The Lets Read Podcast - 275: WAS THIS WW2 DOLL CURSED? | 17 True Scary Stories | EP 263

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Saint Patrick's Day, trail running & yard sale encounters 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: - Betterhelp

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Find your pro at your local Tread Experts. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca Back in 2009, myself, my wife, and our daughter, who had recently turned four, moved into our first house up in Aurora, Illinois. It was a very happy and exciting period in our lives, and if you'd asked me at the time, the only difficulty on the horizon was deciding where to put my man cave, in the attic or in the garage. But when I look back on that time more than two decades later, I marvel at how blissfully ignorant I was. We'd moved out to the high-crime inner-city area that had gotten increasingly worse following the financial crisis. Our apartment had been burglarized once, and our car had been broken into twice in the year that preceded our move,

and we strongly suspected one of our own neighbors to be guilty of the burglary. But proving it was another matter entirely, so when we moved out of the suburbs, I believed our trouble with the neighbors was over. But in reality, that couldn't have been further from the truth. It was exactly one week since we moved when I decided to take my daughter over to a nearby park which had this big jungle gym on it. We'd driven past it a few times already and she was very focused on paying it a visit so, with it being a nice day and all I figured that we could walk down there at a casual pace and I could introduce my daughter to the surrounding neighborhood.

So we're walking down to the jungle gym and I've got the stroller loaded with snacks and all this stuff but my kid is walking next to me when we suddenly see a yard sale set up about 50 yards down the street. My daughter was a very sociable little girl back then so as we walked past and I pointed out the two tables of various stuff to her, she immediately started just heading over to take a look. Behind the tables was a woman who looked to be in her late 40s or early 50s who greeted my daughter with a smile before I told her that we were new to the neighborhood. We exchanged a little small talk and I was taking a look at some of the stuff that she had for sale when I suddenly noticed this small doll nestled in among some grubby stuffed toys.

Unlike its dusty looking friends, the doll looked almost pristine, but what really caught my attention was how it looked so much like my daughter. It was almost uncanny. Now I plucked the doll from among the other stuffed toys and then showed it to my daughter while saying, look honey, this dolly looks just like you. And she fell in love with the thing right there and then. And after gazing at it, sort of wide eyed for a moment or two, my daughter walked over to her stroller and placed the doll in its seat. The woman behind the tables let out a very loud awe before I joked about how my daughter had left me with no choice but to buy it. And the lady thought for a second and asked for just two dollars. I only had a five on me, so I gave the money to my daughter, and I instructed

her to pay for the dolly, which she did in a way that prompted another awe from the lady behind the table, and then I told the lady that she could keep the change. She was very grateful, but honestly, I would have paid five times as much if she'd asked for it. Our daughter was very picky when it came to toys around that age, so to see her have this instant connection was just priceless. After that, my daughter didn't seem so excited about visiting the jungle gym anymore, and she insisted that we take her new doll back home immediately. And in case you were thinking, oh, this is some creepy Annabelle-type doll that's going to turn out to be haunted, well, let me assure you, that really couldn't be further from the truth. This thing was angelic, and a very good condition for something that looks so old-fashioned, so I was

only too happy to let her have it, and I'm pretty sure that she wouldn't have taken it in the first place if it looked like a friggin' Chucky doll or something. Anyway, we take the doll back home. My daughter starts playing house with it and treating it like her own little baby, and my wife comes home to be as pleasantly surprised as I was. We'd spent literally hundreds of dollars on toys our daughter just never played with, and the only thing that seemed to keep her entertained was drawing on the walls or chasing the cat around the house. So to have her fall in love with something, really anything, that didn't cost us to replace or repair, it was a true godsend. The next day was a Sunday, so both me and my wife

were home all day. I was upstairs putting together some furniture when the doorbell rang downstairs. My wife shouted that I'll get it up the stairs, then about a minute or two afterwards, I heard her calling me downstairs saying someone was there to see me. I remember walking out onto the first floor landing and looking down the stairs to see the lady that I bought the doll from just the day before. I walked downstairs to greet her, ask what we could do for her and she responded by saying that she had a big favor to ask of us. Then she took out five dollars from her purse and asked me very politely to return the doll my daughter was just so enamored with. She explained that a mistake had been made, that she'd sold me something she shouldn't have and

that she needed to get it back right away. It was a friendly request, but there was something behind it too. I don't want to say that she was scared, but getting that doll back seemed awfully important to her, so much so that I said sure and went off to take the doll back for my daughter. The moment I stepped into the TV room, I saw her still playing with it, when she would have moved on from literally any other toy by that point, and I knew things were about to get pretty messy here. I walked up, kneeled down next to her, and explained that the nice lady needed to take her dolly back. I made up some excuse, that the doll belonged to another little girl, and that she was really sad that her dolly had been mistakenly sold.

If my daughter gave it up, it would make the fictional girl very happy and I'd take her straight over to Toys R Us or wherever to buy as many new toys as she wanted. My daughter just simply looked up from her doll and started to bawl. Just absolutely crying. And cut to about five minutes later, my daughter has her limbs all wrapped around the doll and she's screaming like the little kid from The Exorcist. These ungodly, satanic screams were coming out of her and they intensified every time we so much as lay a finger on her new favorite toy. It got to the point where, after my wife had taken over, I went back to the door to offer the nice lady $50 on top of what I'd already paid her, and when she refused the offer, I doubled it to $100. You could tell that she thought about it for a second, but then told me something to the effect of, my husband is really mad at me for

selling you that doll. I'd like to take the $ hundred, but he told me I need to get it back, and I need to get it back today. Now, slight side note here, but hear me out. Number one, I really didn't want to give back the doll. I think she could have asked for 200 bucks there and then, and I'd have driven her to an ATM or something. The amount of crap that we were going to have to go through if we tried to pry that doll out of our daughter's grasp would be beyond a mere mortal's comprehension. So at that stage, I think I would have done just about anything to avoid it. But then, there was that other thing. The way the lady seemed almost scared to go home empty-handed. If her husband was so upset that she'd sold the doll, why didn't he come over here to explain himself? I get that it was her that had sold the thing in

the first place, and I'm all for people taking responsibility for their mistakes, but I don't know. Something about it just really didn't sit right with me. I didn't refuse to give the lady her doll back and I didn't offer any more cash. But what I did do was tell her in the nicest way possible that if her husband wanted the doll back, he should come over so we could negotiate. I told her my kid loved that doll. Heck, she could hear all that racket herself and unless it was an exorbitant amount of money, I was more than happy to fork over a lot more money to avoid my daughter hating my guts for probably a week or so. The lady seemed nervous, though, and said that she'd pass the message along, and then we said our goodbyes and I closed the door. Once we'd successfully calmed our daughter down, my wife and I got to talking about the predicament that we were faced with.

I happened to mention my concern for the lady's home life. She then suggested that I do the neighborly thing and head over to the house where the yard sale had been to talk to the lady's husband myself. That way we could iron out the whole affair today while getting a read on the atmosphere inside their home. And so off I went, walking down the street to the house where the yard sale had been, and when I got there, I knocked on the door and waited for a response. Only seconds later, the door swings open, but not before I heard a man's voice coming from the other side, and he didn't sound happy. The guy opens up the door, and I can see the yard sale lady standing in the hallway behind him. He's of a similar age to her, with a beard belly, thick beard, and a few wisps of hair on the top

of his head. He takes a look at me and then looks back at his wife and says, is this the guy? And she nodded. And then the guy turned back to me and asked, Alright man, where is it? I correctly assumed that he was talking about that doll, so I started to explain how I'd come over to talk to him about it. But I don't think I've gotten two sentences out before he cuts me off to say that he didn't care what I had to say. They wanted the doll back. They were offering a refund, and if I wanted a discussion, I could have one with the cops. And at that moment, I was stunned. Now, I had expected the guy to be pretty disagreeable,

but not outright confrontational, and the idea of getting the cops involved seemed like such a needless escalation. I told the guy that there was no need to get any cops involved, and that all I wanted to do was resolve the situation with as little drama as possible, and he responded by saying if I didn't want any drama, I should have thought twice about talking so rudely to his wife. Again, I'm just about knocked off my feet by what he said, and I remember looking over his shoulder towards his wife, expecting her to do something, who now suddenly seems very focused to avoid making any eye contact with me. I thought about explaining to the guy that I'd actually been perfectly civil with his wife, but upon realizing that amounted to calling her a liar right there

