The Lets Read Podcast - 222: SOMETHING'S WRONG WITH MY FRIEND | 25 True Scary Stories | EP 210

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Moving Away, Crazy Friends, & Cleaners... 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/

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Until May 30th, purchase four new Michelin passenger or light truck tires and receive up to $70 by prepaid MasterCard. Conditions apply. Details at Michelin.ca. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at TreadExperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at Treadexperts.ca slash locations. Hi Joel, my name is Allison, I'm 36 years old and at the end of 2018 I decided to start my own business. You can call it basic if you want but I've always been passionate about cutting and styling hair. I was the oldest of six girls and we grew up in a very poor household so not only did I have to learn to cut hair

but I needed to get good at it if I was going to keep myself and my sisters from being the laughing stock of the whole town. It was a skill I continued to practice until way into my high school and college years, but it wasn't a passion so much as an in-demand skill that I had. It was only years later when I started working in an office environment that I started to realize how much I really missed it. By the time I was an adult, my sisters, friends, and co-workers could all afford to go to professional stylists, so I just wasn't being pestered to do it anymore. For a while, it was a relief, but after 18 months working in mind-numbing, boring office job stuff, I was starting to lose my mind. Long story short, I realized that I actually missed cutting people's hair, and that I actually enjoy the process of it.

It wasn't so much the actual cutting and styling, although it is kind of therapeutic once you know what you're doing. It's how happy a good haircut makes a person, regardless of their age or gender. Something so small can make someone's whole day, make them feel like the best version of themselves. Sure, it wasn't curing cancer or anything like that, but it was a way to make people feel good about themselves while making enough money to build towards a brick-and-mortar business. Suddenly, I went from being a despairing commuter to an excited young entrepreneur, and over the next year or so, my business continued to grow and thrive. I specialized in home visits, which more often often than not involve folks that can't otherwise get to a salon or barber. That means a lot of older and disabled folks, folks on end of life care, maybe only 1 in 10 of my clients was some wealthy sub-urbanite who

wanted the convenience of a home visit, most others didn't have the choice. But then, the big pandemic hit and my business was hit hard. Thankfully, I didn't have too much overhead at that stage, which meant that I didn't go bankrupt, and I was also lucky enough to have a means of supplementing my income. A friend told me about an agency who organized cleaning staff for office buildings and service departments, and with the demand for deep cleaning going through the roof, there was plenty of work to go around. The company was super sketchy, mostly paid in cash, and you had to buy all of your own equipment, but money was money, and boy did I need it. So, almost every morning for nearly a whole year, I showed up at some dingy little office

in the north end of town, and was given a handful of addresses that I needed to visit, then went off either alone or in a group to clean wherever needed cleaning. Probably as some way of scamming the IRS, this company treated us as private contractors and paid us by the square foot, but then if you actually got a largest apartment all to yourself to clean, you could actually make quite a lot of money in just a few hours of work. It wasn't almost as much as I had been making as a stylist, but it was what I needed to survive until I could follow my dreams again. So one day, I showed up at the office, got my jobs for the day, then headed off in my car to the first address. First two jobs were kind of small, but then when I arrived at the third address, I found it was way, way bigger than the other two.

Considering the neighborhood it was in I should have known the building would be as fancy as it was but I was still taken aback when I actually saw the place. The penthouse suites at the top looked like they cost more money than I'd ever make in two lifetimes and even the lobby looked like it could have been a fancy hotel. I had introduced myself to a doorman just to get inside the place and then once I was inside, another employee offered to guide me to the floor in the elevator. His name tag said Carl, he was a real nice guy and we chatted on the ride up as I wondered who might actually live in a place like this. That question stayed with me long after I should have forgotten about that third apartment. Back then, I'd have killed to know which actors or sports stars actually lived there, but now, I don't think that I do want to know what kind of people call that place home.

We went all the way up to the fifth floor, but these places were walk-up apartments, so the building was way taller than that suggests, and the apartments were huge. I was given a temporary keycard by one of the staff, and after using it to open up the apartment that I was set to clean, my jaw just dropped to the floor. It was the single most opulent, luxurious living place that I'd ever witnessed with my own eyes. And it was trashed, and it did not smell good. It looked like someone had thrown the party of the century in that place, the kind of party only stupidly rich people could throw. There were empty bottles of champagne everywhere, all kinds of fancy little snack things just going bad on countertops. There were even, like,

clothes all over the place too. Odd items at first, then more revealing things, all leading me to believe that for some folks, it had been a very wild party. Usually the tenants leave some kind of note detailing what they wanted clean, but his place had nothing, and the agency didn't mention anything special about a party that I needed to clean up after. I know this sounds like a nightmare, but it wasn't. I could just take a few pictures on my phone, spend all day cleaning the place, then take home a lot more money in hourly pay than I would have done otherwise. Sure, I'd no doubt encounter some pretty gross surprises in the process, but I was in dire need of the cash, and such a huge mess presented a pretty

gross but super lucrative opportunity for me. So, I took my pictures, sent them over to the agency like, oh no, gonna be here all day, and got to work cleaning the place. I remember thinking how that party must have been wild. Every empty bottle was some sort of bougie liquor or beer, and there was a lot of evidence of hard drug use, and almost everything that had once been in a shelf, in a box, or in a cabinet had either been knocked over or straight up tossed on the floor. I remember seeing dozens of little glass chess pieces, a few of them chipped from where folks had stood on or kicked them. They must have been worth hundreds of dollars, but there they were, all smashed and damaged like replacing them was just

no big deal. The kitchen was similarly trashed as the living area and that's when I realized that the party hadn't taken place the previous night or the night before that or any other time in the previous week. There was all this super old looking party food laid on the countertops, and it was all so rotten that it was literally festering. I mean, things were moving around in some of these moldy blobs that used to be canopies, and I realized what the bad smell was. I'm not exactly the squeamish type, but the smell was so god awful that it had me gagging for a second. And thank god I had two masks on at the time, and I put both of them on before tackling that hot mess.

But even with two masks, I could still smell all that rot, and I swear a lesser woman would have puked more than once getting it all into trash bags. Everything had been relatively normal up until that point. Well, as normal as you could get for the disgusting aftermath of some glitzy party, but they only started to get really weird when I opened up the refrigerator. Inside were yet more bottles of booze, either unopened or corked, and a bunch more of those fancy little hors d'oeuvres things, considerably less decayed than the unrefrigerated stuff. But what really caught my attention was the little cardboard tray that looked very familiar to me. I had a friend back in middle school who used to be a diabetic, and she kept all of her insulin in this little fridge and miniature glass bottles. I understand the technology is very different these days, and most folks use a special pen, but back in the day, her parents had to load up an actual syringe from a glass bottle. I know whatever was in that plastic tray was some kind of medicine or drug, but I have no idea which one. It sure didn't say insulin on any of those bottles, but being a familiar concept, I didn't find it all that suspicious.

Someone at the party probably had some kind of medical condition and needed medication on hand for it. I mean, it's a simple enough explanation, right? But what didn't have a simple explanation were the Polaroid pictures scattered all over the apartment. They all depicted the various antics of the night before, and as raucous as the aftermath might have made the party seem, the pictures made it look kind of wholesome. They showed what looked like a lot of old friends drinking and dancing and smiling and laughing. But then, as I started to find more and more of them during the second phase of cleaning, it was almost like you could pinpoint the moment when things started getting weird.

Keep in mind that I was finding these at random. It wasn't like an old style flip book or a photo album or anything like that. But the more I found, the more I was able to piece together what the party looked like as the night went on. I started seeing a lot of drug use in the pictures. All kinds of stuff too and the more people took, the more that happy look in their eyes got replaced with something a little darker. People started to look meaner, leuder, even scary. I guess at some point people started to dress up in costumes because I started seeing a lot of folks wearing all kinds of different masks, you know what I mean, and some of them were really pretty expensive looking too, but then some of them were so ugly and demonic looking

that they just gave me the creeps really. I then found a few shots of a girl crying, not unusual at a big messy party like that, but still upsetting to see. I found another photo where it looked like someone was trying to comfort her, but then on closer inspection, I think they were actually laughing in the girl's face. I tossed that one into the trash bag that I was holding with contempt, realizing that I was cleaning up after some real jerks. Dumb teenagers making a mess like that is understandable, but there was something different about these people. There was something wrong with them. I try not to look at any more of the Polaroids as I clean the rest of the ground floor and it took me about four hours to actually get the place good as new.

I took a little break, went to get lunch and then came back renewed to get started on the second floor. I decided to take my time with it too because whatever waited for me up there had to be way worse than what I'd already cleaned downstairs. Arriving back, I swapped a little small talk with the employees, put on a podcast once I was back in the apartment, then walked to the stairs to face the music. I figured that it'd be bad up there, and God was I right. The bathroom was in just this disgusting condition. There was no poop at all, thankfully,

but there was a lot of other stuff that I didn't feel comfortable being anywhere near without a pair of very thick rubber gloves. I decided to swallow the frog, as they say, and get the bathroom cleaned up first before I moved on to both the master and guest bedrooms. It was gag-worthy, and I realized that I'd made a terrible decision to eat lunch before tackling it first, but I powered through and got her done before moving on to the guest bedroom. Upon walking into the guest room, I knew that there had been some type of bad juju going on there the night before. There were all these gross-looking toys all over the room, empty baggies next to the bed,

and there was broken wine glasses on the floor next to what looked like a few flecks of blood, honestly. It looked like an accident, but then there was just a bunch of other stuff in the room that gave me really bad vibes and made me think that something else might have happened. And that's about the same time that I noticed that one of the toys wasn't quite like the others. It was carved out of wood with these sharp jagged edges on all sides, and the design carved into it showed scenes that looked like they could be depictions of hell. It was always an irrational fear of mine that I was going to clean up evidence of some kind of crime. Not like a pool of blood or anything like that, but you know, fibers or other DNA or

something. And here I had actual blood in a bedroom after some wild party and thinking about it made me more suspicious by the second. I decided to not clean anything else until I checked the master bedroom. I felt a smidgen overdramatic as I did it, don't get me wrong, but I went ahead and did it anyways. The first thing I noticed about the master bedroom is that it actually looked like it had been spared most of the chaos elsewhere. I guess the homeowner was smart enough to lock the door or something else because aside from the bed having been used for god knows what, the only mess I could see were a bunch of Polaroids scattered all around the room. I was low-key relieved to see that there wasn't a dead body in there,

and also relieved that there seemed to be very little the way of trash to clear up. It seemed like the bloodstain was just an accident, and that I might actually be out of that place sooner than expected. So before I headed down for some hydrogen peroxide for the bloodstain in the guest room, I figured that I'd pick up the Polaroids and straighten up the beds so I could just tick off the master bedroom as being cleaned. Thing is, I didn't finish cleaning that big fancy apartment. I didn't even finish with the master bedroom. Because after I picked up the first couple of Polaroids, and the picture began to build of what had happened in that room, everything changed. And it changed fast. Remember I told you about the girl who was crying in the pictures downstairs, and then how it looked like some

idiot was just laughing at her? It's the same girl as in the photographs from the bedroom, and she's still crying, only she's surrounded by some of the same masked creeps from the Polaroid I saw downstairs. They're touching her, grabbing her, pulling her hair in some pictures, and she went from upset to looking downright terrified in just a few pictures. I found another Polaroid where it looked like a few of the masked men were dragging her somewhere. She was all blurry where I guess she was just struggling and I recognized the furniture from the master bedroom so I knew that it must have been taken almost right where I was standing. I frantically started to sift through the rest of the Polaroids,

arranging them on the bed to try and find out what happened to the crying girl after the masked men grabbed her. Slowly but surely, I found the photos that I needed, and I felt sick when I worked out what they'd done to her. It was all in still frames, not much to go on, but her fate was painfully clear. The guys in the mass had dragged her over to an open closet, then I audibly gasped as I saw them force her into the small looking trunk. There wasn't a picture of them actually closing or locking the thing, but they must have had to fold her up like an origami if she was actually going to fit in there.

But then the next thing, I'm finding a Polaroid of the trunk, closed and padlocked, presumably with the girl still inside. And that's when I realized that I was standing right in front of the same closet shown in the photos, and after reaching out with a shaking hand, I opened it up, praying that locked trunk wouldn't be waiting for me on the other side. But it was, and it broke me. I remember just running to the apartment's plug-in phone, but I couldn't work out how to call down to the desk, so I ended up running to the elevator and hammering the G button, then almost having a panic attack on the way down hyperventilating. I burst into the lobby shouting bolt cutters call the cops I need bolt cutters and 911. The bolt cutters were locked up in the janitorial closet but one of the building staff had a claw hammer that he kept around for minor repairs

so he grabbed that and went back up to the apartment to smash the padlock off the trunk. Watching the guy smash the lock off felt like it lasted forever. I mean, I know whoever was in there probably wasn't alive. They must have been in there for days, but there was always still a chance that they were still there. Still a chance we could bring them back from the brink of death. After showing him the Polaroids, we were both calling out, Hello, are you still alive? Hello? But there was no response from inside the box. I could tell from the way that it was moving that there was still something inside,

but it sounded dry as it shifted around inside. Finally, the padlock's metal link popped off after one of the guys strikes, and I braced myself for whatever we were about to find inside. When the guy swung open the lid, I caught a quick glimpse of folded up limbs before I covered my eyes and turned away. I expected the employee I was with to do the same, but his reaction wasn't as anything like I'd expected it to be. Instead of a horrified oh my god or anything like that, he just sounded confused. I turned back and saw that it wasn't a dead body that had been cramped up in the trunk. It was pieces of a mannequin, all picked apart and separated.

