The Lets Read Podcast - 242: THERE'S SOMETHING OUTSIDE OUR CABIN | 23 True Scary Stories | EP 230

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Hiking/Camping encounters, Native American lore & one truly terrifying individual HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT? www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial Or over email: [e-mail] 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 Mix: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt Today's episode sponsored by BetterHelp

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Valid email address required. Terms apply. See pennzoil.ca slash offer for details. MasterCard is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. Perhaps one of the most significant events in U.S. history took place way back in March of 1840. It ignited 30 years of brutal, unrelenting guerrilla warfare in America's southeast, and the subsequent effect on the national psyche lies somewhere immeasurable and astronomical. It is a tale of desperation, hope, greed, and revenge, all steeped in the incomprehensible man-made horrors of the Old West. This is the story of the Great Comanche Raid. In early 1840, times were tough for the tribe

of Native Americans known as the Comanche. Several years of war with their rival Apache, as well as a catastrophic outbreak of smallpox, had severely weakened the the Comanche. Several years of war with their rival Apache, as well as a catastrophic outbreak of smallpox, had severely weakened the numerous Comanche war bands. Another year of fighting might see their people wiped from the earth, so instead, they sued for peace. Three Comanche emissaries rode out to the newly Texan city of San Antonio to meet with city officials, and were told that if the Comanche returned a dozen Anglo-American captives unharmed, then peace would be forthcoming. The emissaries agreed to return with captives in just over three weeks, but

it was a promise they couldn't keep. Throughout their history, the Comanche were never a single, unified people. Despite being united by language, there were at least 12 different subdivisions of the tribe operating almost entirely independent of one another, as well as up to 35 independent war bands with shifting loyalties to the larger groups. On top of that, the Comanche differed from their fellow Native Americans in that there was no official power structure within their war bands. If a young Comanche warrior was skilled and charismatic enough,

he could defy the wishes of his tribal elders, then lead a raid against just about whoever the hell he wanted. And the Comanche were prolific raiders. The word Comanche is taken from a Ute word meaning, he who attacks me all the time. And it was through this culture of war and raiding that they acquired so many prisoners in the first place. Yet their division presented the peace emissaries with a huge problem, because the Anglo-American captives were spread out among the different groups and

war bands, convincing each to give them up proved impossible. Relinquishing a captive meant losing a valuable source of slave labor, meaning their captives wanted ample compensation in exchange for their release. In the end, the emissaries were only able to negotiate the release of a single American prisoner within the allotted time frame. On March 19th, the day of the Texans' deadline, a Comanche delegation of 12 chiefs and 53 warriors returned to San Antonio. They had come dressed for the occasion. Some wore long braids woven with coyote fur and decorated with brightly colored feathers.

Others wore huge, buffalo horn headdresses with their faces painted a garish, sanguine red. It made for a magnificent sight. But it was one the residents of San Antonio found terrifyingly intimidating. When the Comanche met with Texan officials, one of the warriors dismounted and dragged a filthy, frail young girl from the back of his horse. Sixteen-year-old Matilda Lockhart had been captured two years earlier while working at her cousin's farm, and her return was supposed to be a cause for celebration. But when the emaciated, mutilated girl was revealed to a waiting crowd, her appearance had the opposite effect. Mary Maverick, the woman who helped nurse Matilda back to health, said that she was utterly degraded and could not hold up her head again. Her head, arms, and face were full of bruises and sores,

and we were horrified to discover that her nose had been burned off. All the fleshy end was gone, and a great scab had formed, with both nostrils wide open and denuded of flesh. She told a piteous tale of how dreadfully the Indians had beaten her, and how they would wake her from her sleep by sticking a chunk of fire to her flesh, especially to her nose. Texan authorities were quick to question Matilda on the health of her fellow captives. She confirmed that at least a dozen of them were still alive, including four of her relatives, and claimed that various war bands would only release them if larger compensation was offered. This slightly contradicts the explanation of the Comanche peace delegates, who rightfully blamed the lack of the Comanche peace delegates,

who rightfully blamed the lack of unity among their people. Only one war band had agreed to release a prisoner, and while the others were open to negotiations, no agreement had been reached thus far. It was only then that the Comanche revealed the price for each captive's release, and it constituted a huge amount of food, medicine, ammunition, and blankets. While some argued that this was a simple miscommunication, Texan authorities viewed it as a slap in the face. In their eyes, the Comanche had brazenly defied the terms of their agreement, and they sought to detain the peace delegates until the remaining American captives were released. The Comanche were led to a one-story building next to the town's jail, known as the Council House.

Here, the warriors and their chieftains sat on the floor, as was their custom, while the Texans sat on chairs. A translator was then told to inform the Comanche that they were under arrest, but to the Texans' surprise, he refused. The visibly anxious translator claimed that if he did so, the Comanche would attempt to fight their way out. The Texans responded by placing several armed militia members in the room before reissuing their order to the translator.

He did as they asked, then promptly fled. Upon learning that they were detained, the Comanche began to reach for their weapons. The Texan militia men replied by leveling their shotguns and muskets while warning the warriors against belligerence, but their caution fell on deaf ears. At once, the Comanche rushed their would-be captors with knives and tomahawks drawn. The militia men opened fire, wounding and killing several of their opening salvo, but they were quickly overwhelmed. In the blood-drenched chaos of close quarters fighting, the Texans didn't stand a chance. Some accidentally shot each other in the confusion, while the battle-hardened Comanche warriors simply cut them to ribbons.

They moved like lightning, slashing and stabbing and screeching their war cries and within seconds, the Texans were dead. Outside the council house, the remaining Comanche heard the blood-curdling cries coming from inside and descended into a panic. Many believed that the Texans had set a trap for them and began firing arrows at just about anyone who came into view. At least one unarmed civilian was killed when an arrow cleaved its way into their skull. They died where they lay, with the smell of gun smoke in their nostrils and Comanche war cries in their ears. Once they had cleared a path of escape, the Comanche began to flee but were pursued by a number of militia reinforcements. The militiamen's fire was wild and a number of Texan civilians were

killed in the crossfire. On the other hand, the Comanche's arrows were as precise as they were deadly. By the time a Comanche warrior was around 12 or 13 years old, they were such skilled archers that they were able to shoot horseflies out of the air at short ranges. What's more, a highly efficient method of shooting meant a young Comanche could fire off three arrows in little over one and a half seconds. Compare that to the 30-second reload time of 19th century muskets, or the limited capacity of relatively cumbersome revolvers, which were considered to be the cutting edge of military technology. Take the example of a Texan officer by the name of Lieutenant Dunnington. At the outbreak of hostilities, Dunnington pulled his pistol and aimed it at the head of a Comanche female.

She was able to shoot an arrow with such force that it passed through Dunnington's chest and buried itself into the wall behind him, all before Dunnington could even pull the trigger. The stunned officer was able to reply in turn and blew the woman's brains out before collapsing to the ground. His final words, having mistook the woman for a younger male warrior, were, I killed him, but I believe he's killed me too. By the late afternoon, when the Comanches found themselves completely outnumbered and hopelessly surrounded, the decision was made to surrender to the Texans. 35 of their number had been killed in the fighting while the remaining 29 were taken to the town jail as prisoners, yet their capture

had come at a heavy cost. Seven Texans had been killed outright, including a judge and the town sheriff, with dozens of others being treated for serious injuries. These injuries were treated in part by a German surgeon by the name of Dr. Weidman, whose story is so fascinatingly horrifying that it's worthy of note. Weidman happened to be in San Antonio on the orders of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who had assigned him the task of studying the relatively new Republic of Texas. As thanks for his services, the San Antonio authorities offered Weidman ample financial compensation, but he proposed a considerably more gruesome form of acquittal. Instead of money,

Weidman requested the bodies of two slain Comanche warriors with the intention of returning them to Europe for study. His wish was granted and two days later, he boiled the bodies in a highly toxic chemical bath to strip away the flesh and organs and secure the preserved skeletons. Then, to dispose of the foul-smelling liquid remains of the two Comanches, Dr. Weidman decided to pour the mess into San Antonio's only supply of drinking water, causing untold suffering to the unsuspecting townsfolk. Dr. Weidman went from hero to villain in little over 48 hours, and once his heinous act of pollution was discovered,

he was promptly chased out of town. Meanwhile, back at the town's jail, a single Comanche prisoner was released in the condition that he relay a message to the rest of his people. If all 15 American prisoners were released unharmed within 12 days, the surviving Comanche peace delegates would be allowed to live. If not, they would be executed. Exactly one week later, a Texan woman by the name of Mrs. Webster stumbled into San Antonio with her three-year-old child in tow. Some reports state that Mrs. Webster had escaped from 19 months of Comanche captivity,

but if she made it to San Antonio alive, it's only because her captors allowed her to. She was questioned on the fate of her fellow captives, but was unaware of their condition. Days went by, with no sign of the Comanche or their prisoners, and then finally, on the day of the deadline, another band of Comanches rode into San Antonio with three Texan captives in tow. One of them was a young boy named Booker, son of the previously freed Mrs. Webster. He too was asked what the condition of the remaining captives were. The story that he told was beyond horrifying. When word of the council house's shootout reached

the Comanches, they were enraged. The wives of the slain warriors demanded vengeance, and when it was granted to them, the methods of torture they conjured up were the stuff of nightmares. One Texan captive was slowly roasted to death over an open fire. Another was slowly dismembered, with the Comanches cauterizing the amputations to prevent blood loss and prolong their victims' suffering. Booker Webster had also heard of another captive Texan who was beaten, bound, then laid next to an anthill. The Comanche then sliced off the prisoners' eyelids and then watched as the ants devoured

the soft tissue of their unprotected eyeballs. Other methods of torture employed by the Comanche involved the use of hot coals. Victims sometimes had white hot pieces of firewood stuffed into their mouths or were tied down before it was heaped on top of their stomachs and genitals. As you can imagine, the news horrified the Texans who flat out refused to release their own Comanche prisoners. They were later moved from the city jail to a U.S. Army encampment at the head of the San Antonio River, but escaped in dribs and drabs over the years that followed.

In the aftermath of the council house shootout and their chief's permanent detention by Texan officials, the Comanche hungered for revenge. The war chief of the Penateca warband, a man named Buffalo Hump, began riding between neighboring Comanche groups to converse with their warriors. At each stop, he made the case for a unified act of vengeance, a single brutal riposte that would avenge their fallen and captured brethren. Over the course of that summer, the young war chief gathered up a raiding party of between four and five hundred Comanche warriors, and they began raiding the smaller settlements

between Austin and San Antonio. With each raid, the war party grew stronger and stronger, until finally they were ready for much larger game. And on August 6th of 1840, citizens of the fledgling settlements of Victoria awoke to a harrowing sight. Almost 600 heavily armed Comanche warriors, resplendent in their martial finery, whooped their war cries as they galloped towards Victoria. They'd been caught completely unprepared, and they paid for their lack of diligence and blood. The Comanches swept through the town, slaughtering as they went, and when the opportunity

presented itself, they scalped their fallen victims with glee. The quick and the fortunate were able to barricade themselves inside homes and businesses, while those with rifles took potshots at the Comanche from windows and balconies. The warriors killed around two dozen civilians, looted numerous stores and warehouses, then vanished almost as quickly as they'd appeared. Two days later, the Comanches arrived at the small port of Linville, northeast of modern-day Port Lavaca. Thanks to the advance warning from Victoria, the vast majority of Linville's citizens were able to escape unharmed. They simply boarded the boats docked in the town's harbor and sailed out to a distance the Comanche were unwilling to pursue them.

Yet, this meant that they were forced to watch as their homes were smashed, soiled, and looted by vengeful warriors who carted off the modern-day equivalent of nine million dollars worth of goods. Over the course of the next few hours, the jubilant warriors relished their moment of victory. They dressed themselves in a colorful cavalcade of Texan clothes, drank themselves legless on looted hooch, and took a horrifying amount of pleasure in torturing their captives to death. Only six of Victoria's citizens had been unable to escape in time, one of whom was a man named Hugh Oren Watts, who had delayed his escape to retrieve a family heirloom. Hugh probably heard stories of the Comanche's brutality, yet it's likely he didn't know exactly what that entailed.

But thanks to a serious error of judgment, he received a full and comprehensive education of what it meant to be a Comanche prisoner. It was a standard practice for Comanche warriors, as well as other Great Plains tribes, to inflict unspeakable horrors on those they defeated in battle. But this was not a moral decision, and those who employed such barbarity cannot truly be described as evil. You see, in a society where courage was prized above all, being tortured to death offered a warrior the opportunity to prove himself worthy of the title. To die with fortitude was a thing of great honor, and since he would be shown no mercy, he would show none in return.

It's not clear how Hugh Watts died on the day of the Linville raid, but it's safe to say that it would have been agonizingly slow and unimaginably painful. At the time, Linville was the second largest port in Texas, and capturing such a large town was a monumentous occasion for many of the Comanche warriors. Yet opting to savor the moment proved to be their downfall. One of the great military strengths of all Native American tribes was their incredible mobility, and the success of a raid rested not just on the speed and surprise of the attack, but also the urgency of the withdrawal.

In sacking and burning Linville, the Comanche had given the pursuing Texas Rangers enough time to coordinate their forces and plan an attack. Volunteer companies from all over East and Central Texas converged on Linville, and they eventually tracked the fleeing Comanches to a place called Plum Creek, not far from modern-day Lockhart. Around 60 Comanche warriors were killed in the first few minutes of the Rangers' ambush, and the remainder were forced to flee with only what they could carry. There's no doubt that, thanks to the element of surprise, the pursuing rangers could have run the bloodied war band down

and slaughtered them, but as they rode through the Comanche campground, they made a startling discovery. Thousands of dollars in silver bullion was discovered in the packs of several mules. The rangers were faced with a choice. Do their job, or succumb to their greed. And they chose the latter. Whether or not this was a deliberate ploy for the ever-cunning Comanche, it's not for me to say. But the fact remains, the rangers' greed was the warband's salvation,

and thus marked the end of the Great Comanche Raid of 1840. The cycle of violence would continue for decades afterwards, with hideous injustices, betrayals, and atrocities committed by both sides. The morality of westward expansion and the philosophy of manifest destiny will be debated and scrutinized until there's no one left to talk about them. But when talk stops, and the sun sets over the land that's yours and mine, we can take comfort in the relative peace and security that most of us enjoy today.

Because coexistence is always preferable to killing. My name is Ryan. I'm from southern Oklahoma, and I'm half Native American on my mom's side. My grandpa, who was born in the year 1912, was full-blooded Comanche, and much like a lot of the elders from around his time, he had a lot of stories to tell. These weren't his own stories, and they were passed down from his grandfather in turn, and they're from a time before the Wild West was tamed, as they say. He used to tell us some pretty wild tales sometimes, of how our ancestors would talk to spirits using peyote cactus,

or how they could shoot nickels out of the air with their bows and arrows. Most of Grandpa's stories were either interesting or insightful like that, but every so often, he'd tell us something a little darker. Now, I'm no expert in Native American history or culture, so I'm not going to pretend to be able to speak for other tribes, but I know that a lot of tribes were mostly peaceful hunter and gatherers who only went to war to defend themselves in their land. The Comanche were not one of those tribes. Basically, a bunch of other tribes forced the Comanche out of Wyoming and south into the Great Plains of Texas and Oklahoma.

This is because we sucked at everything. We couldn't fight, we couldn't farm, and when we got to the plains, life sucked even harder, because the whole place is basically one big grassy desert. But then, the Comanches got horses from the Spanish, and because we didn't have much else going for us, we decided to get really good at riding horses. This gave us a huge advantage over, well, just about everyone. And because we had a huge chip on our shoulder, we decided to get a little payback on all the other tribes.

We beat the Apache, who'd been bugging us ever since we arrived on the plains, all the way down into Mexico and Nevada. I mean, we were kicking it hard and taking names all the way from Kansas to Corpus Christi, but that's about where I stopped being proud of it. I know it's an overdone bit to be like, war isn't glamorous, y'all, but in the case of the tribes of the Great Plains, it's a gigantic understatement. Yes, we stuck it to the settler colonizers for like a hundred years, but we did it in some pretty disgusting ways. Nowadays, wars have rules, but back then, it was anything goes. And that whole scalping thing really is just the tip of a very

gory iceberg. Kids were routinely killed. Women were made into slave wives. Whole families were tortured until they just straight up died. The settlers did some evil stuff to us too, but it's like the Comanche made war crimes into an art form. But that's just the way things were back then. Like I said, anything goes. All that nasty stuff said was, hey, don't mess with us or you'll get this too.

