The Lets Read Podcast - 221: I HAD NO IDEA WHO HE WAS | 27 True Scary Stories | EP 209

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Military Deployment, Ted Bundy, & The Woods... 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

It's the Lexus Demonstrator event at Don Valley North Lexus. During May, Don Valley North Lexus has rates as low as 1.9%, with savings up to $9,000 on select remaining 2024 Demonstrator models, while supplies last. See DonValleyNorthLexus.com for details, or visit them at 7200 Victoria Park, just north of Steeles. A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. at 7200 Victoria Park, just north of Steeles. At Don Valley North, Don Valley North for Lexus. A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. In my early 20s, I went through a wandering stage. I had just graduated from college and couldn't find a job anywhere. Rather than go a couple of hundred dollars into the hole every month paying for rent while searching for a job, I decided to pack up what few belongings I owned and headed out to see the

country. And this is something I can't recommend enough. Stay off the interstates, hop a train from time to time, and hitchhike with no particular destination in mind. It was this kind of aimless wandering that led me to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. If you've never experienced them, the Barrens are an amazing place. Huge stands of oak and evergreen trees, many older than time itself, grow out of that strange, sickly soil. Sugar sand, the locals call it. In the rainy season it forms quicksand and in the dry season it can still swallow farm machinery whole. Of the few farms I saw out there, all looked like they had seen better times, and many looked like they had sat untouched for decades. Yet there was

something alluring about the place, a sort of ancient secret I was afforded glimpses of in the shadows when the wind stirred the trees. The sort of movement at the edge of your vision that follows you throughout the day, but disappears as soon as you turn your head. From time to time, as I hiked down old dusty roads, an old pickup truck or rusted-out car would bound over a hill toward me. Most times the driver would eye me suspiciously and speed up as they approached. Occasionally the driver would stop to talk to me for a few minutes. What are you doing out here? One old toothless man

clad in overalls asked me. Wandering around? Seeing what there is to see? I replied. The old man spat a putrid brown stream into the dust. Ain't nothing to see around here. At least nothing you want to be seeing. When I asked the old man what that meant, he made a guttural, throaty sound. I wasn't sure if he was choking on his tobacco or bothered by the question, but he didn't answer. He offered me a ride in his pickup the way that I had come back into town, but when I declined, he spat in the dirt again and sped off, shaking his head. My eventual plan was to make it to Delaware sometime that summer

and meet up with some extended family there, but I was in no hurry. In truth, I had been in heaven these last few weeks, taking my time heading south and exploring anything that caught my eye. I had explored every abandoned building and every cave caught my eye. I had explored every abandoned building and every cave I had seen. I had half my weight and power bars in my pack, but over the last two months I had honed my skills at trapping rabbits and gathering wild edibles, sitting up late at night beside my campfire and sleeping beneath the stars. The night sky in an area so devoid of human influence is beyond comprehension. But tonight there were clouds moving in, and the sun was disappearing faster than I had grown accustomed to.

When the deep roar of thunder shook the valley, I knew that I had better find shelter. In the failing sunlight I could see in the distance some structures at the top of a hill. I ran the half mile distance and was disappointed to see that the ancient house and barn were in terrible shape. The roof of the barn had completely collapsed, and the upper two floors of the three-story house had collapsed into a mangle of ancient wood. Still, the house was my best option, so I made my way toward it as the heavens began to open up. As I'd seen on other properties in the area, this house had a small cemetery in the yard. I ran toward the gaping front door of the dilapidated house, carefully making my way between the headstones. When lightning flashed, I was able to make out the name Calicak on several of the headstones which the elements hadn't completely erased. When I got inside, the floor

was spongy but felt solid enough to hold my weight. I took off my pack and set it near the door, caught my breath and had a look around. The hinges of the front door had long since rusted away but I was able to fit the door back into the opening enough to hopefully keep the wind and rain out. At one end of the room there was a stone fireplace and chimney which was solidly constructed, but I had no wood for a fire. Next to the fireplace was a stairwell full of rubble and cobwebs. I didn't dare apply my weight to those steps as many had rotted to nothing under their own pitiful weight. Opposite the front door was an opening to an old kitchen of sorts, but when I tried

to approach it, my foot went clean through the floor and I decided to stay put until the storm blew over. The remains of the upper floor did an adequate job of keeping the ground floor dry and I was able to arrange my sleeping bag so that very little water draining from the upper floors managed to land on it. I got out my harmonica and played for a few minutes, then stopped, apprehensive. I didn't know what I was afraid of, but something had chilled me to my core. Outside, the storm continued to build in intensity. My eyes were focused on that stairwell, seeing nothing in darkness and flash-blinded when lightning struck. I must have fallen asleep at

some point because suddenly I came to with a searing pain in my neck from leaning my head against the wall for so long. Outside, the storm continued to pound down its fury upon earth. As I sat there rubbing my neck, I began to chuckle to myself for getting wrapped up in the superstition of the area when I heard it. At first, I heard indiscriminate movement upstairs in the ruins of the upper two floors. I was just about to write it off as rats when suddenly it stopped. I froze in place, daring only to move my eyes and even then just barely. After 30 seconds of paralytic fear, I smiled at myself again and was just about to settle into my sleeping bag when I looked toward the stairs.

At the top of the doorway were a pair of glowing red orbs, staring directly at me. Very slowly they closed down to horizontal slits, then opened up again wider than before. I can't tell you how long I sat there staring at it, staring at me. It could have been seconds or even hours. And eventually my lower level self-preservation skills began to kick in and subconsciously I started reaching for the knife on my belt. Our eyes locked, my hand progressed inch by inch towards my only means of defending myself. Neither of us blinked for what felt like hours and while the storm raged on. I prayed for another lightning strike so that I might catch even a glimpse of my adversary, but despite the ferocity of the rain, the darkness was absolute. When at last my hand reassuringly touched the hilt of my knife,

it seemed as if the very fabric of existence was ripped to shreds. The creature began bellowing in the most unearthly, mind-numbing shriek I had ever heard. Knowing I had only one chance and one fluid motion, I released the snap that held my knife in place and released an inside overhand throw that I had practiced during my years of misspent adolescence. I heard a sickening wet thunk, and the shrieking increased in volume a hundredfold. As I smashed the rotten door to pieces, I heard the creature flapping against the wall and screaming.

Just as I wrenched the remains of the door open, a great flash of lightning struck, and all around the house I saw piles of bones, feathers, and fur. I ran as I had never run before or since. I ran until my veins pumped acid and my limbs were stone. I couldn't see where I was going, but I could follow the dirt roads by the sounds of the sugar sands slurping roadside debris into the ditches. I didn't dare look over my shoulder. When the sun finally rose, I collapsed in the road, heaving, oblivious to the downpour. I awoke with a startle to the sound of a car horn blaring inches from my head.

I leapt to my feet and spun around to see the old man from yesterday, holding his sides with laughter. When I opened my mouth to speak, he motioned with his thumb to the back of his truck. I climbed without a word and he began to drive. The events of the previous night began to replay themselves in my head. What had just happened? No matter how many times I considered what I saw, none of it made any sense. As we drove, I realized how far I had run in the dark. It must have been nearly ten miles. I was angry

with myself for being so terrified by a dream, and that's the only thing it could have been. Approached from this angle everything fit into place. I'd experienced a false awakening as so many times in the past when experimenting with dream herbs. I had a nightmare and woke up with adrenaline pumping and abandoned all of my gear in an old house. I suddenly realized that the truck had sat motionless for quite some time and the old man was turned around in his seat staring at me. I looked up at him and he grinned. With sickening horror I realized that we were at the bottom of the hill on which that wretched house sat. I jumped out of the pickup and thanked the old man

who drove off. I slowly walked up the muddy path that led to the house, composing myself. When I reached the yard, I saw the old piles of bones which had shocked me the previous night during the storm. Of course, there were coyotes and foxes in the area and I had hunted a couple of wild turkeys. The critters probably had their dens around here and had been using the house as a windbreak. Inside the house, everything appeared as I had left it. My sleeping bag, my pack, and my harmonica was sitting on the floor, and I could see my knife sticking out of the wall across the room. I packed everything up and put on my backpack, then walked over to the stairs and pulled my knife out of the wall.

I was about to return it to the sheath on my belt when I looked at the blade and noticed the dried on blood and the clump of oily black hair stuck to it. It started out as a nice day in 1973. Mom was paying 50 cents for a small quart-sized bucket of black raspberries, so I had recruited two of the other kids in the neighborhood, Dwight Vanover and Tim Mitchell, to help pick. We had been picking in a field about 300 yards in the back of the house for probably a couple of hours. The field we were picking in might have been a cleared field at one time, but now it hosted huge berry bushes and a ton of small brush-like trees could be found sticking up about 10 or 15 feet. These were all small trees though, with the larger older ones along an old fallen over fence row that bordered the field. We were actually out beyond my folks' backyard to the side of another mowed yard. To get out there

we had walked about halfway down the neighbor's backyard then cut over the fence and gone a couple of hundred feet out into the field to get to the best bushes. We had already each filled our buckets at least once and were trying desperately to fill them once more before sunset. As far as mom knew, I wanted the money to go buy a pop at the Lawson's store downtown but I was really planning on going to the liquor store and buying a pack of cigarettes. I knew they'd let me buy them because I had done it for my dad in the past. They didn't even bother to take the note that dad had given me to give them so I still had it and planned to

use it again. The sky had darkened quite a bit but we were determined to get that last bucket done. I was farthest out in the field toward the center when I saw something strange in front of me. It was a silver ball but I have no idea how big it was. It could have been hundreds of feet or inches across or it could have been the size of a baseball, I really didn't know. If it hadn't been moving, I might not even have seen it there amongst the weeds, but it began moving in a very strange pattern. From where I was standing it looked exactly like it was bouncing along the top of the berry bushes from left to right. I remember thinking at the time and still remembering it that way today as being like the little bouncing ball that used to appear on the television, when there were words for a song shown and it was going in time with the music.

I didn't know what it was, but I had thought maybe it was a ball that had been thrown or perhaps a frisbee on its side glancing off objects. But we were out in the field away from anyone else and in that direction there was nothing but more berry bushes, trees, and fields. Although there are buildings in that direction now, at that time there weren't. I called the rest of the guys over and told them about what I had seen. Tim was skeptical and made a few wisecracks about me wearing glasses, but Dwight made me go over every detail. He wanted to know what it was and even started to go that way even though the bush was very thick and he literally had to make a path. I would have already gone that way further to get berries, but the way was blocked, and Dwight was a tough one

and began pushing his way through. It was really getting dark by now and a beautiful red sunset began to spread out among the clouds. Dwight was still pressing into the bushes and hadn't gone very far when we began to hear a sound. There was the sound of something coming through the weeds at us, and it sounded heavy and quiet at the same time. There was just the sound of berry branches being crushed and occasionally a popping or snapping as a small tree would go over. The bushes around us were tall, taller than us, and we couldn't really see what was going on or what direction it was coming from. But one thing we knew for sure, it was getting a lot louder. It had increased in volume so quickly and so much

that I yelled to everyone to run, and we all ran as fast as we could to the tree line that marked the edge of the field. I remember we all burst out of the weeds at about the same time. It was a relief to be standing on mowed grass even though we were still so far from the house. And then we heard it again. It was still coming our way and by that time, we were all very scared. Everyone took off running again, with me being in the back. We only had to go about 50 feet to get to the edge of my folks' backyard, but it was getting darker by the second. Tim was still in the front of me, but I think Dwight veered off to go around the other side of the house to make a sprint for his house across the street,

while Tim and I tried going for the front door of my house. Tim and I were still carrying the buckets that we had been collecting berries in, but as I reached the corner of our backyard, Tim stopped and turned back towards me. I know I felt good about that, I can recall, because he could have kept going, but he didn't. When he caught sight of me, I caught his eye, but then the wood pile next to me started making sounds. Mostly there were branches that had been thrown there over a period of time. Some were small, others were a couple of inches in diameter. In all, the pile was about chest high to me and had settled becoming denser over time.

As soon as the noises started, Tim dropped his bucket and took off running, but I hesitated. This was my yard, surely it wouldn't come into my yard. The woodpile had made some loud cracking noises, and that's when I saw it. I've never seen anything like it before or since. I have seen things that remind me of it though, and every time, I'm thrown back even now to the gulf of fifty years to look once again at it. If it had hair, it was in coils atop its head and, being in the glare of the sunset with the sun going down behind it, the thing looked for all the world to have an exposed brain. The convolution of its head was all highlighted in red while most everything else was shadowed

to black. Its eyes were strange and seemed idles and overlapped with something like goggles over them. Those I could only see highlights of as most of it was totally hidden in a shadow. Of its mouth in that area I couldn't see anything but lower down I could see an extremely thin neck. It looked segmented like a flexible conduit pipe and tinted the ruddy red of the setting sun. Once it came up above the woodpile, I got one solid look, but it was fast. It had stuck its head up so fast, and it was there at least a second before I dropped my bucket and took off running after Tim.