We had to double check the Polaroids to make sure that we'd seen the girl getting forced into the trunk and we did, but then they must have let her out before tossing the broken up mannequin in there. I can't tell you how much relief that was, but we were both still so shaken up from the panic that it hardly seemed like a moment to celebrate. We knew we had to get out of there to preserve whatever was left of any forensic evidence, and the employee called the cops right away when we got back down to the lobby. I figured that I should stick around to tell them what I saw but I waited almost an hour afterwards and no one showed up. In the end, I had to leave before the cleaning agency's office closed otherwise I wouldn't be able to collect my money until the following morning. But I gave the

employee my contact details before I left expecting the cops to be in touch soon because why wouldn't they investigate something so messed up? But then, one day went, and then another, and then another, until I realized the cops weren't going to call. I even stopped by the building to talk to the employees, but the doorman wouldn't let me in without a good reason. I then called the front desk from my phone and asked if the nice man that I had dealt with was still there. Carl came to the phone and as much as it was great to hear his voice, the news wasn't good. He'd called the cops a second time after I left and once again they assured him that they'd send someone along to take a look. But just like the first time we called, Carl waited and no one showed. He then brought the whole thing up to the building manager who basically told him he'd be

fired if he didn't stop harassing tenants. It was Carl who told me that I should probably just let the whole thing go. It was just a crazy party thrown by some dumb rich idiots who didn't really lock a girl in a trunk for a few weeks, even though it really did look that way. I started to think that maybe he was right, that maybe I was just stressed about money and had overreacted. I mean, seeing how people could just waste money like that, maybe it got to me subconsciously and I just wanted to paint them as bad people. I could have probably convinced myself of that if I hadn't seen the Polaroids, if I hadn't seen the tears and the terror of that girl's face. Part of me just knows that they kept her in there, long enough that even if she did get out alive, she wouldn't be the same

again. Whoever owns that apartment likes trapping people in small spaces. It's like their thing, you know, and that's why they keep that mannequin in there. I had a crazy thought once, thinking that the partygoers were a cult that had used magic to turn that poor girl into a mannequin. That sounds like something a hacky horror writer might dream up. But on the other hand, a very rich individual using their money and influence to live out their sadistic fantasies, away from prying eyes. I don't think there's anything remotely unrealistic about that. Do you? Back when I was in middle school, I used to hang around with a group of neighborhood kids

around my own age. There were maybe half a dozen of us kids around my own age. There were maybe half a dozen of us, and looking back on it, we fit some pretty standard friend group archetypes. We had our wise and cautious leader, a reckless daredevil, a mama's boy, an all-American sports kid, one boring quiet kid, and the crazy one. We all got along well enough, even the crazy kid in spite of how annoying he could be. This is back when parents didn't so much involve themselves in what was going on in their kid's minds, and we just got told to go out and play, so I myself didn't realize that

there was something wrong with the kid, until years later. This kid's family were the most well-off in the neighborhood, which wasn't saying all that much, but they worked their butts off and basically paid no attention to their crazy kid. He told us they figured he was just smart and a free spirit, but with hindsight being what it is, his parents should have gotten him help before it all the kid was smart, so they bought him all kinds of telescopes and science books and encyclopedias, all kinds of things he never used or cared for and would oftentimes trash in a fit of frustration. Then one day, I was exploring in the woods near my house with a couple of friends when, suddenly, we found ourselves on an unpaved road near the crazy kid's house. A contractor had been digging a foundation for a new house, and we often played in the pit in gravel piles.

Down in the pit was the crazy kid, doing something we couldn't see until we got closer. Being boys, we needed no excuse to scramble down into a deep pit and explore, so skidding down the sides of the pit, we ran over to him. When we got to him, we noticed that he had what looked a lot like a chemistry set with him, and although I couldn't see exactly what it was he was doing right away, I did notice the huge, wild smile on his face. A big frog from the swamp had somehow fallen into the big pit, and this boy had captured it. Using pins from his biology kit,

he had nailed it to the ground on its back through all four legs. The terrified frog was still alive when he cut it open with a scalpel. Then, I guess out of morbid curiosity, he poured a bottle of hydrochloric acid into the frog's open chest cavity. Four decades later, and I still can't seem to shake what I saw and heard that day. He was laughing out loud as he held the bottle and scalpel, watching with glee as the subject squirmed in agony. I was so freaked out that I just ran. I caught a bunch of guff for it and got called a chicken later, but that's what I did. I'd just never seen that kind of stuff before, even if it was just a frog. I ran all the way back home, ran into the open garage, then climbed into the loft and just cried my eyes out. I could not get the sights and sounds out of my mind. I just couldn't for the life of me believe that anyone

could be so cruel. Eventually, I fell asleep from exhaustion in some old scratchy army blankets my dad kept in the loft, and then I awoke to what was the sound of my mother calling me for dinner. I still felt sick. I wasn't hungry, and I remember thinking that I would never be hungry again. I didn't feel like I could tell my parents what had happened. I didn't think they would punish me, but I knew that they would call the boy's parents and then my life would just be torture from getting called a snitch as well as a chicken. I had to get up and push my food around the plate until my mom excused me from the table. That night, reliving the whole thing in my dark bedroom,

I decided that I would never, ever hang out with that boy again. I never spoke of what happened with my other friends, but I know that they were affected, maybe not as much as me, but they clearly were. They stopped hanging around with the crazy kid too, and he became even more isolated and frustrated, especially with his mother. His mother even came staggering around to our parents' places one night, asking why no one liked her boy. But she knew why no one liked him. It was the talk of the neighborhood for weeks. Years went by and eventually he dropped out of school and disappeared into some private program for kids who needed special help. And we were glad to hear it, but too little too late if you ask me.

I'm actually 55 years old and thinking about this experience that occurred to me more than 40 years ago still upsets me when I think about it and I know that I'll probably have nightmares because I brought it up tonight. It was without a doubt the most disturbing thing I'd ever experienced. In 2016, I decided I was going to move out of my hometown and make it all by myself across the country. My entire extended family all lived in my hometown and none of my cousins or any other family members had any desire to leave.

I wanted to be the one who changed that for my family. Of course they were upset being that my family is extremely close but it was time to experience this world outside of my own backyard. I moved from a small town in Idaho to a somewhat small town in Maine. I was so excited to start my life in Maine. I was told that the town that I was moving to had a small summer tourist boom, but most of the time it was quiet and scenic, which is exactly what I wanted. I visited a few months before the move and met a lot of locals who all seemed so lovely. The community was so friendly and it appeared as if though everyone there just watched each other's backs.

The time finally came and I moved with my fiancé Ricky. The move was mostly harmless, a few lost tempers, but ultimately it went smoothly and by 6pm we were inside our new home. Unfortunately, the blissful enjoyment of our new home didn't last very long. At some point in the middle of the night, I didn't see the time. We were awoken by a strange sound. It almost sounded like a door slamming. Ricky got out of bed and went to go see. When he returned to the bedroom several minutes later, he said nothing seemed strange or out of place.

However, the time it took for him to check and come back seemed way too long. When I asked him what took so long, he told me that the front door was unlocked, which isn't like us, but he said that it was possible with all the excitement from the day that he may have left it unlocked. So, he spent a few minutes looking around the house just in case whatever we heard was an intruder. Thankfully, no intruders, whatever the sound was, was gone now. He proceeds to kiss me goodnight and told me not to worry about it and we go to bed. That night was rough. I couldn't sleep at all. Call it women's intuition or call it whatever you want, but something deep down just didn't feel right. That morning we had our

coffee and continued to decorate and set up our new home. It wasn't feel right. That morning we had our coffee and continued to decorate and set up our new home. It wasn't until about 1pm that we finally got ready to leave the house and on the front steps was a package with a note. And the note just said, welcome, enjoy the house. Ricky grabbed the package and opened it up inside and it was a drinking glass. Just a regular drinking glass. It looked old but there was nothing special about it. He laughed and made some jokes about people in Maine being just weird or something and I laughed but mostly felt this certain sense of uneasiness. I just knew that something was wrong about this. After the drinking glass package, we went to the store and ran all our necessary errands. Moving is really exhausting. Sometimes you don't realize all the stuff you need

and forget until you're all settled in. That night we had dinner, got the internet set up, and watched a movie together. I felt off and anxious the entire evening. We got into bed at around midnight and shortly after midnight we heard three loud bangs. Neither one of us was asleep yet as we had just got into bed a little while ago. Ricky made his way to the door slowly and before he could answer the door, bang, bang, bang. Three loud bangs reverberated through the house again. Ricky shouted from her side of the door, Who is it? And what I heard next surprised me. A very old woman shakily shouted, Please, I need help.

There's an intruder out here and I'm not safe. My fiancé responded, Okay, just hang tight, I'm calling the police. The woman shrieked almost instantly, I stood in the doorway, clenching my sweater. Ricky turned to me, looking for my input, and I just couldn't speak. I just shrugged. If this woman truly was in danger, we were just leaving her for whatever may be out there. Ricky motioned for me to get into the closet that was right outside our bedroom

and call the police. I got into the closet right away and called the authorities. Once he heard me whispering to the dispatch, Ricky opened the door and some very old frail woman came barreling inside. She started to yell at Ricky. Shut the door right away! I saw them out there! Ricky didn't say anything, much like me. He was trying to process what was even happening. The old woman said again, Who else is in the house?

Ricky looked at her and said, It's just me in the house. Now, here, sit down. Take a deep breath. Relax. I can call the police. The woman became frantic again and started to pace around the living room and said, my husband is out there. Please, please, you need to help him. You need to let him hide in here.

They'll get him. Ricky looked sympathetic, but told the old woman, Listen, I'm sorry ma'am. If it's not safe out there, I'm... I'm going to call the police now. They'll be able to help. With the flip of a switch, the old woman stopped with the erratic behavior, and in a much deeper and almost sinister sounding voice she said, Open the door now, or I'll drain the life out of you. Ricky was not amused.

He looked at the old woman, pointed at the door and said, What? You get out right now. The old woman skipped to the door like a freaking child, and when she opened the door, two much younger and much larger men ran in and began to tackle my fiancé to the ground. I stayed hidden the best I could in the closet and watched the struggle from the crack in the door. I held my breath that the police would be there any second. I could see the men kicking Ricky and I could hear Ricky coughing and struggling all while the old woman cheered and cackled.

I don't know exactly how long it was. It was probably only moments, but the police lights could be seen through the windows. All three intruders ran out the back door, as if they knew exactly where the door was. On the way out the door, the old woman grabbed the package with the glass and she yelled, Enjoy the house, Ricky! The fact that somehow she knew his name made me cry. Even more than I already was and by the time the cops got inside the intruders were out the door and gone. Ricky got to his knees and struggled to get to his feet after the beating he received.

We gave the police all the information we could think of, the random package with the note, which the woman took so we didn't even have that in our possession. We told them that the intruders seemed to know the layout of the house well and we were able to give the cops a mostly accurate description of the intruders as they weren't wearing masks at all. The fact that I could see their faces and eyes made them so much scarier. The two men looked sort of clean cut, both young and they were bigger and muscular looking and both had a little bit of scruff but the neat kind of scruff. One dirty blondish and the other had dark hair. The one with the darker hair was balding and the other man had his hair pulled into a bun. The older woman was

extremely frail and small looking and she had this skin that looked as if though it were almost dripping off of her body. She had long straight white hair and from what I could see from my vantage point, no teeth and I'm not sure about that last bit. The police were unable to catch these intruders but that didn't matter to us. The next day we stayed in a hotel for a few nights and then moved back to Idaho. Being alone with no family during that ordeal nearly broke me and then more than ever I needed my family. I still live in Idaho to this day and I have no intentions of ever moving away after that nightmare. What's most frustrating is that I never did get my answers. I have no idea why we were targeted. I can see the events played out in my head as if it were

yesterday and it still makes me sick. The most frustrating and downright horrifying detail of the story is the details that my fiancé told me after we had already moved home to Idaho. Information he didn't tell the cops because he said it wouldn't have mattered anyway. That first night with the loud noise we had heard, Ricky said the door was unlocked. Well, that's true, but it was more than unlocked. The front door was wide open and so was the back door. The door the intruders ran out of the second night. Whoever these monsters were, they were in my home the night before. I have not slept right since this ordeal and I'm not sure that

I'll ever sleep right again. I attended college in NYU, which truly was an amazing experience. Hopefully there is some bobcat pride out there. And after completing my degree program, I decided to move back upstate instead of staying in the city. I figured that I could move home with my family for a little while, take my old job to save some money, and then search for a job in my field. What I didn't realize was that my move home would end up being one of the worst nights of my life. I didn't have much to my name when I lived in the city for NYU. My parents paid for me to ship most of my belongings back home since they weren't

able to come help me physically move home. My father was out of town for business and my mom is partially disabled and is unable to drive. I never got my license when I was younger. I never needed a car so I couldn't drive either. My only way home from the city was the bus which I didn't mind. I figured I could put my headphones in and just drift away for the three hour or so bus ride. The ticket for my bus ride home was an overnight bus ride and it was significantly cheaper to do overnight and I was broke so this was my only option. I arrived at the bus station early and got myself all situated in my seat and I was ready for my 10pm departure from the station. We left right on time and everything was going smoothly. There weren't very many people on the bus but like I said I didn't mind the dark and desolate bus ride. It was almost

cozy sitting in the back of the bus listening to music. This is one of those big buses with the bathroom in the back of the bus and I was sitting right next to the bathroom at the very back. I know it's kind of gross being so close to the bathroom but it is also the most cozy and secluded place on these types of buses. Being that there weren't very many people on the bus either, I wasn't worried about anything being too gross. About one hour into our trip home, a guy got up and used the bathroom. Nothing too weird about that. What was weird was the extremely awkward eye contact between him and I before he entered the bathroom. What was even weirder than that was the fact that he was in there for a long time,

like a really long time. At first I just thought that he was doing his business, but after 30 minutes I was kind of concerned and I had to use the restroom myself. I finally knocked on the door because I couldn't hold my bladder anymore and surprisingly he opened the door as soon as I knocked. He stared at me like I was bothering something very important, and with anger in his voice but still whispering, the man said, Can I help you, little lady? I was incredibly uncomfortable when I responded nervously, Sorry, sir, I just need to use the bathroom. The man stared at me a bit then walked out of the restroom. I walked in and said thank you as I passed the man.