But still, it makes me glad that I was a 70s kid and not an 1870s kid, you know? Anyway, like I said earlier, every so often grandpa would break out a horror story for just us boys. It makes me cringe a little to think about it now, but back then, those were my favorite kinds of stories to hear from him. Call it that morbid curiosity that all teenage boys have, but I was really into hearing about our people's badass past, and if I thought that it was an appropriate moment, I'd bug him until he told me one. He told me a few humdingers over the years, let me tell you, but the one he saved for Halloween when we were all hitting our mid-teens

had the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. So, picture the scene. It's like the 1850s or whatever and the war between my ancestors and the white settlers is at its peak. We'd raid some homestead, steal a bunch of horses, and then ride off onto the plains to make our escape. Inevitably, we'd end up getting followed by a bunch of soldiers or Texas Rangers who planned on getting revenge and taking back the horses. Now on paper, getting chased like that isn't ideal, but the reality is, us Comanches enjoyed it when the Texans followed us out into the plains. See, we traveled much lighter, and had our pick of the best horses, so we'd always end up escaping. Then as the raiders wandered around the plains running out of food and water, we'd just hide out somewhere and watch them. After a few days, the rangers would be

really low on supplies, and you gotta remember, these dudes would ride for days at a time trying to catch us. They weren't just in and out real quick, 20 minute adventures as they say, they rode for hundreds of miles at a time. But then, on their final night's camp before heading back to civilization, Comanche warriors would sneak up to their horses in the middle of the night and stampede them off into the plains before the rangers knew what hit them. A really skilled group of warriors would stampede the horses through the rangers' camp, wounding and killing a few of them while robbing them of their transport in the process. The result would be a few dozen stranded rangers,

facing a seven-day walk with no food or water if they ever wanted to see home again. And by the sounds of things, not many of them did. Grandpa said that a lot of the time the Comanche wouldn't even waste bullets or arrows on the stranded rangers. They just watched them on horseback from a distance, taunting and laughing at them. Some men collapsed from heat stroke and died where they fell. Their comrades were forced to keep going, probably looking back in time to see their friends being scalped and butchered. I can't even imagine how horrifying it must have been to see that, and to wonder how long it'd be before it was your turn to die. Dehydration killed the next bunch, and when the group of rangers was in a weak enough state, the Comanches flew in, finished them off, and then went off looking for their horses to add to their collections.

But every so often some ranger or soldier proved much tougher than the others, and could be seen wandering back home alone long after their fellow rangers had died or deserted them. These were the guys who actually earned a little respect from the Comanche, but unfortunately, not their mercy. In fact, it became a kind of a game to mess with the final survivor. The Comanche would do things like pour water on the ground about a hundred meters ahead of them, and then watched as they rushed to suck up the mud it produced. They'd do other stuff like ride up real fast and then lean over to one side,

and then slap the lone survivor around the head before laughing. I asked Grandpa why the Ranger didn't shoot him, but he explained that they'd be too weak to hold their rifles by that point. All they had left were swinging a knife or hatchet all pathetically while the Comanche screwed with them. The point is, it became a game to do stuff like that, and more often than not, the Comanche ended up killing this lone survivor, stripping their corpses, and then riding off to do it all over again once they were good and ready. Anyway, in this one story, my Comanche ancestors are

trailing this lone surviving Texas Ranger, waiting for him to drop his rifle so they can swoop in to start messing with him. He'd been going on no food or water for a long time, kind of going along through the grass and to the featureless horizon, longer than the warriors had ever seen any lone survivor go before him. And then finally, he spins around, takes a wildly inaccurate shot at the Comanche's direction. The bullet whizzes harmlessly past them and the Comanche start laughing and taunting the ranger. But then, the ranger starts laughing back at them.

Confused, the warriors ride in closer, then draw down with their lances on him. Most other in his place would have tried to run or fight. Heck, some even took their own lives to save them from what they knew was coming. But instead of doing any of that, the ranger tears open his shirt, points to his heart, and with a big smile on his face, starts goading them to kill him and get it over with. The Comanche didn't understand what he was saying, but with a gesture like that it didn't need any translating. The Comanches looked at each other, impressed by the man's bravery in the face

of death, but as they did so, the man shoved aside their lances and carried on his march along the plains. Obviously, the Comanche followed the man on their horses, watching in bemusement as he continued laughing and joking with himself. To try and find out if the man was brave or if he'd simply lost his mind, one of the Comanche leaned in with their lance and stabbed the man in the arm deep enough to draw a heavy amount of blood. The man didn't cry out in pain. Instead, his laughter intensified.

He then tore off his shirt and began cupping his hand under the wound, letting his own blood pool in his palm before he gulped it down in a mad, desperate thirst. Not at us. This is as clear a sign as any that the guy had completely lost his mind. But drinking blood wasn't nearly as extreme to the Comanche as it is to us. If they were in a bad spot and couldn't find any drinking water, it wasn't uncommon for the Comanche to drink a little tortoise or jackrabbit blood to prevent them from keeling over. So to them, having this guy drink his own blood wasn't a deciding factor in if he

was crazy or not. I could already hear most of you asking, why does this guy's mental health have anything to do with how the Comanche are going to treat him? Well, if a person was really brave, then it was an honor to kill them and take their scalp. But if they were crazy, the Comanches believed that they had bad magic about them. It was no honor to kill someone barely capable of defending themselves, and whatever badness was in their victim, it might jump to them, to put it simply. The Comanche didn't have any set religion or anything like that. They had their customs and traditions, but spirituality tended to be a person-to-person thing. Some warriors prayed to lucky trinkets for protection, others worshipped pet crows, but everyone agreed that

there was a kind of magic in the world. Sometimes that magic worked for good, sometimes for bad. So still unsure that the lone survivor was mad or not, one of the Comanche rode forward, intent on taking a trophy. He scalped the survivor, standing up, slicing around the base of his skull before pulling away at the bloody mess of hair and flesh. Again, the man just laughed louder and harder when another might have just howled in agony, and once the warrior was done, the lone survivor turned around, saw his own bloody scalp flapping in the wind, and began to clap. As you can imagine, it took a lot to freak out a hardened Comanche warrior,

but the display this scalped and bloodied survivor was putting on was unlike anything they'd ever seen. It took a minute or two before they figured out what they wanted to do with him, but in the end, they decided that they had to break him. This guy was human, and a weak European one, they thought, too. He might have been acting strong like a Comanche, but they were going to prove that he wasn't all that. They jumped off their horses, knocked the guy to the ground, then tied him up and staked him down. The Comanches then got a small fire burning, stripped the dude naked, and then lay him near the fire, legs spread, with the fire near his you-know-whats. The plan was to drag him closer and closer to the fire, legs wide open until his junk was burned to a crisp,

and even the most incredibly courageous of warriors broke at the threat of that. But once again, the shirtless, blood-soaked, scalpless survivor just laughed, and this time, he starts nodding his head as if to say, do it. Do it. And this was the last straw for the Comanches. If this guy didn't care about his junk getting roasted, if he actually wanted it, then there had to be something deeply wrong with him, and the Comanches took that as some very bad magic. Kill a person with that kind of magic in them and the effect could be deadly, not just for the warrior who did the deed, but their entire extended family too.

With that being the case, the warriors just left him there, and then rode off before the guy's bad magic could follow him. The last they saw of the guy, this guy was walking back home, naked as the day he was born, scalpless and covered in blood. And for around a quarter mile they could still hear him laughing to himself. Of all the stories my grandpa told me, that's the one that creeps me out the most. Because it's not really about evil spirits or demons or any of the messed up things the Comanches or the Texan Rangers did. It's about how war can make a man lose his mind to the point he's not even really a person anymore. It's like he went out, in Crawford County, Illinois,

a woman by the name of Lucinda Parker gave birth to a baby girl she named Cynthia Ann. If she'd remained in the state of Illinois, little Cynthia might have led an unremarkable life. But around the age of nine or ten years old, her parents made a monumental decision. They agreed to follow their extended family into the heart of Mexican-ruled Texas, to a place now known as Limestone County. There, the Parker family constructed a heavily fortified compound consisting of several block houses surrounding a central defensive citadel. It was christened Fort Parker, and within just a few short weeks, the entire Parker clan had been joined by a bevy of other Anglo-American settlers who dreamed of peace, piety, and prosperity. By the spring of 1836, the Parkers had tilled half a dozen plots of land

and were busying themselves in preparation to farm it. The work was endless, the heat oppressive, and the land near barren, but for a time, the Parkers were happy, healthy, and free. Until one day, when a man collecting firewood began to feel like he was being watched. Over the weeks that followed, more and more of the family began to complain of that same creeping feeling, as if the nearby woods were haunted by unseen apparitions. In response, Fort Parker's security contingent was doubled, with at least two men watching the walls at any one time. Then finally, at the break of dawn on May 19th of 1836, one of the watchmen began to raise the alarm. The terror in the young man's voice was heard by each and every one of Fort Parker's inhabitants, and as armed settlers scrambled to man the fort's crude battlements,

they immediately understood his fears. A huge war party of Comanche and Kiowa warriors was galloping across the plains towards the fort, but just before passing into range of the settlers' muskets, the party halted and began waving a huge white flag. The settlers held their fire, hoping that the warriors had simply come to talk or trade. John Parker knew otherwise. The Comanche and their Kiowa allies had quickly worked out that a large piece of white cloth had some kind of magical effect on the Anglo-American settlers. Upon

waving one in their direction, a heavily armed, well-defended group would sometimes completely let down their guard, making them ripe for the slaughter. It only took one or two instances of this feigned surrender tactic before outrage swept across the prairie, and John Parker knew all too well that it was a trap. Cynthia Ann's father, Silas, proposed that the settlers strike first, claiming that five good men would be enough to defend the fort if properly supplied and positioned. His brother Benjamin disagreed. The 48-year-old knew how skilled the Comanche were at scaling enemy fortifications

and argued the defenders would last just minutes before being overrun. According to Benjamin, the best that they could hope for was to play dumb, attempt to negotiate, and buy the women and children enough time to mount an escape attempt when the assault finally came. And at that, he volunteered himself to be the doomed emissary. As the Parkers watched an unarmed Benjamin walk out of the fort and towards the Mounted Comanche, they knew it was the last time they'd ever see him alive. Yet they honored his last request, gathered up a few essentials and prepared to flee into the nearby woods. Silas took charge of the defenders,

instructing them to open fire as soon as Benjamin had been killed. They fought like lions, and a handful of Comanche were killed by their musket fire, but they were drops in a torrent of violence that spilled over Fort Parker with a terrifying speed. Their final stand bought their families a few minutes, but for some, it wasn't enough. Samuel Frost and his young son were cornered by the Comanche as they attempted to flee. Frost was forced to watch the scalping and execution of his young son before he too was mutilated and murdered.

John Parker's wife was almost out of the fort when she turned around for one final goodbye. Instead, she witnessed a trio of Comanche warriors castrating her husband while he wailed in agony. The sight was too much for her to bear. She collapsed to her knees, broken and sobbing, and was captured by the Comanche. Cynthia's mother and her two youngest siblings slipped away with the help of an armed teenage boy. Cynthia herself was not so lucky. She was quickly surrounded by Comanche warriors, picked up, and then thrown onto one of the horses. Then after looting and burning the fort,

the warriors departed. While it's indisputably unfortunate that Cynthia was captured, her age meant that she fared far better than most Comanche prisoners. In the aftermath of the Comanche raid, grown men were invariably tortured, killed, and then scalped. Older women were violated by groups of warriors, then tortured and executed in similar ways to the menfolk, while younger women were sometimes taken as slaves. Babies and small children were also killed, but when it comes to children between the ages of 9 to 13, the Comanches made an exception. Kids of that age were ripe to be integrated into the tribe,

first as slave labor but eventually a fully-fledged member of the tribe if they proved themselves worthy. Cynthia, being around 9 or 10 years old at the time of her abduction, had been picked out by the warriors for this exact purpose. And although her life among her family's killers was initially traumatic, her resilience marked her out as having massive amounts of potential. As I've mentioned, Cynthia's first few months as a Comanche prisoner were extremely rough. If her experience was anything like other captives of that period, she was most likely treated with extreme contempt by the other females of the tribe, while being used as a source of menial slave labor.

But after learning the Comanche language, and standing up for herself on a few occasions, she gained the respect of her peers and began to slowly increase in standing. She was given more and more freedom to do as she pleased, so long as she partook in some of the more arduous camp tasks. She was taught to tan the hides of slaughtered buffalo, a gruesome process that involved painting the raw skin of the buffalo with its own brains. She learned quickly, and her output soon rivaled those of even the most experienced Comanche tanners. Depending on the source, she was given the name Naurua, meaning that which has been found,

and within just a few short years, Cynthia Ann was not only given free reign at the camp, but a great deal of responsibility. Comanche bands would typically migrate approximately every two weeks, and the women were responsible for all aspects of the move, Cynthia included. The fact that she was given responsibility over the other people's belongings speaks volumes to the trust and respect that Comanche bestowed upon her, and she was soon partaking in all parts of Comanche womanhood. All except one. It's believed that around the age of 13 or 14, Cynthia was introduced to a warrior who went by the name of Peta Nakona.

The pair became fast friends and after Peta was promoted to war chief, he proposed to her. Although it was traditional for chieftains to have several wives, Peta refrained from taking another wife and the couple were said to be deeply in love and very happy together. They would go on to have three children together,

a boy named Pecos, a daughter named Prairie Flower, and a second son whose Cynthia named Quanah. To Cynthia's knowledge, they were her only living family, and she was every part the loving Comanche mother to them. But Cynthia was also mistaken. Several members of the Parker family had miraculously survived the massacre at Fort Parker, and once they were back on their feet, they set about searching for their missing relatives.

Decades passed, and time after time they were told that Cynthia was most likely deceased. But the Parkers were also acutely aware of the Comanches' habit of integrating children into their war bands, and they never gave up on looking. Finally, in December of 1860, more than 26 years after the raid on Fort Parker, a group of Texas Rangers tracked a band of Comanche warriors back to their camp, a camp that was rumored to hold live Anglo-American captives. As dawn broke on December 18th, Ranger Captain Saul Ross sent a detachment of 20 men to position themselves behind a chain of sand hills overlooking the camp, the goal being to cut off any potential escape route. The remaining 40 rangers then crept up the crest of an adjacent hill, then attacked the completely unprepared Comanche in unison. It was an incredible achievement. It wasn't often that a people so tactically masterful as the Comanche were caught unaware, and the result was nothing short of

devastating. The entire warband were either killed by the attacking Rangers, or picked off by the blocking force atop the sandy hills. At one point, a Texas Ranger found himself face to face with a terrified Comanche woman. He aimed his revolver at her and prepared to defend himself, but hesitated when he noticed that the woman held a baby in her arms. Having decided to take the woman prisoner, the ranger began barking rudimentary orders at her, gesturing wildly for her to sit down. But as he did so, he noticed that unlike her fellow Comanche, this woman had

pale blue eyes and a lighter, sandier brown hair. The ranger asked the terrified mother in clear, plain English, who are you? And in reply, she said, me Cincy, Cincy Ann. By 1860, the story of the massacre at Fort Parker had gained international infamy. The Texas government had named a county after the family with Cynthia Anne being a household name in all four corners of the state. The ranger who found her must have immediately recognized who was sat in front of him and marked it one of the most monumentous recoveries in Ranger history. Captain Ross rushed Cynthia back to nearby Fort Belknap, then summoned her uncle Isaac to deliver the good news.

At first he didn't recognize her, but the family resemblance slowly became evident and Isaac was stunned to realize that the girl was his long-lost niece. To say that Cynthia's entire world had fallen apart would be a huge understatement, and it wasn't the second time she had endured such a calamitous event. She wasn't exactly thrilled to have returned to so-called civilization, but she also acknowledged Isaac as a relative and agreed to return to Isaac's home in Weatherford. Shortly afterward, the state of Texas compensated Cynthia by granting her 5,000 acres of land

and an annual pension of $100 for the next five years. They appointed her Uncle Isaac as their legal guardian, wishing her a long and happy life, and left her to decompress. By all accounts, Cynthia tried her best to reintegrate back into Anglo-American society, but adjusting to such a radical culture shift proved a feat too difficult to accomplish a second time. Her uncle Isaac would sometimes catch her performing intricate rituals involving fire and tobacco smoke,

and he once asked her the purpose of such things. In broken English, she told him that they were prayers, prayers for the husband and children she'd lost, and prayers that she could finally be happy with her blood relatives. At one point, a man fluent in the Comanche language came to visit Cynthia in the hopes of learning more about her time living with the tribe. Initially, Cynthia stared daggers at him, having long grown tired of being gawped at by curious white men. But when he spoke to her in Comanche and invited her to talk, she quite literally threw herself at the man's feet, and in a voice that trembled with tears held back, she replied,

Yes, let us talk. For Cynthia Ann, her time with the linguist was perhaps the happiest in recent memory. She shared a great deal with the manist was perhaps the happiest in recent memory. She shared a great deal with the man, not because she enjoyed his company, but because she could finally communicate herself properly. When they tried to have dinner, Cynthia playfully chastised the man, stealing away his cutlery as she told him, we can eat later, but now we talk.

Perhaps there was a slim chance for Cynthia, but it died along with her daughter, Prairie Flower, who succumbed to influenza in 1864. The grief of losing her final child drove her over the edge, and she began to engage in a series of grisly Comanche grief rituals. She would slash at her breast with a razor-sharp knife, dribble the blood onto some tobacco, and then inhale the smoke it produced when put to flame.

