The Lets Read Podcast - 265: WE WERE STALKED BY A MAD HUNTER | 16 True Scary Stories | EP 253

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about camping in winter, terrible experiences on highways & how one redditor got tricked into going to prison. HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT? [e-mail] FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsRead ♫ Music, Editing & Cover art: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt Today's episode is sponsored by: - Bilt - Betterhelp

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Music Music Music Music Music Music On the morning of Sunday, December 6th of 2009, Susan Marie Powell took her two young sons to church service in their hometown of West Valley City, Utah. West Valley City boasts around 140,000 residents and, by all accounts, is a fine place to raise a family. Susan and her husband Joshua had moved there just a few years prior in order to be closer to his family.

He found a job in commercial finance while she started working for Wells Fargo. Over the next few years, the Powells settled in and started a family. To their friends and neighbors, they were something akin to the model nuclear family. But the veneer of Mormon perfection hit deep running fissures, and during the holiday season of 2009, a vexing mystery would kick off a terrifying chain of events that would forever tarnish West Valley City's wholesome and pious reputation. Following the church service, Susan drove her two sons back home, then later that afternoon, she was visited by a family friend

who eventually departed in the early evening. This friend would later state that Susan seemed perfectly content and that she departed with no lingering concerns or suspicions. Yet the very next morning, Joshua's mother, Tarika Powell, received a call from her grandson's daycare center. The boys had not been dropped off and their parents weren't answering their phones. Then, together with Joshua's sister, Jennifer, Tarika drove over to his home and knocked on the door. They received no answer and when they found that neither Joshua nor Susan was picking up their phones, the two women decided

to contact the local police department. Upon their arrival, the two attending police officers became concerned that some kind of gas leak had occurred and quickly sought Tarika's permission to force their way into the home. After smashing their way through a back door, the two police officers were initially relieved to find the house empty as it disproved their dreaded carbon monoxide theory. But as they and Josh's relatives performed a casual search of the home, they found something very unusual. Two large box fans had been set up in the family's living room, each pointed at the large three-seater couch. One of the officers took a closer look at the couch only to observe what

appeared to be a large wet spot on one of its cushions. While this wasn't particularly suspicious on its own, the officers noticed that several of Susan's important possessions, things she never normally left her home without, had been inexplicably left behind. The only thing that was missing was her cell phone. While this was concerning, the police found no obvious signs of any foul play, so they advised Joshua's relatives to await further developments. After all, there might have been a perfectly innocent explanation for the

family's absence, and when Joshua and the boys returned home around 5pm, he appeared to present one. Joshua was said to be just as surprised at his wife's sudden disappearance as everyone else was, and claimed that he'd taken their two boys on an impromptu winter camping trip late the previous night. The weather had been cold, the crisp and relatively dry snow makes for excellent camping conditions, so Josh's claim isn't actually as ridiculous as it might sound. However, considering the boys were due in daycare the next morning, and neither parent had called ahead to let them know the boys wouldn't be attending, the police found Josh's claims to be somewhat dubious.

When asked where he and the boys had camped, Josh told the police that they'd driven out to a place called Simpson Springs in western Utah and even went so far as to describe the spot they'd chosen in intimate detail. Police drove out to the place Josh had described but found no evidence that anyone had camped there overnight. Josh then claimed that he must have been mistaken but when asked why he took the boys camping on what was technically a school night, Josh claimed to have forgotten what day it was. By that point, police were beginning to consider Josh a suspect in the disappearance of his own spouse, as his story was simply far too inconsistent to be the truth.

And so, to commence what would no doubt be a long and painful investigation, the police began to trawl through Josh's past. Joshua Powell was born in Puyallup, Washington on January 20th of 1976 to parents Stephen and the previously mentioned Tarika Powell. His upbringing was rocky to say the least, and he was tormented by his violently abusive alcoholic father, who was said to have become extremely jaded and bitter towards the Mormon church. This same violent behavior seemed to manifest itself in Joshua, who once threatened his own mother with a butcher's knife, and in another instance, killed a pet gerbil belonging to his little sister.

But the final straw came when Tarika caught her husband sharing highly inappropriate adult content with little Joshua and his two older brothers. She filed for divorce in 1992, and Joshua's behavior seemed to improve with his father's absence. But with hindsight, we can't help but wonder if the damage had already been done. By the late 1990s, Josh was living and studying in Seattle at the University of Washington. One day, he met a girl named Catherine at a local Mormon church, and after a few casual coffee dates, the pair became romantically involved. Months went by, and the relationship seemed to be progressing steadily, but after Catherine made the decision to move in with her new boyfriend, she witnessed a drastic change in his demeanor. Joshua began exhibiting extremely possessive and controlling behaviors towards her and at one point, he forbade his new live-in girlfriend from contacting her own family. He would have restrictions and limitations on what I could and couldn't do when it came to my family,

Catherine told police, and in the end, I got sick of it. Catherine manufactured a reason why she had to return to Utah and it's likely only a church-related excuse would have caused Joshua to relent. But once she was safely out of Seattle, Catherine called Joshua from a payphone and ended their relationship. Sometime later, Joshua signed on to a Bible study course at his local Mormon Church Institute, and toward the end of his studies, in November of the year 2000, he threw a small dinner party at his apartment in Tacoma.

It's here that he met Susan for the first time, and after hitting it off at the dinner party, she and Josh began dating. After just six months, the couple were married in a small ceremony in the Portland, Oregon temple, after which they moved into the home of Josh's estranged father, Stephen, in the small town of South Hill, not far from Puyallup. Despite his father's past behavior, Josh took him at his word that he'd be the perfect host. But it was all a ruse. Stephen began secretly filming Susan whenever she used his bathroom.

He also stole her underwear, read her journals, and wrote lewd, anonymous poems about her which he posted online. This lasted for two whole years before Stephen finally confessed what he was doing. He told Susan that he was in love with her, and proposed that they elope while leaving Joshua behind. Stephen seemed to believe that his feeling would be reciprocated, but he was completely and utterly deluded. Susan was horrified by the confession and when confronted by his son, Stephen denied everything. But unbeknownst to him, he had accidentally recorded the entire exchange on his camcorder. Joshua watched the tape, heard his father's admission with his own ears, then told Susan that they were moving out of Washington. It seems the Powell's moved out to Utah in the hopes of cutting off Stephen's negative influence

as part of a wider attempt to enjoy a successful, peaceful marriage. But as the years went by, Joshua's old controlling behavior began to rear its ugly head. He began refusing to attend local church services, which is why Susan and the boys went unaccompanied on the day before she went missing. He also began to resent her over her insistence on such church visits and rebuked any attempt to curtail his wild spending habits, which almost certainly resulted in him declaring bankruptcy in 2007. Susan worked hard to single-handedly support her family, but instead of trying to find himself a job with a humbler pay packet, Joshua continued to rack up credit card debt while insisting that

his next big business idea was just weeks away from coming to fruition. Months went by, and by the summer of 2008, Josh still hadn't found any kind of paying work. Susan confronted him over it, and in the process, discovered Joshua was still keeping in touch with his maniacally perverted father. This is after he'd sworn never to get in touch with him unless a heartfelt apology was issued to Susan. Yet after Josh himself had pushed for the no-contact policy, he seemed to have no problem in going back on it. Naturally, this made Susan furious,

but her anger was dwarfed by that which Joshua displayed in return. He went on a rampage, hurling and smashing household items as he went. When he was finished, Susan made a cell phone video of the destruction, then set about writing what amounted to a secret last will and testament. I want it documented that there is extreme turmoil in our marriage, she wrote. And if I die, it may not be an accident, even if it looks like one. On December 9th of 2009, West Valley City Police invited Joshua down to the department to answer a few questions. Then, during his interview, officers executed a search warrant at the Powell family home,

only to make a series of disturbing discoveries. Firstly, a $1.5 million life insurance policy in Susan's name was located, along with a secret letter she'd written in which she expressed her fear for her life. Police also found trace amounts of Susan's blood on the floor of the Powell family home, along with blood belonging to someone they later referred to as Unknown Male Contributor. Joshua claimed that blood came from a knife accident Susan experienced whilst preparing food and once again insisted on his innocence. Police were almost certain that, at least in some capacity, he was involved in the disappearance of his wife.

But without any solid evidence that Susan was actually deceased, the police were unable to proceed with any formal charges and Josh was released. Yet the investigation didn't stop there. In August of 2010, West Valley City Police had compiled a detailed case file regarding Joshua's suspicious behavior following his wife's disappearance. Not only had Joshua liquidated Susan's retirement accounts, he canceled her regularly scheduled chiropractic sessions and withdrew his children from daycare altogether. On top of that, one of Joshua's co-workers reached out to the police in the aftermath of Susan's disappearance with a very disturbing claim. He stated that in the months prior to her disappearance, Josh had joked about the best place to dispose of a dead body. He asked his co-workers what they

would do if they needed to hide a dead body, and under the guise of a kind of intellectual exercise, he began collecting their answers. After thinking it over, most said that the best place to hide a body would be the abandoned mine shafts of the western Utah desert. This same co-worker who approached the police said that if he was a cop, the first place he'd look would be those same abandoned mine shafts. The case file also detailed an interview with the pal's eldest son, Charlie, who was four years old at the time of his mother's disappearance. Unlike his father, who insisted that Susan had remained at home during their spontaneous camping trip, little Charlie claimed their mother had joined them. He couldn't explain where she'd gone,

but just a few weeks later, he drew a picture in daycare which shed some light on their traveling arrangements charlie drew a picture of a truck he his father and his little brother were riding up front and when asked by a daycare worker where's mommy little charlie pointed to the rear of the vehicle mommy was in the trunk he said on On December 14th of 2010, West Valley City Police advised Joshua to seek legal counsel, at which point he became uncooperative. He refused to answer any more police questions and had his attorney inform the chief of police that he and his two sons would be moving back to Washington to live with Stephen, his psychologically troubled father. Josh moved himself and his two boys into a home that already housed his father, his two older brothers, and his sister, Alina. Space and privacy were at a premium, and the family found themselves frequently harassed by police officers or reporters who wanted nothing more than to get to the bottom of a profoundly frightening mystery.

Not long after Joshua moved back to Washington, police were informed of a website that had the address www.susanpowell.org. Billed as, and I quote, the official website of Susan Powell, the site contained a number of anonymously written posts that claimed Josh was the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the Mormon church. Another post claimed the church's motivation was due to Josh was convincing Susan to abandon her religion, after which she suffered a crisis of faith and disappeared voluntarily after suffering a nervous breakdown.

Other posts posited that Susan's disappearance was connected to a man named Stephen Kosher, a former journalist who just so happened to have disappeared a few days after Susan was declared missing. The posts claimed that Susan and Stephen had eloped to Brazil together, and that the police should spend more time actually looking for her, and less time accusing her innocent husband of something unspeakable. For a brief period, Josh's father, Stephen, was the investigation's prime suspect. In conjunction with the West Valley City Police, federal agents were ordered to seize several electronic devices from Stephen's home, including the camera he'd used to take pictures of his missing daughter-in-law. Upon analyzing the

camera's memory card, investigators discovered more than 4,500 images of Susan, including many close-ups of particular body parts that Stephen had apparently become obsessed with. But Joshua's father wasn't the only one who came under police scrutiny during the investigation into Susan's disappearance. Michael, one of Joshua's older brothers, had apparently sold his old Ford Taurus to a wrecking yard in Pendleton, Oregon, not long after Susan disappeared. Police then searched the wrecking yard, found the remains of Michael's old car, then ran a cadaver dog around its broken shell. It indicated not once, but twice that decomposing human remains had once been in the trunk. A DNA test was ordered, but the results were inconclusive.

Yet while there was no doubt that Michael's car had once contained a human corpse, the only question was, was it Susan's? The following year, in September of 2011, Utah police were searching the area surrounding Topaz Mountain, an area which Joshua himself admitted was one of his favorite camping spots. When they reached a site near the town of Nephi, police discovered signs of recent soil disturbances, suggesting that someone had been digging there recently. They isolated the dig site, sifted through the soil, yet found no evidence of any human remains. Some suggested that the site could have been some kind of ancient Native American burial ground, but this was ruled out by federal anthropologists who asserted that century-old remains would not attract the attention of highly trained cadaver dogs.

Police remained tight-lipped at this phase of the investigation, meaning reported details were few and far between, but when various media outlets reached out to former law enforcement officers for comment, their conclusions were almost unanimous. Someone had driven out to Topaz Mountain, dug up a recently buried human corpse, and then moved it someplace else for reburial. As the investigation progressed, the relationship between the Powells and Susan's relatives soured dramatically. During the fall of 2011, Joshua and his father announced that they'd be holding a small press conference outside of their Puyallup home. Incredibly,

Joshua seemed to support his father's claims that his feelings for Susan were not unrequited, and that he and Susan had been madly in love prior to her disappearance. Then, Josh and his father stunned the local community by producing Susan's teenage diaries. They read lengthy tracts of her middle school scribblings in which she fawned over her classroom crushes, shamelessly claiming that they supported their assertions that Susan was both mentally unstable and prone to infidelity. Divulging the details of Susan's teenage diaries was greeted with outrage from the general public, whose condemnations were so loud that the issue

found its way onto the desk of one of Washington's Supreme Court judges. Equally indignant as the people he served, the judge issued a permanent injunction forbidding Joshua and Stephen from any further publications of Susan's diaries. They were also ordered to return or destroy any of the diaries that had not already been published, lest they face severe legal repercussions. Just a few weeks later, on September 22nd of 2011, Stephen Powell was arrested on the charge of possessing indecent images of children. Susan's father, Chuck, begged the state for at least temporary custody of his grandchildren, which a Washington court judge eventually agreed to. The same judge stated that the boys would only return to Joshua's care if

his living arrangements did not include his father. In response, Joshua rented a small home in the town of South Hill, just a few miles south of Puyallup and sued for custody of his two boys. But following a visit from social services, it was discovered that the entire thing was a facade. Joshua had indeed rented the house, but had neglected to move any of his things into it and continued to reside at his father Stephen's house. In light of that, he was refused custody of his two sons and was only granted permission for weekly visits to them. In response, a number of posts were uploaded to the SusanPowell.org website, each claiming that her parents were abusing and neglecting her sons,

and were doing so in collusion with Utah's Child Protective Services. Baseless allegations eventually led to Google removing the website, citing terms of use violations. The investigation into Susan's disappearance steadily progressed into February of 2012, with Joshua and his father remaining the case's primary suspects. The state of Washington had assigned them a social worker named Elizabeth Hall, whose job it was to monitor Josh and Stephen's behavior whenever the former two sons were over visiting. The routine was simple. Elizabeth would collect the boys from their grandpa Chuck, then she'd drive them over to Stephen's house before watching the pals closely.

Usually, Joshua and Stephen had complied with the arrangement, but on the morning of February 5th, that changed drastically. Upon meeting Elizabeth at the door, Joshua ushered his sons inside but then barred the social worker from entry. Elizabeth reminded Joshua that unsupervised visits had not yet been permitted, and if he refused her entry to his home, he would be subject to arrest and prosecution. Joshua didn't say anything in response. He simply slammed the door in Elizabeth's face, but in doing so, sent a draft of the home's air her way. And it reeked of gasoline. I was panicked.

I was absolutely panicked, Elizabeth later said. I pounded on the door and yelled, Josh, let me in, let me in right now, she said. I ran to the garage and when I got to the garage, I could smell gasoline and I knew something was terribly wrong. Then there was an explosion. Elizabeth also said that the last thing she heard Josh say to her boys was, I have a surprise for you.