When I was closing the door, I looked up and the man was standing right outside the door, still staring at me. I locked the door and as I sat there in the bathroom, the man was slightly knocking on the door. Not banging or knocking hard. He wasn't trying to open it or anything like that either. He was just continually tapping the door, almost rhythmically, and in a loud whisper, I exclaimed, one minute, sorry, I'll be right out. The tapping didn't stop. I finished my business and I was terrified to open the door, but I just wanted to get out of the bathroom. When I opened the door, my nightmarish vision in my head was true. The man was standing there staring at me. His eyes were messed up. He had these huge baleful eyes and these massively dilated pupils.

I knew what was probably happening here but I didn't want to assume anything. I said excuse me and slid by the man who just slightly moved to the side so I can squeeze around in my spot. I had already mentally decided at this point that I was going to grab my stuff and move to the front of the bus as soon as he went back into the bathroom. I got into my spot and quietly started gathering my things so I could make one swift movement. The man entered the bathroom and then immediately came out of the bathroom and stood right next to my seat. I couldn't get by him, even if I wanted to. These back seats next to the bathroom were like a small nook. It's angled off in a way where there are no seats next to you, so the man was standing in this

angled walkway blocking my way out. I immediately thought about screaming, but I feared what that might do. There were also a few small children on the bus and I didn't want to alarm them. I'm not sure why I was thinking about other people in this situation instead of taking care of myself, but it's where my mind was. As I tried to contemplate my next move, the man turned to me and said, Where is he? He was still whispering and quiet but sounded angry. Trying to be calm but sounding nervous for sure, I responded, I'm sorry sir, I don't know what you're talking about. He slammed the seat in front of me and then bent down to my level.

I left him in the bathroom and when you came out, he was gone. He started to become visually more upset and angrier and started to inch closer to me. I put my hands up to create a solid distance between us and the man angrily said, I saw you looking at him and then you took him, didn't you? Didn't you? And he even started to shout. Thankfully, the bus driver must have known or seen something weird. He began to pull over and then made his way to the back of the bus. He could see that I was visually upset and that the situation was clearly hostile. He stood right behind the man and asked,

Excuse me, sir. Is there some kind of problem here? The man ignored the bus driver and continued to stare right at me. And now, in a full shout, the man yelled, Where is he? As he screamed, he was erratically nudging the seat in front of me. I just kept yelling at this point and hoped that the bus driver would do something. Finally, the bus driver told the man he had to step away. The man must not have liked this idea, as he stood up and screamed in the bus driver's face.

After his howl, he looked at the bus driver and screamed, So you took him! He slammed the bus driver to the ground and ran to the front of the bus. At this point you could hear the gasp of everyone on the bus as this clearly insane man sprinted to the front. Once he got to the front, I half expected him to try and steal the bus, but instead he like cannonballed his body into the door of the bus and once he was outside he just sprinted away.

I stood up and looked out the window, and this guy was like the flash, and within seconds, he was out of sight. The bus driver got behind the wheel and drove away quickly, and once we made it to a rest area, he checked on everyone, especially me, to make sure I was alright. He called the police and did what he was supposed to do. I talked to them and gave them a report on everything but given the extremely weird nature of the situation and where it took place, the cops told me that there really wasn't anything they could do for me.

All things considered, I'm extremely lucky that nothing worse happened to me that night. This could have been much worse but I'm so fortunate the bus driver got up when he did and honestly, I'm lucky the man decided to just get off the bus and run. I don't know if those buses have cameras or ways to track people, so I have no idea if they ever caught this guy or if he's just out there somewhere running around trying to find his imaginary friend. My advice to anyone taking public transportation in the middle of the night, please be safe and sit near a lot of people. Sometimes being nestled all cozy in the corner can be the worst mistake you can make. In 2010, me and my wife were starting our new life in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We both recently graduated with our masters, I got a job teaching at NC State, and my wife secured a job at a local hospital. After thousands of dollars of student debt, all the hard work seemed to pay off finally. That student debt is a whole other horror story for another day though. In the late summer months, we started our move from our old home in Philadelphia to North Carolina. We had most of our belongings already sent over to our new home except for one truckload that we were going to drive down ourselves. We rented one of those moving trucks and decided we were going to take that truck load in the middle of the night. I'm not the most confident driver in a truck, so we figured making this trip in the middle of the night would be most ideal because traffic would be less intense. For the most part, this was an accurate plan.

Traffic was light and the several hour drive went splendidly for the first big chunk of the trip. With about two hours left on our drive, I ended up running something over and basically exploding the tire. I was able to pull over safely because there was virtually no traffic where we were. The tire was already instantly flat. Whatever I ran over in the road wasn't just a nail or something, my tire seemed like it was annihilated. We remained calm and cool for a moment as we devised a plan. We didn't know if we had to call the moving truck company first or our insurance or someone else. We looked in the folder that the rental truck employee gave us and they had a special number to call in case of any traffic emergency. We deemed it an emergency and called

the number. After a couple of hoops, we got someone to come out and help us fix the tire, but it was going to be a little while before they showed up. A major inconvenience, but we figured that we could just sit tight for a while and watch YouTube or something on our phones. In hindsight, we forgot about the most important role. In any type of accident, you should alert the authorities. This would be a mistake on our part that almost had a definite disastrous outcome. Only a few minutes after getting off the phone with the rental company, my wife nudged me and said, Hey, there's someone behind the truck. I can see them in the mirror.

I looked in the mirror and sure enough, with the red lights of the truck reflecting off his black sweatshirt, was a person. I kept my eye on him for a second making sure he wasn't going to move. Again, not sure why I didn't just call the police, but the understanding and empathetic person that I am, my mind didn't jump to the police right away. And while I was staring at him in the mirror, she nudged me again and now with nervousness and fear in her voice she said, oh my god, look. I looked up from the mirror and another person was in front of the truck. I looked around and there were no other cars. These people had to have come from the trees on the side of the desolate road we were on. Within seconds, two more individuals emerged from behind the truck. It was a young woman and a man, probably in their early

twenties or something, and the woman gestured for me to roll down my window. I cracked it so I could hear her. In a soft but friendly voice she said, Hi there, I noticed you guys are in a bit of a jam. Not the good kind of jam. But anyway, would you like us to change your tire? We're all fairly handy when it comes to cars, aren't we guys? I looked at my wife and noticed she had texted 911, something I didn't even know you could do. I looked back at the girl outside and I said, Thanks, ma'am. That's sweet of you guys.

The truck company's going to be here any minute, though, and they're going to be fixing it for us. The woman, who never broke this hypnotic stare and over-the-top smile, looked around and thought for a second. Still smiling and chipper as ever, she responded, I see. Well, that's too bad. Hey, sir. It's cold out here. Do you think maybe we could get in the back of the truck until your repair guy shows up? I was completely torn up.

In any ordinary situation, I'm the guy who would pick up these kids, give them a ride, feed them, or anything. I also preached that even though there are horrible people in the world, most people are inherently good, but the situation just felt bad. The woman was smiling, but the man behind her was a big burly man and stoic as can be. He didn't break a smile or even blink, I feel like. The person in the front of the truck was still standing there and the person behind the truck was now out of sight. I tried to keep that nugget of information in the back of my mind though. Getting out and running was also out of the question. Inside the back of the truck wasn't just furniture but all our antiques, valuables, family heirlooms and our personal information. It was not stuff that I just wanted to abandon.

At this point, I was just hoping that they would either leave, the 911 text would work faster, or the rental truck company would just show up, but at this point, it didn't seem like any of that was happening soon. I responded to her question with sorrow in my voice. Ah, sorry ma'am, We're just going to wait alone. There was a rest stop a few miles back that way. You can go get your friends some food and stay warm. The empath in me thought to kill them with kindness. I suggested that and then dropped

a $50 bill out of the crack of the window. The money fell onto the ground and neither one of the two even moved an inch. And this is when I knew we were in trouble. The person in the front of the truck started to approach the side where the other two were standing. The one from the back who disappeared was now on the passenger's side right on top of the door. I looked back at the young woman who was still smiling and she said, you know, I think we'll just take the keys, sir. How about it, guys? Let's get these keys. And the big burly fella moved in front of the woman and started to ferociously try and open my door. At the time, the other man was trying to open my wife's door.

In a full panic at this point, I tried to dial 911 again. While speaking to the dispatch, the lights from the cop car my wife texted could be seen over the horizon. I told the dispatch woman everything that was happening. The cop pulled up, got out of his car, and shouted something at the group of people surrounding the truck. The woman turned and faced the cop, but didn't move from the side of the truck, and she shouted back, Hey, officer! These two stole our truck! We're just trying to get our keys! Could you pretty please help us? From the mirror, I saw the cop talk on his radio, and moments later, he told everyone around the van to back away and get on the ground. The three men obliged in moving back but didn't get on the ground.

The woman looked at me then back at the cop and said, You guys are silly. Bye bye. In an instant, all four of the potential robbers fled into the tree line. The cop yelled and attempted to chase after them, but only made it to the tree line and then started to radio for help instead. In just a minute or two, several more cops appeared from over the horizon. The first relief I felt since this whole ordeal started. When the cops came, I told the cops everything that I laid out here.

All of this transpired within just a couple of minutes. The repair truck came soon after and got us all situated and we were on our way. What was most unfortunate was that this was most definitely a setup. The cops informed me that they found a thin strip that was covered in dozens of nails. That was what I didn't see and I ran over. The nail strip was an intentionally made item to rob or harm an unexpected victim who traveled that desolate road in the middle of the night. I didn't pursue this with the law anymore, even though I probably should have. Some people just get dealt a bad hand and make horrible mistakes. I just hope these young folks find their way in life and

don't have the chance to hurt anyone else. To be continued... and I am partially to blame for what happens. My twisted sense of humor got me in trouble again, and this time people were actually affected by my stupid antics. If you're reading this, and you happen to know the man that I'm speaking about, just know that I'm sorry. A couple of years ago, me and my wife moved to a new house in a beautiful little suburb. It was the ideal spot to start and raise a family. It was one of those picture-perfect looking suburbs that you would see in movies or shows. I never saw myself living any place this nice in my life, but God bless my wife and her job.

I've pulled my weight, but she's without a doubt the queen of the castle. Right away when we were moving in, I could already see all the wandering eyes from the neighbors. Two young people covered in tattoos in a place like this. I just know how some people react to that. While we were moving stuff into the house several neighbors came by and welcomed us. These people were as friendly as can be even if it was kind of fake and it was still nice and my wife loved it. The couple directly across the street was another story though. It was an older couple, probably in their 70s, maybe even 80s, and I could see them staring through the blinds. Not just quick peeks either. These two were eyeballing us like they wanted to win a staring contest or something. I waved to them. I was being a jerk and waving ironically.

They didn't wave back. They stared for another second and then closed the blinds. I turned to my wife and said, screw those guys. I tried to be nice. It's their loss. She laughed and told me to play nice with the new neighbors. And about 10 minutes later, the man actually came out and approached me. He walked all the way up to my driveway and into my new garage where I was putting some tools away. He got my attention by shouting in a very loud and aggressive voice, Hey, I don't appreciate you. This is a quiet neighborhood and I'll call the police if I have to. This poor guy had me laughing on the inside, but instead of trying to diffuse the situation, my temper got the better of me a little bit. I looked down on the inside, but instead of trying to diffuse the situation, my temper got the better

of me a little bit. I looked down on the little man and aggressively responded to him in the same tone he approached me and said, will you listen pal? First off, get off my property. You can't just come into my garage. And secondly, I don't know who you think you are coming here making threats about the police, but me and my wife are good people. Now I give the little man credit. Instead of just saying something stupid, he stepped up to me. Like puffed out his old chest and stepped to me. My wife finally heard what was happening and ran out the side door and came between us.