And she did this for hours on end, on a daily basis, until she finally made the decision to stop eating. After wasting away for the better part of a month, 43-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker passed away in March of 1871 and was buried in Foster Cemetery near the small town of Poynter, Texas. Cynthia Ann's story, as well as that of the wider Parker family, is perhaps one of the most horrifying, heartbreaking, and underexplored in all American history. But not all of their lives had had such tragic endings, and as an epilogue, I'd like to touch on the life of Cynthia's younger brother and fellow Comanche captive, John Richard Parker. Much like his sister, John was raised as a

Comanche, but his upbringing was radically different to that of Cynthia Ann. Comanche boys between the ages of around 9 to 14 led lives that would inspire envy in their modern day counterparts. They had absolutely no responsibilities, no chores, no formal education. They just played around with their bows and blunt arrows, rode around on horseback, and generally did as they pleased. They did this day in and day out for years, and by the time they were young men, they were phenomenal archers and master horsemen. John spent six years with the Comanche from the ages of six to twelve years old, but was ransomed back to Texan authorities in 1842. In contrast to his sister, twelve-year-old John made an attempt to reintegrate himself back into Anglo-American society, and soon ran away to rejoin his Comanche war band. The Comanche were no doubt delighted

with his decision, and even the most skeptical of warriors would have been impressed. The boy had deserted his own blood relatives to rejoin the war band, a demonstration of loyalty tantamount to an oath of allegiance. John would have no doubt spent the next few years preparing to become a fully fledged Comanche raider, and by the time he was 18, he was participating in devastating raids deep in the heart of Mexican territory. This means John would have participated in all the torture, murder, and violation that came with successful raids, and by the time he was a veteran warrior in his mid-twenties, it's likely he'd killed hundreds of soldiers, civilians, and rival Apache. Yet it was on one of these raids that John almost met his end, not by the tip of some Apache arrow or Mexican bullet, by an invisible killer,

responsible for more death than any weapon of war. After one particular profitable raid, John's warband were on their way back to Texas when he began to feel ill. Before long, he was too sick to ride, and with a rudimentary medical exam, his fellow warriors discovered that he was suffering from smallpox. The Comanche were well aware of how devastating the disease was, and John understood that he had to be abandoned in order to protect his brethren. It's likely he accepted this fate with a quiet stoicism, as would be expected of him as a warrior, but to alleviate his suffering, his Comanche comrades ordered a captured Mexican slave girl to stay with him until his death.

Miraculously, not only did John survive his bout of smallpox, but his impromptu caregiver failed to contract it in turn. As she nursed him back to health, the pair fell deeply in love, and after returning the girl to her family, John proposed, and they were married. Incredibly, John would later return to the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War. His motivations for doing so were unclear, as he most likely felt no loyalties to his former home, but he soon signed up with a group of Texan Confederates and rode north to battle the Union. He most probably served with groups of so-called Bushwhackers, mounted guerrilla united which conducted lightning-fast raids against Union positions, before disappearing

again in a cloud of dust and gun smoke. Their tactics would have suited his unique Comanche skill set, and his commanders no doubt used him to devastating effect. Shockingly, John survived the Civil War, and returned to his home in Mexico following the collapse of the Confederacy. The loot he came home with made him a very wealthy man, and he was able to purchase his own ranch on which to raise a family. He lived to the ripe old age of 85 and died peacefully of natural causes sometime in 1915. John's life and death provided a remarkable silver lining to the violence and grief of the raid on Fort Parker. He is once living proof that the Comanches were not monsters, merely a nomadic, primordial civilization shaped by centuries of deprivation,

forced migration, and inter-tribal warfare. Rachel Parker Plummer was born on March 22nd of 1819 in Crawford County, Illinois. She was the second cousin of Cynthia Ann Parker, and joined the rest of the Parker clan in their migration south to Texas, before being captured in the raid that forever changed their family. She was described as a red-haired beauty of rare courage and intelligence, and later married a man named Luther M. Plummer, who somehow survived the raid that saw his wife taken into captivity. In the chaotic aftermath of the attack on Fort Parker,

17-year-old Rachel was seized by mounted warriors who also captured her young son. She was no doubt violated during that night's camp, but later wrote that she never wished to revisit the subject in any of her literature. To narrate their barbarous treatment would only add to my present distress, she wrote, for it is with feelings of the deepest mortification that I think of it, much less to speak or write of it. The only other occasion on which she spoke of her violation was to criticize those who claimed that, and I quote, a good woman died before being sullied in such a way.

Rachel said that anyone who said that had clearly not been forced to run naked, tied by a rope to a horse, for a day or two in the sun. Given that she had more advanced education than her younger cousins, Rachel was able to write a detailed account of her time in captivity, and it serves as a valuable insight into the culture and creed of the Comanche people. Yet it also serves as a detailed account of their abject and unfeeling cruelty, especially when it came to things that might hinder their survival. During her captivity, Rachel gave birth to a healthy baby boy. For the first six weeks, the Comanche allowed Rachel to nurse her newborn son, but then one day, a group of warriors surrounded her and stole her child from her arms.

One of the warriors threw the baby to the ground and beat it till it stopped moving. The warriors then gestured for Rachel to bury her now deceased child and then walked away. Believing her son was dead, Rachel began scrapping a swallow trench in the dry earth beneath her. But as she did so, she noticed her little boy was still breathing. She attempted to nurse him back to health, but when the warriors heard the baby's cries and saw that Rachel had disobeyed them, they chose to make an example. Rachel's infant child was tied to a hose via a long rope, and then dragged through a cactus patch until its tiny body had been quite literally torn to shreds. Rachel was then taken hundreds of miles north, to the furthest reaches of the Comanche

homeland. There she saw vast, wide-open spaces so desolate and barren that they were almost maddening to behold. But after reaching the southern reaches of what is now southern Colorado, the land became lush and abundant with life. The warband that she was a prisoner of took her along to a giant Comanche summit, one which included their close allies, the Kiowa. She wrote that she had never seen so many people in one place before, nor imagined that there would be so many Indians scattered across the Great Plains. She was treated poorly at the gathering, and was often jeered at by young Comanche boys. She also spotted many other Anglo and Hispanic American captives among the war bands, and such a large gathering provided a clear opportunity to show them off. Having picked up some of the Comanche language, Rachel was able to eavesdrop

on certain conversations and amazed to hear that their war chiefs intended to conquer the entirety of Central America. Rachel's maltreatment at the hands of her captives seemed to have peaked around the time of the Great Comanche Summit. She was guarded by the female members of the tribe, and as you can imagine, they came up with particularly cruel and degrading methods of humiliation. They routinely beat and tormented her, and by the time they departed from the summit, Rachel was bruised, battered, and itching for retribution. One day, during a period of particularly intense abuse, Rachel snapped and lost herself with the younger of her two slave masters. The attack was half revenge, half attempting to take her own life,

but instead of killing her, the warriors seemed impressed with Rachel's display of defiance. At any second, I expected a spear in the back, she wrote, but instead, the warriors seemed amused and gathered to watch us fight. At one point, Rachel managed to gain the upper hand and proceeded to beat the young Comanche woman until the blood ran from her mouth and nose. Her older slave masters soon intervened and attempted to set Rachel alight by pushing her into an open fire. She too was beaten half to death by the furious young captive, who bested both her mistresses in brutal fashion,

yet refrained from delivering fatal blows. When the violence was over, Rachel and her Comanche owners were taken before a tribunal of elders. Rachel thoroughly expected to be executed for her insolence, but instead, all the elders asked was that she repair the damage that she'd inflicted to her owner's teepee. Bemused, but continually defiant, Rachel said that she'd only repair the damage if her owners helped her, and the elders agreed. She later claimed that one of the elders told her, She began with you, and you had a right to kill her, but your noble spirit prevented you. Indians do not have pity on a fallen enemy, but we show mercy to our family. By brutally attacking the two young women assigned to guard her, Rachel had not in fact angered the Comanche, she had earned their respect, and from then on,

their treatment of her dramatically improved. Just over a year after she was captured on June 19th of 1837, the Comanche war band Rachel traveled with was approached by a group of Mexican merchants. Known as Comancheros, those roving traders knew the Great Plains better than any Anglo-American and were one of the few groups to ever gain a free pass through the land they called Comancheria. The traders approached the warband and the Comanches sent out a small welcome party to begin negotiations. Rachel watched the exchange, wondering what goods or services might be traded. Little did she know, she was who the Comancheros were looking for. Rachel's father, who had survived the massacre at Fort Parker,

had enlisted the help of the Comancheros in tracking down his daughter, and finally, they had found her. That morning, Rachel didn't know if she'd live to see another sunrise. A few hours later, she was free. Seventeen days later, Rachel and the Comancheros arrived back in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was gaunt to the point of near starvation, covered with scars and sores, and her fiery red hair had turned a silvery gray. But she was alive. Sadly, Rachel Parker Plummer passed away just over a year later in Houston, Texas, on March 19th of 1839.

She was just 20 years old. Her death certificate stated that complications after childbirth were the blame for her demise, but her husband insisted it was the trauma of Comanche captivity which slowly ate away at her. In reality, the already weakened Rachel had been suffering awfully during the unseasonable cold weather, and this was most likely what finished her off. But the fact remains, a once vibrant, outgoing young woman had been completely broken by her time in captivity. And although she'd seen and done more in her brief time on this earth than most folks do in a lifetime, there's no doubt that she deserved so much more. We have an old legend in our family. I don't know how true it is, but I guess that's why they call it a legend.

It's been passed down from generation to generation. I know that much, as my great-aunt remembered my great-grandpa telling the story, too. So I don't think it's something my grandpa just pulled out of his butt after a night of gin and Clint Eastwood movies. The story goes that some distance back, we have a Native American ancestor who was part of the Tonkawa tribe. They're located around Texas and Oklahoma, maybe New Mexico too. But when forefather was just a child, something terrible happened that caused him to leave his home and move up to Chicago. There he met her distant foremother and the rest is literally history.

But the thing that caused him to up and move is one of the most awful things I've ever heard. So, just a little backstory. The Tonkawa were a tribe that was mostly friendly with the United States and all its westward settlers. The other, more dominant tribe in the area, the Comanche and the Apache, used to bully the hell out of the Tonkawa on any chance they got, so they turned to the U.S. Army for protection, and occasionally helped them track down Comanche as a kind of screw-you to their old enemies. Then some other guys who liked to hunt Comanche were called scalp hunters. These were mercenaries that'd go and kill a bunch of Comanches and then bring back their scalps to big towns to swap them for cash.

These guys would sometimes search out Tonkawa camps as places to rest and trade, so unlike some other more famous tribes, the Tonkawa were generally pretty stoked to see foreigners on the horizon, even if they did look like they were armed for bear. So one day, a whole load of these hairy, stinky-looking dudes show up at our forefather's camp and then start making themselves a little too comfortable. They're eating the Takawa food, helping themselves to tobacco, and it's not long before they outstayed their welcome. Eventually, one of the warriors

approaches them and tells them to leave. The scalp hunters just opened up on him before anyone had a chance to defend themselves. Everything becomes chaos and our forefather runs for his life and then hides out on the prairie for a while until things blow over. Sometimes you could actually hear the scalp hunters searching for him but he stayed hidden until it was safe to come out Hours later our forefather trekked back to this village under the cover of darkness It was easy to find, he could see it burning in the distance He rushed over to search for any survivors But what he saw was a vision of hell itself he described

Among the burning teepees lay the bodies of almost everyone he'd ever known, and they were butchered in ways that gave him nightmares for the rest of his life. He never spoke about it in detail, but I could imagine the kinds of things he saw. The story goes that these particular scalp hunters were running a murderous kind of scam. They were being paid for Comanche scalps, but no one could tell the difference between a Comanche scalp and that of any other Indian. No white man could tell the difference between an Indian scalp and a Mexican, for that matter, so these guys were just on a murderous rampage all over the borderlands, killing whenever and whoever they pleased. Our ancestor had his whole entire life burned in a few hours, leaving him with nothing

and no one. The story goes that he walked all the way to El Paso and almost died on the journey. He was so dehydrated and hungry that at one point he sees this buffalo keel over in the distance. He then rushes over, tears the thing's stomach open with his teeth, and then starts eating the half-digested mush in the buffalo's stomach. I honestly think I'd rather die than do something like that, but I guess I've never been that hungry or thirsty before. He made it to El Paso, ended up surviving and working there until he had enough money to move north, and then move he did. It seems crazy that he managed to pull something like that off. Some orphaned Indian kid all on his own like that in a place they weren't very popular.

Makes sense that he moved north as soon as he could. I'm not one of those people who flaunts my native heritage when it's so distant and obscure to me, but I'm very proud of my forefather, especially if he managed to pull off such an incredible feat of survival. Maybe I got a little of that in me too. Well, here's hoping, anyway. Almost ten years ago now, my wife and I decided to go on a little hiking trip in southern Massachusetts, specifically the Miles Standish State Forest. We checked out a few options for cabin rental and found one that was within our budget, and then booked it for a weekend.

It was a beautiful little place, not far from a heart-shaped pond with ready access to all the different hiking trails dotted around the park. Our first day was wonderful. We had a picnic over near College Pond, followed by a basic campfire-style dinner back at our cabin. The daytime was beautiful, but the nighttime was intimidating to say the least. There were plenty of little campgrounds and cabins dotting all over the forest, so it wasn't like we were in a particularly secluded place. But nighttime in the city is very different to nighttime in the woods, especially if you grew up and spent most of your life in the former. There's something very eerie about it,

so much so that both me and my wife commented on it independently of one another. We weren't scared at all. We felt very safe out there, so the feeling was something of a novelty, I guess, and not something that robbed us of any sleep. The second day was similar to the first. We did some hiking, had another al fresco lunch, and then returned to the cabin in time for dinner. But instead of eating at the cabin, we went over to Mirbo, just south of Plymouth, for a fancy three-course dinner and a bottle of wine. We discussed taking a taxi to and from the Mirbo complex, but I decided that I wanted to be fresh for the next morning,

so I drove and my wife drank. The wine went down a little too well, though, and by the time we got back to the cabin, she was so wasted that she dozed off the moment her head hit the pillow. I didn't begrudge her the chance to tie one on like that. I thought it was funny. But it turned out to be very fortunate that only one of us drank that night, and I'll tell you why. After my wife passed out and was snoring, very loudly I might add, I brushed my teeth,

took a shower, and then climbed into bed. It was just before midnight at that time and I set an alarm for 7.30am. God knows how long later that I wake up to what I assume is my phone vibrating on the rustic wooden bedside table next to my head. I reached up to grab it only to realize that it's not my phone making the noise, it's something else entirely. Something is softly scratching the wood at the other side of the cabin wall, almost right next to where I'd been laying my head. Now, while this was very creepy for a second or two, I'm a rational enough person to realize that a sound like that is most probably some kind of animal, and having done my research, I knew all we had to worry about were snakes and possibly foxes or coyotes. There tend not to be any bears or mountain lions in this area of Massachusetts, or rather, the chances of encountering the former at least are extremely remote. It was the reason we'd chosen the state forest in the first place, knowing it

was one of the safer options for hiking, so, like I said, hearing the sound was startling but not scary. At first, I tried to go back to sleep, hoping that whatever was making that scratching sound would just get bored and go away. I know a lot of animals scratch their claws or teeth against wood as a way of filing them down or sharpening them, so I thought that it was maybe something small and non-threatening doing exactly that. But then, the scratching started to move, and it sounded like it was coming from another section of wall, much higher up than before. I say much higher up, it was only maybe a foot or two higher, but in my head, whatever was making the sound went from,

say, squirrel-sized to fox-sized. Again, this was fairly alarming, and I picked my head up off the pillow again while I wondered if I should do anything. In the end, I climbed out of bed, went over to where I could hear the scratching, and then banged on the wall a few times to try and scare it off. And sure enough, that seemed to do the trick. And the sound of my fist against the wall didn't wake up my wife, so I climbed back into bed without saying a word. I swear I was right on the verge of drifting back off when the scratching sound started up again. I realized that if I wanted to get anything resembling a good night's sleep I'd have to head outside with my flashlight and really scare this thing off. So I climbed out of bed, put on some clothes and then headed out into the dark with my light.

I could hear whatever it was still scratching against the wood, but I wasn't in the least bit scared, as I figured that I'd just run away the first moment it saw the beam of my flashlight or heard my feet. It did exactly that, and I heard it running off into the darkness just before I turned the corner, but in place of the familiar four-legged cadence of a fox or a coyote, I heard the very distinct sound of something running, with two feet, not four. It wasn't an animal, it was a person. And right hand to God, that realization made for the creepiest moment of my entire life. That whole time I thought everything was just fine, but there'd been some freaking creep scratching something into the wood that whole time, and I'd actually tried to go back to sleep.

