The Lets Read Podcast - 219: THIS FAMILY IS NUTS | 24 True Scary Stories | EP 207

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Crazy Roommates, Park Rangers, & Nutty Families... 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/LetsRead ♫ Background Music & Audio Remastering: INEKT https://www.instagram.com/_inekt/ PATREON for EARLY ACCESS & Bonus Content!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

Mom, Mom, did you see my race? Of course I did, darling. Look, you did your best. You tried. The thing is, it's not about winning. It's about taking part. Next year you might do better. But I did win, Mom.

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Toyo's open country family of tires will get you through tough weather in a variety of terrains. Until May 31st, save up to $100 in rebates on select Toyo's open country family of tires will get you through tough weather in a variety of terrains. Until May 31st, save up to $100 in rebates on select Toyo tires. Find a Toyo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca For the past four years or so, I've worked as a full-time park ranger for the British National Trust. Established almost 130 years ago, the National Trust is the largest heritage conservation society in the United Kingdom, and its job is to look after places of a historic significance or natural beauty across the country. This includes everything from old stately homes

to national parks, and since I grew up in County Down here in Northern Ireland, my career as a park ranger inevitably saw me posted to the Moorne Mountains. The mountains encompass a few different forests and parks that come under the jurisdiction of the National Trust, Silent Valley, Tollymore, and Ross Trevor to name a few. But since they're all in an area that's only about 15 miles across, they're all under the remit of the team I'm a member of. I said I've been a ranger for four years, but I did my training around Mourne too, and since I was raised just north in Lurgan, I knew the area like the back of my hand by the time it came to my ranger promotion. My experience meant that team members would often come to me if they needed any expert advice on local terrain and navigation, which is how I ended up getting a phone call early one morning from a colleague in need of assistance. She'd had a call from someone she described as a very upset camper, who'd woken up at dawn to

find a couple of dead sheep outside his tent. That's the phrase my colleagues used, a couple. And since sheep have a nasty habit of turning up dead for a multitude of reasons, I didn't think too much of it. As I might have touched on, the reason my colleague had asked for my help was because I'd have a much better chance than her of actually finding where the guy was camped, and as much as I was willing to lend a hand, I was curious as to why the camper couldn't just lead my colleague back to his camp. My colleague replied something to the effect of, it's not that he can't go back, it's that he won't go back. Honestly, he seems terrified.

This really piqued my interest because although a few dead sheep definitely isn't the most pleasant thing to wake up to, I couldn't see how someone would be terrified of it. Then add the fact that they're too scared to even go back to their campsite to collect their belongings. As I said, it piqued my interest. From the fairly vague description I was given by my colleague, I was able to roughly pinpoint the area where the guy's camp had been. If he'd been pitched at a marked campsite, it would have been much easier to find and a much more public affair.

But since he was wild camping or rambling as some folks say, he basically pitched his tent in the middle of nowhere with very little to go on in terms of location aside from near such and such field. While out searching, I got my colleague on the phone again who still had the terrified camper with them down at our mourned country park office and basically asked her to rinse the guy for information. According to him, after coming across the horrifying scene, he basically run all the way from his campsite to Mourne Country Park. He hadn't run all the way and it slowed his pace when he felt that he put himself at a safe distance. And because it was so early in the morning, he'd had to walk past

a few other homes and businesses before he saw anything that could help him. I asked why I hadn't just called someone from his campsite, but the camper repeated that he'd been terrified and hadn't bothered to grab anything before fleeing the area. At this point, as I'm driving around on speakerphone, I start wondering just how many dead sheep it takes to scare someone who was apparently well into middle age. It wasn't some scared kid my colleague had with her. He was older than me by the sounds of things. So I told my colleague to ask him exactly how many dead sheep had been outside his tent. The reply came back,

I don't know. The guy couldn't even guess. He only added, it was a mess up there, and that I should take a gun of some kind with me if I'm the one investigating. I only overheard that last part, my colleague didn't entertain the idea by repeating it to me. I don't know what it's like for park rangers over in America, but 99% of national park staff remain completely unarmed at all times and have absolutely no access to firearms of any kind. We just don't really need

it. We don't have any kind of crazy wildlife that necessitates that kind of kit. So some guy saying that I need to take a gun with me just sounded like complete and utter hysteria. I ended up talking to him personally and I got him to describe his campsite as best he could in painstaking details if possible. He tried his best, but nothing seemed to click until he mentioned how on his first day's walk he passed a large body of water that looked to be in a kind of sea shape. The only large lake or reservoir in the Mourns shaped like that is the Spelga Dam, and with the camper saying that he pitched his tent only five or 10 minutes walk

from the very obvious source of fresh water, that narrowed down my search area by quite a bit. Then, after playing a little mental game of where would I camp near Spelga, I decided to drive over to check out two distinct places with great cover and concealment. The first one was no good, but the second one was a bingo. I see a bright red tent sitting among some trees up ahead of me. The guy had chosen to camp among some trees, meaning I couldn't see much from a distance, dead sheep included. But after trudging across a muddy field and hopping a fence, I finally got a good look at what had scared the camper so much. And let me tell you, it put the fear of God into me too.

From what I could gather, the reason why the man had been unable to give us an exact number of dead sheep is because there were bits and pieces of wool, flesh, and bone strewn all over his campsite. It was mind-bogglingly upsetting to look at. I'd never seen anything like it in all my life, let alone during the course of my ranger career. I had to count the sheep's skulls, or what I could at least guess were the remains of their skulls, to get an accurate number, and I counted four eviscerated sheep around that man's campsite. Four. There was little wonder he'd been so terrified, having a sight like that be the first thing greeting him in the morning.

I'd considered myself quite hardy when it comes to things like that, but sweet baby Jesus, even I found myself shaken having come across that scene. As soon as I was able, I contacted another colleague of mine, told them exactly where the campsite was, then asked them to lock the place down so we could secure the scene. I know it seems a bit over the top going all CSI over a few sheep, but if something like that happens, we have to ensure there's some degree of evidence preservation so we can at least get

an idea of what happened. Then, while they got with that, I intended to drive over to Moran Country House to have a chat with our frightened camper. I had a number of questions for him, things I wanted to hear with my own ears and not via my colleague over the phone. When I arrived, the guy was still quite shaken up, sitting in the little port-a-cabin in the car park that serves as the National Trust Office for Moran Country House. My colleague, Jane, had already given him about three or four cups of tea and was only happy to make me one too before I got to asking my questions. They were irrelevant, really. I was confident we'd find out

everything we needed to know from the scene, but I was very curious as to how the guy didn't wake up during the night. Obviously, he didn't have much of an answer for me. I asked him if he was a heavy sleeper and he said he didn't think so, then added that he believed someone had dumped the sheep's remains there as a kind of warning. I asked him if he'd angered or annoyed anyone during his trip, but again, he said he didn't think so. It was definitely curious, but the guy was being of very little help, so I thought I'd just crack on with the next task at hand, which was trying to find out which farmer had four sheep missing. It was still very much a possibility that the four sheep had managed to

break out of a pen somewhere, went on the run, and then got attacked by a dog or a pair of foxes. Stranger things than that have happened around Moore, I can assure you, but few things as strange as what I was dealing with that day. We quickly found the farm which all four missing sheep had come from, so I drove over to have a word with the farmer and to have a check on his fences. And this is where the story starts to get really weird. We were already at weird with the dead sheep right next to the camp, but this next part catapulted the situation way past a head-scratcher and in a territory which was downright unsettling to me. The farmer in question told me that four sheep

had indeed gone missing from his farm, only they'd done so over the past two weeks, one going missing every couple of nights. What's more, the farmer was only too happy for me to inspect his fences for him because he'd been up the wall with them for weeks and he couldn't work out where the sheep were getting out. I could hardly claim to be an expert on the matter but I gave his fences a check anyways and, just like he said, he turned the place into a bloody fortress of wood stakes and chicken wire. The farmer himself then told me that he was convinced someone was stealing a sheep somehow. A sheep going missing was an irritatingly common occurrence, but then four sheep going missing over the course of two weeks,

then all turning up dead and slashed up in the exact same place. Something was obviously going on, but sadly, it was something we never got to the bottom of. The scene was cleared up, with a wildlife expert stopping by to tell us that the wounds to the sheep were in too bad of a condition to properly analyze. We'd never know if it was an animal or a person that had done those horrible things, just one of the many things that continues to bother me all these years later. When the farmer heard exactly how his sheep had died, he pressed for us to investigate the camper for animal cruelty. His assertions are reasonable in many ways, but four dead sheep don't really make it big on the local police's radar and

we had no idea where the camper went after that so there was no arresting or questioning him. Besides, the PS and I have got enough on their plate without investigating bloody sheep murders and the only papers it's got more than a few lines in was a bloody regional farmer's monthly that put it down to foxes or stray dogs. It was baffling to me. There was obviously something more to the whole thing, yet everyone but me and a handful of my colleagues either didn't know enough or didn't care enough to actually look into it properly. All the higher-ups wanted to do was chalk it up to a spike in the local fox population, but no one who'd actually witnessed the carnage up at that

campsite could possibly claim that foxes did that. The only real feedback or reaction we got from the National Trust or the RSPB was to keep an eye out for any large escaped dogs and other such predators. We all found that last part a wee bit ominous, but it was ultimately inconsequential. There was no hound of the Baskervilles-type creature roaming the moor and mountains, but no formal investigation helped us figure out what actually happened. Of all the things that I've seen or experienced during my time working for the National Trust, the incident with the dead sheep is the one thing that still sends shivers down my spine whenever I think about it. But it's not what I know about it that scared me, it's what I don't know that keeps me up at night sometimes,

even all these years later. Paul Braxton Fugate was born on September 2nd of 1938 in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. His parents were Texan by birth and at the outbreak of World War II, they returned their family to the Lone Star estate to settle in a two-bedroom house in Fort Worth. The first of six children, Paul was a precocious child and showed a talent for gardening that pleasantly surprised his parents. He also showed an affinity with animals and once tamed a crow that became his constant but mischievous companion. Paul pushed back against his disciplinarian father and carried a disdain for authority into his early adulthood. He refused to sign a loyalty oath in college and actively protested against the Vietnam War.

Paul went his own way, for better or worse. During the summer of 1962, a friend of Paul's sister visited the Fugate home, intent on swapping some dance tips with the girls. Dottie and the Fugate sisters knew each other through the Girl Scouts, but upon entering her friend's home that day, Dottie ran into a young man with a crew cut and Buddy Holly glasses. Dottie was only vaguely familiar with Paul, but found herself riveted by an unexpected lesson on Inuit culture, which he delivered with a kind of nerdy panache. It was then that Paul asked Dottie if she'd like to see his gun. This might be a massive red flag for many young women, but it was a calculated move on Paul's part. Dottie was on the women's shooting team at what was then Arlington State College it was a calculated move on Paul's part. Dottie was on the women's shooting team at

what was then Arlington State College and was a passionate firearms enthusiast. No ideas for dance moves were swapped that day, and Paul's sisters were furious that he had hijacked their friend's visit, but neither Paul nor Dottie cared as each felt the butterflies of a budding romance. Paul's romance with Dottie was just about the only thing he cared about. He worked a variety of odd jobs while studying for a degree that, by his own admission, he didn't really care for. Yet apathy was somewhat ironic, given the fact that Paul was one of the most talented students the university had ever seen.

After studying at his university's botany department, one of his supervising professors called him one of the finest students he'd ever worked with, adding that Paul was easily in the top ten students of the past three decades. Paul's reputation among his peers was so great that following his disappearance, a classmate named a new plant species in his honor, a flowering desert perennial called Amzonia fugatii. Following his graduation, he briefly considered using his degree to secure a well-paid job at Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, but at the moment of truth, he changed his mind.

Paul wanted freedom, independence, and the loving embrace of Mother Nature, and with that in mind, he applied for the National Park Service instead. Following Paul and Dottie's wedding in December of 1964, Paul went to work at the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. After New Mexico, the Fugates were stationed at the sandstone canyons of Arizona's Navajo National Monument, home of the Batatican cliff dwelling. It was the kind of lifestyle Paul had always dreamed of, but it was far from perfect. Paul's superiors were everything he loathed, and they once chastised him for his anti-authority streak, his laziness, and his personal appearance. If you want to look and live like a hippie, that is certainly your prerogative, but not here at Navajo National Monument, one wrote, furious that he couldn't just

fire the man. Instead, in 1970, the Park Service transferred Paul to another national park instead, the Shirakawa's National Monument, where he and Dottie would spend the next ten years of their lives in relative bliss. Then, on Sunday, January 13th of 1980, Paul stepped out of the Shirakawa Visitor Center, wearing his standard Park Service uniform and red wing boots and carrying a green down parka. I'm going to do a trail, he announced to a coworker, adding that if he wasn't back by 4.30, she should close up without him. Little did this coworker know, it was the last time anyone would see Paul again.

By 8pm, this same worried coworker contacted the park superintendent, who in turn joined his subordinates in searching the surrounding area. The rangers covered a lot of ground, calling out Paul's name all the while, but eerily, there were no signs of him anywhere. The following morning, the park superintendent contacted the Cochise County Sheriff's Office to officially report Paul missing. Law enforcement then organized an intensive search and rescue effort consisting of almost 30 rangers and police officers,

with the team soon joined by a National Guard helicopter and 16 volunteers from the Southern Arizona Rescue Association. The official search effort lasted just over two weeks, but Dottie organized volunteer search groups for months, then eventually years afterwards. They walked the trails, checked abandoned mines, held benefit concerts, and badgered local politicians, but sadly, their efforts have so far never borne fruit and the only real theory is a grim one. A criminal investigator for the sheriff's department had purported that Paul may have been the victim of a drug deal gone wrong. Since Cochise County

shares 80 miles of border with Mexico, the area is well-traveled by drug smugglers and human traffickers, and it was suggested that a chance encounter with such criminals might have ended very, very badly for the gregarious Paul. Yet without any solid evidence of such an attack or abduction, all anyone could do was wait, wonder, and hope. Paul remains the only Park Service Ranger ever to go missing and never be accounted for, and over the years, his unsolved disappearance has haunted everyone it's touched. A retired detective who once worked the case officially now investigates Paul's disappearance on his own time, traveling around the state and re-interviewing sources, and in 2018, the reward for information was raised from $20,000 to $60,000.