And when the wreckage of his former home was cleared, investigators established exactly what that surprise was. In the seconds after Josh slammed the door in Elizabeth's face, he led his two sons into his home's kitchen, then decapitated them both with a sharpened hatchet. He then poured gasoline all over their freshly slaughtered corpses, gas which he'd already saturated the home with prior to Elizabeth's arrival. Josh poured so much gasoline over the walls, furniture and carpets,

that by the time he struck the match to burn it all to the ground, a highly toxic and highly flammable vapor hung in the air. It's possible that Josh was on the verge of hallucination by the time he put the match head to the striker, but when he did, the entire structure erupted in a fiery, near-deafening explosion. Stephen Powell, who was in federal custody at the time of the explosion, reacted strangely when informed of what had happened. He didn't seem upset at all, said the jailer who notified him. He seemed angry, angry at us for having told him about it.

Shortly afterward, he was convicted on charges of criminal voyeurism, then sentenced to a short spell in prison. After the remains of the Powell family home was cleared, and the remains of Josh and his two sons were recovered, each was subject to a detailed autopsy at the hands of the Pierce County coroner. The coroner discovered that the two boys had high levels of carbon monoxide in their bodies at the time of their deaths, meaning Josh had likely administered the gas as a means of rendering his sons unconscious prior to their beheading. When news of the deaths hit local headlines, friends and relatives of the Powell family stated that Josh had sent them goodbye emails just hours before the explosion. One of these recipients was his local bishop, who received instructions for finding a secret stash of money Joshua had been hiding away. Records also showed Joshua had donated his children's toys and books to local charities the day prior to the incident, while naming his brother Michael as the sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy.

Many saw this incident as tantamount to Josh's admission of guilt. He knew that either sooner or later, he'd face justice. And so, rather than stand before a judge, Josh self-destructed. But the more clinically minded knew that this was little more than a dramatic twist in a cryptic and continuing enigma. The next twist in the tale came on February 11th of 2013, just over a year after what happened with Josh and the murdering of his two sons. Michael, Josh's older brother, who had been subject of an increasing police interest regarding the presence of human remains in his old Taurus, had moved out to Minnesota for graduate school. Police had previously stated that Michael had been evasive following the search by cadaver dogs, and that his sudden move to Minnesota was viewed as highly suspicious. On all previous occasions, Michael had shrugged off any attempt to implicate him in his sister-in-law's disappearance, but on a cold February day in 2013, he decided that he'd had enough.

He walked to the top of a four-story parking garage, walked right to the ledge, and threw himself over the railings to his death. Just a few months later, on May 21st of 2013, West Valley City Police announced that they had closed the act of investigation into Susan's disappearance. Some argued that with Stephen alive and in federal custody, there was still a chance the mystery might yet be solved. Such people were highly critical of the decision to close the investigation, but the more cynically minded agreed that it was the best thing to do. As far as they were concerned, they had everything except footage of the murder to indicate Joshua had killed his wife, faked an overnight winter camping trip, then enlisted the help of his brother in the disposal of her corpse. Why else would Josh and Michael have taken their own lives in such violent circumstances, and all without an attempt to explain their decisions?

Susan remains a missing person, but as of 2015 and 2018 respectively, there have been increasing calls to have her declared legally dead. Joshua's sister, Jennifer, penned a memoir detailing the Pals' tumultuous and traumatic family history. The memoir was published in June 2013 and was titled A Light in Dark Places. The author claimed that she was inspired to write the book by a revelation she experienced following the investigation's conclusion. She said, I wrote this book to help other people to recognize abuse in either their own relationships or relationships around them, because sometimes it's not always completely

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MasterCard is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. My name is Andrew, and I'm a research associate at the University of British Columbia. My specialist field is atmospheric sciences, which is essentially the interdisciplinary study of weather and climate that touches base with departments such as chemistry, math, soil science, and engineering. As you can imagine, a lot of our work over the past couple of years has been focused almost entirely on climate change. But at the beginning of this year, I was invited to join a very special and very unusual kind of research program. In collaboration with the University of Central Asia's Tkeli campus, which is based in Kazakhstan, our task was to translate and accredit a trove of previously unreviewed research data that had been recently acquired from the Kazakh government. To understand why we were asked to do this, there are two things you need to understand why we were asked to do this there are two things you need to understand

firstly unlike many other ex-soviet countries who'd suffered their fair share of turmoil during the breakup of the USSR political power in Kazakhstan was almost instantly consolidated by a guy named nersultin nazarbayev this dude dude was, and is, completely knocking futz. He did stuff like change the name of Kazakhstan's capital city in honor of himself, import a bunch of sand from the Maldives to build himself a fake beach, and build a whole bunch of huge, bizarre-looking buildings that serve no function whatsoever. These aren't monuments or statues, if that's what you're thinking. No, these are legitimate skyscraper apartment-looking buildings, but they have nothing on the inside. They're just there to make Astana, or Nur-Sultan, as it was known during

Nazarbayev's tenure, look super futuristic and cool. Anyway, during his mad dash for power after the Soviets pulled out of Kazakhstan, Nazarbayev had his goons lock down every piece of government-owned property in the country. And this included all the scientific research stations the Russians had built. In places like Poland, Ukraine, and their northern Baltic neighbors, the collapse of the USSR meant the academic institutions were finally able to share research data with their western counterparts. This process took a little longer when it came to Mother Russia herself, but by the mid-90s, western universities were freely able to get their hands on Soviet-era research data and vice versa. But things didn't

go like that with Kazakhstan and Nazarb nazarbayev he and his regime went around looting all the research data from government facilities then they locked it up tight on the pretense of protecting it from the prying eyes of western intelligence agencies i don't know if nazarbayev was genuinely protective of his country's assets or just wanted to solidify his grip on power but either way way, most of that Kazakh Soviet-era research data stayed locked up until he resigned in early 2022. After that, Kazakhstan's two largest universities, one of which had been renamed in honor of you-know-who, applied for custody of the research data, and in sharing it with the multinational University of Central Asia,

allowed direct access to us here at the University of British Columbia. So the first hurdle was actually getting access to all this old Kazakh research data, but then the second came in the form of accrediting it. To say that the Soviet era science was somewhat backward would be very kind indeed. Credit where credit is due when it comes to the space race, and Soviet military science was pretty cutting edge too. But when it came to other areas of research, ideology trumped methodology, sometimes with deadly results. Take Drowfim Lysenko for example, the Soviet Union's top agrarian scientist while Stalin was in power. Lysenko once said that geneticists hated people and that mathematics has no place in biology.

His crackpot schemes killed millions of Soviet and eventually Chinese citizens, and some of those brave enough to criticize him ended up dying in prison for speaking out. But how did such a loony tomb come to reach such lofty heights? Forged research data. Lysenko used flowery language, fudged numbers, and used hideously small sample sizes to decide the farming methods of millions upon millions of farmers, and the results were nothing short of catastrophic. So now you understand what our second hurdle was, and more importantly, what my job was. Following the data's translation, I have to read it through,

compare it to any accredited research papers from Western universities that I could find, then ultimately, make a call on whether it was reliable data or not. For the most part, this made for some extremely tedious work. Atmospheric science research projects can sometimes take you to some pretty awesome far-flung places, but not this one. Most of the traveling I did was either to the coffee machine or the bathroom. I must have worked through a hundred research papers and for the most part, most of the data seemed reliable. or at least in my case, the mere presence of any kind of inaccurate data or faulty test results spoke to the overall

integrity of the research team in question. Most reports, papers, and data sets were little more than routine meteorological studies and like I said, reading through translations was so tedious that I needed hot coffee to keep my eyes open and aspirin to keep the migraines at bay. Then, after weeks of reading through a whole load of soon-to-be-recycled paper, I came across these two translated reports that upon reading them, grabbed a hold of my attention in a way that I can't remember happening before. Each was thousands of words long and the implications might not be clear to the layman, so I'll try to summarize each as best I can, and then finish up with my own, admittedly wild,

conclusions. The first report, and the one that initially grabbed my attention, involved an attempt to recover some valuable equipment from a research facility in a remote region of Kazakh steppe known as Beganin province. From what I could gather, the facility was a rather large one and consisted of several different sites dotted over an area of a few square miles. You can actually see its outline on Google Earth if you zoom into its coordinates, 47 degrees 88 minutes and 67 seconds north latitude, 47°88'67'N latitude and 57°44'73' east longitude. Although these days, a natural gas company named Severna Truva claimed to operate it, at least back in the mid-70s the site was owned and operated by the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.

And from what I could gather gather the site was abandoned sometime in the early 70s following what was described as an extreme weather alert there were no details on what this extreme weather entailed but whatever it was it was so hazardous that the facility was hastily and completely abandoned as opposed to being slowly decommissioned like any other site. But this left the Kazakh Soviet-era Atmospheric Sciences Body, or Kazidramet, as it was called, in a difficult position. According to the initial report, tens of thousands of rubles worth of irreplaceable data and equipment was just sat there, rusting away,

and their overlords back in Moscow were not happy about it. Yet the solution should have been a simple one. Make sure the area was safe, send in a few engineers and then find, dismantle and transport whatever gear or data they needed. But it wasn't that simple. And this is where the plot thickens, so to speak. Since the facility was in such a remote area and Khazidramet wanted to act before the colder winter months,

the obvious solution was to insert the recovery team via helicopter. But according to the report, that wasn't possible. There were, and I quote, continuous hazardous weather conditions that prevented the use of rotary aircraft or helicopters to you and me. It was then suggested that the team traveled to the site via rail, but Kazidramat discovered that the only railroad that serviced the site had been decommissioned following its evacuation. These two factors, along with the difficult terrain present around the evacuated research facility meant the recovery team would have to travel to the site on foot, and that in all likelihood, the journey would take at least

48 hours. The team would have to take shelter in barren, frigid conditions and survive a night on the freezing tundra before continuing their march towards the abandoned research facility. And I remember being sat there at my desk, reading through the translated report and thinking, this sounds like a sequel to The Thing or something. I can almost picture these rugged Russian atmospheric scientists gearing up and heading out on this grand adventure, and honestly being stuck at my desk, the thought made me slightly envious. There was just one problem. Their assignment made no sense whatsoever. As I've already covered, Khazidramat were under huge pressure to recover the data and equipment, but how were six guys supposed to carry a bunch of paper files and equipment,

some of which I imagine would be very heavy, over almost 70 miles of rugged terrain? The only logical explanation is that something was left out of the report, and that the job of this initial recovery team was in fact to survey the damage caused by the so-called extreme weather event and determine if the data and equipment was worth salvaging. That's what the second report entailed. The first outlined the problem, the second the solution, and quite naturally I went skimming through the piles of papers I had yet to review and went looking for a third and hopefully conclusive report. I must have gone through hundreds of sheets of paper,

checking for any mention of Casidramet, the evacuation of the facility in Baganin, or the names of the six researchers who'd been chosen for the recovery team, but there was nothing. I contacted all my colleagues, asking each to keep an eye out for any pertinent documents dated after November 14th of 1974, which was the proposed commencement date of the recovery mission. Again, no one found any relevant documentation. At the time, I honestly just figured that it'd take time for someone to get back to me. We each had workloads resembling entire mountain ranges, so I understood if my colleagues weren't exactly ready to drop everything to go chasing after my pet project. But then days turned into weeks, and weeks turned

into months, and not so much a scrap of information on the Beganine recovery operation was discovered. I had to restrain myself from sifting through all their piles of reports myself, convinced that I must have overlooked or misread or misinterpreted something critical to determine what exactly happened to the recovery team. But they couldn't have. That simply wasn't possible. I asked them time and time again, leaving little post-it reminders on their desks and making sure that they knew the names of the recovery team by heart. But again, there was nothing. The names on the men on the recovery team, names like Igor Smetov, Farkad Zachukov, Ivan Mianrova. They were commonplace on data and

reports prior to November of 1974, but afterwards, there wasn't a single mention of any of them. Not only was there no mention of what happened during the recovery effort, but it was likely the men chosen for it simply vanished. In the end, I was forced to continue with the primary task at hand and put the whole Beganine conundrum on the back burner. The best I could do in terms of pursuing additional information was to mark the reports as inconclusive, in which case I could contact our partners at the UCA to see if they had any additional paperwork.

I waited a week for a reply and the response came back negative. Then, as I said, I was forced to occupy myself with the rest of the project work, of which there was plenty. But the Beganin's puzzle stayed on my mind. I did a little independent research on my own time and that's where I came up against the whole Severna Truva thing. Like I said earlier, there's supposed to be a natural gas company, but they don't have a website, they don't have any social media, and there isn't a single listing for them on any stock market worldwide. But after 2,000 words, I'm pretty sure you're asking yourself,

what the hell does this all mean? In terms of conclusions, all I'm essentially doing is grasping at some very ethereal straws. I don't have any direct or solid evidence regarding what happened with the Meganean research site, its evacuation, or the subsequent recovery mission. Some might even say that it is entirely speculation on my part, but I'd counter by arguing that it's more like intelligent deduction. I believe that an extreme atmospheric event caused some kind of emergency at the research site, but I don't think it's your run-of-the-mill snow or ice storm. A blizzard strong enough to cause mechanical

problems in helicopters is not the kind of blizzard you send six scientific researchers out into, unless you want to treat them to the winter hiking camping trip from hell, and possibly kill them in the process. But what would explain an impetus to do that would be if the freak weather pattern was some kind of electrical storm, or strong electromagnetic interference. Again, if this was the latter, this would make navigation extremely difficult, especially in such a snowy, barren landscape. Your scientific researchers would have to be pretty experienced outdoorsmen if you were confident enough to send them out like that. But then, Kzidramat had to send researchers because they had no idea of the damage done to data and equipment and needed experienced eyes on site for accurate assessment, which leads me into my second point. Cassidra Meds had no idea what kind of damage the

research site had incurred because they had no accounts of what happened during the so-called extreme weather event. None of the reports I read mentioned anything about interviews with the site's scientists or staff, and the way they talked about the Beganin research site, it was like they were going in blind. But then how could they have evacuated what could have potentially been hundreds of workers without getting a single damage assessment or a single accurate account of the weather event? To me, there are three rational explanations for this. The extreme weather event either trapped all the site's scientists and staff inside, or it killed them all outright. I've considered the possibility that the survivors were either hospitalized and unavailable for interview,

or they were detained by Soviet intelligence who wanted to debrief them in isolation by way of ruling out the possibility of sabotage by the CIA or even Chinese agents. But if that were the case, why wasn't enough intelligence fed to the Khazad-Romets so they'd at least know what they were dealing with? Again, I'm open to the possibility that the extreme weather event, the one that meant air travel into the area was a no-go, killed the recovery team during their advance. It'd take a braver man than I to go out in a Kazakh winter blizzard, and it's entirely feasible that the names of the recovery team disappeared from subsequent reports because they fell victim to the elements. Some would say this is applying Occam's razor, that the most logical explanation is the most likely one,

but to me, an experienced atmospheric scientist and not some tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, there is simply too many inconsistencies for me to believe it. I suppose that composing theories in the absence of evidence makes me exactly that, a conspiracy theorist, but then if people are going to dismiss what I have to say based on that alone, then I guess I shouldn't be scared to put it bluntly. I think something extraordinary happened at the Beganing research site, and when I use the word extraordinary, I do so with heavy negative connotation. I mean extraordinarily frightening, extraordinarily destructive, and extraordinarily deadly.

