The Lets Read Podcast - 266: IT WASN'T HUMAN | 27 True Scary Stories | EP 254

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Thanksgiving, skinwalkers & how one redditor narrowly avoided their end 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, Audio Mix & Cover art: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt Today's episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile

My My father told me a story once, and I'll never forget it for a few reasons. I think it's the first story he told me as a child. It's also the story of how my grandfather died. But honestly, that isn't the reason you hear stories on TV, or sometimes you overhear something in a public place. People talk about ghosts and aliens, and you think to yourself, that isn't real. They're making it up or they're mistaken or they're crazy. Something like that. You just can't believe it until something happens. Something that brings it all together, connects the dots in a way that you didn't think of before. Maybe it happens to you,

or maybe you hear the same story again and again happening to different people. It doesn't take long for the world to become a bit bigger than you thought. As I said, this is a story my father told me, but I never believed it, even though he swore up and down that it was true. It wasn't until I started clicking around the internet that I started to believe. I started to hear other stories just like the one my father told me. It didn't take me long to believe in. The rake. That's not what my father called it, of course. He's never used the internet in his life. He wouldn't know what the consensus is taken to naming it. When he chose to call it something other than it or that thing, he called it Skinwalker. After an old Navajo tale his grandfather told him.

But I'll tell you the story the way he told it to me. We were out hunting one night, killing coyotes for 50 bucks a skin. We lived on a dairy farm in Ohio and sometimes we'd kill a calf. We'd do it every night because we needed the money. Sometimes while we were out, we'd come upon a deer and kill it. Our landlord didn't mind and it could feed our family for a few nights and save us some money. Anyway, we were done making our rounds and heading home, walking because we didn't have a car or a four-wheeler back then, and we'd cut through the woods and that's when we came upon it. Blood everywhere, splattered on the trees, in the grass, in the creek, everywhere.

And at first we figured it was a pack of coyotes. We'd seen it sometimes, they scavenge and then start hunting deer or cattle. The worst was when they bred with feral dogs, but this wasn't like that. When a pack of dogs or wolves or coyotes attack something, they do it right. They'll pick off one that's weak, sick, old, or just small. They'll hunt it, draw it into a corner someplace it can't get out of, and then they'll run it right to the biggest one, the alpha. And that deer will never see that alpha. It might hear it, but it won't see it.

It'll just notice that its throat is gone, and then it'll drop dead. It's quick, it's clean. That wasn't what happened here. Something had run up on a den of deer. Coyotes won't attack a den, and wolves neither because they'd get too much of a fight. There were three, I think. Three bodies just torn apart. You'd see a head here, a leg there, a torso over there. Predators don't do that.

They don't leave behind scraps. What had done this hadn't done it for food. It had done it for fun. But we didn't know that. We saw a bunch of carcasses and we think it's something that we've got to take care of. I remember my dad telling me to go home. He thought it was a pack of feral dogs, but I wasn't leaving him and I damn sure wasn't walking through two miles of woods alone with nothing but a.22 and a pocket knife. I was only 13 at the time so a.22 rifle was about the only gun I could reliably use. Dad had the shotgun and he wasn't going anywhere without it. It took me a while to convince him but finally we began tracking whatever did that. It wasn't hard either. We just followed the blood.

Either that thing bled a deer before it got away or it dragged one for a mile. I don't know. I know that I'd never seen my dad scared before that night. We started hearing noises. I've been in a lot of woods in my life. I've been all over the world and I ain't never heard noises like I heard that night. I heard things screaming. Deer and fox and rabbits and raccoons and birds. Just scared. Now keep in mind, this is maybe 12 or 1 o'clock. Except the fox and some birds, nothing was supposed to be awake. But they weren't just awake. They were moving. I saw flocks of birds that night

fly straight into trees just trying to get out of there. We came upon a pack of coyotes, nearly shot a couple thinking that it was what we were looking for. But then we saw that they were running towards us. They ran right past us, didn't even notice. And then some deer did the same. And then some rabbits, squirrels, foxes, even a couple of wild hogs. These things were supposed to be eating each other, and the only thing they cared about was getting out of there. We should have put it together that maybe whatever we were tracking,

it wasn't something we were supposed to see, and it wasn't something we could kill. I don't know why we didn't just go home. I guess we were curious. I think that was my dad's nature, to go toward trouble, to fight. And knowing what I knew about what my father did during the war, my nature was to stay close to him. We finally get into an open valley. It was normally a soy field, but it wasn't in season, so it was just flat dirt. We saw the tracks. Then a lot of the animals fleeing the forest had paved over the land. But where the deer blood was, nothing had taken a single step,

like they were leaving it for us to find. The tracks were shallow. Whatever it was, couldn't have weighed more than 100 pounds. But that didn't mean much. A bobcat weighing around 40 pounds nearly tore my damn throat out once, and all that means is that it's quick and it's hard to hit. So we follow the tracks, and it doesn't take long for us to find where it is. There's this old schoolhouse that sits on the top of the hill. Half of it had been ripped out by a tornado and nobody lived there, not for a long time. We caught homeless people in there sometimes or druggies looking for a safe place to shoot up. We figured maybe that was it. Maybe it

was just some sick kid riding a high, but we didn't think that for long. We get within 50 yards and we hear this noise, a screeching kind of sound. It was sort of made up of two different sounds, one a high-pitched screech, another was a low-pitched growl. It was sort of made up of two different sounds. One a high pitched screech, another was a low pitched growl. It was making both at the same time. We get within 20 yards and we hear this sound. I can remember thinking that it sounded like paper being torn apart while someone was swinging water in a bucket back and forth. Dad looks at me, kneels down and whispers, I gotta stay behind him cause we're about to corner him. Any animal will fight when it's cornered especially when it's a predator,

but we can tell by the tracks that it's just one. He tells me it's probably a single feral dog, probably rabid. The plan is to sneak up on it while it's eating, shoot it and then keep shooting until it doesn't move anymore and then slit its throat. If it gets to dad while it's eating, shoot it, and then keep shooting until it doesn't move anymore, and then slit its throat. If it gets to Dad, it's my job to shoot it or stab it to get it off of him. So he walks up, and I'm right behind him,

just a tad to his side so I can see what it is. I wish to this day that I hadn't. It was leaning over a carcass, tearing off its flesh and throwing what it doesn't nibble at its side. There's blood all over the brick, glistening in the moonlight. It's pale white, human looking, but not quite human. It had arms and legs like a human, but it sat like a monkey hunched over. Its hands weren't normal. It had long fingers with claws

at the end. So we see that and my dad hesitates. He wasn't about to fire on a person, so he clears his throat to try to get it to turn around. I swear to God, all the noise just ceased. I ain't never heard true silence before that and not after it. But for two seconds, nothing. Nothing made any noise which made it all the louder when it turned around, made this shrill cry and jumped on dad. He got a shot off, I think he missed it. If he hit the thing, it didn't mine, but it was on him, tearing parts of him off. I start shooting it with a 22 point blank but it barely

bled. The thing. I got off 5 rounds and then I started hitting it with the gun butt. It wasn't budging. It didn't even register that I was there. It clawed at my dad, taking off bits of his flesh. It started on his torso, ripping off the skin and then it moved up. It tore off his throat, his nose, his eyes. It scalped him. Then it started digging in and ripping off the bottom half of his jaw, the little bones in that tube in your neck, and then his ribs. I don't exactly remember what happened, but somehow my dad's knife ends up in the thing's shoulder, and my dad ends up on my back.

I'm running. And by God, I'm running faster than I've ever run before or after, and I know it's following me. I end up back in the woods, opposite the ones we've been in. I'm heading towards my landlord's house because it's a half mile away. I can hear this thing screeching and moaning. I hear the tree branches crack and get thrown around. It sounds like someone taking an axe to every single tree I pass. It's cracking so loud and often but I just I'm not looking back. Finally I trip into gravel. I look up and there's my landlord and a bunch of his buddies drinking around a campfire. I scream and cry and they come over. I'm telling them to call an ambulance and he looks at me and I'll never forget what he said.

What's that on your back? He asked me. And just as he said it, he saw one of those god awful flannel shirts my dad wore everywhere. It was what was left of my dad. Most of his head, his torso, but nothing after the waist. Suddenly we hear it screeching, and he grabs me. My dad gets thrown on the ground, and I'm fighting him, crying, cause I think we can still save him somehow. But my dad had been gone before I even picked him up. He has to pick me up and throw me inside before I come with him. He and his buddies were all inside and they're locking doors and getting guns ready. The landlord looks at me asking, what happened? What happened? But I just don't know what to tell

him. He pieced enough of it all together to understand that there was something dangerous out there. All the lights in the house are on and someone calls the cops, and they'll be there in 15 minutes. We look outside and see it walk in front of the fire they'd made. I don't know what it is. One of them says it looks like an ape, and suddenly something goes through the window. We shoot at it, but it ain't the thing. It's my landlord's dog. Just the body though, not his head or legs, and we start pushing things in front of the door and windows when we hear

something in the garage. I remember one of his friends saying that the doors were open, and we hear metal and glass just getting ripped apart. We put a couch and a TV in front of the door to the garage. It banged around some more, but then it got quiet. Not silent like it was before. We could hear it move around some, and the guys were talking, making sure the guns were ready. Someone hands me a pistol, and no sooner did I cock the hammer back did we hear something shatter upstairs. Then we heard it screech again except now it was louder and it didn't echo and fade out because it was inside with us. We all rushed to the one door leading upstairs and we got to it just as that thing did.

It opened it just a bit and four or five men just slammed into it. It got its hands through. Someone with a shotgun took care of that, put the barrel right up to its wrist and pulled the trigger, cut its hand clean off. That only made it angry though. It started pushing on the door, clawing. We were on one side, pushing as best as we could and it was on the other doing the same. That wood just wasn't going to hold so someone tells us to keep our heads down. Suddenly the top half of the door is just gone. My ears are ringing and there are splinters everywhere. Two or three of them just unloaded on the top of that door. I don't really know where

it went after that. The police showed up. I was still glued to that door, what was left of it, and the sun was up before they got me off it. They put me in a hospital for a while, and a lot of people talked to me, but I didn't talk back. Not for a long, long time. When we got back home, I got a job from the landlord working on the farm. We didn't talk much, not about that thing. But I signed up for the army when I was 19, and he sat me down to drink some scotch as a send off. I asked him right away what the police told him.

The story they went with was a wild animal, probably a wolf or maybe a bear that had migrated north or something. I asked him about how they could say that when they had the hand. He looks at me, stunned. He tells me that hand never made it back to the station. The cop who had it in his car wrecked and drove into a tree, died on impact. The hand was never found, probably taken away by an animal. And the cops, when they would acknowledge the hand even existed at all, said that it simply was the paw of a bear that looked like a human hand. I never ended up talking to that landlord again. I guess he went missing when I was in basic, and the cops never found him. They said he owed some people some money and just ran away, but I don't think it's that simple.

I never went back to those woods. I wouldn't, even if I had the whole goddamn US Army at my back. And that was my father's story of the rake, or skinwalker. I'm still not sure what to think. But as I grew older, and when my mother died, I don't think my father felt that he had anything left, and he might as well settle old scores. He went back into those woods, I guess, and he never came back. The FBI was called and they did a show and dance for everyone involved, but I knew that they weren't really looking. And they never did find him. I'm 21 and a college senior from Connecticut.

I live in a semi-rural area about 20 minutes from the closest supermarket and fast food. I go to school in Washington, D.C. Not the nice part either, but the part where substance users are a problem and cops are reassuring rather than troublesome. I've definitely seen some things in my day. It would be good to mention here that I'm not some glandular freak. I'm 6 foot 1 and 240 pounds, most of it muscle, and lord knows that I could drop 15 pounds or so. I love to smoke, drink, and eat. Sue me. And being the good student that I am, I picked a real major, accounting. I interned for a mid-sized PR firm, doing accounting work and getting paid $20 an hour. College is expensive, so I deliver pizzas at night after the office closes.

It's a cheap sort of pizza place with an absurdly large delivery radius, around 20 minutes from my house and 5 minutes from the beach. My place is north of there and would deliver probably another 15 minutes past my house. I'm actually typing this at work in between examining the fine print on our client contracts to ensure that we are charging them every penny. Believe me, they do everything they can to short us. But anyway, basically the further north you go from the pizza place, the more countryside it gets. I work until close and this happens at around 9.45pm. I'm in the back folding pizza boxes like a good little boy and the counter girl comes back with a delivery slip.

She tells me that this customer sounded weird on the phone, kind of like he was talking through a fan or through his hands, and that he was kind of gurgling. My Washington DC experience instantly makes me think of some user if you catch my drift, although around here, it's way more likely to be some benzo freak automatically assuming some weird interaction will occur. I look at the address. It's basically in the middle of nowhere. I'm a little mad because I don't want to drive that far, but screw it. Not to mention it's the weirdest ticket I've ever seen. The guy ordered a large pizza with anchovies, ground beef, ham, sausage, pepperoni, etc. Literally $15 worth of extras on top of his pizza i go to ask the counter girl if this

is right and she says she thinks so she couldn't really make it out though so she said she did her best she's about 16 years old so i cut her some slack maybe she was daydreaming while she took the call so i'll just give them a call back to be sure. I dial the phone and it rings 5, 10, 20, 30 times but no one answers. I hang up and call again. This time the phone goes right to the number you have dialed does not have a voicemail box that has been set up yet. Goodbye. Okay then.

My manager decides to just make the pizza as ordered and we would proceed from there. I go out to deliver a separate pizza to a hilariously big guy and a couple who invited me in for drinks, but I don't drink or smoke when I'm working. I was hoping by the time I got back that someone else delivered that pizza order, and surprise surprise no one did, and it was my turn again to pick up an order and begrudging, I take the pizza and get in my car. I enter the address in my phone. It's on a side street adjacent to a park locals call Open Space, which despite the name is actually about 500 acres of straight woods. It's about 25 minutes away, basically the edge of our range.