I darted back into the cabin, grabbed the biggest, heaviest thing I could find, this skillet, and then ran back outside. I wanted to shout something brave and hardcore, but the God's honest truth is I was scared out of my mind. I could barely even keep a straight thought in my head, let alone figure out anything intimidating to yell. So I just ran around, spinning around like a top, shining the flashlight in every little shadow to make sure no one was about to creep up on me. Once I was pretty certain that the coast was actually clear, I ran back into the

cabin, locked the front door, and then woke up my wife. She was still half drunk, but she sobered up pretty quickly when I told her to keep her cell phone handy, just in case I needed her to call 911. I still don't know if it was just a dumb prank or something, kids vandalizing the cabins or deliberately trying to scare us or something. It all depended on what they'd been scratching into the wall, that much was clear, but I was in no mood to just wander back out into the dark to go check right away. We just stayed put for a few minutes, my hand tied around the skillet's handle and listened out for any voices

or footsteps or scratching. After a few minutes of silence, I finally crept out into the dark for two reasons. Number one, to make sure that we were truly alone again, and number two, to check out what the hell this creep had been doing to the cabin's outside wall. I was scared, but I was also ready to cave in the skull of any foolish person enough to rush me. Thankfully, I didn't have to defend myself like that, but there was nothing reassuring about what I'd found scratched into the cabin. When I first saw it, it looked like either a zero or the letter O underneath a roughly scratched letter U or V. The result was that it almost looked like someone had tried to write VO, but vertically instead of horizontally.

No words immediately came to mind. I mean, if it was a K and then an I, then maybe they were trying to write the word kill, in which case we should be concerned. But VO? I had no idea what that might mean. Convinced that it was nothing more than kids being stupid little vandals, I told my wife that it was safe outside and she could come take a look at what the kids had been scratching. She seemed relieved to know that it was nothing too sinister and that we'd most probably remain undisturbed for the remainder of our stay. In fact, all we occupied our thought with for a minute or two was wondering if the owners would help themselves to our security deposit if they'd discovered the damage.

After my wife had gotten some clothes on, we both headed outside to check the damage. I shined my flashlight at it, showing her the weird V and O shapes and watched a very visible look of fright come over her face. I asked her what she thought it was, and she asked how I couldn't see it. To me it was just weird shapes or letters, and to her, it was quite literally the devil. I'll be honest, I didn't really see it at first, and I thought it was just her nerves talking. But her fright proved infectious, and when she decided that she didn't want to stay another night at the cabin, I was in no position to make her stay.

I remember her saying, this has red flags all over it, we'd be morons not to leave now. And honestly, she was right. It didn't really matter who it was or why they'd been scratching something into the wall of our cabin. Our car was out front and they could quite literally see the cabin was occupied and who the hell goes snooping around the woods in the middle of the night like that anyway? No one with any good in mind, that's for sure. We packed our stuff, threw it all into our car and then left as soon as we could. First my wife called the cops to report what had happened, and then she left a message with the owner of the cabin explaining

the situation. They were kind enough to refund our final night's stay and returned our security deposit in full, thus ruling out our bizarre conspiracy theory that the owners were trying to claim our security deposit. We still have no idea who or what was really going on that night and honestly i'm open to the idea that we just overreacted to some dumb prank or something but having said that i have no regrets about cutting our little vacation short because my movies to know that you don't stick around once things get weird. When my earliest memories is being in the playground at a new school, trying to make friends. This was year three, so elementary school age for the Americans reading, and I came across a group of lads playing football. I asked one of them if I could join in, and he told me, Yeah, but only if you just pass to me. It seemed like a fair deal so I accepted. The next day I

asked the same lad if I could sit with him at lunchtime and he said, yeah but only if I can have your pudding. Lofty or fair that time I agreed nevertheless, and then we ate lunch in near silence. I didn't touch my pudding, assuming this lad was going to take it when he was good and ready, but when he'd finished his pudding, I offered him mine, and he suddenly had a change of heart. He shook his head, pushed the little bowl back in my direction, and we've been friends ever since. Walker, as I came to call him on account of it being his second name, was my best mate all throughout primary school and we ended up in the same secondary school too. I had my first pint with him. Our first girlfriends were best friends and he was

part of almost every significant event in my teenage years in some form or another. We were finally separated by going to different unis and we kept in touch and he ended up moving back here for work once he'd graduated. He was there for me all through my breakups. He helped me move into my first real flat and I was the best man in his wedding and the list goes on and on. I was there for all the ups and downs of him and Kathy buying a house, having a baby, all that other grown-up stuff and I was there for all the ups and downs of him and Kathy buying a house, having a baby, all that other grown-up stuff, and I was the first person Walker called about the accident. So it was early April when he rang me up at about 2 o'clock in the morning.

I knew something was going on because of how late the call came, but I never could have guessed of how terrible the news was. Kathy had been walking their daughter back from playgroup when two joyriders plowed into them at a zebra crossing, and their little girl was pronounced dead on the scene, while Kathy passed away in a hospital bed, fighting for her life. In just a few hours, Walker's whole world had been snatched away from him by two monsters and a BMW, and he was every bit as

devastated as you can imagine. He was signed off sick from work, prescribed antidepressants, and then went to live with his parents because he just couldn't look after himself. We all pitched in looking after him, making sure that he stayed away from the drink and all that, but that was just about all we could do. Losing your wife and kid like that, just totally out of the blue. A person's gotta get through that on their own, you know. And for ages, Walker just seemed paralyzed, and I honestly couldn't blame him. But the one day, I get a very surprising text from him that just said, Are you up for some rambling?

Just to explain, rambling was what we called the hiking slash camping trips that we used to go on when we were younger. I think we always fancied ourselves soldiers, but since we'd never be able to pass the piss test, wink wink, we settled for these epic rambles across the countryside, sometimes for a week at a time. We'd camp out in different locations every night and then return home unshowered and stinking of campfire smoke. In between getting very unsober and telling ghost stories around the fire at night, it was bloody good fun. We managed about five or six big and small trips of four jobs and girlfriends started eating up all our time,

but as much as I looked forward to the day that we got to go again, I thought it might have been a bit too soon. After talking it over, we settled on the second week of April, almost one year after the accident. I tried telling myself the timing of it was nothing but a coincidence, but at the same time, I completely understood if he wanted to get away from it all for a few days, especially around the one-year anniversary. There was always something quite soothing about our rambles. If you're running out of food and water while exposed to the elements, there's no time to worry about problems you got back in the, air quotes, real world. I didn't know how far that would

extend into devastating grief, but in the short term, it definitely seemed to work. With him having something to focus his mind on, Walker seemed much more chipper. He was ordering camping gear online, testing it out in his mom's back garden, and with all the planning that we had to do, he was much chattier too. It was just like the old times in many ways, but with one distinct difference, aside from the obvious stuff. Walker had suggested a place for us to visit. Anyone reading this might be like, yeah, so what? But he never made any of the decisions when it came to any of our rambling trips. After I took the lead in planning the first couple, and they all went as planned,

he decided to leave that side of things to me so he could focus on gear and getting us there. So, when he told me he wanted to visit the Scottish Highlands, and in particular a place called Lockenburg, it made for a refreshing change, so I was very keen to go as it was, but Walker's zigzagging route included a lot of freshwater lakes, some hill walking, and a big dirty fry-up at the end of it, which to me sounded absolutely banging. The longest we'd ever been rambling for was a week, and since we were only just starting back up again, it didn't really surprise me when he said that he only wanted to go for two days. I was just made up that he seemed to be getting back to himself again, but if I'd have known what he really had planned, I don't think I'd have ever gone with him. Everything seemed fine on the drive up to Lachenberg. In fact, it was just like old times. We took turns driving and putting on old

playlists and generally reveling in a bit of nostalgia to kill time on the drive. Parking was easy and cheap and then add some unexpectedly good weather for April into the mix and you had a great start to a properly epic hike. Considering it was his first time, Walker had done a stand-up job of planning our route and it took us over some incredible looking country. We must have walked around for five or six miles up and down a gently sloping hill and then along a narrow river until we came to a small lock. The way down was very steep and the river dropped off into a waterfall which fed into the larger lake. It made for some banging scenery and I knew immediately that it was going to be our first camping spot,

and I'd have Pat Walker on the back if I didn't think it'd send him toppling down the slope. We found a nice, flat, grassy spot about 50 meters away from the water's edge, and then set up our little A-frame shelters facing one another. Once we were set up, we brewed up some tea on our hexamine burners, and then set about gathering up firewood for the night. We were quiet while we worked and I put this down to us both concentrating on the job of finding decent kindling, but afterwards, Walker didn't seem to perk up again. I realized about halfway into cooking my dinner that he wasn't going to join me,

but he said that he wasn't feeling hungry and would eat later on when the feeling came to him, but later came and went and he still didn't seem to have anything to eat. We stayed up quite late too and all we did was sit by the fire swapping stories, but I didn't see so much as a morsel past his lips. When I turned into bed, Walker said that he'd only be staying up a little while longer to watch the stars. That didn't raise any alarm bells, but what did was when I woke up about six or seven hours later and found him still sat by the fire. I'm not talking sat by the fire making a brew with bedhead, having obviously gotten at least a few hours kip, I'm talking

same position, tent seemingly undisturbed, like he hadn't moved a muscle for hours on end. The first words out of my mouth when I scooched out of my shelter were, did you not get any sleep? He didn't need to answer me. The big black bags under his eyes said everything, and it was around then that I started to realize that agreeing to the camping trip might not have been a good idea. I asked him if he was okay and actually laughed a little when he told me, a bit tired. I responded by asking him if he was really okay before telling him that there was no shame in tapping out and going home if he really didn't feel up to it. In any other circumstances, if someone had given me some cryptic answer like, I just had a lot on my mind, I'd have told them to bugger off and talk plain

English. But in Walker's case, I knew what he was talking about, or rather, I assumed I knew. His reply shut me up for a minute and when I finally thought of something else to say, I offered him some coffee to help perk him up a bit. He turned the offer down, saying his stomach was feeling a bit rough and would stick to water for the time being. I left him chill by the fire while I went to gather some more firewood and while I was gone, I did some thinking. He turned down coffee, he turned down dinner the night before, and I didn't see any empty packaging or used mess tins when I woke up. This meant that Walker had either cleaned and stowed away all of his cooking gear and utensils immaculately at that, or he hadn't eaten a single freaking thing

in more than 24 hours. I stopped collecting firewood the second it occurred to me and, while I didn't go dropping what I'd already collected, I immediately walked back to camp. In the nicest way possible, without trying to sound like his mum or anything like that, I told him he needed to eat if he was going to have the strength to hike anywhere else. I felt for him, I really did, but he had to look after himself because being out in the highlands, miles from road, was not the time to start intermittent fasting. I kept on rabbiting for a bit, generally just pleading with him to talk to me, then, in frustration, I walked over to his rucksack, opened it up, and started rummaging around for his food supply. I rummaged and rummaged and rummaged some more, before I realized that Walker didn't bring

any food. It wasn't just some oopsie-daisy either, he'd done it deliberately. But why? The obvious thing that came to mind, and what just about scared the life out of me to think about, was the idea that he'd driven us out there so he could take his own life. To my infinite relief, he denied that was the case. But when he got all cryptic again, I told him that he could tell me what was going on, or I was leaving. It was a total bluff, but it worked. And that's when he told me, or partially told me, what he had planned. There was no hike, no tour around the locks for a few days before a

big dirty fry-up in Lockenburg. He, and I use his words, needed to do something for Kathy and the baby, and that something involved not eating and not sleeping. He was okay to drink water, but only when he was really dying of thirst, and when he'd refrained from eating and sleeping for three days, he was going to go into the waterfall. Remember the waterfall I mentioned, the one that we had a view from our campsite? Well, Walker said that there was a shallow alcove in the rock behind it. It was nothing big, just enough room for a single person to sit without getting too wet, and when I asked him how he knew, he told me that he'd verified during the night. Everything was exactly how it said it

would be, and when I asked what it was, Walker said that he was too tired to explain. The only reason he partially explained what he was doing was that he he was too tired to explain. The only reason he partially explained what he was doing was that he needed me there, and he believed that if he didn't tell me, then I might have actually left. He knew what it looked like, a guy starving himself because he's tired of living or something, but he assured me that it wasn't like that. He needed me there to help him get back to the car when he was done because chances were he'd be too weak to do it on his own. I remember sitting there by the fire for a minute or two, stunned into silence, just trying to wrap my head about what Walker was telling me. When I finally got my thoughts together, I asked him why he needed to sit in that little alcove after three days of no food or sleep.

I'd help him, alright, I just need to know why. Again, he just said something along the lines of, it's for Kathy and the baby. And if I'm honest, that was as good an explanation as I needed. I had next to no idea what he was trying to do, but I knew that it would be hard, and probably dangerous too. But what else can you do when a friend asks you to do something like that? Telling you that they can't trust anyone else to do it? There was no dragging him out of there. Leaving him was just out of the question.

And as much as it seemed like the best option, calling the emergency services felt like betrayal. Imagine someone putting all that trust into you, and you just turn around and have them locked up. I know that that's the emotional and not rational response, but in the moment, it just didn't feel right. There seemed like no other option but to do as he asked and make sure that whatever he was going to put himself through, he made it out the other side okay. As it turned out, the first day of his fast was actually the day before we drove up, the second being the hike out to the waterfall. Walker did seem a bit tired out on the hike, but

I just put that down to age and a bad night's sleep or something. So, that second day we were in the highlands, that was going to be the third and final day of no eating or sleeping, meaning his whole plan was going to be over and done by the early hours of the morning. That sounded like good news when I heard it, but it was still proper worrying to see him in such a rough state. It was the lack of sleep that really wore him down. You could watch his brain just frazzling from being awake for so long, with sod all to fuel it. And when he went to the toilet, his pee looked brown. Not that unhealthy looking dark yellow that you see after a summer's night in a beer garden. It was this sickly brown, like rum or whiskey or something. I know it might seem a bit odd fixating on his pee like that,

but stuff like that is quite shocking when you've never seen it before. It wasn't just his body either. It was his mind. He started saying things twice, stumbling over words and then skipping back to an early part of a conversation, like he just lost his train of thought and ten or twenty minutes hadn't gone by. And by the time the sun started to go down, I was ready for it to be over, but we had quite a way to go before that. I didn't get a wink of sleep that night either. I wasn't entirely convinced that Walker wasn't going to try and hurt himself in some way. I just had to trust that he wouldn't.

I quizzed him more and more as the night went on, but he became less and less in the mood for chat. However, he did tell me that he had been thinking about that night for months and had gone over it in his head so many times that it bored him to think about, let alone talk about. He told me he understood how annoying that must be, but he would tell me all about it when it was over. But until then, I had to wait. When the time finally came, I walked him over to the waterfall and he began to take off his clothes. I suppose that was always a given,

he didn't want to get his only jacket and pair of boots soaking wet in the process, but it was still bloody freezing out and he was shaking like a dog as he passed me that last of his clothes. Over the sound of the waterfall, I heard him tell me that if he called out or wasn't back out within an hour, I was to go in and pull him out. He would be naked and soaking wet in the freezing Scottish night and he would be in danger of getting hypothermia if he stayed exposed for too long. And that only added to all the anxiety as he thanked me one last time, turned, and disappeared into the water. Exactly 27 minutes had gone by when I first thought that I heard something over the sound of the waterfall.

I remember straining my ears, thinking that they might have been playing tricks on me. But then I heard it again. It was barely audible over the sound of the waterfall, but it sounded an awful lot like a person. And then suddenly, there was Walker. He was as white as a sheet, skinny as a rake, and shivering violently. Then there were the noises that he was making, and my god, they were inhuman. Not quite weeping, not quite screaming, all blunted by three days of no food or sleep. As soon as he reached the banks of the stream he just collapsed and I threw his jacket around him.

He couldn't speak, he could barely move, and I did everything I could to drag him back to the fire and plonk him down next to it so he could properly warm up. I asked him if he could eat and he nodded very weakly, so I threw a few cereal bars and a bottle of water in front of him. I had to actually feed him and bring the bottle to his lips to get him to eat properly. Walker ate slowly, with silent tears rolling down his cheeks, and I'd be a liar if I said that I didn't shed a few too. Once he had gotten a bit of food and water in him, Walker asked me to help him into his tent so he could finally sleep. I made sure that he was dry, helped him into a few underlayers, and then eased him into a sleeping bag. I made sure that he was dry, helped him into a few under layers and then eased him into a sleeping bag. I think he was asleep before I had even finished tucking him in and I wanted nothing more than to climb into my own sleeping bag for some well-deserved rest. But when it came to it, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I was trapped between being too tired to stay awake and

too scared to fall asleep, but then the harder I tried to fight it, the easier it came. I don't know exactly what time it was at that point, but I remember there being a little creeping blue in the distant horizon. I closed my eyes for a second, and then the next thing I knew, it was full daylight. My eyes burned, and I felt sick from how exhausted I was. But when I saw that Walker was still there, asleep and breathing, I knew everything was going to be fine. I tried to catch a few more hours but an overactive brain fueled by a disco nap made that a no-go. I wanted to wake him up, make him eat a little bit more, and get some coffee down him, but it was for selfish reasons.

What I really wanted to know was what happened in the waterfall, what he'd put himself through hell for. But God knows he needed the rest, and there'd be plenty of time for questions on the way back. I suppose this piece is long enough as it stands, so I'll try to summarize that conversation as best I can. After getting Walker back into Lockenburg safely, we had a little bit more food, bought Walker one of those big bottles of Lucozade so he could carry on replenishing on the drive, and then started on our journey back home. He didn't tell me much about what he'd done or why he'd done it. He said that he was still taking it all in himself.