in front of her husband and realizing that he was kind of a weirdo. I just said something to the effect of, you know what, call the cops. I'd be happy to speak to them. And then I turned around and walked back down the guy's driveway to the sound of him cursing me out like you wouldn't believe. And I remember my heart dropping in that moment. A few hours later, we get a call from the local police department and I guess it shouldn't have surprised me so much, but I was genuinely shocked the guy had gone through with actually calling the cops. I was definitely interested to see what they had to say, transaction or contract, but only if the recipient of goods or services has committed consumer fraud or employed deceptive business practices. Obviously, I had done neither, and even though the yard sale couple had definitely twisted the

story to make it sound like I was the bad guy, I hadn't broken any laws, so I had zero obligation to return that doll. However, the officer did advise me that while I was obviously free to return the doll if I saw fit, that the best option was to simply stay away from the yard sale couple and avoid any further confrontation. I guess they'd been honest enough to admit selling me the doll on accident, which must have made it open and shut for whatever officer was unlucky enough to have received that call. I should also mention that prior to hanging up, I made it clear to the cop that I'd been willing to work with the yard sale folks at first. I tried getting it back from my daughter, I tried offering them more money, and it was all in an attempt to avoid any animosity between us

and the yard sale people. We'd only just moved in, we didn't want to make any enemies, but they'd also put me in a position where I just didn't want to deal with them anymore. I knew the obvious solution was just to return the doll, but I guess wanting to keep my daughter happy, combined with a little bit of pride for myself and contempt for that yard sale couple, made for a less than stellar decision-making process, looking back on it. And so, the day after that was a Monday, and I was off at work all morning, but not long after getting back from my lunch break, I got a call in my cell. It was my wife, and she sounded angry and upset. The yard sale lady's husband had been over to our house and, according to my wife, had suddenly threatened her in reference to getting

back the doll. Apparently he'd made some half-assed attempt at taking it back, telling my wife that he was sorry for the way things had gone and that he'd like to start over, blah blah blah. But when my wife tells him that we'd been in touch with the police and that we'd made our decision, he dropped the nice guy act completely. My wife was even more mad about the situation than I was. So when the guy implied that he could just force his way inside and take the doll back, she gave him a verbal shellacking, told him that he'd have him arrested if he so much as stepped on our driveway again and then slammed the door in his face. I was very proud of her that she held her own like that, but the idea the guy had paid my wife a visit when I

wasn't there to do anything about it, it made my blood boil thinking about it even all these years later. There were a few more incidents like that, nothing involving the guy coming to the house, but we got a couple of death stares and a rude comment or two while walking our daughter to the jungle gym. It wasn't anything that we couldn't handle and we reminded ourselves that things could have been so much worse. We'd lived at least a football field or so down the street from them. If we'd have been closer, things would have been considerably more tense. Now anyways, a few weeks go by and we were still getting looks that could kill whenever we passed the yard sale place in our car. But there had been no further escalations or anything of that nature.

I should also add that even after a month or so of playing with that doll, my daughter still hadn't grown tired of it. She absolutely adored that thing. And spoilers, but she still has it, and it's without a doubt her most precious childhood possession. But as I was saying, things were going smoothly, and I thought things had blown over, until one late Sunday evening, when I heard a knock at our front door. I remember it was just a few minutes past nine and being mildly annoyed that someone was visiting so late, it wasn't like I was running for the old Louisville slugger like I would have been doing back in the city. So I get up, walk to the door, and I open it up to see old yard sale husband standing on our doorstep and he looks absolutely sauced.

I think I just sighed at first before asking him what he wanted in a voice that probably sounded more bored than anything else. I'd had a beer or two myself that evening so I was definitely a little slow on the uptake but as yard sale husband slurred out, you know what I want, in response to my question, I noticed that he had his right hand hidden behind his back. And I didn't mince my words, I asked him straight up, what do you got behind your back there? And when he showed me, it was like space-time itself slowed to a painful crawl. It was a gun, and it was suddenly pointed right at my face. My hands were up before I even thought to put them there, and every action was just involuntary for a few seconds. I said don't shoot, in the same involuntary way. It just sort of jumped out

of my mouth like I wasn't in control of myself anymore. And at the same time, I felt all the color draining from my face, like my brain wanted to pass out but my body just wouldn't let me. It was the most terrifying thing I'd ever experienced in my entire life, and I have no doubt it registered on my face too because when the yard sale husband saw it, he started to smile. He said something like, it didn't have to come to this, you know. You should have just given me back that doll when you had the chance. I backed up, stammering that I'd get it for him right then and that there was no need for anyone to get hurt. He took a step forward, walking through the open door to our home with that gun

still pointed at me. He told me that he'd like to follow, just to make sure that I didn't do anything, as he put it. I think he figured that I might damage the doll in some way or go get a gun myself, which would be an insane thing to do in that situation, but I'd also come to realize that whatever was going on was just about as far from sane as it's possible to get. I told him that if we're going to get the doll, we need to go upstairs into my daughter's room. Yard sale husband then gestures towards the stairs with the gun and says, You first. I remember that. And it was only in that moment that I realized how incredibly screwed I felt.

The moment I saw that gun, I should have just jumped back, slammed the door, but I completely froze up. And the weirdest thing too, it's not even the first time I've had a gun pointed in my face, but the first time, I'd more or less seen it coming. But when I saw one in the hands of that yard sale husband that night, with those bloodshot eyes and the slur of his words, that was a whole other level of fear. That first time, when I was mugged, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut and handed over my wallet that I'd be probably fine, and thank God I was.

I was left to walk back to my apartment with nothing but a bruised ego, kicking myself for being dumb enough to walk around that neighborhood at that time of night. But yard sale guy, he hated me. This was way beyond just getting his doll back. Now I might return it, and he might thank me by shooting me right there in front of my own daughter or wife or both. But then, what other choice did I have? I'm not John Wick, and even if he was drunk as a skunk, I don't think I'd have been able to disarm him without someone getting shot in the process. And keeping in mind that my wife was asleep in the room almost right above us, so any of that Hollywood style wrestle the gun up into

the air then fire off all the bullets. Nothing like that is ever an option. I walked up the stairs. My arms were still up, at as slow and steady a pace as possible. Once I reached the top, I explained that my daughter's room was towards the rear of the house, and that we'd have to walk down the hallway a little before turning into the room on the right. The sound of my voice then prompted my wife to appear from the bedroom, but before she had a chance to even ask who I was with, the sight of yard sale husband and the gun in his hand had her pulling back a scream. I told her to go back inside and close the bedroom door. She completely ignored me,

stepped out into the hallway and stood next to me in a way that blocked the passage of that yard sale guy. And then she then looked him dead in the eye and said, in a voice that sounded terrified, but very defiant, You're not going anywhere near our daughter, you sick son of a bitch. The yard sale husband looked deeply offended by the suggestion that he wanted anything except that doll. These days I'm very proud of how brave my wife has been, but at the time I was furious with her. Doing anything that would offend, antagonize, or even annoy the pistol-wielding drunk standing in front of us seemed just like complete insanity. But the crazy thing is, I think it actually worked for us. Like I said, he seemed almost offended that he wanted anything but his doll, and when he told us that, my wife suggested that she go get the doll while we both

wait in place. The yard sale husband seemed content with that outcome, but before she backed off towards our daughter's room he informed her that if she did anything to that doll, out of spite I mean, that he wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet in me. I dreaded a repeat performance from my daughter in terms of throwing a tantrum I mean but somehow my wife managed to retrieve the thing without waking her up and she handed it over to a very smug looking yard sale guy before he ordered us back into our bedroom. He said that he could see himself out, and that he didn't want us showing him down the stairs or anything once he turned his back. We opted for our daughter's bedroom instead, even though there was no lock on the door or anything,

and that's where we stayed, until we heard that guy slam our front door behind him. After that, I very cautiously made sure the man had actually vacated our home and obviously called 911 to report everything. The adrenaline dump was something, and mixed with the guilt and shame of having allowed an armed man on the second floor of my home, where my wife and daughter were, it didn't make for the most enjoyable evening, let me tell you. What happened next was even more long and drawn out than the first half of the story, so I'll try to just condense things as best I can so I can skip to the juicy stuff, and not all this relatively boring legal stuff. So, the guy gets arrested, needless to say, and the cops throw the book at him.