I put on some dubstep and crank my turbo subby while taking off towards this road. Now, if you're not from a rural area, this can be hard to explain. Winter in the woods is scary. There's never a single sound, ever, unless there's something larger than a cat walking around. It's just you in complete silence. Finally, I make it to the address. There are a few houses on the street, but they sit on probably five acres, so they're spaced out a fair amount. I'm looking for number 1134. I pass 1130, then a long stretch of road of nothing,

and then it picks up again at 1144. What the heck? I just want to get this over with and get the next delivery without getting attacked by some pill head over something as small as a pizza. I try calling their number again, and it rings and rings and then stops ringing. Wait a minute. Someone picked up, but there's no voice. Instead Instead I hear a buzzing or a humming sound It hooked up to my car stereo and it's getting louder and louder until I just hang up because I don't want to ruin my speakers The windows are fogging up at this point I'm pulled over between two of these houses right when I roll the windows down And I am overcome by this odor of decaying trash like driving through Newark,

New Jersey. It's so gross. I put the car in first and start pulling towards the next house trying to escape it. At the end of the driveway, there's a stanchion with a light on top. The plan was to pull into this house and knock and ask if maybe they gave me the wrong number over the phone. That would make sense for these kinds of people. I'm probably a hundred feet away when I see someone step out of the darkness and into the light at the bottom of the driveway. I sigh. Thank goodness. It's the guy that ordered. I'm expecting the guy to be all over the place, leaning over, acting completely out of his mind, but he's actually pretty calm. I stop the car about 10 feet away from him.

He's wearing a big black coat that looks three times too big for him, even though he's probably got five inches on me. I don't look right at him at first. I grab the pizza and step out of the car. Then I grab the tickets and prepare a change if he gives cash. I say to him, Hey, sir, sorry about the wait and for all the calls I made. Delivery's pretty far. There's no response from him. I realize that I should be watching him, considering the red flags, and the smell is extremely pungent, but I know it's not trash day. I get the pizza on the roof of my car and

he's standing there under the light on the opposite side. I finally pay enough attention to get a good look at him. The guy is basically a giant. He's wearing no shoes and he has ripped up jeans and there are stains everywhere. I try to get a good look at his face and his eyes seem to be sunken in. I can't even see the actual pupils with the light from here. It's like they're just black craters. I'm getting really sketched out at this point because the guy still hasn't moved or said a word. I stop the process and stare at him. He's staring right back at me with those freaky eyes. His head is sort of bobbing side to side but not in any sort of fluid

sense at all. Kind of like a car door. Like how it stops halfway open and then you give it another shove and it stops at the all the way point. I watch this head do this with no real pattern for about 10 seconds. I'm starting to get more uneasy between the stench, his head movement, and the eyes and him still completely ignoring me. I stand frozen and so does he. Without breaking eye contact, I take my phone out of my pocket and hold it level with the roof so I can look at the guy and my phone at the same time. Curiosity overflowing, I decide to go to the recent calls on my phone and I redial his number. The phone starts ringing, but I don't hear it anywhere. Wait a second, I do hear it. It's coming out of the quiet of the woods. I can hear a faint distant cell

phone ringing about 50 yards away in the woods,. I'm kicking myself at this point, almost soiling myself. The guy's just standing there, still doing the head thing, but I swear to God I see him smiling. Finally, I get the courage to speak. Uh, can you please come get this? Also, I think you might have dropped your phone or something when you were hiding a potty or whatever in the woods. I laugh nervously, still thinking maybe this guy just dug too deep into the prescription pills, and I see his mouth open, head still bobbing, feet planted on the ground. He makes a sort of low, guttural, quick grunt, and then a high grunt, and then a low grunt, and they are sort of soft, kind of like someone clearing their throat.

At this point I'm ready to book it to the driver's seat if I have to, and just as I go to redial that phone again, I hear him talking. That phone's not mine. The pause between the phone's not and mine was way too long. Phone's not literally sounded like one word. Mine came off as an octave higher. My mind is in DEFCON 5, full on panic mode. My knees are weak and I'm literally about to pass out.

I push the pizza to the far side of the roof away from me and I finally muster out, Sir, you're freaking me out. I got a 45 and less than $20 on me. Just take this so I can leave. When I say this, his head bobbing stops. His eyes are dark and burning a hole through me, and he opens his mouth again. It was his. What? I ask stunned. It was his. The phone was his.

The guy starts coming towards my car. Not a step, but like one huge muscle spasm that propels him forward. The phone was his. He repeats. I'm on the verge of tears at this point. The guy jerk jumps again, now closer to the car. Phone's not his anymore. I blubber wordlessly, then gather myself and scream.

I'm going to call the cops, man, if you just don't get out of here. I see this guy's smile, that creepy smile, and without moving his mouth, I hear him saying a completely different voice, a voice I've never heard before. Go away. Stop following me. I will call the police. In another big jerky motion, the thing reaches forward, takes the pizza off the roof, and places a couple of round things that I later identify as quarters on the roof. They're surrounded by this dark liquid that spreads over the roof. I don't even think. Just get in the car and peel out down the road. I leave the hot sleeve for the pizza too. I leave

everything. Don't even close the door all the way. I get down the road going about 80 for a quarter mile then pull a u-turn because I don't want to get even more lost with that psycho out there. I whip down the road past the place where I had just been and he's gone. I finally get to the end of the road and there's a stop sign to merge with the main road. I look right to make sure it's clear then I look left. That thing's face is 12 inches from my own where I turn. I tactically have a heart attack and peel off down the road. I finally make it back to the pizza place, shaking like crazy. I smoke just to calm down,

which I never do when I'm working. I walk in the front door of the pizza place. Hey, a guy at the open space house just called back. He said you forgot some food, but he only ordered the pizza, right? He wants you to come back. And I start crying. I look at my phone, which had been thrown through the car when I was driving. There are 14 missed calls from his number. All the voicemails are empty except the last one. All I can hear is ragged breathing and those low,

grunting sounds. I'm bawling my eyes out in front of this hot counter girl, but I don't even care. I sit for ten minutes trying to calm down and then I remember the change that he had left on the roof. I steadily go out to the car and turn on a flashlight. The roof of the car was covered in the most viscous, weird fluid, but it smells like copper. I throw up. In the panel gap between the trunk and the end of the rear window, I find the quarters. They're covered in that same gross maple syrup goop, and they're stuck to it along with the fluid. I can now see what appears to be a soft little chunk of tissue.

I go to open my car and my veins turn to ice. There is a single line of this fluid going from the front quarter panel to the driver's side door. That freaking thing tried to open my door when it was next to me at the stop sign. I go back in, crying harder now. I tell the counter girl to try and call the number again for me. She tries over and over, but the phone goes right to voicemail. The next morning I give the number to my uncle, who was a police captain a few towns over. He says the number is a burner phone paid in cash, basically untraceable and it appears to be turned off. Now, I sleep in the woods in the Ozarks of Arkansas, to be exact, with some new gear that I had been saving for months. Boots, a tack vest, even a mil-spec gas mask.

It was like Christmas being where I was and wanting to field test some personal prototypes. I had my nugget on hand. It wouldn't do much against the big bears, but it would ruin any snake, stray dog, or cougar's day right to hell. I had a bunch of strippers and two clippazines I built, and I wanted to field test them in my pouches. I got some rolled up targets stuck in my loops and a light complement of survival gear, compass, topographical map, thermal blanket, extra undies, MREs, canteen, and camelback, the works. Basically prepared for the inevitable invasion of any type. I was having a great time romping around the woods, playing with my field of view and the mask, testing the reliability of the clippazines, and generally having fun. I wandered next to a creek bed and decided it was time to practice my guerrilla tactics.

It was late summer, early fall, so no danger of getting my gear wet in the non-existent stream. My stuff was in more danger of water damage from my own sweat. After triple checking my safety I proceeded to do a series of screen slides and uphill hustles in full survivalist gear. Needless to say I got winded really quick. I stood panting in that dry stream bed and decided to check my position with my topographical map and compass so I could set a course for home. In the middle of reorienting myself, I caught wind of a smell. At first I thought it was my sweat, but the funk quickly evolved into something worse. A dark undercurrent of rot, deep notes of animal musk, a bassy score of raw garbage punctuated by garlicky timpani, and a thick black score of something between skunk and onion sludge. I went into straight operating mode, popped an addy from

my pouch for extra focus, pulled the clippazine from my nugget. It seemed to be working fine, but if I was going to have to shoot something, I prefer not to have any risk of jamming. The smell made me gag and I nearly puked up that Addi tablet. The smell was that strong at this point. Whatever the source was, it was definitely mobile and getting closer to me. Screw it. I pulled on my mask from around my neck and over my face. It helped a bit, but the mask wasn't 100% airtight around the joints so some of the smell got in. I walked cautiously and slowly along the creek bed toward where the slope was shallowest, listening for twigs snapping or animal sounds from above me. I definitely heard something shuffling around up there and it sounded bigger than what my nugget was up for. It was a near-constant snuffle, grunt, and sloppy, uncoordinated crunching around bark and leaves,

all mixed with a smell. My mind immediately jumped to Big Bear. And I mean big, possibly even rabbit if it smelled like that. And let me tell you something about Ozark Big Bears, straight from my dad's mouth. My dad's lived in the Ozark for 58 years and in that time, only two things have managed to shake him. The challenge of fatherhood and the big bears. According to him, the native black bears were hunted to near extinction between the 40s and 50s. And to correct this, the ANRC, NRCS, and Arkansas Fish and Game Commission released 250 bears into the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains. Their website insists that they were all black bears.

My dad insists that that is bullcrap. According to him, more than a few of the bears released there were brown bears. They inbred with a few remaining local bears and the reintroduced blacks. Thanks to a little phenomenon known as hybrid vigor, the resulting offspring were bigger and meaner than their parents. And screw me, were they fertile. When I asked him to prove it, he simply left the summer porch, went upstairs, and came back with a manila folder labeled bb he pulled out a couple of polaroids and asked me to take a look i saw a big black and brown something rooting around a clothesline dad directed my attention to the clothesline about 50 feet away from us between the two poles about five to six feet above the ground it was the same clothesline in the picture

the something shoulder was about a fart's length under the the same clothesline in the picture. The something's shoulder was about a fart's length under the line, despite being further in the background. I looked through the other pictures. One was rooting through the trash, another was barely concealed by trees, all of them slightly shaky. Detail was hard to come by, but I was convinced. My dad told me two things about how to avoid getting attacked by the big bears. Big bears are dumb as crap, something to do with them being hybrid. This makes them more dangerous than other bears because they're not afraid of you. This also makes them smell like crap and you'll smell them coming a mile off. If you smell a big bear get inside, get upstairs but take the 12 gauge and some deer slugs. If you do smell a big bear, get inside, get upstairs, but take the 12 gauge and some deer slugs.

If you do see a big bear and you ain't home or you ain't got a shotgun loaded with slugs, hide up a tree if you can. They're faster than you, so there isn't any use running. I tell you all of this because after 23 years, I'd finally managed to prove my dad wrong about something. Well, half wrong. There's something in the Ozarks that matches my dad's pictures of big bears, but whatever they are, they sure as heck aren't bears. So back to my story, I would have stayed in that creek bed and waited for that something to screw off on its own business, but the light was already slanting through the trees. As bad as my dad made Big Bear sound,

I was sure as heck not wanting to be stuck with a god dang rabid one after dark and instead I opted to climb up the opposite edge of the creek bed. I had to scramble over some big rock outcroppings and half stand half lean against the slope of the hill but I figured that if anything that would just be an extra layer of protection against that something out there. I'd gotten a few glimpses of it over my shoulder as I climbed but this was my first good look at it. I just couldn't stop staring. Like I said in my previous post this was not a bear. It was bear-like but not a bear. It was bear-like, but not a bear. I've been into sci-fi my entire life, and even got Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials from my awesome late stepmom. So when I saw this thing

for the first time, my freaking nerd brain immediately went, oh, a solidor. Except it wasn't. It looked like a solidor. A grizzly bear and a sloth had a three-way on top of a garage heap to make it. It had a long prognathous snout like a stubby trunk, with big angular shoulders, feet that looked like manhole covers covered in dirty matted fur, and a body like a furry blimp. Its fur was the same charcoal black and dark glow brown that I saw in the pictures and full of mats and clumps of dirt I mean I stared at it for so long drinking in those details trying to make

sense of it for two and a half minutes and it somehow didn't notice me Jesus these things were dumb I remember feeling a twinge of relief if it hadn hadn't noticed me yet, trying to scrabble out of a rocky gully, it probably won't notice me sneaking away from it. It's going to sound ridiculous, but I farted then. The something stopped. My breath stopped. And my heart stopped. The only sound in those woods at that moment was my freaking fart echoing

and the sound of my nose blistering under the something's odiferous assault. It was like slow motion when the thing turned its head, looked back at me, sniffed the air, and stood up. It had been shuffling around crouched low to the ground the entire time. What I thought were shoulder blades were its freaking elbows It could tie its shoes without bending But its paws probably would have crushed its Air Jordans to bits They were like trash can lids I sniffed the air again and coughed or barked like it was asking me a question It sounded like gorp

I swear on my mom, that's what it sounded like Gorp So there I was. The idiot who didn't listen to his dad. The awkward cringe lord who freaking farts when he's trying to sneak away from a freaking gorp. I aimed at it in center mass, and I fired. It didn't thwock into the gorp because, hey, if you're gonna die, might as well give your killer a stupid name in your head, right? Instead, the shot thwomped, if that makes sense.

There was a puff of dirt and hair when it thwomped. And bless my luck, the gorp actually flinched from the impact. I waited to see blood. I guess the gorps are so covered in nasty flea-ridden hair mats that, over time, their poor hygiene gave them natural body armor because I didn't see any red at all. What it did do was rear up and gorth at me, a low growl that had my colon deciding that it was a warning because it was producing bricks enough to construct a barricade. I worked the bolt and fired another shot, this time at its ugly sloth, bear, elephant looking face. And this time it did thwock and so did the dirt a few feet to the thing's left because it

ricocheted off its skull. The thing stood there staring at me like it was too dumb to realize that it could have just stood in the stream bed and grabbed me by my face while I pelted it with useless bullet after bullet. I yelled at it and fired a third shot in any direction at all, trying to scare it off. The gorp or gorth or big bear or whatever it was dropped to all fours, lurching forwards towards me. Then I did a 180 and shuffled away. It worked. I stood there until the sky turned blue to orange before I

snapped out of it and tactically retreated back home. When I got back, I told my dad the story. I probably should have mentioned that I was visiting him for a few days. He could probably smell a big bear on me so it was no use lying to him. When I got to the part about what the big bears really were, he refused to believe me. Then he got pissed at me, locked the doors and camped out upstairs for the rest of our visit. I had to freaking bring him beer from downstairs when he started to talk. The weird thing is, as scared as he was and as weirded out as I was seeing him that scared, I wasn't scared myself. I remember that very clearly, not being scared at all.