But the long and short of it was this. He'd read something online about that waterfall. Something about how old monks used to go there to have religious experiences. The story went that if you concentrated on praying for someone hard enough, someone who had already passed on, you could either hear them, see them, talk to them, or something to that effect. The only rule was that you had to sit there for three days with nothing but the water in front of you to drink. Obviously, Walker had tried to streamline the process for safety and convenience,

thinking that as long as he drank a little of the water, he could do all the fasting and staying awake away from the waterfall itself. He'd been quite worried that it had ruined the process and therefore ruined the desired effect, but it didn't. According to Walker, the process had worked exactly as intended. I feel like I have to explain at this point I'm not a religious person and I don't believe in ghosts, spirits, or any of that oogly-boogly nonsense. I think Walker pushed himself to his physical and psychological limits and induced a kind of visual or auditory hallucination, and I think deep down he knows that too. The thing is, he doesn't care, and I don't really blame him either,

and as much as I'm not going to pretend to know how it worked, I understand why he wanted to do it. To have that opportunity to see or talk to a missed relative, even if it isn't real, I admit to seeing the appeal. Whatever happened, Walker started doing much better after the trip. Everyone put it down to finally getting back to the great outdoors and reliving a bit of his youth. We never told anyone what had actually happened. Walker didn't swear me to secrecy or anything like that, but he didn't have to. Because whatever happened in that little alcove behind the waterfall, that's between him and his dearly departed. I've been hiking and camping for as long as I can remember. I was an Eagle Scout, and after that I managed to convince a few high school and then college friends to come along on a few trips with me. My passion for the outdoors stayed strong long after graduation.

But as all of my old hiking buddies started dropping out of the hobby, it got harder and harder to put a trip together. In the end, it seemed like if I wanted to go hiking as regularly as I wanted to, I was going to have to start going solo. Solo hiking seemed kind of lame at first. I mean, what good are all these experiences if you can't share them with someone? Hardship and struggle forge very strong bonds between people and that was half the joy of it. Each trip would bring another set of adventures and memories. I'm talking real experiences too, not just getting drunk and sharing funny vines with each other. But as it turns out, solo hiking is actually pretty fun. Suddenly I wasn't constrained by what anybody else wanted to do, where they wanted to go, or

when a trip could take place. I could just think it up and do it. Clock out of work on a Friday afternoon and then spend the whole weekend in the woods before being back in bed on Sunday night. Don't mind if I do. Take off for a whole week to hike a section of the Great Appalachian? Why not? The only real issue with going solo is safety. I grew to envy my European counterparts, especially those in the United Kingdom. They can head out alone with nothing but a fully charged phone, a spot of tea, and a few crumpets, you know? Whereas here in the United States, you need bear mace, a GPS system, sometimes a gun if you want to feel really safe and secure. I'm not saying I was terrified every time I went anywhere, but you hear enough stories to know it's better to be caught packing than caught lacking.

I only brought a gun with me once I was up in the Sierras, and that was for the bears and big cats, but much like anywhere else a person might go, it's not really the wildlife that you need to be afraid of. It's the people. Like I mentioned, you hear some really crazy stories, and I heard a lot of them, right up until I stumbled into my very own cautionary tale, one that started with me meeting a girl. So this one weekend, I decided to take a trip over to Hammersley Wild Area, which is like a designated wilderness spot sandwiched between Elk and Susquehannock State Parks.

As the name suggests, it's one of the wilder, more secluded areas of natural beauty in the state of Pennsylvania. You gotta drive out to this little place called Crossed Forks, and then turn down a little side road until the blacktop ends and the trail begins. There's one or two small houses out there but they don't mind you parking there so long as you don't leave a mess and the place is so off the beaten path that there's hardly anyone else there to worry about messing with your ride. But then I rolled up late Friday afternoon and there's another car there with a girl leaning up against it. She's cute, dressed in hiking gear, but she looks angry.

Not exactly furious or anything, but super annoyed at something. I parked a distance from her, not wanting to crowd her or draw any anger or anything like that, and then got out and started pulling my gear out of my trunk. I didn't want to be a creep and start any unwanted conversation or anything, so I just resigned myself to walking past her and minding my own business But as I started on my walk We made a little awkward eye contact and we kind of fell in the conversation We swapped haze and I asked her if she was okay and she replied no And well, that was that

It turns out that she had a friend stand her up for a hike that she'd been really looking forward to, and wasn't looking forward to driving all the way back home with nothing to show for it. She was debating going up the trail alone, but also wanted to see if she could convince her friend to come out anyways, as she was well aware that hiking alone as a female was not the brightest of ideas. I told myself it was the polite thing to do but I also knew that inviting her to hike with me was a great way of getting to know a very pretty girl that clearly shared a passion for the outdoors. So I did just that and asked her if she wanted to come join me. There was this definite moment

of hesitation from her. She didn't look like the kind of girl to just go walking down some remote forest trail with a complete stranger, and for a second there, I figured that she was going to politely decline me. But then there was a sort of flash of spontaneity in her eye, before she looks at me with a big smile and said, sure. She told me her name was Allie, and as we walked, I explained that I was planning on making camp somewhere to stay for the weekend, but that I'd be happy to walk her back to her car once she was ready to leave. She thanked me, said that I was sweet for offering, and then carried on breaking the ice and swapping small talk. Then, once we got more comfortable with one another, I can safely say that it made for one of the best first dates that I'd ever been on.

It definitely had this kind of vibe to it. I'm no Disney prince or anything like that, but I'm not terrible to look at, and I know when a girl is flirting with me and not just being polite or nice or whatever. So as we walked and talked, I started getting pretty excited about where this might lead. It had been a while since I since i tried any dating and my brief kind of jump into tinder had been a total disaster i always found it was much more appealing to meet a person naturally rather than to use the internet to sort of force it but as i'm sure many of you will agree that's much easier said than done given how it was mutual interest, we talked a lot about hiking at first, places we'd been, close calls that we've had, and stuff like that. But as time went on,

we started talking about other things too, like our jobs, our families, and relationships. She told me that she'd been single for a while, but she wasn't looking for anything at that moment. But she was also quick to add that if the right thing came along, that she'd been open to changing her mind about the whole not looking thing. It seemed like a loaded statement, but it was a very welcome one, and as we continued to walk, I wondered if that chance meeting with her was the start of some lifelong romance. Now looking back on it, I actually cringe at how naive that sounds, but I guess loneliness is a hell of a thing. Maybe about an hour into our hike, we were walking along the edge of a stream when Allie stopped to take a picture. She then asked me to

give her a second while she texted her friend, saying that she didn't have enough signal for a call but could probably force a text through. To me, it was a very familiar little dance. Hammersley is pretty close to a town, but thanks to all the hills surrounding us, cell signal was kind of hard to come by. While she was texting, I wandered back stream a little bit, just waiting for Allie to finish up doing her thing, when something caught my eye maybe 50 or 60 yards downstream. A flash of movement in the trees, only very slightly, but I 100% saw something for sure. I walked back to Allie to ask if she had any bear spray or anything on her,

but when she said yes, I wasn't completely reassured. It was nice that we'd both be able to defend ourselves in the event of an animal attack, but at the same time, I didn't want anything to ruin our hike, especially if that thing happened to be bear-shaped. I told her I thought that I might have spotted something downstream. She said that she'd keep her eyes peeled, and then we went off on our way as usual. Maybe an hour later, half hour later, we came out of the trees and onto a wide open meadow that sloped slightly upwards. When we got to the top, or rather where the gentle slope turned into a steep hill, we stopped and turned around to take in the view. Nothing had followed us out into the meadow,

so I figured that we were okay on the wild animal front, but just to be safe, I decided to pull out this little monocular, or spyglass for you pirate fans, that I was carrying with me to check out the tree line below us. I scan, and I don't see anything, but then I scan it a second time, and I see a dark figure moving parallel to the tree line. I can't really make out any details because of the difference in the light, but there was definitely something there. And right when I thought that they might just be some fellow innocent hiker that I was making the object of my own paranoia, the figure stopped, turned their profile, and just stayed still.

At first, I thought they might have been taking a leak or something, but then it hit me. They were watching us. I immediately directed Allie's attention to the figure, pointing out where I'd been looking before handing her the spyglass. She put it to her eye, listened again as I gave her directions where to look, but then gave me some skeptical reply when I asked her if she could see anything. She asked me if I was 100% sure that the person had been watching us, and to be fair, I didn't know for certain. I just had a bad feeling based off the previous little flash of movement in the trees back near the stream. I tried again to get her to look in the right spot, then

politely took the spyglass back from her to look for myself, and when I did, I saw that there was no one there. Or at least there was no one in the spot that I had been originally looking. I scanned the tree line for a third time in almost as many minutes and that time there was nothing there but I still felt very uneasy and suggested that we just move on. Our original plan had been to hike around the base of the hill that we come to then head back down the same trail to where Allie's car was parked. But because of how uneasy I felt, I suggested that we walk a longer route so we wouldn't have to double back on ourselves.

I could see that Allie was starting to get a little suspicious of my intentions. There she was, having to agree to go on a short hike with some stranger, probably out of sheer politeness. And there I was, trying to talk her into further going into the wilderness with talk of some shadowy pursuers. She seemed skeptical, but she agreed, most likely knowing that she could turn the bear mace on me if I started to get a little fresh, which I wasn't. After walking another mile or so, the tension had started to clear up though. No one was following us anymore, at least they didn't appear to be, and I was starting to think that I was just being overly paranoid, like it was the nerves of trying to

shoot my shot bleeding over into something else, you know. And speaking of which, that's pretty much all I was focused on from there on out. Allie kept reassuring me, making lighthearted comments about me being desperate for an excuse to save her, so I found myself getting more and more chill and forgetting what I assumed was just a coincidence. Not long after walking back into the forest, we hit what I like to call the babbling brook. I first heard that term in a Bob Ross video that I saw on YouTube, and this place is one of the larger streams looking like something the man himself would have painted. People sometimes give Pennsylvania a hard time given how industrialized parts of it are, but there's

plenty of natural beauty to be had here, and in sharing it with my potential date, I was hoping to up my chances a little. Allie seemed delighted with it and started snapping pictures while I paced around with a smug smile on my face. She liked the place so much, she wanted to hang out there for a while to take a breather and eat some snacks, and while we did, she was planning on texting her friend the pictures, signal permitting to show her what she was missing out on. While Allie was keeping busy trying to text, I excused myself to just go take a leak somewhere private

and then headed off into the trees to find somewhere secluded. I find a spot, do my thing, then just as I'm turning around to head back, I hear something in the trees behind me. I'm instantly reminded of that sensation of being followed, only this time I actually make an effort to find out if there's anything or anyone that was trailing us. I started walking directly towards where I'd heard the noise, calling out and asking if there was anyone there and that's when I see him. This big guy, wearing hiking gear, and was walking away from me at a pace. I found the hiking gear kind of reassuring in a way, like I could give him the benefit of the

doubt, but at the same time, I was now confronted with evidence that we were being followed. Hammersley is a big place, and sure, it gets kind of busy on a weekend, but not on a Friday afternoon, which is half the reason I like to get a head start by arriving at that very time. The chances of just running into someone especially off the trails is slim to none so as much as I wasn't straight up convinced that we were being followed I still wanted to confront that guy to at least make sure. I called out to him not in some overly aggressive way just to get his attention you know. I called out to him, not in some overly aggressive way, just to get his attention, you know. I planned on asking him something fairly innocent like, you okay? Or

something like that, just to gauge his mood, but when he turned, I was stunned into silence. He was dressed like a hiker, alright, but he had these thick, heavy-looking gloves on, almost like those riot gloves that you see with the hard knuckles, and the lower half of his face was covered with a hunting gaiter, the kind where only the person's eyes are showing. Well, a face covering like that was totally normal during 2020 and 2021, and still kind of accepted today. You see, back in 2015, it was definitely not a regular thing to see, especially since the guy didn't have any kind of orange indicators on his clothing for hunting or more importantly, no weapon that I could see. I was sort of relieved to see no weapon in his

hands, but the fact that he was covering his face meant that he was obviously up to no good. And then there was the fact that he just refused to respond to me when I finally did ask him if everything was okay. He just gave me this sort of death stare for a second, and then turned again, and walked off into the woods. Now my mind is rushing like a mile a minute by this point. Following us down a single trail was one thing, but this dude had potentially tracked us across an open meadow, and then it just so happened to stay on our trail even though we traversed the hill and picked up a seemingly random route. I'd like to think of myself as kind of an outdoorsman, but to me, those were some freakily accurate tracking skills,

and if this guy was using his powers for evil, then that was going to be a big problem for us. I rushed back to Allie, told her exactly what I'd seen, and told her that we needed to move fast. I told her that I knew it sounded crazy, and that I totally understood why she'd think that I was a creep or whatever, but I'd rather she think that I was a creep and live than not act on anything and risk both of our lives. So much horrifying stuff seems to happen because people don't stop and just tell themselves this isn't normal or safe and I need to leave. And I was having one of those moments right there. I gave my little speech at Tommy Gunn's speed, you know, and I honestly thought that I'd convinced her for a second. But when I was done and I started walking off while beckoning her to follow me, she just stayed put. I remember saying, we need to leave,

Allie, now. But instead of following me, she gave me a mouthful. She told me I was acting like a total jerk, and that if we were being followed, she'd have known something about it. She wasn't some defenseless little girl either, so she resented me acting like it, and according to her, just because someone happened to be on her trail didn't mean they were acting maliciously. They were all good points. And on any other occasion, I might have echoed them back to her, but I knew this was not any other occasion.

Something was quite obviously shady with this weirdo, and we needed to exercise the proper caution stat. And it was about then that I started to notice this sort of gradual change in the way Allie was talking to me. It went from something like, come on dude, you're being ridiculous, and urging me to stay, to accusing me of being a mixture of dumb, cowardly, and mentally ill. I wanted to walk her back to her car. She wanted to say put and not even move on to someplace else downstream. And if I wanted to move or leave her, then I wasn't half the man I thought I was,

among other personal attacks from her. I just remember being confused beyond belief. It honestly felt like a weird dream. It seemed like any girl in their right mind would at least be kind of alarmed at the prospect of being followed by a man wearing a mask. But here was Allie, not even in the least bit bothered by the sight of me being visibly shaken up as I warned her of the potential danger. The only mitigating factor I guess was this idea that she thought it was me who was trying to trick her into, I don't know, going someplace more remote so I could go all Ted Bundy on her without being discovered. That I totally understood and I suspected that her

reluctance was coming from there and not being dumb or naive or untrusting enough to not respond to my warnings. We were both being pretty loud by that point, arguing back and forth and it hit me that our volume would make it very easy for someone to both zero in on us and catch us unaware. I remember looking around just to make sure that we were still alone and I felt that creeping, skin-crawling feeling that comes with knowing that you're actually being watched. I honestly thought that if I just started to walk off, that Allie would come to her senses somehow and follow. So, that's what I did. I started walking off, looking back just once to see if she was going to follow or not. She looked furious though, I mean really angry, and it was obviously because she

wasn't going to get her way. But there was something else to it too. She wasn't going to get her way, but what she intended wasn't some spur-of-the-moment thing that she could carry on doing without me. It was something that she put a lot of time and effort and excitement into, something that was so close to coming together but was falling apart at the last minute. I guess with the gift of hindsight, some of you have figured out by now, but in that moment, what was actually going on was almost completely inconceivable to me. Almost, but not quite. I realized that two of the big questions in front of me had answers that were intrinsically linked. The reason why the guy in the hunting gear could find us so easy was interwoven with the reason Allie wanted to stay in that exact spot near the babbling brook.

The masked stranger and my new hiking companion were working together. Now I know I couldn't have known that for certain in that moment, and I'm not sure I could even describe how quick and how panicked my thought process was in that moment, but again, it was a case of get the hell out of there, be wrong, but live. Or I could not trust my gut and potentially run into something I wouldn't walk away from. And being the kind of person I am, I chose the path of least resistance. I started walking off, still in disbelief of how surreal it all was. It was a real, this cannot be happening right now kind of moment, like I couldn't believe how things had started off so well but gone so horribly wrong in just an hour or two.

But I could at least still see the funny side, or kind of funny side. Maybe I was being a total jerk and I was going to look back at that hike as being the time that I blew my shot over some weird attack of paranoia. Unfortunately, the funny side was only visible for a matter of seconds, as after that, any benefit of the doubt was blown away by an ear-splitting screech that came following me through the trees. You gotta understand too, that hearing these three little words probably made for the single most terrifying moment in my entire life. All I heard after a few seconds of silence was Allie screaming out, he's getting away.