At one point, a heartbroken but resolute Dottie brought in a psychic who immediately detected what she called a time portal inside a home Paul used to frequent. This psychic also claimed that she'd had a vision of two men bending over a woman's drugged unconscious body. Paul was in the vision, witnessing something he shouldn't and after apprehending him, the two men shoved a drug down his throat and dumped him across the Mexican border. Dottie seemed shaken by the psychic's so called vision, not because she was a believer in the supernatural, but because it was a disturbingly familiar story. In 2014, a Park Service employee named Karen Gonzalez was

assaulted and nearly killed by an alleged drug smuggler from Mexico. The incident happened within spitting distance of where Paul was last seen, meaning the murder was perhaps Dottie's single biggest clue as to the fate of her husband. Yet Dottie has long feared that her husband had suffered some kind of violent death. Just five days after he went missing, Dick Horton, a park service volunteer in his 50s, came forward with a crucial piece of information, one which would set the tone of the investigation for years to come. Around the time of Paul's disappearance, Dick had been out driving with his wife when he'd spotted Paul slumped between two men in a pickup truck,

which seemed to be rapidly fleeing the area. One police officer found Dick's story so compelling that he asked him to undergo deep hypnosis in order to recall minute details of what he'd witnessed. Dick recalled the pickup was a dark green color with a camper shell. The driver was in his 30s, had a trimmed beard, and was wearing a black and red flannel shirt. The driver was in his 30s, had a trimmed beard and was wearing a black and red flannel shirt. The second man wore a green jacket, one eerily similar to the one Paul wore as part of his ranger uniform. According to Dick, Paul himself looked sad and dejected and appeared to be nursing some kind of minor head injury. If what Dick had witnessed was Paul's abduction by drug traffickers or people smugglers, his hesitancy to come forward meant that any guilty parties would essentially have an entire week's head start.

However, the fact remains that aside from one solitary witness statement, there is no solid evidence to place Paul in anyone's truck that day. In the words of one detective, we build cases on what we know, and that's not a lot right now. All we know is that Paul's missing, but there's no evidence to tell us anything else. By the summer of 1980, the swirl of rumor and speculation had condensed into two basic theories. The first was mostly propagated by a park service investigator named Pat Hanley, who believed that Paul had simply walked out on

his career in marriage and that his disappearance was voluntary. He cited what he referred to as Paul's flagging career prospects, as well as something much seedier than the investigation had shed light on. After more than a decade of marriage, Paul had started an affair with a 19 year old colleague, one that had resulted in unexpected pregnancy. The young lady was forced to seek an abortion, so there was no reason for Paul to flee child support payments and the like, but it's possible that the shame and heartache drove him to seek a new life elsewhere. However, one missing persons detective was vocal in his belief that some kind of foul play has caused Paul's disappearance.

Criminal investigator Craig Emanuel insisted that following extensive interviews with Paul's wife, the affair and his career prospects were irrelevant. Paul was content with his life, and he would never have just walked out on Dottie unless he was under duress. Emanuel also placed a lot of credence in the witness statement of Dick Horton and suggested that Dick may have witnessed Paul being disappeared by the foot soldiers of some kind of smuggling ring. Emmanuel also pointed out that in the months following Paul's disappearance, he had received an anonymous block print letter telling him to ask Ernest Goff in the county jail in Phoenix about Mr. Fugate.

The following year, another letter in the same style claimed that a man by the name of Tex Carpenter had been involved in Paul's murder. Carpenter initially agreed to take a polygraph test in October of 1981, but changed his mind during the pre-test interview after three hours of discordant hectoring. During this rant, Carpenter swore that he'd seen two men shoot Paul and had even helped bury him in a dry gulch just south of Tucson. However, just two weeks later, Carpenter denied having said any of the sort and apparently under pressure from his prison's chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood, Carpenter later said that he might

know something about Paul's disappearance, but wouldn't talk unless he got some kind of deal. Ernest Goff, on the other hand, denied any involvement whatsoever and refused to answer any questions unless formally charged with the crime. Both men have since died, meaning any such leads might well have gone to their graves with them. Some have even suggested that Dottie herself was involved in her husband's disappearance, with many theories based around a rather untimely inquiry. Just two weeks after Paul vanished, Dottie asked how long she would have to wait before getting Paul's retirement benefits. She was told the inquiry was a little premature as the authorities

were still hopeful that Paul would be found alive. Dottie replied that she was simply preparing for the worst. I wasn't making much money when I asked about his retirement benefits, Dottie later said. It was just one of those things you do. The inquiry apparently led to her being asked to undergo a polygraph test and although it was implied to be a fairly informal and friendly interview, Dottie showed up with a lawyer, a close friend, and a tape recorder. Despite her somewhat suspicious behavior, the police examiner felt that Dottie was being truthful in her claim that she was innocent of any involvement. Yet the result didn't explain a number of other curious details which investigators found interesting. At Paul's cabin, investigators found an unfinished life insurance application and a check Dottie had written to Paul from their joint bank account.

This had been used to suggest that Dottie and Paul were about to attempt some kind of life insurance scam. But even if this wasn't the case, a few pieces of correspondence seemed to suggest Paul knew that his life was in danger. In one of Dottie's file boxes, police found a letter that Paul had written to her, along with a handwritten will. It was dated December 23rd, 1978, just over a year before he went missing. You won't be opening this unless something bad has happened, or at least I hope not, it began. I have done what I could to see that you can be self-sufficient and believe that is possible now. I know that I've been a long way from perfect and all and seem to have got worse as time has passed, but still I love you dearly. Paul left specific advice on selling some of his rifles and giving him a cheap burial.

He also emphasized the best strategy for her to claim his government death benefits before adding that she had the proper talents to succeed without him. Some have interpreted this as evidence of collusion and insist that Dottie is well aware of Paul's secretive but continued existence. Dottie, on the other hand, has stated that if Paul really was alive, there's no way she'd be able to live apart from him, nor would she be able to hide her joy or fake such a deep, long-lasting grief. Since the disappearance of her husband, Dottie Fugate has never been romantically involved with another man, and her best friend in the world is none other than Paul's young sister. Paul remains the only National Park Ranger in US history to be the victim of an

unexplained disappearance, but maybe that's because he doesn't want to be found. Yet in all likelihood, Paul's fate remains a mystery to this day because someone else didn't want him found. After all, dead men tell no tales. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca Hello, Let's Read. My name is Radim, and I am what you might call a park ranger here in my home country, Slovakia.

I'm writing to you because I want to explain to you something that is happening in my country, and it is happening in one particular area in Slovakia. For some backstory, Slovakia is a country in the middle of Europe. The biggest mountains here are the Carpathian Mountains and Tribec is part of the Carpathian Mountains. Tribec is a relatively small and not very high mountain in the shape of a triangle and is located in the west side of the country. There are some very dangerous tall mountains here in Slovakia like the Tatras Mountains

and these are dangerous because of bad weather and rock slides and wild animals. Trebeck is not like that. The climate is moderate, no tornadoes, no earthquakes. It just looks like a calm, normal place. But it's not calm and it's not normal. For some, Trebeck is a very dangerous place. There is a whole series of missing people in Trebec, people whose bodies have never been found. I believe that most of them could be explained as tragic accidents when animals attacked a victim, preventing the body from being found. But there are other cases when things are not so easily explained. The Trebec disappearances have become a sort of meme or urban legend here in Slovakia, almost like the Bermuda Triangle.

The disappearances are real, but no one seems to take them seriously anymore. The stranger ones happen so far apart in time that people don't become alarmed. They just shrug their shoulders and say, oh well, at least it wasn't me. I made a list of some such cases and I'd like to know your thoughts on them because I think something very frightening is happening here. All the way back in 1929, a man named Mr. A. Somsali went missing on a snowy November day. He just told a neighbor that he wanted to go for a walk and then never came back. The heavy snows made it impossible to search for him properly until the springtime, but by then, it was too late. He had completely disappeared and no dead body was ever recovered. Some say

that the man took his own life, as he had a very lonely life with no wife or children, but all agree that the fact that he was never found is very strange because Trebec is so small. Then, in 1939, a man named Walter Fisher went missing. Walter worked in a shoe factory in a small city called Podizonski on the west of the Trebec Mountains. He worked there for six days every week, then on Sundays, he would visit his wife and children who still lived out in the countryside because they couldn't afford to live in the city. On Sunday of January of 1939, he decided that for some reason he wouldn't visit his family, but rather go for a hike in the forests around Trebec.

According to one of his co-workers, Walter had mentioned that he wanted to visit a place called the Černý Hrad, which literally means the Black Castle in Slovakian. It is a ruined fortress from many hundreds of years ago which was built to protect against Hungarian raiders. Some tourists occasionally visit the place but I don't understand why Walter would make it the destination of his hike. The Black Castle is 25 kilometers from Partizanski, meaning Walter would have had to have walked 50 kilometers if he wanted to make it back to his lodgings in time for

work the next day. This is not my idea of what a hardworking man like Walter would do on his day off to relax. Rather, it sounds like he had some kind of business at the Black Castle, like he had planned to meet someone there or something like that. It also doesn't make sense that he would choose to go on such a hike in January when the snows make it very, very difficult to move around on foot. Sometime later, Walter's wife reported him missing and he remained a missing person for months and months. Then in May of that same year, Walter Fisher suddenly showed up alive. No one knows what happened to him or where he'd been, but it was clear that in the time that he'd been missing, something terrible had happened to him. When he was found, he was in the middle of a field more than 30 kilometers away from Partizanski, the place that he was last seen, on the complete opposite side of the Trebeck Mountains.

His clothes were in rags, he was unconscious, and there were reports of him being horribly wounded. Some accounts say the wounds were burns and others say cuts, but it's clear that he was taken to a hospital where he stayed for a long time. Walter said that he had no memory of the time that he was missing, but was traumatized and spent the rest of his life in a hospital for people with psychological problems. So what in God's name happened to him in the months he was missing? There are many, many theories on this, some quite believable and some wild and crazy Most of them involve World War II and how tensions in the run-up to the war led to Walter being accused of being a spy

This would explain why he was wounded but not killed Someone had been hurting him but also feeding him Then there are all the theories involving time portals, other dimensions, aliens, or UFOs. These are not things that I believe, so I won't go into them, but the lack of any real answers has led to such fantasies. Personally, I have no idea what exactly happened to Walter, but it was clearly something very, very frightening. The next mysterious disappearance involved a husband and

wife in 1966. Their names were Jan and Elena, and in February of 1966, they drove to the city of Jelenet, parked their car near the forest, then apparently went off hiking together. Their car was fine, their friends and family didn't notice anything odd about the way that they were acting before that day either. But still, just like the others, Jan and Elena walked into the forest of the Trebec Mountains and were never seen again. Their case seems to have gotten a lot more attention from newspapers and I read that the whole of Slovakia searched far and wide for the couple. But according to one policeman, it was like they just stepped out of their car, walked into the woods, and completely disappeared. Anyone who knows these particular

cases finds them completely baffling. Like I said, there have been many other people go missing in the Trbeč, but because it is so small, they get found about 99% of the time with an injury or they got lost. A totally normal explanation. But to have these people just completely disappear and for one to suddenly show up with no memory and strange wounds, it's enough to make the rational people like me wonder what is reality and what's science fiction. It's also very frustrating for me because not a lot of people outside of Slovakia know about the Trebec missing people, and those that do assume that they're just campfire stories because of the Slovak shrug-shoulders attitude to them.

I'm sure there is a normal explanation for what has happened to these people, but I cannot see it, and that's why I'm trying to get this story to as many English-language media as I can. Maybe if enough light is shed on it, the mystery will finally be solved. Back when I was a trainee park ranger up here in Washington, I used to patrol this one trail that was popular with some nearby college students. The campus was maybe only 30 or 40 minutes walk away from this particular trail, which was fairly short and set into the northeastern edge of the park, so some weekends the trail would be dotted with groups of students partaking in a

little wholesome outdoor exercise. Occasionally, you'd get a group doing something not so wholesome, either drinking or just making a general nuisance of themselves, but for the most part, the hikers among them tended to be polite and well-behaved. Although they didn't exactly run like clockwork, there was one particular time when the trail would almost always be completely deserted. Due to even the most studious college kids' propensity for drinking, Saturday mornings were without a doubt the quietest time of the week. On the rare occasion you did see anyone, it was usually someone a little older, sometimes a couple, but never anyone college-aged. So this one very early morning, when I suddenly spot someone ahead of me on the trail that looked a lot like a college kid, it definitely raised an eyebrow.

You might be wondering how someone looks like a college kid. Well, first-time hikers tend to look unprepared in both their equipment and their clothing, and this girl had no pack and wore something that looked better suited to a Friday night party than a Saturday morning's hike. She was also walking at a particularly slow pace, the kind of pace that says, I thought this was a good idea, but now I want to go home, which is very typical of first-time college-age hikers who bite off a little more than they can chew. She's walking so slowly that I start wondering if she's still drunk from the night before or something. Every

so often, she'd stumble or sway slightly, and this made me increasingly concerned as I caught up with her. I also happened to notice that her clothes looked pretty dirty, almost like she'd either fallen or had taken a dirt nap of some kind. It also looked like she was sweating a phenomenal amount. Her hair was wet and stringy and there was a big dark patch around her back and shoulders where the fabric was clinging to her wet skin. She was obviously in a really bad way, I just had no idea how bad her condition actually was. When it got to the point where I was only about 10-15 feet behind her, she still hadn't

turned around to notice me and I knew just silently passing her might scare her half to death, so I figured I'd just wish her a good morning just to announce my presence. But as soon as I do that, the girl turns around and I just about jump back in horror at what I saw. The girl had a horrific head wound above her eye and the eye itself was so completely caked with blood that I'm not sure she could see out of it. Someone had seriously tried to cave this girl's head in and the fact that she was still walking around seemed like nothing short of a miracle. As soon as she laid her one good eye on me, she just sort of collapsed down onto her butt, reaching up to me and croaking, water, water, over and over again. I rushed to give her some water, then radioed into HQ to

get her some medical attention, but as I did so, a certain smell hit my nostrils. It was as intense as it was recognizable, and it suddenly hit me that whatever she'd been through was no accident. She wasn't soaked with sweat. Someone had poured gasoline on her. I kept asking her what had happened but she couldn't seem to get any words out. She just kept drinking more and more water then staring off into the distance like she was on the verge of going into shock. The only thing she said to me before passing out was, My friends. Which scared me, thinking that there were more kids hurt or dangerous somewhere out there on the trail.

I kept thinking that she was going to die right there on the trail with me, but she still had a pulse when a co-worker with an ATV stretcher trailer showed up, as far as I knew she was still alive when the EMT showed up to rush her to the hospital. Myself and the rest of the ranger team then spent the rest of the morning combing through the woods around the northeastern trail looking for any signs of the poor girl's friends. All we found was a doused campfire with a few empty beer and liquor containers surrounding it but the ranger who found it was quick to add that the place reeked of gasoline. We didn't get the full story until a week or so later and knowing what actually happened to the girl made her only words to me, my friends, seem all the more haunting. She wasn't saying it because she was worried about them. It was more a case of her asking why people she believed were her friends would do something so awful to her.