He was looking at armed robbery, criminal trespassing, possession of a weapon during a crime, and I think a bunch of other stuff like reckless endangerment, but I'm hardly some legal eagle, so don't go quoting me on that. He ended up getting a suspended sentence on account of a bunch of different factors, but he was banned from owning firearms in Illinois, was forced to attend addiction counseling for his drinking, and if he breached any of his conditions for the next few years, then he was off to prison for at least a year and a half. Now my wife and I were somewhat happy with the results. I mean, it hurt him where it hurt in a sense, because I think he was a big gun guy, but it put a real damper on our move,

knowing that we lived down the street from such a psychopath. And now for the best part, or at least the part that I usually round this story off so it's not so insanely dark and disturbing. Obviously anyone who gets drunk and performs a small-scale home invasion is obviously not of sound mind, but the truth is, there was a method to this guy's madness. He wasn't hell-bent on getting his doll back because of some Mr. Burns-esque affection for his childhood doll. It had almost no sentimental value to him whatsoever. The reason he was so intent on retrieving it was because it was worth way, way more than just five bucks. Before their yard sale, the couple had dug out a bunch of stuff from around their home and had gone about separating the stuff that they could sell online for higher prices from the

stuff they could try and hawk at a yard sale before carting off to the city dump. During the process of emptying out their attic, the couple had found the doll, presumably the possession of some long-departed relative, and the husband had set about trying to get it evaluated. And that's when he finds out that the doll was handmade in pre-World War II Germany, specifically in the city of Nuremberg. I'm guessing the husband or wife's relative served in Germany after the war and had probably been a part of the Nuremberg trials in some capacity. Then, because Nuremberg is famous for its doll manufacturers, these relatives pick up a doll for what would have then been just a few bucks. Remember, Germany was broke by the end of the war,

and then brought it back stateside to give to their kids. Well, as it turns out, this doll was almost a one-of-a-kind. One of three, to be exact, that had been manufactured by a company called Kammer and Reinhardt. Their factory had been damaged during the war, and it took them years before they were able to return to pre-war manufacturing levels, which made the series of dolls that we were in possession of a highly valued collector's item. I don't want to say exactly how much the doll is worth, but to give you an idea, just know that one Kammer and Reinhardt doll got almost $400,000 at auction back in 2014.

Half a million dollars for an old kid's doll, and I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself. But after looking into it, everything suddenly made a whole lot of sense. This all came out after the cops questioned the yard sale lady in connection with the home invasion, and in order to distance herself as much as possible from what her husband had done, she told the cops absolutely everything she knew. That whole story was then repeated at the guy's hearing, and since he pleaded guilty to every charge before begging the judge for the lightest possible punishment, that's how he ended up getting nothing but the suspended sentence and that statewide firearms ban. Like I said, me and my wife weren't too pleased with

the result, as we thought he deserved at least a little jail time for scaring the holy hell out of us, but we got to keep the doll, and if the threat of jail time meant yard sale husbands stay the hell away from my wife and daughter, and so be it. That was almost 15 years ago now, and we've since moved down to the area of kickapoos, so I don't know how the yard sale couple are doing, nor do I care. My daughter still has the doll, which by some kind of miracle survived her childhood ownership. We didn't tell her what it was worth until she was much older when we knew that it was a kind of investment and that she shouldn't go selling it on a whim for money to piss away on

this and that and the other. We always cared for it and my daughter said that she always figured it was because it reminded her of her childhood. But the truth is, we knew there had come a day when that doll might equal the down payment on a house. A lot of people have said that we were crazy to let her keep playing with the doll, after we found out how much it was worth I mean, and at the risk of sounding overly sentimental, I'll tell you what I told them. Seeing my daughter happy, truly happy, was worth more to me than any amount of money. She got years and years worth of joy out of that thing, and even though it cost us one of the most terrifying nights of our lives, acquiring it did something very special and very unique for our family. And let me tell you, it sure as hell beats her drawing on the goddamn walls. We're going back quite a while for this one, but back when I first moved out of my parents' place

and into an apartment of my own, and I was faced with a major male living space trademark issue. I had next to no furniture whatsoever, and I was burning money on takeout because I had next to no furniture whatsoever and I was burning money on takeout because I had nothing to cook or eat with, but I also didn't have a car or anything at that time so it's not like I could just drive over to a furniture warehouse and grab everything I needed. I had to find someone with a truck who was willing to take me and what's more, I needed to save a bunch more money after blowing it all on two months rent and a security deposit up front. I told myself that I could make it till my next paycheck, and I had about a hundred in tips saved up by about week two, when on my way home from work one day, I spotted a sign outside a house saying yard sale. It was a big sign too, propped up on the front lawn and underneath, yard sale tomorrow all day, it said, furniture, clothing, prices negotiable, discounts for bulk purchase. It was a biblical moment, like a bright light shone down from heaven onto that crummy handmade sign while a choir of angels sang

hallelujah. The house where the yard sale was going to be was two blocks away from my apartment at the very most, so best case scenario, I could bring back a huge haul of stuff for 10 to 20 bucks and that had seen me through until I got paid in full. And anyway, so I head down to the place the next day and it's legitimately a treasure trove of furniture, kitchenware, all that stuff. And the people running the sale were practically giving the stuff away. They had a coffee table, a side table, all kinds of knives and forks and other kitchen utensils. They basically had everything I needed except a few odds and ends that I could pick up elsewhere. They even had a wheelbarrow that I could use to push all my purchases home in and a random blanket that they threw in for free that I lined the wheelbarrow with to make sure my tables didn't get scratched.

Once my haul was all assembled and we got to talking prices, I ended up walking away with a ton of stuff for the low, low price of twenty whole dollars. And I do mean a ton of stuff too, including a bunch of old knickknacks and antique looking things to give my new apartment some character. I picked up things like an ornate ashtray, even though I didn't smoke because I figured it looked cool and I could maybe put my keys in it or something. Then there was this old oil lamp that looked really cool, two little wooden elephant statues that looked like they came from India, a ton of other cool stuff, and then about five or six really old-looking books. I say books, two of them were more like tomes,

and although I wasn't planning on reading any of the more archaic old titles, they'd make great decorations and add some old-world coziness to what had previously been a deeply unsettling liminal space. So, when I got all the stuff back to my apartment, I had to carry it all upstairs, which was easier said than done in the case of some pieces. My main focus was getting the coffee and side tables in place, and then I went about stocking up my kitchen with all the utensils and pretty much dumped everything else out onto the coffee table to decide where it was all going to

go. I did some provisional decorating just to get an idea of where things would look their best and then after that I had a smoke, cracked open some brews and then settled down to enjoy the rest of my day off. A few hours later after I cooked myself some food for the very first time in that apartment, I splashed out on the couch and started curiously skimming through some of the old books that I'd picked up. They were relatively impressive to look at, with gold lettering printed on the spines. Not real gold, I imagine, but it looked great either way. One book was this collection of articles from some old-timey magazine called Blackwoods, which was pretty

cool if you're into that kind of thing, so I remember flicking through that for a while before I made my way onto the other two. The second book was this cool old French to English dictionary, with all this amazingly intricate printing on the inside covers, but it was all in French, as in it was written for French people, so it was pretty much useless to me unless I knew the French word that I wanted to look up. That's when I picked up the third book, which was a biography of some old Italian monk, and after skimming through the pages, I went to place it back on the coffee table and this little envelope slips out from between two of the pages. There was nothing written on the envelope's cover, but I figured that it must be some kind of old letter inside, and so out of sheer curiosity,

I flipped the thing over and opened it up. Inside were maybe five or six old photographs. I couldn't tell how old, just that they were, and at first I could only see the first one. I didn't look through them in order, I just glanced at the first photo, which was of a young girl who looked like she was dressed for church, or possibly her first day of school considering the scowl that she had on her face. It was such an innocent looking picture that it totally disarmed me and I didn't hesitate to take the whole bunch out of the envelope before spreading them out on the table in front of me so I could take a look at all of them at once. The second I did, I got these split second glances at all five pictures

and I remember literally standing up and walking away from my couch after yelling out an almost involuntary, oh my god. From the brief glance of what I saw depicted in those photographs, I had the gut instinct to just burn the entire apartment block down. I guess that probably makes me sound crazy, but you know that feeling that you get when you see like a nope the hell out of there picture on Instagram or whatever? It'll be a picture of like a thousand spiders just skittering around a crawlspace or the glowing eyes of a crocodile peeping back at you in a dark sewer and all the comments are just like nope, kill it with fire and all that kind of stuff. I'm talking about the kind of picture that makes your skin crawl, has you shuddering and makes you physically recoil away from it after giving you a tangible physical sensation of disgust and dread and horror. Well, take that feeling and multiply it by 10 and I think you've got something like what I was feeling after seeing what was

