at first, thinking I was making a joke or something. But when I told them I thought that Noah's grandma might be a working girl, I was deadly serious. It explained why he was so neglected, why his grandma had so many different guys coming over to give her money. It didn't quite explain why she was buying Noah whiskey and cigarettes, but it explained a lot of other stuff. It couldn't have been a drugs thing, at least we didn't think so. We'd already asked if Noah could get his hands on something stronger than booze, and he told us that that was the one thing his grandma wouldn't allow. Seemed like a weird place to draw the line, but I suppose it had to land somewhere. We did a lot of speculating that summer, but it was all basically pointless. None of us was going to actually ask if Noah's grandma was a hooker,

because we didn't want to upset or annoy him or lose our golden ticket in the process. So, for a while, that was that. Even though we really wanted to know, we just told ourselves that Noah's family stuff was none of our business and for a while anyway, it stayed that way. All up until the night when Noah made it my business. I remember the night mom and dad had such a big fight that I thought it might get physical. They were screaming at each other, slamming doors closed, throwing things around and they were like that for hours. In the end I just couldn't listen to it anymore. I remember how warm and humid the summer night seemed as I walked out the front door and closed it behind me. Quiet too so mom and dad wouldn't notice. Then I hopped on my bike and rode all

the way up to the dog patch, the one place I felt like I wouldn't hear my parents yelling in my head. I rode the 20 minutes or so up to the dog patch, found the secret little entry point that we'd made by pulling away a few rotten fencing boards, then climbed through into the abandoned park. I start walking across this big field that had the old water slide on the other side of it, and as I get closer, I see this little orange light glow real bright in the darkness for a second before fading back down again. It was a cigarette, someone was smoking a cigarette near the old water slide,

and I found myself praying that it was just Noah and not some psycho killer about to run me down to my doom. I called out to the person through the darkness, asking if it was Noah and to my relief, they called back, yeah. It was Noah's voice alright, but there was something else in there. Something shaky and nasal, like he'd been crying. I walked over to the little concrete pit and sat opposite him, then heard the telltale sniffles of someone who'd been shedding a tear or two. I saw Noah had a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of something in the other.

I didn't see what it was at his feet. I asked him if he was okay, but Noah didn't reply. He just took a sip from the bottle, grimaced, then took another drag on the cigarette that he was smoking. Bearing in mind, since No was held back a year, he was only 15 years old at the time, but I swear he held that bottle like a man who'd lived three or four times as long. He wouldn't say what was wrong, but I knew that there was something, so I tried to do at least the bare minimum of a friend and tell him something reassuring. I'll always remember saying,

It'll be okay. Whatever it is, it'll all be okay one day. I don't remember those words for their mediocrity, but because of what Noah said in response, or more importantly, how he said it. In reply to me telling him everything would be fine, Noah just replied, no, it's not. I wanted to tell myself that he was just being cynical, but there was something in the way he told me, no, that gave me chills. He sounded resigned, doomed even. I tried telling him about how my parents were fighting, how it upset me so bad that I rode out there. But I also told him that no matter how bad they fought sometimes,

they'd always get sweet on each other again after a while. You just had to ride it out. But again, his dismissal sounded like that of a condemned man. I tried more talking, anything to get him to feel better, but in the end, Noah just told me to shut up and smoke a cigarette with him in peace. He shuffled up off the concrete for a second so he could slide his hand into the pocket of his jeans, then after he took out a pack of cigarettes, he passed one over along with a lighter. I remember putting the butt in my mouth, but it wasn't until I ignited the lighter that

I saw it had blood on it. I let it fall from my lips in shock, only to hear Noah say, sorry, one another. I declined and flicked the lighter on again before leaning down to make sure I wasn't mistaken. There was the cigarette lying on the floor with something that looked a lot like bloody fingerprints on the white paper. But I noticed something else while I was down there, the thing that had been lying at Noah's feet. It was a gun. I remember asking, is that a gun? But to this day I don't know why. Maybe it was a gut reaction or wishful thinking or something.

I asked because I wanted him to tell me no but he couldn't because it was a gun that had been lying at Noah's feet. When I asked him he leaned over to pick it up and I swear that I felt my skin trying to crawl right off of my body. I've been around guns before, even fired one a few times, and I've never been around anyone with a gun who was drunk and emotionally distressed before. The feeling must have caused some kind of slight but definite physical reaction in me, because Noah started to reassure me that the gun wasn't loaded,

and that I had nothing to be afraid of. I asked him what he was doing with an unloaded gun and he just replies, it wasn't loaded when I picked it up. I remember the horrified feeling of realizing Noah had shot somebody but also this horrible all-consuming curiosity for who it was that he'd shot. So after a considerable silence I finally brought myself to ask him who it was that he'd shot. So after a considerable silence, I finally brought myself to ask him who it had been. He just sighed, then asked me if I remembered what he'd said about men coming over every few days to give his grandma money. I told him I did, then asked if it was one of those guys that he'd shot. Noah just nodded, but then told me that's not why

he felt bad. Now, keep in mind I'm still under the impression that Noah's grandma is some kind of escort, or that at least something weird is going on. I'm thinking some guy came over, started beating on his grandma, then Noah snapped and just blew the guy away. I immediately understood why doing something like that wouldn't leave a person feeling too bad but Noah was still real shaken up by something, in which case something must have happened to his grandma. It took me a moment or two to figure that out but when I did, I asked him if the guy he shot was hurting his grandma. I was so sure the answer was going to be yes that for a second, I wondered why I'd asked the question in the first place.

But Noah didn't say yes. In fact, he shook his head before covering his face with his hands. Then the only words I could make out before he burst into tears again was, I shot my grandma. I couldn't believe what I just heard, and I had to wait until Noah's sobs died down before I asked him if he was serious. There was no way that he could have shot his grandma. There was just no way. I don't think Noah respected her as much as others might respect their grandparents, but he didn't hate her. At least it didn't seem that way to us.

To me, at the time, the only way it could have happened was if the guy was beating on Noah's grandma and he accidentally shot her. And that's what I went with. And I told him the cops would go easy on him if it was an accident, especially if he was trying to protect her. And that's when he told me it wasn't an accident. I was so stunned that all I could do was sit back down on the edge of the concrete pit. I wanted to ask why, but it was like I'd run out of the woods by that point. I didn't say anything, but it was like Noah heard my thoughts because, about a minute or so into the silence that followed, he says five little words that have haunted me well into my adult life.

He said, She let them do it. I still didn't quite know what to say, and I was still reeling from the news that shooting his own grandma hadn't been an accident, so I didn't really focus on what he said about her letting them do it, whatever that meant. After that, Noah put the bottle down next to himself on the concrete edge of the pit and tossed the pack of cigarettes at me. Then he got up and started walking off back towards the makeshift entry we had going. There was a moment where I was going to ask him

if he needed help, but if what he said was true, he was way beyond any help I could offer him. But what I did ask was why he wasn't taking his smokes with him. I don't need them anymore, was all he said. Then he disappeared into the darkness. Sometime later I arrived back home and my parents were furious that I'd sneaked out so late. They weren't so mad after I told them what Noah had told me. They were too busy getting in touch with the police and for me that was the start of a huge scandal that engulfed the whole area for weeks. I don't know what became of Noah, the cops never found him, but the general consensus

was that he was just a bad kid who'd stolen his grandma's whiskey, then shot her and her boyfriend. I hadn't put the whole thing together at that point, so that was what I believed too. Years later, and I'm talking well into my college years, I happened to be drinking the same kind of whiskey that Noah had brought for us, all those years earlier on that second day that we hung out together. Then as I was sipping it, his words flashed through my mind again. She let them do it. Noah's grandma wasn't making money by selling her body.

She was making money by selling his. In 2005, Christopher Vaughn, his wife Kimberly, and their three children packed up their lives in Seattle and drove east to begin a new life in Illinois. Chris had been offered a job at Navigant Consulting's computer forensics group, and since the new role's salary dwarfed what he was making with his own licensed private detective agency, the decision was a no-brainer. For the two years that followed the move, Chris and Kimberly led peaceful and happy lives, the very definition of a prosperous suburban family. But on the morning of June 14th, 2007, their world was shattered by an event that has paralyzed true crime aficionados

for the better part of 15 years. During the week beginning of June 11th, 2005, Chris announced that the family would be visiting a water park over in Springfield on the coming Thursday. His children, 12-year-old Abigail, 11-year-old Cassandra, and 8-year-old Blake, were ecstatic at the news and were unconcerned by the idea of getting up at dawn in order to enjoy a fun-filled day at the amusement park. So, on the day in question, the Vons departed their home in Oswego and began the three-hour drive down to Springfield. However, less than an hour into their journey, the Vons' car ended up at the side of the road, and at around 5.15am, a passing motorist noticed something rather disturbing. Chris Vaughn was limping away from his vehicle, blood dripping down his leg and when the passing driver asked him what had happened,