Yep, there had been no ambush of some innocent college kids by some masked horror movie psycho. This girl's own friends had lured her out into the woods, beat her half to death, then tried to set her on fire. I found out later that the only thing that stopped them from actually lighting her on fire was that someone's lighter wasn't working. The group then tried to light a stick on fire using their campfire, but it was a slow process, and by the time they'd made themselves a torch, their victim had managed to run off into the woods and hide. She stayed put for a few hours, drifting in and out of consciousness, and finally got enough adrenaline going to try to make her way out of the woods. And that's when I found her, and knowing she'd get the help she needed, her body just

shut down again. They attacked her over some stupid love triangle too, the ringleader having a crush on a guy who had a crush on the victim in turn. Jealousy boiled over, and I guess the alcohol fueled the violence, but a group of college kids legitimately conspired to burn one of their peers alive, all because of a teenage crush. That's the scariest thing in the world to me, and so utterly terrifying because I just can't understand it. The guilty parties all got arrested and kicked out of college, then most were handed lengthy prison sentences after a pretty well publicized trial. My ranger team was glued to the radio during radio news breaks for two weeks, desperate

for any news, and that's how we came to know the horrifying extent of what had occurred that night. The encounter that morning and the eventual discovery of what had occurred that night. The encounter that morning and the eventual discovery of what happened to that poor girl made for the more frightening and disturbing moments of my career. There are some real scary places out there in the woods alright, but there's a kind of innocence to grizzlies and mountain lions. They'll kill you to survive, whereas people on the other hand, people kill just to watch each other die. Many years ago now, I used to work up in Alaska as a member of the park services. One day we had gotten a call about some illegal dumping on one of the local trails, so myself and another employee went out to check it out. We were fairly deep into the trails, not too many people around except for a few joggers,

when we came around to turn on the path. As we were walking, my partner looked into the woods and said, What in the world? There's a guy there. About 20 yards away, there was a white guy with longish hair crouched behind a bush just kind of staring at us. The man noticed that we had noticed him and he immediately stood up and stretched out his arms in the air, like he was just enjoying the day. He actually approached us and it turns out the man that I was with actually knew the man in the woods. He was a local builder or owned a construction company. In fact, he had built a deck for my friend a year prior. After they said their hellos, he mentioned that he just stepped off the path for

a moment to take a leak. It was kind of strange though because we had seen him and that definitely wasn't what he was doing. But he wasn't that suspicious and my friend knew him so after making sure that he wasn't illegally dumping or anything of that nature we just started walking back and he walked with us for a fair while. A few years later I heard that the man that we had seen had been arrested. Apparently there had been some sort of altercation with a girl at a coffee shop or so I had initially been, and he had shot her in a robbery and was under arrest for murder. The truth was even more bizarre. The man, Israel Keyes, was a serial killer who had actually abducted, tortured, and murdered the girl. After being arrested, it turns out that he had been traveling around the

country murdering people randomly for years. He would bury murder kits and come back, sometimes years later, to dig them up, and they would include guns, cash, etc., and whatever he needed. I went back later to where we had come across Israel in the woods to see if there was any such a kit buried there, but I didn't find anything. Others suggested that he might have been waiting to surprise the victim on the trail, but that didn't seem to be his general M.O., as was my understanding. Anyway, our encounter is something that I never have totally been able to explain, and since he ended up taking his own life before trial, I likely never will. I work as a park ranger here in New Mexico, and a few years back, we were dealing with a particularly vicious outbreak of wildfires. We were working with this group of wildland firefighters, coordinating and supplying the various teams in our non-stop, no-sleep fight to put the fires out.

On the incident maps, it's common to make notations of areas that are considered sensitive. This can range from areas with suspected and known endangered species, known pot farms, and Native American land with cultural significance. So we were late into our shift, can't even recall what day we were on, because typically assignments can last up to 14 to 28 days depending on our need for resources. We were working with a Native American crew because our division went through culturally sensitive land, and everything was going good. Darkness fell, and it was coming up on break time eventually. We were all dead tired, sucking in smoke all day,

little sleep, it was pretty normal actually. Fire was pretty much out in our area minus a few hotspots that just needed mopping up. As I was sitting against a tree, all of our normal radio traffic turned to nothing but static, which is totally common in areas that are out there. Fighting the urge to sleep, I got one of those moments that just wakes you up. Like when you wake up from a dream where you're falling, it was like that. But there were these figures, similar to the ghost of Obi-Wan, it was like they would walk behind a tree and disappear. Nobody else saw it, but I've heard similar stories before. I'm not a person who really believes in ghosts or paranormal stuff. I feel like it was real, but I do my best to believe that it was just

hallucinations from lack of sleep. I've worked as a park ranger for the National Park Service for coming up on ten years now, and this is the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me. I was driving on a dirt road on just a regular patrol day when I saw a plume of smoke ahead of me. I thought that I might have to call in a fire or something, but when I rounded a bend, I was greeted with the sight of a or something but when I rounded a bend, I was greeted with the sight of a van parked in the middle of the track, completely engulfed in flames. The tires were melted, things were popping and exploding inside and it was this raging

inferno. I thought someone had just ditched a car and lit it up so I didn't think much of it at first. I called 911 and reported it, then had to drive like a half hour extra to get around it. I find out later that it wasn't abandoned. There had been a guy in the driver's seat. He had to be long dead by the time I showed up so I don't regret not checking it out further. It wasn't an accident though so the car was parked in the middle of the road and it hadn't hit anything. It was eventually ruled that he had

actually taken his own life, but I really can't imagine how anyone would choose to go that way. It was also a super weird place, not out of the way or right by his house. Now I think about it a lot because it just doesn't seem to make any sense to me outside of some catastrophic engine failure. As weird as it sounds to some, my first job out of college was working for the National Park Service as a ranger in training. I was based in NorCal at the time and the survey protocol we were working had us out on ATVs just after sunset, stopping periodically to mimic owl hoots before listening for their response. One night I was riding my ATV on a logging road that was right along a river. I saw a blur off to the side and before I knew it there was a smallish black bear running five feet ahead of my ATV. I immediately slowed down to avoid hitting it but

since it was so small I thought its mother might still be around so I was half expecting a mama bear claw on my back. The bear ran ahead of me on the road for probably 5 seconds, it felt like much longer, before disappearing into the forest on the other side. As soon as the road was clear, I pounded the throttle on the ATV and got out of there. In retrospect, the bear was probably a yearling and no longer with its mother, but in the heat of the moment, it was a terrifying possibility. I love you. Make sure your roommate is someone you can trust, someone you know. Because when you have someone in your house, the place you eat, sleep, and expect to be safe, you need to know that they wouldn't do anything to harm you.

I made the mistake of trusting a total stranger and inviting her into my home to live with me. I put an ad on the bulletin board at the grocery store where I work, and one of my co-workers, who I didn't really know at all, called and told me that she needed a place and that she'd love to rent the other room in my apartment. The other girls I worked with all said that she was cool and that she'd be a great roommate, so I agreed. She moved in and I immediately noticed that she was one of the most socially awkward people I'd ever met. She could barely look me in the eyes and whenever I entered a common room she was also in, she'd leave and go back into her bedroom. I didn't know if I was doing something to make her uncomfortable but I also couldn't really find out because she wouldn't talk to me. I tried my best to make her feel like it was as much her home as it was mine but

there was nothing I could really do to get on her good side and have us be friends. I asked my co-worker if they told the truth about her being cool and fun and they said that they were being completely honest when they vouched for her. That they didn't know why she was acting the way she was with me. She'd never given off any red flags to them before. She was living with me for a few months before I felt comfortable enough to have my boyfriend come over. I wanted her to feel settled first out of respect but her attitude never changed and I was tired of waiting. I told her the day before that he was coming over and she said it was fine. The next night came and after going to dinner my boyfriend and I came back to my apartment to watch a movie. We sat on the

sofa and turned on a random movie when halfway through we heard her door open, and she came out, completely nude. I yelled at her to go back into her room, and she giggled and said she didn't notice. She went back into her room and came back out in a robe, and she sat right between my boyfriend and I, basically squeezing herself into the small space separating my leg and his and asked what we were watching. She dragged her fingers across my boyfriend's leg while she waited for an answer. He was obviously uncomfortable and got up quickly. I immediately told her what she was doing was gross and inappropriate, but she just rolled her eyes at me. The next few times he came over,

she acted the same way. She shamelessly flirted with him, trying to seduce him or something. It was really bizarre. No matter how much he told her how disgusting she was acting, she never seemed to let up. A few weeks later she started acting differently towards him. Not flirting, but still overly nice. She'd make him full meals and once in a while make me something too. Her occasional offers of making me meals became nightly and I began to get used to her doing all the cooking. I guess I appreciated it, especially after long days at work and I never turned them down. After a while of living together, I got sick.

Really sick. I woke up nauseous all the time and could barely hold myself up most days. I thought maybe it was the flu at first, but after a few weeks, I knew something was seriously wrong. My boyfriend took me to the doctor multiple times, but nothing ever came of it. I never could figure out what was wrong, and I had allergy tests done, blood tests, and even a brain scan done, and there was seemingly nothing physically wrong with me. I went weeks where I didn't feel right. My roommate started acting weirdly nice towards

me during this time, taking care of me, bringing me soup and medicine. I was so grateful for her, I felt like we were finally connecting. We'd watch movies, listen to music, and it was great, and I felt like we were starting to finally get close to each other, which made what she did to me even harder to process. After months of my symptoms getting worse and finding no solution, I started to feel like I was never going to get better. Then one morning when I decided to get up earlier than usual, I went into the kitchen and saw my roommate making me something to eat, something she'd done most mornings voluntarily. She was putting everything onto a cute tray like she does when she brings me breakfast in bed,

and I watched her for a second, about to say something, when I saw her grab a bottle from under the sink. She unscrewed the cap and poured some of whatever it was into my smoothie. I ran back in my room before she saw me standing there and laid back in bed to make it look like I was still asleep. She came in and set my food in front of me, but I told her I was too nauseous to eat. She complained and tried to get me to eat, but I refused as politely as possible so she wouldn't get suspicious. She left for work an hour later and I went into the kitchen to see what it was she was putting in my food. I pulled out the bottle and was horrified when the label read antifreeze. I realized it was her who had been poisoning me this entire time, making me feel the way I did. I didn't want to believe it,

but it really seemed like she was trying to kill me. I immediately rushed to the hospital with my boyfriend and got a blood test that came back positive for high levels of ethylene glycol. Apparently, ethylene glycol is exceptionally hard to detect in a blood test unless it's been specifically instructed to look for that compound, which explains the past blood test coming up as nothing being wrong with me. The doctors were amazed that I was still alive after having been ingesting these toxins for weeks. I should have been dead.

We reported this immediately and she was arrested that evening and surprisingly admitted to everything. The detective said that she was so calm and acted as though what she did was totally normal. She said that she wanted to be with my boyfriend and saw getting rid of me as the only way to have him. She was actually going to murder me to have a guy. Psychotic, right? And she was sentenced to seven years in prison for attempted murder. It wasn't relief that I felt when I watched her get sentenced, but a sense of closure. I felt like I was going crazy when I was sick and no doctor could tell me what was wrong. All I can say to everyone out there thinking of letting a stranger be your roommate,

if you don't fully trust someone, don't ingest anything they give you. What I'm about to tell you happened a little over a year ago, so it's still all pretty fresh in my mind. I was 18 and a girl in my class named Kendra was having a really hard time at home. Her parents fought all the time and she always talked about how much she wished she could just disappear. She confided in my mom, who was a teacher at the high school we went to, and my mom offered to let her stay with us. Only we didn't have an extra bedroom so that meant that she'd be staying with me as a roommate. I was really upset. My mom moved most of my furniture out to make room for another bed. Kendra was 18 too, which meant that she didn't have to get permission from her parents to leave, so she moved in pretty quickly. I noticed right away that something was off with

her. She would spend hours sitting in front of the mirror, just smiling at herself. I would ask her what she was doing, and she always responded that she was practicing. Only she wouldn't say for what. Most nights I'd hear her in the bathroom talking to herself, seriously having full on conversations. And it really freaked me out. But when I told my mom, she just said Kendra was awkward and having a tough time and for me to be nice. Kendra and I never became close. She made it very clear that she didn't like me. She ignored me constantly and would express anger whenever I'd hang out with my mom without her. Her jealously turned into something really weird the day she dyed her hair to look like mine. She even went to the same hairdresser I go to and gave her a

picture of me to go off of. She was open about it too. I continued to complain to my mom about her now copying the way that I look but again she told me to just be nice and put up with it because Kendra was having a very hard life. Weeks went by and the copying got worse. She would repeat everything I said but in different voices, almost like she was trying to mimic the way I sounded. She started using my clothes too, and no matter how much I told my mom it creeped me out, she always told me to just go along with it for a while. I started feeling uncomfortable in my own home.

I hated being in my room with her. The worst nights were when I would wake up to Kendra standing at the foot of my bed. Sometimes she'd be staring at me. She'd smirk when I expressed a sense of fear. And after a few months of her living with us, I decided to start sleeping in the living room to try to escape the awkwardness of sharing a room with a person I had started to believe was a legitimate sociopath. The living room proved to be not too much better though. She would still watch me sleep from the armchair across from the sofa and laugh when I woke up, scared of what she might do to me in my sleep. My mom never believed me when I told her what she was doing during the night.

She told me Kendra always denied it and that I was probably making the whole thing up to try to get her kicked out of the house. I was done at this point. I decided one night that I was going to set up a camera to catch her in the act so I could show my mom and Kendra would be gone for good. That night, I set my phone on record and positioned it so it would hopefully be out of sight. I never expected to see what I saw the next morning when I went to check what I'd caught from the night before. I watched as Kendra slowly and quietly made her way down the stairs towards the sofa I was fast asleep on. She stood at the end of the sofa for a whole thirty minutes before she sat down in the armchair to watch me for another hour. Then she made her way into the kitchen.

With wide eyes I watched as she came back into the room with a large knife. She walked towards me and bent down to whisper something in my ear, and she laughed and held up the knife above her head like she was going to stab me with a large knife. She walked towards me and bent down to whisper something in my ear, and she laughed and held up the knife above her head like she was going to stab me with it. Then she brought it down quickly, but stopped, just away from my face. I screamed when I saw her head turn to look directly into the camera. I wanted to cry when I heard her say, You actually thought I didn't know what that was there. I know everything that happens in this house. Remember that. She then walked toward the phone and turned the video off. I immediately rushed upstairs to tell my mom but instead was struck in the chest with a wooden baseball bat. It was Kendra. I screamed at her and asked her what she

was doing while trying to catch my breath, but she looked at me with no emotion on her face at all. She started to drag me into my room, and as I was in that daze from getting struck, she began to tie me to the desk chair. She told me I didn't deserve the life I had. I shouldn't have been given a loving family when she was given an awful one. The goosebumps that went through my body confirmed what I was thinking when she said, You don't appreciate the life you've been given, so I'm taking it. I started shaking uncontrollably, begging her to let me live. She laughed and told me that she wasn't going to kill me.

She was just going to live as me for a while. I didn't really know how that was possible, but I decided it was best not to antagonize the crazy person right in front of me. And I was already pretty sure that she'd broken a few of my ribs with a bat, and I didn't want her to pick it up again and continue where she left off. She dragged me, still tied to the chair, and put me in the closet and closed the door. I could still see her through the cracks and cringed when she put on more of my clothes and styled her hair to match mine. Finally I could hear the sound of the door opening and my mother coming home from work. She called out my name and I started screaming for her to help me. Kendra opened the closet door and told me to be quiet or she'd hurt my mom.