I guess you could say I was just too interested or curious to be scared because if I was scared, I would have just bolted away. And I'd probably be typing this from inside of a year-old gorp turd. If I had to guess, that Adderall I popped probably kept me from switching into run-home-scared-to-mama mode. Well, that's how I met a gorp and lived. It was around November of last year and I had just moved to Washington State, being new to the area. I liked the woods, so a few friends of mine, who were huge in-a-woods fiends, decided to take me out to a secluded spot. What the hell, I thought. I'll do it. I need some time away from work anyway. I got the weekend off, packed my bag, cleaned the rifle and headed

over to my friend's house. We ended up about 25 or 30 miles away from the Canadian border in this forest that seemed to go on forever. I was really digging it because my home state didn't have anything like this. There were six of us and two dogs, a Labrador and a Rottweiler. Each person also had either a hunting rifle or a shotgun with a handgun, except for me. We parked our cars on this tiny dirt road used by game wardens or border patrol and hiked about four miles into the woods. By this time, it was already starting to get a little dark. We decided to build a fire right away so we could set up tents. Two of the group and one of the dogs went out to gather wood while the rest of us started setting up the tent. It was one of those huge 6-8 person ones. November gets cold up there but the tent was set up in about 15 minutes

and the trio still weren't back. We said screw it and started a fire with some branches from around the site. We started hearing crashing noises headed our way like someone was running their butts off. The two guys came barreling through, wide eyed and the dog was nowhere to be seen. They started yammering on about seeing one of the other guys out in the woods acting weird so they started trying to get close. And every time they got close though he would just move away. They said at one point he just disappeared and then popped up not 10 feet behind them. They also mentioned a really bad rotten meat and spoiled milk smell popping up around them. They tried asking what was up but there was no answer And then apparently he took off, sprinting like Usain Bolt into the woods

The dog took off after him, barking its head off And the two dudes lost both the guy and the dog pretty soon And the smell started disappearing as well Far off, they heard a weird screeching followed by a really loud dog's yelp Then the smell came back with vengeance Far off, they heard a weird screeching followed by a really loud dog's yelp. Then the smell came back with vengeance, this time with what they described as mad giggling. They got out of there and back to the camp. And they got really angry at the dude, but all of us who were there vouched for the guy,

and so pretty soon we were all weirded out but still thought that it was just this really messed up elaborate joke. I said as much and got yelled at and then had, well, where the heck is the dog then, tossed at me. Good point. And at this point though the sun was already well on its way down so we built the fire up and brought out some Coleman lanterns as well. All of us huddled around the fire, eating MREs and our guns were at hand. About 15 minutes after dark, the remaining dog, the Rottweiler, kind of perked up and started growling, and I mean, they were really aggressively growling as well. The smell popped back up, and the guys were not wrong about that smell. I had smelled rotten deer carcasses

that have smelled fresher than this. Weird groaning started up and you could hear branches and leaves cracking around the perimeter of our camp. The noping intensified all around and the dog was going ballistic so one of the guys with a shotgun, Greg, stood up and fired off three rounds of buckshot randomly into the woods. This hellacious screech came out of the woods and started moving away from us fast, and the smell dissipated as well. We waited about an hour and then decided to try and get some sleep with two people on guard at all times. The first watch was me and another guy, Victor. The dog was chilling around the fire as well and two hours in, nothing happened so we woke up Greg and Tom for their turn. After being asleep for a little while, I woke up to that smell and Greg was yelling his head off.

We got up and headed outside. Greg was looking around the edge of the woods with a spotlight and calling out Tom's name. I asked what happened. They had been sitting there when they heard one of the guys from earlier calling out from the woods. The dog started growling and rushed the spot and Tom followed after. The dog went through some bushes and he lost him so Tom followed him into the woods. Greg had been yelling for him when he heard Tom begin to say something before he was cut off. I can't leave him out there. So we all put on some clothes, grabbed a flashlight or a spotlight for each person and our guns and headed out. By this time the smell was everywhere and was making most of us rather nauseous, but we kept going because we wanted to find Tom.

We found some of his tracks, but lost the trail when they just stopped. Literally no other footprints after a while and none leading back the way he'd come. One of the guys at the back was shining his light around and kind of stopped and made this sort of weird noise then started yelling, You freaking jerk jerk i've been worried sick about you the rest of the group walked over to look and there was tom standing a good 20 feet away but he was standing very wrong are you okay buddy you need some help he just stood there deadpan and slowly nodded yes. A few of us walked over and put an arm around his shoulders to kind of support him.

We noticed that he reeked and the dude hadn't even been out here for a full day. Now laughs abound except for him, and we thought nothing of it except worried that maybe he fell and hit his head or something. Back at the camp, we tried to lay him down, but he just refused to. So we let him stay outside by the fire. A couple of us went to sleep, but Greg, Vic, and I decided to stay up and keep an eye on him. Watching him, he did weird jerk muscle spasm type things every now and then, very creepy stuff. We thought that it might be something serious. He was mostly quiet and slow to respond to things until it came to food. We gave him an MRE to eat and he only ate the meat out of it. We shrugged it off and then he got up and started moving around, very jerky-like, looking towards the woods. He asked us if we wanted to come into the woods with him for firewood.

Besides the fact that it was pitch black out, besides the fire and also the huge stack of firewood that we collected on the way back, it wasn't all that weird. He jerked something like a shrug before walking weirdly into the woods and at this point we were on guard and didn't try to stop him. Greg got up a few minutes later to step into the tent for something so I was outside with Vic when the smell hit my nose like a ton of bricks and I gagged. Then I started hearing some sort of gibbering and giggling. I'd never been more freaked out in my life and you could tell that Vic was feeling the same. Greg came out in time to hear it really well and then went inside to wake everyone up. He froze at the tent flap and then started cursing, which woke everyone up.

I didn't know why he was cursing, but it was working. When they were all up and awake, he counted everyone and you could see him turn white. What's up, dude? Apparently while he was inside, he did a quick body count and there were four bodies inside. Someone or something had been chilling in our tent without us realizing that it had gotten in. We lost it hard at that moment and then everyone started asking where Tom was. At this time, the gibbering gets louder, and you can hear a bunch of nonsense moving through the woods. We hear Tom's voice calling at us from the woods to come help him, but it's all off-key, and every now and then he would start giggling.

We built the fire up and sat around it with all the lanterns on full and weapons at hand until the sun started coming up. As soon as it was enough to see, we put the fire out and packed our stuff and made for the vehicles. We started hearing the giggling and the smell returned and we just got out of there back for the car. We got there and there were scratches all over them and most of of the windows were smashed, and the seats were ripped to shreds. We just needed them babies to run, so we tossed the keys into the ignition and heard the sweet glorious sound of an internal combustion engine starting up. We tossed our stuff in, got in, and sped out of there. We didn't talk about it for a few months, and most of us didn't even admit that it happened. One of the guys with us told us later that he'd seen Tom at the edge of the woods staring at us as we left and apparently he had this very creepy grin on his face and I

believe him. I know that I'll never go camping that far away again without at least a lot more people than six, but I believe that was my first kill coyotes for that sweet, sweet fur. I grabbed my bare-bones basic AR-15 that I got for cheap. I like the way an AK slings a fix so i get out a sling point to put on the barrel i slung it on my right side around my neck messenger bag style and took my atv up to a cabin on the mountain upon arriving i took the key to my atv and started looking around i've been throwing squirrel and rabbit guts into the woods to attract predators. Checking my bait, I found it all gone and a strange feeling persisted. The guy who lives

on the mountain just down the road left in his car just as I decided that I should look around in the woods. Every time I stepped, I kept thinking that I heard another footstep shuffling through the grass and brush. I saw a stick-figured shape thing at a distance a little bit down the hill from me, and I sort of waved at it and it slipped behind a tree. I thought, okay, goodbye, and walked back to the cabin, deciding to sit around and just drink for a while. I started hearing coyote yelps and stuff in the distance so I got my gat ready to blast a couple of fools. I sat with the lights off on the porch but nothing came by. Then the yelping turned into a distant,

Help me. I looked over to the neighbor's house and the lights were off. It didn't click that he left and I got up and listened. Help me. Help me. I thought, oh god, he broke his leg and is stuck in the woods with coyotes or something. I got close enough into the woods to tell that it was on an ATV trail and I decided to take my ATV and AR driving towards the person saying help me when I came to a U-shaped dip in the path. Without hitting my brakes I just coasted down it. I heard something right in front of me on the trail scream help me and I freaked out trying to turn.

I ended up flipping my ATV and I can't really remember but I blacked out for a minute and woke up under the ATV with it pinned on top of me. I sat still and waited for my eyes to adjust before feeling around. My left leg was pinned under the ATV and I tried pushing it but I couldn't get it off. It's like I got a hundred pounds heavier in a couple of seconds. The sling around my neck told me that I still had a rifle. I dragged it to me, realizing my arm was bleeding in the meantime. I checked over the gun. The handguard was messed up and the stock was cracked,

but it appeared to still be functional. I've got thirty rounds to keep me safe until the night's over or someone finds me, and I sat and listened closely to the sounds of the forest before I heard something shuffling in the grass. That silence is everything. It's dead quiet, and I don't think I've ever felt more fear than I have in this moment. I heard it shuffling around. Help me. Help me. I didn't know if I should respond or just sit in silence. It shuffling got closer and something appeared over the ATV, like if you had fallen at a bar and the bartender sort of looked at you funny. This thing looked like it was nine feet tall, frozen solid. I twiddled my fingers, reaching for my gun,

brought it to my shoulder, and sat there, pointed at whatever this thing was. I didn't want to look at it because I just felt so much fear. Help me. I heard it again. I heard it climbing over the ATV. I looked away, but something grabbed my face. My mind went completely blank, looking for the trigger, but I couldn't find it. Slowly it moved my head over and I was face to face with this thing. It looked like how almost everyone describes them. A golem that had done crack, carved up its face with sunken cheeks and deep eyes. To this day, I've never smelled anything quite as bad as the breath from that thing. I felt the flash hider on my AR bump into something and I remembered that I had it aimed at the thing.

My brain rebooted and I screamed as loud as I could. It screamed back. I started yanking, not pulling or squeezing the trigger as fast as I could. The gun was going off and my ears started to ring. It grabbed my hair and started slamming my head into the ground as fast as it could, still pulling the trigger as fast as I could. It ripped the gun from my hand and started beating me with it. It was still screaming as loud as it could while

beating me over the head with my own gun. Lights started flickering through the woods. I was about to black out when I heard something louder than the screaming. I swear I saw the thing's head fly open. I dropped my gun, screamed like a child that had just been shoved into an oven and ran for it. My gun was dropped ten feet from my head and the light was getting closer. I didn't know if I was dying or being saved. Somebody started screaming my name, telling me to hold on. Something was tugging my arm. I looked over and it was the guy who lived down the road.

He had a huge revolver, a Magnum Research BFR. At that moment, I just blacked out and woke up in a hospital with a ton of stitches in my head. When I eventually got out, I asked my neighbor what he saw that night and he just replied, a bear. We get them often up here. I'm not entirely convinced that I was nearly beaten to death with my own gun by a bear. Hey Joel, I've been a big fan for a while now and thankfully I've never had anything happen to me that might necessitate the writing of a scary story. But then recently, I asked my mom about an unusual memory that I had from my childhood which I then found out was just the tip of the

iceberg. Now from memory, my version of the story goes kind of like this. This happened when I was 8 years old, so Thanksgiving, 1993. Me and my family drove way across the state to spend the night with my aunt and uncle at my mom's side. I was close with my cousins on that side of the family, and my mom and her sister were really close too, so we tended to spend a lot of holidays together. We drove over to their place. I remember playing with my cousins for a few hours then we all sat down to dinner after being summoned by my mom and aunt. We all sat down, loaded up our plates and the last thing I remember is my mom and my aunt telling us that we were going to have dinner in the upstairs bedrooms. I have this distinct recollection of not wanting to eat my food upstairs, but then my mom said, anyone who eats their turkey upstairs gets to watch

the Mighty Ducks on the big TV in the mommy and daddy bedroom, okay? And that was all that needed to be said, and we were all up in her bedroom before we could say, attack the puck. My mom laid out a blanket for us, put all of our plates down on it, then we just sat there, perfectly content. Mom stayed with us, but she didn't need anything. Whenever we needed to use the bathroom, she would walk us there and back, but then anytime we wanted to go downstairs for any reason, she'd tell us to wait where we were and then she returned with whatever it was that we wanted. The way I remembered it, it was the best Thanksgiving ever. We got to eat dessert up there too. We watched a whole bunch of other movies and then we all

fell asleep in my aunt and uncle's bed before driving back home sometime the next morning. And that's where my memory of the event ends. And like I said, for the longest time, I remember nothing except how cool it was to be able to watch the Mighty Ducks while eating my turkey. I somehow knew it was an exception. We asked if we could do the same thing in the years that followed and were always told no. But then last year, I just so happened to ask my dad about that Thanksgiving and why, just for one year we got to eat in front of the TV. And I remember he gave me this look, and it being one that I didn't recognize. I feel like we were all used to seeing our dads with like three basic facial expressions. The first is that I'm not mad right now, but I'm ready for something

kind of look, with the second being straight up mad and the third being my sports team just won a game kind of smile. But that day, my dad gave me this look that I could only interpret as fear. Whatever the answer to my question was, it wasn't some half-buried memory made fuzzy by too many blue ribbons. It was something he remembered very well, and it was something that frightened him. He let out a big sigh and told me, don't tell your mom I told you this, and then went into the grown-up's version of events, which is as follows. So everything I told you to start with still stands, and by that I mean everything was going fine until we sat down to dinner. Then as we were eating,

the phone started to ring. My uncle got up to answer the call and it was a man asking for my aunt. So he calls her to the phone and then sits back down to eat. A minute or two later, my aunt comes back in but she's quiet and she's not touching her food. My uncle asks her what's wrong but she tells him she's fine. It was just someone from work calling or some other excuse which got him to drop it. Then another minute or two goes by and the grown-up starts seeing a car's headlights turn into my aunt and uncle's driveway. They're not expecting any other guests but it was Thanksgiving so it wasn't out of the question that someone might stop over unexpectedly. But instead of just acting curious like the rest of the grown-ups, my dad said that he watched the color drain from my aunt's face. My uncle was halfway to getting

up from his seat and my dad said my aunt grabbed him by the arm and said three hushed words that had the color draining from his face too. Get your gun, she said. Obviously, my mom and dad wanted to know what the hell was happening, but there was no time to really explain. All my aunt told them was that we might all be in a lot of danger, at which point my mom started gathering up us kids and taking us upstairs. We'd all been sitting at the kids table at the time and although it was right there next to the adults table, I don't remember anything except the

moment my mom told me to go upstairs. As I've already told you, she then stayed upstairs with us making sure that we didn't see anything or hear anything of what happened next, but then headed up by my uncle and my dad and aunt went to see who'd showed up unexpectedly. Having listened to the advice of my aunt, my uncle had his.45 ready to rock, but later said that he had no idea who was out there or why my aunt was so scared and all the unanswered questions had him just as scared as she was. But still, he did what he had to and walked outside with his gun ready to go. According to my dad, they walked outside and they can't see anything right away because the guy's

headlights are shining bright and just blinding them. But then they take a few steps off the porch and their security light lit up the stranger's car. My dad said he could see the guy standing behind his open trunk but he couldn't see his face at all at first. Meanwhile my uncle was marching towards the guy asking him to identify himself and the guy steps out from behind his car, holding his gun. My aunt screamed, then ran back inside but my dad said that he was frozen knowing that if this random gun-toting stranger shot my uncle,

he'd have to try and rush him from the side because there was no way he was going to let some maniac gun into his house where his kids were upstairs. My dad also said that round about the same time he saw the gun, he noticed something about the guy holding it. He was drunk as a skunk. He didn't so much as step out from behind the car as stumble out from behind it, and as my uncle approached him, the guy looked like he had no idea how to use the gun he was holding. My uncle raised his own and kept telling him, you point that thing at me and I'll kill you. And by some miracle, the stranger either couldn't load the thing properly or couldn't get a good grip on the side because my uncle made it all the way over to him to knock him out before he could even look up. Dad said it was a nasty hit too, but even so, he'd never been so relieved in

his entire life. After that, my dad rushed him, disarmed the stranger for good, then he and my uncle basically sat on the guy until the cops showed up. I say sat on the guy more like sat with him because when he woke up from being knocked out, he had next to no idea where he was and was so out of it that he didn't even try to get up until he saw the lights of the sheriff's deputies approaching my aunt and uncle's house. The deputies cuffed the guy, then took him away, and all the while me and my cousins are up in the back bedroom, completely none the wiser that any of this was happening. Like I already said, mom stayed with us until bedtime and I remember my aunt and uncle coming in to say goodnight too. Now looking back on it, they were as cool and calm as anything, not even a hint of what had just unfolded downstairs.