So great was my fright at that point that I caught up and almost passed Tim as we came up to the side of the house. Mom was in the kitchen as we came bursting through the door, but didn't scold us when she saw the fright on our faces. Right away she called the vanovers to see that Dwight had made it safely home. After we all calmed down, Tim insisted that he was okay to ride his blue stingray down the street to his house if mom and I would come out and watch him ride home. Our road did have streetlights so we could see him pedaling home as fast as he could, then later we talked on the phone for a while. The next day, my dad called me back to the wood pile.

There was my berry bucket where I had dropped it, but it was the wood pile he wanted to show me. The pile was almost broken in two, with both sides looking as though they had been grasped and ripped apart. My dad gave me one of those weird looks and asked if I was sure I didn't do that, but at the look on my face, he just left it be. My dog was also in the backyard at the time. I don't remember hearing her bark the whole time that we were out there, although she wasn't one of those barking dogs, really. And needless

to say, I was careful to feed the dog in the daytime for quite a while. What happened to me sent me down a path. One thing to consider, when we were out in the field it was light enough to see to pick berries. However, at the dead run for young boys, after about maybe 300 or 400 feet from where we were picking to the corner of the backyard, it became the last vestiges of sunset. It wasn't until years later that I considered it and actually sat outside and waited between the two. I came up with a 20 minute lapse of time. So there is also a missing time element there too. I didn't write this up until many years later, but it haunts my dreams. A while later, Mansfield, Ohio was hit with a huge UFO flap.

Something else was in the description of the thing. It was the speed of it popping up in the woodpile. Once, many years later, I was watching Star Wars when they were trapped in the garbage thing and the head of that worm thing popped up. Although the head was different, I had an immediate flashback. The head was overly large for the neck and the sunset was behind it causing it to have red light all around it. Because I only looked long enough to register what it was, I only caught a glimpse of a head that had corrugations on top. Something like the convolutes of the brain or perhaps dreadlocks with red light shining down on it. And for a very young boy, it's been the thing of nightmares for around 50 years.

I just felt that it was time to tell this. Something happened last summer that has left me with many questions and few answers. I was employed at an appliance and furniture rental and sales business in Great Bend, Kansas. One morning, a co-worker and I opened the store and when we arrived, we noticed that the back door was left open. When we entered the back door, all the lights in the store had been turned on. It didn't look like a break-in because the security latch was intact. The security system had somehow been disabled because there was no power indicator on the code box. We immediately called the police and the store manager to report the situation.

We were told not to open the store and to remain in the back office until someone arrived. A few minutes later, after hanging up the phone with the store manager, a police officer was knocking on the back door. I let them in and told them what we had found when we arrived. The officer started to walk through the back room and into the showroom when we started to hear a baby cry. I thought that a customer may have somehow entered the store and that they had a baby with them, so my coworker and I followed the officer in the direction of the crying baby. And well, I didn't believe what I was seeing.

There were two babies lying on a twin-sized bed display. The officer told us to stay there while he checked the rest of the store. He had also radioed for another police officer to come to the location. I looked down at the babies who were both tightly wrapped in dark green cloth. Both babies were quiet, very still and looking at me and my coworker. I was taken aback by their odd eyes as both babies had these large pupils that were just almost black. There were no irises or any indication of color in either of their eyes. The police officer was soon back with us and he commented on the baby's eyes as well.

In fact, he was totally freaked out, so much so that he even looked scared. The store manager soon arrived as well as the senior police officer, and we all stood around the bed looking at these strange babies who laid there quietly watching us. The store manager pulled my co-worker and I to the side and told us to go ahead and leave. He was not opening the store until we found out what was going on. We quickly headed toward the back door and left. I wasn't scheduled to work until a couple of days later but I had talked to a few co-workers who said that the atmosphere in the store was very strange. They had been receiving weird telephone calls and the security system alarm would trip on several times during the day. I got to work a little early for my next scheduled shift and when I arrived the

store manager was sitting in the office so I asked him what had happened after we had left. He said that two young women who said that they were from the municipal court eventually showed up and took the babies. The senior police officer told him later that he had no idea who the women were but that he was told by a superior not to impede. He thought that they were probably from McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita. He also said that the babies were very quiet and seemed relaxed the entire period that they were there. I stopped working there not long after and things were just never the same and it got tougher each day. Essentially, when odd looking people would come into the store and just walk around. After a while, I felt like I just had to get out of there. I'm not sure why, but it just didn't feel comfortable being there. I went to a summer camp near Kelowna, British Columbia, called Camp Oase.

It was about two kilometers down the road around the Okanagan Lake from a mental institution. The counselors there scared us all by playing a prank on us and saying that one of the patients, named Old Man Jenkins, had recently escaped and that he had murdered three kids but pled insanity and so didn't have to go to jail. So yeah, the camp week started off alright. I was seven or eight and we did a bunch of the regular summertime activities, canoeing, hiking, singing, sports, eating, crafts, all that stuff. It was technically an Anglican camp too, although not many kids there were actually religious so we spent about half an hour a day doing bible stuff too, everyone's least favorite part for sure. I was in a cabin with

4 other kids, all of whom were older than me. I was pretty easy to pick on when I was young, so I still got picked on then, but I was having a good time regardless. A great time actually, one of the best few days I can remember. But one thing that made everyone uneasy, even the counselors, was the cabin at the far end of the field. Unlike all the other cabins which were clustered together around the main buildings in the lake, this one seemed small off in the distance, built into the forest hillside. But somehow at night its figures seemed to grow larger with the shadows of the tall pine trees. Nobody was allowed to go on the other half of the field. I'd seen a kid get kicked out who went there for fun earlier that week.

Nobody had camped in that cabin for around ten years, but nobody really knew why, just that it was forbidden. Now about mid-week, I came back to the cabin at noon to get my bathing suit to find that my teddy was gone. It comforted me, I won't deny it. I mean, like I said, I was about eight years old. I started to panic a bit since I'd had it since I was an infant, and it was almost like a friend to me. I figured one of the other kids had taken it, so when everyone got back at night, I asked about it. They teased me a bit, but nobody admitted to anything. I asked my counselor if he had seen it. He said no. The next few days, I was pretty upset, and I could hardly sleep at night.

Eventually during crafts, one of the kids in the cabin told me that he saw a kid from another cabin take my teddy bear, but he didn't know where he put it. At dinner I confronted him. He laughed and said that he had put it in the cabin at the end of the field. At first my reaction was to just go get it, but I didn't want to be kicked out. This was an expensive camp and my parents were gone to the states for the week, so I'd have to get a relative to come all the way from Van to Kelowna to get me, so I couldn't do that.

I told him to go get it, or else. In other words, an empty threat. I eventually ended up mentioning to a counselor that someone had taken it and put it in the cabin But even he wasn't allowed to go there I thought of telling on the kid and getting him kicked out but thought better of it I wanted to have at least a couple of friends out of this and not be seen as a rat But I needed the teddy There was no way I was leaving the camp without it So I decided that I'd wait until night when all the counselors were asleep and I'd go there myself and get it.

So that night, I went outside at about 2am, doing my best not to crunch on the gravel and stay near the edge of the forest. The moon was extremely bright that night, so it was light enough to see where I was going, but there were clouds that occasionally obscured it so it was intermittent. At the edge of the field I hesitated, knowing that I could be kicked out, and I was also a bit scared to be honest. But I figured that I was already in enough trouble for being out at 2am anyways, and I really needed this teddy. So I went on, keeping my footsteps slow and quiet. The cabin was even further away than it had seemed during the day. By this point I was hyper aware and had adrenaline pumping through me, on the watch for anyone or anything unusual. I tried the front door. Locked. How had this kid gotten in here?

I walked around the back and saw a window that had once had a glass pane but was now empty. I wasn't tall enough so I stacked some rocks and climbed through. The cabin was pitch black but for the moonlight coming through the front door. I was soiling myself. I felt near the front door for a light switch and I found one but there was no electricity. This was an all wood cabin but I could smell a bit of rotten wood, probably from the rainwater coming through the window. But to me, that smell could have been anything. I had brought a stick from outside, as if though I could defend myself with it. This cabin, unlike the others, was two stories. After feeling around on the floor for a while for my teddy, I concluded that it wasn't theirs so

I headed upstairs. There was more light up there due to a window that ran the length of the wall and almost went floor to ceiling. My footsteps creaked as I looked around the unmade bunk beds and my heart was pounding in my ears and I was trying my best to breathe slowly and quietly, gripping my stick very tightly. And then I saw it. My teddy, lying on one of the top bunks near the window. I climbed the ladder, grabbed it, and jumped down. As soon as I landed, I heard something, like someone breathing really hard out of their nose, similar to when you sprint and come to a stop and try to collect your breath as quietly as possible. I spun around, startled, and fell

to the floor. I couldn't see very much in the gloom, but I couldn't make out anything. I got up, trembling, clutching the bear in one hand and stick in another. This was also the first time I ever swore. I remember hearing my parents and older friends say the F word, so I said it. F you, Jason. The name of the kid who allegedly put my teddy there. I kept saying it over and over, for making me come out here like this. What a jerk. F you, Jason.

I kept saying it as I walked back downstairs, as I went to the windows, pulled myself up, and jumped out into the forest. F you, Jason, I muttered, looking at the ground. F you, Jason. F you. I looked back at the cabin from the ground. F you, Jason. F you. I looked back at the cabin from the side. The front door was now open, hanging ajar, but it hadn't been when I got there. I turned around to leave, facing back towards the field. And that's when I saw it. A single dark figure, standing just off to the side near a tree. It let out a low moan and started speed walking towards me. I didn't even hesitate. I raced out of there. I don't think I've ever run

so fast in my life. I ran for the field, trying to scream, trying to alert someone. I couldn't breathe. All I could hear was this man behind me mumbling, come here kid. And at one point, I felt the warmness on my neck again. I could hear his footsteps. I kept trying to yell help all the way back to the cabin cluster, but sometimes you're too scared for words. And when I got back to the cabin, I opened the door, ran in and slammed it shut behind me. No more footsteps. Everyone was awake now asking me what was going on. I was crying and red-faced, unable to speak. I jumped up to my bed and looked through the window, and I could just barely see the face of the man running back into the forest. The next day, the camp counselors called my relatives from Van to come get me, as I was too upset to leave my bed and couldn't stop trembling and holding my teddy. I'd never been back since, but I heard that while Old Man Jenkins was just a story,

someone did actually go missing from that mental institution that week and didn't return. The counselors found nothing in that cabin when I told them except a bunch of rags that hadn't been there before, and some needles. I worked at Keystone Resort in Colorado for a few years. During the summers, we would set up conferences, weddings, and things of that nature. A number of weddings were performed at one of the mountaintop buildings that would be high-end dining cafeterias in the winter and functions in the summer. Imagine mountaintop beautiful buildings with huge stone fireplaces and magnificent vistas off huge wooden decks. Nice places for weddings if you can afford it. Anyway, to get to these places required driving along dirt roads that would snake through valleys and then up switchback roads along the mountain until you reached the top and the building in question.

It was approximately 8 miles of winding mountain roads. One night we had a quick turnaround from a conference into a wedding the following afternoon. This required moving lots of tables and chairs out and down the mountain and moving up different tables and chairs for the wedding. So we would have a crew breaking down the previous setup and loading a truck which would then be driven down to a building that had the other equipment unloaded and reloaded by the crew there and then equipment driven back up the mountain. I was the one driving the truck. So here I am driving the long twisty eight mile drive back up the mountain with my last equipment load. I'm about a mile and a half from my destination which means that I'm in the middle of the switchbacks that are weaving their way up the mountain.

My truck coughs a few times and then shuts off. I try to restart it but I get nothing. At this point I'm angry. I have no radio and now I have to hoof it to the mountaintop building to radio down for another truck. I get out and start walking. I get about 100 yards and I hear something off in the woods. A kind of heavy footfall and some brush snapping. I freeze. The darkness is darn near absolute and this road has no lighting at all, just the little light coming from about a quarter moon. That familiar shiver shoots straight from my lower back right to the top of my head.

I'm straining to hear anything at all, but I don't hear anything. I start to walk again, trying to walk very softly, and my head keeps moving back and forth trying to catch any slight sound. I get about another 25 yards, and the movement in the wood starts up again, sort of shadowing me from uphill and behind me. There are tingles all through my body. My eyes are like dinner plates and my breath is coming in big gasps. I stop and try to look for any movement, and the movement in the wood stops again. My brain is telling me, don't worry, it's a deer or an elk or maybe a bear. My subconscious is screaming, Bigfoot.