depicted in those photographs. I'm sure you'll understand when I say that I want to spend as little time describing these things as possible. So if what I'm about to type seems a little nondescript or vague or whatever, then sorry, but it's the best you're going to get. So like I said, the first picture was innocent looking and lulled me into a sort of false sense of security. But then the others, the girl didn't just look grumpy anymore. She looked scared. There were men on horseback wearing creepy pointy hoods that looked like clan hoods, but were black and way taller. In other pictures, they were off the horses, holding the girl while she cried. There was another picture, one last one, but that one I'm not going to describe. Just know it was

one that made me certain that what I had in my possession wasn't just disturbing or immoral, it was downright illegal and most definitely evil. I stayed away from my couch and coffee table like they were radioactive as I called 911 and asked what I should do. The dispatcher lady took a minute to connect me to the cops and then they told me to just put the photos back in the envelope and put them aside for them to come collect as soon as they could. I told them that I didn't want my fingerprints on them and that I didn't want to have to look at them again, but the cop told me that my forensics were probably all over them by now, that the best way not to see them again was to put them away,

and that the fact that I reported the photos meant that I won't be charged with possession of them. Everything the lady said made sense, but I was still freaking out and wanted the cops to come by my apartment right away so they could take the photos and get them the hell away from me. But unfortunately, that wasn't going to happen. It was classed as a non-emergency thing, meaning that I'd have to wait the whole next day, Sunday, before detectives from the relevant department would drive out to talk to me and collect those pictures. I kept trying to tell her that it wasn't so much the pictures they needed urgent action for, it was the people that I bought the books from.

I didn't know the address by heart, but I could show the cops where the yard sale had been so they could go and question the people there as to where they got the books. The lady responded by saying that if I knew where they lived, that there was no need to rush over there. I guess that makes sense to a police department who are dealing with a busy weekend and with limited resources at that. But to me, at the time, it seemed completely crazy. What was happening to the girl in those pictures, it warranted the attention of every cop in the city. So to hear an officer herself tell me that they simply weren't a priority because they didn't constitute a violent crime, I guess I just didn't expect to

hear that is all. Now anyway, I shoved those pictures back into the envelope using a dishcloth to cover my hand and then made the mistake of thinking that I might be able to sleep a few hours later after I tried to brain bleach those pictures out of my head with as much adult swim as I could consume. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't getting any sleep that night and after staying up smoking for a few hours, I started to fixate on walking back to the house where the yard sale had been to just, I don't know, check the place out. I didn't end up trying to break in or anything like that. Heck, I didn't even go near the place really. I just stood across the street,

smoking cigarettes and watching the front windows. All the lights were off. They stayed off and no one exited or entered. No one I could see anyway. I'll admit it, I got scared. There probably wasn't anything to be afraid of either and I just totally got into my own head about it. There's no way they deliberately put those pictures in that book in the hopes someone like me would one day find them. Something else was clearly going on and breaking into that house wasn't going to get me anywhere but shot or in jail. And the next day I called the police department again, just to make sure someone was definitely coming over the next morning to pick up the pictures. They said they'd already been in touch with the relevant department and

that two detectives would most likely stop by either Monday or Tuesday. I told them again that they should probably get some cops over to the yard sale house to question those folks there on who'd own the books that I'd bought. The guy I spoke to that Sunday, who was a different cop than the one I'd talked to the night before, said that he'd make a point of doing just that. I mean, as in sending some officers over to the place. And I must have sounded pretty frantic by the time I was asking him to promise me that he'd send some officers over and in all fairness, his tone changed completely when he asked me to recap what I'd told the first cop I'd spoken to. Once he understood how serious it all was and more importantly how disturbed and freaked out I must have been, he'd swore that he'd get a patrol unit on it immediately and I later found

out that he was true to his word. The next day when two detectives stopped by to pick up the photos and talk to me about the yard sale, they told me two uniformed officers had stopped by the yard sale house the previous evening, only to find the house empty. It had been put up for sale by the previous owners and the two detectives I talked to were very interested in catching up with them to find out where they'd gotten the pictures. The two cops acted very much on my side and very grateful for all the information I had to give them but before they left, they hit me with something that sounded a lot like bad news at the time. They told me I wasn't being considered a suspect as my story seemed to check out but what I would need to do was head over to the precinct so they could get my fingerprints on file. That way they could isolate any prints on the pictures that weren't mine and potentially find out who had been the last person to handle

them. I guess that's logical and I know I shouldn't have anything to worry about, but at the time, I felt like that's what they'd said to every suspect, just to lull them into a false sense of security and get them to give up fingerprints, DNA, or whatever the cops ask. I was intensely paranoid that I was somehow going to be implicated in the whole thing, even though the photos looked to be decades old, and I myself had been the one to report them. But in the end, those fears proved to be unfounded and I was never contacted again following that first and final talk with the two detectives. One of them gave me his contact number, just in case I remembered anything else about that yard sale. And for a while after, I thought about calling him to see how the whole investigation thing was going on.

But, and I'm honestly a little ashamed to say this, I didn't. I was interested. I wanted to know how the hell those pictures had ended up in that book, but I also knew the best thing I could possibly do was to just try and forget about it. But then just because that was the right thing for me to do, doesn't to just try and forget about it. But then just because that was the right thing for me to do, doesn't mean I was able to do it. And I guess that's how I ended up sitting down to write all of this in the first place, seeing the things that I did that night, they're not things you ever really forget. I think the closest I came was around the holidays of 2018,

but then that whole Epstein Island thing happened and his death was in the news a bunch, so it's been on my mind a lot ever since then. I guess I really didn't want to know what happened with that investigation because I didn't want to hear that the people responsible for the pictures were never going to be caught. You can call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but I guess that's just something I've noticed a lot. How there's some people, but the creepiest thing I ever saw in my life was the result of stopping at a bloody garage sale. That was the summer of 1998 in small town Western Australia,

and I was just dossing around my parents' place when I got a call from a mate of mine. He told me some old kook was throwing a garage sale, which is basically the same thing as a yard sale for all American listeners, and he was selling loads of old military stuff for dirt cheap. My mate said the fuzz had already been by to confiscate some of the stuff he'd been trying to flog because it broke some NSW's statute regarding the sale of military antiques. They'd warned the bloke that he had to get permission to sell his wares, but then he'd just open up his garage again once they'd effed off, and that's when my mate and his brother spotted him while driving past their car. We were both 17 at the time, my mate and I, I mean, and it was his older brother's car, but he asked if I wanted to lift over there because they were going back over after nipping back to theirs to grab some cash. My mate and I were super into war and history stuff, and my buddy said that the guy had some stuff from Vietnam.

Yes, Aussies went to Nam as well. So, you bet your butt that I was keen to get down there to have a gander at what this guy had on sale. Anyway, about 45 minutes later, me and my mate and his older brother are turning into the street in the Brisbane suburbs. The house was right at the end, slightly separated from the others, but then lo and behold, the garage door is open and there's all this old military kit arranged and like a controlled chaos situation all over. The guy's got helmets and hats, bits of old uniforms, and tons of random ribbons and medals. He had a load of maps from Vietnam and East Timor that had been drawn all over to show plans of attack and stuff, which we considered to be gold standard military artifacts. There were flags,

rations, medical kits, propaganda leaflets, and the guy basically had bloody a military museum stashed away in his house, and my mate and I and his brother were having just an absolute ripper looking at it all and asking him questions. The guy said that he was an ex-digger, meaning a former soldier, but had been out for a while and had become something of a collector in his spare time. When we asked why he was selling all his stuff, he said he had money troubles and had become something of a collector in his spare time. When we asked why he was selling all his stuff, he said he had money troubles and had needed to downsize his collection for quite some time anyway, so then was as good a time as any to put on a bit of a garage sale to raise some funds. He seemed like an alright guy, a smidge off his rocker mind, but who isn't? He was wiry,

bald, with jeans and a cut-off leather jacket, like the kind bikers wear but with all the military stuff on it. After a bit of a chat and a few cigs, the guy went back inside and left us to it, and told us to give him a shout when we wanted to check out, so to speak. I think we rummaged through all that stuff for the better part of half an hour, each setting aside all the stuff we wanted to buy. There were rough pricing guides near all the little piles of ribbons and stuff, three for a dollar, buy one get one free, that kind of thing.

So we were pricing all of our stuff to the dollar and making sure that we got the most for our money. But then, right as we're about ready to cash out, I spot this box of old photo albums, Nice ones too, with leather covers and all that, and they're full of old photos from all kinds of different wars and conflict zones. The only problem was, after we called the bloke out, he told me that they were a little bit pricier than the rest of the stuff. That made sense to be honest. They were nice albums and the photos inside could have been a bloody museum. The thing was, I'd already picked out enough stuff to clear me out. The guy said he'd put them aside for me if I wanted, only for 24 hours, but it'd give me enough time to get my hands on some more cash. So I thanked him, bought what I'd already picked out and then went back the next day on my own to get the photo albums. It was about a 30 minute walk from my parents place to the guy's house so I grabbed my pack, made my way around there and gave the bloke a knock to let him know that I was there.