But after we went to sleep, it was a different story. My aunt told my mom, dad and uncle for the very first time the story of why she'd packed up and moved away from her home city and it was all because of some psycho that she'd made the mistake of getting hitched to. He didn't hit her, he wasn't a violent man, which made sense after the sorry display that he made with the pistol, but he found other ways to make her life absolutely terrible. At first, she didn't need to work because he could take care of her, and she didn't need her own checking accounts because why would she? My aunt was too naive to realize that when her ex-husband turned bad,

not having her own money would mean that she was basically stranded. Her ex took the phone out of the house, threw all the food out one at a time, then left her alone for a night, and she had to beg on the street for the payphone money to call my grandma to come rescue her. She was so ashamed of having gotten into that situation, of having been so stupid as she put it, that she swore my grandma to secrecy and it was a secret that she took to her grave with her. And sometime after, my aunt moved to Chicago to be closer to my sister, met my uncle,

and the rest is history. She thought that she'd left that whole sad chapter of her life behind, and after ten years of not hearing from him, she had no idea if her ex was dead or alive. Not until he showed up at her house early on that Thanksgiving evening with a gun and two gallons of gas in his trunk to burn the house down after he'd shot us all. At least, that was his plan. The guy ended up going to prison. Not for as long as anyone would have liked him to, but if he steps foot back in the town my aunt and uncle live in, not Chicago by the way, then he'll go straight back to prison, no questions asked. Obviously, 30 years have gone by and my

parents and aunt are all in their 70s by now. That means that her ex is going to be around that age too and hopefully he's somehow found a way to make peace with the whole thing and he's not going to try and reach out again. But that's the thing that actually frightens me about this whole story. It's not actually over yet. Everyone just kind of assumes that he's not going to show up again mostly on account of how old he'll be but from where I'm standing it looks a lot more like hope than assumption.

They're all just hoping this guy isn't going to show up again and the idea that there's some impending family tragedy on the horizon it makes me feel like there's a blade hanging over my neck, just waiting to drop at any time. I'm scared what my aunt went through twice will only really ever be over when her ex is dead. At least I hope so, because God knows I don't want it to end with anyone else dying except him. Something like ten years ago, I got my first ever dog, a toy-sized poodle puppy. She was way cute and also way too smart for her own good. She quickly learned that little little kids, elderly ladies, and people who wore pink and sparkly stuff loved puppies, so much that she could get people

food from them. One day she escapes the yard while I'm vacuuming the house and I end up going all over searching. I started on foot, then decided that she must have gone far, maybe got out right when I started and so I got into my car and started driving all over the neighborhood, calling for her and showing people walking by pictures of her and asking if they'd seen my puppy. As I'm driving around hollering for her, I see some kids on their lawn playing with Barbies. They look five to six years old maybe and they hear me calling for my pup and come running up to ask what kind of puppy I lost. I was going to show them my phone picture and then realize that this is the exact scenario they use to teach stranger danger. So instead I was like, go get your parents, I need to talk to them. One girl did,

but the other stood there, even put her hands on the windowsill of my car and asked if I had the puppy in the car. At the time I only thought was for the parents to hurry up because I really didn't know what to do. So the mom comes out and has a total panic over her child being right up at a stranger's car and comes running over. I explain to her that I lost my dog and I give her my number and show her the picture but I doubt she believed any of it because she just scooped up her kids and carried them into the house. I just wanted to share this story because that day, I was the creep. And if you're wondering if I have found my puppy, I did, or rather a neighbor did. She had gone into

his chicken coop and fallen asleep in a nest full of eggs and got sat on by the mama bird. When he went to collect the eggs, he was surprised to find a very waggy-tailed chick. I don't really have an explanation for what happened. I have ideas, but here's the story. I'm a freshly graduated high school student on my way to college. During my senior year, I had a job working for my grandfather as a farmhand, more or less a farm manager. He would give me instructions on what to do on the farm without him being there, most commonly feeding the cows. It was early November and at this time, baseball practice started after school and would last from 3.25 to

5.30. By that time, the sun was almost down when I arrived at work and started getting ready. One day I had gotten dressed, filled up the buckets, and fed the first farm when I realized that I didn't have a key to the other farm. Frustrated, I was forced to pick up two buckets at a time and walk them from the fence to the feed trough, a good 40-yard walk. While walking, I was trying to keep myself upbeat and just started to whistle. No real pattern or tune, just something that I came up with. When I came back and put the last buckets in the bed of the truck, I heard something from my neighboring property. It was whistling. Strange, I thought, as no one

lives anywhere near that property and it sounded very close. I rationalized it was a mockingbird or something and just kind of went on with my life. The next couple of days I didn't whistle, but the whistling continued. Slowly over those few days it got clearer and clearer until it sounded like regular whistling. Eventually it got louder. When I first heard it, it was very faint. I almost missed it over the crunching of me walking to my truck. In the last few days I kind of became accustomed to the whistling and kind of expected it. When one day it didn't come, I was a little disappointed. This time I had brought the key and walked up to the gate and started fiddling with my keys when I dropped them into the grass. I said damn it when I dropped them. I squatted down and started

to search for them when I heard a very faint sound coming from the other property. A low groan or gurgle and it was getting louder. At this point I wasn't scared but more curious as to what was going on over there. I left my truck parked across from the property and walked a few feet down the road and hopped the fence at the property where I heard the sounds. The land in there goes straight uphill and is heavily wooded all throughout and the further you go up the more dense it gets. Looking back now, I made a few big mistakes that could have gotten me hurt. As I walked up the hill I would occasionally hear the gurgle.

It was far up the hill, so still as faint as it was before. As I walked, a bad smell started to hit my nose, a weird mixture of garbage and wet dog or something. I heard something as I was about to crest the hill. Damn it. A very dry, low, and quite distorted damn it came from a couple of yards in front of me. It sounded like a 60-year-old smoker saying damn it very slowly as if they didn't know English or something. I automatically thought someone was on our property, somewhat angry and paranoid now. I started to move slower. I didn't want this guy to hear me before I could see them. I kept going and stopped and listened when I heard another sound.

Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. This guy was now slowly saying damn it normally. Not long and drawn out in that eerie way as if he didn't know English. I sat down on this log, kind of listening, trying to figure out what I should do about this person. He kept saying it over and over and I noticed his tone was getting higher and his inflection was changing. And it hit me, this guy was perfectly mimicking me, my tone, inflection, literally everything. He even mimicked my frustration when I said it. Angry and kind of scared now, I got up and started to crest the hill. I flicked on my flashlight on my phone. Hey, this is private property.

I was cut off mid-sentence. As I came over the hill, the light barely illuminated this naked figure squatting just a couple of yards in front of me. His eyes were illuminated by the faint glow of my flashlight. I automatically felt that something was wrong. This wasn't a regular person. His neck was longer than normal, and when I came up the hill, he winched his neck and snapped his head to look at me without moving. His eyes were too big, and his head was large and slender. He was squatted in a ballerina-type squat. I looked at his body. He was very skinny, his ribs were showing through his skin. There was a short silence and, like a robot, the man turned in the leaves and slowly stood with his hands next to his side.

I was debating if it was even a person. It was far too tall to be a person. Damn it, it said in my voice. I turned and sprinted down the hill It didn't feel like I was running But more that my legs were just going through the motions I didn't look back before I got to the fence And when I hopped it, I got in my truck and sped away

Sadly, I still work at that farm But I've never told anyone this story Not even my grandfather I've only heard the whistling a few more times since then. I'm not really a believer in the paranormal, and I really try to find an explanation for weird stuff, and I believe that this may have just been some weird squatter, but I really don't know. Thanks for watching! Thanksgiving is coming up and I know you sometimes make videos based on whatever holiday is on the horizon. So I wanted to send my story in about that time of the year.

You see, I had a great childhood. I know that in the age of people wearing their traumas on their sleeve, that's not a very cool thing to admit, but it's true. I don't have any issues with my mom or dad who were still together after 40 plus years of marriage. Neither was I bullied at school. And unlike my two best friends growing up who had liver problems and diabetes respectively, I never had any chronic medical issues to deal with. And I used to think that I was lucky. Everyone seemed to have some messed up thing going on in their family, be it a divorce, a sibling or parent with a drug or alcohol problems, anything that meant that they were broody and world-weary by the time we hit high school. But I didn't, and on top of that, I couldn't exactly see anything on the horizon either.

But during Thanksgiving of 2005, when I was 15 years old, I found out that everything in my family wasn't exactly perfect either. So, I have an uncle that's almost 20 years younger than my dad. Dad was an only child all through his teenage years, then one day, he got the news that his little brother was on the way. My grandparents always said my uncle was an unexpected blessing, which I guess means he was an accident. But then with him being the baby of the family, he was doted on and spoiled like it was nobody's business. And this ended up with my dad and uncle being worlds apart in terms of age, but also worlds apart in terms of personality too. My dad spent a few years in the Marine Corps, and he wasn't like Jocko or anything like that,

but it definitely stuck with him. Whereas my uncle was a struggling musician, then a struggling artist, and then a struggling writer, all because my grandparents blew so much hot air up his butt that he thought that ambition could just trump talent. I always thought he was a cool guy, and I could never understand why my dad gave him such a hard time. He always seemed so laid back and chilled out and I could talk to him about all the stuff my dad found boring or had no time for. I was always pleased to see him whenever he visited and he and my dad never argued in front of me, which I appreciate looking back on. At least until the Thanksgiving that I'm about to tell you about. So one night we're having dinner and my dad tells my mom that my uncle is bringing his girlfriend over for Thanksgiving.

I remember being excited to meet her, as anyone dating my uncle must be as cool as him, right? Mom and dad seem kind of nervous, emphasis on kind of, but put it down to never having met her prior to some big family occasion. Cut to maybe a week or two later and my uncle shows up for Thanksgiving and starts introducing his girlfriend to the whole family. She was very attractive, I'll say that much, but she was definitely out of place with her leather jacket and tattoos. Now that being said, my family were as friendly as ever and tried their best to make her feel welcome. Dad made a toast, we ate dinner, then everyone kind of went their separate ways to do the after dinner stuff. The men went to watch sports highlights, the women had coffee around the breakfast nook in the kitchen, and the younger kids played among themselves.

But me, I went upstairs to my bedroom to play video games. I can't remember how long I played for, but it was mid-evening when I went downstairs to grab a soda, so maybe like 7.30 to 8 o'clock or something. I walked downstairs into the kitchen and right by our refrigerator was the door to the garage. I opened up the fridge, grabbed a soda, then after I closed it and started walking out of the kitchen, I heard something coming from the garage. To my knowledge, everyone is either sitting around the TV or playing bridge in the dining room. There's no one left in the kitchen, and there definitely shouldn't have been anyone in the garage. So, obviously, the question was, who was in there, and why? It could have easily been maybe a raccoon, I guess, but my biggest fear, the one that had me reaching for the door to take a peek outside, was the idea that someone had broken into our garage, the same garage that had direct access to a house full of totally

unsuspecting people, and myself. I remember reaching for the door handle, real slow, then pulling it open real fast, and then just scanning the interior. Something caught my eye right away. It was my uncle's girlfriend. Her eyes just looked wrong. There was blood coming out of her nose and mouth and at first I thought my uncle was trying to help her, but then right there with me watching, he hits her. And he hit her so hard that her head just jerked back in this weird ragdoll kind of way that I can still remember clear as day even all these years

later. And the second he did, I slammed the door closed and ran into the TV room and managed to get the attention of everyone there by just pointing towards the kitchen and saying, Uncle Tony in the garage. His name isn't actually Tony by the way, I just don't know how to describe the moment without dropping a name. Everyone ran to the garage, the cops were called, and within maybe 10 or 15 minutes, what had once been this nice family atmosphere had turned into total chaos, which spilled out into the streets, and ended with my uncle in a cop car and his girl in an ambulance. I didn't get to see all that much before my mom and dad screamed at me to get up to my room. They were so angry that I thought that they were mad at me for a while and

afterwards they explained something to me that I don't think childless people are even capable of conceiving. So much of what a parent does bears no other purpose than to protect their children. Sometimes a parent can come across as a total jerk, just a soulless, joyless husk that wants nothing more than to suck all the happiness out of their kid's life. I know there's times when parents overstep the line and genuinely are cruel and abusive to their kids, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the things that feel like punishments or restrictions that are actually nothing but manifestations of love and protection. And that's pretty much the reason my mom and dad

shielded me from the truth about Uncle Tony. They didn't want to cut him off or have me resenting them for not allowing us to have a relationship, so they went about this difficult balancing act of allowing him to visit me, without filling my head about stuff that he was doing in his life. Stuff like doing drugs, committing petty financial crimes, stealing from grandparents, and as I saw with my own eyes, being a complete piece of human garbage and how he chose to treat the women in his life. Which reminds me, like I said, Uncle Tony, again, not his real name, got picked up by the cops after my dad and some neighbors basically beat the crap out of him and