So I shut my mouth. I watched as my mom burst into the room and asked her where I was since she'd heard me calling for help. I started to feel sick when Kendra said, but mommy, it is me. My mom looked at her with pure confusion and asked her what she meant and Kendra kept repeating herself, it's me. Don't you recognize your daughter? I saw my mom's face drain of color when she asked Kendra what she'd done to me and that's when Kendra had enough. She shoved my mother to the ground and screamed in her face that she was her daughter and she needed to act like it. My mom got up slowly and as nicely as she could she says, oh my goodness I don't know what's gotten into me today.

Of course you're my daughter. Let's make some tea. Stay right there. She left the room and Kendra opened the closet door to tell me her plan was working and that my mom believed her. I of course knew that clearly wasn't the case and that Kendra had lost her mind. I was 100% positive my mother was downstairs calling the police, but I wasn't going to tell Kendra that though. My mom came back upstairs 15 minutes later and told Kendra that T was downstairs and to please join her.

Kendra and my mom left the room and within seconds I heard the police entering and her being arrested. My mom found me in the closet soon after and untied me. She immediately apologized for never believing me and in that moment I was just happy to be in my mother's arms. Kendra was charged with assault with a deadly weapon at first but was deemed unfit to stand trial. Instead, she was sent to a mental facility where they'd assess her condition further to decide whether or not she should be a danger to herself or others. She was sentenced to spend at least three years in that facility before she'd have the chance to get out. All in all,

the experience was truly a nightmare, but I also couldn't help but feeling at least a little sorry for Kendra. She was never given a chance in her life to grow into anything but what she became. She may have been the scariest roommate I truly ever had, but I don't blame her. I blame her horrible parents. If they had just given her the life she deserved, I doubt that wherever her mental health started to deteriorate, it may have never actually gone down that route. A couple months in her stay in that facility, I got a letter from Kendra in the mail. In it she told me that she was on medication and had plenty of time to think about what she did.

She apologized and expressed how much she hoped I could forgive her. I actually wrote her back telling her I had already forgiven her and that I hope she continues to get the help that she needs and that there was no hard feelings between us. And even though I have forgiven her, I'd be lying if I said that there wasn't still a part of me that's scared of what she might do when she does eventually get out. I hate dogs. Please don't be mad at me when I tell you that. I'm not some psycho who thinks dogs don't have souls or they're evil. I actually used to love dogs. I was so excited when I moved in with my buddy who had four of them so you can imagine I was a little disappointed when he told me not to interact with them.

He said that they were only tame around him and his girlfriend and if anyone else came near them they'd quote unquote freak out. It was a little scary to think about four very large dogs who hated me living only a wall away but my friend was usually pretty good about locking his door when he left or putting them out in the backyard if he was going to be gone longer than a day or so. One summer my roommate said he and his girlfriend were going to visit his family a couple of states away and that he'd be leaving the dogs in the backyard for a few nights. He had automatic feeders and the dogs had access to this weird petto-activated watering system so there was no need for me to go out and give them anything. The backyard was pretty huge and he assured me that they'd be fine and out of my way all weekend. I felt safe knowing

that they'd be out of the house. No one was able to control those dogs except my roommate so keeping them away from all the people while he was gone was definitely the right move. The day came where my roommate and his girlfriend left. I woke up and went downstairs for some coffee and looked out the sliding glass door at the four dogs as they stood there staring at me. Now these were all huge German shepherds, so seeing them growl at me but not being able to do anything about it kind of made me laugh a little bit. I went through my regular morning routine and got ready for work. I left the rest of the day and came home around 6pm after going to the gym. As I entered the kitchen, I noticed something was very wrong. There was glass all over the kitchen floor and the sliding glass door was shattered.

And that's when I started to hear the growling coming from behind me. I didn't even have to turn around to figure out what the sound was coming from. I did what any smart person would do and ran as fast as I could up the stairs into my room. The whole time I was running, it felt like that dog was going to latch onto my leg at any moment. I slammed the door shut behind me and grabbed at my pocket to get my phone out and call 911. Except it wasn't there. The pocket was empty. I wanted to cry when I realized that I'd left my phone in my car in my gym bag.

I felt so stupid. And you're probably wondering why I didn't just call for help outside the window. Well, I would have if we didn't live a mile from the next house. My roommate insisted on living in the country so his dogs could have a big yard to run around. I was really regretting moving in as I sat there wondering what the hell I was going to do to get myself out of that situation. I didn't even know where the other dogs were. I had only seen one when I made my way upstairs and I guess I could have overlooked them in the panic. Maybe the others were chasing me too. I leaned against the door and sat there for a few seconds before bang. Something huge and heavy was smashing itself against the door.

Growling came soon after and I quickly realized the dogs were actually trying to get into my room. I didn't know if they were rabid or something, but I couldn't just sit there and wait for them to get to me. With the progress they were making on the door, I knew that they'd get to me at some point. The banging didn't last long before the scratching started. It was even louder than the banging and would quickly grant them access into the room if they continued to tear at that door. It was clearly very flimsy. I ran into the connecting bathroom and closed the door behind me. Listening to them scratch and gnaw their way through my door was mental torture. Getting ripped apart by dogs was not the way I wanted to leave this world. There isn't a single moment in my life where

I wished I had access to a landline until that moment just then. I heard the door finally giving way and the dogs finally entered my room as they growled and barked. It was the kind of growl where even without seeing it you could tell that their teeth were showing. I still couldn't tell how many dogs were out there, I just knew that it was more than one. I tried my hardest not to move or make a sound but the sweat on my hands made a squeaking sound when they slid across the floor as I tried to get up. My heart dropped and I knew I was screwed. They started their assault on my bathroom door and I had no choice but to get into my bathroom counter and climb through the very small rectangular window about three feet above the sink. I squeezed myself

through and laid on the roof out of sight of the dogs in case they got into the bathroom as well. Hours went by before they got in. I felt safe though, and this was the moment I realized that I had an injury on my left calf. The adrenaline must have worn off because the pain was getting worse by the second. I pulled up the leg of my pants and revealed a pretty severe bite along the back of my leg, and I kept wondering how long I didn't notice when that happened, but there was no changing anything then. Thankfully, the bleeding had mostly stopped, but I still wrapped it up with the flannel that I was wearing. I didn't need it exposed to whatever was on that roof. It was obviously the only choice I had was to wait on the roof for my roommate to get home a couple of days from then. I couldn't jump down because

the dogs would get me. If I did jump down, I wouldn't be able to drive away because my car keys were downstairs in the house and I wasn't going to risk going inside again. I was safe on the roof and that was all that mattered. I didn't have food but thankfully there was a spigot only a few feet from where I was sitting. It was a considerably large house and the spigot was installed to easily hose off the roof if needed. I never knew what that was necessary for but I of course was grateful to have access to water for the next couple of days that I guess I would be spending on that roof. The hunger wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. The worst part was hearing the dogs make their way through the house at night looking for me and

thank god they never found me though. My friend came back Monday morning and was shocked to find me on the roof. He gathered his dogs in his bedroom and helped me back into the house. When he found out what happened he begged me not to tell the police or animal control. But I had no choice. One of his dogs had bitten me and they were so vicious that if they ever got out I had no doubt that they probably would kill somebody. I went to the hospital and was treated for the bite wound and I was advised to get the rabies shot treatments and wasn't too happy about that, but it was smart, so I went along with it. The dogs were impounded and after evaluation it was ruled that they would be humanely euthanized.

My roommate blamed me for having his dogs killed, but I can't say I regret their outcome. I feel like lives may have been saved by them being euthanized. I try not to blame the dogs since I've known so many amazing shepherds in my life but I do have this trauma. It turns out the sliding glass door had been broken in by a tree, pushed down by the strong winds earlier in the day after I'd left for work. Most large dogs scare me now and I can say that I don't particularly like dogs in general anymore because of this incident. It's disappointing but oh well. I got my two cats and that's perfect for me for the time being. Hopefully one day I can find the love for dogs I once had. I think the real moral of the story is to not move in with a guy who is open about having

aggressive dogs. I probably should have taken my mom's advice when I started looking for a roommate, but hindsight is always 20-20, right? I was 22 years old when this story that I'm about to tell you took place, so bear with me when you hear the absolute idiotic decisions I made during that time in my life. There is a huge detail anyone reading the story needs to know before it started. It's something I never planned on sharing but thankfully nothing bad can come from it now. I've had a stalker since I was around 15. I never met him in person or knew the person that was making my life miserable so my family did everything they could to keep me safe. It started at the end of my freshman year of high school. I started getting secret

admirer notes left in my locker for me to find every morning when I opened it up to get my books. It was always stuff about how pretty I was and how amazing I looked the previous day. Innocent enough that I didn't think to tell my parents at first because it was probably just some guy in one of my classes with what I assumed to be a harmless crush. I was wrong though. Not about the person having a crush, but that maybe it was harmless. It actually was anything but. I got a car when I turned 16.

Nothing crazy, just my mom's old minivan. I was so excited to finally be able to drive myself to school every morning. I never thought that that was information I'd have to keep to myself, so I didn't. I told everyone that would listen about how cool it was to have my car and how having a minivan was actually pretty fun, lots of space and so on. I must have reached the wrong person at some point because the cute innocent notes turned into gifts left on the hood of my car. I didn't trust them. I'd seen a bunch of videos on how kidnappers will leave stuff on your car so they can grab you while you're distracted and trying to grab it. So instead of picking them up off my car like anyone else would have, I had whatever guy friend I could find come and take it and dump it in the trash for me. That happened a few times before I got

a note in my locker telling me the gifts were from them and that they were safe to open. The next day, there was another gift on top of my car. I had a friend come out with me and this time I decided to open it. Inside was something so incredibly creepy and inappropriate, I just had to tell my parents. Contained in the box was a scrapbook. The front read, Our Future Life Together. Inside was all these crudely photoshopped images of married couples, with my picture over one of the couple's faces in each of the photos. The last half of the scrapbook was just my face photoshopped onto a naked woman's body with

messages along the side that said stuff like, Can't wait to see you in this lingerie and I bet this is what your body looks like. I started crying then and there in the parking lot out of pure disgust and terror. Why was this person doing this? I rushed home and showed my parents the scrapbook and whatever notes I still had that had been left in my locker the months before. They called the police and a detective came over to take my story. The next couple of years were spent in constant fear. The stalker would find any way they could to leave notes or gifts. We had to install cameras that recorded all around our house since the person kept coming back. Multiple times throughout the night we'd get alerts of movement outside the front door, but all we could catch was a person

wearing all black leaving the creepy items behind, never enough to suspect anyone. Flash forward to 2018 when I was 22. It had been at least two years since the last time I had heard anything from my stalker. It calmed down a lot when I moved away from university. I was a 20 hour drive from my hometown and instead of letters and gifts, I got Instagram DMs and emails. And those were things I could handle. Things that didn't scare me as much because now all I had to do was block them. Until one day, it just stopped. The relief was incredible but the paranoia still remained.

There was nothing anyone could do or say to make me stop looking over my shoulder. Nothing anyone could do to make me fully trust someone again. That part of life had been ruined for me. Taken from me. Even though I was scared, I thought it might finally be time for me to move on. Get on with my life. Up until that point, I'd never had a roommate. Never lived with anyone other than my parents and siblings.

I was ready, I thought. I had done everything right. I went through the university to find a roommate. Never lived with anyone other than my parents and siblings. I was ready, I thought. I'd done everything right. I went through the university to find a roommate, even made a Google application so people could apply online and I could do a sort of background check on them. It might sound crazy, but I really tried. Most men I passed on, some even had the audacity to ask for pictures to make sure that I'd be attractive enough for them. It was disgusting, really. And that's when I started only taking applications from other women. I met with a few, but we didn't seem to click.

That was until I met Ashley. She was funny and smart and very motivated, and we had almost everything in common, and I couldn't find anything negative about her online, and I just felt that it was a perfect fit. She moved in the next month and everything was great for a while. We became very close, did practically everything together. I didn't realize at the time that a lot of that was mostly because Ashley never really let me go anywhere without her. Not that she was forcing me to stay home, but she also always had a reason to tag along. Her cleanliness only got worse when I started dating my boyfriend, Matt.

Now, Matt was a really, really good guy. The perfect gentleman. So imagine my shock when Ashley never really liked him. She would say really out of the blue stuff, like, I should break up with him and that he wasn't good enough for me. And then seemingly joke and say, no one's good enough for you. Well, except for maybe me of course. Then she'd laugh and it just felt really off-putting.

But after the tenth time of her saying that, I started to realize that it wasn't a joke at all. She didn't want me to be with anyone else because she wanted me to be with her. I tried distancing myself from Ashley and spending more time with Matt and she became more withdrawn and spent a lot of time in her bedroom. About five months into Matt and my relationship, I woke up to the sound of my door creaking open. The light from the hall shined directly into my face, blocking me from seeing the person entering my room. I called out to her name. Ashley? Ashley, is that you? Come on, this isn't funny, say something.

The room was dark now that the door was closed and I couldn't see anything. I reached toward my nightstand to grab my phone when I felt a hand close around my wrist. I grabbed my phone and harshly pulled my hand away. I turned on the flashlight and wasn't surprised to see Ashley. Of course it was her. What surprised me was the fact that she didn't have any clothes on and was holding a doll with a picture of my face stapled to it. It was truly surreal and I wondered if I was in some sort of nightmare. She was smiling this smile right at me and she said nothing and just cradled this doll in her arms. I started to scream at her to stop, to get out of my room but she wouldn't. She just stood there, staring. I got out of my bed and rushed out of the room as quickly as I could.

I stood in the hallway outside the door to our apartment and called Matt. He lived only five minutes away so I knew that he'd be there soon. I watched from the hallways as Ashley paced back and forth in the apartment. She'd begun humming to the doll. I recognized the song as the same one my mom used to sing to me before I went to sleep. She sang it to me all the way up until I left for school, but it had to be a coincidence, I thought. Matt arrived and was just as shocked and weirded out as I was. He was glad I called him but admitted that there was nothing he could do.

The only option we had was to call the police and have them take her to a mental hospital or something if they found that she was at risk. We thought maybe that she had gone out and was just high on a large amount of LSD or something. Now when the police arrived, they asked her if she knew her name and why she wasn't wearing any clothes. They tried covering her with a blanket, but she threw it off every chance she got. She kept saying her name was something other than the one she'd originally given me, and when they asked her where she was from, I was confused when she said, the name of my hometown. She told the police that she was going to hurt herself if she couldn't have me, and that was enough for them to take her to get placed on a psychiatric hold.