Chris claimed that he had been shot twice, once through the leg and once through the wrist. Then, when the motorist asked who shot him, Chris simply replied, I think my wife shot me. After the police and ambulance arrived, Chris was taken to the hospital while uniformed officers surveyed the scene. The three Vaughn children were lying on the back seat of the car, each of them having sustained two fatal gunshot wounds, while Kimberly was slumped over the center console with a single bullet hole under her chin. At her feet lay a 9mm pistol, one later determined to be registered in her husband's name. While being treated at a nearby hospital, Chris appeared to be in a deep state of shock

and said things which suggested that he had no idea that his wife and children had been murdered. Police officers were forced to postpone questioning until Chris was in a stable and lucid condition. But when he was finally interviewed, he told a truly nightmarish story. Chris told the officers that about 45 minutes into their drive to the water park, Kimberly had mentioned feeling nauseous before asking him to pull over. Chris added that the nausea was a symptom of his wife's migraines and that she was taking the medications nortriptyline and topamax to treat them. After pulling over to the side of the road, Kimberly remained in her seat while Chris got out

of his car to get some fresh air. It was then he noticed that one of the straps of his car topper was a little loose, so after tightening the strap, Chris climbed back in the driver's seat. Yet just as he sat down, he noticed that his leg was bleeding. After that, his memory of the event grew foggy, and he told officers that he had no memory of being shot at or wounded. In a subsequent interview, when asked if he believed it possible that Kimberly was the shooter, Chris stated that was impossible. There's no way she could have hurt the kids, he reportedly said, before adding that she didn't own a firearm. To some, it might seem like Kimberly had shot her husband and children before turning the gun on herself, and that the gaps in Chris' memory were a trauma-induced reaction to the horror

of what he'd witnessed. But to the police, Chris' story didn't wash, and they believed that he was trying to cover up that he was the one who pulled the trigger. To his horror, Chris was arrested a few months after getting out of the hospital, and after a lengthy period of detention, was charged with four counts of first degree murder. The news was met with horror by the local community, who couldn't believe that such a wholesome looking man could be capable of such a monstrosity. Public opinion was also flavored by Chris' story that his wife was responsible for their family's destruction, and that his treatment at the hands of police officers was a blatant miscarriage of justice. Yet when he finally was brought to trial in 2012, the prosecution painted a very different portrait of Christopher Vaughn. The prosecution started

off by arguing that Chris's version of events did not match the forensic evidence found within the vehicle, and that his wounds showed signs of being self-inflicted. They claimed his apparent amnesia was all a well-thought-out act, one intended to disguise his own guilt, and that an extensive investigation had uncovered a very probable motive. Prosecuting attorneys claimed that Chris had been researching survival methods and looked up remote places to camp in the Canadian wilderness. They argued that this was either a way of escaping justice after murdering his family or that Chris harbored some bizarre self-destructive desire to start his life over as some kind of introverted survivalist.

Police had also discovered that Chris had been in email contact with someone and had asked them to help in faking his own death. However, this piece of evidence was also used by the prosecution, as the conversation included Chris insisting that his death be faked in a way that allowed his wife to collect on his life insurance. It was a scheme that stood in stark contrast of what Chris was accused of, yet the prosecution produced even more damning evidence over the course of his trial. Investigators had discovered that Chris had visited a number of different strip clubs and had reportedly spent just less than $5,000 on exotic dancers in the week before his family was murdered. Two of these dancers took the stand in Chris's trial, with one stating that he'd repeatedly

told her of his desires to leave his wife before moving to Canada to live in the woods. Another told the court that Chris claimed to be single and without children, evidence enough that he had had designs to abandon his family. Chris' defense tied their argument into his original story, arguing that Kimberly's medication was known to cause thoughts of taking her own life and had side effects which included intense confusion or agitation. The defense also stated that Chris had recently spoken with his wife regarding the issue of their marriage and it was possible that she was so distraught that she decided to annihilate her own family. The argument was a compelling one, but it didn't convince the jury,

who returned a verdict of guilty after several hours of deliberation. It was a decision that stunned Chris' close family and friends, who were reeling by the time the judge sentenced him to four consecutive life sentences. Chris immediately appealed the conviction and enlisted the help of an expert crime scene investigator by the name of Robert Deal. Deal had personally worked on the case at one stage and asserted that the investigation into the Vaughn family deaths had been completely mishandled. He stated that there was plenty of forensic evidence to indicate that Kimberly was the shooter, and that at the very minimum, the trajectory of the bullets rolled out any

possibility that Chris fired the pistol from the driver's seat. This was a crucial part of the prosecution's argument. Chris had to have been sitting in the driver's seat if he was able to place the muzzle of his pistol under his wife's chin. If he wanted to make it look like she had taken her own life, there had to be powder burns on her chin to trick investigators into believing the wound was self-inflicted. If Chris wasn't in the driver's seat when the bullets were fired, it cast doubt on the prosecution's version of events, and enough doubt might be enough to force a retrial. Robert Deal also leveled heavy criticism at the homicide detectives who worked with him on the case. I felt as if though I wasn't being listened to, he said.

Every time I offered up something that was contrary to their theory, they had some reason why I didn't know what I was talking about. Deal was insulted, and rightfully so, as he was an experienced investigator during the time of the murders. He also complained that the homicide detective seemed overly fixated on the prospect of Chris being the killer, and seemed unwilling to even contemplate the idea that a mother had murdered her own children. In their eyes, it also fell back on that Christopher Vaughn, Deal said. They thought he was some kind of criminal mastermind who knew all about crime scenes and that he was trying to fool me into thinking that something else happened.

But Robert Deal was no amateur, and he is vehemently denied having misinterpreted the forensic evidence. The detectives kept changing, trying to make the evidence fit their theory, Diehl added, instead of letting the evidence dictate to you the events that occurred. In great detail, Robert Diehl explained why it was in fact the prosecution that had misinterpreted the evidence. The state's attorney had Christopher unbuckle his wife's seatbelt before he shot her, when in reality, a large blood stain was found at the point where the latch came together. Since the blood belonged to Chris, this would mean that Kimberly had unbuckled the seatbelt after Christopher was shot,

at which point throws serious doubt on the prosecution's case. Following Chris' conviction, an email had come to light which seems to back up the idea that Kimberly's medication was having some horribly adverse effects on her. The email, which was composed by Kimberly herself, states that she was experiencing a huge upsurge of anxiety in the weeks before her death. This could well be down to the amount of nortriptyline that she was taking, as during her autopsy, it was discovered that she had toxic levels of it in her system. Chris's defense lawyers have since cited an FDA study which reports that people taking nortriptyline are at a statistically significant risk of taking their own lives, and that a clinical psychiatrist believed it entirely possible that Chris had been suffering from disassociative amnesia

brought on by witnessing a traumatic event. Such compelling evidence of wrongful conviction has since spurred the Conviction Advocacy Group investigating innocence to champion Chris' cause, and a crowdfunding campaign has raised a sizable amount to fund his legal expenses. If indeed the defense has as compelling an argument as they claim, there's a very real possibility that Chris Vaughn's conviction is soon to be overturned. At the very minimum, he'll be granted a retrial, but doing so will no doubt dredge up some very painful questions for all concerned. What was it that destroyed the Vaughn family? Was it the selfish

destructiveness of a neglectful father, or was it the hellish fury of a woman scorned? We'll be a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRiver Sportsbook. Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-5 at the site of a former cement factory just north of St. Louis, Missouri. For many of them, the project they were faced with was the most unusual of their entire careers, as they were tasked with creating a very unconventional kind of amusement park, one simply named Cementland. Cementland was the brainchild of a

man named Bob Casilli, an eccentric but highly successful entrepreneur who played a central role in the revitalization of downtown St. Louis. He envisioned Cementland as a kind of brutalist art installation turned amusement park, one which would feature giant concrete sculptures, the rusting skeletons of obsolete machinery, and even an artificial river large enough to accommodate small boats. Cacilli proved to be an exacting taskmaster, but had earned the respect of the construction crews by pouring his own blood, sweat, and tears into the project. He sometimes slept overnight on the unfinished job site, and after long days of

back-breaking work, Bob would carry on working long after the construction crews put down their tools. So, on the morning of September 26th, when the construction crews spotted Bob's truck and an unlocked job site, they simply assumed that he'd started work early that day. Yet as they walked onto the site, they were greeted by a dead silence that hung thick in the air. Construction work is nothing but noise, and to hear a silent job site is as rare as it is disconcerting. So, after clocking in and filling up their coffee flasks, the construction workers fanned out over the job site to search for Bob Casilli. After just a few minutes of searching, one of the workers cried out in alarm,

and after rushing to his location, the remaining construction workers were greeted by a horrifying sight. One of the site's bulldozers was lying on its side at the bottom of a steep slope, and lying slumped over in its cab, covered in blood, was Bob Casilli. The workers immediately contacted 911, but sadly, EMTs discovered that Bob had passed away as a result of his injuries just a few hours earlier. Attending police officers initially believed that Bob had died as a result of an accident, one that involved his bulldozer rolling down the steep hill on which he'd been working, crushing all his ribs and causing severe head trauma in the process.

But although St. Louis Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Graham confirmed this cause of death in his autopsy report, he couldn't be certain that Bob had actually been in the cab of the bulldozer when it had tumbled down the hill. Officially speaking, the police ruled Bob's death an accident but over the weeks that followed, Bob's widow began to insist that her husband was murdered and that his death had been staged to appear accidental. This theory was supported by a physician, Dr. Arthur Combs, who asserted that Bob's injuries were far too severe to have resulted from a mere accident. In his expert opinion, only a sustained and vicious attack with a blunt object could have caused such mortal wounds. Spurred on by the doctor's professional opinion, Giovanna Casilli

began conducting her own investigation into her husband's death, and in the process, discovered something deeply disturbing. She once cited an article from St. Louis' Riverfront Times which stated that fatal bulldozer rollovers are astonishingly rare. A study surveying mining accidents from 1988 to 1997 found just 14 fatalities related to rollovers, and in every single case, the victim was either thrown from the vehicle, asphyxiated, or drowned. Not one was found inside the cab with a fractured skull. Despite the sample years being less than a decade, the survey cited an astonishing number of bulldozer accidents, and in almost every single case of death by head trauma, the deceased had neglected to wear their seatbelt. Police argued that Bob hadn't been wearing his seatbelt when his body was found,

but to his widow, this was further evidence that he had been murdered. She stated that her husband was extremely safety conscious conscious and would never have gotten to a bulldozer without following the proper protocols. Once Dr. Combs had obtained a copy of Bob's autopsy report, he was able to more accurately articulate why his death was so suspicious. The first and perhaps the most compelling of Dr. Combs' points was that several bones in Bob's hands were broken. To him, these were textbook defensive injuries, wounds which had been sustained as he attempted to defend himself from his mysterious attackers. There were also lacerations to Bob's head and Dr. Combs stated that if he was present in the cab during its fall, the source of these wounds should have been