I'm trying to maintain my calm, but calm has left the building. I start walking very fast, trying to discern any sounds from behind me. It doesn't take long. The footfalls in the brush being moved through starts up again as I'm moving. And that was all she wrote for me. I haul off, running hell-bent on reaching the building in safety before I'm slaughtered by the unknown. I hear crashing in the underbrush for about 15 or 20 seconds. After that, all I can hear is the pounding of my blood in my head and the jolting

thuds of my own feet hitting the ground. I have no idea how fast I ran that last mile and a half to the building. I was sure that at any moment something was going to grab me out of the darkness. I made it to the safety of the building and dashed inside. Everyone there took one look at me and then sat me down and gave me a big drink from the bar. I must have been white as a ghost. My buddies gave me plenty of crap for being scared but none of them set foot outside to check out my story. They just radioed for another truck to come and get the stuff out of my broken down vehicle and deliver it the rest of the way. I finished up my shift and got cross-eyed drunk that morning and the next day.

I'd never been so scared in the woods in my life. And in case you couldn't tell, I'm not an outdoorsy type. I don't hunt or camp. I have no idea what was in the woods that night. My rational side says it was just a big animal. But my paranoia tells me it was something else. I never saw anything, I just heard the noise and it chasing me. And to this day I still think it was probably just an elk or a bear. But try telling that to

yourself when you're all alone in the pitch black woods. A couple of years ago, I spent the summer fighting wildfires in southern Oregon. My crew was on a particularly large fire and an unfortunate series of events landed us on night shift. On one of those nights, we were posted up near the top of a ridge as the fire was burning slowly up towards us from a valley below. The fire was a good half mile away, so there wasn't much for us to do besides wait. We broke into two groups and spread out over a large stretch of road and hunkered down for the night. My partner got bored of sitting around so he decided to hike over and check in on the groups on either side of us. The next thing I remember is waking up at the start. It was dead quiet and the air was incredibly still. Some thick smoke

had settled in around us and was messing with the bright moonlight. It's hard to describe, the light was bouncing around the smoke as it appeared relatively bright. But it was smoke, so you still can't see more than 10 to 20 feet in front of you. Anyways, I woke up in this dead silent, still eerie night, and I immediately knew something was wrong, but I couldn't quite place it. I tried, but I couldn't get myself to relax. I was looking around, trying to peer through the smoke at anything that could have woken me up. About 30 seconds after waking up, I heard a stick snapping nearby. Instant sphincter clencher. I sat straight up, switched on my

headlamp to try and look around. Of course, the headlamp didn't do much to illuminate anything besides smoke. After a couple of minutes of frantically looking around and not seeing or hearing anything, I started to relax a bit and switched off my headlamp and leaned back. At this point, I was starting to think that the setting was too perfect for my crew to not be messing with me. Besides, animals don't like smoke, so they usually aren't around fires. I was about to start laughing at myself for being so jumpy over nothing and yelling that they weren't going to scare me this time. But just then, I heard another crack, a lot closer this time and about 20 feet away.

I instantly knew this wasn't anyone in the crew. It was too silent that night for anyone to be able to sneak up on me like that, especially as freaked out as I was a couple of minutes ago trying to find the source of the initial stick breaking. I jumped right up, tool in hand and looked in the direction of the snap. And then I saw it, about 20 feet away. A silhouette, easily distinguishable from the trees. There were no branches on the silhouette, and not to mention that it wasn't there in my previous scans. What I did see though was a definite head sitting on top of a neck on top of broad shoulders standing extremely tall with, what looked like like big eyes that

were glinting a bit from the moonlight. Needless to say, I turned and hightailed it back to the road and then down the road until I found some other people for my crew. I talked to the people who were around me and none of them saw or heard anything the rest of the night or any other night that we were on top of that ridge. But I know what I saw and it wasn't human and it absolutely scared me. The End These are two accounts of the most scared I've ever been. Both happened while I was stationed in Afghanistan. The first happened in late 2011 in a place called Helmand Province, Afghanistan. I was standing post on a small eight-man patrol base at about 2 a.m. in the morning. The post consisted of four plywood walls, bulletproof

glass, and multiple sandbags. I had been up for about 24 hours at this point and was starting to hallucinate through my NVGs, mildly seeing school buses and the like, when all of a sudden, bang. I first thought it was a round hitting the bulletproof glass, realized about a second later that it was a rock. Immediately on high alert, adrenaline flowing, I scanned the area with mini thermals and get no heat signatures from anywhere the strange part was that we had double stacked razor wire about 30 meters out from the post and it was all open ground for about 30 meters past that so any rock throw would have had to have been amazing I called up to the center of command and had them use a big thermal camera on a stick

to scan the area in case I missed something. They got nothing. At this point I'm kind of freaking out thinking that there's someone out there that I can't see but they can see me. 10 or 15 minutes go by and I'm starting to relax a little bit, thinking maybe a bird flew into the glass or something like that. All of a sudden, bang. Now this time, it sounded two times louder. I get a feeling of pure terror and feel adrenaline flush through my body. I've got my rifle at the ready, PEQ laser on, looking harder than I've ever looked before at every piece of micro-terrain that a human could be hiding behind. And still, I can't see anything.

I freak out, but nothing happens for the rest of the post. I still do not know to this day what it was, but it scared the life out of me. I'm thinking it might have been some form of hallucination, but it felt too real. I know that probably doesn't make sense, but it just kind of didn't feel like something my brain was making up. Now the second story happened in early 2012. We were still in Helmand province, but a different, bigger patrol base. 13 man plus Afghan National Army platoon. It was around midnight on this post.

The patrol base had gravel lining the whole grounds to keep dust down. It was a poorly built defensive position with blind spots everywhere. I was a little over 6 hours into an 8 hour shift when I heard some gravel crunching just below my post, which is about 10 feet back inside the wire, i.e. the blind spot. Very unusual because we had an early AM patrol and everyone but myself, the other poststander, and the one guy on radio watch in the command center were sleeping. I call out, Who's that? And the crunching stops and I get no response.

I use my radio to call the command center and ask if he was walking about. He tells me no, so I ask him to come check this out. I make sure to tell him to be careful coming around the corner and have him keep his rifle up, weapon light on, and pop the corner. As I see him walking out of the COC, the gravel crunching sound picks up again, but this time rapidly like someone was running. Once again, high alert adrenaline flowing hardcore. I'm thinking we've got someone inside the wires, so I start yelling stop or I'll shoot an Afghan. The sound stops, and my radio watch pops the corner ready to shoot, and nothing. There was just nothing there. So once again, I'm freaked out. He chalks

it up to me being paranoid and lacking sleep, but I'm not so sure. About an hour later it happens again, almost exactly the same way with nothing being there once more. I have the radio watch, I wake up my buddy and he stands on post with me for the last hour, which passes without incident. I still have no clue what it was. A kid inside the wire somehow? A cat? A dog? A ghost? Who knows? All I know is I have never been more scared than those two incidents. I don't know why people make up these skinwalker stories. The things animals do in the wild are often much more terrifying. I work primarily as a hiking guide in northern West Virginia. It's very beautiful and there's a wide variety of trails that people love to walk on, and it's a dream job that I love to do

myself. This story happened a few years ago in the spring of 2019. I was leading a group of four, two of them were veterans, apparently on some type of PTSD therapy retreat, and the other two were a middle-aged dad and his kid, who I think was about 13 or so. I only work from 8am to 4pm, but due to a scheduling error, this hike was a lot earlier than I'm used to at 6am. I was wide awake and it wasn't pitch black out so I know the story isn't the result of sleep deprivation or seeing the shadows move. We had gotten halfway through the trail, it was quite a short one and we were taking a break because the kid tripped and got his knee hurt. One of the veterans was looking over it, making sure that he was fine and I was looking

out into the woods, waiting for them to wrap up. It was about 7.30 in the morning and if I recall correctly, it was a bit hard to see into the denser part of the woods. But I saw a coyote very slowly approach us out of the woods and near the trail. Coyotes are usually spooked off by groups larger than three and I was expecting it to scamper. But I noticed pretty quickly though that it seemed to be very injured. One of its hind legs had been gnawed down to the bone. I didn't get a clear look, but it was like it had been degloved, aside from a few parts clinging to it. The coyote looked very haggard too, like it was tired and probably sick. I kind of felt bad

for it and went to grab my phone so I could report it to one of the local rangers that there was a sick or at least wounded coyote out here. Its injuries didn't look like they were caused by anything natural like infections or bites. And all of a sudden, that's when this massive buck bounded out from the woods. Now I was at a distance from all of this, but for my estimation, this thing would have easily towered over me and even one of the veterans, who was a 6'6 brick house. I instinctively backed up, knowing not to mess around with this thing or anything in its path, and I just watched as it started to bash on the coyote. It stomped it into the dirt and

completely mutilated its corpse. It kept ramming its antlers into the coyote and rending backwards until the poor thing was just ripped apart. It looked up after it was done and casually walked back into the woods like it didn't absolutely massacre a predator. I don't know if the kid or parents saw it, but the veteran eventually commented on how terrifying moose are, and I have only told my wife about and the guys who served with me at the time it happened. Just for future reference, audience, if you ever come across someone who's been in the military and they are always talking about war battles and combat, they're lying. You don't really talk about those things with civilians. Maybe close family, a spouse, but mainly you only talk to the guys you serve with about it, if at all, really. I won't give every single solid detail as far as the city and exactly where, but you'll get enough.

So here I was, a college dropout, just turned 20 years old, only been in the Marine Corps for about 18 months, and I was already four months deep into my first combat deployment in Iraq. My job? 0331 Infantry Machine Gunner. We were doing weapons cash sweep along the Euphrates River because Al-Qaeda likes to store weapons along the banks and coasts of rivers. We're on the patrol, metal detector in hand, sweeping for weapons caches while also providing security when the metal detector goes off.

The Marine holding it stops, sways around the area until the metal detector starts beeping crazy. So, all of us junior Marines, meaning it's our first deployment and we have to do all the nonsensical work, we start digging. Except me of course. Being a machine gunner on patrol with a 240 gulf machine gun, I had to provide security. But I was right there. Marines start digging and digging until they hear a ding. Jackpot.

We all thought at first, but as they kept digging, it was only a metal rod about four feet long. Dang. But another Marine was still digging until we came upon a piece of cloth. He tried to pull the cloth up, but it wouldn't budge, so other marines around him started digging too, until they finally dig up a dead corpse. Not just any dead corpse, but the corpse of someone who had been tortured and mutilated for God knows what reason. His robe had bloodstains all over it, his hands were tied behind his back and his feet were tied together. Someone had obviously killed him and buried him there. We asked the locals around, but nobody would tell us anything. Not surprised at all by that, but the thing that always amazed me and still piques my interest till this day was the state of the corpse.

Although his robe still had blood all over it and his hands and feet were tied together with rope. It was all bones, pure skeleton. Not a piece of flesh remained on him, but yet the rope that was used to tie his hands and feet together still remained on his skeleton along with his robe. I don't know much about decomposing bodies and how it works, but it still boggles my mind to this day. I never really fit in during high school. I wasn't a complete socially inept outcast, but I definitely didn't have a clique or a niche to hang around with. I didn't have a reputation, which luckily means I wasn't the quiet kid either. I had friends, I had bullies, and I would occasionally crack jokes in class. Unfortunately, they were always rude jokes about whatever a teacher was teaching us at the time.

So, this resulted in me getting scolded and disliked a lot, which made me a prime target for suspensions and detentions. And this is how my story starts. I don't know what sarcastic comment that I said, but lo and behold, it resulted in me getting an out-of-school suspension for a day. The thing about out-of-school suspensions is that those are probably some of the best, yet worst punishments. I get the day off, but it normally resulted in 12 to 14 hours of constant belittling from my parents. Why can't you just shut up and sleep in class like the other kids? Or I work until my back is sore to put food on this table just for you to screw

off in class and blah blah blah. You know, the standard stuff. So I hatched a plan right after I was given my suspension. I would unplug the phone line early in the morning because no one ever made calls so no one would even notice the phone hadn't rung all day. Then I would just go for a walk around town and maybe explore the woods that were semi-nearby. I could easily waste a day away in the woods and the weather seemed fitting for a hike. And thus, that's exactly what I thought would happen. I mean, yes, I did unplug the phone line. My parents were rather old school with technology and this was back in 2010 so they weren't huge into cell phones at the time.

And yes, I did act like I went to school and then walked off into town. But when it came to going into the woods, I was not prepared. I walked out of the gas station with an energy drink that I had bought with some leftover allowance and headed towards this trail that leads into the wooded area of town. It was rather beautiful, as it was just beginning to become springtime, so leaves were beginning to sprout out of branches, flower buds were popping out of dirt, and the sun felt amazing. I hopped off the trail and walked for, assumingly, miles into the woods. I really couldn't tell how long I had walked for or how far I had really traveled, but I was definitely nowhere near civilization. Eventually, I came across this small little opening in the woods.