He comes to the door, says hello then goes around to the garage to meet me there instead. I only had 20 bucks on me and each album was $4 so I had to decide which ones I wanted out of the 20 to 30 that were there. As I was going through them, me and the guy are making a bit of small talk about why I'm so interested in history and all of that. And I told him how I was thinking about signing up once I'd done a bit of traveling around Asia. He then joked about the army sending me around Asia for free if I signed up, but he knew what I was getting at. After that, there was a bit of a lull in the conversation and I thought that he might leave me alone for a bit until I made my choices, but they lowered his voice a bit and asked me if I wanted to see something really cool. I told him it depended on what it was, but was reassured when he told me that he wanted to show me his proper collection, as he put it.

The stuff that he put out for sale was stuff that he didn't mind seeing the back of, but the stuff that he kept upstairs in his office was all the stuff that he considered priceless. Things he couldn't part with, and things that he'd never be able to sell, not legally anyway. My first thought was that he had a load of guns up there, rifles and such, which at the time were extremely illegal to own. This was the summer of 98, a year after the great Aussie gun amnesty of 97 and two years after the Port Arthur massacre in 96 where some schizo guy shot a load of people down in Tasmania. Martin Bryant, I think his name was, and he killed more than 30 people, kids included, before being captured by police. And it caused a massive amount of outrage, so the government changed all the gun laws

and then did this massive buyback program to get all kinds of guns off Aussie streets. And it actually worked in a lot of ways, and I think it got nearly half a million guns melted down into scrap, but then a lot of gun owners didn't want to give up their rifles and I thought that this ex-military guy might have been one of them. I was a bit nervous if I'm being honest, so I just asked him something like, they're not machine guns are they? And he laughed and said no, but that they were probably just as illegal, and not for the viewing pleasure of anyone who might dob him into the fuzz, meaning like snitch on him to the

police. I should have just said no, but he seemed like a nice enough guy, and when he told me something like, oh come on, I won't bite, I really did just think, what's the harm in looking? So we walked into his house, then went upstairs to what he called his office, what was really just a room with a computer and a few cabinets in it. We went inside and then opened up a drawer and got out one of those little wallet things that photos used to come in. He handed them over to me and says, take a look at these. And so I do. And what I saw made my jaw drop. They were photographs of dead bodies, loads of them, all hacked up and shot to pieces.

The guy said that they'd been taken as evidence after a massacre in East Timor and he'd bought them off of an Aussie peacekeeper who had brought them home with him for some godforsaken reason. He told me they obviously weren't for sale, but that he had heaps more like that stashed away if I wanted to see them. I told him I was alright actually, but before I could say anything else, the guy went for the cabinet and opened it up while telling me get a load of this then. I actually didn't want to see anything else that was graphic or gory, and that's what I meant when I said I was alright. But I think he took that as me saying that I thought the photos were boring or something, which seems bonkers to say, but I can't think of any other reason why that prompted him to show me what he showed me next. So yeah, he opens up the cabinet, pulls away a cloth from something it was covering up, and then all of a sudden, I'm greeted by the sight of a human head,

floating in a jar of God knows what kind of clear fluid. The guy said that he had it shipped over from Indonesia, that the poor guy was a communist who had been killed by some army officer, who then kept the guy's head like a trophy. The officer bloke dies, the family are only too keen to get rid of it because it obviously made him look like a monster, and then the jar somehow made it down to Oz and into the hands of my friend, the collector. It was probably the single, most horrifying thing I had ever laid eyes on. Not so much because it was an actual human head that someone had cut off and jarred for the sake of posterity. That was horrific all on its own. It's what the bloke said to me as I was looking at it, just totally shocked. Shh, he said. He's not dead. Just sleeping. And then he let out this wheezing laugh like it was the funniest thing he could possibly think of. Then, as if to clarify his point in a less insensitive way, he says to me,

no really, looks awful peaceful, doesn't he? Especially considering the circumstances. I hadn't heard much about all the anti-communist killings in Indonesia at the time, but I've come to know a lot more in the years since I saw that floating head. I won't go into all the details, I'm sure you and your subscribers, Joel, can do that on their own, but I'm warning you now, they're not pretty. But then, that's where the guy seemed to have an eerily morbid but very good point. Considering the way in which the guy died, and by that I mean, rounded up in the middle of the night and killed in the most horrible of ways, he didn't look half peaceful. Eyes closed, face perfectly relaxed, like he'd passed away peacefully in his sleep.

I must have really looked disturbed because the guy then said to me, if you think that's bad, you should have seen what they'd done to the women. I don't know why he thought that might reassure me, but it didn't, and I started edging toward the door saying, no thanks, trying to make it clear that I wanted out of there. He tells me suit yourself then and takes me back down into the garage where I paid for the photo albums I wanted and then made my way home. He then tells me that I can come back anytime I like, but I didn't go anywhere near his street even, not for years and years. Like I said, I didn't know much about all the stuff that happened in Indonesia at the time, but I did know that having a bloody

human head in a jar was way beyond illegal or criminal in any way. It was disgustingly evil. Then, by the time it had occurred to me that he could have quite easily been lying about it being a victim of some foreign conflict, I was just itching to call the police. That always gave me a chuckle these days too because despite my military aspirations, I had a bit of an authority problem at the time. I'd have never called the police on just about anyone, or so I thought, and then all it took was seeing that peaceful expression on the face of a severed head and I was itching to hit those three zeros. Which by the way, 000 is the Aussie emergency number just in case you find yourself over here for any reason in particular.

I called it in, told my parents about it and I remember my dad's jaw being on the floor as I was telling him. He told me I did the right thing, which I really needed at the time if I'm being honest. It might sound a bit goofy of me, but I really was that bothered about being considered a grass, even if I had just seen something that'd rightly give anyone a sleepless night. I never heard anything about it after that, and if he got raided or something, it certainly didn't make its way back to me. The only thing I really wanted out of it, after years of thinking it over, was getting that head back to the person it belonged to.

I mean that figuratively, of course. You'd be returning the remains to a family or something. But if that was my brother or my dad, I think I'd really appreciate someone doing that for me. Stuff like that helps people heal, and I'm sure given all the messed up stuff that happened in Indonesia back around the Vietnam War era, that's still a heap load of healing to do. I was trail running along this logging road for about 100 meters before peeling off into the woods, where game trails eventually lead to the stream at the base of the hill slope. The game trails off the logging road were flagged by previous surveyors and multiple routes were marked. This made it kind of confusing and not all routes actually led to the stream.

Some just petered out once the vegetation got too thick. Another led to a cliff face overlooking the riverbed and lots of faint trails. One day, I turned off into the woods where one of the survey flags was tied around a branch at the side of the road. I followed some pink flagging heading south along the hillside. I noticed the trail seemed freshly torn up and figured maybe a bear had clambered through recently since the last time I was there, about two weeks previously. The trail led to a small claustrophobic clearing and the ground was freshly torn up in the shape of a circle, which seemed strange. Then I noticed an assortment of bones scattered around the edges

of the clearing. They weren't there before. Everything was dead silent and something about it was just setting me on edge. I poked around the bones a bit, trying to piece together this scene. I noticed another slight path, which strayed from my main route, veering to the right from the clearing. I walked a bit down that way and gazed ahead trying to see if this path was flagged. It was densely packed with trees. A subtle movement caught the corner of my eye ahead and to the right as I walked. I turned my head to look past the trees and saw the silhouette of a large shelter maybe about 50 to 75 feet from the clearing. It was surrounded by what looked to be jugs and bones.

Tons of plastic jugs, light shapes of bones on the ground. The lighting made seeing anything else impossible, and everything was so quiet. I left in a hurry and continued with my run along the trail without trying to get a better look, without getting to the stream. The alarm bells in my brain were screaming by the time I got back to running again. I'm not the kind of person who usually ends up telling stories like this. Not only has writing never been my thing, but I just don't really like telling stories, especially stories that really affect me in some type of way.