obvious. The doctor also pointed out that the ribs on both sides of Bob's torso were broken, wounds which couldn't possibly have been caused by a single impact or crash. If the bulldozer rolled down the hill and Bob wasn't strapped into the seat, then his body would have almost certainly been tossed around like a rag doll. But the lack of damage to the roof of the dozer's cab suggested that no such rolling had occurred. Another piece of evidence that Giovanna's attorney found extremely suspicious is the bloodstain identified beside the bulldozer. Photographs of the bloodstain were published by the St. Louis Riverfront Times, so it's not like

it was some overlooked piece of evidence. Yet despite the sizable amount of blood present outside the bulldozer, police refused to entertain the idea that a murder had taken place. They claimed that the blood could have simply dripped out of the bulldozer's broken cab, an opinion which totally contradicted the angle that Bob's body was lying in when it was discovered. Giovanna Casilli has also mentioned how her husband exhibited strange behavior prior to his death. The weekend before her husband died, Giovanna was visiting some friends over in California, so it was down to Bob to pick up their kids from her parents' place. When Bob failed to show up on time, a deeply concerned Giovanna attempted to contact her husband, as his no-show was completely out of character for him. Giovanna then got in touch

with one of their neighbors and asked them to drive over to Cementland to see if her husband was there. When this neighbor arrived at Cementland, they reported back to Giovanna that they did not hear anything and assumed the place was derelict since the gate was padlocked. Many have assumed that Bob's failure to pick up his kid was the result of his accident, and by the time the neighbor arrived at Cementland, he was already dead. But Giovanna has pointed out that Bob never locked the gate when he was there working, something which his co-workers attested to as it was in line with the safety regulations Bob so rigorously followed. Another event that seems to have been completely overlooked by police is the fact that Bob was subjected to a violent assault in the weeks before his death. The attack occurred when Bob was working alone in the park and involved masked men who stole power tools after ambushing and incapacitating him.

Bob failed to report the attack to police, claiming there was little point, as the tools were unlikely to be recovered by an already overstretched police department. The police ruled that Bob's death was unrelated to the violent robbery and dismissed Giovanna's suggestion that the same group were responsible for her husband's murder. But the dismissal did nothing to dampen the widow's beliefs that Bob's death was the result of foul play. As the investigation floundered, some began to suggest that the people responsible for Bob's death were the ones with the most to gain from it. Following this line of thinking,

the eye of suspicion was cast at Bob's former business partner, David Jump Bob and David each had a 50% share of the St. Louis City Museum The highly popular tourist attraction that had made them both very wealthy But upon Bob's passing, David was suddenly the sole recipient of the museum's profits. It's been reported that David paid a generous out-of-court settlement to Bob's family to prevent them from contesting his full, unrestricted ownership of the museum, and relations between the two parties appear to be amicable enough. But it remains a fact that David Jump had a lot to gain from Bob's succumbing to a little accident, and the possibility of his involvement in his partner's death cannot be ruled out. Despite such an obvious possibility, the St. Louis Police Department appear

to have never considered Jump as a suspect, but this appears to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of the department's shortcomings. Numerous news articles purport that over the past decade, St. Louis law enforcement has come under fire for perceived incompetence and apathy, as well as the controversial way in handling the 2014 Ferguson riots. If we accuse them of mishandling Bob Casilli's murder, it wouldn't be the first time the St. Louis Police Department had been charged with bungling a serious investigation. Not only does Giovanna Casilli truly believe that her husband was murdered, but it also seems that a very compelling argument can be made to support

her suspicions. Casilli's eldest son, Max, is insistent that his father's death was merely a tragic accident, and both he and his sister, Daisy, seem to have made peace with their father's passing. They prefer to reflect on their father's accomplishments in life rather than the event which ended it. If Cassilly's death was indeed the result of foul play, his killers did an excellent job of concealing the evidence of their involvement and have kept their secret over a decade later. The fact remains that there is no one left to say exactly what happened that day except for Bob Casselli himself, yet no with this cute looking guy on Bumble.

And after a week or two of texting back and forth, we arranged to meet up someplace. At first, he wanted to keep the place he had in mind as a surprise, but I don't do surprises on first dates. So after squeezing him for info, he told me that his plan was Icon Park. For those of you that don't know, Icon Park is like a mall slash amusement park here in Orlando, kind of like a Disney World for grown-ups. And although an amusement park wasn't my idea of a perfect date, I figured it was a good place as any to meet someone for the first time. Nice and public, lots of cameras, you get the idea. I broke it to him gently that I wouldn't be interested in going on any rides,

but he was cool with just meeting up for ice cream and keeping it chill, so it was a date. It actually started off as a really nice date. I got some pistachio ice cream, he paid, we talked movies and music, it was a good time. After that, we started walking around the park, just chatting about this and that, until we came to the Orlando Freefall. The Freefall is one of the big, tall tower rides, the kind where everyone is strapped into a ring which goes up real high, then plummets down super fast before slowing and stopping near the bottom. I'm sure you all know the kind I'm talking about. As someone with a distinct fear of heights, the freefall is my

idea of hell. And of all the rides they have at Icon, the freefall is one that I'd rather die before riding. I remember feeling nauseous from just looking at it, so much so that my date started laughing to himself and jokingly asking me if I wanted to ride it. Obviously, I told him no. Then as we're staring at the freefall, we start talking about how I'm not into roller coasters and how I'm actually kind of a homebody, which makes dating pretty tiresome for me sometimes and stuff like that. But the whole time, I have my eyes pretty much glued to the freefall in some horrified trance, watching as each drop preceded the sound of screams from all the people

riding it. It repeats the cycle one more time, edging up towards the top before suddenly dropping again. Only that time, the screams from the freefall sounded different and I suddenly noticed someone falling through the air. I remember how feeling it caused this pressure in my stomach, this pure gut-punch reaction of not being able to do anything about what I was seeing. My actual lifelong nightmare of falling off of a roller coaster had come to life right there in front of me and even having seen it with my own eyes, I didn't want to accept it.

A collective scream of absolute horror rose up from the crowd surrounding the freefall, one I don't think I'll ever forget as long as I live. And when my date asked me, in this stunned and trembling voice, if someone fell off the ride, I told him that I hoped not. I always think about my choice of words in that moment, how I opted to use the word hope over everything else I could have said. I knew what I'd seen. I saw the person's limbs flailing in terror as they fell.

I just couldn't quite bring myself to accept it. In the moments after the screams, a few people began running in the direction of the free fall, but way more people started walking or running away from it. Some of them were pale, others were crying. One guy was just walking away with his fingers clasped around the back of his head, saying what the F, what the F, over and over again. I realized that they were people that had all seen what I'd seen,

only it was more real to them because they'd seen it up close. Instead of just watching someone fall like I had, they actually watched someone die. When it really hit me, when I finally came out of that paralyzed state of belief, all I could do was just walk in the opposite direction. I had to just get the image of that metal tower out of my head, and as my date started to follow me, asking if I was okay, I had to really fight not to just burst into tears right there and then. I still remember how all these different kinds of thoughts seemed to be wrestling for control of my mind, this mix of wondering how the person got loose from their seat, wondering

if it hurt, wondering if they were okay. But there was no way they were okay. They must have fallen at least a hundred feet down onto solid concrete. It'd be a miracle if a person survived a fall like that. In the end, the thing that had my eyes welling up with tears was thinking about how the person's mom would take the news. You never really know when a person's time is up, and the thought of the person and their mom maybe having a fight or just some other bad interaction, not knowing it would be the last time they'd ever see each other, just that idea alone made me break down. Even now, just typing it out makes my lips quiver. The idea that you can just hit up an amusement park one day, then boom, next thing you're dead.

I know this is all making me sound a bit selfish, talking about my own reaction to it instead of describing how I helped in some way, but me and my date were at least a football field away from the free fall, and tons of other folks were closer and were already calling 911. That feeling of being useless again, of not being able to stop it or turn back the clock or help in any way at all. It was one of the worst feelings I'd ever felt in my whole life. I asked my date to take me home, and those words were the only thing I could actually say outside of just sitting there crying. He was great in that respect. He just put his arm around me, walked me all the way back to his car,

then took me straight to my apartment. He offered to come inside and stay with me if I didn't want to be alone, but I told him it was okay, that I just needed to be away from people so I could process what I'd just seen. He was real shaken up too and I feel bad that I had said no to him as he might have needed someone around just to keep from focusing on it, but I just couldn't do anything but just curl up on my bed and cry. Days went by, and I barely talked to anyone except my mom, my sister, and the guy I'd been on a date with. My mom and sister were great. They brought me care packages, made sure that I was okay for money and stuff because I was way too traumatized

to go to my waitressing job. But I think my date for that day helped the most because he could actually understand what I'd seen and how I was feeling. He also kept up to date with the news surrounding what had happened and that's how I found out exactly what had happened with the free fall accident. And forgive me if any of this is wrong because I only skimmed the article and this is all from memory, but the 14 year old kid who tragically lost his life was well over the weight limit for the ride. There were some seats that had been adjusted to accommodate larger riders, so the kid was seated in those, but then whoever was in charge of strapping them in didn't do it properly, so after the straps got loosened after a few reps, the free fall dropped, but the kid just slipped out of his seat, fell at least a hundred feet, then died instantly when they hit the

concrete. I feel horrible for the kid's family, I still do, and please don't let what I'm about to say detract from the sympathy I have for everyone involved, but knowing something was wrong helped me get past the trauma. I'm probably not going to articulate this very well, so I'm sorry if this is confusing or doesn't make any sense, and I probably just sound dumb admitting that the whole thing got me so depressed when it barely affected me, but here it goes. Knowing the kid's death was down to human negligence in some way made me realize that it wasn't just random. It wasn't some skinny kid who'd slipped out of the seat after having conformed to the minimum height and weight requirements. The person who died should have never been allowed on that ride to begin with. Something went wrong, not just with the ride, but with the safety procedures. I'm guessing the kid's family are going to sue the park, and so they should,