Hills seemed to convex into this area and trees seemed to stay clear of it. In reality's sake, it was probably some complex root system that prevented more trees from growing, but it still was pretty cool to see. Pretty cool to see until my eyes stumbled upon this old rusted freezer that sat near the middle of the clearing. I began to wonder if this was a man-made clearing, but it didn't look like any trees were dropped down. Curiosity took its course and I walked up to it. Sure enough, it literally was just some rusted box freezer that you'd find in a garage or basement or something. I started inspecting it before finding this flexible metal hose with a large bolt hanging down at the bottom of it,

laying in front of the freezer. Before I could even process it, my brain starts imagining that this bolt could have been used to murder someone or something dark and intrusive. I usually can just shake these thoughts off, but this one in particular rattled me and I felt myself getting scared. Scared, I thought? From a rusty box? Are you kidding me? And so, I pretty much bullied myself into opening the freezer, with a stick that I picked up of course, since the lock wasn't actually securing the freezer's lid. My heart was beating so fast that I thought my chest was going to burst, and I looked inside the freezer.

Blood. There was blood everywhere. Blood, entrails, organs, guts, a whole box completely full of gore and rotting meat. I don't even give myself time to close it. I dropped everything and raced right out of there. I kept looking behind to see if someone was giving chase because my brain kept telling me that I was being watched but no one was behind me. At this point my thoughts are so full, you walked upon a murder scene, you're going to be next, and this is all part of their plan. But no. Nothing. I ran through the

trees, tripped over rocks, scuffed my knees on rocks, and kept racing. I made it out of the woods and onto the trail, where, luckily, no one was around to see me. Because I didn't have a plan. What do I even say? Hello, stranger's going for a walk. I'm a dumb teenager who should be in school. Well, technically I should be at home, being absolutely screamed at. But instead, I pulled a huge bluff and now I'm running away from a murderer. By the way, there's a freezer of gore in the middle of the woods, just as a heads up. I start speedwalking back to town where I'm fortunate enough to see some buses driving around, meaning I can get back home, blend in with the other students, and act like I'm just

getting home from school. But this whole time I can't stop thinking about the freezer, or about why someone would just dump so much gore into a freezer and then abandon it. Did they want it to get found? Like a sick little game to them? It began plaguing my thoughts until maybe two days later. See, while I was fighting these thoughts, contemplating whether or not I should report it, I was also supposed to be at home, being suspended from school, being lectured by my parents for my classroom behavior, and the only way the school will know that I got lectured is from a signed paper from my parents. So imagine the look on their faces, on all of our faces, when one

evening, we're all making dinner, my mom walks in with a letter from the school saying that they need to verify that they're aware of my suspension. Well, needless to say, I was screamed at for the rest of that week and into the weekend I wanted to get around the 12 hour hissy fit just to end up receiving several days of it An unsettling trauma for months I'm still afraid to go hiking to this day To be continued... I know everyone wants to hear creepy paranormal stories about witches and skinwalkers, but this story that I have is the only creepy life story that I have, and it still keeps me up late on some nights.

I'm currently employed as a receptionist for my town's local pharmacy and wellness center. In other words, it's basically the place for people to try and steal cough medicine or give us false prescriptions. It happens much more often than you imagine, but that's irrelevant to the story. Now I work the early morning shift with my hours being from 5am to 10am because I live pretty close nearby. I spend most of my shifts taking calls, leaving voice messages, doing paperwork, again, usually just me faxing doctors to get proof of their signature. Since it's so early in the morning, a common routine that I face is that I eventually have

nothing more to do in terms of work. This means that it's time to head back to the break room and pass some time. I used to make up tasks and chores to do to keep myself busy until I caught my manager sleeping behind his desk. That was my cue to not take this job that seriously. In the break room, there is this tiny little TV that is mounted on the wall, but it has no place to sit and the TV only gets the news and some vintage fitness channel. So, I put some water on to boil to make some tea, lean against the wall, and begin watching the news. Now, I'm not alone in the building. The janitor had gone upstairs a few minutes before I went into the break room, and the residence kid's psychiatrist was in his

office on the first floor. All of a sudden, I hear the bell that's near the front door ring. This indicates that someone is here, and is meant to let the receptionist know someone's on the premises if the receptionist isn't at the front desk. I take the water off and head back to the front desk. As I leave the break room, down the hall, there's this door that connects the waiting room with the hallway that leads to all of the offices. To get past this door and to get where I'm at, you'd need either a key or a punch combination to enter. Suddenly, I watch as the doorknob begins to rattle violently,

like someone's trying desperately to get in. I take a different route away from this hallway and walk in from another door behind the front desk. There, I see this gaunt, pale old man, trying for the life of him to get the door open, constantly twisting and tugging at the doorknob. He stops, looks at me, and seems to just freeze in place. I begin to think that he might have just had that oh shoot moment of being caught, but his face has this remorseful look to it, like either dread or sadness. Now, quick little detail, I'm a guy,

but I have decently long hair and I shave my face regularly and I guess if you squint, I do kind of look like a woman, at least in my facial area. The guy seems mystified as he stares at me. Claire? Claire? He coos out to me. It takes me a moment before I snap back to my customer representation voice. Sir, I'm not Claire and I'm going to need you to sit down, please. If you have an appointment, you'll have to wait for the doctor to call you in, okay? As I told him this, he looked at me with this sad, almost puppy-eyed expression. It honestly felt like I just told him heartbreaking news, and I started to wonder if I said it too harshly. Claire?

He mumbled out, before miserably shuffling to the front door. He turned one last time and gave me another sad, soul-shattered look. Don't leave me. And then I just watched through the windows as he stumbled away and vanished into the morning. No idea if the guy was having a dementia episode or was on something, but it honestly haunts me sometimes. I know it's not anything terribly terrifying, but I can't stop thinking about who he thought I was. Perhaps a partner who had passed away. I just can't seem to get his raspy voice out of my head. The world's oceans are vast, enigmatic places full of countless mysteries and strange sights.

Yet the mysterious secrets of the sea are not confined solely to what we can see, but rather also what we can hear. Far from the stoic, silent, underwater world we may imagine, the acoustics of the ocean are in fact awash with a constant cacophony of seismic activity. Boats, sonar, marine creatures, cracking icebergs, undersea volcanoes, and many others. While many of these sounds have definite, known, or mundane sources, there are others that have long managed to elude any sort of easy explanation. These are the eerie, unexplained sounds that pervade our planet's oceans, standing out from all others as oddities that continue to defy simple answers. Many of the mysterious audio anomalies of the ocean came to the attention of scientists with the help of a network of underwater microphones called hydrophones, which were set up in the

1960s by the US Navy for the purpose of monitoring the movements of Soviet submarines. This network was called the Sound Surveillance System, or the SOSUS, and was sprawled out along the ocean floor throughout various regions around the globe. The microphones were typically located on the seabed deep below the surface in a place known as the Deep Sound Channel, a place where sound can travel thousands of kilometers due to the effects of the unique pressure and temperature gradient inherent to the zone, which effectively funnel sounds without any interference across vast distances. For years, the SOS-US system was used exclusively to listen in on the audio signatures of submarines and track their locations, and the various other potential scientific applications for such an extensive

network of deep-sea hydrophones were never really explored. It was not until the end of the Cold War that the network's primary purpose became obsolete and the system of hydrophones was allowed to be accessed by civilian scientists. By analyzing the audio signatures of incoming sounds as they arrive at different microphones, scientists were finally able to locate and analyze a whole new domain of acoustics, and also one of mystery. What they heard down there in the depths was often able to be fairly quickly identified due to each sound's unique sound signature, but the scientists also realized that many of the sounds were not so readily categorized.

These mysterious notes of the deep come in a myriad of different types. Some are low frequency and others high, some short bursts and others long continuous wails, and some happen only once while others can go on for years. The one thing they all have in common is that nobody really knows where they come from. One of the strangest of these enigmatic sounds is the one known as upsweep. The sound was first detected in 1991, emanating from across the entire Pacific. Besides this vast range, upsweeps showed a bizarre and totally unprecedented sound signature the likes of which no one had ever heard before in decades of listening in on ocean sounds. Upsweep consists of persistent, ongoing, narrow-band upsweeping noises that last

for several seconds each. To the ears, the sound itself is described as sounding like the wail of an ambulance or the undulating howl of some huge beast. In addition to its haunting audio signature, Upsweep exhibits some other rather unusual characteristics that add to its mystique. The impressive geographical range of the sound makes it difficult to attribute to any one localized source. Upsweep is additionally very consistent and uniform in nature, which is unlike the sounds produced by underwater volcanoes or earthquakes. The sound is also highly seasonal, always peaking every spring and autumn for no discernible reason.

Furthermore, it has demonstrated remarkable longevity, occurring at peak volume continuously from 1991 to 1994, and even after that reverberating through the ocean at a lower intensity. The sound is seasonably audible even now and no one is quite sure what it is. One of the first ideas was that upsweep was caused by whales, but this theory was quickly abandoned as the volume was simply too high for any known whales to generate and also did not move around from season to season like the song of migrating whales should have done. The sound also was much too uniform to be attributed to whales whose songs are typically highly varied in their range, pitch, and amplitude. Seismic explanations were considered as well,

but the uniformity and constant nature of upsweep did not fit in with what is typically heard for these events. It was also suggested that the sound could be caused by simple water movements and currents producing a noise something akin to that of wind. Presently, it is thought that perhaps the sound is caused by the oscillation of some liquid as it reacts to coming in contact with lava, and one team of researchers think that they have identified the origin of the sound as being in the southern Pacific in the vicinity of volcanic activity. Yet the sound still does not conform to the known sound signatures of such events.

Despite these various theories, the origin of upsweep remains a mystery. Another bizarre mystery sound is referred to as slowdown and was first detected in the equatorial Pacific Ocean on May 19th, 1997. It had been heard several times a year since in both the Atlantic and the Pacific and has been picked up on hydrophones nearly 5,000 kilometers or 3,100 miles apart. Slowdown is so named for its unusual characteristic of slowing down gradually over the course of seven minutes, it has been described as sounding like an airplane going by. Slowdown has typically occurred too far from the SOS US hydrophones to get a good fix on the exact point of origin, but one thing that has remained consistent is that it always comes from the south.

This has led to the speculation that it is perhaps emanating from the Antarctic. It was thought that the sound could perhaps be the result of military exercises using some new technology, but the Navy has denied any such activity in the area and maintains the sounds are not man-made. One theory for the sound has been the noises created by the friction created by icebergs grinding against each other, the ocean floor, or even land to come to a halt, which would account for the slowing characteristic and eventual sudden stop of the sound. Additionally, the sound signature of slowdown has been shown to be somewhat similar to that of icebergs scraping together. At the moment, the exact source of the sound remains unknown. The movement device has been used to explain away other anomalous sounds as well.

One of the weirder sounds picked up on hydrophone arrays is one called Julia. The odd sound was detected in the equatorial Pacific on March 1st, 1999, and sounds like a person cooing or whining. It has been speculated that it is most likely the result of a massive iceberg ponderously rubbing against the seafloor. Likewise, yet another sound known as Train had been theorized to be that of an iceberg scraping against the seafloor. Likewise, yet another sound known as train had been theorized to be that of an iceberg scraping against the seabed. Train sounds just like its name implies, like a distant train going with its wheels clattering along the tracks. Other noises had been chalked up to not ice, but even fire. A common explanation for a variety of weird ocean noises is the eruption of undersea

volcanoes. One example is the sound known as whistle. Picked up in July 1997, the sound resembles that of a kettle of boiling water. It is thought that it is perhaps caused by an erupting submarine volcano. However, since the sound was only detected once, and on only a single hydrophone, its origin may forever be a mystery. Besides the explanations of ice movement, volcanoes, and earthquakes, there has from time to time been speculation that these mysterious undersea sounds are caused by some sort of unknown sea creature. Perhaps one of the most well-known and baffling anomalous ocean sounds is known as the bloop. Recorded off the southern coast of South America by hydrophones nearly 4,800 kilometers or 3,000 miles apart, the sound is highly unusual in that it matches several of the common features

found in sounds made by biological organisms, such as the rapid variation in frequency common in marine creatures. There is much debate as to what actually produced the noise, with a phenomenon caused by shearing and fracturing ice called an ice quake being suggested as a more rational explanation, yet several biologists have stood by the theory that it was bellowed by some living organism. It is a romantic notion to be sure that some undiscovered monster of the deep is out there, but since the bloop was heard over such vast distances, it would have to either be something far larger than any known sea creature, or be something extremely efficient at producing sound. If it is something so large, then what sort of leviathan can we expect to find

lurking in the murky dark? Whether it was made by a natural phenomenon or a terrifying monster, whatever the case may be, the bloop has still not been satisfactorily explained. So what do we make of these anomalous ocean noises? Are they originating from a known source? Are they produced by some new undersea phenomenon we are not yet aware of? Or are these the sounds made by gargantuan mysterious sea creatures hidden within their remote layers? For now, we do not know. We know so little about the deepest recesses of the oceans. We are far from cataloging all the species that call these places home, and we still have an incomplete knowledge of the oceans. We are far from cataloging all the species that call these places home,

and we still have an incomplete knowledge of the various natural phenomenon that go on here. We know so little that sometimes it seems as if we have two parallel yet distinct worlds existing side by side on the same planet, the world we are familiar with and the alien, little understood realm of the deep blue cold of our oceans it often feels that our oceans might as well be another far away planet the sea is a noisy place but this noise is not without meaning scientists plan to continue to monitor the hydrophones in the hopes that they will help to uncover some of the ocean's secrets these listening stations could give us valuable insights into the geological processes raging deep below the waves as well as important information on the movement

and nature of the ice of our poles it is thought that such information could even help to monitor the process of our ever rapidly growing climate problems just as we are gaining an understanding of these various phenomena, perhaps one day we will be closer to the answers we seek with regards to the mysterious, unexplained sounds of the deep sea as well. I worked as a local hiking guide for my county's forest preservation organization. It has benefited me in so many ways. I've gotten in shape from hiking, I've felt more connected to nature, and it's been a blessing towards my mental health. I used to just be another factory grub.