I would never do anything to this old man, but he was trespassing technically and he was pushing some buttons. My wife tried to calm the tension and introduce herself and apologize to the old man for my behavior. Instead, the man spit in front of my wife and said, Get away from me, harlot. I don't care who you are. You're both dirty and ruining my neighborhood. She stood there looking at the man with her jaw just about hanging to the ground. I snickered in the background and she pointed to his house and said, you get away from me right now and you get off of our property. The man walked away mumbling something to himself and we both just looked at each other in complete disbelief.

Nothing like this has ever happened to us. Of course, since I can't just let little things like that go, I decided to take things too far, as I often do. I have a ton of boxes of Halloween stuff because we're huge fans of Halloween. We go all out every year decorating and we have a massive party as well. I made a joke to her about how I can't wait to see how he reacts to our house on Halloween. She laughed but told me to just stop and just forget about it. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen. She married me. She should have known I was going to take things a little too far. And as I was saying, I grabbed some fake blood that you put on the windows for Halloween. This wasn't just like those sticky decorations. This was like movie quality fake blood that I used the year prior

for a haunted house. It was washable and all that so I wasn't worried about ruining anything. I took the fake blood and made a massive blood stain on the window that faced his house. When the sun goes down and I turn the light on in that room, it will look like a giant blood splatter on the window. And this was just my shameless attempt at a prank to mess with the old guy across the street, you see, and I could have never have known how he was going to react. I didn't want any kind of confrontation or anything like that, I just wanted him to get annoyed and maybe leave me a letter in the mailbox or something. That night, she and I were watching a movie when we heard the noise of someone trying to get in to our front door. Alarmed, we both jumped off the couch and made our way to the front door.

As we got to the door, the guy rammed right through with a hatchet. I started to yell right away at the guy. He started to approach me and raise the hatchet. Now, I'm a big guy, but I'm not stopping some guy that's about to blow me with a hatchet. Whoa, whoa, calm down, buddy. What's going on? I tried to plead with the guy. He was beside himself, enraged and stumbling over his words. I saw the blood. I knew you were trouble. I saw the blood. He just kept repeating that line over and over again. I saw the blood.

Even though I was slightly panicking, I responded as quickly as I could. It's fake. I'm sorry. I was just playing a joke. The hatchet was still above his head, a little less aggressive now, but still yelling,

and he said, Death is no joke. All while this was happening my wife ran upstairs and began to call the police. This was scary but I knew I could outrun the guy and overpower him if I could get him to drop the hatchet. While I was trying to work out a plan to get out of this, he dropped the hatchet and fell to a knee. He was motionless and almost seemed like he was gasping for air. Still holding my hands out in a defensive position, I inched closer to the man and said, hey buddy, you okay? Let's just take a step back. At that moment, the man just collapsed in my front room. I screamed for my wife who was much better in

these situations than me. She sprinted down the stairs and I'll never forget the pain in her eyes at that moment. She screamed that I think he's dead. And only minutes later the cops showed up and I told them to get inside immediately. An ambulance arrived minutes later and I don't think he was even dead yet but he did end up passing away a few days later in the hospital from cardiac arrest or something. It was tragic and I felt horrible about the situation. I went over and personally apologized to his wife for any harm or pain I may have caused and this poor lady could not have been nicer to me. She smiled and said, he was very old and very sick. He just wasn't playing with a full deck anymore. There's nothing you kids did wrong. That didn't make me feel any better. After that night,

I tried to be more friendly and less of an arrogant jerk. I took care of all the maintenance for the woman's house until she passed away actually just a few weeks ago which prompted me to actually sit down and write this. Be careful with who you mess with. You have no idea what crosses people's minds or what kind of state they're in. I endured the horror of having my life threatened and then the horror of a man dropping right in front of me in a matter of seconds. Life is short and I urge all of you to just be good humans. Moving can be the worst sometimes. Due to my job, I am constantly having to move. At first, the idea of having to move all over the country was exciting. I would be able to view cities and landmarks that would otherwise never get to see.

But even though I got to see some truly remarkable places, not every new place was great. Last year, my company had me move to a small town in Vermont. All things considered, the place wasn't that bad, I guess. The house was a tiny little cabin tucked away in the woods. The town was small, the people kept to themselves, and my new house for the month was just fine. Regardless of all that, this is not one of the better places, though. The wifi was shoddy, and if I needed a grocery store or even a Walmart, it was about a 25 minute drive. I just wanted to keep to myself for the month in my small little hut and be on to the next location. I had two neighbors on each side

of my house but they were separated by a good amount of brush. Because it was winter you could see through the trees a little bit but they were just far enough away that I wouldn't go out of my way to say hi as bad as that may sound. Two nights into being in my new house, I went out back to have a cigarette before I went to bed. It was around 11pm if I had to guess. This was one of those middle of nowhere places, so out in the backyard it was completely pitch black. It's that beautiful darkness though, where it's creepy but there is also a strange beauty to it, and before heading inside I just happened to look over, and through the brush I could see my neighbor just standing there, seeming like he was staring at me. I winced a little bit, trying to focus on him,

and it looked as if though he was staring at my house and not me. I waved but the man didn't move at all. It looked like he didn't even notice that I was standing there. Weird. But I was tired and I didn't really care so I went inside and got myself ready for bed. Shortly after coming inside I got into bed and just passed out. I don't know exactly how much time had passed but I heard an extremely loud noise in my living room that woke me up. I sat still in bed for a second thinking maybe I had just dreamed the noise. I got up and peeked out of my bedroom door and the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. There was a man in my living room. I know I locked the door, so whoever this was broke the door.

I didn't own a gun or anything like that so I basically just sat behind my door, just completely crippled in fear. As the seconds passed, I could hear the creak of the hardwood floors getting closer to me. I contemplated making a run for it but I wasn't confident in my abilities to make a run for it. When the creaky floorboards sounded like they were right outside my room, they stopped for a moment and then started to move back in the other direction. I got up and peeked out of the door again in the mostly dark house. The only light was a low dim from the moon. As I tried to make out the details of the intruder,

another noise came from the other side of the room the intruder was walking in. My first thought was, God, another one, and my stomach sank even deeper. Then, without notice, in the extreme quiet of night, in a loud and commanding voice, the intruder shouted, Freeze! Derek, put down the weapon and come here right now! The intruder was a cop. I was shocked, relieved, and honestly surprised. Where I'm from, cops won't just enter a house, but in this instance, I was happy he did. In the direction the cop was facing with his outstretched hand, I could hear someone laughing. Such a horrible laugh, though.

It was like a low giggle with almost a hint of a growl. Derek, easy now. You don't live here. I heard the cop murmur something again, and then without warning, the man from the other side of the room emerged from the shadows and tried to run right through the cop. The cop seemed to take him down, and I heard something large hit the ground at the same time as both men fell to the floor. As I sat cowering behind the door, the cop shouted, If anybody's in here, get in your car now and drive a mile down the road where another officer is stationed. I wasted no time. In my boxers and Nintendo 64 t-shirt, in the heart of winter, I grabbed my keys and ran out the door to meet the other officer.

When I got to the end of the road, there were two police officers and my neighbor. In my car for work, I had a pair of snow pants that I put on so I didn't look so ridiculous, and after getting slightly dressed, I approached them and asked what the heck was going on. The first one to say anything was my neighbor who came right over and patted me on the shoulder and said, thank god you're alright buddy. I just nodded along with him, still at a loss for words trying to process everything. Once the cops checked on me and made sure that I was actually alright and not hurt is when I actually got the entire story. About a year ago, a girl lived in the house that I was now staying in. This guy, Derek, was her boyfriend and the

two of them were doing some not so legal things in the house. It ended up causing the woman to die and Derek did not take it well. The guy pretty much went off the deep end and kind of just started to waste away. He was in and out of jail for some petty stuff, but the cops thought it was just to get a meal and get to sleep in a bed during the cold nights. A few times within the past year, Derek was seen trying to break into the house that was vacant at the time, claiming that he needed to get back inside to see her. A few months ago, nobody around the town had seen Derek, so as morbid as it is, the people in the town just kind of thought that maybe nature got to him, or that he wandered into another town. Until tonight, when my neighbor was taking out his dog. He thought he saw a man laughing and making his way through the brush that separates my house and his. He said he didn't even

see me outside smoking because he was watching Derek pace in front of my house and then jump into an unlocked window in the kitchen. He went inside immediately and called the police. Everyone was familiar with Derek, especially my neighbor and the police, and that is why the cop broke my door and just came in because he knew that I was in legitimate danger. When the cop tackled Derek, the loud noise that I heard hitting the ground was a machete. Yes, an actual freaking small sword. They arrested Derek, who could barely talk at this point. It was sad to see how much the human brain can diminish at such a young age. To the naked eye, this Derek guy looked like a normal,

decent looking fella. You would have no idea a dark passenger lives within his mind. I called my company the next morning who paid for me to stay in a hotel for a few weeks and then I left the town for good and I never plan on going back. As far as I know, Derek was sent somewhere where he'll be taken care of and not a danger to himself or others. I am beyond lucky my neighbor stepped outside when he did and that he was smart enough to call the police right away. If there is any advice I could offer anyone reading this, it's not enough to just lock your doors. Always check your windows and still open-ended.

This story may keep you up at night, but not for the usual reasons. Instead, if you're like me, you'll think about it all night long. Let me start by saying that moving is a strange blend of excitement and dread. It's often exciting moving to a new place and making it your home, but the flip side of that is the act of moving, and that can just be dreadful. I have moved at least a dozen times in my life and I'm only 31 years old. Two years ago after breaking up with my longtime girlfriend I needed a place to stay. Her and I bought a house together but after the breakup I moved out so I lived in an apartment for a year. When that year's lease was up I looked for a house instead of renting another apartment. I didn't want to buy another house just yet for several reasons, specifically because I was

finishing up my degree and I may move out of state after graduation and the fact that the housing market a year ago was still a mess, much like it is now. I ended up finding an old but mostly refurbished house through a co-worker. She introduced me to a neighbor of hers who was looking to rent a house that he purchased for cheap. This guy was one of those guys that just bought houses and rented them out. So the guy never lived there or anything like that, just bought it, slightly refurbished it, and then rented it out. And I just happened to be looking at the right time and scooped the place up. To keep everyone's information private who was involved in this story I'll be using fake names and with that being said I'm going to call my landlord in this story Joe. What I really liked about the situation other than

the fact it was a whole house and not an apartment was that Joe was willing to do a month-to-month lease. Sometimes that can be messy but it worked for my lifestyle at the time. Joe and I signed all the papers, agreed on the price, and I became the proud renter of a home on the corner of a very secluded street. Once I moved in, I ended up falling in love with the house. It was huge, way bigger than I initially thought when I had just looked at the pictures. You could tell the house was old, but everything inside was updated and new. Joey even had the wifi set up and was included in my rent payment. As I had just stated, the house sat on the corner of a street that was off another three side streets. You would have to turn off the main road, which wasn't that busy of a road to begin with,

and then go down several more streets until you hit the street that I was on. At the very end of the street sat my newly rented house which was concealed behind a massive cluster of trees. I figured, being an online student and working from home a lot, this privacy was super ideal. The first month was great. I never saw any of my neighbors which was great for me. It was quiet and I mostly just spent the time moving in and getting myself set up. When you move into a new place it takes a little while to make you feel like it's an actual home but for some reason I just didn't feel at home in this new place. I loved the seclusion of the house and all the perks but I just had a feeling something wasn't quite right. I had a small get togethertogether at the start of the second month in the house. I was giving a tour of the place to some friends and we made our way to the basement.

While down there we could hear this strange noise, almost like something scratching or something coming from one of the walls near the stairs. I really hadn't been in the basement at all since I moved in. It's possible that noise had always been there but I just never go down there because the washer and dryer are in a separate room off the kitchen so this was really the first time I had heard that noise. One of my friends joked that it was rats, another friend joked that I must have someone tied up in the walls and my one friend was really scared and just wanted to leave the basement. We all had a laugh and went upstairs to continue the friend's gathering. However, I couldn't stop thinking of the noise the entire night. This noise was not just plumbing or pipes. It was definitely a scratching noise,

no doubt about it. Eventually, everyone left except my friend Mike. We had a couple of beers and decided that we were going to figure out what that noise was in the basement. We went down there with crowbars and hammers like we knew what we were doing, but full disclosure, we had no clue. We listened for the noise and tracked it to the same location that we had heard it earlier. It sounded like scratching coming from behind the stairs. I must admit, I was pretty nervous. My mind was racing trying to figure out what the noise could be, but the adrenaline from the situation had me pumped up. Mike and I can thank the beers for what happened

next. We thought it would be a lovely idea to take the hammer and smash the wall beneath the stairs and smash away we did. I am still, a year later, in utter shock at what we found underneath the stairs. I shined a flashlight into the dark hole and we quickly found the source of the scratches. I counted at least twelve big rats. I'm sure there were more, but after twelve I was done counting. The rats were the least of our concern. In this dark cavern underneath the stairs was a ton of these dark grayish red stains everywhere. The small room was no bigger than a broom closet.