because if the park had just played it safe and kept the height and weight recommendations, their kid would still be alive. That's what I kept telling myself anyways, and over time, the trauma turned to an anger towards Icon Park and the freefall itself. I honestly hope the family gets millions out of the park owners and I honestly don't care if the whole place gets shut down or whatever because if you're willing to risk a life just for a few bucks you don't deserve to own any kind of business

let alone an amusement park. It was a pretty cool job in a lot of ways, great place to talk to girls, and if you worked a shift longer than 7 hours you could get a free cheeseburger on your break. So this one day, it was like 100 degrees outside, not a single cloud in the sky and I'm sweating balls because I had to wear khakis and a thick polo shirt as part of my uniform. The most that me and the rest of my lifeguards could get was a water bottle refill every hour. It was like that all week too. But this day in question was way worse for me because when the boss was neglecting jobs at the start of the day, he decided to give me the highest water slide in the park. The thing was about 60 feet high and had three channeled slides that started off like a pipe and then became fluted channels, which means the slide

becomes a half pipe with no ceiling. One pipe, and the one that was the most popular, went down at like a 140 degree angle. It was really steep. I mean, people just flew down that thing in about two or three seconds. I can confirm it was an awesome water slide, so it made sense that it was so popular. But then that popularity meant that we needed to seriously police folks using it. So one lifeguard was posted at the top of the slide, then one was posted at the bottom to minimize any chaos and avoid accidents. So by about midday, I'd settled into the rhythm of allowing four people a minute to head down the water slide, one every 15 seconds, just like clockwork. Then, up comes what is clearly a group of male teenage friends,

and they all seemed way too excitable for my liking. Teenage boys are the like of the king trolls of the park, and their antics are an almost constant source of problems for all members of the park staff, from the lowliest trash haulers to the higher levels of management. I can see these kids have mischief in mind, I just don't know what exactly they're planning. But regardless, I make it clear to them that I don't want any trouble and they all need to chill before I allow them to head down the slide. They seem to calm down at first, and the first three go down the slide as requested. But then the fourth, just before he heads down the slide, turns to give me this grin when I give him the go-ahead. He then grabs hold of the top of the pipe, jumps up into the air a little,

then basically flings himself down the pipe way faster than was safely allowed. I tried to grab him at the last second just to slow him down a little, but I guess the heat got to me that day because my reaction was way too late to make a difference. He just bombs down the slide, and I look over the side of the tower to the section that's only a half pipe. Seconds later, I see exactly why us lifeguards were told never to let anyone throw themselves down the slides like that. Now, at that point in my life, I had been scared of a bunch of different stuff. I feared flunking out of school, getting rejected by girls, having my parents get divorced,

but nothing in all my life has made me this scared until now. As the kid hit the half-pipe section of the slide, he comes in real fast at a side angle and the momentum basically throws him up out of the pipe, then down maybe 30 or 40 feet onto the concrete below. Seeing a young man fall to his impending doom and being powerless over it makes you feel terrible. Feeling, by some extension of logic, that you are indirectly responsible for this makes it even worse. Never in all my life has my stomach and jaw dropped so fast. I felt literally sick with fear, and the sound the kid made when he hit the concrete was somehow even worse than I imagined. He landed with this huge smacking sound and because he didn't move, I actually thought

the kid was dead at first. Two seconds later, even though his scream sounded worse than anything I'd ever heard, I was weirdly relieved knowing that he hadn't been killed outright. But that didn't mean his injuries weren't absolutely devastating. When the paramedics came to cart the guy away, I saw how floppy his arm was. He'd landed on that side and the force must have just crushed his whole arm because when they put him on the stretcher, it was flopping around like a piece of wet spaghetti.

It was basically just chaos all around the kid as he was lying there. Other kids were crying, even some older folks were covering their faces and shaking, having to be consoled by their loved ones. We all just thought that we'd watch this kid die, so imagine all the painful reactions a person would have to seeing that, and I can promise you that they were all on display down below me. But for me, once I saw that he was okay, relatively okay anyway, all I felt was anger. I had warned all four of those teenagers not to pull anything stupid, and the way the last one sort of gave me this screw you look before he threw himself down the slide, it all just made me furious. Sure, he was hurt, really bad too, but if he'd

only listened to what I had to say, it all could have been avoided. I thought I was going to get fired, but luckily for me, the park manager understood the situation and refused to write me up or caution me, so I got to keep my job that summer. There were no more accidents on our biggest slide either because it was closed off for the rest of the summer. I heard it opened up the following year with a cover on the lower half of the slide, and that was good to hear. Knowing that kind of accident couldn't happen again. But I felt even better knowing that no other lifeguards were going to have to go through the same fear and terror that I had. When my wife and I were quite a bit younger, we decided that we would spend the bicentennial outdoors. Yes, July of 76, we're old.

We lived in Pueblo at the time and decided to go hiking, fishing, and camp along Lime Creek between Durango and Silverton. There wasn't anything other than brookies in the creek, but they were plentiful and fun to catch. We left our car by the side of the road along old Lime Creek Road about five miles in from the highway and packed in upstream along the creek with our shepherd, Rebel. It only took about an hour to get to where we wanted to camp, a nice meadow between the creek just before a slot canyon that required you to go swim to get any further upstream. Either that or take a several mile detour. We camped uneventfully that night, the 3rd of July, enjoying the sounds of the rippling creek and

nature all around us. It was such a nice night that we just slept out under the stars and didn't bother to pitch our little backpacking tent. A little cool, but we had the fire going and our lightweight 30 degree bag, so we were very comfortable. The next day we had breakfast, packed up, and we all swam our way up the creek to the next wide spot with a bit of bank in the canyon, only about 150 yards or so. Now Rebel was never one to turn down a chance to get wet, but we had to do quite a bit of coaxing to get him to follow us up the creek. We fished and splashed upstream a bit and before we knew it, it was lunchtime. We thought that we'd fry up some of those brookies, but we were in the slot canyon that terminated in a fairly deep pool with about a 10-foot rocky waterfall at the end of it. We decided that I would scale the waterfall and pull

the dog and the packs up, and then I'd help Maggie get up. It was fairly difficult, even with the help of an old cable left over from a mining operation that was hanging down the sidewall of the canyon. It took a lot of effort and thought that we finally made it. We looked back down that waterfall and wondered what the heck we were thinking. Rebel was none too happy about it either and seemed to get more irritable by the minute. We found enough driftwood at the rocky top of the falls to get a fire started and get the fish fried up and that was about it. You know that uneasy feeling that several others have mentioned? It was like a switch turned on and we all of a sudden became aware of our surroundings.

It grew like a cancer and I actually watched the hair on the back of Rebel's neck stand up. Maggie felt it too and we both noticed that it was getting dark fast down in this canyon. First thought in my head was a cat and I actually felt a bit better about that because I figured the cat would leave us be between the fire and the dog. I told Maggie what I thought and she seemed to feel a bit better too. I did not want to get caught in the dark in the canyon for a bunch of reasons, flash floods, etc. I spied what looked like a mine shaft about 200 feet above us, a heck of a steep climb, but it looked like our best bet. We pulled out our flashlights and by the time we reached it, it was pitch black.

The dog was a mess by this point, whipping around in circles, whining, yelping and generally being a real pain in the backside. Maggie and I were drenched with sweat and immediately began to freeze. July in the mountains is a weird thing. I have seen blizzard conditions before but this was like someone turned on the deep freeze. We were at what looked like the start of a mine, it only went back about 10 feet but there was evidence of fires at the mouth and they curiously looked fresh. I was too tired to think more about it. I knew that we had to get out of our wet clothes, pitch the tent, and climb in our bags before we got serious hypothermia. That was no fun, let me tell you.

Having to do all of that by the light of our rapidly dying flashlight. And there was no firewood anywhere close. I cursed myself several times for letting things get this far out of control. We finally got the tent pitched right there in the back of this little cave, buck naked as we had no dry clothes left. The sleeping bags were slightly damp too, even though we had stuffed them in plastic garbage bags before our swimming expedition up the canyon. And we froze. It was miserable. About one in the morning, I called Rebel into the tent for a little heat. The dog seemed to have calmed down greatly, and with the added heat, we drifted off.

Sometime during the night, I heard something that just about woke me. I was still in a haze, so I fell asleep again immediately. I woke up one more time because I thought that I heard Rebel yip a little bit, but again, I was in and out. I pulled my hand out to pet his head and he licked my hand, and I fell asleep again. Maggie later said that she fell asleep the same time as I did but never woke up at all during the night. I woke to the most horrible noise that I'd ever heard coming out of a hundred pound woman. Just the most god awful shrieks that

I'd ever heard and I never want to hear that again. I opened my eyes just in time to see a man at the mouth of the shaft, silhouetted against the morning daylight, looking back at us with the most twisted evil grin I had ever seen on the face of another human. I scrambled to get free of the tightly zipped bag and the little tent while he just crouched there and grinned. When I was just about free, he disappeared. Now, we were granola crunch and tree hugging anti-gun nature freaks at the time, so the only thing I had of any consequence as a weapon was my camp knife. I found it after what seemed like hours of searching but really was probably under a minute. I very cautiously made my way to the entrance, millimeters at a time. The guy was gone. About that time, Maggie started screaming and whimpering again so I rushed back to the back

of the shaft. She had struggled out of the tent and was pointing at what used to be Rebel. His head was nearly severed and the tent and the bags were ruined with blood all over everything. She had blood all over her so the first thing I did was make sure that she wasn't injured. Then I checked myself. We were okay. It was all rebel's blood. We put on our still damp cold clothes from the night before and then we noticed that our boots were gone. We were in trouble. I had some paracord so we tied some shirts and towels around our feet and climbed back down towards the creek. We left everything in the mine except for the knife and some stuff that we shoved in our pockets. It took us eight hours to get back down to the car and we looked like raw hamburger meat. Hands, feet, arms, legs scraped raw, bruised and bleeding.