Once she was gone, Matt and I decided it was a good idea to go into her room to see if we could find anything else about her being a different person than the one that she led us to believe. What we found was eye-opening and gave me the closure I desperately needed. Inside her closet was what I can only describe as a shrine to me. There were pictures of me sleeping, eating, and walking around town, but the pictures that made me understand why she did what she did were the ones from high school, ones of me. Some when I was only 15. She even had a few of me standing next to my mom's minivan opening the sketchbook my stalker had made me. And that's when it hit me. My stalker wasn't some guy from one of my classes or even a guy at all. It had been Ashley. A woman. The whole time. That was something I never expected.

We called the police again and they took pictures of the shrine before taking it down and bagging it as evidence. Now I want to make it clear nothing Ashley did was violent or threatening in any way. Now in saying this there was no way she was going to get jail time and Ashley didn't really think that she should. Instead I got a restraining order against her. She's not allowed within a certain distance of me and no contact whatsoever and I was happy about that. It had been three years and I hadn't heard from her since. Her mother did reach out to tell me that she was on medication and not to worry about her anymore. I never did get to ask why she was as obsessed with me as she was.

I still get curious sometimes but never curious enough to try to figure it out. All I really learned from her mom at the time was that she was from my high school but just one of those faces I never really paid any mind. Her mom even told me that she was under the interpretation that we were close friends back then. I just can't believe she went through all that trouble to move states just to be closer to me, and it's hard to imagine I invited my own stalker into my home to live with me. Having a roommate was never something I planned on but knew was inevitable. My parents were never wealthy enough to promise they'd pay for my housing once I moved out so I kinda always knew that I would have to have a roommate at some point. That point came when I moved into an apartment a little outside of my price range closer to

the university I was going to. I had lived in the dorms the first couple of years I was in college and decided this year that I was done being disgusted by the communal bathrooms and a guy living in the same space as me and I figured at least this way I'd have my own room and bathroom. My parents offered to help me find a roommate since they had friends with children going to the same university as me but I just wanted to get it over with so I did what any other idiot would do. I posted an ad on Craigslist, basically saying I was looking for a roommate who picked up after themselves and didn't have multiple people over too often. I thought that wasn't asking too much. I really

was fine with a guy or a woman, so I never specified that, although I was a little shocked when a girl actually did respond to my ad. She told me that she was moving out of her parents' place and even said that she'd do all the cooking and cleaning if I would take $100 a month off of her half of the rent. I thought that was awesome, so I agreed to meet up to get a feel of the kind of person she was. We met at a local coffee place and she told me how excited she was to move in with me. She showed me pictures of her room and her parents to how excited she was to move in with me. She showed me pictures of her room and her parents to prove that she was clean. I found it a little strange considering I never asked for pictures. That would never have even crossed my mind. I got a little uncomfortable

at one point because multiple times throughout our conversation she just kept repeating how clean she was. But she seemed nice enough so I agreed to let her move in the next day. She practically leapt into my arms when I told her my decision. The next day came and she was at the apartment at 7am sharp. I helped her move all of her stuff into her room which was pretty easy considering that she literally only had a bed, nightstand, and one dresser. No personal items. It seemed a little suspicious to me but I'm not the kind of person to ask a bunch of questions so I left it alone and let her get settled in. After around an hour she came out of her room and started cleaning up around the apartment while I watched TV in the

living room. After she was done she walked right in front of the TV and just stood there with her arms crossed like she was waiting for me to acknowledge her even though she'd never said anything to me. I look up at her and asked her what was up and was shocked when she basically ordered me to go to my room because she was having company over and it would be better for her if I just stayed in my room the rest of the night. And that's the moment I started to question whether or not I made the right decision letting her move in. I guess I just reluctantly agreed not wanting to get into an argument but I planned on speaking to her the next day about how she needed to give me more notice when she'd be having people over. I got in my room and locked the door and just decided to

work on some homework until whoever it was she was having over left. I guess I probably should have mentioned to her that the apartment has really thin walls. I don't think she knew that I'd be able to hear everything that went on that night. And God, I wish I didn't. It was incredibly disturbing to say the least. There was a knock on the door and I listened as she walked through the apartment to answer it. She opened the door and greeted the man by saying, Hey daddy, ready for a wild night? I was horrified.

Not because of what she said, but because of what I knew I'd be hearing for the rest of the night. I'd heard exactly what you think I heard. It was loud and what was said was literally gross at times. I finally stopped at around 2am when I heard her walk the guy to the door. I exited my room to finally get the glass of water I had very desperately needed for the last few hours and almost dropped to my knees in disgust when I smelled something putrid coming from her room. I started gagging and forced myself away from her door and into the kitchen. I got the glass of water and basically sprinted past her door to avoid the stench.

I was amazed that she was still in there with whatever that smell was coming from. I woke up the next morning fully expecting the smell to have gone away but it was still there. And not only did it fill the hallway but the rest of the apartment as well. I pinched my nose shut and knocked on her door but she didn't answer. I figured that she had gone out and prepared myself as I turned the doorknob and opened her door. I refrained from gasping as I saw the room absolutely covered in human feces. I'm not kidding. It was everywhere.

On the walls, on the floor, on her bed. Smeared everywhere. I couldn't help it. I started to throw up as I ran out of the apartment. I called her and told her she needed to pay for a cleaning crew and that she needed to move out by the end of the day. She was calm as she told me that yes, she'd hire a cleaning crew but she'd not be moving out. She told me I would have to get her evicted and that would take at least 30 days. Then she said something that gave me chills. So because you've decided we can't work this out, I'm going to make the next 30 days of your life in this apartment a living hell. Then without another word, she just hung up. The days after the conversation, she'd bring back men over to the apartment constantly.

A few of them stole some of my stuff. Basically anything that was worth anything to me had to be kept inside my room or would never be seen again. She'd make these huge meals in the kitchen and not clean up after herself. She left used feminine hygiene products sitting around the apartment, seemingly to gross me out. I'm not ashamed to admit that there were a few nights I cried myself to sleep over what was going on. I ended up going to the landlord to tell him all that was happening, but because each resident of the building was legally required a 24-hour notice before inspection, my roommate always

had enough time to clean up the place by the time they came over to check it out. The worst one was one day, when I came home to around 50 bags of literal festering garbage sitting in my living room. I could smell it before I even opened the door to the apartment but the wall of rotting garbage stench hit like a ton of bricks as I walked inside. It actually looked like she'd gone out in the street and collected all these just to torment me. I called the police that night and all they did was tell her that she needed to get the garbage out of the building since it was a health hazard. It took her about half a day but it was eventually taken care of. The last week she was there was by far the worst. And I know you may be thinking,

how does it get any worse than that? Well, I'll tell you. The men she brought over stopped being confined to her room as she took it upon herself to have her fun in the living room. The stains and smell on the sofa were some I knew I was never going to be able to get out. She stopped using the bathroom actually in the bathroom and just did it on the floor instead. I am not kidding you. The gross part was that she acted like it was nothing. She'd walk around and laugh when I screamed at her to clean it up. And it just felt like when I was younger when my parents had a dog. It was really, really strange. She even got her quote-unquote devil-worshipping friend to put a curse on the whole apartment building. I don't know what that

really meant, but I just began to hate my life. I didn't move out because I had a lease I couldn't break, so the best I could do was wait it out. And finally, the day that she was meant to move out came. She moved her furniture out of the apartment and spat my face on the way out as she laughed at the damage she'd done to my home. It took a full week of deep cleaning before things were finally back to what they used to be and I remember the property management that would check in from time to time even asked me if I was secretly keeping a dog there. Once it was back to its original state I didn't even want to think about getting another roommate. I got another job and decided that I'd rather work multiple jobs than have to possibly deal with a person as awful as she was living with me again. I was done.

And thankfully, I heard from a friend that she was actually arrested for meth. And in some odd way, it just made sense to me. I never had any problems in my apartment after that, but still decided on moving after my lease was up. I moved back in with my parents and have been living with them ever since. I'm in graduate school now and still think about it as being the worst month of my life by a long shot. I felt like I was alone beyond the ability to be alone. It was like no one would hear me out. And all I can say is if you do need a roommate, choose someone who's not secretly addicted to meth. I don't do much writing when it comes to stories about my own personal life, so bear with me as I take you on this weird, scary, and absolutely awful experience

that was my life for two months in 2015. The best place to get started is by giving a little background. My two friends and I decided we wanted to rent a house in LA since we all got jobs in the area and I dreamt of living together after we all got out of college. We got a pretty decent price for rent that was split between all of us, but also thought that if we had one more person as a roommate, the rent would be perfect. It was a four bedroom, three bathroom house so we had the space and my friend Molly said she knew someone who needed a place anyways so it would be perfect. We all met her and got along great in the short amount of time we spent with her so we all agreed it would be a good fit between the four of us.

Our new roommate's name was Dove and for the first month that she lived with us she was amazing. She did her share of the housework and honestly for the most part she stayed pretty much to herself. She never had people over and never complained and was generally one of the sweetest girls I'd ever met. We all used to talk about how lucky we were to find a roommate as great as Dove. That was until she met the man that would become her boyfriend, Ty. The first time she brought Ty over to the house, the three of us were shocked. He was covered in tattoos, including his face, and he reeked of marijuana and just had the worst attitude of anyone we'd all collectively had ever met. Dove, on the other hand, either seemed not to notice or didn't really care.

She took him into her room and thankfully we didn't see either of them for the rest of the night. The next morning we woke up to our TV, vintage stereo system, and our freaking microwave completely gone. Obviously, Ty had done this since he was the only person in the house besides the four of us girls, and we were livid. We banged on Dove's door until she came out and confronted her about it. Instead of denying it like we expected, she told us that she'd actually just given him the stuff. He said he needed it, and she just told him to take it. She didn't see the problem and got mad at us for yelling at her for allowing him to just steal our things. She said she'd replace what was taken but that was never really the point.

We decided to forgive her but told her if she was going to continue living with us, she couldn't have Ty over again since he was clearly terrible. She didn't like that but agreed. A week went by and nothing of significance happened. Then one random Tuesday night when the three of us were watching a movie while Dove was out, we heard the door open and to our shock, in walked Dove holding the hand of Ty. She walked right by us like we told her the week before meant nothing to her and slammed the door when they got into her room. We decided

on spending the night in the living room to possibly prevent him from taking anything else, but not even that worked. On his way out, Dove told him he could take whatever he wanted from the fridge. He grabbed a grocery bag and practically acted like he was shopping as he took most of what was in there as we yelled at Dove that he was not allowed to take our stuff again. They ignored us like we weren't even there. Neither of them would even look in our direction. Ty just walked out of the door and we stared as Dove made her way back to her bedroom, saying nothing, as we asked her to explain what was going on with her lately. It didn't take long for us to realize Ty had gotten her hooked on pills and was just her hookup. It's why she

never said no to him. To her, it seemed like getting what she wanted was all that really mattered. We watched for months as she deteriorated in front of her eyes, and the three of us had to move everything into our bedrooms to make sure it wouldn't get stolen in the night and installed locks on all of our doors since Dove and Ty constantly had random druggies come over to our house. No matter what we did or how much we begged, Dove refused to see things logically or from our point of view. So we did what any sane person would do in a situation like this. We waited for Ty and his friends to come over and we promptly called the police. They told us to leave the house before they got there.

And we went to our neighbor's house and watched out the window as an actual SWAT team arrived and raided the place. Ty and a couple of his friends were arrested for multiple different things involving drug possession and sales, which we did mention but we never expected this kind of reaction from the police. Dove was let go since Ty took the blame for everything. We were relieved. We thought maybe this would mean that Dove could finally kick this habit, get some help, and just be done with that monster. They did end up searching the whole house, including our bedrooms, and the place was a disaster by the time we were allowed back in. Dove was irate. She screamed at

us and told us that we ruined her life. We tried telling her that she needed to get help, but she refused and said that she'd be moving out as soon as possible since we had apparently betrayed her. We felt bad for her and the situation that she was in, but we were all kind of relieved too. Now, a couple of weeks after Ty's arrest, we were all hanging out in the living room not expecting what was about to happen. All of a sudden the door burst open and in came four guys wearing blue and black ski masks. They ran over to us as we were screaming and grabbed the three of us as one went into Dove's room and pulled her out as she was kicking and screaming. They dragged us outside, put us in a van that was waiting outside with the driver as the rest of them piled into a car behind us.

I was positive the neighbors had heard what was happening and all I could do was hope that one of them had called the police. Once we were in the van, one of the men took our phones and told us all to be quiet. He drove for at least an hour with no words spoken until the van pulled over. They opened the door and threw us out. We were standing in the middle of a dirt field as they tied our hands behind our backs. Dove seemed to calm us as we all were beginning to beg for our lives. They told us we shouldn't have ratted out Ty and that we'd be paying for it with our lives. We all started to cry and beg and plead but Dove, she seemed like she was laughing and she started cracking up and calling us babies for crying. She told the guys to untie her hands and that it was

a funny joke but that she was over it and just let us go. Instead of doing what she said, one of the guys just decked her really hard in the face and told her to shut up and she hit the ground hard and then started crying herself. I actually believed then and there that I was going to die. These men were going to murder us and that would be it. I was just hoping that they'd find my family so my family could maybe get some closure from my death. And those were the thoughts that I was thinking. Begging wasn't doing anything. We watched in horror as the men who had taken us began digging these large holes just in front of us, and I was sure that that's where we would be buried. Just as I had started to come to terms with the fact that my life would be ending that night,

in the distance I could see flashing lights speeding towards us, and I burst into tears. We were saved. The men tried to run but it was a big dirt field and there was nowhere for them to go. The police officers got over to us, untied our hands, and thankfully they were able to apprehend all four men and we were escorted to the hospital. We didn't have any serious injuries so we were let go that night. We all eventually went to my mom's house just outside of LA and waited to hear from the police about what was being done to ensure these men stayed in jail. They were all charged with kidnapping and assault as well as conspiracy to murder. All four of them ratted on each other as well as Ty and their sentence ranged from, and I kid you not, 17 to 25 years. And we were glad this meant none would

have the chance to finish what they started any time soon. I guess that night was a wake-up call for Dove, as she was also arrested and tried for being an accomplice. All of my roommates have kept in contact, except obviously Dove, but we agreed we didn't want to live in that house after that happened. I still live with my mom. Molly and our friend Jenna live together in a small apartment in LA and we all get together from time to time for lunch. I have PTSD from that night and still get nightmares about it. I'm just glad I have my parents to help me get through it. And I urge anyone to be their further friends if they notice red flags alluding to drug abuse. Even if they say they aren't ready to quit, sometimes just knowing toward my ex-roommate.