pinned him down in our driveway at that time. But his girlfriend, she had to stay in the hospital overnight. My uncle had beaten her pretty bad and I think the doctors were scared that she had a concussion, but all she had was a broken nose and a busted lip, I guess. Mom and dad paid her hospital bills, and mom went to visit with her sometime after, I'm guessing to ask about her pressing charges. And to this day, I still don't know for sure if my mom went over to talk her into it. She's always claimed that all she said was something like, we'll support you no matter what your decision is, and that the girl went ahead and pressed charges all of her own

free will. I'm not saying that's impossible, but I've heard way too many stories about battered wives and girlfriends being too afraid to talk to the cops for years before they suddenly snap and decide to do something themselves. And maybe that was the case with my uncle and his girl. Or maybe my mom knew that unless someone stepped in and encouraged her to do the right thing, the same pattern of misery and violence would just go on and on until someone either died or got sent to jail. Just to be clear, that's entirely speculation on my part, and I guess I'll take my mom's word for it that she didn't intervene or interfere, but either way, it went to court and my uncle pled

no contest seeing as there were a ton of witnesses against him and he ended up doing three years of a six-year sentence at which point my parents totally cut him off. And by that time I was completely okay with him doing that as I had absolutely no desire to see my uncle Tony ever again. Now I know I might sound kind of messed up but for the first few days after it happened I wasn't angry or horrified or appalled at what my uncle did. I was heartbroken. I couldn't believe someone that I looked up to so much was capable of doing something just so awful. I just couldn't make sense of it. In my mind, there had been some kind of terrible misunderstanding and I still haven't really forgiven myself for thinking this, but I couldn't help but think this girl had

done something to deserve it, I guess. Was she trying to steal something? Had he caught her doing drugs? There had to be some logical reason why my laid-back, incredibly cool uncle would do something so terrible. Spoilers. But there wasn't a reason. At least nothing that could possibly justify putting his hands on her in the way that he did. And I had to hear the whole thing from my mom, following her visit to the still recovering and

now ex-girlfriend to really understand what had happened. One of the things I wonder in the days after was why his girl hadn't screamed. If they were having a fight or whatever, then how had it gone from near silence to physical violence without any kind of escalation in volume. That was just one of the reasons why I very naively thought that there must have been something more to the story right up until my mom told me the following. She hadn't asked my uncle's ex the same question, not directly anyway, it just came out during my mom's retelling of her visit. My uncle's ex didn't scream when he started hitting her because she learned that if she did, he'd only hit her harder. And this did

two things. Number one, it gave me an idea of just how long the abuse had been going on for, and two, it made me hate my uncle, and I mean really hate him. There was, and is, something so sickeningly sadistic about that one little detail and once I had it in my head, there was no coming back from it. That was the uncle I didn't know I had. That was the version of my uncle that my parents tried to shield me from. I guess that's maybe an overdone concept with some of the stories that you probably get sent to you here. As in the old, I thought they were sweet but they were actually a monster, but I also understand why they don't ever really get old either. It's something a lot of people go through

in their lives, realizing that sometimes things aren't quite what they seem. But a lot of my school friends got that lesson way early, whereas I was way into my teenage years when I realized that sometimes you think you know someone when really you don't know what your policy is on this kind of thing, so feel free to leave it out if you really don't think it's necessary, but I'd like to give everyone a little trigger warning regarding the topic of taking your own life. I personally don't think I need them, but I've talked to enough people with these kind of ideations over the years to know that they're greatly appreciated by those who think they need them. So if you don't mind including

this one, I think people would be very grateful. I guess I gave it away already, but you see, I'm struggling with these kind of thoughts for a long time. I ended up getting addicted to painkillers after a sports injury, and although I tried as hard as I possibly could to break the cycle and kick my habit, I kept on failing time and time again. Addiction counseling just didn't seem to work for me and once I'd picked up street drugs a few times and knew my way around, keeping me away from opiates became harder and harder. In the end, I decided that the only way out, the only true way out, was to take my own life, and stop being such a burden on absolutely everyone around me. I only made one solid attempt, and I survived, and after I ended up in the hospital, my parents were informed of what I'd tried to do. It was a sort of come to Jesus moment when I realized how far I'd fallen and from then on, we did things different. There were no

more rehabs, no more treatment programs in the city. I was going out to the middle of nowhere, to where my mom and dad owned a little vacation cabin and I was basically going to live there until opiates just weren't part of my thought process anymore. It was like a bridge between where I was and wherever I was going to go next and although I didn't know where exactly that would be, I sure as hell knew that it wasn't going to involve any pills or powders that I couldn't buy at a mom and pop drugstore. I ended up staying at that cabin for four months and it was in a real sorry state that I found it too. I guess that just showed my resolve though. Cleaning it gave me something to

keep me occupied and I guess the whole process is maybe good for the mind or something because it definitely had this therapy-like quality to it that had an awesome effect on my peace of mind. So like I say, I made a house, a home, so to speak, then ended up staying there for basically the whole of the fall and then including Thanksgiving. I'd been there a while by that point and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't miss my family. In fact, I was just jonesing for some company all around. So when my mom and dad suggested driving up to visit with some turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sandwiches, I was in no position to turn them down. They traveled up, and we had a nice afternoon just hanging out, and then we all went to bed at a pretty early hour before rising just as early.

I made us some eggs, and they packed up their things, but before they left, my parents asked if I wanted to go for a walk. It had been a while since they'd visited the cabin, so they'd figured that it'd be nice to just sort of reacquaint themselves with some of the old trails that we used to walk during our childhood vacations. I remember the old route because it led up to this big iron bridge that ran high above a shallow stream. Walking across it always used to freak me out as a kid because looking through the railings down into the stream gave me the willies in a big way. But the more we walked there, the less freaked out I got and eventually it became one of my favorite spots whenever we visited the cabin.

So we got to going on our walk along those winding trails that went up and up until we reached the iron footbridge. Then when we got there, we see this other guy standing by the railings looking over the edge. There are plenty of other cabins in the area so I just figured this guy was doing the same thing we were, taking a little walk, maybe before or after dinner just to clear his head and digest his turkey. We didn't call out to him or anything, I guess I figured that we'd just give him a friendly nod if we made eye contact while walking across the bridge. We also weren't talking very loudly, we were just enjoying the stillness of the forest, so I guess that had us talking in library voices or something. Go figure. Anyway, my point

is, this guy didn't see or hear us until we were almost right up on the bridge, and when he did, I knew something was off just from the look he gave us. He got startled, and had this sort of you caught me expression that I found really confusing at first. But then, he did what he did, and that look made a chilling amount of sense. The second after the guy saw us, he threw himself off the bridge. My mom let out this really shocked gasp, while my dad went to grab her like he was trying to protect her from something that couldn't actually do her any physical harm me on the other hand i just ran forward towards where the guy jumped looking back i don't really know what i was thinking and to be honest i don't really know if i

was really thinking at all i guess it was just some gut reaction to try and stop the guy from falling, but he was in free fall by the time I even stepped foot onto the bridge. He didn't do it like one foot up the railing then jumped. He sort of rolled himself over, I guess to try his best to land on his head or his neck. But things didn't work out like that for him. He didn't get to go quick, and after I saw what remained of him, I've never been able to get that image out of my head. I don't want to go into too much detail and turn this into some big, gross kind of affair, but just imagine what it would be like to somehow survive a fall that breaks dozens of bones, but still has you awake and feeling

everything. The image was bad, but I honestly think the noises he was making were worse. He couldn't really scream. He was trying to. He was trying with all he could to express just how much agony he felt, but for some reason, probably in some part due to the devastation his body had just endured, he couldn't actually scream. The only sound he could make was this croaking noise, like a big bullfrog, and he only made it one or two times before I ran back towards my parents to turn us back towards the cabin. Thankfully, the cell reception in the area wasn't too bad, which meant that my first 911 call connected just fine, and I was able to tell the

dispatcher what had happened. A forest ranger was first on the scene but by the time they got there the guy lying in the shallow stream had stopped making all of his terrible noises. I honestly think that even if the ranger had been there with his medical supplies the moment the guy jumped off the bridge there still wouldn't have been a thing that we could do for him. He was a mess beyond saving and I have no doubt that he died in absolute agony. I moved out of the cabin a month later and although it wasn't the whole reason witnessing that man take his life up near the bridge was definitely playing a part. It's not like I was having nightmares or anything either, and I really don't want to sound too self-absorbed here because what happened to that guy is a tragedy all on its own, but I couldn't help but think to myself, that could have been you down there,

writhing in agony trying and failing to scream your last scream. And I think that was the time that I knew that I was going to be okay. Because the one thing that I was certain of is that I never want to end up like that guy. I know how it feels to be that desperate. But what I realized was that I never once considered that taking my own life would be a selfish thing to do. I thought the selfish thing was to try and carry on living, that it was cowardly to just go on living knowing that I was going to be an addict my whole life. But the truth is, choosing life is the bravest thing a person can do.

Waking up, getting dressed, and going to face whatever life throws at you, that's the really difficult part. And there's personal glory in even the smallest of successes. That and I wouldn't wish seeing a body like that on anyone, not even a dumb junkie like me, because now, I do believe people can be haunted by the dead. Not by some sort of apparition, but the ghost inside their head. For Thanksgiving of 2009, I took my family over to my sister's place. They lived in Chattanooga, which was a long drive from where we lived in Indianapolis, but I had no problem driving all that way to spend the holidays with my brother-in-law. He became my

best friend during those early dad years as I didn't really have anyone else to ask advice from. My own father passed away when I was a kid and my friends who actually got it together and had families didn't do so until their 30s. So when it came to getting dad advice, he was the first person I turned to and that little conversation evolved into one of the closest friendships of my life. So we got there, he cooked us an amazing dinner but afterwards he complained that he wasn't feeling so hot. He went to the bathroom then came back saying that there was fluid coming out of his ear but was also quick to reassure us that he'd struggled with ear infections in the past and that it wasn't anything we needed to worry about. The night went on perfectly normal after that. We put the kids to bed at around 9 before adult bedtime ended up being around 11.30 to midnight. But then around 1am, my sister wakes

up to her husband trembling and sweating in the bed next to her, saying that he felt like he had a fever. He goes to the bathroom, takes some medication, but he's still awake and shivering at around 3am with no signs of feeling any better. The next morning my sister got up early to take care of their boys and was mindful to be quiet so he could get some rest. I swung by in the morning with breakfast for them and my sister informed me that he was still sleeping. Right away I thought that was weird because he was never one to let a hangover keep him in bed so I knew that he must have been feeling pretty terrible. The two of us left to leave him to get some rest, tried to keep the noise from the boys to a minimum and let my brother-in-law get some rest as we all had plans that afternoon. Afternoon rolls around and after calling a couple times and them not picking up,

my wife and I went by the house at around 2 to check on my sister and brother-in-law. The moment we got there, I got this terrible feeling. When I stepped inside, I took no satisfaction in finding out how right I was. The moment my sister opened the door, she was white as a ghost as she told me to follow her upstairs because she desperately needed help. We sprinted up the stairs to find my brother-in-law breathing extremely erratically, with all this bright green snot coming out of his nose. My sister was shaking him to get him to wake up and you could hear the fluid in his lungs as he was breathing in. As I started trying to wake him up my sister ran over to get water to pour on his face to rinse off the snot and try and startle him awake and at that point he stopped breathing. I looked up at my sister and we both knew that

things were getting wildly serious and we had to act quick. She was fortunate to have had a few CPR lessons so she started instructing me on exactly what needed to be done. We dragged him off the bed to the floor and started alternating breathing in his mouth and chest compressions and this is when things started going from bad to worse. We screamed down to my wife to call 911 and have my mom get the kids out of the house. My wife then ran up the stairs on the phone to see the two of us performing CPR on him. As I did the CPR moves, a truly horrifying amount of blood started coming out of his mouth and nose and this was something that I was completely unprepared for.

I didn't even realize it was blood at first. It was dark brown, not like the movies and TV shows depict. So there I was, bawling with my sister as the two of us were pounding on my brother-in-law's chest with my wife standing over us on the phone with the operator. I decide that I'm going to check on him and with my thumb I open his eyelid. Big mistake. You cannot unsee that. His eye didn't focus, didn't move, didn't do anything and I pulled my hand away. As I was still performing CPR my sister runs around the bed to get shorts on my brother-in-law before the paramedics get there so when they take him out he's just not completely nude. Now another thing that I wasn't ready for, my brother-in-law's bowels evacuating as we try to get his underwear on. Seconds later my sister is standing there cupping her hands over

his stuff, crying as she's saying, he's peeing, oh my god he's peeing. I yell back that we're doing everything we can and that it's going to be okay. But we both knew that things were not going to be okay. It was only a question of how bad they were about to get. The paramedics arrived and the moment they did, we got out of the way to let them work. At this point, I was so relieved. They just needed to get him to breathe and start his heart. This is the 21st century, right? They do this kind of thing daily, right? I thought. They started chest compressions and got him on monitors and the belt looking thing that went around his chest and performed the compressions for them.

It was a terrible thing to watch, as it contracts and sends him heaving forwards and then back down over and over. We drape a sheet around his waist before they drag him down the stairs. I run to the bathroom because I am now very aware of the taste of my mouth. It was like I had a mouth full of pennies and vomit. I rinsed out my mouth as they got him downstairs and I soon found myself screaming, get the kids outside now. My wife takes them up and gets them to the back patio. Thankfully they didn't see him the way he was and we ran out the door and got to the hospital. The ambulance wasn't there yet so

I waited outside. As it arrived, they wheeled him to the door, chest still regularly heaving upwards, eyes still closed, and I ran back to the waiting room and told my sister and wife that he'd arrived. After that, all we could do was wait. It feels like hours go by and they pull us into a small room and the doctor comes to speak to us. The moment he asked if he could close the door I just kind of knew. He informs us that they tried everything but that my brother-in-law had passed away. I'm not totally sure what happened next. No tears at first, disbelief and confusion. My sister is hysterically crying, screaming that it's not supposed to be this way, they we're supposed to grow old together. And I eventually lose it, and everyone was inconsolable.

Things have since gotten better though, or at least more normal. But still, I can barely believe it. The company I work for was awesome about it, and they paid for grief counseling for my sister and I. Also, between friends and family, my sister received close to 20k that she is putting towards the boys college funds. And you really find out who was important in your life really quickly. I have amazing friends and family and wouldn't trade a single one for the world. We later found out that he had a nearly perfect storm of issues. Infection that manifested streptococcus pneumoniae, meningitis, and he had a

lung infection, ear infection, enlarged heart, and eventually septic shock. If I can give any advice to anyone that reads this, or hears this, go to the doctor if you feel even remotely sick. Within 11 hours of shivering in bed, he was dead. Don't think about how you're going to pay for it, just tough it out. Because just one second with those you love is more valuable than any dollar amount, and I mean any. My brother-in-law was a healthy guy too. He worked out regularly, did jujitsu, biked everywhere, cooked all of his meals from organic fruits and vegetables, did yoga, and was only 39 years young when he passed.