We jumped in. The car started right up thankfully and we left a dust cloud that blanketed the valley as we sped down the rough trail toward Durango. We limped into the sheriff's office and we looked absolutely tragic. We got our story out. My wife threw tears and me talking way too fast but finally got it all out. The deputy said that they would go out first thing in the morning and asked us to stay in town. We had no money for a hotel so they let us stay in a cell after we showered and changed into prison jumpsuits. We were there at the jail waiting when the expedition returned with a convoy of three trucks. I noticed that all the officers who were quite wet and filthy gave us dirty looks as they passed us,

and the deputy that we had talked to the day before herded us back to his office, and then came the interrogation. It turns out that some animal had spread the dog's remains all down the side of the creek, and he said that there was nothing else there. No tent, no backpacks, nothing. He asked us if we had any drugs. I didn't want to admit to him that we had some herb so I denied it. It was clear that we were fighting a losing battle.

They had come to the conclusion that we were wandering out in the woods high on LSD while a mountain lion had gotten our dog. The idiot even made us change back into our filthy clothes and give back the jumpsuits right then. He told us that he better never see us again. And we left. Maggie was sobbing, and I'd never been back to Durango. The thing that I still have nightmares about years later and I've never mentioned this to Maggie is, the second time when I woke up when I heard Rebel Yelp, was that when he died, and if it was, was the dog who licked my hand before I fell back asleep.

I still go out into the wilderness, never overnight, out well before dark, and only with other people and always with a big gun. I respect animals, but I fear people. We'll be a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRiver Sportsbook. Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. It's my first time posting here, but I have a spooky story to share about a time some friends and I went to Urbex in Vermont on a vacation.

It was 2017, we were in college, and summer was approaching when my dorm mate suggested we go to Vermont. Some other people join up, and there was the suggestion of going out to Shaftesbury to hike, smoke, and hook up. I immediately think, oh hey, this is how horror movies start. We headed out there and started bumming around the state park, but nothing good really happened. We proceeded into town, which had very little going on outside the dinky motel we rented. Trying to find something to do, we talked with the clerk and let him know that we are sightseeing. He brought up Glastonbury which was east of town and deep in the forest. He called it a modern ghost town and with that being established, my roommate's friend immediately says we're going. Next morning, we all wake up at the crack of dawn

and head towards the forest of Glastonbury. On the way to the trail, a friend on his phone says that this area is in the Bennington Triangle and that it was apparently well known for a series of disappearances in the area. We all laugh, but honestly we got a bit worked up. Why would the clerk suggest tourists go to such a controversial area? We approached a trailhead near where the village was, park, and talk with some other hikers that were nearby. They all laugh and say that they've never seen a ghost town in the woods, or even the foundations supposedly left behind, so either they just haven't explored deep enough or were being set up for something.

And like any college students in a horror movie, we decide to hike anyways. We all head out, following the map that we printed out at a motel from some website, following the Glastonbury loop as my roommate's one friend is using her phone as GPS as we hike. The hike itself sucks. It's all up hills somehow in the Glastonbury wilderness, but we think to ourselves, how bad can it be? We're near a college town. We can simply turn back and head into town if this turns uneventful. The heat that day was bad. There were bugs everywhere and their insistent buzzing was driving us nuts. After like four hours or so, we discovered this little abandoned cabin that was rotting in the woods.

It was small, with only one room, a rusted out stove, and some broken glass everywhere. Seeing as it was the only event to actually spark interest with us, we break inside where we find a bunch of bones scattered across the floor. One of my roommate's friends mentions that it was probably from coyotes or bobcats. Now that we have the idea of a bobcat nearby, we're all a little spooked as we go back to following the trail. We approach a sign in the middle of the woods, one of those national park ones that say, you are here, and we decide to take the detour from the map that we had and start following a river further uphill. The hike takes another hour until we reach the forks, which is the outskirts of the town. One of the friends begins to hear

noises in the woods, like people following us, but we brush it off and figure that it's just more hikers. We continue up the river, everywhere is covered and overgrown by trees and there's nothing really to see but rubble. We hear more movement in the distance but we continue to brush it off that it's summer so we think it could be other hikers. The six of us keep marching up the hill, spotting different abandoned buildings as we progress. One of them ends up getting way ahead of us and shouts out from about 50 yards deeper up the mountain. They say that a path has appeared, made of crushed up white rocks everywhere, and that it's deep in the brush. We all laugh and decide that this is the best place to continue on, but one friend gets upset and doesn't want to continue forward.

We all march up the path and eventually find piles of rocks everywhere, like rocky mounds covered in moss, as my roommate starts shouting out, telling the people walking around us to join us, or maybe they were shouting to try and scare animals away. The upset friend from earlier suddenly outright refuses to continue, and so we all agree to head back as the adventure was losing its thrill and begin our trek back. That's when things got weird. As we head back toward the ghost town, the path we follow continues and we never find the town. We begin to wonder if we missed a turn that would have brought us back to familiar areas and as the hike back continues on, we start to get worried as it's now around 3pm.

It would take a few more hours to get back to the car, meaning we are now racing against sundown. We trek deeper and deeper, but we realize now that we're lost. No one can find the river near the ghost town that we specifically followed uphill. Another hour of hiking goes by and the sun is starting to get low through the trees. A few friends start yelling for help, hoping that all those walking noises that we were hearing are people who can help. The upset friend is getting angry now and running off ahead to figure out if we're done for or not. Their words. She vanishes for about half an hour and we're really worried now and of course some idiot brings up the Blair Witch

myth. Almost instantly, like magic, we hear the missing friend yell that she found something. We follow her voice and find an old three-story house surrounded by dead trees, causing us all to quite literally lose our minds. She mentions that she hadn't been inside and the door is locked. But now, the trees have consumed a lot of sunlight, so there's barely any more hiking that could be done. We look around one last time, and despite the ghost town somehow being completely consumed by the forest, this random house is completely intact. Still weathered down, but in okay condition. Even the windows aren't broken. There's a debate on whether to go into the house

and I vote yes in case there's an old phone or a map. Roommate is understandably very against the idea, but the vote goes 4-2 so we work our way in by managing to get the back door of the house open. The two who were against remain outside. Once inside, we realize we're in a kitchen as there's a huge fireplace with a blackened hearth. We hear a giant crash in the distance, like a tree limb falling, and we call out to my roommate and the other friend who stayed outside. They rush inside, stating that the walking we heard earlier was really close now. Taking no chances, we do a quick search through the house and of course there's no phone and nothing that resembles a map. Suddenly, one of the friends that were against entering the house

shouts that he got a signal. It lasted just long enough for him to find our location on Google and screenshot the map and that's when we discover that if we head west, towards the setting sun, that there would be a highway there. We instantly leave the house and head off towards the setting sun, that there would be a highway there. We instantly leave the house and head off towards the sunlight. Hours go by, and eventually we happen upon some actual other hikers, not just footsteps this time. We learn that we're rather close to Manchester Center, a town about 20 miles north of where we were parked. The couple who found us gives us water, as some other hikers volunteer to take us back to our SUV. The entire time we couldn't stop thanking them, and who knew I would have fallen in love with seeing our dumb little SUV again.

We immediately drove back to Albany and everyone was quiet on the ride back, rather napping or trying to process how close we were to possibly losing our lives. It eventually became a good party story about the time we got lost in the woods and found the Blair Witch House, and how we got out before we found one of us standing in the corner. However, jokes and story aside, to this day, I'm not sure what happened. I've seen YouTube videos of people going to the ghost town, but the house we went into is never talked about and I'm not sure if it was a witch's house or someone's hunting cabin.

Was it simply all just one giant coincidence or was there something deeper at work here that didn't want us to investigate any further into the house? Either way, I have no interest in going back. I've been a long time lurker on this board and I figured that I would post some of my unsettling if not just outright strange experiences from my childhood. It was 2009-ish and I was living in an old duplex with my mom, my mom's girlfriend who we'll call Kim and Kim's daughter who we'll call Talia. The house itself was built in 1947 so it's seen its fair amount of families come and go.

We were friends with our neighbors, a single mom with two sons who were around my age. When we first moved in, there were these small pouches of scented herbs hanging from all the windows. My moms tell me to not move them when I reach for them, but I eventually take down the herbs that were hanging in my room. I mean, it was my room, I didn't want them in there. So we find pennies in almost every corner of the house. Just four pennies per corner, all heads up and arranged in a square. And they were placed in every reachable corner of all the rooms. Again, mom tells me not to touch them and again I pretty quickly pick up the ones in my room. She would never tell me what they were, so I never understood their existence or why they were there.

The house also had a wildly overgrown backyard. The yard itself was tiny, maybe only 30 by 15 feet, but it had tons of colorful plants that were completely untended to. Our non-adjoined neighbor had this huge wooden privacy fence that made our yard seem even smaller and because of it, the plants began growing vertically along it. Quite beautiful if I'm being honest, like a wall of flora. The house had this steep spiral staircase in the middle of the second floor hallway that led up to a split attic. One side had my mom's exercise equipment while the other had some

junk for us kids, boxes of toys and old video games, stuff like that. The second floor itself was just for bedrooms and a bathroom. The master bedroom looked down the hallway where the first door on the left was Talia's room, then the door to the spiral staircase, then my room, and finally the bathroom which faced back at the master bedroom. My mom and Kim would claim that they'd see me sleepwalk out of Talia's room, down the hallway, into my room and then a few moments later, back out of Talia's room. Like I was stuck in a loop or something. They couldn't wake me up and they're both pretty small while I'm in the middle of male puberty so they couldn't exactly restrain me

either. They devised a plan where they just had to wait in front of my mattress for me to walk by and when I would, they both just pushed me over into bed. Apparently it worked a couple of times before deciding to put my dresser in front of the archway and hung a curtain for privacy's sake. Before getting to this house I had never been known to sleepwalk and I haven't done it since moving out. We had two dogs, a bulldog and a beagle. The beagle was my shadow and I loved her more than anything.