She was really something else. Moving into the dorms your freshman year of college is supposed to be one of those fun experiences in life. Something you look forward to all summer. Well, I look forward to it at least. Move-in day went well. I was a little disappointed when they told me that I wouldn't be having a roommate. I always envisioned my roommate becoming my best friend and doing everything together but I guess that wasn't meant

to be. The first half of the school year went great. I made plenty of friends and had gotten really used to having the room all to myself. When they told me I'd be getting a roommate in January I was actually pretty bummed. I cleaned up the other half of the room to accommodate the girl that would be moving in and just hoped that we would get along. She came the second week of January when we had gotten back from winter break. She told me her name was Cassandra but they should just call her Cassie. And Cassie didn't have much. She said it was because her parents never bought her anything and whatever she had she had bought herself. I think she had maybe four boxes in total. I felt bad for her and told

her that she could borrow some of my stuff if she ever needed to but to ask first so I wouldn't think that I just lost it or something. And I quickly realized Cassie wasn't the average 18 year old girl. She was different. First, she had horrible hygiene. I had to beg her a few times to take a shower in the nicest way possible because she would smell so bad that I actually would gag when I entered the room. She always thought it was kind of funny. She never washed her clothes which also meant that the clothes that she would borrow of mine never got washed either.

She would give me back my shirts with sweat stains and food covering the front. It was like this girl had never been taught any manners or basic social skills ever in her life. But the worst thing about Cassie was her obsession with eating raw meat. And I'm not kidding you. I walked in on her eating cuts of raw bacon one day, and she tried hiding it when I walked in, but there was no way that I could unsee that. I asked her why she was eating raw bacon, not to shame her or anything, but I just was generally morbidly curious. Really grossed out, obviously, but still curious. She said it was something that she'd always done growing up, and that her parents ate raw meat too, and that it was just a normal thing for her.

I honestly thought it was completely disgusting, but I also was trying to be a good roommate and as nice as I could, so I told her as long as I didn't have to witness her eating it in front of me, I was cool with her keeping her raw meat in the mini fridge. I should never have said that. The next day I opened the mini fridge to find it full of pounds of pounds of meat. All different kinds too, bacon, ground beef, different cuts of steak, and even some goat meat. When Cassie walked in and saw me staring into the fridge, she looked at me. She was smiling ear to ear, so proud of her meat stash. She bragged about the deals that she found,

and before I could stop her, she reached in front of me, grabbed a package of ground beef, opened it up, and started shoving it into her mouth. I almost threw up right then. I was yelling at her to stop, and with meat still in her mouth, she just laughed. I reacted in horror when I felt bits of it land near me, and that only made her laugh harder. The next day I requested a room change. I couldn't take it, but I was told that that would only be possible in the next two weeks. I was fine with that as long as it meant that I could escape the nightmare that was this disgusting person known as Cassie.

She really freaked me out. I told her she wasn't allowed to borrow my stuff anymore since she never returned anything in a good enough state for me to use anyways. She was upset, but seemed to understand. We didn't talk much the week after I requested a room change. She continued to stash all her meat in the fridge but at least she wasn't eating it in front of me anymore. A couple of days before I was due to move out of the room I was sitting at my desk next to Cassie when she walked out of the room. I got a call from one of my friends and leaned back as we talked. I was looking around the room when my eyes settled on her computer. One of the tabs had three words that read, wanted, fresh meat. I laughed and

told my friend what I saw. He told me to click on it and see what it was because he was curious, and I never in my wildest dreams would have expected to see what was on there. When I clicked on the tab, my laughing quickly halted. My friend was asking me over and over what it was, but I was too scared to even speak. It was an ad that she had posted on a website I had never even heard of, and the fresh meat that she was looking for wasn't from a cow or a pig or a goat. She had posted a wanted ad for fresh human meat. In the ad she carefully explained how she liked eating raw meat and had always dreamed about what human meat would taste

like. She seemed to be obsessed with it. One line completely caught me off guard and made me want to join the witness protection program immediately and in it she said, eating human flesh has consumed my every thought. Sometimes I watch my roommate sleeping and fantasize about chewing on her. I took a picture of the ad on my phone and clicked off of it so she wouldn't notice I was on her computer. I grabbed my bag and headed out telling my friend to meet me at the police station immediately. I told them everything and showed them the picture of the ad. In conjunction with the university and their concern, they spoke to Cassie about this, and surprisingly, she admitted

to everything. They took it as far as actually testing all the meat in the fridge since we lived on campus, but thankfully, it was all either beef or pork. I was able to get a restraining order against her, and she was expelled from the university for apparently accessing the dark web while using the school's Wi-Fi and for attempting to engage in illegal activities. Now for a while, people actually compared Cassie to that German guy, Armin Miewes, who cannibalized a person who volunteered to be eaten. Who knows if she really would have gone through with it though. I don't think Cassie was ever charged for what she did. I tried to distance myself from her as much as possible. Hearing her name five years later would still be too soon.

After her arrest, I just never saw her again. I think she must have just moved away out of embarrassment for what she did, but she was expelled from the school, and the entire town knew who she was and what she did. There was no escaping the whispers and dirty looks and I do hope that she got the help she clearly needed. I still don't know how anyone could survive eating raw meat like the way she did. I ended up getting a new roommate after that who was perfectly normal, maybe even a little boring in some ways, but that was totally okay with me. I'll take boring over a cannibal any day. To be continued... If you didn't know, sleepwalking is a crazy thing. You don't think about it too much if it doesn't affect you or you've never seen anyone do it, but it's very real and can be really scary.

I'd sleepwalked a couple of times in my life, but always ended up waking up and getting back in bed. It was something I experienced more when I was younger. So when I was looking for a roommate and found a guy, Brandon, that seemed like a great candidate, I wasn't too worried when he told me he would occasionally sleepwalk. Brandon moved in in August of 2012 and only a month in, the night terrors began. Something he had completely forgotten to mention before. I'd wake up around 3 or 4 in the morning to the sound of him screaming, and not screaming like he saw a spider or something,

but screaming like someone was in spider or something, but screaming like someone was in his room trying to murder him. Whenever I went to check on him, by the time I reached his bedroom he was fast asleep and quiet as a mouse. This continued for months. He'd scream, I'd wake up and he'd be completely asleep by the time that I went to check and make sure that everything was okay. Eventually I stopped checking on him because every time I did, he was fine. I decided to try and talk to him about it because more than anything I just wanted to see him see a sleep specialist or something to try to get this sorted out. Most mornings when I saw him, he'd barely be able to walk from all the screaming that he'd done the night before.

But every time I mentioned it, he said that he didn't know what I was talking about and that he'd never had a problem with screaming in his sleep. He believed me but also wasn't willing to see anyone regarding the issue because he thought it was so surreal and he was just too busy. I was frustrated by that a little because not only was the screaming completely unnerving but at the same time I was losing so much sleep over it and he woke me up constantly. By month five, the actual sleepwalking started. I began with me occasionally hearing his bedroom door open and him walk around the house. The floorboards would creak underneath him and the few times I went to make sure that he was okay or see what was going on, it was obvious he wasn't awake. He told me not to wake him up if I would

ever find him in this state, so I didn't. I let him walk around for hours sometimes before he would make his way back to bed or sometimes even fall asleep right there on the floor. I felt bad for a while, but it was what he told me to do and I was going to respect his wishes and I heard it could be a bad thing to wake people up while sleepwalking. A few weeks after getting used to him walking around the house at night, I was shocked to wake up to him opening the door to my room. I couldn't see him, but also didn't bother asking who it was or what he was doing because I was sure that he was asleep. I turned the flashlight on from my phone and saw Brandon standing at the corner of my room,

facing the wall. Now he did tell me that sleepwalking might actually happen, and if he did make his way into my room to just guide him back to his room and lock the door behind me. So I just did that. From then on he'd occasionally make his way into my room and I always put him back where he wanted to go. It was irritating for a while but I guess I just got used to it, like taking care of a kid or something. Brandon was a genuinely nice guy and I had no other reason to kick him out so I put up with these weird sleep habits for a while. He even started bringing me things in his sleep, always something random like my toothbrush from the bathroom or a screwdriver or something equally meaningless. He would leave the items at the foot of my bed and I would wake up to him standing there above me and the items, almost like he was waiting for a reaction. But that couldn't have been the case, he was asleep.

His sleepwalking stopped bothering me altogether when I realized if I left him alone, he'd find his way back to his room eventually. It even stopped waking me up when he came into my room. I had learned to sleep through it and I knew that he was still coming in though because I would wake up to my door open when it was closed the night before or I'd see the things that he left behind after a long night of him walking around the house. It went from being weird and slightly creepy to just kind of normal to me. He still apologized all the time for it, but I didn't mind. Brandon was a better roommate than anyone else I'd of normal to me. He still apologized all the time for it but I didn't mind. Brandon was a better roommate than anyone else I'd be able to find. The only thing strange about

Brandon was the fact that he had no friends and from what I could tell, really no family either. It was always just him. He'd go to work, come home, eat and then go to sleep. He had a routine and he always stuck to it. I found it odd but I didn't think too much of it. That was until what I found one morning on the foot of my bed. It was a picture of me sleeping. It was clearly taken on a Polaroid camera and it started making me sweat just looking at it. I showed Brandon that morning and he started to apologize. He told me he probably took it while he was sleepwalking and we joked about him being a sleep photographer and I got over the whole thing pretty quickly

and just chalked it up to another weird thing. Well I told him I got over it but that day I went out and bought a new doorknob with a lock for my room. I didn't want him coming in unannounced anymore and that seemed like a good solution. He even told me that was a good idea so he wouldn't wake me up anymore. And I guess he didn't realize I stopped waking up from him coming into my room and I installed it that night and there was a sense of relief when I went to sleep with a locked door for the first time since living with Brandon. That night I woke up to the sounds of Brandon's body slamming into my door over and over, almost like he wasn't registering that it wasn't opening this time.

I got up from my bed and opened the door to lead him back to his room, but instead he pushed his way past me and into the room. I tried turning him around, but he was set on where he wanted to go. He got on his hands and knees and reached under my bed and pulled out a small wooden box. I stood beside him as he set it on my bed and opened it up revealing its contents. Inside were more pictures of me sleeping, I don't know how many, and next to the pictures was a 6 inch long knife. I had never noticed those things under there before but I guess I just never thought to check under my bed as I really didn't use it for anything other than just random things ending up there. He grabbed the knife and stood over the spot in my bed I'd usually be sleeping and just started stabbing the mattress in my pillow.

I immediately came to, freaking out, screaming for him to stop and thank god he woke up. He just looked at me, then at the knife and what he'd done to my bed in one swift movement exited my room without saying a thing. I stood there in shock for a while, wondering what in god's name had just happened or if this was going to happen again. I looked at my destroyed bed and I just was speechless. I locked my door at that moment as it was close to sunrise and I just waited it out. I couldn't sleep again. In my haze I eventually went to work the next day and came home to his room empty and all of his things were gone. I wanted to make a formal complaint with the police but I never did as I tried to get a hold of him but there was no one I knew who knew him either and he didn't answer his phone. I never heard from him

after that and refrained from getting a new roommate until about a year after that happened. I suppose it's the best that he left. I was planning on kicking him out after that but it was like he just up and disappeared. He'd obviously planned on killing me and whatever subconscious thought process he had going on while sleepwalking, but he just didn't know it. It was like the person he was when he was sleepwalking was a different person than who he was when he was awake. I just never knew it was possible to actually murder someone in your sleep. This all started in 2013. I was 14 at the time and I needed some money.

I lived in a pretty bland, tight-knit suburb and I ended up working as a babysitter for this elderly woman who still had a few young kids of her own. The kids I babysat were an 8 year old boy named Luke and a 7 year old girl named Patty. They were good kids and didn't cause much trouble and it made my job real easy, at least for a while. In May of that year something bizarre started happening. Patty was suddenly getting violent. Repeatedly, I'd catch her hitting Luke, pulling him around by his hair because he had quite long hair, and she'd also cuss me out and hit my knees whenever I'd scold her or anything like that. When her mother would show up, however, she would just completely drop the act and go silent.

I'm not a children's psychologist, but I figured at the time, Patty was, well, a psycho in the making. Either bipolar, borderline personality disorder, or just was developing some sort of massive aggression towards everyone. But it wasn't until November later that year that everything started to unravel. I showed up to babysit the kids and I noticed immediately that Patty wasn't in the living room waiting for me. Luke seemed more quiet than usual. He was always a gentle giant of a kid. Never spoke much and had a slight lisp that got him bullied I guess and he'd always brighten up when I was around. So I asked him where Patty was and he mumbled a little

and nodded his head towards the stairs. When I got close to him, I noticed this streak across the side of his face. It looked a whole lot like a belt mark or a strap had been smacked across his head. When I looked towards the stairs, I felt my heart sink. The stairs always kind of freaked me out because of the way they were built. They were always dark no matter what. They were meant to have a light bulb, but it was too high up for the old woman who lived there to ever change, so she just left it to be pitch black.

But I saw at the top of those stairs, in the darkness, two little white dots. They quickly zipped away as I stepped up onto the stairs, and just immediately I felt some primal fight or flight instinct kick in. I darted backwards and quickly grabbed the landline. I punched in the old woman's number, but messed it up in my haste and I had to redo it. However, it was pointless because no matter what I tried to do, I wouldn't be able to get the old woman. The landlines had been cut. At this point, I don't know what's going on but I'm freaking myself out. I grab Luke gently by the wrist and tell him that

we're going to go for a little walk. He follows and as I'm stepping out the door I just hear thud, thud, thud, thud, thud rapidly behind me really loudly. I somehow didn't break into a sprint there and I think that it was because I didn't want Luke to know how freaked out I was. When I turned around, the door slammed shut and I didn't see anyone there. Now the rational part of my brain finally kicked in and I swiftly brought Luke to the neighbor's house. I explained to them, or rather lied, that there might be some kind of home intruder and Patty was missing. I know it seemed like a harsh lie, but what am I going to say instead? Hi neighbor, a seven-year-old girl is scaring me, please bring the police.

So the neighbor called 911 and while Luke was sitting with me in her living room, he stuttered out something incoherent and got really panicky and began sobbing hysterically. The neighbor and I tried our best to make him feel better but he wouldn't stop. Finally the police showed up, investigated and took Luke away. I was questioned a bit but nothing really came of it. I guess I could drag this out but honestly everything is really spotty and I don't feel comfortable with the accusations that could be made. So, wanna know the real kicker? The grandmother wasn't alone.

She was a, let's say, adult worker. And she'd bring her clients over. To her house. And with Luke and Patty in the same house, I was never filled in on the exact details. But Patty and Luke were taken away and put into foster homes. I wrote this story out because I ran into Luke recently. He was, I think, 15 at the time, and I was probably just in my 20s, but he looked like a wreck. He looked like three times his age and had bags under his eyes the size of parachutes. I wanted to ask about Patty, but he carried this

thousand-yard stare that made me think twice about that. I wish him the best, honestly. I wish both of them the best. God only knows what they went through. As a kid, I lived with my grandparents for a while and let me tell you, my grandfather was not a friendly guy. He was a World War II vet who then enlisted in the Air Force after returning from the Pacific. He didn't even come home to visit his family for several years. Family lore goes that the war had messed him up in the head or that he was injured badly and he needed time to heal back to himself before coming home. He may have healed but he never returned back to himself. He was always saying that the end of the world was right around the corner with all the recent wars in the Middle East, the gasoline rationing, Watergate, the Kennedys, etc, etc.