He was a magnificent human being, an amazing martial artist, and a wonderful father. And he will be missed. When I was just 11 years old, my dad and I went for a walk just before Thanksgiving dinner. We lived just north of Columbus back then in a little suburb called Shawnee Hills. It was a great place to grow up and we had a big house with my own bedroom and a big backyard too. At the end of this backyard was a small gate and beyond that was a whole bunch of woods and then a deep, fast-flowing river that's probably still popular with summertime kayakers. I remember being incredibly hungry, but dinner wasn't going to be ready for another hour or so, so instead of sitting in front

of the TV moping, my dad offered to take me on a walk to the river. Walking down there to throw twigs and stones into the water was one of my favorite things to do, mainly because I was never allowed to do it on my own. I have a real vivid memory of throwing larger stones into the water and finding the big plump that they made upon splashing into the current to be extremely satisfying. Plus, as my dad said, if we used up the last of the daylight to walk down there, toss a few stones in, then walk back, then dinner would be on the table just seconds after we arrived back. It seemed like a flawless plan at the time, so I accepted his offer and off we went. We walked all the way down to the stream, shining flashlights even though it was still half light outside, then when we got there,

I did my usual thing of looking around for the biggest rocks possible. My dad joined in and for the next few minutes were picking them up and tossing them into the river until my dad comes across one that looks particularly promising. I remember him distinctly saying, oh we got a big one here and then he took a step up onto one of the rocks at the edge of the river and kicked one of his feet against the one next to it, I guess to try and dislodge a piece that was cracked and coming away. Then, in one fluid motion, he slipped,

hit the rock that he'd been standing on, then went crashing into the water. It sounds so perversely awful to think about it now, but at the time, I actually thought it was kind of funny. He slipped, and when he hit the rock on his side, he made this funny sort of sound, and then after he fell into the water, I honestly thought he'd just pull himself out right away, just like he did whenever he jumped into our swimming pool in the summer. Only problem was, he didn't. And as I walked up to the river's edge, I caught a glimpse of him floating away downstream.

Recalling that moment has suddenly made this very difficult to write about, so excuse me if the quality of my writing just takes a sudden turn. But seeing him floating away, or rather, seeing a flash of the fabric of the jacket that he was wearing just bobbing in the water as the fast flowing river took him further and further away. That's what made me realize that something was wrong, and that's what had me running down the riverbank desperately calling out his name and wondering why he wouldn't answer. The more I ran, the more I started to cry, and by the time he was truly out of sight and I couldn't run anymore, I completely fell apart. I didn't want to accept that he was gone, but at the same time something in my gut just told me

that he was dead. But that didn't stop me from running for help and I ended up running all the way to my neighbor's yard where they called 911 and carried me back home to my mom. Again, the memories of what happened next are difficult to recall. Not in the sense that they're hazy, but because I can still remember how painful it was. The worst part was seeing my mom and older sister hoping that, somehow, my dad had survived lying unconscious in a freezing cold river for who knows how long. I wanted to share that hope so badly, but I couldn't. I think part of me always knew that he was never coming back, so getting the news that his body had been found

wasn't quite as devastating to me as it was to my mom and sister. But it still almost destroyed our family, and even after all these years of trying to process it, through therapy and self-help books, or religion and booze, we're still not really over what happened that Thanksgiving. It's something I think about every single day, without fail, and somehow even the smallest, most inconspicuous little things bring the memories right back to me, sometimes at distressingly short notice. I guess this isn't the kind of story you're used to receiving as a submission, and I can understand why some people might think that this is more sad or tragic than outright horrifying. But to me, when I think of horror, true horror, I think of that moment when I realized that my dad wasn't okay. I think about that flash of his jacket that I saw floating in the water and how quickly the current was dragging his unconscious body downstream. Sometimes I think I'd happily

swap that memory for a thousand nightly visits from Freddy Krueger and I'd happily share my apartment with a ghost or two, even more so if they'd help me with the utilities. Anything to get that picture out of my head. Anything to have an actual goodbye with a man that I never had a chance to really know. To be continued... You see, after dinner I was sitting at the top of the hill not far from my house. At the base of the hill there were trees that went along the edge of the school. Kids would often start at the top of the hill and race down, with the first to cross through the trees being the winner. A simple game made fun by putting a steep hill in the mix. Well, I was all by myself and felt like doing it anyways, so I stood up and ran down that hill as fast as my legs could go.

I was the fastest kid in the world at that moment. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground looking at the sky and it felt like someone had taken a sword to my neck. I felt it, looked at my hands, and saw blood. A lot of blood. I focused my eyes and saw it tie between the two trees that I ran through. A fishing line, about three stands worth, twisted together to give it strength. And I stared at that fishing line so confused. Why? What? How? And that's when I heard them. Maybe 20 feet away a group of what looked like 8th or 9th graders who I had seen around the school sitting on their bikes, pointing and

laughing. I could hear one distinctly say, I can't believe he didn't see it, what an idiot. I never figured out who they were, but they were the reason why I was in pain, and they were the reason why I was in pain, and they were the reason why I was bleeding. I didn't know any of them, I'd never done anything to deserve anything from them, but still they'd chosen to do it, out of some pure malicious sense of boredom. I was so confused and in so much pain, but worst of all I was scared that they weren't finished with me.

I got up and ran with everything left in me down the back towards my house. I ended up tripping over the curb in front of the white hen pantry which is now a 7-11. I was lucky and saw some lady that helped me back up and she dragged me inside and bought me some bandages and patched me up and told me to go home. I didn't trust anyone for a long time after that and refused to do anything without first slowly and cautiously inspecting everything before I let myself even have any fun. Almost having my head cut off truly did ruin my carefree childhood days. This is a story of someone I knew and had cut ties with because he was a psycho. The first half will be to add context as to why I cut him off, and the second half is what makes it a let's not meet.

I don't know if he uses Reddit, so I'll omit ages and locations. It started about four years ago when I was living in a friend's house while attending a nearby university. It was myself, my friend, his sister, and their parents. Roughly about two weeks into staying there, my friend's sister invited her boyfriend to live in the house too, and by all accounts, he was a pretty cool guy at first. Very sociable and full of great stories. We often sat around the table for drinks or talked about life, having a smoke in the garden. Within the first month, however, as he started to get comfortable, cracks started to show in this veneer.

He would rant about government conspiracy, how he was always a wronged party. He was big into Sigma male nonsense and martial arts and Christ did he have a temper. He had this big dog he always kept in a cage that was extremely violent when he wasn't around. The dog attacked his girlfriend and had to be put down and that's when the guilt trips towards her began and the ranting became incessant. About two months later, he had the bright idea to live in a shipping container, mainly because the parents wanted him out and dragged his girlfriend along for the ride. I'm not talking about one of those chic little restoration jobs. This was a rented container in a storage yard among the outskirts of the town we were living in. He would intimidate and

threaten the staff there constantly until they called the police. This of course was another conspiracy. He became increasingly abusive to his girlfriend to the point where the family got involved to get her out of there. I stuck close to them, having to pretend to be on his side until we could safely get her out. They broke up, which he blamed me for, claiming that I was poisoning her against him to make her mine, and she has a new partner now and they're happy. We all blocked the psycho ex on everything possible but he continued to harass them until eventually he disappeared, or so we thought. Fast forward to last year, I started to receive messages over social media

from several different accounts, blocking each one in turn when I discovered who it was. Some friendly and some hostile, and one of these profiles, however, was pretending to be someone I knew from university. We talked about life and how things were going, and eventually I was invited to a house party, claiming that it was a free house and plenty of people were coming. I booked the time off of work, made my travel plans, and kept talking to this friend coming to the date of the party. I mentioned it to my friend's sister, and she was interested in going herself, until I mentioned the address, and she began to panic. The address in question was a property belonging to the crazy ex's father that was scheduled for sale. I waited until the day of the party and

called the police to check the property claiming a suspected break-in. They found five people there including the ex. Parked out front was a butcher's van equipped for food storage and a collection of knives, hammers, and rope. Let's just say I'm glad I didn't go. I was shopping with my toddler when an older lady, maybe around 70 years old, who was by herself, came up and said, ma'am, just so you know, all canned veggies are on sale for 50 cents this week, and went on about how it's a great deal and they don't run it often. I replied, thanks, I appreciate the heads up, and I'll definitely grab a few on my way out. She began to walk away, almost out of sight,

and she stopped and looked back, smiling at my son. She then asked how old he was, and I responded, Oh, he's just over a year. She then asked if he was my only child, and some other random questions about him. Then she said, Hey, I just remembered, I have some clothes in my trunk, all boys stuff in your kids range. And she asked if I wanted them. I politely declined saying, we'll be shopping for a while. I don't want to hold you up. She insisted. Oh, not a problem.

I'll just wait outside and then I can come back in and find you before you leave. Are you a single mom? Would you need them? I got this gut feeling that something was just off about this lady, so I said, Nope, I'm not a single mom, and we have all the clothes we need. I thanked her for the offer. She tried a few more times, saying things like, I just don't know what to do with them. If you could use them, I'd be happy to give them to you. At this point, it really felt like

she was trying to lure me and my son to her car. I continued to decline the offer and walked away. I did a few more laps around the store, looking for things I needed. At one point, I saw her standing in an aisle in the center of the store with a younger man, just sort of people watching. I could just be super paranoid and she was just a sweet old lady trying to be nice, but something in my gut told me to get out of that conversation as quickly as possible. I feel like parents will know that having a small child with you makes strangers talk to you all the time and makes small talk about your sweet kiddos, but this conversation did not feel the same as the others I've had while out and about with my son. Has anyone else had a similar experience? This happened when my best friend was 17 and a half and I was 17 in 1996.

My best friend Chrissy and I are both smaller females. She's 5 foot 4 and at the time weighed 110 pounds but was a soccer player, very athletic and strong. I'm 5'7 and at the time I weighed 125. We're both blue-eyed blondes and were often asked if we were sisters or cousins. There was a large reservoir on the outskirts of her town surrounded by a beautiful public park. We figured that we'd be fine to walk around in the park because of lots of people usually hiking there. I had gotten some really good quality weed and we were looking forward to finding a peaceful place to smoke, someplace out in nature. I had my pipe ready in my pocket and we were looking forward to finding a peaceful place to smoke, someplace out in nature.

I had my pipe ready in my pocket and we were pretty stoked. We chose to go out on a Saturday. It was a beautiful sunny day and there weren't too many people out there. We parked our car by the reservoir in the mostly vacant lot that had two other cars. We didn't see anybody when we got there. We walked around the water for a bit and then chose a trail to go up. It was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit out and we were sweating but we had some water in my small day pack. As we got about a quarter mile or so into the trail I started having a weird feeling. I looked at her and quietly asked, hey, do you feel something off here? Everything's really quiet. Where there were usually crickets chirping and frogs singing, it was totally silent out. She looked at me and said, yeah, I think so, and then we heard some crackling of leaves about 60

feet behind us and a bit to the left. We didn't see anybody at the time so we continued forward. We were both getting pretty nervous and we heard the crackling again, this time a little bit closer. We still didn't see anyone and each time we would continue forward we would hear footsteps a little more behind us and I thought that we were being stalked. There was a turn off to the left which led to a clearing by a large rock about 12 feet high with a large sturdy rope anchored onto it to climb up to the top. It was part of a steep hillside of the cliff. The rope to climb it was anchored to the ground as well so one could not move it

and I told her, We need to get up that rock now. I think we need the high ground. She nodded and went up first with me right behind her. We flew up that rock, clinging to the rope tightly and going as fast as we could. When we reached the top, we turned around to see an older man, probably about 45 with a slighter build, wearing a jacket, jeans, and glasses coming into the clearing. He was about 20 feet away. He looked at us with a cold, vacant expression.

I got goosebumps looking at him, so I shouted, Hi, will you please leave us alone? We're just trying to have some privacy up here. He didn't respond, and with a blank expression, slowly started walking towards the rope which led to the top of the rock. My friend at this point was really scared and asked what do we do. I saw a large rock about 8 inches and almost square to my right so I grabbed it. I was surprised at how heavy it was but my adrenaline was going so I lifted it pretty easily and I told her, look around for the biggest rock you can find fast. Move them next to us, hold the biggest one and if the guy tries to come up,

we throw them at him and hit him as hard as we can. Aim for his head. Fortunately, there was a pile of sizable rocks behind us to the left like someone had made a ring to hold a fire on top of the rock and then move them away. She brought a few over and held a large one to herself. My friend and I stood close to the edge of the rock, holding our makeshift weapons. I looked down to the base of the rock where the guy was considering the rope. He looked up at us again with very cold blue eyes and no expression and then he reached his hand for the rope. I shouted loudly,

do not come up here. If you try to come up here you're going to get hurt. I held the rock close to my chest so he could see it. My friend was next to me doing the same thing and we had a pile of more rocks. He blinked his eyes and cocked his head a little bit and then released his hand from the rope and silently backed away. He backed to the edge of the clearing, back through the bush, still watching us and then we heard his crunching footsteps go back through the woods until we couldn't hear him anymore. We stayed on the rock for another 20 minutes, maybe a bit more, watching and waiting. There was no other way to access the rock except for the steep hillside covered with poison oak, so we didn't think he'd try it, and plus we'd be able to hear him if he did.