You see, it happened on the eve of St. Patrick's Day more than a few years ago. It was supposed to be a night of fun and friends, and instead, it was an anxiety and fear-ridden night. Instead of drinking Guinness, we were lost on dark country roads with our phones not working and the gas tank close to empty. And to make this horrible night even worse, it was topped off with an encounter that I wish I could forget. And so I'll do my best in telling this story, and maybe you'll think I'm overreacting, but if you put yourself in my shoes, I'm sure you'd be scared too. Me and my friend Jess were all hyped up for the St. Patrick's Day party that was kind of on the outskirts of town.

We had our green outfits on point and we were ready to join in all the St. Patty's Day festivities. Unfortunately, neither of us were great with directions, and this was right before the era where every phone had a GPS in it. We were basically driving to this party in the middle of nowhere based on horrible directions Jess got from one of her friends. And so, there we were, driving down these winding country roads completely lost in about no time. Everything was so dark, and every turn seemed to lead us further away from any signs of life and it felt like we were driving in circles. After what felt like hours, the gas light flickered on and panic started to set in. We hadn't seen a gas station or even another car in about an hour of driving. We couldn't risk running out of gas since we would

most likely be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no way of contacting anyone. We did have our phones, but as I said earlier, they weren't smartphones yet and we had no service at all. I decided my best course of action would be to just shut the car off and figure out a game plan. I pulled over to the side of the road and me and Jess started to catch our breath and talk about what we should do next. And that's when things took a turn for the downright terrifying. You see, out of nowhere, this massive SUV with these blindingly bright lights pulled up behind us. At first we thought, okay, maybe these people were here to help. But something about the whole situation just immediately fell off.

The SUV just idled there for what felt like forever before the driver just gets out. It was probably about two minutes, but it did feel a lot longer. This person was large, and they started walking toward our car, and every instinct I had was screaming that something was not right here. Jess started begging that I drive away but for some reason I went against my better judgment and stayed put. It was so dark and the lights from the SUV were so bright that I couldn't tell if this person might have been a cop. At this point it was just a large dark silhouette. I locked the doors and I cracked the window just a bit,

ready to say that we didn't need help and that we were fine, unless it was a cop and could help us with directions. But as the person got closer, that wave of fear just washed over me. When he reached us and stood just inches from the window, Jess shouted through the crack, Hey, we're all set, thanks. But that person didn't say a word, nothing. Instead they reached for the door handle, immediately trying to force it open. In the few seconds that this all took place, I was able to see the man trying to open my door.

The entire time he tried getting into my car, he made direct eye contact with me. He had these huge eyes that almost looked sad in the moment, and that's the only way I can describe them. He had a large overgrown beard and it wasn't well trimmed. Jess was screaming and it broke me from my trance. And then without thinking I started the car and slammed my foot on the gas, peeling out of there like a bat out of hell. And we drove non-stop for about 20 minutes until by some miracle we were able to find a gas station.

The entire drive we didn't see anyone following us, but we weren't 100% certain. While we were at the gas station, even though it wasn't busy, every time we saw a vehicle approach with their bright headlights, our hearts would just stop, thinking it was the SUV coming back for us. Thankfully, it never did, at least not that we knew of. We never did find out who that person was or what they wanted, but I'd never been so scared in my life. The rest of the night was just a blur of fear and adrenaline. We contacted the police, but they really couldn't do anything and it didn't seem like they even cared. It was the eve of St. Patrick's Day and they had bigger fish to fry. We didn't talk much about it and to this day we still really don't. St. Patrick's Day is supposed to be all about fun and games, but for us,

it was a close encounter that I still can't believe actually happened to me, and I can't believe we got away unharmed other than that mental anguish, I'd say. And it's crazy because you hear stories about close calls and creepy encounters, but you never think it's going to happen to you. This whole encounter was maybe two minutes long, and yet years later it holds all this weight in my mind. I still cringe and get all tense every time I see those bright lights of an SUV drive by me, and I'll never forget that face. Just be careful out there, my friends. I never thought something like this would happen to me, and yet it did, as monsters do exist. So always lock your doors. I've been walking and running on forest trails for most of my adult life, and here are some of the weirdest, creepiest, and most frightening things I've experienced on those

trails. One day I went trail running on a rainy, foggy day. There were no other cars and I didn't see any other people up there there but I was around 5 miles up the trail which is about 8 kilometers for you find people across the pond. There's a part where the trail is really steep and you kind of slow down and stoop low to avoid this really low hanging branch so you can't really see what's on the other side. But then I pass under the branch, stand up and and suddenly, I'm face to face with a raccoon head sitting on top of a big rock, deliberately placed facing the trail. It looked fresh too. The blood hadn't finished drying and its eyes had been gouged out.

It still looked like a fresh wound. It was very unnerving to randomly come face to face with that on a foggy day alone in the woods. I sailed very well away from that head and kept on going and didn't see anything else weird that day unless you count two crows following me, circling above me the whole time I was there. The second thing happened when I was running a new trail that I'd never been to before. I was having a lovely time until I came to a long straight section of the trail and I can see up ahead are two trees that look like they've been propped together to create an incomplete archway over the trail and on the tip of each tree was a deer skull placed so that if you walked in the center of the trail they were both looking down at you as you

passed them. Seeing this obviously set off some alarm bells, but I just kept running. But you can bet that I stayed ready to pull out my can of bear mace from my little fanny pack. Moments after I passed that archway with the skulls, I started getting chills all over and I felt like I was being watched. I also remember it suddenly got very quiet in the woods where moments before I could hear birds and the chatter of small animals in the brush. Anyone who is an experienced outdoorsman can tell you that sudden silence in the woods is not a good sign. It generally means there's a predator of some kind nearby. Almost feels like the whole forest is holding its breath,

waiting for it to pass. I only made it like 20 feet past the archway before that bad feeling in my gut convinced me to turn around and leave. I felt like I was being stalked or watched the whole time I was going down the trail until I got closer to the parking lot. I didn't see a thing though. To this day I have no idea what that was all about but I'm glad I listened to my gut and turned around. Any supernatural explanations aside, it easily could have been a cougar or a grizzly bear that was living out there or maybe even a moose. I didn't see or experience anything other than the feeling of being followed or watched and when you're out in the mountains alone though, you trust that gut feeling. This one took place in the same place as the first story with that raccoon head. This time I was not alone and I had three friends with me. Something to note is that there was only one way

to get into this canyon and to reach the trailhead you have to park on a residential street up in the hills and walk on the trail past like three people's houses. When we arrived, there were no other cars around so most likely no people up the trail either. Early on in the trail we encountered our first oddity. There were some clothes on the trail laid out in the ground as if someone had recently been wearing them. A shirt, jacket, pants, boots, socks. All arranged as if someone had been laying there and then just melted away, leaving only the clothes behind. I thought it was weird as heck, but I made a joke that we might find some crazy naked person running around here on the way up, and we laughed it off and kept going. Now not much further up the trail, we saw the second oddity. Just a whole

bunch of camping equipment in a big old pile. I'm talking big hiking backpacks, tent bags, sleeping bags. All of this gear looked brand new, never used. There was enough gear for like 10 people, and there was no one around. I thought that was weird, but we kept going. Well, we saw a couple more similarly big piles of gear stashed in a clear view along the trail, but again, no one at all around. Further up the trail, we had probably gone three-ish miles, or 4.8 kilometers at this point, and we encountered yet another large pile of gear, but this time it was right in the center of the trail for some reason. I remember there were a few backpacks sitting next to each other and they were just full, bursting with something. I wanted to look, I really did, but none of us wanted to

touch the bags or open them up. It gave us all kind of a weird feeling. I remember there was a handful of leather coats strewn about that area too for some reason. At this point my friends and I are getting a little uneasy about all of this because none of this made any sense and it'd be quite an undertaking to bring all of this camping gear up to this trail. It's not an easy trail and it was enough gear that it would take probably 20 to 30 plus people to bring it all in one go. We decided not to touch anything and just kept going. I remember a very distinct moment when something changed. I led the group and climbed up a boulder to continue on the trail and

what do I see up ahead? Yet another big pile of equipment laid out in the middle of the trail. Suddenly at that moment it got quiet and as you know, that's never a good laid out in the middle of the trail. Suddenly at that moment it got quiet and as you know, that's never a good sign out in nature. Nothing changed other than that but this feeling of dread came over me suddenly and my intuition was telling me to get the hell out of there. And so I turned around and said, executive decision, we're leaving. No one argued. My friends had picked up the same vibe as I had. It was kind of a tense hike, but we didn't see anything other than the stuff that was still there or anyone the whole way down. When we arrived at the car, I called the nearest ranger station and told them what we saw, and I never heard back from them. And I have no