There were also chains, shackles, knives, and I kid you not, a scythe. The chains and the rest of the items down there were extremely rusted, so I gathered that they must have been very old. The creepiest part for me, for some reason though, was a small dirty bowl in the corner of the room that had a rusted fork in it and a stack of old books. I don't know what the books were. They were those old books that have that almost fabric feel to them. I'm sorry, I don't know what the material is called and the pages looked almost yellow. One of the books was opened and the pages looked almost yellow. One of the books was opened and the writing was almost completely faded. I called Joe right away, not even caring that it was around

midnight at this point. Joe came right over and looked at the hole for himself. He seemed to be in a combination of confused, mad, and embarrassed. And I moved out after that night and went to my parents' house and Joe didn't give me any trouble about doing so given the situation. He even refunded my first month rent. I often think about that little room under the stairs. I still don't know what it is or what ended up happening. I thought about reaching out to Joe to see what he did about the situation but I thought that that may be a little strange. I guess one reason why I'm writing this is to see what people think I should do. Is there a way to look up past owners of a

house? I really don't know a lot about being an internet sleuth so any advice out there would be greatly appreciated. If I ever find out what happened in that room I'll write a follow up but until then I'm left with the mystery of the dark, scary room underneath the stairs. I am curious to see what people think about this story. I ended up getting into a lot of legal trouble for something I didn't even do. At that point in my life, I chalked it up to life isn't fair sometimes, but now that I'm over a decade removed from the situation, I'm a little shocked at how everything played out. I was 19 during the altercation of this story and I was young and stupid. I moved out right away and rented this nasty little place with my girlfriend.

I used the word place loosely. This was little more than a shack. We'd only been dating for a few months and we were not good together. We fought constantly. And like I said, I was young and I thought that I knew what I was doing. Moving in with her was my rebellion against my parents who did not like this young woman. As soon as we moved in together, we started to fight right away though. I would wake up in the middle of the night and she would just be staring at me. And if anybody had ever seen the movie Paranormal Activity, when the main character just stands there and stares at her significant other

for hours, that is exactly what my ex-girlfriend was doing. It was really creepy. I woke up two nights in a row to her standing there. Now when I called her out on it, she just responded, Relax, I'm just watching you. What does that even mean? I tried not to let it bother me and I also tried not to tell my parents that they were right. I made minimum wage, she didn't work and I couldn't pay my bills, eat and support her. It just wasn't plausible.

And this of course led to fights. I finally hit my breaking point after a month and I told her that I was moving out as soon as the month was officially over. She lost it on me when I told her that. She started to punch me in the face like I was an actual punching bag. And I held my hands up and just screamed for her to stop. I'm sure neighbors heard, but in the area I I lived nobody got involved with anybody else's business. When she finally calmed down we tried to have a conversation. I was so surprised at how well the conversation went

considering our track record of past conversations. We agreed to move back to our parents' houses and just take things one day at a time. It was a mature conversation and I started to feel good about it. I made my arrangements and told her that I would be moving home tomorrow morning. I could tell that she was upset but just nodded and said okay. That night I woke up to her screaming. Like the type of screaming that you would hear if someone was getting murdered.

It was my girlfriend or ex-girlfriend or whatever she was at the time. She wasn't in the room so I ran into the living room and she was standing next to the front door. I grabbed her shoulder and asked if she was okay. She was sobbing uncontrollably. I held her and tried to tell her everything was okay. While I was hugging her, she had her keys in her hand and smacked me in the back of the head with her keys. I started to yell in pain and frustration asking what that was all about and she just kept saying that she knew. I still have no idea what she knew to this day but repeatedly she just kept saying that she knew she knew. I kept stupidly trying to plead with her to relax when I should have just got into my car and drove away at that moment. What I didn't realize was prior to her screaming she had called the police. When I held my hand

out to try and console her she threw herself at me. I was basically holding her in my arms. The cops knocked on the door and opened it. They saw her sobbing and immediately handcuffed me. Like didn't even ask any questions or anything, just told me to step away, put my hands up, and they cuffed me. I didn't know what to do or what to say, and I have never been in legal trouble before. She just kept yelling at me, serves you right, dirtbag. I tried pleading with the cops that I have no idea what's going on, and they were being kind of rude and ignoring me and giving me very little acknowledgement.

They put me in the back of the car and told me that they were taking me to the holding center until they could get this sorted out. I called my parents, who were down there in minutes, fighting for me. I guess she called the police and told them that I had been beating her for weeks. Let me just see. There are monsters out there that do this, and everything that happens to those people, they deserve it. But I truly never laid a finger on her. She also told the cops that she was the one who wanted to move out, and when she told me is when I lost my temper. Thankfully Thankfully I had all the text conversations with my parents about moving home and that helped me a lot. I don't know how it's possible and when I tell people this story they don't understand how it's possible either but I was held at this

holding center for over a week. They wouldn't let me out and with no evidence or proof they just held me there. Some people have told me it could be because of the county that I was in but either way it was just still incredibly messed up. I finally got out and within a day's I got a text from her asking when I was moving back home, meaning our shack that we lived in. I didn't respond and I just blocked her number. I ended up winning a suit against them, actually, and had my record cleaned up, but it took a long time to happen. I had this stain on my name for years. And one last detail about this horrible story.

About four or five years ago, I found out that she was actually diagnosed with schizophrenia. Apparently, it runs in her family, as she has two cousins that also have it, and the last that I knew, she was in some institution for trying to stab her boyfriend at the time. She claimed he was working with the CIA to assassinate world leaders, and when I found that out, I legitimately got shivers. I thought of all the times she just watched me sleep, and about the night that she had me arrested when she kept saying that she knew. I'm so happy I got out when I did even if it did cost me months of hell. Thankfully she was never able to actually physically harm anyone, at least that I know of anyway. I truly hope she gets the help she needs and that one day she can live a happy and healthy life. Back in 2015, 66-year-old Sumio Sanaga disappeared from his hometown of Katsugai, Japan.

He had been living with his two siblings in the country's southern Aichi prefecture and was not considered to be at risk. So instead of immediately reporting Sumio missing, his siblings waited until the following year to inform authorities of his disappearance. A preliminary search of the surrounding area yielded no clues to Sumio's whereabouts, and despite extensive interviews with friends and neighbors, the investigation into his disappearance made little progress. For five long years, Sumio's siblings left his bedroom untouched. They claimed to have taken a brief look through his belongings, but found no clue to his location among them. For a while, they held out hope for his safe return, but as the years went by, their hope dwindled, and they began to accept that Sumio wasn't coming home.

Finally, after more than half a decade, Sumio's brother and sister accepted that their big brother was gone, and decided to clear out his bedroom. Sumio had been something of a hoarder, and his siblings were faced with a Herculean task in cleaning out his room, but after arming themselves with a veritable arsenal of disinfectants, they entered his bedroom and got to work. Yet almost immediately they were faced with a truly horrifying sight. Lying on the floor, out of sight of the room's doorway, was a human skeleton. Sumio's siblings immediately contacted the police and were horrified to discover that it belonged to their missing brother.

They had been completely oblivious to the fact that they had been living in the same house as their brother's corpse for five long years. Yet puzzlingly, the Sanaga house was very small, even by Japanese standards. It seems impossible two people could live in a place like that without detecting the stench of decomposing flesh. It was also extremely suspicious that Sumio's siblings hadn't discovered his body during the initial search of his bedroom. They claim to have gone through Sumio's belongings, searching for clues to his disappearance. These belongings have been strewn all over his bedroom, so how they failed to spot his corpse during this search is nothing short of baffling. When it was discovered

that Sumio had passed away of natural causes, his siblings were essentially cleared of all suspicion. But as many investigators have pointed out, this doesn't exactly preclude their involvement. You see, Sumio Sanaga was actually the owner of the home, and it was no secret that the three siblings resented having to share such a small space. There's a good chance that Sumio's brother and sister knew he was suffering from some kind of life-threatening medical problem, and they certainly would have heard him hit the floorboards when he collapsed. Detectives began to suspect that Sumio's siblings simply allowed their older brother to die, possibly as a means of freeing up more room in the house. There was also evidence that Sumio's corpse had been tampered with,

as his skeleton lay in a position that detectives felt was unnatural. Given that it was found naked, some began to speculate that Sumio's body had been stripped of clothing, either before or after his death, simply as a means of saving money on new clothes. It's also believed that once they allowed their brother to die, Sumio's siblings realized that a funeral would be very costly. So to save expenses, they could just let him decompose in his bedroom, then dispose of whatever remained in the future once it was easier to deal with. It made for a very preposterous allegation, and it was extremely unlikely that a Japanese court would convict Sumio's brothers of any kind of crime. They staunchly denied allowing

their brother to die, claiming that only those with the blackest of hearts could simply stand by and listen to the loved one expire. Yet shockingly, Japan has a long and storied history of such things, so much so that the murder or abandonment of the elderly has its own special name. The word Oboste translates to abandoning old woman, but the practice is also referred to as Oboste or Oyoste, which means to abandon a parent. Legend has it that in times gone by, elderly people of a variety of cultures were forced to sacrifice themselves so as not to be a burden on their friends and families. In ancient Japan, the elderly and infirm were sometimes carried to a mountain or some other remote, desolate place, then left there to die. The practice apparently stems from an ancient Buddhist folktale in which a son carries his mother up a mountain on his back. During the journey, she stretches out her arms, catching the twigs and scattering them in their wake,

so that her son will be able to find the way home. The story was commemorated in the following poem. In the depths of the mountain, whom was it for the aged mother snapped, one twig after another? Heedless of herself, she did so, for the sake of her son. According to the Kodansha Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japan, Uba's day is the subject of legend, but does not seem ever to have been a common custom. However, the train station in Nagano Prefecture is named after the practice, and one of the largest mountains in the same region has been nicknamed Uba-ste-yama,

which directly translates to Mountain of Abandoned Old Women. Japanese historians have attempted to downplay the role that Uba-ste has played in Japanese society, but it seems highly unlikely that a place would earn such a nickname unless the practice was commonplace, at least at one point in time. It certainly seems to have entered the Japanese national consciousness, enough so that Sumio's siblings would see it fit to abandon him during his time of need. It hardly seems important whether it was a sense of tradition and honor that led Sumio to rot in his own bedroom, or simply callousness and greed.

But the horrifying fact is that when he needed them most, Sumio's siblings, people he'd been close to for his whole adult life, simply chose to let him die, cold and alone. More of a burden than a brother. On January 2nd of 1935, a man calling himself Roland T. Owen checked himself into the Hotel President in Kansas City, Missouri. The receptionist who took Roland's reservation later described him as being in between his late 20s or early 30s, with brown hair and a scar over his right ear. He didn't appear to have any luggage in his possession and carried only a hairbrush, comb, and toothpaste in his pocket. Then when it came to his choice of hotel room, Roland specifically asked for an interior room, several floors up. Roland was booked into room 1046 and he quickly ran into a young lady named Mary Soptic,

who would be his maid for the duration of his stay. Roland gave her full permission to clean his room, asking only that she not lock the door behind her because he was waiting for a friend. Mary later noted that Roland kept the room's blinds tightly drawn, keeping the room dark aside from one small dim lamp. Other members of the hotel's staff noticed the same thing upon their visits to room 1046, and also observed that Roland seemed to be deathly afraid of something. At around 4pm on the day Roland checked in, Mary Soptic returned to his room with some fresh towels, only to find him lying on the bed,

in pitch darkness. Mary wasn't sure if Roland was sleeping or not, but to be on the safe side, she crept over to the table, placed the towels down in silence, then exited the room again. Yet on her way out, she noticed a handwritten note on Roland's bedside table, and it read, Dawn, I'll be back in 15 minutes. Wait. It seemed like an odd note for someone to write if they intended to have a nap, but things were about to get much, much stranger at the Hotel President. The following day, Mary Soptic returned to Roland's room in order to clean it. She quickly noticed that the door had been locked from the outside and assumed Roland had locked it after he left. Using her own key, she unlocked the door and walked inside, but to her surprise, there was Roland sitting in the darkness.

After giving Mary permission to clean the room, Roland took a call on his hotel's phone. Mary later stated that he said, No, Don. I don't want to eat. I'm not hungry. I just had breakfast. Mary also said he repeated the phrase, No, I'm not hungry, several times, to the point it started to sound very, very odd indeed. Still holding the phone, Roland began to ask Mary about her job as she continued to clean the room. She later mentioned how he wanted to know if she was responsible for the entire floor and if the president was a residential hotel which housed long-term guests. Mary tried

to be as helpful as possible and answered all of Roland's questions as best she could, but still, she found his intense curiosity to be odd, especially considering that most of the hotel's guests chose never to talk to her at all. Later that evening, when Mary returned with more towels, she claimed to have heard two male voices coming from inside the room. When she knocked on the door, she heard a loud, deep voice ask, who is it? Then she explained that she had fresh towels and the voice replied, we don't need any. Mary knew for certain that there wasn't a single towel in the room, dry or otherwise, as she had taken them herself in the morning.