After we didn't hear anything for 20 minutes, we decided to make a break for our car. We threw several rocks down to the ground. Mine hit the dirt with a particularly satisfying thud. Chrissy went first down when I was keeping watch in case he came back. When I was scaling down the rock, she was holding a rock, getting ready to throw it full force if he returned. Unfortunately, he did not. We each grabbed the largest rock we could carry, put a few smaller ones in our pockets for good measure, then headed back to our car on the trail, very carefully and quietly. The crickets were chirping again, so we felt that he had left,

but we were still extremely cautious. We did make it back to our car without incident and quickly left, and that was the last time I've ever hiked in that park. This happened when I was 10 years old. I was at a ski resort with my dad, stepmom, and three sisters. When this happened, my two sisters, dad and stepmom were still out skiing, but my sister Ava and I got cold, so we went back to the hotel to get some food. We sat at the restaurant in the hotel until my stepmom came down. We asked her if she could hold the table so we could quickly go up to the room to drop off our

ski jackets. So we took the elevator and once we got off, we started to walk to our room. That's when I heard someone behind me say, hey. Now keep in mind we were both about 11 at the time. I didn't think he was talking to us so I just ignored it. We walked into our room but before we could close the door, the man stepped into the doorway. He was tall, probably about six feet and looked pretty old, maybe in his early 60s or late 50s. He was wearing the hotel staff uniform but without the logos. The thing that raised a big red flag was that he was wearing black surgical gloves. He goes on to say, hey, I was talking to you. We spun around, caught off guard, Ava saying, us? Then he replies, yes, you. I was wondering if you could grab a picture for me and come into my room

to pour some water for me. Our parents always told us never to trust strangers, and we already got a bad vibe from him, so we politely declined. His tone then got a bit annoyed and he said, it'll just take a second, can you just come pour me some water in my room? At this point we already knew this wasn't right so we just said no again. This conversation went back and forth for about three minutes until we tried to walk into our room. Our instincts kicked in at this point and I ran towards the door saying, sir, we're good, and I slammed the door on him. Ava and I sat in the hotel room for about ten minutes, panicking about how we were going to talk to our parents because we left our phones downstairs. We looked out the peephole and he

was gone so we bolted down the hallway and ran back down the stairs to the restaurant. Once we told our stepmom, she was mortified and went to the office security. They interviewed us and asked us for a description because they didn't have any cameras in the hallway. We gave them the description and they told us that nobody with that description works there and that most of them were young, broke college students. At this point, it really set in that if I accepted and just helped him, I waited tables in a local restaurant to pay for the gas for my car. I met Mr. Creep there. In my naive mind, he seemed normal at first, despite the fact that he was 20 and wanting to date a teenager like me.

Leaving my job after dark scared me, so I taught myself to get in my car, shut the door, and lock it in one fluid motion. It made me feel safe. One night, I was leaving work and had just gotten into my car when Mr. Creep seemed to just appear out of nowhere, yanking my door handle to try and open it. I looked into his eyes in the split second before he smiled and what I saw absolutely chilled my bones. I don't know how to describe the evil that I saw. And from then on I was terrified of him but I didn't let on because I was afraid what he might do if I told him that I never wanted to see him again. And after this, he constantly lied to try and impress me and try to invent ways of being alone

with me but my instinct was to run so I avoided him. About two weeks after this incident the restaurant got robbed and there was significant evidence against Mr. Creep, just not the kind that allowed the cops to charge him. I sent all my text conversations with Mr. Creep to the police chief in hopes that it would help. Mr. Creep slithered away after that, but I always looked over my shoulder. About five years ago, he messaged me on Facebook out of the blue. They went on about this top secret military clearance as well as a huge acreage that he owned. It made me nervous and I felt like he was trying to spring a trap or something

but I tried to put it out of my mind. Then today I was looking at posts about an unsolved murder when I saw his mugshot. He is now facing murder charges as well as two other violent felony charges. I'm just so glad to know that he's locked up but so overwhelmed about how correct my instincts were about the guy I worked with. I, a mid-twenties female, went to the local grocery store tonight at around 5pm. It's winter and getting dark by 5 where I live. I was in an aisle, taking my time deciding between the options when this late-twenties, early-thirties looking guy with light features, glasses, and a scruffy beard comes right next to me and just stands there. I didn't think much of it or even look at him at first because I figured, whatever, he's just looking too. But then after a few seconds I noticed that he wasn't moving or doing anything, just standing there. So I looked at him and he was already staring at me and for half a second I thought that he might say something.

So I stood there for a second just looking back at him and he didn't say anything so I just turned and walked fast away. At this point I'm thinking, okay that was weird but whatever, probably just an awkward guy who doesn't know how to talk to women. Then not 30 seconds later I'm in another aisle and I see him out of the corner of my eye coming down the aisle I'm in, again staring right at me. So again, I walked away as fast as I could and just went right to the self-checkout. While I was at self-checkout, I'm looking over my shoulders the whole time making sure that he isn't behind me anymore and he's not. I start walking out of the store, relieved that once again I was just being

paranoid and I wasn't ever in any real danger. As I'm walking out, I decide to look behind me one more time and there he is, right behind me. I then notice that he has nothing in his hands, no groceries and he's heading towards the door right on my heels. Without even thinking, I just stop dead in my tracks. I look right at him again and he's already looking at me and then he puts his head down looking at his phone and walks past me out the door. He bought nothing. I'm so scared at this point my head is spinning. I don't know what to do. I can see my car because I parked close to the exit, thank goodness, so I call my fiancé and sprint as fast as I can to my car. I jump in, lock the

doors, and start looking for this dude. Then I see him. He's aimlessly walking around the parking lot through the cars. He's pretty far away from me at this point and I have my fiancé on the phone, so I'm feeling somewhat safe again. I watched him walk around for another few seconds before I got out of there. I have no idea what this guy was doing or what his motive could have been. Maybe he was just a weird dude who doesn't know how to talk to girls or maybe he was a predator with a dangerous intention or maybe he thought I just looked like easy prey for a robbery. The thing I can't really wrap my head around is the fact that each time I noticed him, he was already staring at me. He was not discreet at all and I would think a dangerous predator

might be a little more inconspicuous. He also didn't buy anything from the grocery store, which I also can't understand. I was in the store about five minutes before I noticed him so I'm sure that he didn't follow me in the store. Am I just being paranoid? There's a lot that didn't feel right so I'm having a really hard time trying to rationalize this experience. It was definitely a creepy encounter. I'm currently an 18 year old female, but this situation happened in 2021 when I was just 16. It was around 3.30pm in the afternoon and I was returning home from my tuition classes. At that time, there was a high spread of the pandemic so the school was happening online. Still, I had no other option than to go and take notes from my teacher because there was an important exam coming up. Normally, I wasn't allowed to go outside because my knowledge of roads and areas was pretty poor.

However, my teacher's house was about 3 kilometers away and on the same route as our old apartment, so my parents allowed me to go. On the way there, there was a puchka stall, a popular, affordable, and delicious snack in our country where I knew the shopkeeper since childhood. As I was walking home from my teacher's place after fetching the notes, I decided to snack on some of these puchkas and have a chat with the kind shopkeeper. The roads were somewhat empty at the time with most of the shops closed and only a few passerby here and there. While I was eating, I suddenly felt someone touch my hair from behind which startled me. I had a ponytail. When I turned around, I saw an old woman who appeared to be homeless, probably in her 60s or early 70s, smiling at me. She asked if I could buy her some snacks. At the time, I felt awkward and didn't know how

to refuse, so I just said, yeah, sure, even though I didn't have enough money. I asked the kind shopkeeper to give her my share of the snacks that were left. I didn't really mind this, but as I was about to leave, she firmly grabbed my right hand and said, God bless you, child. If I could see my granddaughter, she would be just like you. And so on. I was awkwardly smiling and nodding because I felt uncomfortable. And I did try to politely pull my hand away from her grip, but she didn't let go. Then she started talking about how she had raised her daughter and son and how her husband, who was a rich man but a drunkard, used to mistreat and assault them. She explained how she had kept silent about it because of the money. Later, when her children grew up, got jobs and got married, her husband got into gambling, lost all of his money, went into debt and eventually died of liver failure. Now she was helpless and

went to her children for help but they resented her because they were greedy and refused to assist her. She shared how she had lost everything and went on for the next two hours. I sympathized with her but I also realized that it was getting late to return home. The woman had a very eerie body language and she started asking me about where I lived. Unfortunately, I told her about it at the time. She asked for my dad's name and I shared it with her. She claimed to know him and started saying positive things about him, describing him differently from how I knew him, which was strange because I looked more like my mother.

At this point, I became uneasy and tried to pull my hand away but she wouldn't let go. She kept insisting on taking me to her home and feeding me some sweets. That's when it struck me that she couldn't possibly take me to her home given her earlier story. I got frightened and told her that I needed to get back home because my parents would scold me if I was late. I started using more force to free my wrist from her grip. She resisted and even tried to drag me towards a dark lane by the road, saying that I had to accept her return gift. Finally, I managed to pull my hand away with all my strength and ran straight home. And as I reached

my house, I was breaking out in a cold sweat. My parents were understandably angry and confused when I was 14. I still think about this encounter almost every day. My dad lives near a small lake in Wisconsin. There are only about 100 people who live in the neighborhood. My brother and I spent every other week up there so we knew pretty much everyone. My dad's house was the second house to the top of this large hill. At the very top is a gas station and the diner where I would work over the summer. At the bottom of the hill was the lake and a small beach.

That morning, I was waitressing at the diner and at the end of my shift, I bought a slushie from the gas station and was planning on going down to the beach for the afternoon. Parked outside the diner was a gorgeous teal vintage car. I'm not sure what brand, I'm not good with that kind of stuff, but it seemed to be from the 60s and it caught my eye. There was an older man in the driver's seat and his wife was in the passenger seat. They had their windows up and I wasn't too close so I didn't get a great look at them, but I did notice that they were looking at me. I didn't think anything of it and started walking home. On my walk home, I remember wondering where they could be from.

We don't get many tourists, and I would have remembered if someone drove a car like that. The diner was off of a pretty quiet highway, and it was rarely used by out-of-towners, but I assumed that they were just driving through. My younger brother and I went to the beach that afternoon and hung out for a few hours. When we decided to head home I packed up my stuff probably a minute before he did and started walking home before him. On the walk up the hill there was probably half a city's blocks distance between us and he could clearly see me but we were too far to talk. I heard a car coming towards me and look back and move to the side of the street. It's the car that I saw earlier at the diner. They slow down as they approach me and I kind of start to get nervous. The woman in

the passenger seat rolls down her window and I nearly crap my pants. They both seemed to be wearing hyper-realistic latex face masks. There seemed to be no beginning and end to the mask and there weren't noticeable holes for eyes, yet their eyes definitely seemed real and there was no seam at the edge of the neck. If they were wearing masks, they were some of the best masks that I'd ever seen and must have cost a fortune, but it definitely wasn't their skin. There's no way. Something about them was just so off. The woman asked me for directions to a highway I'd never heard of. I didn't drive yet so this in and of itself wasn't weird but I pointed them to the highway by the diner that leads out of town. They thanked me, rolled up the window and drove away.

I ran to my brother and told him what happened and he said they looked pretty normal when they drove past him but they looked normal to me that morning as well. The masks were too good. He had to be close enough to notice how strange they looked. There was just something so unsettling about them. They didn't really do anything odd except asking a girl who was clearly too young to drive for directions but it was a very small community. I might have been the first person they had seen in hours and it was just the way they looked. I'd never seen anything like it and I haven't seen anything like it since. I mentioned it to my dad when I got home but he didn't have much to say about it.

I still feel deeply unnerved when I think about it more than six years later. I don't believe much in the paranormal stuff, and I do think that they were human. But why the mass? What were they doing there? And why ask a child who was obviously too young to drive for directions to a highway? Has anyone ever experienced something as strange as this before? I work overnights at a 24-hour diner. You can probably guess what company. I'm used to weird people and odd things happening, but tonight was just too much. The restaurant backs up to a field that has a tree line and my cook and I went out back to smoke. We could hear someone yelling in the distance but we get a

lot of homeless people that come through town that usually are harmless so we just shrugged it off as weird and went back inside. Later I came out again to smoke and throw away some trash in the dumpster that's next to the field. It was stupid to go over to it but I hadn't heard him again. As I'm walking away from the dumpster I hear, Hey, come here. Hey, hey, come here. It was much closer than when we heard him yelling the first time. I went inside and got my co-worker who owns a car with a spotlight on it. We shined it into the field which again not smart and we admit that but we couldn't see where he was but he kept saying hey girl come here. I called the cops by this point because it was just too weird.

As soon as I got off the phone with him, he comes walking out of the field. He's an older man wearing a tan trench coat and my co-worker and customer ran back inside because this dude was hauling it across the parking lot. He started to come towards the door and I called the cops again. My cook cut him off and told him he needed to go. The man was acting erratically, yelling at my cook and said, I'll end your life next time I see ya. He kept moving his jacket by his waist like he was flashing a weapon, but I couldn't see anything from inside. Cops get him down the road and an officer came by and basically said the guy's homeless and not mentally stable. No kidding.

We told them everything that happened and my cook pressed charges on him. The officer told us that there wasn't anything they could do and he wouldn't give her his name so they let him go. It basically ended with, oh by the way, he's known to carry a knife in his waistband. Call us if you need us. Bye. He came back, again hauling it across the neighboring parking lot and back into the field And we could hear him screaming, yelling, hey come here, again and again We got busy when the bars closed and haven't heard him yelling since But I know he's still back there because I had caught him sleeping behind the dumpster before

My manager comes in the morning and I'm going to try and get her to let me take a picture of him off the security tape so I can warn the other third shift workers. The field that he's camping out in also backs to a middle school but the cops said again there was nothing they could do. Hopefully he moves on and leaves us alone or the cops can get him on something where no one gets hurt. In 2018, I live with my partner and my German shepherd in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. I was 33 years old and our neighbor was a fourth floor walk-up unit. Very typical low-budget Chicago rental in a changing neighborhood. The layout of our building is going to matter to the story.

Our building had a total of 12 units. Mine and the three below me had a shared front entrance and the other eight units were through a second entrance. All 12 apartments had connected back porches and stairs that shared a walkway to a rear gate which led to an alley. From the front stairwell, there are windows on each landing to the back porches, so you can see the back door of my apartment when standing at the front door through that window. We had good relations with our neighbors, especially those that lived directly below us and shared our front door. This was the thing that saved all three of us, my partner, my dog, and myself. My partner was in a touring band at the

time and would leave for weekends for weeks at a time and it was a scary thing for me because I was actually hurt and stalked by my ex in my teens and twenties. I always worried something would tip him off and he'd start stalking me again. A little less than a month before a two-week tour my partner had scheduled, I received a creepy Facebook message from that stalker ex from yet another new account. About a week after that, my car was broken into. The glove box was empty and things were thrown around, but the only thing that was taken was a bag of dog treats. I had about $20 and change in the compartment between the seats and they left the money. I was on high alert at that point and very scared about the time that I'd be alone during the tour. My partner was kind of irritated with me and the

situation and felt that it was too last minute to cancel, especially over what amounted to be a bad feeling and a few isolated things that weren't direct threats. And truthfully, car break-ins are very common in Chicago. It happened to me like 15 times and police usually do reports over the phone and don't even come to the scene. What I found really strange was that the thief didn't take the money. There was a homeless man who had started camping on the boulevard nearby recently. My partner left for his tour and I set up cameras and bought door braces for my front and back doors. I became completely nocturnal, unable to sleep at night.