She goes to bed with me every night, usually sleeping at the foot of the bed. I'd wake up periodically to her growling at the corner of the room with her hackles raised. She would still be laying down in bed but was clearly agitated by something. The corner she'd stare at is right behind the door and if the door were to be opened, she'd be staring at the closet corner to the attic staircase. I obviously can't ever see anything in the corner as it's too dark but I reach down and pat her to try and calm her and myself down and she looks back at me, eyes wide, licking her chops, but when she looks back at the corner, she kind of just glances around the room like she lost whatever she was looking at and settles back down. This would become a weekly occurrence over our two years of living there.

I would sometimes wake up from naps or in the middle of the night to the sound of my name being whispered really loudly, similar to a stage whisper. It didn't sound like my mom or Kim or anyone in the house. The voice was usually masculine, but the oldest guy in the building was only a couple of years older than me. Besides, my bed was against the outside wall, not the one we shared with the neighbors so it wasn't coming from my neighboring rooms. So one night, I'm up way past my bedtime playing Pokemon on my DS. I always played with the sound off, and I still do, but I was feeling goofy, so I took the volume slider on the side of the DS and cranked it up and back down a couple of times, making the music play for a second then stop, then play for a second then stop. I did this once or twice before realizing that blasting

Pokemon music was a surefire way to get busted for staying up late. A few moments go by, I'm battling a gym leader or something and I distinctly hear the music come in and out again. I didn't touch the volume slider as my finger was actually on it, forcing it to remain off. It didn't sound like the actual game's audio either, but more like someone had recorded the exact sound that came from my DS and played it back to me. Feeling confused and scared, I just shut the DS down and fell asleep, hugging my dog. So about the attic, I always had a sinking feeling when climbing the steps that led to the attic. I would normally try to ignore it so I didn't come off like a coward in front of everyone. I would occasionally go up there to play a game or

something with Talia, but no matter how confident I acted, I always had the most horrific feeling of being watched the entire time. Even being with an entire family wouldn't make the feeling go away. One day, Talia and I build a small box fort in the attic. Again, I wouldn't tell anyone that I was afraid of the attic. Teenage masculinity, I guess. Talia ended up leaving something in the box fort and wanted it back and after pestering her, she drops the bombshell that she doesn't want to go up there by herself because the attic scares her. I remember wanting to tell her that I agree, that the attic feels almost evil in a sense,

but instead I go up to grab it. Without missing a beat, the feeling of dread returns the moment I'm on the first step, and only grows worse as I climb up and get to the attic proper. I get to the fort and try to reach into the box to grab her toy, but my arms aren't long enough so I get on my stomach and crawl through. For some reason, the second I got inside, the feeling of dread amps up to 11, and still to this day I've never felt this again. All the hair on my body stood on end and my eyes started watering and I felt myself entering that survival panic mode. I snatched the toy and ripped myself out of the box, splitting it open in the process, but I didn't even care anymore because I swear I saw something duck out of my vision as I ran

out of there. We spent one whole winter all just sleeping in the downstairs living room. We have a huge sectional couch and they would blow up an air mattress right next to it so it was like one giant bed. I thought it was just fun, like camping out in the living room. It wasn't until much later that my mom would tell me that both her and Kim were terrified of the house and just wanted us all together at night. She told me that the pennies and pouches were to ward off spirits and so that would explain why I was getting affected the most. I was the only one who destroyed and interrupted the wards in my room. Anyway, that's about it for my experience in the house. Kim also

claimed to have seen a woman in gardening clothes in the backyard from the upstairs bathroom and ran down to see who was in the yard only for no one to be there. She also claimed to have had a hand come out of a cabinet and grab her leg while she was putting dishes away and had only let go when she screamed at it. She said that she would often smell onions, like a man's body odor. Ryan Schertz has been trying to save John Jones for 19 hours already that fateful day in 2010. John had gotten himself trapped headfirst and upside down in the narrow passageway in Utah's Nutty Putty Cave, and Ryan and his team were doing everything they could to get him out. While his men built a pulley system meant to yank John out, Ryan stayed with him, talking to keep him calm.

I'm sorry I'm so fat, John said. It would be so much easier for you guys to get me out of here if I wasn't so fat. Ryan promised that he'd be his workout buddy when they got out. For now, the pulley was in place and they were going to start pulling. John needed to get ready. When they yanked him up, John shrieked in pain. They gave him a break. Ryan talked him through it and they pulled again. This time though, things got worse. A natural arch through which the rope was fed shattered and the rope broke. A metal carabiner fell and hit Ryan in the face, causing him to bite his tongue in half. John fell back down the hole. Ryan had to get out. While blood dribbled out of his mouth, he promised John

that he'd be back for him. Ryan's team helped him escape the collapsing cave and Ryan's father went in to take over for him. We're going to get you out, he told the man trapped inside. But John was already unconscious and he would never wake up again. Kentucky and Floyd Collins found Crystal Cave in 1917 and he was determined to explore every inch of it. For eight years he squeezed through its passageways until the day he got trapped. His lantern had started to flicker and Collins was trying to get out before he lost light. He was climbing his way up a tight passageway when he knocked a 12-kilogram or 27-pound rock loose. It came crashing down onto his ankle, pinning him in place. For the next 17 days, rescue teams tried to save him, but nothing they tried worked. In time, they brought in miners to

dig a shaft to him, believing the only hope was to make a new way out. While he waited, Collins was becoming a celebrity. Tourists from all around were coming to see his rescue. With hucksters setting up booths to sell food, drinks, and souvenirs, the mine shaft took too long. And on his 18th day in the cave, Collins succumbed to hypothermia, thirst, and hunger. The group of 17 students who visited New Zealand's Cave Creek in 1995 didn't think that they were doing anything dangerous. They weren't exploring narrow pathways. They were on a guided tour, staying on a beaten path designed for tourists.

When they made it to a platform that overlooked a chasm, some of the boys couldn't help but notice how flimsy it felt. As a joke, they jumped and shook it, marveling at how precariously it seemed to be built. They figured it was all in fun. In an era of safety regulations, they assumed that it just looked flimsier than it really was. But they were wrong. The platform had been built by men with no experience in engineering. It was meant to be bolted in place, but they'd used nails instead simply because they didn't have a drill handy. Under the weight of the students, the platform gave way. It toppled over and collapsed, crashing down into the chasm below. One student survived by grabbing onto the handrail and riding it down,

but his classmates were hurtled overboard and killed. Of the 17, only four survived. They were lifted out in helicopters. One had a fractured spine, but with 13 of her friends dead, she counted herself as one of the lucky ones. In 1988, Andrew White was on a team of 15 people exploring one of the deepest caves in the world. They would never see the bottom. A freak storm hit.

A flood of water poured in through the cave entrance and the middle section of the entire cave collapsed. All 15 people were trapped underground with White and a few others stuck on a small ledge. It was hard to know what to do. The roof above them was getting ready to collapse but the rushing water below them was too wild to enter. Boulders would fall off the cave walls and into the water, threatening to crush anyone who dared to step in. White decided to try it. He swam through the water and managed to find another way out. Over the next 27 hours, he and others worked to send in line and lead his team out. Kai Kankanen was one of the last divers to go into Norway's Plura Cave. It was a cold winter day in February 2014, and the pond that led to the cave had frozen over. The divers had cut a hole in the

ice before diving in. Patrick Gonquist and Yari Hunterin went in first and Kai's group followed after. The plan was to swim through the pathways of Plura and come out on the other side, where there was an exit in the mountainside. Kai had already made it most of the way when he found Hu Terran's body. His friend had gotten trapped in a narrow passageway. In his panic, he swallowed water and choked. Now, Yari's lifeless body was blocking the way forward. Yari Usamaki, one of the men with Kai, panicked. He started breathing too quickly and poisoned himself with carbon dioxide. Kai tried to save him, but he couldn't get him to calm down. And Yari was the next to die, and Kai was left alone.

Kai turned back. He swam through the freezing water and back to the pond, but he wouldn't find the hold they'd made. He had no choice but to smash his way through the ice blocking his way to the pond, but he wouldn't find the hold they'd made. He had no choice but to smash his way through the ice blocking his way to the surface. By the time he was out, Kai had been underwater for 11 hours. The other men in his group had made it to the other exit and survived, and it would take nearly two months though for the bodies of their friends to be retrieved. I'll cut to the chase. I'm part of an extensive armed security for multiple private companies. Recently we got hired onto a construction security company in the Bay Area of Florida,

and I get told that I'm doing graveyard shifts from midnight to 0630. As the pay is higher and I'm normally up this late, that's fine with me. I pull up and the construction site is a private high school that's being renovated. Pretty uneventful stuff the first two weeks, except this one time when a trucker kept his walkie-talkie on while watching grown-up videos. That was pretty funny. On my third night shift on the third week with this company, one of the older guys told me that when I'd started, things could get hairy in the middle of the night. It's nothing new to me, but it definitely piqued my interest. My shift starts like any other shift. I show up and make sure my takedowns and hideaways are

functioning. The dash cam is good to go and my laptop is plugged in. As I said, all standard and nothing abnormal. The officer that I'm relieving said some odd noises are coming from around the area. I nod and start patrolling the campus. Kind of expected either urban explorers or just some dumb kids, so wasn't really too hyper fixated on the situation. By about 0-1-30 and I hear my first oddity. It sounds like screaming from the football field and mind you, from the football field to all the way up on the right side of the campus is

completely demolished with construction equipment and debris everywhere, like a giant maze of industrial equipment and building supplies. Due to the mess of their equipment, I stay put and pull out my night vision goggles to scan the field and the darkness beyond it. Ten minutes go by with nothing, no follow up noises or anything. I have a whole area to cover within a time frame so I pull out from my spot to finish my patrolling. I wrap up with the first patrol, log my time, and file a report for the oddity that happened.