I think the Soviets were so terrified of what happened there in November of 1974 that they sealed the entire area off and then organized a human probe mission. Maybe this team of human probes made it to the research site. Maybe they didn't. But either way, the Soviets knew what happened. Maybe even Nazarbayev, too, and they made sure to scrub the records clean of any mention of that extreme weather event. Think of it like Chernobyl before Chernobyl. There's nothing I've mentioned here that the Soviets didn't go on to do during that fatal nuclear disaster. It's just that in the

case of Chernobyl, they couldn't hide it like they hid whatever happened at Paganin. And that's what frightens me. And quite frankly, it should frighten you too. The Chernobyl reactor, the one that melted down, is still actively emitting radiation. The Ukrainians didn't solve the problem it poses, they just boxed it up in a big iron coffin. This could potentially have disastrous consequences for subsequent generations, and it's only due to constant maintenance that the big iron coffin continues to hold. If not, the reactor's toxic remains could very easily blanket Europe in radiation, killing and displacing millions in the process. In other words, it's a ticking time bomb. And if a similar event happened way out in

Kazakhstan, does that too require constant maintenance to prevent some kind of continental, ecological, and humanitarian disaster? And if so, can we trust the nut job government over there to keep a lid on it? As an atmospheric scientist, people sometimes ask me if they should be scared of climate change. I tell them no. Not because it poses a real and serious threat to the world around us but because there are far more urgent and mysterious things that keep me up at night. Things that'll wipe us out far quicker and far more painfully. I grew up in a little place called Athabasca, a small Canadian town that's a couple of hours drive from Edmonton, Alberta. Nestled into a bend in the river it's got its name from,

Athabasca was a great place to grow up, and for around four to five months every year, the town becomes a bona fide winter wonderland. As a result, winter sports were a huge part of my life growing up, as were all the other snow-related activities, like building snowmen or hurling snowballs at my childhood friend who lived up and down 52nd Street. Alberta was home, and I thought the farthest I'd ever move would be down to Edmonton for work.

But as it happened, my family would take me further from home than I ever imagined. My eventual career choice meant that I now live and work in Melbourne, Australia. I moved there in 2007, met a girl, got married, and we decided to settle down and have a family in Australia. Since my side of the family were much more able to travel, they flew over to Melbourne roughly once or twice annually for the first seven years of their grandchildren's lives. They'd only ever heard stories of their dad's homeland, and more importantly, they'd never, ever seen snow. My little girl got to seven, and my little boy got to four before me and my wife decided that had to change, and we organized a trip back to Alberta for Christmas of 2017.

My daughter, Angie, was particularly excited, but my little boy, boy Zach clearly had no idea what to expect. Then when we landed in Edmonton and drove the 80 miles or so to my parents' place, their minds were blown by pillowy white blankets of snow on either side of the highway. Getting to show them my old hometown was a fantastic experience, and obviously the kids had a great time visiting their grandparents. But the thing that captured their attention and imaginations the most was the snow. It's worth noting that in Australia, Christmas is basically the exact same that it is in Canada, except for the weather. Deep winter in the Northern Hemisphere is high summer in the southern so despite all the festive wintery advertising it's actually blood boiling outside in december i can't tell you how jarring it is

to see a restaurant put fake snow on its sign when it's 40 degrees in the shade i often get the impression that aussies would quite happily zap their entire country with a frost ray for 24 hours just to match the festivities. And so for my kids, having the scenery match the Christmas spirit was as magical as a trip to Disneyland, and it came at half the price. Nearly every waking moment, they wanted to be on the snow, doing all the same stuff I did when I was a kid. Wearing all that warm wintery clothing was such a novelty for them too. Angie once said that she couldn't decide if she felt more like an Eskimo or an astronaut. It was that alien to them. They loved it so much that when my wife spotted an advertisement for a

winter glamping experience up at a place called Joe Cat Lodge, we jumped at the chance to book an overnight stay in one of their family-sized yurts. We drove up there on the 22nd of December, got there around noon and were all set up and ready to build an army of snowmen by around 1.30. We played around in the snow for a few hours, then my wife retired into the yurt to begin preparing dinner on the small camping stove the lodge provided. The kids and I carried on playing as the skiesurt to begin preparing dinner on the small camping stove the lodge provided. The kids and I carried on playing as the skies began to darken and after one particularly vicious snowball fight in which my kids struck an unlikely alliance and teamed up on me, we all started feeling pretty hungry. We were no more than 50 yards away from the yurt so after telling my daughter to keep an eye on her little brother I jogged back to the yurt to check on my wife who told me that dinner would be ready in

just a few minutes. I then jogged back to where my kids had been playing to find my daughter starting off the base of yet another snowman but when I look around for Zach he was nowhere to be seen. I assumed that Zach couldn't have gone far but after looking around and not being able to see him, I asked Angie where he was. She then looked up from building her snowman, looked around, then got a look of visible concern on her face when she realized he was gone. She looked up at me and with this sort of quivering voice said, I don't know. She thought I was going to be mad at her, I guess, and in a small way, I suppose I was. But whatever anger I felt was completely overridden by this frantic, terrified panic that only abated a little when I realized I could track Zach's

little boot prints to follow his trail. And when I found them, that's what I did. I followed his footprints through the snow until I was greeted by the sight of something that, as a parent, put the literal fear of God into me. An icy cold stream. It didn't look particularly deep and neither was it particularly wide, but it was the perfect size for a four-year-old to fall in and be swept away. An older child might have been able to make it across the series of small stepping stones that ran across the stream at one of its narrower and shallower sections, but fall downstream of those and a kid as small as Zach would almost certainly have been swept away, drowned, and frozen. I ran up and down the banks of the stream, keeping an eye out for my son's body in the water while I screamed out his name in the hopes that he'd hear me and come running.

They were the most terrifying moments of my life thus far, made all the worse by the fact that my daughter had followed me and was witnessing every moment of my terror-induced nervous breakdown. I can't imagine how frightened she was. Not only did she not really understand what was going on, but on some level, she blamed herself for what was happening. I kept on running up and down the bank and I remember not paying much attention to the opposite side of the stream. It seemed impossible that Zach had traversed the stream somehow, not without becoming overwhelmed by the current, so when I finally heard him call out to me, I spun around to see him standing there, right where I hadn't expected to, on the other side of the stream. He didn't seem scared or anxious or anything. He was just kind of muddling through the snow

in his overcoat and boots, like he didn't have a care in the world. I definitely freaked him out a little when I bounded across the stream, ran up to him in the snow and scooped him up into my arms. I didn't yell at him or anything but he definitely picked up some of my energy and he started to cry when he saw his sister who by that point was also in tears. I carried him back to the yurt where we were greeted by my very confused and very angry wife. When I told her what happened, she was mad at me, then mad at our daughter, then mad at me again. And we were all a mess. But primarily, we were all just super relieved that we'd found Zach and that we weren't about to be the cause of an Amber Alert. Once we were somewhat relaxed again, we ate dinner,

then me and my wife set about putting the kids to bed. But before I took Zach in, who by that point was almost completely tuckered out, I asked him something that had been bugging me since it popped in my head just after dinner. I just asked him, how did you get across that stream, buddy? And like I said, we'd all been incredibly relieved to have found Zach safe and sound, so for me personally, that's all that occupied my thoughts, at least until we'd finished up with our food. In the moments after discovering he was missing, as I ran up and down the banks of the stream, I expected him to be on the same side as us, or in the water. It seemed impossible that he'd crossed on his own somehow and as you can imagine once it popped back in my head i

wanted to get to the bottom of how he'd gotten across i asked him and his reply made my blood run cold the snowman carried me now obviously a snowman did not carry my kid across an icy stream but someone did and just the thought made me feel sick to my stomach in the most delicate possible way I told Zack it couldn't have been a snowman I then asked again in a very delicate manner if the snowman that he was talking about was actually a person wearing lots of white clothes or perhaps someone with fallen snow on their hair or the shoulders of their jacket. He shook his head and repeated his claim that the snowman carried me. And then before I could ask him anything else, he closed his eyes and just drifted off to sleep. I don't think he was out for more than five or ten minutes.

I told my wife what our son had just told us, and within a few short moments, we were packing up our things, getting the children dressed, and making our way back to our car. What happened was bizarre, but it seemed obvious. Someone had taken my son. It might have only been for a minute or two and thank God that they had the sudden compulsion to let him go. Perhaps they heard my screams, knew I might catch up with them, and decided to quit before they got caught red-handed. Regardless, I thank God that that the case but I was not about to stay overnight while being stalked by a potential child snatcher.

We made sure to tell one of the campground's representatives on our way out and I don't know what they did in response but there was no way we were staying there so we drove back home not even thinking to ask for a refund on account of how freaked out we were. The very next morning, I was in touch with the police regarding what happened and not a day later, they called us back to confirm our worst fears. On the opposite side of the stream,

accompanied by the smaller footprints of my son, were a set of much larger footprints that I'm quite certain were put there by his potential abductor. Zach later said that yes, the person who carried them had been wearing a white hat but I'm quite certain were put there by his potential abductor. Zach later said that yes, the person who carried them had been wearing a white hat or at least light-colored clothing, and that after carrying him through the woods for a minute or two, they simply put him down again and walked away. Zach then heard me yelling, then trudged off in the direction of my voice whereupon we were reunited. I asked Zach if the man said anything to him and he said no. I asked him if he was scared and bizarrely he said no to that too.

My son wasn't exactly an overly trusting or gregarious child either. It wasn't like him to remain calm if picked up or spoken to by a complete stranger. But when asked if he cried or yelled out or struggled when this complete stranger appeared out of nowhere and scooped him up out of the snow, Zach once again just said no. Maybe he thought it was me. Maybe he was swept up in how magical and alien the landscape was there in the woods. Maybe he was just sleepy and that's why he didn't freak out and start screaming. But when I think about this stranger snatching my son, and him not even emitting so much as a whimper, it sends a shudder down my spine. long time lurker here finally sending a story your way and you'll be pleased to know that it isn't one of those a creepy guy stared at me stories because it's the story of how me and

my best friend from college almost got murdered in the woods and i know what some of the listeners are going to be thinking almost got murdered is going to involve a lot of creepy staring and very little almost murdering. Well, hang tight ye of little faith, because I have the story and the scar to prove it. I don't know what the hell got into me and my buddy Connell during college, but we went down a serious survivalism rabbit hole during the first few months of our sophomore year at CU Denver. We were living together off campus, each working part-time jobs, and being only a stone's throw away from the likes of Chief Mountain and Mount Blue Sky, we'd gotten increasingly into hiking as a means of exercising and generally blowing off steam.

The hiking was during our freshman year when we lived on campus, but then once we moved into the apartment near Colfax Avenue, we watched a movie one night in I think around mid-October, and that movie was called Alive. If I recall correctly, Alive is about a team of South American rugby players who's playing crashlands in the Andes Mountains. The injured and freezing survivors are then forced to consume the flesh of their deceased comrades in order to survive, and the energy they gain from this cannibalism allows them to engineer their own rescue. It's an awesome film, and all based on a true story, which captured mine and Connell's imaginations even more. We couldn't help but ask ourselves, what would we do in that situation? But mainly, it was an argument of how hungry we'd have to be before eating our dead friends became an option. Obviously, that wasn't something we could or wanted to ever put to the test, but we could do the next best

thing and head up into the mountains during the peak snows and try to camp for a night or two just to see if we could handle it. Now this is the part where I tell you all to not try this at home. Wilderness camping is risky at the best of times, but doing it during the dead of winter is an extremely foolhardy thing to do so naturally stupid college-age connell and i decide that it was an awesome idea and immediately begin to organize a camping weekend for some time after the holidays we kept on planning over christmas then the first weekend after we got back to school we drove up to echo lake park up near rogers peak so we could park the car there then marched off into the snowy forest in the direction of Mount Goliath.

We must have gone a couple of miles before we found ourselves the perfect sheltered spot among some pine trees, and then we set down our stuff and began clearing away space for a camp. I won't bore you by going into some play-by-play of how much it sucked to camp in those conditions, but holy crap did it suck. Everything stayed wet, all the goddamn time too, so we could barely keep the fire going, and we barely got any sleep. It sucked so hard that we decided to pack up and leave around 6.30 to 7 so we could use the first light to navigate back to our ride and thus get the F out of there and home for some hot showers. I used my jet boil, if you don't have one get one, to safely make us some coffee inside the tent and then once we were all warmed up and caffeinated we began to pack up our stuff. Connell finished doing so maybe a minute or two before me, then opened up

the tent flap and told me he was going off to take a piss. I just grunted, still half asleep, and carried on with what I was doing. Moments later, Connell returns, but just squats by the tent's entrance and asks me, is your knife in arm's reach? First thing on my mind is that he's seen a bear or something. Sometimes they wake up from hibernation early and since there's no food around, they're a huge danger to campers and whatnot. But when I asked Connell what the issue was, he just said, There's a dude. He was watching me take a piss. I was so relieved to hear it wasn't some mangy starving psycho bear that hearing it was just a dude almost made me laugh. So what if some early morning hiker had

given Connell a disapproving look while turning the snow yellow, big deal. I started to laugh and asked him if that's all he was spooked over and then Connell tells me that the guy had a gun. This didn't freak me out either because sure, the guy was outrageously out of season for anything other than maybe elk or maybe bighorn, but if everyone had a heart attack every time they saw an armed man in Colorado in the mountains, the whole state would be on life support. I don't know if I was too tired, too cold, or too desperate to get out of there, but I just couldn't detect the severity of the situation. Maybe Connell was doing a crappy job of explaining it too, I don't know, but my point is, I just sat there confused when really,

we should have been running. The next thing I know, Connell turns and looks the other way, and I hear him screaming out, before he turns back and says, Get out of the tent! I hadn't even finished packing up yet, but I scrambled out of the tent like he told me to, and was finally faced with a sight that had Connell so spooked. It was a hunter, a lone hunter, with a ski mask or one whole balaclava completely covering his face. He didn't say anything as we got to our feet and started backing away from him in the tent. I can't remember exactly what we said, but it was something like, Hey, we don't want any trouble.

And, listen, we're sorry if we're trespassing. We didn't know. We'll leave. We kept on talking and talking. And still this guy didn't say a word. And suddenly, he raises his rifle and took aim at us. Now what happened next is kind of a blur. I just remember seeing him raising the gun.

And then we both turned and ran like our lives depended on it the first shot was the loudest thing i'd ever heard one that seemed to echo all around us as we ran through the woods away from our campsite it felt like an eternity passed between the first shot and the second, and I remember thinking, he's aiming, and he's second now, and I'm dead. And then bang, he's shot, and I felt something hit the back of my left thigh. I felt myself drop, and I half expected my leg to just not work anymore, but it did, and I found that I could pick myself up, not even with Connell's help, and we kept on running off through the trees. I knew I'd been hit, not just from the initial punch of the bullet fragment hitting my leg, but also because of how hot and cold it felt back there. Warm blood was spilling

down my leg, lots of it too from how hard I was running, but then the cold air is hitting the skin and making it feel cold too. It was a very weird sensation and not one I ever want to feel again. Long story short, we made it down the mountain after the hunter either couldn't get another shot on us, lost us and decided to flee the area before we could get someone to call the cops for us. And to say that I had gotten off lucky would be the understatement of the century. I'd been hit alright, and not just by a whole bullet. Thanks to the pine trees, the hunter had a hard time getting a clear shot and the second hit a tree. Then, whatever cheap,

crappy ammo he was using splintered and a piece basically slashed open the top rear of my thigh as I was in the middle of a full sprint through the snow. The doctor said if the bullet had hit the tree in a slightly different way, or if I'd been running a little slower, the fragment would have punctured into my thigh, severed my femoral artery, and I'd have been dead in a matter of minutes. But it didn't, and honestly I try not to think about it, because thinking on it too hard brings some serious scaries that, just like that hot and cold feeling, I'd rather not feel again any time soon, or more preferably, ever.