What's more, the responding voice didn't sound like Roland at all. Suspicious but not wanting to cause any trouble, Mary left the room alone. The next morning, one of the hotel's switchboard operators came on shift at 7am, only to notice that Roland's phone had been off the hook for quite some time. Concerned for the guest's well-being, the operator then sent a bellboy to go check up on Roland to see if he needed any assistance. When the bellboy arrived at room 1046, he noticed it had a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. However, given that he was under strict instructions to perform a welfare check, the boy knocked on the room several times before hearing a voice say, Come in. Turn on the lights.

The boy tried, but found the door was locked, and Roland seemed to ignore his request to unlock the room. Concluding that Roland was either drunk or half asleep, he decided to try again in an hour or so. Then at around 8.30am, the hotel's switchboard operator noticed that room 1046's phone was still off the hook and sent another bellboy to the room in order to check on the guest. This bellboy, named Harold Pike, opened the room to find Roland lying naked on the bed. The phone was off the hook because it had been knocked to the ground somehow. So assuming that Roland was indeed drunk, he replaced the phone's receiver,

then crept out of the room again. Strangely, between 10.30 and 10.45 AM, room 1046's phone again came off the receiver, and this time, the original bellboy was once again sent to investigate. By this time, the hotel's staff were growing irritated with Roland, who had already gained a reputation as being a rather annoying guest. The bellboy expected yet more inebriated antics on entering the room, yet the sight that greeted him was one of pure horror. On the floor in front of him was Roland's unconscious body,

and almost every visible surface was drenched in blood. Quote, When I entered the room, the man was within two feet of the door on his knees and elbows, holding his head in his hands, the boy later told police. I saw blood on his head. I then turned the light on. I looked around and saw blood on the walls, on the bed, and in the bathroom. This frightened me and I immediately left the room and went downstairs.

The boy then fled downstairs to seek help, returning soon afterward with the hotel's assistant manager, and after a near breathless Roland began to beg him for help, he rushed to summon medical aid. Dr. Harold Flanders of Kansas City General Hospital arrived soon after Roland was discovered and was one of the first to witness the extent of his injuries. Ronald had his neck, wrists, and ankles all bound with cord. His neck had visible bruising and suggested someone had attempted to strangle him. He also had multiple stab wounds to his chest, with one wound dangerously close to his heart, while another had punctured his lung. Repeated blows to the right side of his head had rendered him with a serious skull fracture, and he had been struck so hard that there was blood spray on the ceiling of his hotel room.

Dr. Flanders cut the cords from Roland's wrist and asked him who had done this to him, only to have Roland reply with one single word, nobody. Roland then claimed that he'd sustained his injuries after falling and hitting his head on the edge of the room's bathtub and denied trying to take his own life when the subject was raised. Shortly afterwards, Roland lost consciousness and was completely comatose by the time he arrived at Kansas City General. Hospital staff fought hard to save his life, but sadly, Roland passed away shortly after midnight on January 5th of 1935. The coroner, who performed an autopsy on Roland, determined that he had died as a result of his wounds.

His estimated time of death was logged as having occurred between 4 and 5 o'clock in the morning, and aside from the tag on the necktie, which indicated it had been manufactured in New Jersey, there were no clues to Roland's identity or background. No knives were found at the scene of the crime, which led to the dismissal of him taking his own life as a cause of Roland's death, since the stab wounds in his chest could not be accounted for. The cords used to tie him suggested the involvement of others, and detectives found other items that were checked in his evidence, including a hairpin, a safety pin, an unsmoked cigarette, and a full bottle of diluted sulfuric acid. Four fingerprints, small enough that detectives believed they had been a woman's, were found on the room's phone. These fingerprints could not be matched to Roland nor to any of the hotel employees who had been known to have entered the room. It seemed obvious that someone had entered Roland's hotel room at some point during the early hours of the morning, but frustratingly, not a single member

of hotel staff recalled seeing anyone during that period of the morning. With no fingerprint match and no witnesses, law enforcement was forced to seek help through the local media. But not only did the coverage not generate any credible leads, but no next of kin came forward to claim Roland's body. This is about the time police began to suspect that their murder victim wasn't actually named Roland T. Owen. His body was stored in a local funeral parlor for almost two months and he only avoided an unceremonious anonymous burial due to a mysterious donor financing his funeral at the last moment. This donor paid by wire transfer and had a floral arrangement

delivered which bore a note saying, Luis. For almost 18 months afterwards, the man's identity remained a complete enigma, until finally, an Alabama woman named Ruby Ogletree spotted a photo of a man in the newspaper, one who had a very distinctive scar above his right ear. Ruby came forward to identify the dead man as her son, Artemis Ogletree, who had been born in Florida back in 1915. He was one of three children, and during his childhood, an accident with some hot grease left a sizable scar on his head above his ear, which remained hairless afterward. According to his mother, Artemis was just 19 when he left Birmingham, Alabama to hitchhike to California. Years later, she received

a number of letters from him, some from as far away as Egypt. Some of these letters requested money from her, and each time, she obliged him. Then in August of 1935, Ruby claimed to have received a call from someone in Memphis, Tennessee. The man calling told her that Artemis had saved his life in a fight and that Artemis himself could not call because he was now happily settled in Cairo. The caller added that Artemis was unable to write to her because he had lost one of his thumbs in the same fight which had saved the caller's life. Ruby noted that the man spoke wildly and incoherently for over 30 minutes, and that according to the timeline of her son's death, all the letters had been sent post-mortem.

It also emerged that Artemis had never been to Egypt, as records kept by shipping companies found no records that Artemis had ever visited the place. These same letters were connected to a murder which occurred in New York during 1937, but the investigation into the suspect quickly fell apart. However, one of the accused aliases was Donald Kelso, perhaps even the same Don that was being referred to in Artemis' note. Donald Kelso, whose real name was Joseph Martin, had been arrested for murder after he killed a man he shared a room with before shipping the body to Memphis in a trunk.

According to a story about the case in the New Yorker, Kansas City police had matched samples of his handwriting to that in the letters written by Ruby Ogletree. However, no charges were filed against Martin in relation to Artemis' murder, and the KCPD kept the case open. The case files show that different detectives reviewed the murder every few years throughout the 1950s, but gradually, the case went cold. The absence of suspects in the case has inspired several different theories on who killed Artemis and why. There were telephone calls alleging that Roland was killed in retaliation for a broken engagement and that he was having an affair with a woman

who'd rather see him dead than in the arms of his wife. However, organized crime has also been considered since Artemis seems somehow connected to Joseph Martin, the career criminal from New York City. Little is known about Martin or the shadowy criminal organization he represented, but some theories assigned them as a great deal of power. Some theorized that the reason Artemis' killer remained invisible to the hotel staff was because his killer was a member of the hotel staff, and that whatever bloodthirsty group wanted Artemis dead were able to manipulate, intimidate, or pay off one of the staff members into murdering him. That explains why the killer was apparently able to lock Artemis' door from the outside,

and why no one had seen any guests or outsiders moving around the hallways at the time of his murder. Sadly, this angle was completely neglected by law enforcement at the time, and not a single member of the hotel's staff was questioned aggressively in the aftermath. Perhaps if they had been, Artemis Ogletree's life and death wouldn't still be such a mystery, and perhaps his killer might have actually been brought to justice. I don't know if any of y'all will find this scary or whatever, but for me, I think this made for one of the scariest, soul-crushing thoughts of my whole life. Many, many years ago now, I'd head over to my grandmother's place to help her clean up. She was getting on a little, and although she seemed as sharp as she ever was,

she was having a few mobility issues, so we used to help her clean her place and cook for herself. Being one of the better cooks among us, I tended to stick to making her meals with my husband and brother-in-law took to cleaning the house. So it was me that started to notice that certain pots and pans kept going missing every week. I brought it up with grandma, asking where all of her pots and pans were going, but she told me that she didn't know, and offered me money to buy her new ones. I do just that, but then as the weeks go by, those pots and pans go missing too. Next thing we know, hubby can smell a weird burnt smell outside the guest room, and when he looks in, there are all the pots and pans, but burn right off them.

Grandma was going senile, and she was putting things on to cook or boil or what have you than just forgetting about them, and then she was so scared of us finding out, she didn't put them in the trash, but was also incapable of thinking of a good hiding place, so she just tossed them in the guest room. Grandma was scared. She was scared of losing her mind, and she didn't want to address it. And because Grandma was scared, I got scared for her. I got scared for myself, too, wondering if I was going to end up sitting in a chair all day, staring into space and drooling while trying to remember who I am.

Or if Grandma was going to end up like that, and how it was going to break my heart to have to explain who I was to her at the start of every single visit. What followed was very emotional for all involved. It wasn't a discussion mom wanted to have and because of that, it turned into a confrontation that ended in tears. Sad tears. Tears of despair even, but at least we could cry them together, and not alone. After my grandma died, my dad enlisted mine and my brother's help to clean out her place. Growing up on a North Carolina farm, she was able to take French in high school, apparently because my great-grandparents insisted on it being available in the local school to give the kids a sense of culture. Turns out, her French class did a bunch of correspondence exchanges with other French-speaking countries, and grandma managed to get herself a pen pal in France who was about the same age.

Their letters seemed real cute, and I don't speak a lot of French, but I knew enough to work out roughly what they were saying. Then I saw the dates, spring and summer of 1940, and I realized grandma's pen pal was writing from northeastern France. Around the summer, I started seeing mentions of war, and then in the last letter my grandma received, I read the words in French, which translated to, The Germans are very close now. And that was the last letter, the last one we found anyway. It still gives me chills to think about my grandma having to deal with that as a kid. Torreveja is a small resort town near the eastern Spanish city of Alicante.

It's a major hub for international tourism, with just 80,000 year-round residents welcoming over half a million visitors every single year. Like most other Spanish resort towns, Torreveja is home to a number of expats, people who pack up their lives in their home countries to start new ones in often sunnier climates. Only around 60% of the year-round residents are Spanish, and the rest are a smattering of English, German, Swedish, Eastern European, and South Americans. The eclectic mix of languages and cultures certainly makes for a diverse cultural tableau, but as local law enforcement will tell you, it can present a number of obstacles to criminal investigations. Each cultural enclave can be deeply protective of its own, and detectives

have described being met with impenetrable walls of silence during their work. In that kind of environment, lawlessness can survive, and that puts everyday people in a great deal of danger. On July 16th of 2020, a 58-year-old cleaning lady was working in an apartment building on Torrevejas Pascual Street. It was just before 7 o'clock in the evening, and the woman had almost finished her shift at the apartment block. Yet just before she was due to depart, a young man walked into the building and changed her life forever. Without saying a word, the man grabbed her by the neck, punched her in the face, then stabbed her repeatedly in the shoulders and the back of the neck.

Luckily, her screams of terror alerted one of the apartment building's residents, who came rushing to her aid. This resident managed to scare off the attacker, but despite being brave enough to chase him down the street, the attacker managed to escape. Emergency services rushed to the scene of the attack, and thankfully, none of the cleaning lady's injuries proved life-threatening, but even so, the damage had been devastating. She suffered a broken nose along with 20 stab wounds her attacker had inflicted, and given that some of these were to the rear of her neck, it's nothing short of a miracle that she survived. The doctor who applied stitching to her wounds was almost certain that there'd be permanent spinal damage, but aside from nicking a few minor nerve endings, the cleaning lady had somehow avoided any kind of life-changing injury. Once she was able, the police conducted an interview with the woman, who preferred not

to be named in the media. She claimed that she couldn't get a good look at her attacker, but they didn't suspect that it was anyone she knew. However, the good Samaritan who came to her aid was able to give a much more detailed description, stating that they were a bald Caucasian male of medium height and athletic build, between the ages of 25 to 35. The witness also stated that the attacker had been wearing sunglasses, a striped white and navy blue t-shirt, denim shorts, and white sneakers. While the identity of the attacker remains a mystery, one thing was abundantly clear. They hadn't attempted to engage in any kind of robbery or further violation, and no words were exchanged prior to the attack, meaning their sole intention had been to kill. In the weeks that followed, the local community was horrified by police reports

suggesting the killer was motivated by perverse antisocial impulses. The public was also gripped by the fact that the attack had been interrupted and the Spanish media fueled their obsession with what might have happened had it been allowed to continue. The public's morbid obsession with the case generated a great outrage, leading to tens of thousands of euros being poured into the investigation. Yet despite an extensive hunt for the killer, no suspects were identified and no one was ever arrested. It's almost been three years since the random and savage attack,

and in all likelihood, it's only a matter of time before someone so dangerously disturbed chooses to strike again. Toraveja will prove rich pickings for a predator like that, being a place where people are only passing through for a short period of time. Perhaps true crime aficionados should keep an eye out on the town of Toraveja, because next time, the knife-wielding maniac might just finish what he started. When I was 10, my parents and I went to visit my grandmother for spring break. My cousin also came to visit and we decided that we wanted to go to the YMCA for the day. My grandmother dropped us off and said that she would come and pick us up in four hours. On that day, the YMCA was empty. There were a couple of adults in the exercise room, but that's it.