He didn't trust anyone and was sure the banks were going to fail, that the Russians were going to invade, race riots were coming again. His theories changed literally weekly. He always warned me that they would be trying to come and get our stuff someday soon, so we had to be ready. We had shelves of food, water, generators, fuel, gold bars, buried firearms and ammo, you know, the usual. I was 9 or 10 at the time and this would have been around 1972 or 73. We were living in a small cabin on a ridge looking over the Maumee River in northeast Ohio for the summer. This was his weekend getaway primarily. There were very few neighbors for miles and the ones that were nearby were mostly weekenders. The nearest small town was about 10 miles away and the hospitals were even further away if I recall.

There is a two lane highway that's on the opposite side of the cabin with nice views of the river that was pretty much a straight road with slow curves every 10 miles or so. About a half a mile down the road though, there was a crazy sharp curve that terminated at a small bridge over a creek. There were several accidents there every year and some with fatal injuries. We could often hear the crashes. Sometimes I would wander down there the next morning to look at the scene and stuff and wonder if the drivers were okay. One warm summer night we were awakened by a pounding on the front door. My room was right next to the door and my grandfather was down the

hallway a bit. I remember getting out of bed and having him hand me a shotgun while he held a 1911 as he looked through the window to see who it was. I had never recalled anyone ever stopping by before especially in the middle of the night. The cabin was elevated with a storm shelter underneath, so there were four steps leading up to the door. We had one of those old yellow security lights in the yard, and things always look kind of hazy and weird at night because of them. I looked out the window next to him and saw a man and a woman on the lower step to the door. They must have knocked and then stepped back down to appear less threatening. It was a good call because he opened the door a bit while openly displaying and keeping his pistol pointed at them. The woman exploded in a crying, blabbering,

screaming wail all at once. She said that there was a terrible accident that just happened down at the curve and could we please call an ambulance. She said that there was a terrible accident that just happened down at the curve and could we please call an ambulance. She said that there were other people who were seriously hurt and they needed help and asked if we could come to help them too. Now this man hated hippies more than anyone else and these two might just have qualified. She had on ripped jeans, one of those suede leather fringe jackets and the guy looked like he had a biker vest on. She did have what looked like blood in her hair and was not making much sense at all. What was really weird was the guy wasn't saying anything, he was just standing off the porch listening to her go off. I assumed that he was intimidated by the 45 pointed at him and

didn't want to antagonize the old man with the crew cut holding it. My grandfather was sure they were stoned and kept telling the girl to calm down but she wouldn't and they got into a screaming match between them, ending with him telling her to get the hell off of his property or he would shoot them both. We were both outside watching them head back to the road and I noticed the guy wasn't even wearing any shoes. As I didn't hear a crash and they were so weird, I didn't know what to think. We went back inside and my grandfather sat me down and explained his theory to me. They were making the story up.

They were most likely drug addicts who were looking for some poor suckers to rob or maybe kill. Unfortunately, it was not that crazy of a theory as, at the time, the Manson family murders had just happened less than four years ago. I recall the Manson story and held my grandfather's interest for some time. I asked him what about the blood in her hair and he stated it was fake, trying to gain our trust and entrance into our cabin. I thought we could just call the state police to be safe, but he wasn't fond of inviting cops into his world either so we just went back to bed. As soon as I woke up I was still curious but didn't walk down to the bridge on the curve this time. Later in the morning several police cars and pickups began arriving and

parking off to the side of the road down there and I couldn't resist going down to check it out. My grandmother went with me as my grandfather was still at work. An ambulance was departing as we arrived at the location and we soon saw the evidence of an accident the previous evening. There was a smashed guardrail, bits of metal, glass and a tree off the road with a deep gouge and a bunch of bark missing. A mangled motorcycle was down in the ditch and several people were searching around in the heavily wooded creek area. We overheard that there was at least one man dead and his girlfriend was found a half a mile down the road in really bad shape and was in critical condition after

being found by a passing motorist. It was a single motorcycle that had lost control, as far as I understood. One woman was sobbing to one of the troopers asking if they had found the boots yet. Turns out, her son was the motorcyclist who wrecked and I guess the impact threw him out of the new boots that she said that he had just purchased. She also said that he didn't ever wear a helmet and she wished he would have. The cop, trying to console her, told her that he didn't suffer as he was almost assuredly killed instantly when he hit the tree. I tell you, I think my heart nearly jumped out of my chest, and I had never felt so cold in my life when I started connecting the

dots. We walked back home without giving any of the people there any information. I don't remember even speaking to any of them, but I was in a daze. I was freaked out for days. I didn't want to connect the dots anymore, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Who did that girl want us to help? I heard my grandparents discussing it only once, later that night, and coming up with a story to help them sleep at night. They decided the guy wasn't killed in the crash, that he somehow died later on, mostly from all the drugs that he and his girlfriend were hopped up on, and that the girl was just fine.

We never mentioned it again, but we didn't spend as much time at that vacation area as we had before. The creepiest thing I'd ever seen had happened to me as an adult, not as a child. I was born and raised in a little tiny mountain town in Northern California that no one has ever heard of, Pollock Pines, in the year 1966. My parents owned the only pharmacy there and it was a great place to grow up. Times were different then. If your kids wanted to go out to play, you told them to be back by dinner. We were allowed to fish and explore in the woods, the whole bit. It was a great place to grow up. I was heavily involved in the outdoors and the Boy Scouts and Eagle Class, fourth one in my town. Whole summers would be spent on camp staff or

backpacking with friends and with the Scouts, so needless to say I was not a stranger to the outdoors. I graduated high school in the next largest town over, Placerville, about a 20 minute drive on H-150 in 1985, and joined the Navy. I had lots of adventures, saw the world, saw most of the country, and ended up getting stationed in 1994 at Travis AFB for a couple of years, which is cool because it's only three hours or so from my home in Scrambler. A couple of years previously, a chain pharmacy had moved into town and my father, seeing the writing on the wall, sold his pharmacy stock to them, as well as taking a job as one of

their pharmacists. Honestly, it was a good move on the chain store's part. A small town of 3,000 people can get protective of their people. Mom and dad used the proceeds for the sale of the store to buy 40 acres in the middle of nowhere. No power, no phone, and a couple of unpermitted barns. One that we had converted to housing. Nice land. It had a seasonal creek, big catfish pond, all on the southern slope. A really great piece of property. Bordered on three sides by National

Forest, Sierra Nevada, and on one side by the local lumber company which used to be Michigan Cal, but is called something else now. Up north of the property are two popular fishing reservoirs, Ice House and Loon Lake, where water is made more accessible for Los Angeles and surrounding areas to steal. South of the property, the American River flows year-round, occasionally washing the highway out when it gets all antsy. My parents had big plans on making this their new home. They had lived in town about a block away from the store they owned since 74. My dad's an outdoor buff too and my mom goes where my dad goes. They bought good generators, put in a couple of propane tanks and spent some weekends up there but at this point in 1996 they're still not living there yet. So it was both a great chance to get away from Fairfield and Travis AFB

and as a favor to my parents, I'd go up on weekends. I didn't have duty and so I just sort of watched the place. I did this pretty much every week for two years and I loved it. Gold panning, shooting, a lot of maintenance and fire prevention as brush cleaning and all that kind of stuff but honestly I found it relaxing. It was fun. I'd pick up my parents' dog at the time, a Rottweiler and a Rottweiler slash Shepherd Australian mix and they'd go up with me. I'd get done doing whatever I was working on and then take a walk about the property while there was still enough light to see. You were inside at night, it was black as pitch out there at night without a

moon or city lights. The walks were cool and I got to test out a lot of my equipment. I went through phases where I was trying to determine what the best working and journeying sidearm was and how to carry it. Then the best long gun and how to carry that and at one point, I liked the Winchester 94s for their simplicity but back then I could get a Garand Blue Sky for $2.95 so went with one of those for a while with a bipod on the end to keep the barrel out of the mud when I was chain swinging or slinging brush. That got to be too heavy to carry so I switched to a Massey 590 which I eventually dropped for lack of long range effectiveness. I was a sailor,

not a soldier. Don't make fun of me. Effectively, I was playing like a kid in a sandbox, but with expensive toys. I ended up eventually with an AR-15 H-Bar that I'd picked up in Oklahoma while stationed at Tinker. I carried this African style, which is what the military taught me back when I had volunteered for security for a tour, and it only banged me up a little when I scrambled over the mountain. The night of this incident I'd just finished doing a task, I don't remember what, but I was finishing the end of a walk around before I went in for the night to the lower barn that was sort of set up like a house. It was still light out but not bright. It was that dusky sort of light that is sort of orange and gray, and while bright enough to see very clearly, it was obvious that it was going to

be dark very soon, like in ten minutes or so. Clear day, early summer, not too hot. Very light breeze, light clouds, the kind that are really pretty up in the mountains, and starting to turn orangish pink from the sun setting down the canyon. I'm walking the gravel road that comes from the top of the property where a great little artesian spring pumped out 5 gallons a minute or so and the upper barn that was used for storage of dad's equipment and tractors etc. I'm just passing the pond off to my left carrying that AR on my left shoulder, handguard in my left hand to keep it from smacking me as I walk. My pants are a little damp from working and I'm dirty but happy.

I love being up there, as it got me away from my wife who absolutely hated the woods. So, the weight of the sweat, plus the gun in my pockets, tends to pull my pants annoyingly down every 40 steps or so. I stop where the gravel and mud road curves and to where I can now clearly see the barn and house and pull up my pants, making them more comfortable. I'm admiring the beautiful cloud patterns, the light breeze is feeling really good against my face. I'm pleasantly tired and looking forward to some cold fried chicken in the propane fridge. I'm just really feeling calm and at peace. The dogs have been with me all day and they were both tired from exploring around and the mixed breed was actually leaning against me as I stood there after tugging at my pants,

looking over this great scenery. The Rottweiler was laying splayed out on the gravel in front of me and I'm just looking around me, marveling at how pretty everything was, checking out some overgrowth pine that had a really awesome looking granite boulder next to it. When the boulder stood up, turned around, and walked away. I swear to you, I'm not making this up. I was awake, wasn't thinking anything along the lines of creepy, and I'm in home geography. Whatever this thing was, it had been obviously watching me and when I looked at it, it made the point of slowly turning around and walking away.

No head, no limbs that I could see other than some sort of thick, trunk-like legs, and I couldn't tell you how I knew it was watching me without seeing eyes of any kind, let alone a head, but I swear it was. It waited until I was looking in its direction and then, whatever it was, turned around and walked away. It took its time and was over the ridgeline behind it and gone in about 8-10 seconds. It sauntered off slowly, sort of swaying. It didn't panic or scatter or bound off. It turned

around and strolled away. I stood there in shock. I was literally frozen. I don't want to say that I was scared, but I think I was. I don't know. It was still light, but now just dusky enough to see where the shadows between the trees were dark and all I knew was that I wanted to be inside. Inside somewhere with lights. I stood there looking at the spot where this thing had walked off and even though I had my hand on a loaded rifle with a full mag, I never even thought about using the gun. I just wanted to go but I was afraid to move quickly. Still don't know why when I think of it. I think I cleared my throat or something because it got melly up the Rottweiler and she came over and nuzzled my

hand for love. I said something along the lines of, come on girls, and walked towards the barn slash house not looking anywhere else except the front door. I got in, shut that useless front door, made almost completely up of glass, and locked it. I then put myself in a corner with two walls behind me, couldn't stand the thought of being against an outside wall, and called my parents on this huge Motorola phone that we shared back then. I kept the dogs with me because I really, really needed something living there with me as I tried to explain to my dad what I'd just seen. My dad's already been drinking by this time and I didn't want him to come up and

I guess I'm trying not to look like such a coward because I'm a grown man. Eventually though, I told him I just wanted to let him know that I'd gotten spooked by something I couldn't identify. He laughed at me, not in a negative way, and told me that I wouldn't be able to stay up there anymore if I was just freaking myself out, and I laughed it off of him because, well, he was right. But I still slept downstairs in the big room that night with the propane lights on all night. I mean, if you want to call this sweaty, feverish, stressed out, never-ending time sleep. I was never in my whole life so glad to see the sun rise as I was that day. He and my mother came up the next morning and we all went out to where I had seen

whatever it was. Once we got there though, there were no tracks or anything and this thing was big. No hole where a boulder might have been and neither of them ever remembered a rock being in that particular spot. I must have been hallucinating. It's the only thing that really makes sense, especially since neither one of the dogs that were with me lit up on this thing and they get territorial over everything. I've never hallucinated before and I haven't since, but it's the only thing that makes sense to me. But I swear to you, and will swear to anybody, I saw what I saw. The part that really freaked me out about the whole thing was how I froze up. I didn't have to go for a gun, my hand was already on a fully loaded round in the chamber, just clicked the safety off on the AR and it had never even crossed my mind to defend myself.

All I could do was freeze. To be honest, my nights in the woods aren't always as comfortable now as they used to be. I do get a bit weirded out sometimes and I never used to. Parents still own the property but they don't live there. Just got too old for it with mom being 80 and dad almost there and still working. Mom never got creeped out up there. She was inside when it was dark and went to sleep to save gas. She got up when it got light and dad had to make the 30-40 minute one way drive back and forth between work and the property, coming home late at night. However he has told me that even he's gotten weirded out while up there before, but I don't

know if he was just trying to make me feel better or if he was feeling weirded out simply because I was weirded out. Every year we go hunting up in Millerville, Alabama where my in-laws have a cabin. I come from New Hampshire and spent most of my time outdoors in the woods growing up and I don't scare easily. However, I don't know what it is but those early morning and after dark walks to and from the hunting stands in the Alabama woods scare the daylights out of me. There is something different about the woods there that I can't put my finger on. I just kind of always felt uneasy. So this one area that we hunt has an old abandoned house on it. My brother-in-law told me that it was the old Alexander place. He said when he was very little he remembered going there with his dad.

I guess they all got to drinking and old man Alexander pulled out a gun and just shot himself through his foot for no reason other than he was absolutely crazy, I guess. My father and brother-in-law booked it out of there, and so my first trip hunting up there, he showed me the hole in the floor. I guess about 15 or so years later, old man Alexander dies. His kids didn't want anything to do with him, so he died out there all alone. In fact, they didn't find his body for a couple of months because no one ever checked in on him. Apparently, he got dressed in a Sunday best, laid down in his bed, and pulled the trigger. One year after I got out of my stand

for my morning hunt, I decided to make a pit stop over at the old Alexander Place. The trail to my stand runs along a creek bottom and is about three miles from the hardtop. About two miles from the hardtop on the same trail is the intersection that leads to Alexander's Place. It goes for a good mile and is completely overgrown with just enough room to go through with my Honda. I started creeping down there and the house comes into view. Now I know it's been about five or six years since I've been there but the place was decaying fast. I forgot how spooky it was down there. The place is in the bottom of a hollow, all overgrown and extremely dark. The house was covered in kudzu and a big tree had fallen and caved in a large portion of the roof.