Nothing wrong with working in a factory if that's what you like or enjoy, but I used to be in a place that made me feel immensely replaceable. I wasn't a name, just a badge number. If anything were to happen to me, my badge number would just be pinned to a new guy and no one would remember me. So to go from that mindset, to be able to live as a forest guide, has truly improved my life in ways I never would have imagined. The only problem is that the forest is uncontrollable. What happens in nature is only to be experienced and never interrupted. Animals behave in strange ways, sometimes uncanny and disturbing ways.

For example, one morning I was guiding a small family around the trails. We have to stick to the trails that have been cleared, otherwise it could result in endangerment and missing person reports that could hurt our publicity. As for the family, it was a husband, a wife, and their little daughter who couldn't have been more than six years old. And for the trail itself, they chose a beginner trail to go through, and it really is a pleasant experience. No, you don't get to climb over any crazy rocks or anything, but the way the sun pours through the leaves, it's hard not to be impressed with nature. I've guided a lot of people on this trail and it still sometimes astonishes me with how beautiful it truly is. The kid had been asking me all sorts of questions about animals nearby as she had taken a liking towards the birds that were around. Even her mom was egging her on to ask more and I

could tell that the mom was losing herself into nature. So I begin to tell them all about the local bird species, what time certain species come out, what weather other species enjoy, and I mention about the great horned owl. This animal instantly has the daughter jolted with excitement, so I specifically start talking about the owl. As we continue, the trail comes to a bend in the path with a sharp turn downhill. Since I'm in front, I'm the first to notice that a large tree had fallen down near the path. It didn't block the path, but with all the commotion it must have caused, I noticed that a nest in its branches had fallen onto the path. I tell the family to wait there as I get closer to inspect the nest and

that's when I first noticed that it might be an owl nest. I don't normally get too involved with other people's interest in wildlife, but I couldn't help but point out the owl nest to the mother and daughter. The daughter made this audible wow and right then, that's when I noticed something else. This owl nest wasn't just made out of miscellaneous straw and sticks. There seemed to be almost a bed of animal skulls inside it, nestled between some sticks. I don't mean there were a handful, I mean there seemed to be a literal bedding layer made entirely out of skulls and bones from small animals. I couldn't identify

them since my job didn't really have me involved in vulture culture type stuff, but if I were to guess, it was a combination of mice, rats, and possum skulls. There was one skull in there that stood out from the rest though, but as I said before, I couldn't identify it. But the skull was much larger than the others in comparison and so after talking about it to some hunter buddies and other guides, I've come to the rough conclusion that the skull must have belonged to either a fox or a coyote. I've seen a lot of things happen in the forest. I've had to calmly rush Taurus off trail after finding two deer mating.

If you don't know, bucks get extremely territorial when in heat, so if we're spotted, we would have been in great danger. I've even had a fox kill a rabbit right in front of a group of students before. But this? I can't say I've seen a bed of skulls before. I know I stared for too long into the nest because the father asked if everything was alright. I somewhat gasped, recomposed myself, and grabbed the branches and put them far off trail. I told them that everything was fine and we continued with the hike, but on the way back, I noticed that the branches I set aside were suddenly missing. It's probable that some

collector came by and noticed the gold mine that I set aside, but I really couldn't stop thinking about how eerie that truly was. I grew up in a small town south of Detroit. Most of the people in my family are or were employed at a factory, machine shop, or assembly plant in the area. Around here, it's common to hear a lot of stories about people getting killed or maimed by machinery or some other hazard at the workplace. As my father used to put it, things at the plants were a lot different before those a-holes at OSHA came in and changed everything. After hearing a few stories myself, I never understood why dad thought OSHA was a bad thing. I myself, I was just a humble security guard at one of these places. The plant that I used to work at was a foundry back in the 1950s, up until it was shut

down and converted into a warehouse at some point in the 1980s. For those of you that don't know what a foundry is, it's a factory where steel gets casted into different forms. My story starts in 2006 when I got hired by a contracted security company. I was assigned to a midnight shift at this place. Some of the older people there used to tell me that the place was built on top of a county-owned graveyard. I've never confirmed this, but I'm pretty sure that it's just an old man trying to scare the younger guys. Interestingly enough, the place I worked at was the first factory in the country where a person was killed by an automated machine. We had to do a patrol round through the basement of this place. The first time I went down there, it was just as I imagined.

Dirty, dusty, and lots and lots of junk and spare parts, and best of all, nice and dark. While you were down there, you couldn't get a cell phone signal and our handheld radios got a spotty signal at best. And what I think was an effort to save energy, they had installed motion-activated lights that would stay on for about 20 minutes before turning off and would turn on when you were within 7 or 8 feet of walking. So one night in the summer of 2006 I was doing my rounds down there and there was one area where for some reason or another the automatic lights wouldn't turn on. As part of the round you had to walk straight through this area

so I always carried a flashlight for that occasion. I was about halfway through my round when I had to walk through this dark area when I saw the shadow of what appeared to be the outline of a man walk out about 12 feet or so in front of me. He had walked behind a support column and then just disappeared. I thought to myself about how strange that was and continued on my way thinking that it could have been someone else down there messing with me. I had to go back down there the next night and this time something felt different. There was a strange stir in the air and I hate to admit it but it felt as if though I was being followed. Whatever this feeling was I couldn't shake it. I make my way back to the area where I'd seen the shadow the night before, and this time no shadow man. I made my way into

an area that was like a big hallway and of course it was dark and I wasn't close enough to activate the lights. I stood there for a second looking into the darkness when about halfway down the hall a light came on, then another, and another. So me with my flashlight standing ready to swing at whatever was coming down the hall towards me felt a slight cold breeze. The real strange thing was that my co-workers were having similar experiences of seeing shadows and feeling cold gusts of air in places where you shouldn't. I ended up working there for way too long and in that time I saw the shadow man several more times and felt the cold breeze a lot too. I've since moved on from that place but I do have a lot more creepy stories about it and other experiences that I've had but I do wonder sometimes if these things that I saw were just

tricks of the light or people that meet their end and are still on the job. Now in the fall of 2007 I decided that I had done enough research into the paranormal and it was time I got out into the field and do some serious work. I had done some looking around and I had gotten in touch with a local paranormal group that was kind enough to take the time to give me a trial run of sorts. We met up at a restaurant and had discussed the finer points of what the night's festivities were going to be, the investigation of a local cemetery that was reported to be extremely active. The place had an interesting history. Supposedly, it was the resting place of a witch that had been hung sometime around 1870, no doubt by angry townsfolk with pitchforks and torches, and the

entire family that owned the land was buried there as well. At this point, I had already read enough and experimented with trying to record EVPs with little to no success, and I also had a digital camcorder that I had played around with a little bit. It was after dark when we finally found the old cemetery. We all stayed pretty close together and decided it was time to leave when we found a protest truck at around 11pm. We all stood around it wondering, one, what is a truck like this doing parked in the back of a cemetery? And two, go figure, go out looking for ghosts and find this thing. Well, about the time we started walking away from the truck, we saw a man wearing dark blue mechanics coveralls walking to the truck and getting in. The truck had a camper in the back of it. Well, after the too-close-for-comfort run-in with Michael Myers look-alike, we left and all

met back up at the parking lot of the restaurant we'd met at earlier. We said our goodbyes and called it a night. We were out there for about two hours or so and I had about 90 minutes of video to go through and about 30 minutes of audio recordings to listen to the next day. I never got anything on the EVP but the video was interesting. About 20 minutes or so in I was holding my camera and I had two people walking in front of me. They were about 15 feet ahead of me. In the bottom left hand corner of the screen you could see the outline of a shadow run out from behind a headstone It ran up behind the person that was in front of me and then vanished This shadow object couldn't have been but two, maybe two and a half feet tall

And for some reason I always thought it was the image of a little girl I never went back to that place and since that time I've lost contact with those people. I think I may have actually gotten something on camera. I can't be too sure about it, but I can tell you this. Everyone I've ever shown that video to sees the shadow run out from behind the headstone and everyone that's seen it gets just a little bit creeped out by it. If you've ever been walking out in the woods in Ozark country and thought that you saw a big hairy monster, you might have. Don't laugh. Many people have seen the Blue Man. Other parts of the world have their own real or maybe mythological monster. Scotland has Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Yeti or Abominable Snowman from Tibet.

The United States has a few creatures of its own. From the western states come Bigfoot legends, the Iceman from Minnesota, and the Headless Horseman as told by Washington Irving. Ozarkers have never been ones to be outdone by others. Here in the Ozarks, we have the Blue Man of Spring Creek. The story began over a hundred years ago in the winter of 1865 when a hunter from Douglas County, Sol Collins, was hunting out on the ridge between Big North Fork and Spring Creek. With snow on the ground, Collins was tracking a game when he came upon a set of tracks that were something like a bear's. Sol had killed many bears, but

these tracks were the largest and widest that he'd ever seen. Quickly, he followed the tracks and kept on them. He had followed the footprints north, almost to Indian Creek, then in a wide half-circle to the west until he was close to above the big North Fork River. When climbing the north slope of Upper Twin Mountain, Collins looked up and barely escaped being hit by a boulder that tumbled by him. He again barely escaped two more huge boulders that crashed down the hill. Just as he stumbled to get behind a big oak, he first saw the gigantic figure shaped like a huge man, which was naked except for what looked like the skin of an animal around its midsection and other wrappings around its feet. The creature was completely covered with a coat of curly short

black fur. When the sun struck it, it took on a deep dark blue hue. Collins never gave up his claim that this creature was not less than nine feet tall, and this is among the shortest estimates of many others in the years to come. Sol stated that he only stared long enough to see the creature throw away a ten-foot club that he was carrying and pick up another boulder, which he threw against the post oak. Then the giant made an ear-splitting scream that some said was more terrifying than any that had ever come from a beast that could be found in the hills. Collins then headed back and gathered up some of his neighbors and for a few days they kept on the trail of the beast the best they could by following its tracks in snow. A few times they caught a glimpse of it at a distance, plundering through the woods at a rate that left the posse far behind. No man was ever able to get within distance to take a shot at the creature, but nevertheless, the hunt continued for another two or three weeks almost every day, but there were never any results.

Many people saw the wild man and people in isolated cabins claimed to be awakened in the dead of night by the screams of the creature. Usually after the awful shrieks were heard the person would find a lamb or pig had been carried away. By now, the blue man, as he was now called had been considered a fake and it was almost nine years before he was heard from again.

In autumn of 1874, word was passed that he had emerged again, because sheep and hogs had started disappearing in the carcasses found in the woods. Organized hunts were carried out to capture the creature, but after a week or two, the blue man disappeared once again. Sixteen years went by and he only made two or three visits to the hills along the Big North Fork. Every visit he was seen and hunted by many. Every visit he also made a clean getaway from the hillsmen. However, the last time they got too close, for he remained out of sight from 1890 to 1911 and nothing was seen or heard of him. For this reason,

many of the people who had moved into the area regarded the stories of the Blue Man of Spring Creek as a figment of someone's imagination. About this time, he was seen again and more joined in the search. Reportedly, they discovered the creature's den in the cave in a remote valley. The floor of the cave was littered with bones of animals he had eaten, and a bed of dry leaves was found in the corner, again, just as before the creature disappeared. The next time the blue man was seen, O.C. Collins was searching for two lambs that had disappeared. He spotted the creature on Spring Creek four miles from Old Horton. Two days later, Cap Turner came across him catching fish with his hands in Indian Creek. The creature chased Turner up the steep hillside.