explanation for any of this. But ultimately, what was weird to me is that they brought all this stuff up there and just left it in plain view of the trail, and then they were just gone. The last couple of piles we saw in the middle of the trail gave off a distinct, it's a trap vibe for some reason, and we didn't see or hear another person up there. And where did they go? Why did they bring all that stuff up there and vanish? Why did they leave all their stuff behind? And what the hell did they have in those backpacks? Now, I'd rather not say my name, but I'm a 37-year-old woman and a long-time listener from Surrey in England. I know that you like to do hiking and camping stories from time to time,

and that a lot of videos are centered around outdoorsy themes like forests or national parks. Well, I've got my very own story for you. The story of how I developed xylophobia. And for those of you wondering what that is, let me explain. Xylophobia is the fear of forests and woodland, and more accurately, the irrational fear of the two. Interesting fact, xylo is the Greek word for wood, and the term xylophobia was initially coined to describe a fear of wooden objects, but over time it became a synonym for the much longer term, arboreal-specific primary agoraphobia. I say that just to clarify that xylophobia is not,

as a dear friend of mine once suggested, the irrational fear of xylophones, which I am in fact very fond of. But how be it, Sirite, I hear you asking, that you wish to tell us the story of how you came to be possessed by such a crushing and debilitating fear? Well, my dear listeners, and Joel, there's actually quite an interesting answer to that. For the past year or so, I've been attending a bi-monthly therapy session with a highly accredited cognitive behavioral psychologist. The more cynically minded of us might argue that cognitive behavioral therapy is just a fancy name for talk therapy, and in a sense, they're right. But CBT extends to writing, making audio recordings, even sketching

and painting, anything that has you confronting and exploring a subject in a way that changes your thoughts or behavior towards it. It's most commonly used among substance abuse and anger management patients, as it helps them identify potential triggers and unhealthy patterns of behavior. But CBT is also used to treat anxiety, depression, grief, and most pertinent to my story, post-traumatic stress disorder and complex phobias. My therapist and I focused almost exclusively on face-to-face therapy sessions for the first few months, as she wanted to get to grips with the issues that I faced before giving me what she lovingly referred to as homework. But then as time went by, she recommended that I undertake a long-form writing project,

whereby I could describe the root cause of my trauma while exploring how I thought and felt about it. I knew that it'd take a while to get round to something like that, and my therapist herself said that it was normal to find the idea quite daunting. But then it occurred to me, if I actually got my arse into gear and completed the assignment I could email the finished product over to your submissions over on the email and one day just maybe I could hear that story of my life's most traumatic experience narrated in your own dulcet tones. But how be it surreyite I hear asking, that you're perfectly content to hear your own traumatic memories read back to you? Well, that's because the cognitive behavioral therapy kind of worked.

I feel like I've taken ownership of my trauma. If I can tell my story, it gives me a sense of control over it, and since I happened to survive a situation that other young women weren't so lucky to walk or run away from. I feel as though it's a story with educational value too. And if just one young person can benefit from what I've got to say, either emotionally or physically, then I think it's worth for me to face my fears and actually write down my story so I can share it with others. But I'm sure by now you're thinking, bloody hell woman, get to the blooming point, why don't you? Well, without further ado,

this is my story. At the time, I was living with my parents in a little village called Abinger Common, which is a few miles down the road from Dorking. But back then, there were no gyms in Abinger, and unless you fancied running around in circles in the local secondary school's playing field, you had to run to the nearby forest trails to avoid feeling like a rat in a cage. And this is how I got into cross-country, or trail running as I've increasingly heard it called, as a way of burning off work-related stress. I actually really hated cardio at first, but nothing kept me sane and slender like three-mile trail runs twice or three times a week. I was honestly just too tired to be stressed, and flying through the woods with my little USB stick MP3 player sometimes made me feel more productive and centered than a whole week at my financial job in the city. It was like the ultimate antidepressant, and I quickly became very addicted to it.

Then, like all addicts, I developed a rather particular routine. I'd run to the same routes, at the same times, on the same days, whatever the weather. I became a creature of habit, because if I didn't get my runs in, I'd have trouble getting to sleep that night. Even if it was dark outside, I'd just strap a little head torch around my woolly hat and then off I'd go, running through the forest with the trail lit up in front of me. I knew the path well enough to run in my sleep by the end of that first year, and I wasn't scared to venture off into the deep dark woods because there wasn't anything to be scared of in the first place. I know in America you've got those big cats and bears and snakes to worry about, but here in the UK, you'd be lucky if

you bumped into a badger. And like xylophones, I've always quite liked badgers. So no, unless I was bed-bound with illness, which only ever happened once while I was living with my parents, I'd run at set times on set days with very little variation. Even if it was pitch black out or raining sideways outside, I'd always get my run-ins because if it isn't raining, it isn't training. Nothing ever happened on any of those post-sunset winter trail runs, and I never ran any later than 8pm in the summertime, but all the same, my mom was

never a fan of it. She always used to tell me to be careful and to avoid anyone acting strangely or suspiciously when I was out on my own. That always made me picture some consciously creepy child snatcher type character sneaking from tree to tree in the darkness with a fiendish grin on their face. But when trouble did finally come, it came in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon and it didn't look anything like I imagined it would. So that Sunday, mom was preparing to make a roast dinner with all the trimmings, and that meant that I had to get at least four miles in to justify consuming my body weight and honeyed parsnips and Yorkshire pudding.

So in the early afternoon, I put on my running gear, told my mom that I'd be back in time for dinner, and then I started to cross the open fields towards pasture wood stables and the forest beyond. I jogged past the stables, then through the old polo fields with the woods looming large in front of me, and then after that, I was in the forest proper, running along the large riding track towards the narrower woodland trails. The trail curves through the trees a fair amount, so you can't really see what's ahead of you in some sections. But after about a half a mile or so, the trail straightened out a little bit, and I saw a man walking towards me about a hundred meters ahead. He was quite a big bloke, in a dark green waterproof jacket, light blue jeans, and what looked to be brown hiking boots, and although it wasn't often that I'd see someone else on the

trails, spotting what looked to be a hiker didn't raise even the tiniest bit of suspicion in me. I jogged past dozens of hikers before them, some I'd even swapped short breathless greetings with a few while passing them, and I had no reason to believe that the exchange with this man was going to be any different. But as I got closer and we made eye contact, I gave him a clipped afternoon, and to my utter shock and surprise, he responded by violently lunging towards me and shoving me off balance. It was a really powerful shove, but the way it caught me off guard and off balance made the tumble a truly brutal one. I ended up crashing into the dirt on my right side and it didn't quite knock the wind out of me entirely, but it was bloody close. As I tried to find my feet, I remember reaching for my

headphones, which had fallen out during the fall, and asking him something, what the bloody hell's wrong with you? He didn't offer a response, and I looked up just in time to see him launch a fist into my face. The force knocked me backwards, and then I think that I must have smacked my head on a tree on the way down, that or he landed a kick as I was going down or something because I remember that second impact sending the sharp pain through my scalp. I tried to get up, but it was even harder that time. I expected another punch or kick, but instead, he wrapped an arm around my neck so that the crook of his elbow was at my throat. Then he started dragging me back towards the trail. I screamed for help, and that prompted him to clamp a hand over my mouth,

but after I managed to get a grip of a finger or two between my teeth, I bit down, and it was his turn to let out a yelp of his own. I remember how hearing him in pain gave me a brief moment of satisfaction, but I mean brief, because the next thing I knew, his fist slammed into my cheek so hard that I could immediately taste the blood when I hit the ground again. Only that time, instead of trying to get up, the idea to play dead suddenly struck me. It was probably a silly thing to do now that I think about it. In that kind of situation, your number one priority is to put as much distance between yourself and your attacker as possible.

Don't try to fight, not in a sustained fashion anyways. Attack to blind or disable, and then run like the clappers of hell. But as I'm sure you've gathered by now, my situation was a little bit different. Getting up and trying to run wasn't really an option anymore, and I knew a few more blows to the head like that and I'd probably be out cold or unable to stand entirely. So I suppose that I thought the best thing to do would be to throw him off a bit, trick him into a false sense of security, and then run like mad as soon as the opportunity arose. I thought he might start trying to drag me again, in which case I could

burst into action at a moment's notice and take him by surprise. But for some reason, that's not what he chose to do. And after giving me a swift kick to the ribs and a few slaps, I couldn't fake being unconscious anymore. But then, another idea came to me. If I couldn't play dead, I could try playing dying instead. I started faking these wheezes, like I couldn't breathe or my throat had closed over or something. I made a massive song and dance out of it too and the man kicked me again in the ribs, but that only inspired a much more convincing performance. Then after a few seconds of fake choking, I went quiet and tried to breathe as shallow and subtly as I could manage.