And as for the guy who took shots at us, the cops questioned a few hunters, but never made any arrests, and never charged anyone with almost killing us up there on the mountain. If you ask me, I think the guy was just a hunter. I don't think he went out looking to shoot people but I think he was just a psycho who thought, huh, no witnesses, why not? I guess there are folks out there who want to know what it feels like to kill stuff. And I'm not saying every hunter thinks like that, obviously. Don't get me wrong. I just know damn sure that at least one of them does. The single scariest thing that's ever happened to me

happened on a routine drive home from work back in 2009. I used to work in a kind of speakeasy down in Shreveport, sort of a hipster place that did Prohibition-era cocktails. It was a pretty cool job, but the scheduling sucked and sometimes we didn't get out of there until 3 and sometimes 3.30 in the morning. So this one time, we finished around three and I'm driving down West Shreveport with nothing but the streetlights to light my way. Then out of nowhere, I suddenly spot someone just lying there in the middle of the street. From what I could tell, a dude was just splayed out, starfished on the blacktop, so I slowed down, swerved so as not to hit him, and then peered out of my driver's side window to get an idea of what was wrong with him. I couldn't see any blood or anything, and nothing looked broken, but the dude's eyes were wide open

in this really creepy way, and that made me think that he was in some real trouble, or worse, maybe he was dead. Real realizing i should probably do something i reach for my door handle and i swear i'm like halfway out of my car before this feeling takes me i don't think i got the words to describe it properly but it was almost like i got a tap on my shoulder something in my head head told me, look behind you. And when I did, I saw something that made my blood turn to ice. Those of you that know Shreveport will know what I'm talking about. But as you're driving down Jewela in the direction of that strip mall near the office depot, you get all these trees on the left hand side where the forest park thing is and wild woods or whatever it's called.

And so there's me. The guy lying in the street is on my right and the woods are way off to the left over the center divide. And as I look in that direction on nothing but pure instinct, I see two guys, both their faces covered and they're creeping through the trees in the direction of me and my car. Realizing I was about to get carjacked, I jumped back into my car and hit the gas. But the second I slammed my doors closed, the guy I once thought was either dead or unconscious, the same one I'd thought to offer help to, jumped up off the ground and made a grab for my door handle before I sped off. My heart was pounding the whole rest of the ride home and I swear I was maybe a mile away before I was actually like, okay, slow down, they're not going to catch you. If I drove like I first did the whole way home, I'd probably have gotten a ticket or worse, gotten into a bad car accident or something.

I know that maybe seems like a little unrelated, but I always look back and think how I could have dodged one hairy situation just to die in a blind panic thinking they might be following me in a car or something. And that's not even touching on that gut feeling that I got when I stepped out of the car. If I'd been a little extra tired, a little slower out of the gate in terms of getting that bad feeling, I might not be around today to write this. I don't think they had a gun or anything, or if they did, they didn't fire any shots at me as I was driving away. But a knife, or even something like if they ran me over trying to escape, and I could have just laid there in the

street just like that guy had been when I rolled up. Only with me, I might not have gotten up again nearly so easy. I used to work nights here in Arizona, way out in the middle of nowhere at this old pueblo that had been turned into a hotel. It was a nice place to work, probably the easiest job I've ever done. But the downside was having to drive an hour and a half to and from work every single night. I hated it at first. It cut a big chunk out of my free time, so I decided I was either going to move to Ajo or try to get a job over in Yuma, which was way closer. But then, during the drive back home after, I think it was my third or maybe my fourth shift, I stopped at this random taco truck to get a bite to eat. It was just sat outside of the Copper Sands RV park,

so I guess the owner either lived there or drove over there every night to do business. I'd seen it the first couple of drives but couldn't see myself stopping when I already had a hundred plus miles to drive. But then that first night I stopped there, I knew I had to eat something because I was so hungry that I'd probably ended up speeding if I didn't risk it with some street meats. So knowing it was coming up on my left, I turned off the road to where the entrance to the RV park was, then got out of my car and walked over to his truck. Turns out, this guy made some of the best tacos I'd ever eaten in my life. I ate them in my car, drove home, and the next night, I did exactly the same thing. I didn't stop every night, but it's

safe to say that it became a regular stop on my way home from work. I wouldn't just go back to my car and eat them either, which was always way messier. I stayed by the dude's truck, got my eat on, and then shot the breeze with the truck's owner with a soda and a cigarette. He had those nice lemon hand wipes too that he gave away for free so I didn't have to grease up my wheel on the way back home either. I must have done this maybe 40 or 50 times over the next couple of months. But the weird thing is, I never got the dude's name. I didn't ask if the first few times and then I don't know, I just didn't ask at all. I didn't really need to know his name, he didn't need to know mine, so I just didn't ask.

I guess that makes me sound kind of rude now that I think about it, but I mean, he didn't ask me my name either, so I guess it didn't bother him. I was just a customer, probably one of many regulars that he had. My point is, I wish I'd asked him, and I get randomly mad at myself for not asking because one day I rolled up on that spot outside of Copper Sands and he was gone. As I parked my car in its usual spot, got out and walked towards the truck, everything looked perfectly normal at first. It wasn't the first time that I'd rolled up and the taco guy hadn't been in the truck. One time he'd been checking out his back wheels out of sight and another time I'm pretty sure that he was just taking a pee somewhere and I knew all I had to do was whistle or call out and the guy would come running out. So I walk up to the truck

and calling out but no one shows up and no one answers. It's like deathly quiet too. No one's on the highway, no one seems awake on the RV park and it's just completely total calm and still. Then as I'm looking around, waiting for the taco guy to show up, I start smelling something burning. I stand on my tiptoes and I can't quite see if there's anything on the grill or not, but I can definitely smell something burning up in there. And as I looked, I started to see a little smoke too. Something was burning up on his grill and I couldn't see what, but there was definitely something there burning. I called out again, something dumb like, hey, I think there's something burning over here, but still, everything was quiet, except for the sound of something sizzling up on

the grill above me i guess that makes me sound kind of short but just to be clear it was one of those big taco trucks not a small one like an ice cream truck everything you ordered got handed down to you not over a little counter i guess because it was just safer to operate that way but that's why i couldn't see what was on the grill. You see, by that point, I actually liked the guy. I liked the tacos, I liked the way he'd nod along sympathetically when I complained about something that happened during my shift, but most of all, I liked the way he was always there. Well, every day except Sundays, anyways. If there's one thing I learned, it's that reliable things are hard to come by.

So when you find them, you learn to appreciate them, even when they come in the form of a late-night taco truck. So I figured if that was me, I'd want someone to at least turn off the gas or something. I had no idea where the guy was. If he'd had some kind of medical emergency, the only thing I knew was that I sure as hell didn't want to see my favorite taco truck go up in flames. And that's when I walked around the side to where the entrance was. Just this narrow door with a set of retractable stairs. I stepped up, grabbed the door handle, opened her up, and the first thing I see is an open, empty cash register with a drawer lying upturned on the deck with a bunch of loose change dotted around it.

Now right away I'm thinking robbery, but I also didn't see any signs of like a violent struggle or anything. I know the cash drawer had been pulled out, but a robber could have just pulled a gun on my taco guy, told him to run and not look back and then emptied the drawer himself before taking off. So yeah, getting robbed sucks but I didn't think anyone had been hurt, at least not bad anyway. Not until I went to turn off the dude's grill. I had to take a couple of more steps up to climb into the actual cooking area then the grill was on my left, but when I looked at it, I remember recoiling and saying out loud, oh my god. Right there, burned on the grill,

was this perfect jet black outline of a person's hand. All I could do was try not to look at it again as I opened up the little cabinet underneath the grill and turned off the flame. Then I just walked down the steps after closing the door and then walked back to my car to call the cops. I didn't really know what to tell the dispatcher at first. I knew there had been a robbery and I knew someone had been hurt bad but where they'd gone or where they'd been taken after they'd been burned, that was a total mystery. I mean, the only reason I could be sure it wasn't just some kind of accident was all the missing cash. I answered a bunch of the dispatcher's questions, then she told me that a couple of deputies would be over to handle it.

I didn't have to stick around at all, but I did. I wanted to make sure the taco guy wasn't going to be back any second with a bandage around his arm or something, but no one showed. I waited maybe 30 to 40 minutes too and no one showed up. I drove home, just feeling kind of numb. My head had been spinning the whole time wondering what had happened and why the cops wouldn't show up with their lights and sirens on knowing something so terrible had happened. I still beat myself up for never getting the guy's name either. If I did, maybe I'd have been able to look him up, you know, or be of more help to the cops.

I tried googling things like taco truck owner burned by robber and things like that. Those turned up a bunch of depressingly violent robberies, but none matched the description of the scene I'd come across. I just really hope that he's okay. I mean, I have no doubt that he needed major skin grafts after what happened, but I also no doubt that his insurance premiums took a hit too. But whatever happened, I just hope that he's recovered. I'm not much of a writer, never have been, but I do think I hit on a good idea in opening this thing up with a question. And that question being, when was the last time you picked up a hitchhiker? I can probably guess what you're thinking right off the bat. Are you crazy? No, I've never picked up a hitchhiker. And sure, I totally get it.

Nowadays, the word hitchhiker is almost synonymous with terms like serial killer, and only the bravest or most foolish of drivers does anything but straight up ignore anyone crazy enough to be sticking their thumb out at the side of the road. The reverse is also true, maybe more so. You'd have to be tough as a green beret or dumb as a rock to put yourself in that much of a vulnerable position these days, especially with hitchhiking having the reputation it does. But there was a time, and this is where I really show my age, when hitchhiking, as well as picking them up, wasn't quite seen as signing your own death warrant.

I was born in Van Nuys, California in 1959. My mom and dad had one foot in the world of corporate finance and the other in the world of hippy-dippy free-loving beatniks. They tried to instill a mix of those values in me. Be kind, be peaceful, but get an education and make a lot of money. It might not have any spiritual value to it, but the more money a person has, the more they're able to help others and the more personal freedom they have. And with that in mind, I decided to pursue an accountancy degree at USF and by 1981,

I was a sophomore living in Haight-Ashbury with a few friends. I'd also been dating my first real girlfriend for almost nine months by early 81, and when spring break hit, I drove down to visit my parents for a few days, then made the return journey back to San Francisco to spend the rest of it with her. I figured that i'd spend my final day with my parents helping them with sunday dinner then once we'd finished i'd begin my drive back to san francisco around 6 pm this meant that if the journey went smoothly i'd be back in haight ashbury by around midnight i set off on schedule then maybe an hour or so into the drive, I arrived at a large trucker spot called Grapevine. For those unfamiliar with it, Grapevine has two gas stations, a motel, and a little fast food

joint, and I stopped there once or twice before when driving up and down the state. On that evening, as the sun set, I had no plans to stop there. I had a schedule to stick to, so I hadn't planned on making any stops along the way. But then, just as I'm leaving Grapevine, I see this hitchhiker, standing there at the side of the highway, sticking his thumb out in the hopes of catching a ride. Like I said, I wasn't planning on making any unscheduled stops, but something about the way the guy looked caught my sympathy for some reason. He was a skinny redhead with almost a nerdy look about him, and he looked much younger than his age. The kind of kid who would get carded for walking into an R-rated movie on their 21st birthday, which, funnily enough, is exactly what happened to me. I figured that in another world,

it might have been me stood at the side of the road hoping for someone kind enough to stop and give me a ride so that's what I did I started to slow as I passed him then pulled over to the side of the road and honked my horn to let him know that he was welcome to join me I watched the guy's posture go from hopeless to joyous as he ran up to my passenger door and opened it up. He seemed super grateful for the ride, asked how far I was going, and when I told him all the way to San Francisco, he told me that that was perfect, since his final destination was the city of Tracy up in San Joaquin. That meant that we'd be traveling together for what, by my estimation, would be the better part of four and a half hours,

which at the time seemed like something of an overcommitment. I was either expecting or hoping that he'd hop out with a smile and a thank you just a few miles up the road, but then once he was in my passenger seat, I could hardly hit him up with a sudden refusal. Besides, he seemed harmless and I figured the longer I gave him a ride, the better it would be for my karma. As we drove off, he told me his name was Ronald, that he was a history student at UCLA, and that he was headed home to see his family and friends for spring break. I was majoring in accounting, with a minor in media literacy that had a focus on the more nascent forms of personal computer,

but I'd already had an interest in history, particularly in the areas of the two world wars. It just so happened that Ronald was a self-professed expert in World War II, and had claimed he was spent many an hour studying books and writing papers on the subject. Most of my own knowledge was mostly gleaned from old movies like The Longest Day or Stalag 17, so I figured the ride would turn out to be as educational as it was interesting. But what I didn't know was that the hours that I spent with Ronald would be two of the most terrifying of my entire life. At one point in our little history conversation, I made the mistake of asking

Ronald which event or battle from World War II stuck with him the most. That's when Ronald launched into a highly detailed description of something he called the Sack of Nanking. Now technically, this wasn't part of World War II because it happened way back in 1937, two years before Germany invaded Poland and a whole four years before Pearl Harbor. But as many historians will tell you, the Japanese invasion of China was almost like the prologue to the Second World War. Anyway, Ronald launches into this big speech about the sack of Nanking, which I understand is now called the Nanjing Massacre, and all the terrible stuff the Japanese military did to Chinese civilians. A lot of the stuff that he said really doesn't help thinking

about it if I'm being perfectly honest. It was some of the most disturbing stuff I'd ever heard. But it wasn't so much the details of what Ronald was saying that creeped me out, it was the way he was saying it. Sometimes when a historian talks about a particular event, they might do so in a way that seems detached. I once went on a tour of an old Civil War fort and the way the guy talked about how many men died taking it, you'd think that he described the fifth inning of a minor league baseball game. I guess that comes with having told and retold the story a thousand times to hordes of half-interested tourists, and the rest of the time, people tend to talk about morbid historical stuff

with a fairly somber tone. But Ronald, on the other hand, he seemed to delight in every little gory detail, to the point that it started to get pretty uncomfortable in the car. At one point, he started telling me about a competition which two Japanese officers took part in it was a race to see which one of them could be the first to behead a hundred Chinese prisoners of war Ronald claimed the race was neck and neck no pun intended until the very end and when some Japanese General decided it was too close to call, the competition was continued indefinitely. He asked me if I could imagine how it felt to cut ten, twenty, or thirty heads off in one sitting, all with a single swing of a razor-sharp samurai sword. Then as he described how these mass executions used to occur,

he smacked his hand down on the dash in front of him so hard that it made me jump at first. He was saying things like, Can you even imagine how much blood there'd be filling up the trench with all those dead bodies in it? All while you're like bang, bang, bang. In the end, I had to say, Okay, Ronnie, I get it. It was rough. And I made the mistake of taking my eyes off the road to look at him just to make my point a little clearer. I wouldn't say that he looked manic, per se, but he was right on the cusp of it, if that makes any sense. He was grinning,

very wide-eyed, like the thought of all that murder was the most exciting thing in the world to him. And again, I wouldn't say that I was scared, but I definitely thought it was time to change the topic of conversation. I was feeling a little thirsty and I figured the polite thing to do was to offer my guest something too, so I asked Ronald to grab us both a bottle of water from the back seat. He said he was okay, as he had a whole bunch of stuff stashed away in his knapsack, and he wasn't lying either. I figured his pack would have at least a few basic supplies in it, maybe some clothes and a book or two. Instead, the entire thing was stuffed with snacks and bottles of soda. Then, instead of

taking something I'd offered him, Ronald offered me not one, but two bottles of Pepsi. And when I offered to reimburse him for his generous offer, he told me, it's alright, they didn't cost me anything anyways. I know there are probably a handful of legitimate reasons why Ronald could have gotten his hands on that stuff for free, but just like the World War II stuff, it was the way he said it which gave me a bad feeling. I asked him straight up if he stole all those snacks and sodas and I'll never ever forget the exact words he gave in reply. He sort of scoffed before saying, stealing is such a dirty word. Ronald then launched into yet another big speech about how no one really owns anything anyways,

it's all just on loan from the bank. The banks know people are wise to their schemes, so to prevent savvy citizens from reclaiming their property, they came up with a scam called insurance, which tricks people into paying for property they already own, while screwing them out of what's been promised when said property goes missing, or goes up in smoke. I got the impression that Ronald would go on and on if I didn't interject by asking him if he'd gotten caught stealing what he was now trying to share with me. The implication being that we might just see some police lights flashing my rear view at any second. And that was the first time Ronald got angry with me. He turned in his seat and I didn't need to meet his gaze to know that he was staring daggers at me. He then asked

me in a very aggressive manner if he looked like the kind of idiot who'd get caught stealing sodas. I gave him the most honest answer I could and told him that he didn't look like the kind of person who stole at all, period. I wasn't trying to flatter him or placate his anger, it was the god honest truth. Ronald continued to stare at me for a few moments and then burst into a wheezing laughter before saying, maybe that's why I get away with it so much. And what happens when you don't get away with it, huh? What happens then? It wasn't a confrontational question, more a suggestive one. But instead of launching into some sophistry,

Ronald simply reached into his backpack, pulled out a revolver, and then said, I show him this. I realized that, for many people, they would have realized what a mistake they'd made right around the time Ronald started talking about chopping off heads. Call it idealism or sheer naivety, but I had to see that gun before I realized how bad I'd messed up by letting this guy into my car. Petty larceny is one thing, but unless that was a starter pistol in his hand, the risk level had just shot through the roof. I guess it was a moment of wishful thinking, but I asked Ronald if his gun was real, and the question prompted the kind of response you might expect by now.