Cal Alsup, a few days later, was one of the posse that had chased the blue man into a cave. He stumbled through the darkness over objects he knew were the pelts of sheep or the dried hides that had once made a meal for the wild man. He was seen one more time after eluding his pursuers at the cave. That time was at Ava Crossing, where he was catching crayfish from under rocks and eating the tails. By November 15th, 1924, terror was prevailing over northern Howell and Douglas counties From Tater Hill to Collins Ford and from Blue Buck to Ava Crossing People were searching for the Blue Man Cattle weren't allowed to graze Sheep were watched by herders with rifles

And livestock was locked up at night Nobody left their home and churches and schools were closed People armed with rifles and shotguns searched every nook and cranny of the area in search of the Blue Man of Spring Creek. December of 1938 was when the next account of the Blue Man came. The Bunt brothers, who were living in Johnson Hollow, said their coon dogs had bayed off from them quite a little distance. The men had been seeing range hogs in the area quite often, so they didn't go to their cabin for their guns. They just went up to the ridge to call off the dogs before they killed one of the hogs. They got quite a surprise when they saw the dogs

baying up the big tree in which there was a man hissing and snarling in anger. He had no weapons and no clothes, except for some type of fur garment around his middle and something wrapped around his feet. According to the brothers, he was hairy and apparently blew from the cold. The younger brother took the dogs a good way off while the older tried to talk to the man in the tree. Bunt promised him food, shoes, clothing, and a place to sleep, but the man in the tree just stared at him. After about half an hour, Bunt gave up and joined his younger brother. They said that they were hesitant to walk away and leave the man there,

yet they had no reason to question him further. Later, they were questioned as to why they didn't report this to the law, and they said that they had no complaint against the man and had no way to come the eight miles into town. Only once was a wild man caught, but it happened before the Bunt brothers had their confrontation with the Blue Man. The August 18th, 1911 edition of the Sentinel, published at Pomona, ran a story entitled Wild Man Captured, the mysterious disappearance of livestock and farm trucks that had had many farmers along Bryant Creek puzzled. Two boys, Ott Collin and

Tom Rayburn, were returning from a fishing trip. They noticed something apparently springing right out of the ground, near the base of the hollow, and began chasing one of the frightened sheep that was grazing there. The frightened boys didn't stick around. They ran home just as quick as they got there. When they got back home and told their parents what they had seen, they quickly gathered a bunch of men. The boys acted as guides and when arriving at the spot they found a log and an opening in the ground that looked as if it was frequently used. One of the men pulled together his courage, shoved a lantern in and followed it into a cave room of considerable size.

At the far side, a man was crouched, and said to be the sorriest specimen of a man any of them had ever seen. He was bare of clothing except for a breechcloth of some kind of animal hide. His body was completely covered with short hair, and his head was covered with a mass of hair two feet long. The wild man tried to get away, but he was caught and turned over to the authorities. He either couldn't or wouldn't talk, and his cave was littered deep with wool, hair, bones, and feathers. There was no evidence of him ever having cooked his food.

The most recent account of an encounter with a wild man occurred in 1966 in Peterbottom, a fertile meadow along the War Eagle River, near War Eagle Community in northwest Arkansas. It began when a doctor who was wanted for murder found refuge in the forest around Peterbottom. When the man was caught, he was ruled insane and sent to a state mental institution. And just before he died in early 1960s, he made the statement that since he was near dying, he wanted to tell the story of a monster that lived in Peterbottom. He also made the statement to stay away from the area, and the story appeared on the back pages of local newspapers. But because of his history of mental disorder,

it was treated as a figment of his imagination. Little interest was stirred in the War Eagle area until 1966. On a Sunday afternoon, two men were horseback riding down the steep road that leads to Peterbottom. Suddenly, a tractor coming at full speed from the bottom almost ran them off the road. The man on the tractor warned the two that there was something horrible living down there. He had been starting his spring plowing when he spotted the monster. The boys thanked him for his warning but decided that they wouldn't believe it unless they saw it for themselves. They kept riding but the horses became restless and soon refused to go any further.

The boys then walked the rest of the way into the valley where they spotted what they thought was a large clump of white fur on the grass near a cedar tree. They thought it must be a dead horse or cow, but when they got within ten yards of the clump of fur, it stood up. The two young men described it as an animal that stood upright like a man, with its body covered completely with white hair about two or three inches long. They said its height was eight or nine feet and its features looked more like a man's than an ape's. Its face and hands were pinkish color and these were the only areas not covered by the white fur. They also said that there was a strong offensive odor which they described as smelling like old coffee grounds coming from the creature. The two stood there unable to believe what they were seeing. Then the creature began slowly walking toward them, making strange sounds, and they turned and ran as quick as they could.

When they got to their horses, they put a quick distance between them and Peter Bottom. The parents of one young man said by the time he reached his home in the Knob Hill community, he was almost in a state of shock. He then spent several days in the hospital with a nervous disorder. As the young man's tale spread, hunting parties were formed, but the strange creature was never seen again. Over the years, cattle have been found, torn apart, and one man's corpse was found with his limbs separated from his body. No one can prove that the two really saw the creature, but Peter Bottom hasn't been farmed since then. It can can prove that the two really saw the creature, but Peter Bottom hasn't been farmed since then. It can be said that the albino monster in Peter Bottom is clearly

unique in its own right. How then can the legend of the Blue Man of Spring Creek, the monster in Peter Bottom be explained? This has come to be the most widely accepted reasoning. Jerry Hilterbrand, who settled in what is now Douglas County in 1820 and died there in 1885, told the following story handed down to him by the older residents of the area. Years before the American Revolution, while Missouri was still a part of the French colony of Louisiana, a French fur trader came through the Ozarks with a beautiful Spanish woman. After a while, he got tired of his companion and traded her to an Indian chief for a larger amount of furs, leaving her captive. The woman, left with the Indians in the wilderness, lost her reasoning and lived for years as a

demented person of the hills. From her came a race of people, half Spanish and half Indian, who never mingled with anyone and hid away in remote and inaccessible places. There they increased in numbers and were known to exist for a good many years. Between 1820 and 1840, when the pioneer settlers came to the Ozarks, the race probably disappeared and many thought that it probably retreated to the more remote Boston Mountains in western Arkansas. Yesterday, while returning home from work, I was exhausted and strayed from my routine way back home, and I decided to sit down on the bench at a small park. The park was empty at the time. About five minutes later, a young man, I'd say he was in his late 20s to early 30s, dressed in a business suit holding a briefcase, sat on the bench across

from me and started to occasionally stare at me. Later on, he got up and sat next to me on the bench and said, how are you, Jennifer? Now, Jennifer's obviously not my real name, but he had a British accent and he was speaking in a very exaggerated manner. He was surprised and thought that this was someone from college or high school that I didn't remember at the time. And when I asked how he knew my name, he simply replied, Oh, it doesn't matter. and then put his briefcase to his lap and clasped his hands on top of the briefcase. At this point, I started to feel worried and asked him again how he knew me, but before I could finish my sentence, he interrupted

me and said, I'll get into that a little while later, but first, let me ask you, are you satisfied with where you're living at right now? And then just said my entire address. He then said, what are your thoughts on your workplace? Are you satisfied with your wage? And then he correctly stated my exact wage. At this point, I started to get really creeped out by him and asked him who he was again and he calmly replied, It doesn't matter at this point and moment. Right now what matters is that I want to help you. He then went on to state a lot of personal information about me and that I would think no one would ever know and he especially knew a lot about my personal relationships about people that I know. As he was saying all of this stuff I started to pack my things and get up from the bench and asked who he was and what he wanted in a worried manner. He didn't answer me and told me to calm

down. I then yelled at him asking him what in God's name he wanted from me and who he was. And he didn't say anything and he did this very weird thing where he rolled his eyes first and then slowly turned his head behind as if to say someone was standing behind him and just said, very well then. The way he did that was really strange, like almost as if though he was a character giving the camera a side eye and breaking the fourth wall. He picked up his briefcase, got up from the bench and started to approach me. I tried to reach for the pepper spray in my bag but he grabbed my arm and said, no need for that. Pushing me away and I lost my balance and fell to the ground and he

then quickly walked away. I was really scared after falling to the ground and didn't know what to do for a solid minute. When I got back up, I went the way that he walked away, but I didn't see him and decided to just get out of the park and go home. Overall, his mannerisms were really strange and he used his hands in this elegant manner a lot when he talked, like as if though he was a theatrical actor and, as I stated before, he did speak in a sort of nice British accent and I live in the United States. He was really tall, very well dressed, clean shaven, had short slicked hair and was wearing circular glasses. Another detail that I noticed was that he had this square pin on the lapel of his blazer. The pin was white and had a little black trinket on it. I haven't went to the police

yet and I intend to ASAP, but I really don't know what to say or what evidence to provide apart from a small wound on my hand. Is there a place where I can ask some advice about what to do about this situation? Also, I apologize for the way I wrote this. My mind is a mess right now. I work with disabled and vulnerable adults, and one time I was grabbing a drink with a friend, Joe, and he asked if I could work for his girlfriend Jane. Jane and I got on like a house on fire. She had some physical disabilities, but also some mental health issues leading to her being prescribed a raft of antipsychotics. Joe was particularly on top of Jane's meds as he was training to be a mental health nurse. He had me filling in sheets as I was working in a psych ward at their house rather than a private residence. Usually, I simply make sure that people I work with take their meds. Sometimes, if they're

controlled drugs, I might need to fill in a tick box, but he had full-on sheets that I was expected to fill in, as a nurse would. Over time, I realized how controlling Joe was, and how much he used Jane's mental health against her. Gradually, I realized that if he attended doctor's appointments with her, she would get an increase in meds. If I attended with her, this didn't happen. Joe was getting me stressed out with how useless he was saying I was, not putting items back in the cupboards perfectly, making spelling mistakes or missing punctuation on the over-the-top med sheets. I didn't notice quite how off-balance he was keeping me, but I was very stressed out.

So stressed out, I had several episodes of insomnia. One of these episodes, the doctor concluded, had led to me hallucinating twice whilst awake. The doctor gave me sleeping pills and the hallucinations didn't come back. When I saw Joe hit Jane for the first time, I did have the wherewithal to call social services, but Jane claimed that it hadn't happened. Joe said I'd misunderstood what was going on and that I didn't have any right to interfere with their relationship. The first time Jane left, he claimed that I had undue influence over her and left me checking words I said in case I was somehow influencing her as a vulnerable person. When Joe pinned me to the wall by my throat because I tried to prevent him from hitting her, I knew that I needed to leave.

So I mentally gave Jane until January to leave him and then I'd stop working there. I registered a complaint with Joe's nursing course about his treatment of the vulnerable. She left him before that Christmas. By June, without him influencing her doctors, she had been taken off all the psych meds and hadn't had an episode since she'd left. Almost as if though her successor wasn't present, her physical disabilities improved significantly as well in the years since she left. That's because of the lack of unnecessary psych meds, in my opinion. I haven't worked for Jane in years as she moved away to marry a lovely bloke,

but I do work for a young adult who is apprenticing in a workplace and for his first six months has me in the breakout area identifying anything a disability charity can provide for his access needs. His colleagues chat away to me on their breaks, including one who is very proud of his daughter, a nurse. The daughter has a colleague who at first used to provide fun tales for an idiot who came to work hungover. Then the colleague turned up to work, on a ward, whilst drunk or high. Then the colleague boasted about keeping an ex-girlfriend's interfering friend quiet by feeding her the girlfriend's drugs so she didn't call social services on him. The daughter has made a complaint. Then I got to see a photo of this colleague.

And of course, it's Joe. And I'm stuck here thinking about those times I hallucinated due to insomnia or did he put something in my tea? Let me start off by saying, I know how terribly dumb and naive I was for letting myself get into the situation. You know, sometimes I even laugh at how preposterous this whole thing was, and you can too. It is kind of funny at parts. However, at the same time, I knew if I had been just a little dumber, I might not have been so lucky. It all started a couple of years ago. I was a sophomore in high school, about 15 or 16 at the time, and I was hanging out with an extremely toxic and emotionally manipulative acquaintance, Holly, who let's just say they weren't shy on getting money from lucrative ways.