The second that I heard that, I just instinctively ran. I don't know if it was finding out all that so-called paranoia had been justified, but I mean it when I say that. When it all came together like that, I could feel my heart pounding out of my chest. I had no idea where the guy was, if he was close, or what he had in his pack. So I popped the clasp on my pack and wiggled it off my back and then moved my legs faster than I'd ever moved them before. And I didn't stop until I felt like puking. I always wore like a kind of fishing jacket, the kind with a lot of

pockets and I kept all my absolute essentials in there, car keys included. If they'd have been in my pack, I'd have been forced to run with it and if that was the case, I honestly don't know if I'd be around to write this. After I stopped for maybe a minute to catch my breath, I kept pushing through the trees back towards my truck, trying not to trip and fall on my face as I kept checking over my shoulder. I knew the guy wasn't some master tracker anymore. He'd obviously been coordinating with that so-called Allie, if that even was her real name. But I still had that fear that I was going to look over my shoulder and he'd just be there. Thankfully he wasn't and I made it back to my truck, jumped in, and drove off.

I kept telling myself that I'd call the cops the moment that I walked through the door, but when it came time to doing it, I found that it might have been a bad idea. I don't think any kind of crime had actually been committed, in which case, what exactly was I going to report? I hadn't even tried to retrieve my bag or anything, and if it was gone, the least I could report was it stolen or something. So that's what I decided to do. I waited a day to try and ensure no one was using it for bait or whatever and then went out to retrieve it and I found it untouched. I'd actually found myself hoping that someone had, I don't know, maybe gone through it or tried to damage it in some way, as that might yield some DNA or maybe

fingerprints, I guess. But no, my pack was just there, exactly where I dropped it, totally untouched. I had nothing to show from my experience, only my word and my memories. But as any attorney will tell you, those are about as useful to the cops as a chocolate coffee pot. There was nothing I could do. I had no recourse, nothing that wouldn't put my own safety at risk anyways. But then I realized that there was something I could do. Even if it was just some insignificant internet post or email that gets ignored, downvoted, or buried, or whatever.

Because if just one person reads this, who is thinking of hiking through Hammersley, and actually listens and takes note, then I might just save a life. Because if I'm right, and I wasn't just being completely and utterly paranoid, there's a couple out there who are setting traps for unwary male hikers. And I only avoided falling into it by the skin of my teeth. I'm a 31-year-old female, originally from Oregon, and I was 28 when the story took place. Back during the whole hashtag MeToo thing, I remember talking to a friend of mine about the whole not-all-men thing. We both agreed that it's a ridiculous state to label all men as predators, but we disagreed on something a little more nuanced. My friend believed that since just

about anyone, no matter how nice they looked or how pleasant they acted, could be a predator, it made sense to exercise a degree of caution around every man outside of immediate family. I thought it was quite a pessimistic way of looking at things, and that it made sense to employ the caution of a case-by-case basis. I'm not going to plug the first two digits of 911 into my phone if an Uber driver asks me how my day's been, but follow me down a dark side street and I'm reaching for my pepper spray. We went back and forth like that for a while over a few glasses of alcohol and as much as they're always friendly exchanges we never got to any solid conclusions however my

friend said something that really stuck with me it's not all men but one is enough i had no idea how right she truly was you see see, a few months later, I drove out to government camp in my native Oregon, parked my car in the old Golden Poles parking lot, and then headed up for my favorite trail into the foothills of Mount Hood. I went for two reasons. Number one, I was itching to get outdoors again after six months of being locked inside, and number two, I was working on a photography project as part of my lockdown side hustle, and number two, I was working on a photography project as part of my lockdown side hustle, and getting the right pictures of the mountain and its surroundings were a huge part of it. Anyway, I walk up to just about where the ski runs start,

took my pictures, then started making my way back down towards town, snapping shots along the way. About halfway down, I reach a fork in the trail on my left and when i looked i saw someone standing there on the trail they immediately stood out because they weren't wearing hiking gear and i'd never seen anyone so far up the trail who wasn't wearing ski or hiking attire he had long hair sneakersgy shorts, and a t-shirt. Just your average white skater guy, maybe 20 to 24 years old. I guess that's not entirely out of the ordinary on its own, but this guy had no backpack, no water bottle. He just looked lost.

We made eye contact for a second, and I gave him a polite smile before heading off on my way. But as I did, I heard him call after me with something like does this trail head up the mountain i told him no but it'd lead him to a trail that would take him up the mountain and then i wished him luck and carried on walking i don't think i even got four or five steps away before i heard him call out again only that time he said something so strange it actually made me do one of those silent little laughs. The guy says, and in a way that made it sound like there had been some minor confusion, Hey, uh, I think that's my bag.

I stopped, smiled at how crazy of a statement it was, and then turned back and told him with just a hint of laughter that he must be confused. He started walking towards me slowly and casually saying, nah that's totally my bag I've been looking for it all afternoon. Giving him the benefit of the doubt I just slipped my backpack off my shoulders and then showed him like I can promise you it's mine it even has my name on it see and I showed him the tag saying Maddy. He leaned in and squinted, like the writing was tiny and not in big block capital letters, then asked me in a voice that sounded genuinely hurt, why would you do that? I remember literally hearing that F this I'm out jingle in my head and this guy was either playing a stupid prank on me with his buddy recording from behind a tree or he was actually crazy and I wasn't about to stick around to find out which one.

I turned my politeness up to 100, smiled and told him, I'm so sorry I gotta go, I hope you find your bag, okay? He stayed quiet as I turned and began to walk away, and I found myself hoping that that'd be the end of the exchange. But as I found out, that was more wishful thinking than accurate assessment. As the sound of his footsteps followed me down the trail, I started to get nervous. This wasn't some unusual encounter with a weirdo stranger anymore. The weirdo stranger was now following me down a quiet hillside trail with not another soul in sight. Remember what I said about pepper spray in side streets? Well, that rule applies to mountain trails too, and I always keep one of those cute little miniature pepper sprays on my car keys. In one smooth motion, I slipped my

backpack off my shoulder again, shoved a hand into the little pocket where I kept my car keys, and then shoved them into my pocket for easier access. And once that was in place, I felt a little more comfortable getting vocal again. I asked the guy if he was following me. He told me yes, because I had his backpack. I told him that's not a funny joke and it wasn't funny the first time and he told me it wasn't a joke. He wanted his backpack returned and if I didn't give it to him, he was going to have to take it. As we're still walking, me with my back to him and him about 15 feet behind me, I told the guy that it was starting to sound like he was threatening me. When he heard that, he took on this sort of indignant tone, asking me how dare I try and play the victim when it was me that had stolen his backpack. I was so convinced that it

was a prank by that period that I actually stopped, turned around and started looking for the similarly dumb looking skater guy with some smartphone and looking back on it, I think that was just wishful thinking. If there was someone else there, I wasn't dealing with another crazy person. But when I realized that we were truly alone on the trail, that was not a nice feeling, I can tell you that. So once it hit me that this guy is either crazy or trying to rob me in the weirdest way imaginable, I reach for my pepper spray. I take it out, I show him, and he pulls that frustrated card again. I tell him if he doesn't stop following me, I'm going to pepper spray him, and then I'm calling the cops. He responds by saying stuff like, Do it. Call the cops. That's my bag you're carrying, with my stuff in it.

Once again, I told him if he came within five feet of me, I was going to pepper spray him. And then I turned back and immediately realized the problem that I was facing. If I wanted to really be safe, I'd have to walk freaking backwards the whole rest of the way down to government camp. The best I could do was keep a minimum safe distance and just keep my hand on my pepper spray. This guy trailed me for a great distance for a while, yelling after me as we walked down, and the more he talked, the more obnoxious he got. Like I might have mentioned at the start that he was acting polite and well-mannered, then he switched to the victim tone that he'd adopted. But as time went on, he got more and more obnoxious. I remember at one point he said something like, I just don't understand why you're being such a

bee about it. Just admit that you're wrong already and hand over my stuff. And then as he got more aggressive, it became things like, you need therapy. You could do hours of sessions and not work out all the crap you got going on in your head. He actually said that. My blood was boiling, but I knew better than to react. If anything, he just wanted to stop me so he could close the distance again, or failing that, he just wanted this weird attention that I chose not to give him. Aside from the occasional look over my shoulder to make sure that he wasn't trying to close in on me, I try not to give the guy so much as a word.

The distance from where I ran into the guy and where the trail ended was maybe only a mile, so after a few minutes walking, I could literally see people walking around near the houses at the end of East Blossom Trail, and just seeing them was a huge relief. I felt like I was almost back on our friendly territory, you know? That even if the guy was being a jerk, he wouldn't dare put his hands on me if there were other people around. But even better, I suddenly see these two hikers walking up the trail towards us. I figured rather than risk this guy following me back to my car, I'd ask these hikers to accompany me. But as we got closer, the guy following me tried one last trick. The second I called out to the two hikers, he started screaming over me. He was saying stuff like, help me, my sister is off her meds and she wants to take her own life,

you gotta help me, grab her. I remember looking back at him, completely boiling over at that point, wondering if I'd actually ran into the biggest moron or psychopath on the face of the planet. And then as I turned back to call out something to oppose what he said, I heard these fast, heavy footsteps coming up at me. I remember turning, seeing the guy sprinting at me, and letting off a burst of pepper spray at the last second before he collided with me. Thank Christ, most if not all of the spray was effective, despite his efforts to shield his face as he ran at me. So as I found my feet, I was shaken, but I was still furious, and it was deeply satisfying to see him rubbing his eyes, screaming in pain. The hikers had ran up onto the scene by the time I was up again, and I explained everything very

clearly that the creep was not my brother, and that he'd been harassing me all the way down the trail. They very kindly told me that they'd keep him there for as long as it took to lose sight of me, and as I walked off, I pulled out my phone and I called the cops. I was almost at the end of the trail when I heard this scream. You can't tell me crap. Just from a way distance away, and then right as I looked back, the two hikers were wrestling this guy to the ground. I just kept walking as I relayed all of this information to 911, feeling incredibly thankful that those two hikers showed up when they did.

Even when I thought it was safe, I know now looking back on it that I wasn't. People have been snatched in broad daylight before and there's no telling what would have happened if he continued to follow me What I find incredibly creepy to this day is just how devious he tried to be And how he seemed to enjoy trying to mentally overpower me as opposed to physically overpowering me Although I do get the feeling that the mental thing was just an appetizer for something that he never got a chance to do I couldn't tell if he was truly psychotic or just mentally ill. Born on December 19th of 1986, Christina Kaleika grew up in Canada as the only daughter of divorced Filipino migrants Elizabeth and Mario Kaleika.

Like many Filipinos, she had a devoutly Catholic upbringing and was also described as hard-working and a natural leader, with ambitions of attending teacher's college at Toronto's York University. At 5'2 and 125 pounds, she kept in shape by playing volleyball and would only occasionally try jogging. Just before the civic holiday of 2007, Christina had planned to take part in a Christian youth conference in the city of Montreal. But at the last minute, she pulled out in favor of a hiking trip to Ontario's Rainbow Falls Provincial Park, accompanied by her 20-year-old cousin, Faith Costolo, and two friends, Eddie Migue and Joe Benedict. Rainbow Falls Provincial Park covers an area of about two square miles and is

located on Highway 17 between the towns of Schreiber and Rossport. There are two main camping areas within its boundaries, the primary White Sand Lake site, which is just a few hundred meters from the park's entrance, and the smaller Rossport site, which is three kilometers to the west, not far from the Trans-Canada Highway. The vast majority of the hiking trails in the park are relatively easy, averaging between three and five kilometers. The only exception is the Cask Isles Trail, which is a whopping 32 miles long and runs through the park from Rossport all the way to Terrace Bay. But step off the trails into Rainbow Falls and you'll run into what some have described as the most rugged terrain in the province. Just after 12 p.m. on Sunday, August 5th of 2007, Christina and friends arrived at the park.

Christina had been at the wheel for the 14-hour drive from Toronto, and after completing what had turned into a two-day journey, the group were exhausted. They set up camp on Lot 88 of the White Sand Lake campsite, then exchanged a few friendly greetings with their new but temporary neighbors. White Sand Lake was very busy that weekend, with only a handful of lots left unoccupied. Yet as the hustle and bustle of the holiday weekend went on outside, Christine and her friends settled down for a nap. The group were exhausted from their two-day drive, so what was intended to be a half-hour nap turned into more

like a four-hour snooze. They awoke around 10.30 at night, made a small campfire, and then ate dinner together while consuming a small amount of alcohol. Around 30 a.m the group decided to head back to bed and all are thought to have been asleep within 30 minutes three hours later christina woke up eddie and asked him to accompany her to the campsite's communal showers according to eddie the pair had planned to go running together at dawn, and after washing and dressing themselves, they headed out into the trails. The pair ran together for a period of around 30 minutes, then at some point, Christina began to tire. Then, upon reaching an intersection near the park entrance, the pair decided to split up. Eddie would continue along the longer of the

two trails towards Highway 17, while Christina opted to visit the nearby eponymous Rainbow Falls waterfall before returning to camp. Eddie only made so far as a small roadside picnic area before he too began to tire. He briefly stopped to catch his breath, carved the first initials of all four members into a rock, and then made his way back to camp. He claimed he would have spent the next few hours searching for an axe to whittle down some oversized logs, but was unable to find one. At around 9.30am, Joe Benedict and Faith Costolo emerged from their tents. They made breakfast and took showers, believing Christina would return at any moment, but by 11am, they began to grow concerned. Joe and Eddie went down one of the trails to the

waterfall Christina had wanted to visit. They also searched the Lake Superior Trail and Rainbow Falls Trail, as well as a number of other trails they suspected her to have jogged down, but she was nowhere to be found. The two men remained calm and refrained from raising the alarm, believing that Christina would soon be found. However, by mid-afternoon, she had yet to reappear. Around 2pm, the group approached a park ranger to report Christina missing. Park rangers then joined the group of friends in continuing their search of nearby trails and beaches. When it became evident that she was missing, they advised them to report her disappearance to the police. The Ontario Police's Regional Emergency Response Team took charge of the search

and quickly established a command post near Whitesand Island. Almost a hundred personnel then scoured the area, including police officers, firefighters, and specifically trained divers who searched nearby lakes and streams. They utilized GPS equipment, underwater radar, infrared cameras, and four canine units, along with two fixed-wing airplanes, a float plane, three helicopters, and a plethora of watercraft, but no trace of Christina could be found. Poor weather and rough terrain made the search extremely difficult, and some search personnel were severely injured in the course

of their work. One man needed emergency surgery when a repelling accident resulted in horrific facial lacerations, while another was taken to the hospital with a sprained ankle and twisted knee following a nasty fall down a steep slope. An unusual aspect of the search involved the use of tracker dogs. They were walking up and down the Rainbow Falls and Cask Isles trails in search of Christina's scent. Although they picked up her trail in places that she had been running with Eddie Miga, there was no traces of her anywhere else, including up near Rainbow Falls. She was gone alright, but her scent trail suggested that she had left the park.

At this point, the search for Christina became highly scientific. The search teams began studying maps of the area in order to identify so-called anthropogenic corridors. This is a fancy term for what we might refer to as natural pathways that occur off the beaten path, such as streams or rivers, even electrical lines. Anything a person might believe will lead them back to civilization. The search team also based their phase two search areas as a highly advanced lost hiker behavioral profile. This stated that there was a 90% chance that she was still within a five mile radius of her last known position, but her condition remained another question entirely.

The strategy led to some interesting developments in the search. A pair of socks were recovered from a deep pool of water in the Hewitson River, a tributary that feeds into the larger White Sands Lake. Search teams also found several footprints in a mossy area of the ground not far from the waterfall. While the footprints matched Calica's shoe size, the lack of preserved tread pattern made it impossible to determine if they were created by one of her running shoes. Against the advice of provincial police, Christina's family traveled out to Rainbow Falls.

There, they set up a series of tents on lots rented by friends and well-wishers and refused to leave until Christina was found. They were joined by Raul Escarpe, a Catholic priest and fellow Filipino-Canadian who performed special masses for the family to allay their fears. Escarpe also helped raise the case's public profile, and within just a few days, a team of around 200 volunteers was scouring the surrounding area. The team included politicians from nearby Schreiber and Terrace Bay, but also some very experienced search and rescue personnel who weren't just using the opportunity as a photo op. August 11th saw a search that lasted a full

eight hours, covering the area between the provincial parks East Beach and Highway 17. The following day signaled another long search, but this time, less than a hundred of the original volunteers showed up to try again. Frustrated with the lack of results, Christina's family openly admitted that their hope was fading. High-ranking Ontario police officers assured them that the chances of her survival were high, but her loved ones were quite clearly prepared for the worst. They've used canine units. They've used planes. They've used submarines. Christina's uncle despaired.

They've used all sorts of different ways to find Christina. And nothing, absolutely nothing works. There's no clue at all. By August 21st, the police began using a chilling euphemism to refer to Christina as a non-responsive person, meaning that she would not have been able to reply if she heard searchers calling her name. The move prompted law enforcement to reallocate all aircraft and canine units away from the search, leaving only a skeleton crew of 20 officers to continue the effort. And then finally, two days later, the search was called off, and it was announced that investigative theories now surrounded the possibility of abduction. However, the Kalikov family once again openly criticized the investigation, claiming the abduction theory wasn't based on any concrete evidence.