He acted offended, emasculated even, and even went to the effort of showing me the bullet that he'd lodged into the thing's chamber. I knew then that somehow I had to get him out of my car. The only question was how to do that without making him angry enough to do something stupid. We drove along in silence for a while, and then Donald asked if I was nervous because of the gun. Once again, I just gave him an honest answer and told him yes, but obviously having a loaded gun in the hands of an almost total stranger sitting next to me made me nervous. Ronald thought that was hilarious, but when I didn't see the funny side, he seemed to have a moment of genuine remorse. He explained how he didn't have a problem with me and that he appreciated me giving him the ride. He then claimed he'd only showed me the gun to impress me,

and that he'd only been kidding about stealing all the snacks and sodas. I didn't believe a word of it, or at least I'd already decided that I didn't like him and that I wanted him out of my car. But again, I knew that a confrontation would not be wise. We drove another mile or two in complete silence until Ronald once again reached into his pack to pull something out. Kind of tense in here. This should do the trick. I remember him saying almost to himself and then when I looked to see what he had in his hand, I saw a cigarette. But not the kind out of a pack, the kind a person rolls on their own. He asked if I minded if he smoked and I took the path of least resistance in replying

no. I knew it probably just wasn't tobacco in that cigarette, but I told him that as long as he cracked a window and didn't burn any holes in the upholstery, as it was technically my dad's car, he could do whatever he pleased. I was a college student in San Francisco. I'd been around a lot of Mary Jane, but when Ronald lit up his smoke and exhaled a big cloud of smoke, I knew right away that it wasn't marijuana. I dreaded to ask the question, but I did, and when the reply came, it was worse than I imagined. PCP, Ronald told me, and then said something like, don't freak out, it's just a little. I didn't care if there was only a single grain of PCP in that thing. I'd heard enough to know that it did some very scary stuff to people. I told him very plainly, but sternly, I'd rather you didn't smoke that in here. But Ronald simply replied, it's too late, and began giggling to himself before taking another drag.

At this point, I'm actively plotting ways to get him out of the car. I considered faking a breakdown, but he seemed just a little too smart to fall for something like that. Then as I considered faking some kind of illness, but figured he'd simply volunteer to drive for us, I even considered some pretty far out stuff like faking a come on to him or something to see if any deep seated homophobia might drive him away. I didn't do that. I didn't do any of that. And I had miles to go before I began to see light at the end of the tunnel. Ronald finished his PCP cigarette and clumsily tossed the remains out of the passenger window. I dared not look over at him. Even in my peripheral vision, I could see that his movements had slowed, signaling a chilling

change in his demeanor. He seemed sloppier, for lack of a better word, less erratically energetic than before, and it wasn't his energy I'd grown to fear, it was his judgment. And when he suddenly reached down to his backpack again and asked me, have you ever seen The Deer Hunter? I just about felt my blood turn cold. For those of you that don't already know, it's fair to say that the movie The Deer Hunter is famous for one thing and one thing alone. Russian roulette. The two climaxing scenes of the movie, which I had in fact seen, involved Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken pulling out a loaded gun and putting it to their heads, and hoping the chamber is empty when they pull the trigger. In both scenes, Vietnamese guys are betting on who's going to die. In the first scene,

Bobby and Chrissy ambush their captors and they escape. In the first scene, Bobby and Chrissy ambush their captors and they escape. In the second scene, well, no prizes for guessing what happens to poor Christopher Walken. I can't even begin to describe the kind of terror that I felt as Ronald opened up the chamber of his revolver, jimmied out every bullet except one, and then closed it again before asking, want to play? I asked him if he was crazy, but it felt like a redundant question and all he did was laugh as he slid sideways in his seat, leaning his back up against the passenger side door. I looked over at him, and he looked out of it, but as he raised the revolver and put it to his forehead, I couldn't watch anymore. I mean, I had to watch the road anyways, but my god,

I just instinctively knew not to look if what I thought was going to happen, happened. I just remember shouting, it's not funny, Ronald, stop it. But the more I pleaded with him, the more manically he laughed, until there was this terrifying sort of crescendo of laughter and begging that was only broken by Ronald shouting something like, You ready? Here goes nothing! I heard the click. Even over the begging and his laughter, I heard it. Dull and shudder-inducing. I was this nauseating mix of relieved, terrified, and furious. Relieved that the bullet had been in the chamber, but furious that he'd been dumb enough to try it in the first place. But now, there's a twisted part of me that wishes he had shot himself, because he wouldn't have been able to do what came next. Ready for your turn?

I didn't think I could get any more frightened, but I was wrong. I started talking a mile a minute, telling Ronald that if he shot me in the head, I'd probably lean on the gas, wreck the car, and he too would be killed. Makes for some high stakes, was all he said in reply. At first, I pushed on the gas, trying to hit a speed that might spook him into reconsidering, when when he started to count down from five, he aimed the revolver at my head, and I knew that I'd have to try something else. I made sure that I had plenty of space between me and the driver behind me, and then the second Ronald said,

One, I slammed my foot onto the brake so hard that it completely threw him off balance, and almost had him toppling through his seatbelt and into the feet space beneath him. But what did fall into that area was his backpack full of sodas, and as we drove off again to the sound of the car behind honking its horn, Ronald seemed more concerned with his fizzed up sodas and crushed snacks than he was about my attempt at any evasive maneuver. My heart was pounding in my chest, my life was flashing before my eyes, and there's Ronald, crying over spilled soda. He started demanding that we stop somewhere so we could get more snacks, which obviously fed into my plan of at least stopping my car somewhere so I could get help,

or, I don't know, do something to bring the whole situation screeching to a halt. We ended up rolling into a place up in Merced County, a little rest stop with a gas station and a small convenience store. At first, he demanded that I go in and buy stuff for him, but luckily he believed my lie that I didn't have any cash on me. He then demanded that I go in and steal some replacement snacks for him, but I managed to convince him that, being the more experienced ex-proprietor, it should be him that goes inside to work his magic. The mix of feigned ignorance and gentle flattery seemed to work,

and after sliding his gun back into his backpack, he unbuckled his seatbelt and opened up my car door. Before he got out, he said something to the effect of, Don't go anywhere. I got a photographic memory so I'll remember your license plate, you leave me here, I'll find you, and I'll kill you. I gave him a theatrical look of indignation then told him I wouldn't just leave him there and then capped it off by shutting my car's engine and asking him to pick me up some soda. Ronald didn't say yes or no.

He just laughed and then slammed my door closed and walked off towards the convenience store. I can't even tell you how nerve-wracking those moments were. I tried my absolute best to keep my cool and play it like I was just going to sit there and wait for him to come back. I didn't even dare look at him for fear of him suspecting something and I saw him take one last look back at me before walking into the store and I did all I could to just stare off into space like I was thinking about nothing at all. And then he was gone. I didn't waste a second. I started my engine and put my foot down, probably sending a spray of dust and gravel up behind me as I tore off one of the highway. And I couldn't believe my luck. Or rather, I couldn't believe that something I thought was going to end in my death ended in such a dumb way.

I don't know how else to describe it but the word dumb. That idiot had a gun to my head one moment, then the next. I'm granted a window of escape because he wanted a fresh root beer. It makes no sense, but then somehow it makes all the sense in the world. The guy was nuts, straight up out of his mind, three sheets to the wind, crazy. And he was crazy before he smoked a ton of PCP, or whatever it was he was smoking. And I don't believe for a second that it was just a little, as he claimed. The car reeked of chemicals while he was smoking, so whatever it was, it felt like a lot. Anyway, after whooping and roaring in celebration for a minute or two, I pulled off of the 5 and then drove up the 165 towards a town called Las Baños. I figured there'd be some kind of law enforcement infrastructure

there and I was right. And then when I rolled into their shop, boy did I have a story to tell. And not only did I have the story, but I had Ronald's backpack to somewhat corroborate what I was saying. Ronald never did track me down, presumably because he went to jail shortly afterwards. I wouldn't possibly be able to guess how long for, presumably that depends on just how many sodas he stole or how many others he pointed his gun at. All I know is I had one hell of a story to tell my girlfriend when I got back to San Francisco. To be continued... Yes, same city as Peaky Blinders. I'm a big fan of the channel and since Christmas is coming up, it reminded me of a story my dad told me a few years ago. It's a story of two parts in a way. The first part is us finding out what happened in the first place, which was big drama,

but not as interesting as the event itself, so I'll dive in and I think you'll see what I mean. Back in 1983 my mom and dad were still brand new parents and I wasn't even out of nappies yet so my mom mostly stayed at home to look after me. Mom couldn't work and dad was still on crap money so he ended up getting a part-time job as a DJ. You wouldn't think to look at him but my dad has a sick taste in music. Our family has a Jamaican background and his parents were first generation, so he loves everything from rocksteady and roots to dub and dancehall. And I've got a lot of happy memories of being a kid, going through his records and pretending it was me that was the selector.

Anyways, he gets offered this gig playing a party over in West Brom, which is only a couple of miles down the road, so he accepts, drives over, does the gig, and then starts driving back. It's about one in the morning, and he's just gone past the roundabout on Kenrick Way when he sees a flashing blue light behind him. He looks up his rear view and sees a copper on a police bike behind him, white helmet, high-vis jacket, all that stuff. So he pulls over to the side of the road, turns his car off and waits for the copper to come up to his window and tell him why he's been stopped.

So my dad's sitting there, looking into his right-hand wing mirror, watching as the copper parks up behind him, gets off his bike and then starts walking towards his window. But then the closer the copper gets to my dad's window, the more my dad starts thinking that something isn't quite right. For a start, motorbike cops like that mostly stuck to motorways so they could respond to big car crashes faster. Then secondly, cops are

supposed to have something on the front and the back of their uniforms that make it clear that they're policemen. But then instead of little patch over his heart saying police, there was nothing there. It looked like the kind of jacket a builder might wear or something. Then on this guy's feet, he didn't have boots on. He had all white trainers. By the time he clocked all that about the bloke, my dad's thinking, hang on, this isn't right at all. But then right as that thought pops into his head, he sees this copper, who's not a cop at all, reaching into his pocket and pulls out what looked an awful lot like a gun. My dad said that he did the only thing that came to mind. He reached for his keys, started his engine, and while sinking as far down into his seat as he

could, he put his foot down. As he's taking off, he says the front seats just exploded in a shower of glass as his front and driver's side windows got taken out by the guy's bullets. He only sits up again when he's almost at the turnoff to Birmingham Road, and it's only when he turns right off of Kenrick and has to turn his steering wheel all the way and back again that he can just feel there's something wrong with his shoulder. He makes it all the way to the Hawthorns before he has to pull over because by that point he's noticed how badly he's bleeding from the bullet that's gone through his shoulder and he's terrified that he's going to bleed to death or something. He ended up getting out of his car, flagging down the next one

that passed him and getting a lift to A&E at Sanwell Hospital, which is where he found out just how lucky he'd been. If the bullet had hit him a few inches further down, it could have done fatal damage to his heart, or he'd probably have bled to death before he could even get out of his car to flag another one down. Obviously, because he needed surgery, the hospital kept him for a few nights, and the police asked him questions from his bed. The first visit was all questions. The second one included telling him that his car, which he'd basically just abandoned near the Hawthorns, had been found.

Someone had found it and set it on fire. Because of that, the coppers who came to ask him questions started asking things like, are you involved in organized crime? And, is there anyone you've angered recently enough for them to want to hurt you? And to each of these quite accusing questions, his answer was no every time. Something you gotta know about my dad for this to all make sense is that apart from his taste in music, he's basically a massive nerd. He was interested in computers growing up, got an IT job, and kept himself squeaky clean when he was a teenager. He was never involved in any kind of gangs or drug dealing or anything like that, which, to be fair, Hansworth has got quite a bad reputation for. The only thing he could think of, which could have possibly rubbed anyone up the wrong way, was having to turn down a song request at the party he'd been playing that night.

Dad said a fella had come up to him, asked for some proper aggro dub track, and when my dad told him that he didn't have it, the bloke started giving him this death stare before he finally walked off. Dad's set continued without any further confrontation, but he'd said he caught the bloke staring at him across the hall a few times just staring and kissing his teeth and all this other hard man stuff dad finishes his set packs up his gear and the bloke had plenty of opportunities to come up and have a go but he didn't then the next thing dad's getting pulled over by a fake cop and get shot in the shoulder. My dad said that he only really put it together then and that was only because the police seemed very interested in

the details of what dad believed was nothing more than a minor confrontation. Dad gave them a description of the bloke. He'd been a Jamaican guy, about 5'10", with a blue and white striped shirt, white jeans, and lots of gold chains. Dad also said that he was still in the dance hall when he packed up and left, and he looked legless drunk too, so there was no way that he was hopping on a motorcycle and following him. And what were the chances of him having a fake motorbike coppers outfit just stashed nearby in case of an emergency? But like I said, the penny started to drop as he described the guy from the dance hall and a few days later, one of the coppers

all but confirmed his worst fears. Basically, the police thought that the bloke that he'd had that little confrontation with in the dance hall was a yardie. And lots of people know about yardies because of Grand Theft Auto. Niko's made Jacob as a Yardi and he'd do some missions for them and aside from that, I suppose they're famous for the same way the Yakuza and Triad are famous. They're not as famous as the Italian or Russian mafias, not by any stretch, but I suppose crime families get a reputation all over the world for a reason. Anyway, back in the early 80s,

lots of Jamaicans started coming over to the UK. There had been a trickle since the 1950s, which is when my grandparents came over, but the late 70s and early 80s saw loads more unemployed Jamaicans coming over to the UK to make better lives for themselves. The trouble was, not all of them were honest hard-working people just looking to get along the yardies got their name because they tended to hang around what were basically council estates or what they called in jamaica government yards if you were a known criminal you couldn't get a job so instead you hung around the yards with the other yard boys who were always up to no good.