Such ways included scamming older men for their money from fake dating profiles that she made of other girls in our grade she didn't like, stealing from her parents, and bumming off money and things from her other friends. She had been doing this for years, same age as Carter and I and was a minor at the time. Sure, we could have been considered friends, but I was much closer to my best friend Carter. Carter had been best friends with Holly since freshman year and honestly the only reason I hung out with her was because Carter insisted on inviting her to our hangouts every time. Holly was not a good person and I quietly put up with her antics. One day, she starts talking about her friend Sarah. Awesome, but honestly, I really didn't care, especially knowing Carter and her ditched me for her. I wasn't really paying attention to the story until Holly asked me if I wanted to sell my socks for money. What? She smiles and

proceeds to tell me how they found a super senior, I kid you not, who bought knee-high socks for $90. All Sarah had to do was wear them outside for an entire day. Yeah, the freak liked them sweaty, I guess. The only thing was, the super senior insisted on meeting in person only. Holly laughed, telling me that it was a little weird. Okay, red flag number one. Holly never really thought things were weird unless they were really messed up. Then she proceeds to tell me that this super senior, honestly I never got his name so I'll just call him Kyle, was trying to get in her house the entire time but finally gave up and left. You're probably thinking, pardon me? Who would be dumb enough to try and wrangle money from

this freak? Me. I'm the idiot. All I really heard was $90 for a pair of old worn socks. I was in. Being the amazing friends they were, Holly and Carter just laughed and informed me that I would have to do it on my own since they had better things to do, whatever that meant. They gave me his Instagram handle and wished me luck. Well, we had a problem right off the bat. You see, I totaled my car just around a month before and had no vehicle of my own. American and a small town, so it was hard to get around without a car. Well, being the idiot that I was

and still am, decided hey, let's just take my mom's car. Huge mistake. So I start messaging this Kyle on Instagram, explaining my situation and how I got in contact with him. I can't remember most of this conversation but I can remember the guy being really insistent on meeting at his apartment complex. Red flag number two. Although I'm very stupid and naive at times, I had at least common sense. I brushed it off and suggested other areas, Starbucks parking lot, local park, etc. But this guy wasn't backing down. Finally, after much convincing, I get Kyle to agree to meet in a nearby park, right by his house, red flag number three. So I convince my mom to allow me to drive her car and I meet up with Kyle at the park. It's mostly deserted,

but it's by a busy street, so I don't feel too uncomfortable. And that's when I met Kyle. He was a huge, fat, sweaty guy with a beard who reeked to God knows what, but think neckbeard type character. My guy was at least 19, but looked like he could be pushing in his mid-20s by this point and that's when I knew I made a big mistake but there was no way I was going to say no to $90. I awkwardly greeted him and formal pleasantries were exchanged. I don't remember much of this weird conversation other than a couple of highlights. Number one, the dude brought rope. It turns out that he was into bounding feet as well and I was super creeped out. The dude then starts to tie my feet together after I mumbled a weak agreement. All I remember is staring at the sun wishing I would die right then and there. Number two, this guy had the gall to

call my feet ugly while rubbing and massaging them. That kind of hurt, not gonna lie. And number three, the dude was insistent, almost straight up begging on showing me his knife collection back at home and he would pay me extra to come with him. Yeah, no, wasn't going to happen. I knew what that meant and my stupid self wanted no part of that. The highlights continued. Number four, the dude straight up sniffed my socks after I gave them to him. No shame whatsoever. Told me he liked the vinegar smell. It turns out the socks used to belong to my now deceased grandfather. I had just grabbed a random knee-high pair from my sock drawer. Number five, after refusing Kyle multiple times to come back to his house, he only gave me one third price that we agreed on since I refused

to come home with him. Whatever, I was disgusted and disturbed, so anyways, I just wanted to get out of there. After returning home and getting my butt chewed out by my mom, I told her the truth after she asked me why I took her car, and I promptly blocked the guy and getting my butt chewed out by my mom, I told her the truth after she asked me why I took her car, and I promptly blocked the guy and called my friends to tell them about the experience. Much to my surprise, Holly informed me about something she forgot to tell me about. Apparently, the guy had made several threats of shooting up his high school's graduation and was very well known to the local police. Although I thought this was over and done with, my junior year of high school I received threatening and grotesque phone calls that I reported to the police. Carter and Holly were also called and threatened.

While mine were more of an intimate nature, theirs involved being extremely specific slurs as Holly was black and Carter was gay and he even recited Holly's address. Although I never found out who did them and there was a good chance Holly could have orchestrated the whole thing herself, I can't help but wonder if Kyle was behind it. Looking back on the insanity of the decision making I had back as a young person, it turned out to be an insane story that I still regret. My mom was an avid conspiracy podcast listener when my brother and I were growing up. She used to listen to coast-to-coast podcasts on alien conspiracies and would talk about recent UFO sightings and stuff like that. Anyways, because of this, my mom decided to tell my dad, my brother, and me an incredible secret

one-word code that would only be used to verify that we are who we say we are, in case of time travel or something crazy like that. It's a pretty unique word, if you can even call it that, that is almost inconceivable to be mentioned in regular conversation. We all thought it was pretty corny, but we all agreed to remember it and all of us talk about the code and conversation every once in a while. Now note that my mom came up with this code word several years after we had moved away to a different state, California from our hometown of Illinois. Fast forward to last year, our tradition of our family is to go back to our hometown for Thanksgiving every year, and my dad's and uncle's birthday is within that week so we usually celebrate their birthday during this week as well. We decided, since it was my father's 50th

birthday, that we go to a dive bar with my family and my parents' high school friends. Vibes were great and it was the first time our whole family had been out together for several years. About an hour in, a late 60s to early 70s man wearing a bar staff shirt came up to me, my brother and my mom, and said this incredibly secret aforementioned family code. The way he said it was so deliberate, it was like he knew how much the code meant to my family. We all looked at each other with very perplexing gazes, like we all wanted to say WTF to each other but as soon as we looked at each other, he went over to where he was sitting prior to this incident. My brother went over to talk to him a few minutes later, but I forget what he said to him. Nothing noteworthy if I recall, but I'll update this post on what he said to my brother during this encounter when I ask him.

Later that night, he and my dad were outside smoking and gave my dad a rock. It was a dark brown rock with dark orange streaks passing through the rock. I think my dad gave it to my mom and my mom threw it away but I'll update the post with an image of it if she still has it. My mom believed that the rock was some sort of bad omen. I kid you not, this really did happen. My brother and I think it's a clever prank that my mom has pulled, but she usually cracks when this happens and we ask her a few times. I would think she wouldn't joke about this in the first place, but it's the only logical thing that we could possibly come up with. Even the day following, my brother and I asked my mom about this incident and she remained very adamant about her having no involvement in this. My dad isn't the prank pulling kind of guy and wasn't even there to see it go down.

No negative connotation, but it's just not in his nature to ask a stranger to do something like that. So it eliminates him from doing something like this. We asked him anyway and to no surprise he said he had no involvement. I know this seems incredibly unbelievable and I agree it totally does, but it did happen and it's a creepy interaction we'll likely never forget. I'm not a believer in the supernatural, but if I did think it was just a prank, I wouldn't have spent time posting it here. I know this is not usually what people post here, but I don't know where else to post this. But for about three months, I've been experiencing hacking from what I assume to be another tenant in my building. It began with hacking my Bluetooth speaker.

I would be listening to something while doing housework, and the next thing I know, my device would be disconnected and the hacker would start playing very creepy and inappropriate music via my speaker. The main song that they would play is F'd with an Anchor by Aelstorm, a song I had never heard until this. If you choose to listen to this song, you'll see why this immediately freaked me out. I would try everything I could to turn it off but they would put the volume at full and play it over and over again and this happened on two separate occasions. After this I stopped using my bluetooth speaker to prevent this from happening again until they hacked into my playstation and began playing the same song again on full volume and

continued to play after I pressed the pause or exit my music app. I then unplugged my PlayStation and have not used it again. Finally, yesterday I had asked Google a question via my Google Nest device, and straight after I heard a ding on the device, signaling someone else was controlling it, which is only possible if I grant access, and is also the case with all the devices they had hacked so far. Straight after the ding, the hackers started playing creepy music again, different from the last time. It was an old song with a very creepy undertone, and the only words I remember are, times are getting hard, boy.

I straight away unplugged my device to stop the music and have stopped using the device altogether. The reason this had freaked me out more than the last few times is the fact that I was on the phone with a friend at the time, talking about some personal things I had going on. Therefore, I believe this hacker is able to hear me. I'm unsure whether this is due to them being a direct neighbor of mine or whether they have hacked my device to listen to me. I'm completely stumped with what to do now, as I've contacted my landlord and all they said was they'd send out a warning email to all tenants, but I needed to contact my internet provider for further action. I should have mentioned this earlier, but I live in student accommodations, and to make it cheaper everyone uses the sameFi but have separate logins, so the reason it's so easy for them to hack into my device is due to us using the same Wi-Fi. I then contacted my internet provider and they said they can't do anything about it.

I really don't know what to do anymore. I have now had to forfeit use of three separate devices to ensure this stops happening, but they continue to find a way to hack me. I feel incredibly unsafe and uneasy in my apartment, becoming paranoid someone is listening to me to celebrate my birthday. We went to a couple of parties since it was the weekend, then bar hopped the rest of the night. While we were at a bar, we met a group of guys that offered to buy us drinks. No biggie, and heck yeah, it was my birthday. We danced around with them for a bit before retreating back to our little section. One of the guys came over to our section and asked me to dance again.

I told him maybe in a bit and went back to partying with my girl. We didn't see them again until the club closed. The group of guys came over to us and of course were trying to find someone to go home with. The same guy that approached me earlier had approached me again. I laughed it off and thanked him for a good time. By this time we were all getting in the car. We had a designated driver and they made sure each of us got home safe after the club. Three nights later, me and my then boyfriend were knocked out as I had work the next morning.

My boyfriend worked nights but he was off this night. It's 3.41am and there's a knock at the door. My boyfriend goes to answer it and I'm walking behind him wondering who could possibly be at the door at that time of night. We lived in a not so good area so the porch lights would work when they wanted to and now wasn't one of those times. As my boyfriend opens the door, the person at the door says, excuse me ma'am, I can't get my car to start. And as he looks up, I immediately recognize him as the man from the club. I scream, and my boyfriend catches on and closes the door. Me and him had a few laughs when I told him about the guy at the club so when I told

him that was him, he opened the door back, I guess to confront him, but he was gone. We hadn't seen a car but again, it was dark. I don't know how this man found where I live other than following us home that night. I still get the chills thinking about what may have happened if my boyfriend wasn't there that night. I'm a 26 year old female and I live in a flat building in a good area. It's long, windy cul-de-sac so there's not many cars coming in and out unless it's people leaving or coming home from work. My boyfriend is away to Thailand for a month and we usually take the dog out together at night. I went myself which I was fine with, I'm usually feeling safe. Last week at around 8pm I left the flat to take my dog for a pee.

My dog is extremely excitable, especially around other people. She just had her spay surgery, she has a cone on her head and stitches that have to heal. I'm waiting for my dog to do her business and a car pulls in and drives slowly past me. The guy did a friendly neighborly nod towards me so I did a small smile back, you know, to be polite. The guy parks at the front of the building and I'm at the other side of the car park on the grass with my dog. I'm watching my dog, trying to get her to hurry up because it was freezing. I look up and the man has stood outside of his car, now staring at me. I felt freaked out by this and I turn my attention back to my dog.

I keep looking over my shoulder and he's staring with this creepy smile on his face now. I looked away again for a second and he was walking around the road slowly toward us. I'm a really friendly person, I can be paranoid and aware as any woman should be at night but something about him made me feel scared. He's walking so slow as if he wants to talk to me so I hide behind a van and I'm telling my dog to hurry up and pee. I can't see him anymore which terrified the life out of me. All I hear are footsteps coming towards us. The guy peeks his face around the van and my dog goes nuts. She's jumping around, barking aggressively which she never does with people and the guy doesn't take this as a reason to leave.

My dog is showing that he doesn't want his presence, but even though she's doing this, he continues walking towards us slowly. I start backing up and say to him to please leave, as she's just had surgery and she's too excited. In the most quiet, sinister voice, he asks, What's your name? I couldn't really hear him. He kept repeating the question.

I eventually understood what he was saying, and my dog is still going absolutely nuts at him. I say again, Please, my dog just had surgery. You need to walk away. She's too excited. Ignored again, and he walks towards us, asking my name. So I start walking away from him, and he ponders for a minute, still smiling, creepily may I add, and he eventually backs up slowly, still facing me. I swear he did this for at least 20 seconds. He walks back to his car, looking over his shoulder at me, then stands back at his car and stares for another three minutes.

I pretend my dog is doing something when she's really just being a pain in the butt and just standing there, and I look up and he's gone. I'm shaking, sending my sister voice notes about what's going on, and she's telling me to just go inside, but she doesn't realize that I'm legitimately paralyzed in fear. Eventually, I see a woman and her son rock up to the front door so I gain control of myself and half jog over with my dog to go inside the same time as them. The front of our building has glass doors. I glance in and the man is standing there, seemingly waiting for us. I told the woman, this man's been following me and my dog. I'm scared. She walks in with me. The man sees that I'm not alone and walks right past us out of the

building again. I run into the lift with my dog, get in, and lock my doors. I decide to tell my two male neighbors about it as my boyfriend is away and they agree to run downstairs if I ever need them. I took a picture of his car in registration as my twin sister gets the train home late at night after work and I want her to be wary of him. Well, today I was out with my dog at 11am, just doing our usual walk around the block. We walk into the building and as we're heading to the lift, I see the guy peek his head around the corner. He was looking for me, and he started walking towards me. At first I didn't recognize him, but then he smiled his creepy smile and I realized

who it was. He said, Hi. So I said hi, then beelined it for the lift. He came towards me and my dog again. I pressed the lift button, just watching it come down from the sixth floor. He comes and stands closer to me again, and my dog is going nuts at him. He asks what my name is, and he has kind of an accent. He asked again when I didn't understand what he was saying. I asked, What, my dog's name or mine?