It was widely accepted that, alive or dead, she was clearly no longer in the park. But if that was the case, where did she go? Some maintain that Christina vanished as a result of a bear attack, and that any potential remains were carried off and consumed by the animal. Yet if this was the case, there would most certainly be plenty of evidence in the form of ripped clothing, blood, or drag marks. Stephen Herrero of the University of Calgary, who once authored a weighty tome on the nature and circumstances of bear attacks, was quoted as saying it was not impossible, but highly unlikely that Christina had fallen victim to a bear, and that predators of that kind rarely travel more than 600 feet before consuming a kill.

Another distinct possibility that Christina died as a result of what might legally be referred to as misadventure. Many have cited Christina's lack of experience when it came to wilderness hiking, and believe that it likely led to her becoming lost and disoriented, especially if she was already exhausted following their long two-day journey. But again, if this had been the case, some trace of her would have been recovered, even if it was the tragic discovery of her lifeless body. Prior to Christina, the only other person missing in the park was recovered safely in less than nine hours, and 95% of all missing person cases are solved within the first 24 hours.

With this in mind, we start to understand the frustrations experienced by law enforcement and why more and more of those involved began to suspect foul play. As recently as 2018, Catherine's mother had expressed her belief that her daughter was either abducted or murdered. Citing the proximity of the nearby Trans-Canada Highway, Elizabeth believed her overly trusting daughter might have provided the perfect target to a potential killer that would then be able to almost instantly abscond. Despite accusations that Christina's three friends had something to do with her disappearance, they have vehemently denied any involvement and are not considered suspects.

Don MacArthur, a former mayor of Schreiber, has stated that he doesn't believe any local resident is guilty of her abduction or murder. According to him, the only other known homicide in the area occurred back in 2005 and was mostly related to the local drug trade. Perhaps one of the most probable theories was posted by the host of CBC's The Next Call podcast with David Ridgen. He suggested that convicted child predator Dennis Livier might have been involved in Christina's disappearance, given his history of abusing teenage girls. What's more, her disappearance fits into the window of time in which Livalle was actively praying.

Rigenus theorized that following her run, Christina took off her socks to wade into the waters of the Hewitson River, and it was there that she was ambushed by her killer. He dismissed the notion that the socks recovered from the river could not have belonged to Christina, saying that they only appeared larger due to being submerged for so long. Ridgen's theories, though seemingly well thought out, have been roundly dismissed by the Ontario Provincial Police, who don't believe Christina was deliberately or maliciously killed. In fact, one or two detectives even floated the idea that Christina intentionally disappeared to sever ties with her community and family.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time that a member of a strict religious community had a sudden change of heart. And rather than face the ire and shame of their loved ones, they disappear themselves instead. However, there is a strong evidence to suggest that Christina had a wonderful relationship with her parents and continued to share their deep Christian faith. She was unwavering in her attendance of certain Christian youth organizations, and even after pulling out of her most recent conference, she opted for a weekend camping with friends that she met at one of those very same conferences. Granted, the possibility can't be entirely ruled out, as people have hidden worse secrets from their families before.

But in this case, whatever happened to Christina certainly didn't happen, or of her own volition. Other search and rescue personnel have questioned the effectiveness of the entire search effort. One volunteer claimed that entire sections of the forest were so dense that if a person were to become immobilized, the mass of surrounding vegetation would be enough to keep their body upright. This would potentially obscure the body from any other aerial search teams, which by far covered the most ground during the search. Ontario police officer Greg Beasley also spoke of such difficulties, telling one journalist that when you trip, you don't fall down. Perhaps the closest any investigation has come to uncovering the truth behind Christina's disappearance was back in

March of 2009. Jeff Hasse, a volunteer with the Minnesota Search and Rescue non-profit, stated that he believed volunteers actually located Christina's remains in November of 2009. During this privately funded search, six cadaver dogs indicated the presence of human remains at a location in the Hewitson River, but further investigation was made impossible by the speed and depth of the water. Hasse believes that if the private search and rescue teams had access to more advanced equipment, their task might have been concluded there and then.

Perhaps that is indeed the case, and Christina Kaleka's remains lie deep under the waters of Rainbow Falls. But just as many other leads in the case have proven to be dead ends, perhaps the reason she's never been found in the park is that she's no longer there. As one police officer noted, the absence of remains is perhaps the best possible indicator that Christina was abducted, which begs the question, has the predator who took her met with some other kind of indirect justice, or do they still walk among us.

So I'm going to tell you the story of my brief encounter with a man called Happy. So in 2013, I'm working at a cannabis dispensary in Venice Beach, a block from the boardwalk. A good 35% of our patrons were unhoused people. Occasionally, someone experiencing severe psychosis would try to come in, but if they were screaming or unintelligible, security would not let them in. If they had and presented the holy trinity of medical papers, ID, and cash, they were good to go. We had a compassion program where we'd bag up grams of shake left over from the bottoms of jars and give them completely free, one per person per day to anyone who asked. Word about this spread quickly on the boardwalk. Generally these people would be the nicest,

most polite and considerate customers, even if they did smell a bit stinky and their money got pulled out of a sweaty sock. No one working there would bat an eye if someone came in smelling like they'd slept on the beach for a week next to a bottle of vodka, as long as they just calmly buy their weed and be on their way like any other customer. It's a foggy, chilly day around the holidays, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Someone called out, so I was the only person in the back, bud-tending. There was another employee at reception and the security guard at the front door. I'm alone in the back room. There are cameras, but no one is actively watching them. This guy walks in after being checked in at the front. He's the only customer at the moment, and I swear the whole room gets colder as he walks in. He's wearing a very worn-in,

deeply faded, wrinkled, conformed-to- to his body, floor-length leather duster jacket, and a similarly beaten up wide-brimmed leather cowboy hat. It looked like he'd lived and slept in these same clothes for years. We didn't allow hats, hoods, or sunglasses in the store, so I'm surprised that security didn't make him take off his hat. The man had to be at least six foot five and built like a boulder, not obese kind of large, pick you up and toss you around like a ragdoll large. The stench that comes off of him is unlike anything I've ever smelled before or since. It was beyond BO, beyond soiling yourself. It smelled like actual death, as if though he had raw rotting carcasses tucked under his thick,

long leather coat. I thought I had been hardened by plenty of nasty body stank before, but this was absolutely revolting far beyond anyone who hadn't showered lately or peed their pants. I'm trying not to inhale very deeply, and I say, Hi, sir. Excuse me, I'm sorry, but would you mind taking off your hat? It's store policy. Big customer service smile. What are you looking for today? He grunts deeply, and he's walking very slowly, shuffling and dragging his feet. His voice sounds like he gargles with gravel, rough and wet, raw and angry.

Don't take off my hat. At this point, I'm not trying to argue with this man about his hat either. Let's get him in and get him out. I glance down and I see he's not wearing shoes. The bit that I can see from under his coat, one of his ankles is massively purple and black and swollen, melon sized. The bottoms of both of his feet are bloody and torn up and I realize that he is leaving a slight trail of blood as he drags his ragged feet across the concrete floor on the shop. My first thought is how and why did security let this guy come in? Second is this guy is obviously seriously injured and that is concerning as a human being. I'm making sure to keep the display shelf between

me and this guy and that's only about a foot of space, like a bar. He gets to me and the stench gets stronger. I meekly but sincerely ask, are you alright sir? His eyes flare at me, what do you care? And I'm like, well, I tried. Not my chair, not my problem. Not my monkeys, not my circus, you know. Well, great. What can I get for you? He pulls up one of his sleeves to expose his forearm.

And it's covered in large, round burns, like from a cigar. Some old, healed, and some fresh, pussy and infected. It's not track marks, it's actual burns. He also has a jagged homemade looking stick and poke tattoo of a smiley face, a crooked circle, two lines for the eyes and scabbed up curve of a smile. He points at this tattoo. Happy. My name is Happy. The rotting stink was so strong that I needed to breathe little gasps of air, the least possible.

I walked here. I walked all the way here from Pasadena. I'm like, wow, sir, that's a really long walk. Anyway, what are you looking for today? Just for you. His eyes are dark and menacing. He is smeared with a layer of grime like he lives in the woods.

He doesn't look like the average crust punk or disabled veteran you generally see living on the beach. It's hard to guess his age, but he wasn't that old or young, somewhere between 30 to 50, I guess. He looked like he dragged himself here from his log cabin, like what would happen if you entangled some quantum mechanics poorly and mixed Ed Gein with an 1800s homesteader that transported him to 2013 Venice Beach. I, of course, have never seen this man before. Once was more than enough to make him unforgettable. He keeps staring at me and I move as far back as I can to the wall, hopefully out of his grasp if he lunged. I would need to walk out from behind

the case and around him to get to the security guard. I'm weighing my options. I decided to grab a bunch of compassion grams and then weigh out an eighth and mark it down that I'd pay for it later, and he's still just leering at me, wheezing heavy, stinky breaths. We actually have a special today, only for people who walked more than ten miles to get here. This is all for you, on the house. Thanks for stopping by. He accepts the bag, but continues to just stand there and stare at me. Thank you, Happy. It worked. He grunts a guttural noise that is not a word and slowly turns the shuffle back towards the door. At the door he turns back to me and says, I'll see you later. He finally walks out after, leaving plenty of his residual stench of death

behind. Thank any and all of the gods that I did not see happy later or ever again. When I asked security why did they let him in, he said that when he had noticed his bloody feet and said, hey bro, you all good? It looks like it hurts. Happy had stepped up to his face and threatened to choke him out and called him a slur. And since it was just him and two 22 year old 130 pound girls, he wasn't trying to die tonight and figured hopefully Happy could just get his stuff and leave. He was watching the cameras in the back ready to call the police and owners if anything got weird. Apparently we had different definitions of weird but I understood his reaction and ultimately we were all fine, just spooked and creeped out. And now needing to clean blood

off the floor with bleach and gloves and texting our boss that he owed us free weed, he agreed. We all lived happily ever after. When I turned 17 last year, my two friends and I had a little get together and planned to go out that night. One of my friends were active on Tinder and been chatting with an 18 year old guy named Jens. This guy asked if we could come and meet him at a bar in Utrecht in the Netherlands. We thought, oh my god, free alcohol with a hot guy, that sounds fun. We got ready, took a train and within 15 minutes we were in Utrecht. We stopped at some stores and a restaurant before reaching the bar. Once inside, we sat on high chairs, but we didn't see the guy from the Tinder profile,

so we just waited. And then my friend received a message saying that he was delayed, so we continued waiting. We ordered some cokes, and my friend tried to message the guy again, but the messages went unanswered. After a while, a man who had also been sitting at the bar the whole time asked us if he could buy us a drink. This man was maybe 30 years old, but since there were three of us, we came for a free drink and we said yes. He ordered us shots and we continued our conversation. Each time we finished the shots, he would just get us new ones. At one point, he joined our conversation and later we all moved to a lounge in the corner of the bar. We were all kinds of tipsy and we were enjoying ourselves. And this went on for a while. We talked

about our favorite artists, but then he started asking very suggestive questions. We didn't appreciate it because this man really wasn't attractive, quite unattractive actually, and obviously way too old. I started feeling too tipsy and needed some water so I got up to ask for water at the bar. When I did this, the waitress told me that we absolutely should not go home with that man that we were sitting with. She explained that at their bar, a young girl would often come, get stood up, and then this supposedly nice man, who always seemed to be there when a girl got stood up, would buy them a drink, get them drunk, and ask them to go home with him.

That man was the one that we were sitting with. I didn't immediately make the connection, but I understood that this man wasn't as nice as he seemed. When I returned to our table, I told my friends that I wanted to go home, and they agreed. We tried to say goodbye, but the guy kept pressuring us to have another drink or go to another bar. He said that he had Bacardi at his home and asked if we wanted to go get it. He continued pressuring us and even walked with us out of the bar. I freaked out, thinking that this man was going to follow us home but eventually he seemed to enter another bar and we took our train back home. The next day I realized what had happened. I told my friends

about what the waitress had said and when my friend tried to contact the tinder profile she discovered that he had blocked her. I am 100% sure that the 30-year-old man who coincidentally was there to be friendly with us when we got stood up was actually the 19-year-old that we were supposed to meet up with. I think about what could have happened if we had gone with him to his home, and I'm so happy that there were three of us. I don't know what could have happened if I were alone. For every young girl in the Netherlands out there, if you come across a Tinder account under the name of Jens, don't be too quick to meet him. I believe he lives in Utrecht City, as he asked us to walk with him for Bacardi. If you happen to get stood up, and a guy about 30

years old, with short dark blonde hair and uneven eyebrows offers you drinks, don't accept and run. I've worked in restaurants for almost ten years, and I'm accustomed to getting out late. One night after finishing a double shift at a ramen spot, I had my usual beer and decided to Uber home. My Uber arrived, checked the plate and all, and the gentleman confirmed my name. I spent half of the ride almost dozing off. As the ride progressed, I noticed the driver kept staring at me through the mirror, never said a single word, no expression, just a blank stare. I figured exhaustion and the beer had gotten the best of me and he was probably staring because he thought I was drunk. Later on I also noticed that he had taken a different highway and

that they were making our way through Rikers Island. It was a route that I wasn't accustomed to but he had his ways open and I figured that he was trying to take some sort of shortcut. He kept getting further into Rikers Island and the area had become full of trees and construction machines, neon cones and cracked cement, and he came to a sudden stop. My car just broke. Here, get out and call a new Uber. I was confused.

There hadn't been any indication that a tire had popped, or it had ran out of gas or anything like that. I got out and before I could ask anything, he stepped on the gas and sped off. Car, perfectly fine. Alone by a construction zone, I started to freak out and called another Uber. When he arrived, his first question was why I was in the middle of nowhere, especially so late as it was 1am at this point. I told him about the other Uber and he urged me to report that immediately. I did report it and checked the profile. 4.8 stars, same license plate, but it was not the same man in the picture. The report never really got anywhere and I can't

help but feel that I encountered a possible murderer or was he trying to leave me out there to be human trafficked or something. Thank god my Uber came so quickly. Now a quick detail, this was almost two years ago when my husband and I just moved into a townhouse. We have our front door with a regular deadbolt lock and our back door has, no joke, five different locks. Our city isn't always the safest so we didn't question it. About one month after we moved in we get a knock on our door. We were confused but maybe it's a neighbor needing something so my husband opens the door. It ended up being a man we hadn't seen before and he said that he was a maintenance man here to fix our back door. We explained to him that we didn't

call for anyone and that our back door was completely fine. He kept insisting that he was at the correct place and we kept insisting no, he was in fact not. What threw us off was the fact that we have not personally seen him before and we have met most of the workers since we needed some things fixed when we first moved here and he also wasn't wearing a uniform like they usually do. Next thing we know he goes, let me show you and just walks right in and heads to our back door. My husband gives me a look as in saying, get up and behind me, because it obviously made him nervous. The guy walks to our door and looks surprised seeing all the locks. He undoes them all and opens it for a quick second before saying, oops, wrong place,

and just turns around and walks back out the front door without another word. My husband locks everything back up quick and we literally never see that guy again. We didn't do anything as of calling the office like we should have but we thought that maybe we were overreacting and that maybe it was just the wrong place but it also felt like we were being scouted out in some strange way. Like every night, I work at 4am, so I leave around 3.40am. Unfortunately, in France, they decided to turn off the lights from 10pm to like 6am, I think. But thankfully for me, the landlord where I live turned on the lights just for me from 3am to 4am. It's very dim, but I'm thankful for it still. This Thursday night, as always,

I left in my car. I locked it, turned on my lights, and something caught my eye. I looked up and thought it was just a cat jumping from my balcony since they love to come by and look around before leaving. However, it wasn't a cat. It was a man standing next to my balcony. I believe the light surprised him and as I watched, he walked away from me on the grass but that wasn't an exit route. I stared at him, scared and calmly crying, unsure of what to do for about ten seconds. Suddenly I saw movement again and he started walking towards me, quickly looking at me before I continued walking to the main road as if nothing had happened. He took one last look at me in my car before disappearing from sight. It was really weird. He was wearing black sweatpants and a camo jacket. I don't know why he was here, whether he was sleeping on my plastic sofa on the balcony or something else, but I can't stop thinking about his face looking at me or what could have

happened if it had been pitch black outside. I wanted to file a report with the police, but they said they can't since there was no damage. The lady I spoke to suggested that, quote, maybe it wasn't for you. Maybe he was looking around for a dwelling. I replied, at this hour? And in this outfit? I don't think so. She then responded, no, I mean, robbery. Well, yeah, of course, lady. And since then, every night I run to my car like crazy holding a pepper spray in my hand. I also bought a surveillance camera for my balcony to check before going out at night because I'm super paranoid. I'm even developing OCD, constantly needing to look and check outside before going to sleep. So dear random man, let's not meet again. This was four years ago. I was 15 and I loved puzzles.

I wanted to buy one but didn't have much money so I went out with my sister, who was 12 at the time and short for her age, looking for random toy stores that sold off-brand and cheap toys. We found one in an area of town that didn't have much activity around. It didn't really look like a toy store in the front and when you walked in, you could see that the shelves were full and looked like they haven't been rearranged in years. It kind of seemed like the store didn't really have a reason to be there, you know? There was a man at the cash register who noticed our coming in.