Gang life in Jamaica is brutal, and there's hardly any money to go around, so when the yardies heard that they could get over to the UK on forged documents or jump a ship once it arrived in Bristol or London, they came over in their hundreds looking to make their fortune. And make it they did. London and Bristol got saturated fairly quickly, so the yardies that arrived later ended up moving north to the likes of Nottingham and Manchester, but especially Birmingham with it being the second biggest city in the UK, and they brought all their yardie badman brutality with them. Ask anyone around here and they'll tell you, badman is fairly recent slang, but ask my granddad and my dad and they'll tell you, bad man is fairly recent slang. But ask my granddad and my dad and they'll tell you the whole bad man ting had been around forever. Jamaican culture is very

macho as it is, and the yardies took the whole culture and ran with it, until the whole point of being a bad man yardie was being the coldest, cruelest gangster you could be. I've heard stories of yardies shooting people dead just for giving them a funny look, so it made sense that the one my dad ran into would want to have him shot for being disrespectful. And to a yardie, anything that wasn't perfectly to their liking could be seen as disrespectful. One of the policemen my dad dealt with basically told him that they thought his shooting was connected to a handful of others that happened around Hansworth and West Brom, and that any help my dad might be able to give him would potentially bring them a step closer to solving quite a few other unsolved

shootings. Dad told them everything he could, more than once too, but weeks turned into months, and we never heard from the police again. As far as my dad knows, they never caught the bloke who shot him, and for a while, he was worried they'd come back for him. Police advised him not to go around West Brom for a while, but without his car, he wasn't going anywhere that wasn't on a bus route anytime soon. Time went on, and after a while, dad stopped looking over his shoulder, and his wounds healed. He still can't lift his left arm above his head, but other than that, he's perfectly mobile. Crazily enough, this whole story came out one Christmas when my nana, who was completely smashed, let slip that my dad knew what it was like to be shot.

My granddad and I had been watching some terrible old war film, laughing about how awful the acting was whenever someone got shot. Granddad says something like, they can't act because they don't know how it feels. And Nana goes, your dad does. Basically all hell broke loose after that, and it ended with our dad telling us that story you just heard. It got a bit emotional

toward the end because we inevitably got to the part where it hit us how lucky we were to even still have him around. And in my sister's case, how she wouldn't have even been born yet if the shooter's aim had been a bit better. Now I won't lie, the thought still gets me sometimes, thinking someone could be so petty as to want to end another man's life just over a freaking dub track. I grew up in a real messed up family. My dad was never home. He worked for some big arms company in Europe and spent most of his time lubricating shady backdoor deals in the former eastern block we didn't miss him when he was away because whenever he was home it felt like a great dark cloud was hanging over our house everything we did was wrong nothing was ever good enough and he made life impossible for me

my brother and my mom my mom gave up on trying to parent us when she realized just how rotten we both were me and my brother i mean she spent most of her days either drinking or high on Valium, and only ever emerged from her bedroom whenever we were being too obnoxious and loud. My brother, my older brother, liked motorcycles and spent most of his time either riding them, working on them, or buying them. Me, on the other hand, I somehow found an even more dangerous hobby. If my brother worshipped speed, I worshipped self-destruction of all varieties. I took up smoking, started cutting, and with my hefty monthly allowance in hand, managed to become acquainted with some of the city's less scrupulous purveyors of narcotics.

From the age of around 14 onwards, all I was interested in was chasing that next high, and after two years of frying my brain with almost everything I could get my hands on, I suffered a kind of psychotic break and attempted to burn down my family home with my mother and brother asleep in their beds. First of all, no one was hurt and I'm eternally grateful for that, but the fire spread quickly and the amount of structural damage it inflicted to the house was catastrophic. My family was furious with me, and obviously so. We had to find some place to live while extremely expensive repairs were being done. Only, it wasn't going to be we, as my mom and dad had suddenly decided.

They were going to find a hotel, maybe a rental home once they were settled. But me? I was headed to Jamaica. Now, I know what you might be thinking. Jamaica? As in the tropical island paradise? How is that a punishment? Well, if you put down your narrow stereotypes for one moment, allow me to give you a brief but informative lesson in geography. Yes, lots of Jamaica is palm trees and white sandy beaches,

but on the southwestern coast, the scenery changes quite dramatically. You go from tropical island paradise to something that looks more like Texas plains country in just 20 miles or so. And that's the part of Jamaica I ended up going to. Because I wasn't there for vacation. I was there for a behavioral rehabilitation program so harsh that it was literally illegal to run back in the United States. The program was run by two Americans out of a place they called Tranquility Bay, which turned out to be just about as ironic a name as they could possibly have picked. It cost $20,000 to send me there for six months. That's some people's salaries. I should have come

back and invented Google for that kind of money. Instead, I found out that they had next to no idea what they were doing. I remember having to go to a doctor in Utah first who cleared me for international travel, but then just over a week later, my dad was driving me to the airport and I was trying not to cry. I was pretty bad like that, just completely spoiled. I could have killed my mom and brother, but I thought a few tears might cause my dad to turn the car around. Little did I know, he'd already transferred the twenty grand, so I was going to Jamaica if he had to fly me there himself. When I landed at the airport, there was something holding a sign with my name on it. I followed them to a car and they drove me about three hours to pretty much the opposite side of Jamaica from the lush green pastures up into the dry and dusty hills. It was there that the Tranquility

Bay facility was located and after being taken inside I was given my induction. The people were kind of nice and welcoming at first but explained that that was the last time they'd act like that with me until the day I graduated. When my program started, I'd be at level one, which meant that I'd be treated like crap, but as I advanced up through the levels, my treatment would supposedly get better and better. And after that, life as I knew it changed completely. As of that moment, I had zero rights or liberties as a human being. I needed permission to speak, to stand, to walk anywhere, and the more I complied, the more I advanced. I wasn't allowed a bed at first, and I had to go to the bathroom in a bucket.

But then as time went on, I was allowed to visit an actual bathroom and was given access to hot showers and better food. It might sound harsh, but it also might seem like a functional system. Your crazy parents send you there for a ton of money, then after your time is up, you've reached the sixth and highest level and you got to go home. But that's not how things worked out. My parents paid for six months, but I ended up staying for almost a year, and my parents had to pay out an extra $15,000 for the pleasure. I did everything I could to get home within that six months but the program

leaders did everything they could to stop me. They found just about any reason to demote you down a level or two and it was all a scam to keep the kids there longer than they needed to be. Anyone who tried to actually rebel was punished, just with really menial stuff at first, but if they persisted, they were made to clean something to do with the facility's sewage system. I don't know exactly what it was, I never did anything to warrant the punishment, but kids regularly got sick after it and that was the best incentive to stick with the program. When people ask what the standards of living were like, I tell them that for anyone below level 6, it was worse than prison.

In U.S. prisons, a certain standard of hygiene is enforced and prisoners get access to proper medical treatment. We had neither of those. The bugs were the worst part, though, as almost all the accommodation blocks were infested with sand flies and mosquitoes. Everyone below level 6 was covered in bug bites almost all the time, and it wasn't much better for the staff or level 6ers either. Anyone below level 3 wasn't allowed to wear shoes, and we were only allowed cold showers once a day. This meant that bug bites on their feet would get infected and

this happened to me personally. Kids called it fat foot and it would cause your foot and ankle to balloon to double its size. You might think that this would warrant a trip to the hospital, but no. You were given antibiotic cream, some painkillers, and then you went about your day as usual. At the lower levels, fights were really common too. You put a bunch of spoiled brats together in near-prisoner-of-war camp conditions, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they'll lash out at one another. You might think the Tranquility Bay staff would want to stop things like that, but in truth, it was useful to them. It allowed them to knock the offenders down a few levels,

thus ensuring their parents continued financial cooperation and it also served as a great way of enforcing discipline in the higher ranks. You mess up and you'd be back to fist fighting to be first to use the bucket in the morning. Now long story short, I did manage to get out, but only after I managed to convince my mom that the whole thing was a scam. And if she hadn't listened to me, I think I'd have ended up staying for another six months, meaning a year and a half in total. And just so you know, maybe I did get a little bit better, but it wasn't because of this tranquility bae. It was because I grew up in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, which is about 10-11 miles north of downtown Chicago. I had a pretty regular, uneventful childhood.

Almost everything before the age of 11 is a blur of just happy memories. I wasn't bullied in school. I never broke any bones falling off my bike. I was just kind of ignorant. A happy-go-lucky preteen boy with not so much as a care in the world. That all changed one Saturday after a visit to my grandma Pearl's house. I remember I was almost at the end of fifth grade and we went to my grandma's house one Saturday for dinner. I loved my grandma Pearl, but my God were her trips to her place boring for me. My mom and dad forbade me from ever bringing along my Game Boy as they thought that it would be rude.

But then they also didn't seem to notice when I inevitably wandered off to try and keep myself entertained. Normally I'd just wander off, explore her house, and wait until dinner was ready, but on this particular Saturday I was feeling hungry. I went and asked grandma how much longer dinner would be and felt my heart sink when I heard her say, not for at least another hour, sweetie. I walked into the kitchen, out of sight from my parents and grandma, and then peered into the little oven window to see what we were having. I think it was some type of brisket or some other kind of roast. I just remember seeing it sizzling away and wanting to speed up the process. So, dumb 11-year-old me decides to crank up the heat.

I wasn't so dumb that I cranked up the dial and then walked away. I stayed put in the kitchen, keeping an eye on the meat as it got browner and browner Eventually I started to smell a slight burning, but it still smelled okay And the meat hadn't gotten black or anything, so I just went back to what I was doing Then figured I'd just check back in a few minutes I don't know if something occupied my attention a little too long Or if the temperature of the meat was suddenly such that it burst into flames, but the next thing I remember,

I could see black smoke coming out of the oven, so I panicked. I ran into the living room, told my grandma that something was burning, so she got up and followed me into the kitchen. I ran up to the oven, pointed at the black smoke and watched my grandma's expression suddenly and drastically change. I knew I was going to be in trouble if they found out that I ruined dinner. But the way my grandma started acting really scared me. I'd never seen her look so, I don't know, not mad, but horrified. And because I don't know what she was feeling, I assumed the worst and thought that my sweet old grandma was about to explode on me. Only she didn't, and I can barely even describe the feelings of fear and confusion I felt when

she suddenly laid down on the kitchen floor and curled up into a ball. I remember how her eyes were wide staring off at nothing as she sort of whispered something that I couldn't hear. There were only a few moments of that confusion before my parents appeared in the kitchen, my dad stepping over my grandma to deal with the burnt meat situation while my mom kneeled next to grandma asking, mom, mom, are you okay? I had no idea what was happening, I just knew that I'd somehow caused it all by burning dinner and I felt god-awful about it.

Dad drove me back home. He was irate with me, but I was pretty angry at myself too. All I wanted was to eat dinner a little easier and now I'd be lucky if I got a PB&J after being banished to my room for giving my grandma a heart attack. That's honestly what I thought it was at first and even when my dad said it wasn't a heart attack I still had this terrible feeling that something equally awful had happened, something that was all my fault. My dad stayed home after

I went up to my room and lay under my covers, just crying, while my mom stayed with my grandma to make sure that she was okay. She returned home later that night, by which point it was way past my bedtime, but even so, they wake me up, sit on my bed, and have a little talk with me. I won't tell you everything they said to me, or this would take hours to write up, but the long and short of it was, my grandma had lived through World War II. My parents gave me a full history lesson right there in bed and explained why the smell of burning meat had upset my grandma so much. I remember being absolutely gripped with horror

the entire way through. I couldn't believe that people could be so evil to each other over something so small and arbitrary. And it killed me to think that my own selfishness had brought back such horrific memories from my grandma, who had escaped a place called Sobibor in the 1940s. She moved to America when the war was over, met my grandpa, and the rest is history. I guess my mom and dad thought the best thing to do was to just be honest with me, having probably realized that my fear of the unknown would hurt worse than the dark truth. I suppose in hindsight it was the best thing to do, but it still messed with my head so bad that I barely slept a wink that night.

I called my grandma the next day to apologize for scaring her and told her that my parents had explained all that she'd been through. She obviously didn't want me to know and I guess my mom and dad were complicit in shielding me from that ugly truth. I suppose it's like a lot of things with kids. You want to keep them as innocent as possible until absolutely necessary then just hope they're equipped to deal with it. Truth be told, I didn't even know I was Jewish, or at least had Jewish ancestry. My mom didn't practice her religion, and her parents didn't mind if she married someone who didn't either. It wasn't like she was ashamed of her heritage or anything, she just learned that a lot of Jewish holidays brought back awful memories for my grandma, so our place became a kind of

safe space for her. I'm not a religious person myself, none of that really interests me, but just like my mom, I still have a reverence for those that came before, or as my grandma called them, the survivors. So a few weeks ago, I was working as a utility staff member in our supermax unit of our prison. These two units are brand new and are separated from the rest of the prison. Now as a utility, the job I serve is basically ensuring everything gets done, and I'm a first responder in the event that an emergency event unfolds. If you look at the other story that I wrote here before, I mentioned another staff member that I worked with who assisted me in the emergency that we handled.

His name is D and since then he has promoted to sergeant of this unit. Myself and D were having our sixth sense, so to speak. The tensions were high on unit 1. We were feeling this all week. With these thoughts in mind, upper admin, including the warden, scheduled all of Unit 1A to be searched cell to cell in an effort to discard some contraband. For those uninitiated, most contraband are items inmates aren't allowed to have. These items range in severity, but we unanimously say the big-ticket items are weapons, drug, hooch, which is homemade alcohol, and cell phones.

I know what you're thinking, and yes, they can get those items or make them in the prison. The time is 10.30am, and this is usually designated as our first count time of our shift. So while we were conducting these mass searches, the rest of the institution is counting their inmates. I myself was helping the search team with anything they needed to help with the searches. We assumed that something could happen at any moment. However, while we were correct in our assumption, we unfortunately were wrong about the unit. The events are as followed. At approximately 10.40am, I had heard a call over the radio from Unit 2.

We got three intoxicated inmates in cell over here. This actually elicited a head tilt and an eyebrow raise from me, as there are only two inmates per cell. I look down at D from one of the top tier railings and then the sergeant of unit 2 gets on the radio and says, I'll be down in a minute. The protocol for incorrect inmates and cells is to remove said inmate from the cell and place them in holding. A protocol that I assumed the 2A sergeant was doing and I was correct. The next radio traffic was something I wasn't expecting and in all honesty happened very quickly. When the Unit 2 sergeant made it to 2A, he called for the door to be opened on the radio.

Followed by, Sergeant D, I need additional staff here. This was said in a calm voice so it didn't ring any alarms in my head and I started moving off 1A and leaving Unit 1 building towards Unit 2 building. Not even as I get fully out of the Unit 1 building, I then hear the most haunting radio traffic I think I've ever heard in all of my almost five years of service. We need all available staff! Staff assault! Staff assault! They have weapons! I've never ran so fast in my entire life.