And he goes, Yours. I froze and just said a fake name, and he started to move closer. I had no time to pay attention. The lift was about open and I could run away. He told me his name, and I just replied nice to meet you and finally the lift doors opened. I walked in and pressed the button to my floor hoping he'd leave me alone.

He ran behind me as I walked in and went, I'd like to see you again. Good God. Shivers ran down my spine. I was so creeped out. I just said that I had a boyfriend, but thanks. And as I said this, the lift doors were closing and he tried to stick his hand out to stop the lift from closing. But thank God they closed on time.

I'm only on the next floor up, so I was so afraid that he was going to run up as he could see what floor I got off at. I stopped for a moment and almost pressed a different floor but I just wanted to get into my home and lock the doors. The lift opens and he's not there so I beeline to my front door. There's a glass door to the stairs and I swear that I thought I saw someone coming up. I ran in and locked the front door. I was so confused by what had just happened. The next thing I do, I message everyone with the update, and they told me to phone the non-emergency police number, even just to get it on record, so I did that, and the police arrived in my flat at about 3pm. I explained everything to them, and they said that I could either A, get the police to go to his front door and tell him to knock it off or B. next time he does something like that tell him to leave me alone and if he doesn't phone the police as it would then actually be considered harassment.

But for now the police couldn't do more which is fair enough. I didn't want to anger him at this stage as it's not a crime at this point, but why can't he just leave me alone? I clearly have shown that I'm not interested. It just annoys me so much that I can't even leave my house looking ugly without someone being desperate enough for any female in the immediate area, and especially going about it in the weird way that he has. Now, I hadn't seen the guy since the last incident. However, I saw him today. Again was taking my dog out to the toilet at around 1pm. As soon as I left the main door, I look and the guy is sitting in his car. He clocks me. I start walking past his car when

he gets out and said hi to me. I completely ignored him and walked on by. I was preparing myself to shout at him if he kept following or talking to me. I went over to the grass and the guy is standing at his car, once again staring. I'm a bit further away so I text my sister letting her know that he was at his car watching me. She didn't reply so I phoned one of my male neighbors and he quickly got his shoes on and said that he was coming down the stairs. He was at his car, watching me. She didn't reply, so I phoned one of my male neighbors, and he quickly got his shoes on and said that he was coming down the stairs. I look back at the man, and it seems as though he has his phone out, and he's recording me.

I started shaking, working myself up to the point of confronting him and telling him to leave me alone. The next thing I know, my sister bolts out of the building and fast walks over to me and my dog. She said know, my sister bolts out of the building and fast walks over to me and my dog. She said as soon as she came out of the building, she saw him back inside of his car with the car door fully open and his back was turned to her because he was watching me. So she saw it this time. He looked at her briefly and watched her walk over to me. He started staring at us both. And that's when my male neighbor gets outside and walk over to me. They started staring at us both, and that's when my male neighbor gets outside and walked over to us. The man continued watching as I told them both

that I think he was waiting for me to get back into the building because why was he just sitting there? My sister had had enough, so she told me and my neighbor to take the dog for a walk and stormed over to the guy's car. She said, excuse me, and he was shocked. She stood right in front of his car and explained that he needs to leave me alone, and I'm not interested. I told him the dog had surgery and he wouldn't leave, which is unacceptable. She also said that I had mentioned about my boyfriend, so he needs to leave me alone. He just nodded and mumbled a few times, and she said he even looked frightened. She walked back into the building, so we took the dog on a walk, and when we got back, the guy was gone.

Probably got out of his car and ran back into his flat. I mean, he made me uncomfortable, so she did it to him. And now, if anything else happens, I'm phoning the police as they would then say that it's harassment. In 1977, I had taken time off of work to have a baby and stay at home with her. Trouble was, I still needed an income, so my mother had hired my younger sister and me to do the dirty back-breaking work at her antique store while she took care of her first infant granddaughter. I know that might sound harsh, but it was an informal system that gave me a break from child-rearing while bringing in some extra money.

One day, my sister and I were working together and my mom had just gotten a truckload of European oak furniture that needed to be cleaned and polished, so we were busy working away when a handsome young man walked into the store. He started talking to my sister, who was 16 at the time, introducing himself as Ted Smith. Our mom's maiden name was also Smith and it also happened to be the name of the antique store, so I remember my sister and the man having a good old laugh that we could all be related. He ended up picking up a big old armoire but said that he'd have to go get his truck since at the moment he was driving his VW Bug. But before he left, he asked my sister and me if we wanted to go out to dinner that night with him.

We were sweaty and dirty from work, I had a baby to care for and sis already had a boyfriend so we both politely declined. Ted then asked me to ride with him to get his truck so he could drop off his bug at the auto shop for repairs but by that point I had to go home to get to my infant right away because I was still nursing her and I thought my breasts were going to begin to leak at any moment. However, he wouldn't give up on trying to get one or both of us away from the shop. He said that he could come back at 10pm that evening for his armoire and asked whether one or both of us would be there. Again, we declined, telling him that we'd be closed and were busy after hours.

But Ted was persistent and asked us about the next night. Once again, we told him no, so he switched to early morning, but by that stage we were so weirded out by his behavior that we told him that he'd have to just swing by during regular operating hours. In the end, he said he was sorry, but he couldn't buy the armoire if we couldn't be flexible. We hated to give up the sale but after he had been there for over two hours we thought that he was just looking and taking up our time. We still had a lot of work to do on the furniture that had just arrived in the shop and finally we just wanted to finish our work and go home. At 6pm as we were leaving his VW bug was parked outside and he asked whether we want to go for coffee, and he especially seemed to want my sister to go. We told him thanks, but no thanks, even making out that we might join him another time.

It was a straight up lie though, as he was thoroughly giving us the creeps by that stage. After he drove off in his Bug, we really didn't think of it again. Until the next year, when his picture appeared in the paper. His name wasn't Ted Smith. It was Bundy. Ted Bundy. As in THE Ted Bundy. I'm not kidding you. It still sends chills up my spine just to write about it and sis and I still talk about it occasionally. We were two lucky young women that day. If either of us had agreed to go, we would have been murdered like the at least 30 other women Bundy had kidnapped. I'm a 20 year old female and I work part time at a small business in my local mall and usually work alone. I'm a sales associate so I'm required to talk to customers and encourage them to buy things.

It was the last hour of my shift when a creepy man came in. He was about mid 40s and everything about him was just kind of odd. I.e. clothes didn't fit, expensive shoes, just socially awkward. He originally asked a pretty standard question about a less expensive item that I happily answered. After this though, he continued to ask questions almost as if though he wanted to keep my attention on him. He then asked if he can try out our most expensive item in the store, which is a massage chair, and I say sure, we let everyone try it out. At this point, I just thought that he was an innocent yet socially awkward guy. He gets in the chair to try it out and continues to ask unusual

questions. We chit-chat a bit and I tell him the massage chair's features and the price of it. All of a sudden, the questions get more personal. He asks what high school I went to and if I missed it. Me being naive, I said the high school I went to and that I don't miss going. He said some story about a teacher that I've never heard of and he said he missed high school a lot. He asked if I lived around there to which I avoided the question but implied that I lived close. He then repeatedly asked me the price of the chair and asked me to calculate the price along with our second most expensive item in the store. I thought he was fully interested and I was convinced that he was going to buy it. We made commission on the chair

so I ignored his creepiness because I wanted to make the sale. He kept insisting that he needed to walk out with the chair today and that he has a truck that is big enough to hold it. It seemed that I had finally answered his questions to his liking because I was able to walk away a bit. He then made a phone call and started describing how I look, my age, where I live approximately, and what store I worked at. He then said to the person on the phone, We got one. We got one. I had suspicions that he was creepy, but this just about confirmed it. I asked him from behind the cashier's counter,

You're not talking about me, right? He shook his head no. He then stood up from the chair and said that he'll not be buying the chair today. I was so scared and alone. No one else around me but me and him and I ran to the back and grabbed all my stuff and pulled out my pocket knife. He then left the store and hung out right outside the only entrance slash exit. I didn't want to leave but I couldn't stay inside the mall. I waited for him to go out of sight then quickly locked the store doors and ran outside to my car. I called my manager and she said that I have to close the store properly, i.e. turn off the lights and count the register, so she told

me to go into a nearby store in the mall and call a security escort. I did just that and was escorted back to the store to close up and was escorted back to my car with no further incident. I live in a city with one of the highest rates of human trafficking in the country. Do you think that I was potentially being targeted? To be continued... My mother and myself decided to visit Nevada City, Canada on a whim. It's an old-timey Victorian-era mining and logging town built in 1856. Look at a picture on Google if you really want to see a creepy town. It looks haunted without even having to try. After eating lunch at a brewpup, we decided to stroll around the massive Pioneer Historical Cemetery on the outskirts of town.

It wasn't quite dusk, but the trees are really tall in this area, so daylight is hard to gauge, and it usually feels later than it is. This cemetery was sprawling. I mean, most Pioneer cemeteries are, because of the high mortality rate of the time. There are lots of child graves. As we progress through the cemetery, it starts like a proper cemetery with large ornate tombstones and mausoleums, marble obelisks and family plots, etc. But that's what's wild about this cemetery is that it stretches on almost forever into the woods. Spooky, but this isn't a paranormal story. As we follow the cemetery deeper and deeper into the woods, it becomes harder to tell what's a grave or not and it's getting more and more wild and overgrown. It eventually devolved into just wilderness with the occasional sign of homeless camps like abandoned tents and bags of trash. Luckily, the trees were opening up and more daylight was

coming through and we ended up in an open area with a large solitary juniper tree, tall brush and a few random graves. I sort of tripped over something and it turned out to be a purse, like a large designer purse and it looked super old like it had been there a while. Looking up from the purse about 10 yards ahead, I saw what looked like a pile of woman's clothing, but then I noticed in my horror a tangled mess of hair, and I froze. Did you ever know something without actually knowing something? I knew that this was a dead woman's body, down to my core. I put a hand out and stopped my mom, who was trailing behind me. Get your phone. Call the police. That's a dead body over there. And she immediately

started dialing 911 because like me, she just knew. Then it gets bananas. As my mom and I are discussing the situation, we had her attention turned away from the corpse. When we look back at the body, I swear to god, she was sitting up with her back turned to us. She was wearing a bright red trench coat, and she had super grimy blonde hair that was more standing up than laying on her shoulders. It's like the grime in her hair allowed it to defy gravity. Slowly she turned her head over her shoulder like something out of a horror movie and spotted us. She literally jumped to her feet, lightning fast, and turned to face us. Her front was a mess of torn clothing and she was barely covered. In the weirdest gait I've ever seen, she rapidly advanced

on us in a jerking and lurching fashion. Her hands were desperately trying to keep herself covered. My first thought was that she had been assaulted or something. She kept trying to speak, but it was like she couldn't form words, only making short, high-pitched squeaks. As she closed on me, she stopped and pointed down in excitement at the purse that I had tripped over. I asked if it was hers, and when I did, her expression changed into a horrible smirk. It still haunts me, and suddenly, she was slowly starting to undress herself and we had to shout to get her to stop. By this point, we had the cops on the way.

We said that we had found someone in serious distress. Be that as it may, we both knew that this was not a safe situation for us and we quickly backed away, turned, and just cooked it out of there. When we follow up with the police out of concern and morbid curiosity, they said whoever we found must have fled because they didn't find her. I hope to God that she's okay and gets the help that she desperately needs. So this event happened over the weekend while I was home from college for my mom's birthday. On Saturday night I had a couple of beers with my girlfriend who was spending the weekend at her house because my parents are kind of super chill and at about 12.30am, a few minutes after my parents went to bed, I went to the back porch to grab a couple of more beers for myself and my girlfriend who was waiting in the basement where we planned to watch Game of Thrones for a while before going to bed. I opened the back door and stepped onto the back porch. Immediately the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I felt like I was being watched from the tree line. My back porch overlooks the backyard which leads directly into a thick woods.

I thought nothing of it at first because I always feel a little spooked going outside at night, but as I opened the cooler, I heard it. In my mind, it was unmistakable. The agonizing screams of what sounded like my next door neighbor and her teenage daughter. I won't say their names because of Reddit creeps, but what's even more terrifying is that I swear that they were screaming a very specific thing. Sam. Help us, please, Sam. Which is my name. Now, I was drunk and already on edge, so frankly I turned around without the beers and locked the door behind me as I went back inside. Then I heard my mom's voice calling from upstairs asking if I'd heard it. I responded yes and asked if she knew what it was. She didn't have a clear answer and could only speculate,

but she knew for a fact that our neighbors were both inside their home. To be continued... notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm 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.