Afterwards, I pull back up to the front and park my unit off to the side under a garage wall that was protected on the entire right side. It's nearing about 0200 and so I mess around with some Pokemon Go and smoke a cigarette and play some Age of Empires on Steam. I've got personal wifi in my car so it enables me to slack off. Originally I wasn't too bothered by the sound but I soon couldn't shake off the feeling that if some dumb teen just got hurt on sight, things have the potential to get ugly quick. Nonetheless, I kept gaming. 0230 comes around and I get to the middle of the admin parking lot that is being built when

I come across my first sign of trouble. So I'm driving with my left window down for noise purposes while other windows are CVPI tier tent. I feel confident no one or nothing can see inside my vehicle. As I pull up to the lot, I suddenly hear what sounds like a giant 2x4 hitting the side of the building with a force that is likened to Thor obliterating a planet. I black out and code one my way over to that area before stopping mid-drive to listen for anyone. I hear what sounds like a bunch of sticks with rubber pads on the ends running through the cargo crates, and what followed that sound is the sound I will never forget. It sounded like a mixture between a lion and a coyote put into one, and at that moment, my blood went cold. I backed my unit up and called for LEOs to get to my site pronto,

to which I then explained the situation to them, and the responder just replies, Oh god, it's back. As I'm panicking at their rather disturbing reaction, I hear the same running broomsticks and rubber pads sound again, but now from behind me. Then something I wish I'd never heard before. I heard the side door to the front building swing open and slam into the brick behind it. I peel out and code for lights and sirens to the main area of the building where the door is located. As I'm turning the corner with my lights and sirens, three city police officers are pulling in with their lights on as well. Two more city LEOs and a deputy pull into the back area of the school building and by this point I'm almost soiling myself because this is something I've clearly never dealt with before.

I draw my.45 ACP Taurus and turn my mag light on. I side peek the doorway and see nothing but dead darkness being cut through by the torch of a thousand suns as officers stack up behind me. Suddenly, we all hear this screech and then a bunch of destruction. Whoever was in here was absolutely decimating this one room. I get word from the other officers that we're breaching, and we hit the room with speed and nearly pinpoint stillness. The room was completely trashed, seats ripped seemingly from the concrete and thrown several yards, wall bricks missing layers, doors cracked, however, nothing was found. We finish clearing the main building on high alert, following this trail of destruction.

We're checking doors, rooms, and covering our backs the entire way down the hall. With nothing to actually be discovered, we all carefully start to hustle out towards the parking lot. I was the third to clear the building and come out onto the pavement and by now, it's almost 0-430. Completely deadness outside. It was disturbing to go from such high energy to an area where it seemed to be completely dead silent. After it was all said and done, six officers saw the mess including myself and all six of myself heard the different noises. We all still don't know what it is. I had a canine stationed with me until we both got off at 0630, and for the rest of the night, the canine would go nuts every 30 minutes or so,

and we were constantly looking over our shoulders. We'll be right back. Over, under, money, line Same game, Paul A's, it's all fine We'll put a smile on your face Bet on the sports you love with BetRiver Sportsbook Take a chance! Must be 19 plus, available in Ontario only Please play responsibly If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you Please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600

To speak to an advisor, free of charge All right, boys. It's my first time posting here, and I don't know how to green text. This happened in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia. It was 2015, and we were 12th graders going on a fall break from school. We decided to go hiking in the Khan Bagh mountain, which is a protected area, but people were permitted to go hiking on a small designated hiking trail. It was a rather popular site too. It was our autumn break, so me and two friends just wanted to hang out and exercise a bit. And it was that really comfortable autumn weather too.

A cloudy, kind of gloomy day, but not too cold and with little wind. There's a flat campsite with a couple of sunshades where people can rest and play around near the top. The hike there normally takes around an hour and a half to get there, which is where we decided to go. We brought food to eat and snuck in some alcohol because why not? Being a senior in high school does that to you, you know. Just stop caring because we were finished and we thought we knew it all. So around halfway through the hike I saw what looked like an apartment building, about 5 or 6 stories tall, orange colored with its top floor windows reflecting light and all, just a normal building.

I could only see the top bit above the tree line because tall pine trees are predominant here. The problem is that we have hiked there many times before and since and never came across such a thing. I was surprised and told one of my friends and sure enough he could see it too and described exactly what I saw. The third friend was behind us so a few minutes had passed and the building went out of sight. We waited for a bit and when he caught up we asked him, Did you see that building? Strange, isn't it? He just replied, No, what are you guys talking about?

Me and my friend just thought maybe he didn't notice it and we continued onward until we arrived at the campsite about 30 minutes later. There were a bunch of people shouting and playing and having fun. As I said before, this place is popular on weekends. We wanted to get far from all the noise so we camped far out in some pretty thick woods with a little clearing and a felled tree so we could sit. We unpacked our stuff and started relaxing and smoking cigarettes. I took a picture of the clearing that we camped at,

but getting a picture of the apartment building never crossed my mind until now. I know, the mind works in a weird if not frustrating way. Later on, I decided to take a bathroom break due to all the water and coffee I sipped on the way. And of course, the guys due to all the water and coffee I sipped on the way. And of course, the guys decided to do the same. We turned our backs from each other and spread out a few meters away. Our little potty circle allowed us to see all around us. I was just staring at a bunch of trees when suddenly the third friend who didn't see the building earlier just whispers loudly for us to shut up. We stopped making noise to figure out what was going on and then a bunch of branches started crackling and breaking far away and we heard a

loud thud. I was of course still in the midst of taking a leak so I didn't turn to face the direction of that sound. Then my two friends started talking. Oh my god, did you see that? The other. Yeah, wait what was that thing? I quickly finished my business and asked them what was happening. They said that some sort of black thing just dropped from a tall tree in an instant. They said that thing must have been bigger than a fully grown horse. They further detailed the thing saying it was hairy and the thing ran four-legged into the woods disappearing almost instantly. We estimated it was about 30-40 meters away but weren't really sure of that since there were a couple of trees blocking full sight.

I didn't see anything obviously but I did hear the noise. The next 30 minutes we finished our food and beers during which we talked about what it was and joked around. Maybe the almas must have smelled our cans of fish and grew interested. Almas in Mongolian is like the Bigfoot of America or the Yeti of Tibet. Big furry ape-like creature with intelligence and cunning. A lot of tales in traditional folklore. So we decided to go back down, of which there's two options. Go straight ahead, climb up some rocks and follow a trail into more woods or head back. And considering what we just experienced, we obviously chose the latter, save for option. While on the hike back, we talked about that thing non-stop and me and another friend thought that it might have had something

to do with the weird apartment building on the way up here. Finally, after another hour or so, we went down and into the city and headed home. Now, I've hiked there dozens of times since, but never came across anything like that again. I've even used Google Earth to I spy for anything remotely built with concrete, but again, nothing came up. Logically, something that deep in the woods is impossible. A six-story apartment building, water pipes and infrastructure built next to massive trees and in the mountains. I guess crazier things have happened, but it was just nice to get this off my chest. I live with my father in a place with hundreds of houses, a majority of them more or less abandoned. I had lived here since I was a kid, so about 15 years. When I was a kid, I guess around 5 years old, there was a man living in the house right across my father's house.

His first name starts with P, so let's just refer to him as that. Anyway, P was in his late 70s. He was a retired war veteran, and he was very good with herbs and botanics and other odd things. He was also a junk collector, not a hoarder, just a unique antique collector. And because of it, he did have a lot of weird stuff, like dozens of ceramic trolls outside his front door and stuff like that. He also had the biggest apples in his apple tree. Rumors said P used his feces as fertilizer, but that's probably not true. Probably. However, P barely spoke to anyone. People didn't really know much about him either, but my father was

an exception. Since he is good with people and whatnot he managed to chat up small talk with P every once in a while. He always told me to stay away from him though. Years passed and P died when I was around 11 years old. My father told me about it the same day. A couple of days later P's mother and sister came here to clean out the house and pick up what was theirs. P's mother was really old as you may have already have realized, which made it harder for them to clean it out than they didn't feel like doing it. On top of that, they were naturally sad about P's death. With all of this combined, they offered my father to buy P's property for a small amount of money, as they just wanted to get it over with. And so, my father did buy P's property for a small amount of money, as they just wanted to get it over with.

And so, my father did buy P's property including all of the stuff inside his house. He would then spend weeks cleaning that stuff up and man, all the weird things he found in there. One of the things he found inside P's house was an electric scooter, the two-wheeled kind, kids sometimes have them, which he just carried and put in our storage room. After he cleaned the house, he spent some time applying new wallpapers and placed a new floor to freshen up a little. He then gave me the house to use instead of a room. Yes, you read that right, I've had my own house before I was even an adult. It's only two rooms though and right in front of my father's

place. Now the following weeks, mysterious things started happening around here. Things would seem out of place and strange sounds could be heard at night. My father jokingly said that it was P's ghost and it made me rather uncomfortable at times, but I manned up and just didn't think about it that way. Some nights when I went out to take a leak in the bushes, I could feel as if he was watching me from somewhere. I don't know how to describe this feeling more than I could just feel it. Months later, my father went on a month-long boat trip and I stayed at my mother's house during that time since I didn't want to go with him. A couple of weeks into his vacation, another neighbor

called my father and told him our fire alarm went off. My father told him where the extra set of keys were and our neighbor went inside to find nothing out of the ordinary. When my father came home from his vacation, he went to turn the water back on and the electricity and then he opened the storage room. Inside was the electrical scooter with a completely burned out tire and a huge hole in the fat carpet on the floor. This was extremely weird, since the scooter can't possibly be started without the key in the ignition. The scooter hadn't even been test driven since he removed it from P's house, and this is when my father really thought something was going on about P. He told

me and I freaked a little but it didn't stop me from sleeping in my new house though. Various small spooky things continued to happen and both my father and I were convinced that P's ghost was messing with us. We looked through all of his old stuff again to see what kinds of things we could find if we took a second look and my father found a small sign with P. Wicht on it. Wicht was P.'s surname. My father decided to take the sign and attach it to the house as a sign of respect of some sort or just to honor the old man. He did so and immediately after that, the haunting and tormenting seemed to stop. None of us got that feeling anymore. I didn't feel creeped on when taking a leak in the bushes outside my house. I guess it's nothing too crazy

but I just felt like I wanted to share this with you ex. I didn't get to know Wicked but I can't help but think that he was just misunderstood and simply wanted to collect antiques and the entire neighborhood just decided to title him as some creep. A few years ago, while in college, I was really into weird, internet-obscure content. Back when ARGs and creepypastas weren't cliche YouTube bait but rather dark and mysterious and sometimes downright disturbing. I found one of those mini ARG sites where you complete a bunch of obscure complex riddles and puzzles to advance onto new levels. Now I don't remember its name, but the whole theme of the site was rather dark. I would spend many hours trying to solve the

puzzles. I mean I would take notes and study them, even in class, eagerly waiting to get back to my computer and keep playing. This one particular level took me an embarrassing amount of time to complete and one day, all of a sudden, I felt extremely ill in class as I was reading my ARG notes for the new level. I don't mean just an upset stomach, I'm talking severe anxiety, dizziness, and vertigo. It didn't last long though, but it felt miserable, and the anxiety ended up instilling this feeling of dread inside of me. I was confused and scared, and with all the evidence I had at the time,