We went to the basketball court and after two hours of playing tag and shooting baskets we were bored. I've never been the biggest fan of swimming but this YMCA had a pretty cool pool so we changed into our bathing suits and headed in there. The pool was empty except for the lifeguard. We played a bunch of games and swam laps but after about an hour there wasn't much left to do and there was no one except us to hang out with to keep things interesting. So we decided to play a game of seeing how long we could hold our breath underwater. We stood in the shallow end near the clock on the wall so we could time ourselves. Instead of fully submerging, we just stuck our heads face down in the water.

We did this a couple of times and I was winning. Our last round I felt a tap on my shoulder. I figured it was my cousin giving up and telling me that I won. But instead, it was the lifeguard who told me to knock it off or she was going to have to ask us to leave the pool. Since we were tired of being in the pool we figured that we would just get out, get dressed, and go back to the basketball courts until my grandmother picked us up. We only had an hour left anyways and the water was freezing. As we got out, the lifeguard stopped us and asked if we wanted to go into the sauna to warm up and dry off. The sign said 18 years or older, so of course, we were super excited that she allowed us to do that. She walked us to the sauna and unlocked the door. The door was glass and the

interior was made entirely out of wood. Inside above the door there was a clock, probably to make sure that you were not in there for an unsafe amount of time. The lifeguard's stand was adjacent to the sauna but if you looked out the door you could clearly see it. She followed us in and went over to the thermometer encased in plastic and unlocked it so she could crank up the heat. I figured that she must have to turn it on each time so I didn't think anything of it. Both my cousin and I were very short girls and so we couldn't see the temperature that was printed on the thermometer knob but I know that she was turning up the heat. Then she left and shut the door behind her. I thought that I saw her lock the door too,

but I thought to myself, why would she lock the door when we might want to get out? I checked the clock and decided that we should probably get out in about 10 or 15 minutes. It was already plenty warm in the sauna, but now the room was blazing. It felt nice because I was so cold from the pool. After about 15 minutes, it was starting to get a little bit too hot and my cousin agreed that we should leave so we can get dressed. I went to turn the knob on the door but it wasn't budging. I thought maybe it was jammed so I shook it but it still wasn't opening and then I let my cousin try. She couldn't get it open either. We figured the lifeguard would be back in a couple of minutes so we sat back down and waited. The room was getting hotter now too and I really wanted to leave.

I got up and started banging on the door and shaking and twisting the knob trying to get the lifeguard's attention. My cousin got up and joined me. We started screaming at the top of our lungs for her to let us out but she just stared straight ahead. I don't think there's any way that she couldn't have noticed or heard two little girls banging and kicking the door and screaming. Now, we had been in there for about 25 minutes. It was so hot in the sauna that it hurt to breathe. It felt like my lungs were on fire. My eyes and skin were burning. We sat back down and put our towels over our heads because they were still a little

damp and it made it easier to breathe. I was so worried about my cousin as she's a couple of years younger than me. I looked at the clock and saw that we had been there for 35 minutes. I got up and walked to the door again and saw the lifeguard still just staring, dead, straight ahead. Again, I tried to get her attention by screaming that we needed out and banging on the door as hard as I could, but still nothing. I was starting to get pretty dizzy by this point, so I went to go sit back down, but the wooden seats of the sauna burned my skin. My towel was completely dry, so I put it underneath me to sit on. My hair was also dry, but I wrapped it across my face to cover

my nose, and I squinted my eyes so that they didn't burn as bad, but I could still watch if anyone walked past the door. They helped a little bit. My cousin was laying face down with a towel over her head, not moving or saying anything, so I nudged her to make sure that she was still okay. She was, but I could tell that we really needed to get out of there soon because she seemed to be a bit disoriented. It had been maybe 45 minutes now and I was extremely nauseous. There was no way that the lifeguard would forget that we were in there and I thought that she would have came back soon, but there was this little voice in my head telling me that maybe she purposely locked us in there. Finally, a man walked past the door towards the pool, but for some reason I just couldn't get up.

My whole body was on fire and I felt dizzy. Luckily, this man wasn't going to the pool. He wanted to be led into the sauna and came back with a lifeguard. I saw them walking this way and immediately jumped up to grab my cousin. I knew now that for sure she had locked us in there because she pulled out her keys and unlocked the door and let the man in. I didn't want to take any chances of us being trapped in there for any longer so as the man was trying to walk in, I was trying to shove our way out. As we were going out, the lifeguards started to try to shut

the door and push us back in with it. The man was clearly confused about what was going on and said, uh, I think they want out. The lifeguard let out a sigh and opened the door fully, and we ran away as fast as we could into the changing room. We only had about ten minutes before our grandmother was supposed to pick us up, and we were both so shaken up by what had just happened that we didn't say anything to each other as we got dressed or on the car ride home. When we got back to the house, my parents were making us dinner and I told them the story of what had just happened. They thought that I must have been exaggerating

and they didn't believe me. I truly think that that woman was going to let us cook alive in there. The only bit of doubt that I have is what would have happened if we actually died. She obviously would have gotten the blame. What was her endgame? I mean, I'm 21 now, but I think about this interaction all the time, and when I'm in small spaces or I get too warm, I still have panic attacks. No one believes the story, and I get it. It is pretty absurd. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to ask for opinions here, but do you think that this could have been some crazy misunderstanding? Or do you think that she really just left us in there to die? Why would she do that? When I was maybe 12 or a little older, I was waiting for my ride after school one day,

when this big white family van pulls up in front of me and asks if I'm waiting for my ride. My family had a van just like this one, so it wasn't suspicious or anything to me, but I was dumb and didn't register that, yeah, I am, and he was asking an obvious question because here I am sitting outside the school by myself but I answered anyways and then he asked what my name was and I hesitated but he explained that he was looking for someone so I gave it. I told him my name and it was Thea and he said oh so it's you. Your mom asked me to come pick you up from school. He then introduces himself as Sam, my mom's nephew, and I never really met my mom's family, so I was none the wiser. Eager to get home and out of the cold, I didn't question him much, even though I was skeptical.

I just jumped in the car, and thinking back on it now, I realize how dumb I was and how lucky I was to get away. I got in and we started driving towards the opposite direction of my house. At first, I thought no big deal of it because there was a route this way to my place but it was just further. But soon we were passing that route too and out of nowhere I realized that we were on the motorway. Now all traces of tiredness had left me and I was on the edge of tears. I asked him if he could please take me home and that if my mom sent him then he should know that I'm not really allowed to go out after school but he just kept ignoring me. At this point I was officially bawling my eyes out and cars that

were passing us on the motorway or standing next to us in traffic were just starting to stare. At one point I was crying so much that he slammed his hands on the steering wheel and started mumbling how this would be easier for both of us if I would just shut up. But now I wasn't thinking straight, and I knew that anything would be better than making it to wherever he was taking me, so the next time the car slowed down, I unlocked the door and jumped out. In all honesty, I wasn't thinking at all because if I thought about it, I would have chickened out and for once, thank god, I didn't. I hit the ground and landed on my left leg. The pain was so bad but I didn't care because in my head, anything was better than being in that car. The dude didn't even bat an eye, I feel like. In the chaos, I'd seen him even try and grab me, but once I was outside, he just sped away. And there was even a driver that almost hit me, but stopped just in time, and they got out and ran towards me.

The police were called, and my parents as well, but to this day, I'm not allowed to wait outside anywhere. And even before I'm done with whatever I'm doing, my parents will be there waiting, outside. I think about this a lot, and I truly think that I might have stopped a kidnapping just by being in a parked car. My ex-boyfriend lived with me for over a year, and there was a period of time where his truck was acting up, so I would pick him up from work. He worked just down the road from my place at a liquor store, so he'd get out at around 10pm on weekdays. So one night, he asked me to pick him up, and I agreed. in my pajamas and drive down to grumpily wait for him since my bedtime was 10pm due to my job, obviously, and I park my car in the small parking lot out front. His liquor store is sandwiched between an adult store and a head shop, party central I guess, but now the head shop and liquor

store are closed, so their thirds of the lot are mostly empty. Now the adult store only had one other car in front of it. Outside the liquor store is my car and one other, so three total cars, with a woman standing outside of it sitting on her hood. I don't think much of it, maybe she's waiting for someone in the adult store or one of the ex-co-workers and just relaxing in the summer night air. I sit hunched in my seat, car off, playing on my phone. I notice a white van. I know it's cliche, but that's why I noticed it pull into the lot. It drives through slowly, then back out into the main road. Weird, but maybe they wanted alcohol and saw the store was closed. Whatever. I go back to my phone, but I glance at the woman.

Still outside her car, but moved between my car and hers. I had parked a couple of spots over, so close, but not too close. I just go back to my phone. The same white van pulls in again and stops in front of her. I sit up slightly and watch. I'm a true crime nut, and what can I say, I'm just easily alerted. And watch some guy roll down the van window and lean out to talk to the woman. I pull out my phone and snap a photo of the license plate, again,

just in case, but I can't see anything with it. So I turn on my car and go to open the door, but the guy in the van instantly pulls away and leaves. The woman moves closer to my car as I get out and approach her, and I ask her what that was, and she says that she doesn't know. He was trying to ask her for directions, but stopped mid-sentence when I turned on my car. I ask her if she's waiting for anyone, and she says kinda. She's been sitting outside the liquor store for three hours, waiting on a tow truck because she locked her keys inside her car. And she couldn't leave the car because her puppy was in the back seat. Thankfully it wasn't hot that night but it was actually comfortable so she was just sitting there waiting for the tow truck. As her and I are

talking my ex comes out and asks what's up. So we decide to help her since there was no way that I was leaving her alone now. I have some rope in my car for emergencies, and my ex uses it to basically jimmy her door open, make a lasso, and hook it around the door lock and pull it up to unlock it. It works, and we open the door just as the tow truck pulls in. Her puppy's safe, we wish her well, and I get back in the car just to tell my ex I think I almost watched her get kidnapped. I am a member of a website that posts pictures of gravestones for people.

One day, a picture was requested of a very old gravestone in a graveyard walking distance from my house, so I agreed to take it. I walked there, found the grave, and stood over the almost 200 year old grave to see if it was the grave that I was looking for, considering how degraded the stone was. And then, my foot sank. In to the grave. And up to my hip. I nearly passed out. I was sure that something was going to grab my foot. It took me several minutes to get free, and I very nearly lost my shoe, and I was sobbing when I was done. That night I had an extremely vivid dream that I still remember. I was talking to a Civil War soldier on a battlefield. He was telling me about his life and apologizing for scaring me. He told me to call him Charlie. The next day I went to the church to let them know about the collapsed grave. They looked it up on their map to make sure which one it was, and I'm absolutely

serious when I say this. He was a soldier who was killed in the Civil War, and his first name was Charles. I'm browsing around aimlessly in TJ Maxx. I'm a 35-year-old female and kind of just all over the store. Not sure what I'm going to get. Now I see this young guy, probably early 20s, skinny with glasses. I didn't think anything of it. I went to a different spot and I see this young guy, probably early 20s, skinny with glasses. I didn't think anything of it and went to a different spot and I see him again. He's in the same aisle picking stuff up to look at and putting it back. No card or anything. Now my red flags were not yet raised and then I see

him a third time in a different area doing the same thing but now stopping and texting someone. Now my spidey senses start to perk up a little bit. Like okay, this is weird but I'm not nervous yet per se, but I am a bit more aware. Then it happens again and this time I know something is weird. He's following me all over the store and just not buying anything. So I start kind of zigzagging through the store and I find a coat I want to try on. At this point I was very wary but also thinking I'm being ridiculous and paranoid but I just had this strong sense that this was not normal. I went into the dressing room for about 15 minutes hoping that I would lose him. I came out and didn't see him for another 20-ish

minutes. I was relieved thinking that I was definitely being paranoid and he probably just left. I go to the checkout after almost an hour and a half of shopping with a cart full of stuff. I was the only one in line. I get called to cash out and I turn around and this man is immediately behind me in the checkout. He just came out of nowhere. He had one item. Some cheap little decoration. At this point, I was full on panicking. The cashier could tell that I was being weird and very distracted,

and at the risk of sounding crazy, I almost didn't say anything, but I told her that I think this man was following me. She was extremely empathetic and did not seem very surprised. She says, I'm so sorry, I'll have someone walk you out to your car. And I was so thankful for her kindness. The man checked out with his one item and left the store with some older man who I didn't see with him before and that older man had absolutely nothing with him. The parking lot at this store is a huge dark plaza. I did not want to go outside alone. I just knew that it was a very bad idea. The cashier asked another employee to walk me out.