I shut off my four-wheeler and right away I'm freaked out by the complete and total lack of noise. No birds or chipmunks. Nothing. Not a sound. I get to the front door and open it up. The floor is covered in leaves and pine needles from the hole in the roof. It's dark, dank and musty and smells a little of rotting flesh. I reason to myself that there's probably a dead animal under the house or something continue about. The house is pretty small with one room for the kitchen and living room and a single bedroom and bath off to one side. Now at this point my mind is telling me to just get out of there, but my sense of exploration won't listen to reason. I start poking around and I'm amazed because everything seemed to just be as old man Alexander had left it. Granted, he'd been gone many years and things were rotting away,

but it looked like it hadn't been touched. I started to wonder about what he did to make his family just straight up abandon him, to the point that they didn't even come around to scavenge for things to sell. Just left him to decompose, found him, then abandoned the house afterwards. Now you have to understand something about me. I've been an antique collector for years, and in particular I collect old pictures and period frames. As I look around me, I see beautiful old family pictures set in very ornate original wooden frames. Three of them are in the bedroom and in perfect condition. The others are in the living room where the tree

crashed through the roof. Those portraits were ruined but the frames were still intact for the most part. So for the next hour I start digging through the paperwork, reading letters, looking in closets and such. I'm totally engrossed and almost unaware of everything around me. I end up in the bedroom and look under the bed and pull out an old box of letters that old man Alexander wrote to his wife during the war. I sit down in the old mattress and start reading for about half an hour I guess. I'm halfway through this one letter and bang. This loud echo of a gun goes off and it sounded like it was right in the room with me. I could even feel the concussion it was so close. Now if anyone has ever heard the effects

of a gunshot in a house then they know that there's a big difference between in the house and right outside the house. And this, this was definitely in the house and it felt like it was in the bedroom that I was in. I pretty much froze for a couple of seconds and actually slightly peed myself. At first I didn't know if it was my brother-in-law messing with me or some crazy mountain man shooting wildly. My rifle was on my four-wheeler outside so if that second part was the case, I was screwed. I took a decisive course of action and ran out there, jumped on my Honda, and white knuckled that sucker all the way back to the cabin. I got there and met all the guys and told them the whole story. Of course, they immediately

wanted to go back there and check it out, so we all drove back there and had a good look around, but there was nothing to be seen anywhere. I went back inside with my brother-in-law and as we were standing in the bedroom, he said it was probably the ghost of old man Alexander, either replaying his fate or warning me to get out. I ended up taking all the pictures with me. I refinished five of them and put old family pictures of my own in them and hung them on the walls of our farmhouse. I didn't destroy any of the original Alexander portraits out of respect and stored them in my den. The last portrait is of old Alexander himself, in an ornate convex glass frame and hangs intact in my foyer.

It may sound kind of creepy to you, but it felt right to me. I think he may approve as well. I haven't been back there since that day and I never will, but every time I get out of my stand after dark and ride my four-wheeler past the Alexander intersection, I put the high beams on and pin it all the way back to the cabin. I have a lot of relatives who live in and around the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee. I only ever really see them once a year at our family reunion, which takes place in this terrifying old southern mountain Baptist church. I'll start off talking about my great aunt, who I'll call Sally. She was like the embodiment of every stereotype that you've ever heard about old cougar redneck women. She was a chain-smoking, lottery-playing, meth-dealing pimp. Her three kids, who I'll call Emma, Joe, and Steve, were no better.

Emma dropped out of high school to have three kids, then got addicted to meth, and according to my dad, sold her baby girl to her boyfriend's dad, who now has custody of the baby in exchange for drugs nobody knows where she is but the last time we saw her she didn't have her kids with her and all her teeth were missing joe on the other hand has about six children from six different women he's constantly on the lamb from the lawn as family tradition goes sells and smokes a ton of meth. He got into an argument with my uncle once over who was going to cut the grass at the family cemetery and showed up at his house with a shotgun. He burned down my great grandma's barn only because he was hiding a meth lab inside of it and was about to get busted.

Pretty sure he still got busted. Steve is a little different because he's unfortunately HIV positive and that makes him kind of a black sheep for the family. Yeah, the meth family who sells kids for money considers Steve to be the weird one in the group. My grandma won't even let him eat off of her plates because down in their region, nobody really understands how HIV works. However, rumor has it that he's not just a victim of the disease, but instead, one of those bug spreader types. If you don't know what a bug spreader slash chaser is, it is someone who intentionally tries to give HIV to the largest number of people possible. And so, the four of these kids worked together on some straight up shady stuff a few years ago. My great grandmother was dying

and Sally, my grandma's sister, was taking care of her. Apparently, Sally refused to give my great grandma her medication until she would change her will so that my grandma was completely cut out of it and that everything went to Sally and her three no good kids. Now flash forward to last year, Sally suddenly wins $100,000 in the lottery. Now she's been playing scratcher tickets for the last 40 odd years and she suddenly wins out of nowhere. Everyone just thought it was dumb luck and that since she'd been playing so long it was about time for her to win. But then about 6 months later she has a sudden massive heart attack out of nowhere and they find her dead in her house. And here's where things get even weirder. People have always suspected Sally of being involved in

some weird occultist lifestyle because of some story that people refused to tell me about that happened in the 80s. When they found Sally, there was literally blood all over everything. Her blood. But they couldn't find any cuts on her body and there wasn't any blood coming from any of her orifices. And this is where I come in. Sally was in the possession of a red diamond ring that originally belonged to my great-grandmother when they found her dead. The story behind this ring was that during World War I, an American soldier got this ring from a dead German housewife and brought it back for his niece, who was the best friend of my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother, her best

friend, and her best friend's pregnant sister had been accused of witchcraft by a local priest. The day before her friend and her friend's sister, who the priest claimed was carrying the Antichrist, got their heads blown off by this guy. My great grandma's friend entrusted her with this German ring. Some time passes and my great grandma dies and Sally steals this ring. Initially she wanted this ring to go to Emma, but on her deathbed, my great grandma told someone that she wanted this diamond ring to go to me. So my grandma sneaks into Sally's house after she dies and steals this diamond ring back. However, before Sally croaked, she told her kids that they weren't to let that ring out of their sight because of its value. And now, I'm being given threatening warnings down the grapevine that if I try and claim this red diamond ring when my

grandma dies, that I'll get royally messed up. Honestly, I'm not exactly the jewelry wearing type, but I have to know what the big deal with this ring is. I know it's got a huge monetary value, but there's all this weird stigma and superstition about this weird ring in my family that I have to try and get it. This incident occurred on Christmas night, 2007, at our family home in upstate New York. The day was pleasant and festive, opening presents early in the morning with my sisters, hearty breakfast made by my dad, delicious smells from the kitchen as mom and dad prepared a feast, visits from extended family bringing pies and cakes for dessert. At around 2pm we all sat down to eat and then lazed about for the rest of the afternoon into the evening. At about 8pm,

after everyone had left and the food was all put away for round two of the following day, I decided to head over to visit my friend in the next village. The drive was about ten minutes if I took the back roads to get there, so I did. First, a little background of where my friend lived. It was a housing development surrounded by a private lake. You might call it a gated community, but you could still drive through it freely after hours by entering one of four private entry points. Since the community was built around a lake, the road surrounding it went in a spiral sort of shape. The houses were sparsely positioned on the outermost part of the spiral road, closest to the four private entry points.

As you drove in further, there were a lot more houses positioned closer together nearer the lake. My friend lived on the outer edge of this development, so once I reached the entry point, in further, there were a lot more houses positioned closer together nearer the lake. My friend lived on the outer edge of this development, so once I reached the entry point, it would only take me another few minutes until I reached his house. His house, along with all the others, were far enough apart that you couldn't see them from the road as you drove by. There were either woods all around with long drives or open fields with long drives. You could see porch lights on in the distance but that was about it. As I entered into the development the speed limit dropped from 30 miles per hour down to 15. There were no street lights in the development and for some reason I

never put my high beams on. I couldn't go any faster than the speed limit because there were speed bumps in place every 30 feet or so for a bit. It was a mild night. I remember having my driver's side window open slightly, taking in some fresh air. I remember driving in silence, which was unusual for me. I normally always listen to music when driving. I must have been enjoying the quietness after the commotion of the day. I reached a section of road that had barren fields on either side and wood set back. The houses were probably nestled back into the trees. As I drove, I noticed what looked like someone walking up ahead in the opposite direction of the road coming in my direction. Mind you, I was still going about 15 miles per hour the whole time, so it was probably less than a minute

by the time the walker came into clear view i got a quick scan of them from the windshield before my car was exactly parallel with them and this is what i saw it was not a person it stood on two long legs with long arms hanging down from its shoulders it was strong looking lean muscular but not beefy in stature. It looked thin at the same time. It stood at least 7 feet tall and was light colored, not sure whether it was white, tan, yellow or grayish. It didn't appear to have fur but there was some texture to the skin that wasn't smooth. There appeared to be something coming down off of its back, I don't know what

this was. All I can recall about its face is the small features it had but the mouth and jaw were notably large and it had pointed things atop its head, two things going straight upward with something mingled between the two things and that's what I got from a quick scan from my observation of it as it neared my car and my car neared it. As my car became parallel to it within a split second, I went from looking out my windshield to looking at it from my driver's side window. In that moment, its face quickly peered down at me and all I remembered was the mouth opened wide. Out came a remarkable scream that I'll never forget. It gives me the chills just thinking about it. It consisted of a high-pitched shrill or shriek, enveloped by a deep guttural growl.

Both sounds happened simultaneously in that scream, and I kept driving all the while. And this was all happening so fast that I didn't even have a chance to be scared or shocked or anything. I continued driving and went past my friend's house and drove home. Called him to tell him what happened and that I just needed to get back. I was probably running on adrenaline to get back home. Later on, I was in total shock after it sank in. Had my driver's side window been opened fully, it could have touched me. Or worse, it might have attacked.

I'm certain of that, and to this day, I used to go and stay some weekends at my cousin's house in Carrick, PA. He lived in an old, odd-shaped, creepy brick house that was built in 1990. The road he lived on is called Lindview Avenue, and the house still stands there to this day. There was something very evil and sinister in that house. I used to dread going into his basement but that's where most of his toys were so we would run down there, grab a few toys and run back upstairs as fast as we could. The far back room in the basement was the worst though. I used to feel like something was watching me every time I went down there. On one occasion my cousin was down there getting something when he got to the back room. He said that he saw two red eyes staring back at him.

He bolted out of there and ran up the stairs and when he got back to the top landing and turned around to shut the basement door, the lights were off downstairs already and the red eyes were halfway up the stairs coming towards him. Another incident he told me about was that he was laying in bed one night and his dog, or what he thought was his dog, came up to the second floor and into his room and jumped up on the bed. He sat up to pet the dog and at that exact moment, he watched as his dog came running into the room, jumped on the bed, and started growling at the air. He said that he felt something jump on the bed and never hop off, but he never was able to see what actually came into his room before the dog. That house is no joke, it's seriously haunted and not by anything kind hearted at all.

I absolutely hated that basement and I hated that house after I heard all of the stories about the red eyes and the doppelganger dog. My aunt, uncle and my other cousin Jennifer all witnessed messed up things in the house too. My cousin Jennifer was coming down the stairs from the second floor to the first floor one day and when she got into the living room, she saw a shadow figure run out of the room and into the dining room and into the kitchen and then all of a sudden, she heard the basement door slam shut. My aunt never saw anything but she would always hear people whispering from other rooms when she'd be cooking in the kitchen or cleaning a certain room. Most of the time she was home alone, so it couldn't have been anyone pulling a prank on her. My uncle had mentioned seeing weird things, but he never talked about the details.

I think it just frightened him too much to really talk about it. Finally, fast forward about 8 years. When we were around 15 or 16 years old, my cousin and I decided to brave the basement and stop being cowards. It's just a dinky, gross, ugly basement. We went down there in the dark looking for the thing. Thing being whatever had red eyes and chased after us as kids. We joked and taunted, but looking back, I know that it was out of fear, rightfully so because not too long into the taunts we heard this loud growl coming from the back room as we approached and we ran out of there faster than ever before. We could hear the thing breathing heavily behind

us as we ran up the stairs and jetted through the whole house and out of the front door into the street. We stood there, looking back at the evil house on Lynnview Avenue, and we were terrified beyond belief. That was the last time I ever went near that basement in my life. My cousin and his family ended up moving out of there in the late 90s or early 2000s. I would so love to see a ghost hunting crew spend a night in that basement or even a whole weekend in that house. I don't think they would last too long, however. They could be in content heaven if they were serious about their session. It's not a house for the faint of heart, that's for sure. It's legit haunted by evil. Beware the odd-shaped old brick house on Linview Avenue. This took place on the night of April 15th, 2013 and it has bothered my family and I ever since.

We lived in Portland, Oregon and on that night, my mother had a very bad respiratory illness. She woke in what she described as a drug-induced stupor. She saw blurry images of what appeared to be people in full surgical dress. One of the doctors called her by name and proceeded to tell her everything would be fine. She recalls a needle being inserted into her arm and that blood was taken. She was unable to speak and was very confused before she passed out. The next morning she woke up and somehow there was a needle mark in her arm. My mother wasn't a paranoid person, if anything a

rather well-collected if not boring person, so when she gets upset then something is probably up. My stepfather, who was also in the bed with her, noticed that he also had one which completely petrified him. In fact, it petrified all of us. You see, my stepfather has a serious phobia of needles. When he sees the doctor, he must be sedated before they can insert any sort of needle into him. He literally throws up and passes out when seeing needles and, of course, he often must leave the room when blood is being taken from my mother. However, he remembered nothing, but was also feeling very drowsy and confused. They both came in and asked me if I had let paramedics in the night before, which completely threw me off guard as I was wary of their question and told them that of course I hadn't. That night I was surfing the internet. Since I was working a graveyard shift at the time,

I had only woken up at about 8pm, yet after only two hours of being awake, I suddenly was hit with such deep drowsiness and exhaustion. I crawled back into bed and I fell asleep within minutes, which was very strange. I woke up feeling sore all over, but no puncture or needle marks appeared on my arms at all. I had no recollection of anything the night before and so when they both showed me these strange marks, I was more than intrigued. They told me that they had fallen asleep suddenly, probably around the same time I did judging by what was on TV when they fell asleep. And what was even more bizarre is that my cats were very spooked the next day. This was very unsettling as my largest cat never gets spooked.

Vacuum cleaners, dogs, loud sounds, nothing fazes him. Yet, I found him hiding under a bunch of boxes and he hissed at me each time I tried to reach in and get him. The other cats were terrified and hiding all through the house My stepfather also told me that the doors were unlocked yet I remember him locking the door every night We lived in a bad neighborhood and we always made sure that it was locked It has been nearly a decade now and I've done tons of research but I cannot seem to find any possible explanations. Although I have always been interested in the UFO phenomenon, I actually have not found many cases that are related to our family's story. To be continued... p.m. Eastern Standard Time. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash Let's Read Official, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. 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. Let's Read.