I didn't really get a weird vibe from him, or the store was just empty. So we looked around, and there are no puzzles, so I go up to the man and I ask him, Hey, I can't seem to find any puzzles. Do you know if there are any or any ones I might be missing? The man answers, oh yeah, there are puzzles. They're downstairs. I didn't see any downstairs when we entered the store, but I was like, sure, show me the puzzles. And this was like the third store that we had tried, so I just wanted to find my toy, you know. The man walked around the counter and to this door that you wouldn't even notice unless you pointed at it. He opened and revealed a steep staircase

going down. At the bottom was a plain wall. You would have to go left or right to enter whatever the room was. It didn't seem like there were toys down there. It was also kind of dark down there. And also, also, if there really was a downstairs to the store, wouldn't the door be open? At that moment, I got that stomach drop sensation and the get the F out of there feeling. The man was looking at me, waiting for my sister and I to walk down in front of him. I was like, uh, I, uh, well, uh, oh, my mama's calling me. I'll be right back. And my sister and I got the heck out of there and I never even been close to that store since. Maybe there were puzzles down there. Maybe there weren't, but I'm definitely not going to stay and find out.

Also, it's very important to be careful in this sort of situation because if I was right and the man did have bad intentions, then if I had taken even just one step closer to that staircase, he could have pushed me down the stairs and at that moment, there would have definitely been no possible escape. So don't go down random stairs, y'all, and be safe. We had a transfer join our team from another department within the company. He was almost completely deaf, which meant that he could only hear very loud noises and nothing else. However, he managed to speak out loud quite well and relied on lip reading to understand what was being said to him. It wasn't a big deal, we simply made the adjustment of facing him when speaking and talking one at a time. Initially, he was a decent team member, but after some time, he began making inappropriate comments to me and the only other female on the team.

He would say things like, why haven't you made the coffee yet? And other offensive, outdated jokes that targeted women, you know. As part of my role, I provided him with instructions regarding customer requests and needs. Unfortunately, he frequently failed to follow the instructions, resulting in customer complaints. I often had to inform him that he needed to correct his work to match the original request. Afterward, he would storm into my office and yell at me as if his inability to read and follow simple instructions were my fault. I grew tired of it and told him, if you did your job correctly the first time, there wouldn't be any complaints. Needless to say, he didn't take it well,

and his anger was very unsettling, and I had a feeling that it wouldn't stop there. In the following weeks, he intentionally blocked doorways that I tried to pass through. On one occasion, when I was in the small office of the other female worker, he blocked the entire doorway. He stood there, wearing a super creepy smile as if challenging us, saying, what are you going to do about it? I refused to touch him in an attempt to push past. The other ladies seemed just as uncomfortable, and it was as if we could read each other's minds. We continued our own conversation about work-related matters and just ignored him. After several minutes, though, he finally left. Another time, I had to go to the

far back of the warehouse to organize some items in a room. I remember thinking, okay, there are two cameras and they can see this main hallway but not the spaces between the shelving units. I had an uneasy feeling that he would come back there. And sure enough, a few minutes later, he burst into the room and came straight toward me. Being on high alert, I quickly exited through the other door and rushed back to where the rest of the team was located. I pulled up the security cameras to see if he had a valid reason to be in there and unsurprisingly, he loitered in the room for a few minutes after I left and then departed. It was clear that he had no legitimate reason to be there at that exact moment. I shared this incident with a male co-worker friend and he offered to accompany me to

any area away from the main team spaces. I had work to do, but I didn't trust that I could complete it without this angry individual finding me. Whenever we mentioned his anger or demeaning jokes, the managers would just dismiss it, saying things like, maybe he didn't understand because you spoke too fast, or I'm sure it's just a misunderstanding. It was as if though they believed that having a disability meant that he couldn't also be a despicable person. Not long after, I learned from a teammate that this angry individual had grabbed the other female's upper thigh, just below her private area, squeezed it and asked, Does this make you uncomfortable? And then he laughed.

A few teammates witnessed it, but they didn't know what to do, and the female worker froze up. I immediately went to HR and told them everything that he'd been doing to intimidate, belittle, trap, and of course harass us, and he was fired the next day. When they escorted him out, he yelled, this is retaliation. HR asked me what I would make of that comment, and all I could think was that it had to do with me standing my ground with him. I was so scared to see him show up unexpectedly. I told my family what he looked like, his tattoos, the car he drove, anything that would identify him since they never met him. I blocked him from every social media platform as well.

After he was let go, other females came forward and shared things that he had said or did to them too. They had told managers, but they dismissed it because the guy was deaf, and they didn't want to deal with any lawsuits. And as much as I hate what he did to my co-worker, I'm grateful it gave that final boost to finally get him fired. In my childhood home, we had an island in the kitchen with bar stools. If you sat at the furthest bar stool to the right, you'd be able to see through the door that opened up to the garage. One night when I was about six or seven, everyone else in my family was either in their bedrooms or in the living room watching TV. My dad worked nights at

Briggs and Stratton, so he wasn't home. I was sitting on the bar stool furthest to the right having a nighttime snack when I look over and I see an eerily white hand wave at me. All I could see was the hand and I was petrified. I didn't know what to do or say. The hand waved again and pointed down at the doorknob as if to suggest that I unlock it and open it. After that I ran to the living room and yelled for my mom. She called our neighbor over to investigate, and we lived in a rural western Kentucky area, so it took a few minutes for him to get there. When the neighbor finally arrived, he looked around and couldn't find anybody. It had been raining that night, but we couldn't see any

evidence of tracks into the garage or in the driveway. The same thing happened to my sister not long after. She's one year younger than me. She told me that she walked up to the door after the hand gestured to her and almost unlocked it, but then screamed and ran to my mother. To this day I hate to think about what would have happened if either of us had opened that door, and I hate to think about who had been watching to see that the two younger kids were alone in the kitchen or how long they had been watching. When I was in high school, I had a strange encounter while riding my bike home from work. During my senior year in high school, I worked at a Target store from approximately 4pm until 10pm, 4-5 nights a week.

After assisting with closing the store, finalizing the registers, and completing other closing tasks, my co-workers and I usually left the building and headed home before 10.30pm. The store was not too far from a bike path that had also led close to my house. It would take me around 15 to 20 minutes to ride my bike home from work, traversing a bike path with a large subdivision. Around the midpoint of my journey home, there was a section of the bike trail that passed through an underdeveloped field and had inadequate lighting. I remember slowing down to change the radio station on my CD Walkman slash radio, yes yes I am revealing my age here,

when suddenly I noticed a dark figure about 100 feet or 30 meters away from me on my right. This figure swiftly began running towards me from the dark field. In an instant, my fight or flight response kicked in and I pedaled my 18 speed mountain bike so vigorously that it felt as if though I could have qualified for the Tour de France. As I made my escape, I quickly glanced back and witnessed the person in black attempting to chase after me for a few moments. Needless to say, what would typically be a 15-20 minute bike ride transformed into a frantic five minute journey home at top speed and in top gear. That night I obviously struggled to sleep well and even now during my darker moments I occasionally reflect on that unsettling encounter. I have lived in New York City my whole life, but this ranks as one of my oddest encounters.

I probably owe my life to someone that I met only briefly. It was about 30 years ago, and I was coming out of my dentist who was located on a desolate side street between Penn Station and 7th Avenue, not far from Macy's Herald Square. At around 6.30pm, my dental work finished, and the sun was just starting to set. I walked out of the appointment only to run into a man who repeatedly, intentionally body slammed me while pretending that it was an accident. I had formed an intention to say nothing but slowly edge my way closer and closer to the open door of a chock full of nuts and make a quick dash for the entrance. Again and again the man said, excuse me miss, and slammed into me from the street side as I tried to pick my way across the sidewalk to the open door. He must have stepped back and hit me six or eight times

when out of nowhere a larger man stepped forward and said, miss, where are you going? Terrified that they were some sort of tag team, I said, I'm trying to make my way to 6th Avenue's subway entrance at Macy's. This mysterious guy grabbed me and propelled me so quickly the couple of blocks of the subway that my feet didn't touch the ground, even though I was a young woman of large size and a former distance runner who could move with great speed. The mysterious man took me right to the train and then disappeared. My dad said that he was probably a plainclothes cop. I never knew who he was or what the other guy was trying to pull, but I will always be grateful for having

been saved from something quite potentially bad. I want to talk about one of the scariest experiences I've had, which happened quite recently and I apologize for the length of the story. I, recently, a 24-year-old female, was living in a woman's shelter and made some really good friends there. We used to sit at a park across from a temple at night, drinking and smoking whatever we had. We would spend hours there listening to music, having fun and discussing our lives. We were all quite young in our early twenties. I should mention that we all had experienced a fair amount of trauma in our lives and we connected through that shared experience. One night, my friends and I went to a party in the city and had been drinking for hours. When the party was over, we weren't tired, so my closest friends there, a 22-year-old female and I,

decided to go to the park and watch the sunrise and have a little more to drink. We were there for a while when suddenly we heard R&B and rap music coming from the temple across the street. I should mention that we were both mixed black girls and being tipsy, we thought it would be a strange adventure to go over there and see who was playing my favorite song so loudly in the morning at a temple. It could have been a potential friend or a chance to learn more about the place and the temple looked beautiful. We walked over but the gates were locked. We felt disappointed but then a man came out to greet us and said that we could come in to see the temple. He mentioned that it

was his music and that he loved that we liked the same songs. We went inside and he showed us around the temple. The bottom part was beautiful but we noticed several rooms with beds. He told us that if we ever wanted to rent rooms, it would be unbelievably cheap. As homeless girls with not much work, we thought it was an amazing opportunity, almost too good to be true. At first, I felt nothing but positive vibes. He showed us his computer playing the music and asked us which songs we wanted to hear. I became comfortable with this guy because he was funny and we all got along really well. Anyway, we started discussing recreational activities that rhyme with marijuana and we had some and we offered it to him because he was so cool and laid back.

He said he would pack our stuff with our things, which becomes important later. I should add that he constantly complimented me specifically on my hair and skin color, and he made very forward compliments that made me uncomfortable. He started asking if I liked Asian men and if I'd ever slept with one. He was of Eastern Asian descent, though I'm not sure where exactly. Then he proceeded to ask more questions about my preferences and told us about giving drugs that I can't mention to girls to smoke and get with them. These were drugs that no one should ever do. He also mentioned that he would see us sitting at the park sometime through his window,

and all of this started to raise a lot of red flags. He then said that if we had another friend, they could also take his room because he was moving soon. And that's when I got a weird feeling, so I decided to ask him why he was leaving, if the rent was so cheap. He wouldn't answer and kept dodging the question. My intuition was telling me that something was wrong, and it's ridiculous that it took me so long to realize it. I asked if I could get some water, and he told me to get one out of the fridge. When I went out, there was another guy there who was nice and offered me water, but I decided to get a glass and use the tap.

He runs out of the room, my friend was in and says, No, the one from the fridge. I said, I'm fine with this. He walks me back to the room and I sit back down next to my friend And then he then went on to say I'm moving because I hear people screaming and touching each other every night Noises banging on my door, sounds of people being tortured and hurt And it disturbs my sleep

Uh, what? It was almost like he accidentally slipped out of what he had just said. I almost thought it was a joke. Then I asked him, is it nightmares? Ghosts? Or real people that are making these noises at night? And he continued to dodge my questions. I asked why on earth he didn't tell us this earlier. We were honestly in disbelief, and he continued to ignore what we were saying and acting strange. I then noticed that he had closed the door when I came back in earlier, and I started to think that we needed to get the hell out of there. He then said, you have to listen to this song. You'll love it. It gets worse. He puts on this terrifying chant slash viking-like song and plays it loud.

Too loud. And he's chanting this song so loud that we're yelling at him to turn it off, and he doesn't seem to be listening. And the video is like viking-like people hurting other people. As we're begging him to turn it off because it's terrifying, and why would he or anyone like that music, he turns his face to us fast and screams maniacally, with his teeth showing, his tongue out, and his eyes wide. It was like the most distorted face I'd seen in real life.

He didn't look human. No sane person would act this way. My fight or flight response isn't really good, I just sat there trying to laugh it off, but I was really frozen in fear. My friend on the other hand was in fight mode, she threatened to beat him up if he didn't let us out right now, and I ran to the door and he ran at me so I froze in front of him again and he wouldn't open the door because it was locked. We start running out of the house while he's laughing maniacally, speedwalking behind us and we bolted out. And mind you, I'm still trying to just laugh this off, but it was the beginning of the worst panic attack I'd ever experienced. If my friend wasn't there in her fight mode,

I genuinely don't know what would have happened to us. I know it probably doesn't sound that scary, but this terrified me to my core. The way he changed so quickly, his movements and mannerisms, the way his face just didn't look human anymore, and how naive we were to go in there in the first place because it seemed like an innocent temple. We didn't get many answers from this situation because we were too scared to go back or cause problems, which is stupid. We didn't know if he was truly troubled or if there were actually people there getting hurt, tortured, or whatever else he was saying. It scared me as well to think about the fact that he knew that we were homeless, vulnerable girls at the time,

that he may have lured us with the music that he hears us play. We were also completely tripping balls, because I believe that he laced our stuff. I don't think I can say on here what my friend believed it was, but it was the worst experience ever, and I highly doubt that those girls he spoke about in the beginning were there consensually. I, a 32-year-old female, grew up in Donetsk, Ukraine, a major city with my youngest sister only seven minutes from the downtown.

But the lifestyle was still pretty rural. Everybody had orchards and gardens. Many kept animals for food. We got milk and eggs from our neighbors, fish from local ponds and gardens. Many kept animals for food. We got milk and eggs from our neighbors, fish from local ponds and lakes. Kids of all ages walked around unsupervised, and adults would get together under the streetlights to talk while kids played. Unpaved roads, everybody walked or took public transport. There was exactly one family who had a car because they owned a home garage business and fixed cars. Winters were very slushy and summers were very dusty.

Electricity was very unstable and we spent many nights in the dark. A piece of cloth dipped in oil makes a great candle and we were pretty poor. Our mother was an alcohol addict. Fall down on the street and mud alcoholic. No dad. I always wanted a dad. Our mother was an alcohol addict, fall down on the street and mud alcoholic. No dad. I always wanted a dad. When I was about 8 or 9 she met a man with his own apartment in a more city like area.

And the apartment had heat, our house did not, so we started staying there for winters. To get there we had to walk between two mountains in these woods and right before, or after depending on direction, there was an open air market that also had some kiosks which mostly sold alcohol and tobacco products. So, this one day sister and I went to try and trade some bottles for coins so we could get something to eat that day but at that time most places didn't accept colored bottles. So with disappointment we walked to the step-boyfriend's place through the woods, and this man comes out of nowhere and says how he's been watching us and felt bad for us, so would we like some money?

Of course. Two hungry, growing kids couldn't resist the offer, so we followed him as he asked. He led us to this tiny corner with a bush and drops his pants. I immediately felt terrified and grabbed onto my sister. He asked us to touch it but I refused. I was kind of the spokesperson for us both being the older one and he starts to what I now know as being pleasuring himself. And at that time I was just very scared and confused so I angrily ask,

You promised us money, where is it? He finishes on this small bush and gives us five, grivnya. Looking back, we must have had a guardian angel or something because, boy oh boy, could that have turned so dangerous incredibly fast. He was watching us and definitely saw two unsupervised, poor, dirty kids as easy targets. People like our mom shouldn't have kids. We got very lucky. She passed from drinking and we were sent to the orphanage where eventually we got adopted to the United States, both of us. But so many aren't so lucky, and I always wonder, why me? So, this incident happened a few days ago. I work at a bar and will usually travel home between 12.30 to 1.30 a.m. In the warm months, I used my bike and electric scooter.

On this night, I was riding the scooter. I was only a few minutes away from home at this point, but I had heard my phone go off a couple of times in my purse, so I decided to stop a moment to make sure it wasn't anything important. I realized this probably wasn't the greatest decision, but I don't normally get notifications like that so late at night. So I go to pull over on the sidewalk near a sloped entrance into a plaza that has a couple of bushes on either side, and on the left side a

stone fence of sorts and more plants. I would have been maybe 15 or 20 feet away from the left at that point. So as soon as I stopped and went to get my phone out, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. It was a tall, thin man, standing up from where he had been hiding in the bushes on the left side of the entrance. He was looking at me, and he said something I couldn't make out and started to walk toward me. I immediately got the scooter in drive and back onto the road after that. I don't ever stop and talk to people at this time of night as a matter of principle, but anyone hiding in the bushes at 1am certainly isn't someone I wanted to deal with.

Sadly, things like this happen a lot, though this instance was definitely one of the creepiest I've ever experienced. And yeah, I definitely realized that I shouldn't have stopped, let alone when I was so close to home. Don't make my mistake, and always be vigilant when you are out at night, especially when you are by yourself. To be continued... 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 letsreadofficial, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast,

where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data, located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon. you