She was younger than me but so sweet and I apologized profusely because it was sleeting and cold raining out so she had no coat and she said, I don't care if it's downpouring. I'd still walk you to your car. It was so sweet, really, and she walked me all the way and even waited until I pulled out and drove away. The whole time I was shaking like a leaf. Like I said, I've heard this happen to so many women, but I kind of thought that they might be being paranoid or exaggerating, and that was extremely scary though. The more I think about it, the creepier it gets. He followed me around the entire store,

and everywhere I turned, there he was. I have no idea what his deal was, but this was just so unsettling. My husband freaked out and does not want me to shop alone anymore. I don't really want to shop alone anymore either, and if I had not been paying attention or dismissed my bad feelings, I have a feeling something very bad may have happened. As a woman, being aware of your surroundings is your greatest asset. The year is 2004. I was about 8 or 9. The cool thing to do was to walk uptown to the local Starbucks, an area with lots of shops and foot traffic. A man in his 40s to 50s was parked near the Starbucks down a side street. He had a terrible brown clunker of a car with no license plates. I remember thinking that he was a big fat man and looked quite pathetic and dirty. He called my friend and I over to his car.

Can you girls please help me out? I need to get something from my trunk, but I'm too big to get back in there and get it. Can one of you crawl in there and grab it? I remember he had an uneasy laugh, and he was trying overly hard to be nice to us. It just seemed fake and labored. I immediately was like, heck no, because my parents taught me better, but my friend was more gullible and was going to help him. We approached the car and I could see his trunk was totally empty. I grabbed my friend's arm and pulled her back. I told the man we couldn't help him. My

friend was a really sweet little girl and reiterated that she wanted to help him but I refused and kept pulling her arm to lead her away. She said that I was being mean, and a couple of other kids were walking by at the same time, so he turned his attention away from us and started asking them for help. My friend and I ran inside the Starbucks to tell the workers that there was a man outside trying to get kids to crawl in his trunk. They called the police, but the man and his car were gone by the time they arrived. A few years ago, I was staying in a family resort in Turkey with my parents and sister. I was 17 then.

One night, after we had finished dinner, I wanted to go upstairs to our hotel room to get my jacket. The guy that entered the elevator with me was already giving me weird vibes but I shook it off. He got off the same floor as me and also followed me down the path to our room. I eventually started running because I felt so uneasy and he was getting so close. I reached our room and thought that that was it, just some weird encounter that I was overreacting to. I had sufficiently calmed down and was going to leave when our hotel room's phone rang. I picked it up assuming my parents had made a call from the reception desk but instead it was a male voice telling me how

sexy I looked and how much he wanted to do terrible things to me. I hung up immediately and started crying. That dude had been close enough to see which room I had entered to be able to make that call. The phone rang a few more times but I refused to pick up. I must have been in our room for a long time because my parents had gotten worried and had come upstairs to check on me. I explained what happened and when the phone rang once again my father picked up. There was a silence on the other end, and the call was quickly ended. I was terrified that I'd see the man again, but weirdly, I didn't. I kept looking out for him at the pool, the restaurant, etc., but I never saw him again.

My parents told me to brush it off, that such creeps are everywhere, truly, but it really shook me to my core. I was horrified about what may have happened if I hadn't started running, and to this day I hate walking down long hotel floors on my own. It just fills me with this sense of dread. Okay, so this happened not even an hour ago, and I'm still shaking. I'm now safe, thank goodness, but I'm so anxious I can barely type this. I'm a 24-year-old female currently staying with my boyfriend. He's 28, and he was having a small get-together. We were having drinks, so once we were out of most of the juice,

I decided to go to the nearby store to pick up a few. Now keep in mind this store is about a three minute walk away so I had no problem going by myself since I was also the most sober one. I had about one drink and was in the middle of a second one. Everything on the way there went perfectly fine. I went in, got what I needed and left. As I was walking out, a man who looked to be about in his mid-thirties was about to walk in, but stopped. I kept walking. He turned around and said, hey. I didn't respond, and kept going on my way. I knew I didn't drop anything, and I had everything I came for, so I didn't need to have any other interactions especially since it was nearing 3am.

He then proceeded to start following me and when he was close enough he said, You're pretty. I need me a you. I again ignored him and kept walking. He then taps me on the shoulder and asks for my number. I said no and please leave me alone. He replied with, but you're so pretty, come on. I ignored it and walked faster at this point. I needed to cross the street too, so I called my boyfriend and gave him the rundown of what's going on and he asked for a description of the guy and I gave it to him and I heard him putting his stuff on in the background. His friends asked where he was going and he said he needed to handle something. He instructed me to walk faster and at this point I was run walking basically and I checked behind me and the guy was still following me. He made a gesture for me to lower the phone.

Now I was just running. Out of nowhere I just crashed into my boyfriend and by that point I looked behind me and the guy wasn't there anymore. I'm not sure if he was hiding or something but he was gone. My boyfriend hugged me and asked me where he was and I said I don't know and he told me if I wanted him to go check and I said no just to take me back home so he put his arm around me and walked me back home. I'm now sitting in my room absolutely terrified. He asked me if I'm okay and I said that I am and I'm used to this behavior but I can't help but be terrified. Usually once I've told them to leave me alone they will, except for a few times but I can count those encounters with one hand. But this was so scary. The fact that he gestured me to lower the phone was something that makes

me want to throw up. His friends asked what happened and their girlfriends came to check up on me once he told them. I'm now sitting with them still in the room and they're comforting me. I don't know why this keeps happening. I'm sick of this. I just got back from a business trip in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The area we're in is very high on crime, and I'm pretty shaken up. So my co-worker and I, both females, were leaving one of the stores at 8.20pm, and it's dark outside, and we're headed to meet more co-workers at dinner. When all of a sudden, a pitbull runs into four-lane traffic crossing the street from the left of the road to our right. We stop traffic and see the dog is heading right towards a parking lot. We pull into the parking lot, which is an elementary school, and hop out of the vehicle.

Immediately, the dog starts running towards us when we're calling it. She comes up to us, and she appears to have shown all the signs of just having a litter of puppies. She has skin and bones, marks on her, and appears to have shown all the signs of just having a litter of puppies. She has skin and bones, marks on her and appears to have been abused. The dog is standing by our side, not leaving us. She is extremely sweet. My co-worker and I just look at each other with this look of, this would happen to us on a business trip. So we stand there and we start calling friends and family back home to see what we should do. I go ahead and call the police to see if they can send an animal control officer to the scene. They tell us that due to protocol, they can't because the dog is not hurt, harmed, or dead. So disappointed, we just stood there.

The dispatcher took our phone number down. While I'm trying to look for an animal hospital that's open 24 hours, my coworker calls a police station. She calls the same one I did, and they took her phone number, and we kept explaining time after time our predicament and how we're staying in a hotel and couldn't take the dog with us, but also couldn't leave her. At this point, it's almost 9.30. My coworker and I are standing there, all options exhausted at this point. In the corner of my eye, I see a man about in his late to mid-twenties walk the perimeter of the school. He's watching us intently and I locked eyes with him.

My coworker sees him as well and she opens the side of her car and grabs her taser when the man walks by. We just thought it was weird, so we thought nothing of it due to our mind just being so caught up in the situation regarding the dog. We suddenly got a phone call from the officers stating that they were in fact going to send out an officer. Excited, we stood there waiting, and 25 minutes go by, and we suddenly get a call from the sheriff's office once again that they were not coming by, and suggested that we either leave the dog or just keep it till the morning. Standing there irritated, suddenly we see the man walk by us again, walking the sidewalk, staring at us. This time the dog seems to try and walk up to the man, and we yell for it to come back to our side. At this point he walks by for a second time, and once he disappears into

the night we forget about him because our emotions are still running wild. Suddenly we realize almost two and a half hours later we realize to call one of the others from work who is from the area to see if she knew any fosters or any 24-hour shelters or anything we could take this dog to. My co-worker looks over the hood of her car and she sees a car which I don't learn until later and I do see this same car driving down the road then turning a legal U-turn into the street. I'm standing at the back bumper of her car near the back door and she is standing at the front of her car. The car is speeding through the school parking lot going towards where I'm standing. All of a sudden, she yells to get in the back seat and pushes me in the back seat and throws the dog into the back seat as well. The car looked like it had been t-boned, headlights are out, and she struggled to get in the front seat.

At this point, the car realizes that I can't corner my backside, so it drives around the bus loop to try and corner my co-worker. And she finally gets into the car and speeds out of the school parking lot when this car is on our backside trying to speed up against us. The car chases us and follows us for half a block and then does a U-turn back up the road where we were. The local that we called, who also works with the company, ended up knowing someone and a dog rescue. Network and we met the person to give her the dog and she was accredited and

very trusting so we drove about an hour away to meet this person. We were honestly pretty shaken up badly and before we met the person who was going to foster the dog we just kept driving so the car wouldn't follow us. I do want to touch base on the fact that the area was not very nice and one of the locals that we were on the phone with about the rescue did in fact tell us that dog fighting was really bad in the area. And again, the dog looked to be in bad shape at the time, but it was healthy. But what are your thoughts or ideas on what happened to us? Do you think that guy had something to do with dog fighting. While deployed to Iraq with the army, one night I'd been assigned evening guard duty in one of the camp's perimeter towers. These towers were just upended concrete pipe, ten feet in diameter with a roof, floor, and a ladder inside.

It was only two stories up, and each tower was a set of night vision goggles, a pair of binoculars, machine gun, a radio, and a spotlight. There were two of us per tower on each shift. On this night it was me and my buddy, who goes by Smith. It was a quiet, cloudless, moonlit night. Our camp was small and situated on a low hill. Five towers and total protected the perimeter, with number three being the one facing the rear of the camp. We had mostly an unobstructed view out for at least a mile in all directions, but there were small hills and valleys, no more than six feet at the most. Otherwise, it was just empty desert.

While we scanned our sector, Smith and I just shot the breeze. We complained about the war, talked about going back home, having a beer, and just meeting girls. It was the best way to pass the time. Then at some point during the night, we hear what I can only describe as the shriek, like nothing I'd ever heard before. The sound came from somewhere off in the dark, maybe 30 to 50 yards away from us. It was short, barely a second and a half long, sharp and loud, and ascending in pitch. Something that could have been either a child, woman, or an animal in distress, or an animal in anger. It really stopped my heart, and it was even more frightening in contrast to the calm and quiet of the evening.

And then it happened again. And then again. Smith, you hear that? I asked. Yeah, what the hell is that? He said, grabbing the binoculars and looking out. I don't know, but it's freaking me out, man. I said.

Get the light out there. Smith said. I got the spotlight out scanning the I said. Get the light out there, Smith said. I got the spotlight out scanning the desert, but there was nothing out there. I kept moving back and forth. Get the night vision. Again, I scanned the desert for as far as I could see, but there was nothing. Just empty air. We got on the radio to the watch commander.

HQ, this is Tower 3. Did you hear that? Over. The radio cracked and then responded, negative three. What am I supposed to hear? By then, the noise had stopped. We described what we were hearing and asked the other towers if they had heard anything. No one but us heard it. Watch Commander checked back with us a couple of times then came up and looked for himself. He tried the night vision, then the binos with the spotlight. Nothing but sand. The shrieking was gone and all was quiet again. We finished the shift with no more interruptions, just the same as before, except for one difference. I stayed perched on the machine gun watching the night.

In the morning after we were replaced, Smith, myself, and another buddy from the watch commander's office went out to the gate and headed in the direction of the noise. About 30 yards from the gate was the most horrific thing I've ever seen. Scattered in about an 8 foot diameter was a splashing of dark brown blood soaked desert sand with bits of flesh. None of us could tell if it was human or animal, but whatever it was, almost nothing was left. What scared us most is that from the sight of the blood we had a direct line of sight straight to tower three. Even without the spotlight we should have been able to see whatever had taken place here. But neither of us in the tower saw whatever did this. Even the watch commander himself came out to investigate. A report was made and a brief search of the area was conducted.

No foot or paw prints, no drag marks, no patterns, nothing. Whatever it was, it shrieked three times left nothing but blood and disappeared. It was well within eyesight of us but was never spotted it just vanished. It's been years now and I can still hear that desperate noise and it still gives me chills. The End My grandma often tells this story as though it's sweet because she thinks this dude's intentions were pure. My mom and I are baffled that she can't see the more likely reason, but she was raised very religious and naive, so she never considered someone could do something that bad. Anyway, my grandma grew up in New York City during the Great Depression. When she was around 8 to 10, so sometime in the 1930s, she met a man at the park who said that he would give her tennis lessons for free. Being dirt poor and having no way to pay to do something like that,

my grandmother took him up on the offer. They started meeting weekly, and he would buy her things, such as tennis clothes and stuff like that, and they would play tennis and sometimes go out to eat and talk. He told her about how he had a daughter who looked so much like her, but that his wife left him and he wasn't allowed to see his daughter anymore. My grandma was a very cute little girl by all conventional standards, with blonde ringlets and bright blue eyes. Eventually he asked to meet her parents. They met at a store somewhere to chat and he just bluntly told them, I'd love to adopt your daughter and have her as my own. I'll pay you good money of course.

Now, times were desperate, but luckily my great grandparents were reasonable and decided it was not sell your child to a stranger desperate. They told my grandma that she couldn't take tennis lessons from that guy anymore. To be continued... bell to be alerted of all future narrations. I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm EST. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash let's read official, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast, where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data, located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the

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