My poor dog developed diarrhea, maybe because she was picking up on my stress level. It meant that I was taking her down all four flights of stairs for her to go blast her bow six or seven times a night. I had the distinct prickly crawling sensation of being watched when I would take her out, but I couldn't tell what was genuine and what was my own fear and paranoia. Her diarrhea lasted an unusually long time, like three or four days. I was going in and out of the main door a lot, feeling very scared, and I noticed that some of my neighbors wouldn't pull the door all the way closed, so the lock engaged. I mentioned it to my downstairs neighbor one day, including that I was extra careful because of the stalker.

He was supportive, said that he'd mention it to the other neighbors if he saw them, and I noticed that the door was locked more frequently after that. My partner came home at about 11am on a Sunday morning. At about 8.30am that morning, my first floor neighbor's place was burglarized. He was a metalhead, dude who collected instruments and sold weed and psychedelics and lived alone. I guess he went out for breakfast and left his door unlocked while he was gone. Someone had come in, eaten the leftovers in his fridge, took a coat and a pair of boots and left a filthy coat and a pair of boots

and took his college diploma but left $500 in the same cabinet. They left all the expensive musical instruments and mixing equipment, left the drugs, but did take a set of keys. The keys were to the first floor apartment and a master key for the front door and the back gate. My neighbors ran into each other right after the break-in and the second floor neighbor said to go tell me because I had a stalker. So my metalhead neighbor came up to let me know what had happened. My partner had just gotten home from his tour when he knocked at the front door. I jumped out of my skin but looked through the peephole, recognized him and the three of us stood on the stairs at the front door while

he told us about the break-in. We jabber-jawed for a while, about 15-20 minutes, and while we were talking we heard the front door open and close below us but really didn't think anything of it. Then we saw a man climbing up my back porch steps at the back door through the window. There was no other apartment that he could have been going to and he had to walk past all 11 more accessible units on his way to mine. He was not my stalker and I didn't recognize him, but his image is burned into my mind. He was wearing flashy black and white high top sneakers, not the ones stolen

from downstairs. His black coat was oversized and hanging off of his shoulders. We locked eyes through the window and he froze halfway up the stairs to my back porch. He slowly took a cell phone and called someone as he slowly turned around halfway up the stairs to my back porch. He slowly took a cell phone and called someone as he slowly turned around halfway up the steps. He walked back down the stairs in artificial slow motion, as if he were pretending to be nonchalant and then bolted into a sprint as soon as he hit the porch below mine. My neighbor ran downstairs and dialed 911.

My partner and I ran through the apartment to the back porch and saw a sedan and a windowless van pulling out from the sketchy building two doors down. Both cars floored it out of the alley. We didn't get the license plate numbers, but the cops said that it wouldn't have mattered. There wasn't any crime committed and nothing concrete to justify stopping them. They very condescendingly explained this to me as they took my statement later. My neighbor is the one who actually made the call and has the police report and my partner and I were just considered witnesses. For a long time, the thing that scared me the most was the tool that my neighbor found when

he went running downstairs. It was a 2x4 piece of wood cut to about 2 feet but about 6 inches of it had been made into a handle. It looked like a paddle and for a long time I couldn't figure out what it was but I'm pretty sure that it was a ram for the door jam and locks. When I looked at my door afterward it looked like the frame had been repaired, like it had been broken open before. It seems like they used the one master key to place their ram, get somebody at the back door to catch me if I tried to run out that way, and somebody else was going to come back around, since they only had one key, and they'd break in my front door and go forward with whatever they had planned. When we caught them, before they could catch me unaware, they seemed to have aborted the plan. I suspect that they had been watching me, especially while I was taking out my dog and figured that I was alone. It was pure coincidence that my partner had gotten home 30 minutes before

all of this. I feel that we all could have been horribly injured or worse had we been trapped inside and they had gotten the jump on us. Nothing else ever came of it except that my landlord refused to change the locks but he did agree to let us out of our lease. I moved out of Chicago and now I've added a younger dog I'm training to do some bite work. My house is surrounded by cameras and floodlights and I have wingnut neighbors. This happened pretty recently. I, a 23-year-old female, work in property management. I was not supposed to be working alone that day, but my manager and co-worker called in sick,

and my other co-worker had requested time off that we all forgot about. I voiced my concerns because the property is in a crime-ridden area and I've had some bad experiences in the past. I actually transitioned to a different role because I no longer felt safe but they offered me a lot of money to come back so I did. The front door stayed locked during business hours so literally anybody could walk in. Also, it's a large and busy property. I needed someone with me just to help with all the tours and residents. Nobody was able to do anything so I called one of our sister properties and begged for their leaser to help me. They agreed but the leaser was going to have to leave early.

I agreed and was just happy to have someone help. Flash forward to an hour before closing and the leaser had to go. Literally as she walked out, this disgruntled man walked in holding a duffel bag. I hate to profile him but he was clearly homeless and not all there mentally. He walked up to me and handed me his ID. I asked him how I can help him and all he could say was, You don't respect veterans. I again asked how I could help him and he couldn't give me a straight answer.

I was getting fed up when the co-worker, who had requested the day off, happened to come in just to say hi. My co-worker instantly knew something was off so he came over to investigate. The homeless guy didn't like my co-worker asking him all these questions so he opened up his duffel bag and started sorting through it. He pulled out a piece of women's lingerie and threw it on my desk. Then he pulled out a box and in that box was an SD card. He was trying to put it at my computer and I told him to not do that. He listened to me but proceeded to rummage through his bag. He seemed very irritated because

we kept telling him, if you can't help us, how can we help you then? You're going to need to leave. At this point, I'm getting scared that he's going to pull out a gun and just light us up. And instead of a gun, he pulls out a knife. Instantly, both me and my co-worker started to scream at him to put the knife away and to leave. He eventually put the knife away but refused to leave. I messaged my manager who was out sick but lived on site to please call the cops and told him that there was a guy with a knife in the office. My co-worker who was with me didn't physically force him out but he guided him out by walking towards him and making himself look threatening. Finally the dude leaves and we immediately lock the doors.

He kept trying to come back in and was cussing up a storm outside. Eventually he made his way to the convenience store that is attached to the building. Within 30 seconds of him going in, about four squad cars pull up. We pointed at the store and they ran in there. The guy got aggressive with the police so they beat him and ended up detaining him. I told the police to look in his bag for the knife and they found it. I identified the weapon and answered some of the police's questions. I didn't press charges because this was clearly a mental health crisis and jail isn't going to reform that. He needs serious professional help. The DA pressed charges on my behalf and the courts granted me a protection order. They also let him go without bail.

The last update I got was that he didn't show up to his court hearing and now there's a warrant out for his arrest. I wonder why. I've not seen him since that event took place and that's all I really care about. It's been about ten years since this happened, but I still remember things pretty clearly. I should note that this is told from my perspective and I wish I could get my mother's perspective on it as well. She just doesn't remember the events as well as I do. And for context, I lived in a mid-sized city in the southern United States where the main thing to do at the time was to go to the mall. Sure, we had movie theaters and a couple of bowling alleys but besides that, there really wasn't much to the mall. Sure, we had movie theaters and a couple of bowling alleys, but besides that,

there really wasn't much to the city. My mom worked at a department store located in the mall, and having nothing better to do, I would regularly go and sit in the break room while she worked. It gave me a reason to get out of the house, and if I wanted to, I was allowed to walk around the mall or get something to snack on in the food court. Honestly though, I was shy and prefer to just stay cooped up in the break room, playing video games on my Nintendo DS. My mom's co-workers were generally very sweet to me and frequently popped in to say hello or just check on me during downtime. If I was lucky enough to go with my mom on weekends, I could usually convince my mom to pick up my friend. We were

actually dating, but since we were both girls, I didn't want that to get out, to go along with us. Going to the mall meant that I was free from doing chores at home, but it was a cheap way to sneak a secret date in every now and then. My girlfriend, though, never really liked staying in the break room with me. She always wanted to walk around the mall. I should note that she really enjoyed taking walks, so it wasn't out of the ordinary to want to do so at the mall as well. I just didn't like walking as much as she did, so I tried to weasel my way out of it whenever I could. I could usually convince her to walk over to a nearby store and look around or go grab something from the food court rather than walking but I noticed pretty quickly that she wasn't trying to actually get me to walk around.

She just didn't want me to be in the break room. And now my girlfriend was more perceptive to things than I was and I assumed that she just didn't like the ambience of the break room for some reason. And for a little while I let it go. But eventually I got frustrated and asked directly what was really bothering her about the break room. I thought she was going to tell me that it was too cramped or the lights randomly cutting off made her uneasy or something, the things that bothered me about it too, but no. What she told me was that she heard things in the ceiling, like someone was walking around in there. I had learned from my mother that there was a room in the ceiling, but it wasn't for walking around, it was for maintenance. Most of the stuff in there was wiring and insulation, but technically someone could get up there.

So I told my girlfriend this and said it was likely an employee up there fixing something. She said that was fine, but she didn't really like it and still preferred to just walk around or sitting in the food court. I understood her discomfort and wanted to help, so I agreed. We had a really good relationship in the sense of communication, though I got frustrated and wanted to make sure that she felt comfortable. Later that day, I mentioned what my girlfriend had told me and asked what they were fixing in the ceiling. Though my mom looked distressed and said that they hadn't been up there fixing anything that day, but she wanted me to see something. My mom took me into the receiving room of the department store, which was just a room off in the back filled with boxes and random junk the store was going to put out for sale.

The layout of this room, though, was sort of an L shape. One part of the L was used for receiving, but the other part was the way into the ceiling. I should clarify for this next part that to get into the ceiling, the store would have to call for the mall's maintenance team. They didn't have a ladder or anything on hand to climb in there as it would have been a safety hazard. The only thing that this particular area had was a hatch that led into the ceiling and that was it. So needless to say, I was horrified to see what appeared to be claw marks leading up the wall to the hatch. I still remember the way they looked, brown gashes that had been dug into the concrete wall of the receiving room. I asked my mom if it was some sort of prank, but she told me that it

wasn't the first time that it had happened, and she had no way of knowing I would even ask about it. According to her, these weird carvings had shown up several times over the course of a few months. Each time the store would call in the mall security and maintenance teams who would clean the wall up and then go into the ceiling to investigate. Nothing had ever come of their searches though, and they eventually gave up dealing with the marks. The only explanation mall security could give was that it was likely a homeless individual who had made their way into the ceiling by sheer willpower and happened to be very good at hiding during the searches. I stopped staying at the mall with my mom after that and anytime I wanted my girlfriend to come

over we found somewhere else to go during the day. Sometimes she'd just come over to my house when we watched TV or whatever, but I didn't feel safe going back to the break room after that. I knew nothing had happened up until that point, but I just didn't want to risk it, honestly. So to whoever or whatever was walking around in the ceiling at my mom's workplace, I hope we never meet again. For context, I moved into my new house about a year or two ago. I had lived in the area for a year before, but we were evicted due to the owners of our old house wanting to move in. I'm a young female, still living with my family, which makes the story even more strange and unsettling. When you look out my window,

you see my fence and then a house. They are up on a small hill, so the fence doesn't block anything. The first encounter I had with this man was late at night. I was with some friends while all of our parents were out at a party. I will say that my friends and I are old enough to be left at home and we were responsible. We were just relaxing in my room with no light or music on. We had turned the TV off when we were alone. We heard my dog start barking for a good 10 minutes and we passed this off because she barks at absolutely everything, from birds on the powered line to bugs on the front porch, basically anything that moves. We started hearing weirder noises like crunching, circling the perimeter of my room and scratching on the walls. I kid you not,

the moment we started getting scared, the loudest bangs I'd ever heard began pounding on my glass sliding door. My three friends and I ran out of the room to see what in the world could be making this much noise. We were greeted by an aggressive dog, which was up on the glass pounding on the door. My dog was scared, she usually doesn't do this, but she backed away behind me into the room with all of her fur up. Then we saw it. A man dressed in all black, standing at the door. We were all standing perfectly still, but I guess my friend's flight response kicked in and just as he had jumped to lock the door, the man reached for it too.

My friend yelled, what are you doing here? Who are you? He responded with a simple, I don't know, and walked off with his dog, which was on a leash. When our parents got back, we told them about him. They asked us why we didn't call them. Truthfully, I know we should have, but I didn't want to ruin my mom's birthday party. I have learned from this. Two days later, my mom confronted our neighbor who was mowing the lawn. He said that it was in fact him and that his dog had run into our gate and he got the dog back. He said he meant to come and talk to her earlier about it but didn't. I thought it was a normal story until I thought back to that night. The gate that his dog supposedly ran through has a tough clasp

that was shut on that night. We have it there so our dog can't get out and so nothing can come in, but you can open it by hand, meaning that this man opened the gate and let himself and his dog in. My theory is that he heard the music stop and didn't see lights from his house so he decided that he was going to come and, I don't know, rob us. The noises we heard must have been him, scaling the perimeter of my room for ten minutes before attempting to enter. We filed a police report and nothing happened for a few months until one night. I was in bed, almost asleep but still getting comfortable. I set up to rearrange my pillows and turned around to make it more comfortable when I saw a face outside my window staring back at me. Whoever it was was wearing a black face covering and I texted my mom and froze. I heard movement and then my mom came and checked and nothing was there. This wasn't just my

imagination as my neighbor's lights are visible from the crack in my curtain but the face was covering a majority of the light. Ever since then I have noticed them watching and whenever I catch them looking they get up from their balcony and leave. I'll catch them watching in the same spot only five minutes later. A few years back, I, a 23-year-old female, was driving home after taking my dad to the airport for a late flight. It was already dark when I left the airport and I still had a three-hour drive home. A few hours into the drive, I get recalculated to some windy back road highway. There were no cars or street lights so it was pretty dark and pretty creepy. As I turned to curve I noticed a black car come out of nowhere and start to ride my bumper, then the blue

lights. The road was so dark that I had to drive for a minute to find a spot with at least a few lights where I could pull over. The officer came up to my window and asked me if I knew that my tags were expired. I thought it was kind of odd because I was driving my mom's car and she's usually pretty on top of those things, but it was more so the way he talked that made me uneasy. He was speaking pretty fast, like he was in a hurry or something. As he's standing at my window, before he even gets my license and registration, his radio beeps and tells me that he has to go to another call. He practically runs back to the car and speeds off. I head back home, half weirded out, half thanking God that I didn't get a ticket,

and I kind of brush it off until I go outside to my car the next day and find that my tags were not due to expire for two more months. It could have been a simple mistake but I couldn't help recalling how weird the whole incident was. He could have misread the number but looking back I wonder what could have happened if he was someone with bad intentions. From then on I pull over only in well-populated areas and if a safe option is unavailable, call 911 to make them aware. To be continued... future narrations. I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm Eastern Standard Time. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash Let's Read Official, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me

even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast, where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data, located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon. Thank you.