I blamed the game. I genuinely felt like it was driving me crazy. Not just an addiction either, I'd get resentful for playing the game because I knew that I was snared in it, but I'd get even angrier and feel even worse when I wouldn't play the game, because the game was all I thought about. I'm not superstitious. I didn't believe that the ARG had some kind of paranormal impact on me, or that there was some sort of ghost in the machine, but I did consider

the fact that it could be making me paranoid and obsessed. So I gave it up. I never tried playing it again as I finally realized that I was extremely scared of it, almost like I developed Stockholm Syndrome to the game. The fear and anger would go away if I just kept playing. I wiped it from my internet history, installed extensions that prevented me from opening the website, and I even had my roommate sign into Firefox and put a password on his account so I wouldn't be able to remove any extensions. But the anxiety never went away though, and still to this day it gets progressively worse. Depression, panic attacks, and new random phobias, like being scared of holes and being scared of

commitment. However, I normally brush it off as most likely a coincidence as I always felt a little depressed, shy, and stressed, but who knows. Sometime after I gave up on the ARG, my roommate noticed my symptoms and suggested I get checked on. And long story short, I got diagnosed with a terminal neurological disease. Said disease can in fact create or amplify depression and anxiety. I know, it all sounds like a big coincidence. I'm not convinced of the opposite, I just wanted to mention this story. Ironic thing is that I've almost completely forgotten everything about that ARG, like my conscience has blocked it out completely. I don't remember the name of the game, how it looked, what the puzzles were about or anything else, but I'm sure it existed. Hell, if I were

to find my old college notebooks then perhaps I could find the ARG notes that I wrote among them, but maybe that's a door that best remains shut. I've been wondering how to put this down since this afternoon and decided all the information would need to be listed. I'm sorry if there's any unnecessary rambling, but I want any readers to have as full a picture as possible. I'm open-minded and not easily freaked out but since yesterday I've had four experiences that I just can't seem to explain. At approximately 9.15am yesterday I was in my car, in my driveway, loading my mobile studio ready to go do a shoot. I'm a freelance photographer. My neighbor who lives across the street from me, reversed his car into the road, rolled down his window and called me. Hey, how are you? I replied. I'm good, mate. To which he gave me a thumbs up and drove away.

I returned to my home, lifted another bag of equipment, returned my car and put it in the back door. It took maybe a maximum of 30 seconds to get this bag and return to the car. As I did so, I looked across the road to see my neighbor repeating the exact same maneuver as before. He reversed his car into the road, rolled down his window, and even gave me the same greeting of, Hey, how are you? I replied exactly as before, which he, again again gave me a thumbs up and drove away. It never crossed my mind to say that I heard him earlier and that I even replied to him and overall felt the situation to be quite surreal. The morning went by and I finished

the shoot and was home by 1pm. My wife was out so I made coffee and went to the computer room to have a look at the photographs that I'd taken. I placed the mini SD card in the card reader and waited till the raw files had loaded onto my computer. The quick glance over the files already led me to affirm that six or seven of them needed to be deleted due to wrong exposure and so I duly deleted them. At that moment my wife came in and I greeted her with, Hey, how was your morning? She replied, Okay, yours?

And then asked if I could make her a coffee and leave it on the kitchen table. She began to put her shopping away and I came back to the computer only to see the files still showing on the card. Not wanting to risk losing them, I decided to get the USB cable and link the camera directly to the card. Not wanting to risk losing them, I decided to get the USB cable and link the camera directly to the computer. I then downloaded the photographs to a directory called Work in Progress. My workflow is obviously really important to me. Now things started to get really weird. As I'm sitting at the computer, my wife comes in the front door and greets me.

Hey, I didn't expect to see you so soon. You could have picked me up with these heavy bags if I'd known. I said yeah, sorry, and told her that her coffee was on the table, to which she said, oh, awesome, you know me so well. But then, her coffee wasn't there. She came over and teased me for hyping up the coffee and I just sat there dumbfounded. I didn't drink the coffee. I don't even like coffee. She noticed how disturbing and perplexed I was and so a discussion followed that led me to believe that either I'm needing some medication or time is repeating itself. I know, it's ridiculous and even saying that line makes me cringe, but my wife explained that she had only come in once and laughingly suggested that I was working way too hard. Example 3. I've had a bad head cold for a few days and I'm not sleeping too well.

At 3.20am this morning, I got up to use the toilet, making sure to keep as quiet as possible as my son starts work early and wakes up at 4.15am. I returned to bed, I was getting back under the covers when my wife woke up, looked at the digital clock and said, go make sure T's up for work, I don't hear him so he might have slept in. I look at the clock and it was 3.55. Now, I know I'm getting older but I don't need 35 minutes to go pee, and I know for a fact that it was 3.20 when I went to the toilet. As for the last example, I have two dogs, both Cocker Spaniels, and one of them has developed some kind of psychological fear of me since yesterday morning. If I go into the living room, she paces around the outside of the room and won't come to me. If I leave the door open, she'll pace the room then run into the kitchen. My wife thinks that I stood on her tail or might have accidentally kicked her in my sleep. But she's an old dog, this attitude shouldn't have

developed within 24 hours. Something's happening, X. Either to me, or around me. I've experienced my own reality glitch, or I guess you could call it a time warp. Several years ago I was visiting my parents who live over an hour and a half away from me. The time was 9.12pm when I'd started the car and proceeded to go home. I had a very strange feeling as I passed under an overpass that was about 10 minutes away from my parents. I remember listening to the radio and everything felt very still. Even the air felt kind of stale. My passengers were sleeping, so I was alone. I remember that the streetlights along the freeway were passing so fast. I know that I'm not speeding because of having seen several police officers on the trip there,

so I was extra careful about my driving. All of a sudden, I was pulling down my driveway and the time was only 9.28. I called my mom and dad from my home phone to let them know that we made it home safe. It's a family thing, worrying. My dad answered the phone and was completely shocked that it was home. He thought it was some kind of joke. My normal 90 minute trip somehow turned into a 16 minute trip and he and I still talk about it and I wish I could explain it. At least I have someone else to discuss the experience with and that I can talk to. Me and my friend Keisha used to walk

down to Burgess Park in the evening with our kids to feed the ducks. Quite often it was dark and the gates to that part of the park were locked but there was a gap in the railings to squeeze through so we used to do this regularly. The kids enjoyed it and it was a nice walk and could still walk through the rest of Burgess. It's massive and mostly not gated off. Well one night after we fed some ducks we came out and just saw over the hilltop in the ungated section a red and white striped top of a circus tent. Or at least it's what we presumed. All the children saw it too so we said the next day that we would inquire about tickets and prices, but since it was so late that night, we didn't want to head over.

We did think it was odd, however, as there were no posters advertising any circus or carnival. We went home, and the next day we went to find out about the circus. There was no tent. No evidence in the grass to suggest that there had been a tent of any kind, and we even asked the park keeper on shift, and he said that there was no circus that had been around recently. He said one did come yearly, but not recently, and it always leaves such a mess behind that there's no way the cleanup was over in 12 hours.

There was nothing on the grass to show anything had been there, and we were totally baffled by what it was. This story happened about six months ago. Me and my daughter were up way past our bedtime, and it was probably about 2am. I was on the internet on the laptop when suddenly the connection went off along with the Sky TV. My internet was through the Sky connection, so I began checking the leads and connections and found that the plug had disappeared. As in there should have been 5 plugs total. I counted them all and yet one was gone.

I asked my daughter to check too and we unplugged everything and one by one reconnected everything and to no avail. One plug was just missing. I was extremely frightened as my brain refused to accept the strange reality of this but since my daughter is only 11, I tried to be as calm so as not to scare her. Oh well, hey, it's very late. Let's go to bed, I said and I disconnected everything again. The next morning I got up and rushed down to check the plugs and wouldn't you know it, there were five plugs again. Each individual one worked fine when I reconnected them. But my daughter and I counted them and put our entire attention onto it too. This wasn't like a lazy miscount at 2am. My dad told me about his nephew's experience a few good

years ago and they were about to go on holidays so my cousin went back in the house to check that everything was switched off and to double check. He put his car keys on the kitchen counter and when he turned to pick them up, they were gone. They searched everywhere and still there were no keys to be found. He was so bemused by it all that he regressed a short while after. His mentality practically collapsed within itself and in regression, he remembered putting the keys down and remembering that they were gone. But in between those moments, there is no memory at all for him. Nothing. Those few seconds, if not minutes, of his life are just gone. No, the keys never did turn up, and they

still live in that house to this day. To be continued... Eastern Standard Time. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash let's read official, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast, where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data. Located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends.

And I'll see you again soon.