When I went through the front door to Unit 2 and made it to the 2A door, I banged so hard and yelled at the control station officer to run the damn door now, and when the door opened, it was absolute chaos. Now whether or not it was a trick of the eye, the sun coming in from the windows, or maybe the pepper spray all over the ground, I'm not joking when I say that the unit had a red tint to it. It looked like I stepped into a literal depiction of hell. First thing I see is one staff member getting his face stomped in by an inmate. I assess the situation and saw that the staff were already en route to help him so I scanned more left.

On the stairs leading up to the top tier an inmate and staff member were fighting and rolling down the stairs. However, beneath those stairs was a staff member lying on the ground with an inmate on top of him, stabbing the staff member. I didn't even realize how fast I was running and I started yelling, Get off him now! Get off now! The inmate didn't hear me and by this point, I'm full on sprinting at this. I will literally sit here and tell you, my inner monologue decided that we were choosing violence today and said, we're going to spear the F out of this guy. And I did, hard. I mean this guy literally turned, saw me coming, got eyes bigger than I'd ever seen before.

Within a split second I hit his ribs with my right shoulder and hit the ground. The next thing I remember is my eyes burning. Apparently some pepper spray splashed in my eyes upon the impact of both of our bodies. And so here I am, blind on top of a dangerous criminal who's wielding a homemade knife. I managed to force my eyes open long enough to see this guy punching my head. As to not get in trouble here, I'm going to say multiple staff did dogpile on us and we beat this dude down so he would drop the knife. After that, I got off the unit, eyes burning, shoulder hurting and apparently blood around my neck with no pain or wound. Strange. However, it was when I went to the hospital and

returned to work that I got to see the CCTV camera footage of the assaults. Apparently as I hit this inmate square in the ribs, he raised his knife and goes to stab me in the left side of the neck. It was only the impact of us hitting the ground that his hand moved and he stabbed me in the back instead. Seven of us went to the hospital that day with stab wounds and today, I just had my first PTSD nightmare about this incident. I woke up in a pool of sweat and was having a panic attack. I vomited on the floor and finally calmed down. I try and play it off that I'm a very strong guy and I am to a point, but even the strong have moments of weakness. As I lay here in bed and share this story, to all who read or listen to this,

please, hug your loved ones tight when you see them. You never know when death will hit. And I'll end this story with one of my favorite quotes. You can be a king is a throwaway account, and I've never opened up about this story because it's taken me a long time to let this sink in. My story isn't a life-threatening one, such as the other ones here, but I felt the need to let this off my chest. The story starts off with me at 12 years old, diving into the world of puppy love and awkward first romantic encounters. I was called terrible names in my classroom during an

age when no one actually understood what that entailed since I was openly liked by at least five guys in our class, and this only made my self-esteem fall even lower as they called me these names. I was overly friendly at this time because when you're young, insecure, and often verging on taking your own life, you tend to overcompensate. This meant that I was close to the class outcasts, the ones that were on the spectrum of Naruto running through the halls to socially anxious. And one of these guys was my stalker. You see, stalker was a casual friend. We'd share lengthy conversations about video games and random YouTubers, you know the kind. He was a socially awkward guy, but pretty harmless. He just had these neckbeard tendencies that were concealed behind the fact that he was a generally well put together guy. On the last day of classes, he'd confessed that he was attracted to me and asked if I'd be

open to dating him. I felt bad for him and with that pity, I just said yes. The good girl complex that I had was taking full control even if every inch of my brain was saying no. It was casual and awkward. I treated it like a friendship with commitment. There were a few red flags like him tracking my location from my messages but I thought it was harmless. Eventually I broke it off. The whole ordeal just left a bad taste in my mouth and I didn't want to keep it going any longer as I felt that six months was probably enough to validate breaking it off. After all, we were 13. Who the hell took relationships at that stage seriously? Well, it turns out, he did. He looked at us as meant to be because it turns out we were actually friends during childhood and he held on to that. To quote-unquote win me back, he would often

message incessantly, try to talk to me in school, even following me whenever I needed to go to the bathroom, and even going as far as coming to my house unannounced. At that point I was alarmed, especially with the thought that he was probably following me home with how quickly he'd arrived after I got home from school. Still, good girl mentality in check, I thought that I could just turn this into a friendship. He made it very clear that it wasn't going to be that way. He would pick fights with anybody that I liked, it was excruciating, and he would often force me to hang out with him. At one point, turning to grab me by the arm while

I was with my friends and only stopping once my friends defended me, I felt both powerless and weak. Once we moved, he would still show up to my doorstep unannounced. This understandably freaked me out, and by the time I was still trying to make it a friendship while he still insisted on being more than that, I was young, confused, and scared while I was being blamed for all of this for leading him on or even engaging him in the first place. He often used the excuse needing closure to talk to me or get my attention and you'll see how overused that becomes. It reached a point where I was constantly looking over my shoulder and going through lengths just

to avoid because he would wait by my regular routes to have an excuse to walk with me and talk. I changed the places that I frequented, making sure that I was always surrounded by my friend group and go as far as ducking past his class to make sure that he doesn't follow me as I walked to the bathroom. Whenever the doorbell rang, I would freeze. I was anxious about leaving the house because I always thought that he might be on his way to my home. Once he caught on to this, he ended up spilling a sob story to our guidance counselor. I suppose she felt bad, which explains why she had me pulled out of class, only to be ambushed into having a lengthy, unnecessary conversation with him,

where he pretty much used the I need closure excuse. Instead of talking about closure, he talked as if though he didn't have me pulled out of class to discuss closure. My mom ended up chewing out the guidance counselor for doing so. Still, the damage was done. At that point, I thought I'd be safe and as much as he was a lot less stalky, for lack of a better word, he was still there, like a looming presence. I always felt his stare. His friends would act weird around me, and I still felt paranoid and terrified. One day, we had a new exchange student. New girl, for the sake of the story, who everyone was quick

to point out looked like me. The resemblance was uncanny. We ended up becoming close friends, and she told me that during her first week, a group of guys began pointing at her, calling out my name, and one of them began messaging her and hitting on her. This was her first encounter with being mistaken as me and we decided to have a bit of fun with this, often pranking others by doing a little switcheroo. I would send her down the hallway before me and to our surprise, this caught his attention He would stop her in the hallway only for him to leave her alone once I popped out behind her It usually left him dumbfounded, giving us time to walk away as he processed it This left me slightly comforted that I could confuse him and New Girl didn't seem to mind

She and I ended up dating, surprise surprise, I was a lesbian this whole time. He took personal offense to this, often making weird remarks about it. He was still being creepy at the time, leaving notes on my desk on a semi-regular basis. My anxiety grew with this. I then ended up moving schools and thought that would be the end of it. In a way it was because that severely limited our ability to encounter each other. At one point, though, my old school sports team had gone to our school along with teams from other schools for a regional inter-school competition, and I was actually anxious and refused to leave my classroom for that week. At one point, he blocked me,

unblocked me, got a girlfriend, and I thought that that was the end of it. As of now, the story has come to its conclusion and how it ended was with a Twitter conversation. He messaged me asking for closure again and war flashbacks ensued. I left the conversation happen. He took time to gloat about his happy relationship with the perfect girl, who creepily had a noticeable resemblance. Say what you will about it, but I wish he was happy enough to have just left me alone. So, a five year stalker. I'm still terrified of walking alone, still looking over my shoulder no matter how irrational, and fall into paranoia constantly. I'm happy now,

but I don't think I'll ever lose that anxiety I was left with. This happened years ago when I had gotten my first actual job. I didn't think much of it. I figured it was harmless. I could find people around the country to chat with, learn about some other cultures, you know, all that kind of stuff. I wouldn't give out personal information about myself, no phone number, address, or anything like that. I wasn't stupid. What I'm referring to is having a pen pal. You see, I was bored, no friends in my city, all my friends were back in my hometown, and I wanted to fill time in loneliness and talk to people. I heard about these websites to meet pen pals around the world.

I made a simple profile, stated what kind of friends that I was interested in making, just basic stuff. After about a month, I received a message from a man. I don't remember it word for word, but it basically said, Hi, I found your profile and I'm super interested in being friends. He then stated that he lives in the same state as me. Even though he was 58 years old, he seemed really chill. Though I know maybe it was rude to be snobby about someone in my state contacting me, I did politely say on my profile that I was trying to find some pen pals outside of the US. I responded politely though and I replied to a few of his messages for a while.

I found out that he lived in the same city as me. I see you like anime. I love anime. I also see that you've been to Japan. I've been to Japan too. Do you go to anime conventions? Maybe we could go together to the next convention that comes to town. I felt a little uncomfortable. I put right on my page that I have no intention to meet up with anyone,

just to have an online pen pal. I politely told him that, and he didn't like it. He says, I just thought we could be friends, since we have similar interests. I again politely told him I'm not interested in meeting anyone in person from the website. He pretended to be fine with it and went right back to rambling about his interests. I logged out of the website for a few days and just focused on my personal life, going to work and doing school and taking care of my disabled father. One day I woke up to

notifications on multiple of my instant messaging apps, all stating basically the same thing. Hey, it's me from the penpal website. Smiley face. He messaged me on like four of my chat apps, which I did not give him. How did he find him? I was really annoyed at that point, and as politely as I could be, I messaged him on the Pen Pal website, saying, Hey, so, I don't know how you found my IDs for my chat apps, but that was kind of over the line. That wasn't really appropriate. Not one app, but you messaged me on like four. I'm sorry, but I really wanted to talk to you, and you haven't been on the website for a few days.

Well, that doesn't make it okay. I also have a personal life and a job and a family. I can't spend all my time on here. Well, that's why I messaged you on those apps. I don't have them listed on my profile. How did you find them? And he avoided the subject. I'm sorry that I did that. I'm just trying to be your friend. I just want to be friends with you. This isn't the way to do it. I'm very uncomfortable that you somehow found that information that I didn't give you. I don't think we should talk anymore. I don't want to be friends with you. I'm sorry. And please don't contact me again.

I immediately blocked him on all of those apps and on the penpal website. For a few months, everything was fine. Suddenly I got a message on one of those apps and the user wasn't in my friends list. And the message was basically as follows. You stupid, fat, ugly girl. No one will ever love you. You'll never find a man to love you. You're so incredibly fat and ugly.

Why don't you just take your own life? Do the world a favor. I rolled my eyes and blocked the account. Throughout the course of a year, every few months, across my multiple social media platforms, I was being harassed. I had completely forgotten about the man until I received a message on the penpal website. The account had no name or photos, it was just a random username. The message I received was the same nonsense as before, calling me fat and ugly and saying all sorts of terrible things about me, telling me I should die. Once I got the message on that website, I knew that it had to be him.

I had no other issues with anyone else. I replied saying that guy's name, telling him I knew it was him, and that his behavior is really sad and pathetic. I just wanted to be your friend. You're disgusting. Watch your back. Then, the account blocked me. For a few more months, nothing really happened.

I got one or two messages from fake accounts again, but I had grown used to it and just immediately blocked them. Then one day, I received a Facebook message from a police officer. He was contacting me about a profile I apparently made on a website called Ashley Madison. It is used for people to have affairs and hookups. I had never heard of it before then and absolutely did not have an account there. I had a long talk with him where he told me his department investigates human trafficking and thought that I was an underage girl, possibly in danger. I had my personal Facebook account listed on the profile as well as other ways to

contact me, and I was in shock. He advised me to contact the website and ask them to take down the profile, but he said, you seem like a sweet girl. I don't know who you made angry, but don't read the profile. My curiosity got the better of me, but I should have taken his advice. Using some of my normal selfies, an account was made and the profile stated a lot of horrible things, very derogatory. It made me sick to my stomach to read some of my normal selfies, an account was made and the profile stated a lot of horrible things. Very derogatory. It made me sick to my stomach to read some of the things it said that I apparently wanted to have done to me. Thankfully, the website took quick action to take down the profile.

The next time I got one of those hate messages online, I snapped. I didn't hold back, cursing him out for being so immature and disgusting because someone simply didn't want to be his friend. The account blocks me without answering. I didn't get a message from any accounts for a while. One day, when I was closer at work, I was waiting outside for my family member to pick me up. I didn't have my own vehicle and my family would give me rides to and from work. As I was listening to music, waving goodbye to my manager as they drove off, I got a notification on one of my apps. It said, you're disgusting and ugly.

I sighed, rolling my eyes as I opened the message. As I was typing, another message came in that made me stop typing and freeze up. You're all alone. I could kill you right now if I wanted to. No one would ever find you. I backed up against the building. I didn't have keys, and only the manager did, who just left. I looked around through the parking lot, not a car in sight. The streetlights shined dimly around me. My heart started to race as more messages came in. You're so disgusting, you know that. No one will ever fall in love with you. Your family probably won't even miss you.

You're gross. I should just kill you right now. I started to cry, the phone shaking in my hands just as another text came in, a car pulled up in front of me. It was my family member coming to pick me up. I took a deep breath and quickly got into the car. Hey, sorry I'm late, I got stuck in two red lights. Your manager already left? They just left you alone out here? Just drive.

I accidentally screamed at them, tears starting to come down my face. What's wrong? Did something happen at work? I was crying, shaking. They took my phone and looked at it and saw the messages. What? Who's texting you? I don't know who it is. Just drive. I want to get out of here. We went back to their place and they called the police, but I told them not to. I had no idea who they were, where to find them, and to make a police report against them. Instead, they called another family member who works in the IT field. After they heard the whole story, everything I've endured for almost two years, they told me that I should have made new accounts from the beginning of this harassment.

I listened to them and right then and there I made new accounts on all my social media. I worked at that job for another month but my family member had told my manager what had happened so I was never put on closing shifts again. I was only given morning shifts where I clocked out of work when the sun was still out, but I still didn't feel safe. They knew where I worked. My manager understood when I quit. And all the harassment stopped.

To this day, I still haven't received any more of those messages. And now I'm married. I still live in the city and I don't live in that neighborhood anymore. I feel comfortable and I don't feel afraid that this person will find me and stalk me again. But even now, anytime I get a random message from someone who isn't in my friends list, my heart races for just a second. I'm a girl and this happened when I was 20 in the early 2000s. People used landlines and cell phones were not unlimited, obviously. And this happened in a town about an hour away from Sacramento.

My friend was house-sitting for a family that her family were his friends with from church. She was to house-sit in the country just outside of town for a week. They had animals like cats, rabbits, a donkey, and a horse. The family also had dogs too, but the family took the dogs with them. My friend was in charge of feeding the animals and watching the place. She didn't have to get the mail daily because they had this metal lockbox style mailbox down their long driveway. They didn't have any neighbors for miles, just fields of alfalfa, cattle, and corn, so I guess the lockbox was for safety or something. Towards the end of the week, she asked if I wanted to spend the night and keep her company,

and I thought it sounded fun. I had moved out of my aunt and uncle's and got my own apartment, so I told her that I'd pick her up on the way there after I got out of work. We got there at around 9.30pm, grabbing dinner on the way. We went into the barn first thing and fed the animals. It was late for their dinner and they made their hunger known with their animal noises and we made sure that they had water then went inside. The house was this big ranch style house, single story. The living room was to the left as you walked into the home. There was a long hallway directly to the right of the entrance that led to where the bathroom and bedrooms were. Straight ahead was a dining area and to the left

of that was the kitchen area and a patio door. They did not have an open floor plan. In the kitchen on the opposite side from the dining area, there was a long hall with several doors. My friend explained that the wife ran a daycare center out of the house. These rooms were play areas for the kids that she took care of. We didn't bother going over there because we had no interest. We watched some TV, ate our leftovers, and talked about people we knew. As it got later, she turned on the house alarm and said that she didn't like sleeping in other people's beds, so she had been sleeping on the couch and then offered it to me.

She would sleep on one of the two huge recliners that reclined so far back that it was almost flat. The chairs were really comfortable, so I just said that I'd take the chair. I went and laid back in a chair with my blanket. We turned off the TV and talked for maybe 20 minutes in the dark when the motion sensor floodlights started shining through the window, lighting up the room. Now I really have no idea why people in the country think it's okay to not have curtains or blinds because to me that's kind of insane. We both got quiet and Amanda said, maybe it's just one of the cats. Then we started hearing gravel crunch, like a person walking across gravel in the parking area outside. My chair was closest to the window and I

slid carefully down to the floor, clutching the stupid blanket the whole time. The floodlight timed out and my friend slid to the floor too. We laid on our stomachs in the dark, not knowing what to do for a minute. We heard a loud bang and all of a sudden the house alarm started blaring and the floodlights turned on again. It was so loud we covered our eyes and started to panic. I swear I've never been so close to peeing my pants in my life. I began crawling toward the keypad for the security because I've seen the commercials. There's a button you push and a person responds to you in case of an emergency or at least sends the police. The main screen said patio one of two open. Amanda started to cry a little and hit the call assistance

button on the pad and nothing happened. There's no assistance. I asked her where the phone was and she said that there's a phone in the kitchen and one in the parents room down the hall. So our choices were to go to the kitchen, past the windows and next to one of the patio doors or to go down the hall to the parents' room and use the phone there. I asked where the other patio is and she said it was in the daycare part of the house. It was an easy decision. We went inside the parents' room and it was pitch black. I asked her where the phone was and she said, I think we have to turn on a light. I really didn't want to turn on a light but had no choice.

I didn't have a flashlight and I didn't bring my cell phone because I had limited minutes. It was a simpler time and Amanda didn't even get her own cell until after this happened. She turned on the light and we started looking around the room. Not only did these people not have curtains on any window but they didn't even have closet doors. We saw a golf club leaning against the wall by the bed. They probably have it instead of a baseball bat, which is what I had next to my bed at home. We figured that if we hit someone with it, it's going to leave a mark. She grabbed it, and we continued our search for the phone.

Looking at the obvious places, we found a cordless phone stand minus the actual phone. The alarm was still raging. We had a light on, and the person who opened the patio door was bound to notice, is all I was thinking at this point. She asked, should we use the locate phone buttons? I looked at her and responded, yeah, if you want some strange guy coming in here with it and asking if you were looking for something. I'm getting mad that I'm scared and in this situation. Standing there, knowing that we have to go to the kitchen, the house alarms stopped. They got country quiet.

If you lived in the country, you know what I'm talking about. There isn't another golf club for me to grab so I make her go out first, flipping every light on and keeping the doors that we pass in the hall closed. We double check the security panel and it still says patio open. Hit call button and it still doesn't work. Double checking the front door is locked we start for the kitchen. I tell her that we have to check the patio near the kitchen and I grab a big knife that wasn't even close to being sharp from the kitchen and we check the patio door near the kitchen and it's locked. We turn on all the lights, grab the phone and dial 911. The phone isn't a cordless

phone. It's one of the old ones with a cord attached to a wall. My friend is on the phone with the dispatcher telling her what happened and I hear a whistle coming from outside the kitchen window. The thing people don't think about, because I didn't and my thinking that safety was turning on the lights, is while you have the reflection of the inside on the window, people on the outside have a clear view of you. Unless you press your face against the window, that is. I hear the whistle again. It sounds like someone trying to get someone else's attention,

that kind of whistle, but I don't see anything outside, and I'm not pressing my face to the window to see if I'm the person they're whistling for. My friend is still talking to the dispatcher and is crying and saying she doesn't have the address to the house. She hands me the phone and I say, Hello? The dispatcher lady, who sounds annoyed, tells me she needs an address to send the police to. I ask that she just trace the call and she says something like, You're house-sitting. You don't even know where you're at?

Scared, angry, and overwhelmed, I hand the phone back to Amanda and start looking for something with an address in the kitchen. I'm looking in the junk drawer, on the counter, on the refrigerator, fully keeping an eye down the hall that has the daycare rooms knowing that on the other side of their lockbox and then a few seconds later, removes the phone from her ear and stares at me with a blank face. I ask her if they're tracing the call because I cannot find anything with an address. Amanda tells me, she said I hoped the police find you in time and hung up the phone. I was now really scared and angry at the same time. We knew that there were people outside. We knew that the patio door to the daycare area was open. We did not know what to do. We stood in the kitchen silently for what seemed like forever, but it was probably only one minute. I picked up the phone and dialed 411. I told Amanda that

they would have the number for the police department. As calmly as I could, I explained what was happening to us to 411. I included the 911 dispatcher and said that we really needed the phone number of the town's police department directly. Then we heard a loud metallic bang outside the kitchen window by the patio door. It sounded like someone dropped something metal and heavy. Amanda started crying, and I couldn't hold in my fear any longer, so I started crying too. The 411 operator said that they were connecting us and would stay on the line with us after getting upset at the 911 dispatcher on our behalf. A police officer answered the phone and the 411 operator started explaining what was happening to the police. They were asked to disconnect once we had an established connection.

The police asked a few questions and we heard the whistle again outside and floodlights all around the house turned on again. I was too scared to look outside, and we had never turned on the patio light because we had to walk past the patio window to get to the switch. We told the policeman on the phone about the whistle, and he said that several policemen should be showing up shortly and to stay on the phone. We were just outside the town limits and knew that it might take a few minutes. Having an officer on the phone made me feel a little bit better but it was still really scary. He told us that police have arrived

and were coming up the drive. The policeman said to put down the phone and open the door so I did. What I saw was a police pickup truck with spotlights flashing into the pastures that ran along both sides of the drive. Two officers, not with handguns but with shotguns, were walking slowly beside the truck as it came up the long drive. Four officers approached the house and asked us our names. One went to the phone and said that they were here and hung up the phone. They ordered us to stay in the dining room and began searching the house and property. One by one, they returned. The last one came back in through the patio door by the kitchen. He said he searched the barn and the horse scared him, and the horse also looked spooked.

He asked what other animals were in the barn. They told us that they didn't find anyone and that the daycare patio was not locked. There was, however, a broom handle in the track to prevent it from being opened too far. I looked at the patio door that the officer entered through and saw that there was not a broom handle in that one. Then I felt dumb because he just walked through it. They lectured Amanda about not knowing the address of the house that she was supposed to be responsible for and other stuff I don't remember. And after finishing statements, they said they'd stick around and look more and if we wanted to leave, we could. They could lock the bottom lock but not activate

the alarm and we were cool with that. And we left there so fast. We got into my car and went to her mom's. So mentally exhausted, we fell asleep and I went to my office job the next morning. She said she really didn't want to go back to the house, but she had to feed the animals their breakfast. Her mom told her to take her sister and she did. That afternoon, she called me at work. She was really nervous and began to tell me that when they went into the house, there were footprints and poop on the carpet. I said it was probably the cop that checked the barn, and she said that she didn't know or pay attention. Also, she said that when they went into the barn to feed and water the animals in the morning,

someone had tied all the rabbits' legs together in their hutches. They had ten rabbits the kids used for 4-H, and Amanda then continued to say that there was a note with the word lucky scribbled on the back of a pizza coupon that she thought came from the refrigerator door because the flyer was missing a coupon. It took a while for them to untie the rabbits and Amanda asked her mom to find someone else for their church to finish their house sitting. She wasn't going back. She also told the officer what she came back to, but no one was ever caught, and the police never called either of us to update us. This was in the mid-2000s when I was in about second or third grade. I lived in the rural Midwest and went to a decent-sized elementary school. For a few weeks,

a friend of mine I chatted with often was absent from school. I was confused and curious as to why he hadn't been attending school for so many days. And soon I found out from the other kids in the school that he was taking time to rest and recover after a very traumatic experience in his family. I'm not going to reveal names as for one, I don't remember the boy's name and I don't want to reveal any personal info about those names that I do remember. And for the sake of easier reading, I'll call the boy who was absent Mike. The standard chats and occasional gossip I'd shared with friends in the playground and in the cafeteria took a very dark turn once word got out of why Mike was absent. You see, one day, a friend of mine, we'll call him Chad,

told us that Mike's mother was murdered. Hearing later from some of the school employees, my own appearance, I found out that this horrific act was carried out by the boyfriend of Mike's sister. The killer had snuck into the bedroom of his girlfriend's mother. He then either stabbed her to death or slit her throat in her sleep. I don't remember the exact details. I was only around 9 or 10 years old so hearing this was especially shocking. Having something like that happen so close to me, even more so. I'm not quite sure how reliable this is, but according to Chad, the mother didn't want her daughter's relationship to get intimate until she

and her boyfriend were married. She also didn't want them to get married until they had been together for a few years and she had gotten to know the guy well enough to know that he would treat her daughter well. The sister's boyfriend was furious at this and believed that the best way to get what he wants would be to eliminate what he saw as a roadblock. I was disgusted and disturbed at such a selfish, pathetic, and creepy move. This so-called man murdered an innocent woman just because he wanted to get intimate with her daughter and was delusional enough to believe that she would go along with him after he carried out the gruesome act. I remember one day on the way back home from school, my mom pointed out that the funeral

procession was happening around the neighborhood we lived in. It honestly surprised me that it was that close to where we live. I remember seeing Mike in his black suit and tie with a very somber and serious look on his face. At school I remember him being a pretty easygoing, cheerful guy who enjoyed cracking jokes with me. Seeing him like this hurt and I can only imagine how this terror had affected him. Horror like this seems like it would stay with you, but honestly I only just remember it and there's still so many details that I don't quite recall. I don't even remember if Mike ever came back to school for the rest of the semester or not. If he did, I have no idea what I would have

even said to him. What the hell do you even say to someone who had just had their life so cruelly changed at a young age? What do you say to someone whose mother was just taken from them by some heartless monster? Something about my memory of this being hazy unnerves me and I wonder if being hit with this cold reality at such a young age influenced my often cynical outlook of the world. I hope Mike and his family are doing well because no one deserves to have to go through that. This is a story that was only recently unlocked in my memory within the last week or so. I think I forced myself to forget it because it was just so creepy. So flashback to around 2010.

I was about 9 or 10 years old and it was a lovely summer's evening in the Midwest. My buddy, who I'll call Chase for the story, invited me and two of my other friends in the neighborhood over for a sleepover. Like I said, we were at an age where close adult supervision was starting to slip and Chase's house was a great spot for unsupervised shenanigans. Chase was adopted by a relatively older couple. I remember his parents being in their late 50s while most of the rest of ours were in their late 30s or even early 40s. His father was paralyzed from the legs down while serving in the Gulf War and required caretakers and his mom was some kind of business executive who wasn't in town too much. In addition to this,

Chase's only sibling was much older and had already moved out for college by this time, so whenever we were hanging out there, there was almost never any eyes on us. We never did anything bad, but typical stupid stuff you'd imagine kids at that time would do. Shooting airsoft guns, putting all kinds of crazy seasonings into instant ramen, staying up late playing M-rated games that none of us had yet, putting all kinds of crazy seasonings into instant ramen, staying up late playing M-rated games that none of us had yet, all that kind of stuff. Chase's house was also by far the biggest house in the neighborhood too, sitting on top of a hill with a gate, a big long driveway, and a huge yard that surrounded the perimeter

of the house that backed into a wooded area which eventually led into a state forest. This one particular night, Chase has the idea that we should set up a tent in the woods and camp out for the night. While I don't think any of us were jumping out of our skin to do this, we all complied on the condition that we stayed at the edge of the woods so we could use the bathroom and get snacks easily from the house. We set the tent up, laid out our sleeping bags, grabbed as much junk food as physically possible, and hung out in the tent for the night. We goofed around for a few hours even after the sun sets until the sugar high dies off and the unhealthy food settles in. We one by one started to fall asleep. I was usually the first one to crash at sleepovers and tonight was no different

However, this sleep was not for long I get woken up by someone shaking me out of the pitch black As my eyes adjust, the concerned face of my friend comes into focus Before I can chew him out for waking me up, he whispers Do you hear that? I sat up and carefully listened until I hear the noise that he's talking about, noticing another one of my friends was awake too. It was a whistle.

Somebody out in the woods was whistling. Each whistle was drawn out and breathy, followed by another equally drawn out note. Even writing about this now still gives me goosebumps. From the sounds of it, it wasn't that close but not that far either. I'm sure my expression turned to that of horror as my other friend woke the last friend up. We all sit in silence and listen for a minute to try and determine the direction of the whistling. It could have been coming from the house, maybe one of Chase's dad's caretakers decided to stay the night, which didn't usually happen. But it didn't take long to realize that the whistling

was coming from the woods, and not only was it coming from there, but it was getting closer. With that, we were out of there. It probably took us 15 seconds to get our shoes on and sprint to the front porch. We left everything in there, our snacks, pillows, sleeping bags, Nintendo DSes. We didn't dare to go back. Under the light of this heavily illuminated driveway, which was basically a mini parking lot, we all gained a newfound confidence. At this time, we managed to convince ourselves that we weren't scared, so we got our airsoft guns from the garage and started talking trash and shooting into the woods, basically trying to intimidate or shoot whoever was out there. As we were yelling like a bunch of idiots, we weren't able to hear anything, but at some point when we cooled down we listened intently and didn't hear anything. Knowing that, we were satisfied and went to sleep on the floor of his living room after playing a little Xbox.

While that experience was creepy, what was really terrifying was what happened the next morning. We all woke up and started talking about how creepy everything that happened last night was, and under the light of day, made the walk down to the tent. As we got closer, we noticed something looked off about the tent. It had been completely trashed. The rain tarp had been mostly pulled off, and it looked like one corner of the tent had been caved in, like someone broke one of the tent had been caved in, like someone broke one of the poles. Yeah, we had left in a hurry, but it felt hard to believe four ten-year-olds

could do this much damage in that time. Making our way over to the front of the tent, my face dropped when we saw the true extent of the carnage. Everything inside was completely trashed. Our snacks had been dumped out and seemingly stomped on. Several of the sleeping bags and pillows had been thrown into the woods. Chase's DS had been snapped in half. And worst of all, one of the sides of the tent had slits all the way along the side of it, as if some psycho had a stabbing frenzy when he realized that there was nobody in there. All of us said shockingly

little about it, despite all the bravado that we had, boasting about how we scared off whoever was in the woods the previous night and earlier that morning. The four of us packed up the tent, gathered the stuff we could, brought it back to the house, and then our other two friends hopped on our bikes and headed home. Nobody mentioned it to their parents, partly out of fear of trouble and partly to delegitimize what had just happened. Chase's family would have never used that tent again anyway, and I'm sure he just convinced his parents to buy him a new DS and said he lost it. After this sleepover, we all kind of naturally separated as friends.

It was at the end of our summer of 5th grade and Chase ended up going to a private middle school while the rest of us went to a public one, where we were then separated into different cliques. I never thought about the incident again until I ran into one of the other friends there recently when I was back in my hometown visiting family. After catching up, we exchanged numbers, and recently after seeing a Reddit thread about submitting your own scary stories, all of these memories came rushing back. I texted him, asking if he remembers that night, and he called me right after and basically laid out every single detail exactly as I remembered it. Immediately after, I spent the last half hour writing all of this down on my phone. If there's any takeaway from this, it's that you should always stick to

that instant gut instinct that you get when something seems off. Because if it seems like it, it probably is. To be continued... to submit them to my subreddit, r slash let's read official, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast, where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data. Located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much friends, and I'll see you again soon.