I didn't dare open my eyes. I just lay there, listening and hoping my little performance had achieved something, and to my absolute amazement, it somehow had. I couldn't see him, but I heard him swearing over and over. He thought that he'd buggered up his little scheme by killing me and he was panicking. The next thing I knew, I could hear him pacing back and forth, swearing under his breath, and then the sound of his footfalls got a little more distanced, and I dared open one eye to see what he was doing. With his back to me, I watched him bend down then raise himself up again, and when he turned, he was carrying this big, torso-sized rock back towards

me, one so heavy he was really struggling with it. Right away I thought to myself, he's going to drop that thing on my head to finish me off. So I leapt up, and at that moment I was running off into the forest, with my lungs burning and my head pounding. I'll never forget those next few minutes for as long as I live. My heart was beating so fast and hard that I could feel it in my temples, and every time my heart beat, these flashes of pain would split through my head like red hot needles boring into my skull. My legs screamed at me to stop sprinting, and I could feel them starting to ache in ways that told me I couldn't run much longer. I was already tired from having to run all that way to start with, so suddenly going into a full sprint was pretty hellish on my legs. But then, all at the same time, my heart, my brain,

every ounce of survival instinct I had in me, they were all screaming in this chorus of terror, go, run, don't stop, he'll kill you. And that alone kept me running and running and pushing through the pain long after I've called it quits on the trail. I never even tried to look back. I was so scared that I'd accidentally run into a tree and knock myself out and looking back on it, I'm very glad that I didn't end up as the most comically depressing murder victim in British criminal history. I focused everything I had on getting as far away from there as possible, as fast as possible, not a single other thing in the world mattered. I don't think he got anywhere near me because by the time I stopped to look around, I couldn't see nor hear my attacker. I don't think he'd been the fittest of men.

Perhaps that's why he'd opted to be an ambush predator. The only chance he had of catching a sprightly young thing like me, god was I sprightly back then, was to catch me unawares. Trick us into putting down our guard before striking with brutal decisiveness. I've gotta hold my hands up too. It was a very effective little plan that he had, and if it wasn't for my very high stakes gamble paying off dramatically, I can honestly say that I wouldn't be around to type this. But I think the worst thing, far worse than any lacerated cheek, bruised rib, or graze on my scalp, was the fact that the guy was never caught. I can't safely reassure everyone that the bastard was caught, that he stood before a

judge and that he's now serving at her majesty's pleasure. I got home safe, called the police and then gave all the necessary statements and descriptions, but sadly nothing ever came of it. The police were good as gold, they really were. They took the entire thing very seriously and I believe they did everything they could to try and apprehend my attacker. But not every real world crime has a TV ending where the bad guy slips up, gives himself away and is promptly brought to justice by a couple of hard faced detectives. Most people aren't lucky enough to have a happy ending to their stories and some stories don't have any discernible ends at all. And I often think of that.

If my attacker had been caught, that might have provided a comfort that I otherwise didn't get to experience, and that the enduring fear of forests and woodlands stems from the fear that I'll somehow run into him again, and give him a chance to finish what he started. I suppose I'm trying to work towards the stage where my subconscious mind can accept the reality my conscious mind acknowledges, that the chances of me running into that guy again, even if I ran on that same trail, are so small that they'd make your mind boggle. I don't even live anywhere near Abinger anymore, but there's still a primal, primitive part of me that thinks that if I go for a walk in the woods with my dog, that my attacker will be there, waiting for me,

and that time, I won't be able to get away. I just hope that one day I'll be able to feel as excited about the woods as I used to be back when I was a trail runner, and that by listening to this, people will know there's a life on the other side of trauma, and that if something terrible does happen to you, you're never helpless. There's always something you can do, and you should always fight like hell until you find what that thing is. St. Patrick's Day start when I was a kid and my parents would take me to the parade each year. We would usually make a big deal of it. My parents would fill the cooler and meet up with some other family and friends and I would hang out with the other kids or just sit and watch the parade and hope to get beads, candy or anything else that they would throw out into the crowd.

As I got older, I still always went with my parents, but would meet up with friends later. When I was with my friends, we would partake in the traditional jello shots, as well as an assortment of other beverages to get us in the St. Patrick's Day spirit. Once I got out of school and a little older, I grew out of my party phase, but still always made sure to attend the parade. Within the last six to seven years, I've been involved in not only St. Patrick's Day parade planning, but also with the day of preparation and walking in the actual parade. There is a pretty detailed process of who are walking in the parade, a certain allotment for local business and advertisers,

and also a large contingent of schools, bands, and local Irish step groups, etc. And the events I'm sharing with you now took place around two years ago. It was the day before the parade, and we had lots of workers and volunteers helping set up and working on finishing touches. We were finishing decorating floats, had people painting on the large banners, as well as gathering candy, t-shirts, beads, and other items to throw out into the crowd. I remember that it seemed like a really hectic day compared to other years. Everyone was running around and trying to help, but it felt completely unorganized. Most people had a lanyard or a name tag to distinguish themselves as volunteers. I call this out because I remember seeing a particular person sticking up

from all the hustle and the bustle. They were casually walking around, slowly peering into cars and floats and looking like they were just checking out the scenes. I walked over to them and said, is there anything I can help you with? I see you don't have a lanyard. You need one? She popped around quickly and said, oh, yes, please. I haven't gotten one. I'd love to help out. I asked her who she was here with and which sector she would be helping out in. She seemed nervous and her face got red. She said her name was Leanne and she was there with Doug and really wasn't sure what she would be doing. I had no idea who Doug was but directed her to a table with some sign-in information and she thanked me and then walked

away quickly towards the table. I went around the rest of the day frantically trying to get everything ready. Before I knew it, it was after 7pm and I needed to start rest of the day, frantically trying to get everything ready. Before I knew it, it was after 7pm and I needed to start locking up the facility since it was going to be an early morning the next day. As I went around to check the lights and various door locks, I kept feeling like I heard something. Almost like scurrying or scratching on the floor like there was a small animal moving around. I turned on my cell phone lights since most of the lights were now off but didn't see anything. And then I heard a big crash coming from the opposite side of the room. I took a few steps forward with my cell phone light but still didn't see anything.

I decided to just get out of there. If it was an animal or something, I wasn't sticking around to probably get rabies. I got home and immediately went to bed so I wasn't super tired in the morning. I got up, showered, made myself some tea with honey and headed back to the facility to unlock it and start getting ready for the morning. I went to the side doors, unlocked them and went to the first bank of lights and turned them on. I felt like I heard the same scurrying sound that I'd heard the night before. I had already forgotten about being afraid that a rabid animal was going to jump on me out of nowhere. I decided to keep the bank of lights on, but slowly walked around to see if I noticed

anything out of the norm. As I weaved my way around everything that filled up the entire floor space, I saw what looked to be two glowing beams in the far back corner. I couldn't tell what it was, but as soon as I looked in the direction, it was gone. I started making my way over to that side of the facility, and I heard what sounded like a tree branch snapping, but like a thick branch, almost like a bone breaking. About five seconds after that sound, I heard the loudest and most terrifying noise in my life. It was a blood-curdling scream that almost sounded like

laughing as it came to an end. And I sprinted to the door that I had unlocked, closed it behind me, and locked it as quickly as possible. About 15 seconds after it was locked, I heard one solid bang against the door, like someone throwing their entire body weight against it. I called the police, told them what happened, and they began searching the area. At the same time, other volunteers and parade participants were showing up. After about 15 minutes, the police came out with a person in handcuffs. It was a woman, who looked like she had been awake for four days straight. Her hair and clothes were a mess. As the police walked by me, I got a good look at her face and saw that it was the woman from the previous day. That one that I had mentioned, named Leanne. I thought I

had done something wrong and was going to get charged with like false imprisonment or something. And after about 45 minutes, the police said that they needed to talk to me again. I was so nervous. I think they picked up on that and told me to relax and that I did everything as I should have. They told me that the person inside was an estranged mother of one of the children that was due to show up to march with one of the bands in the parade. And they also informed me that she told them that she just wanted to talk to her daughter. But when they searched her car, they found suitcases filled with clothes and other items that almost looked like travel materials. They didn't really share much else other than they were getting into contact with the child and their guardian to inform them.

They had me make another statement about what I remembered from this Leanne, which I think I found out later wasn't her real name from the day before. Apparently she found a place to hide and stay overnight planning to do whatever she was going to do that day. If she was trying to go undetected, I'm not sure why she screamed. Maybe she was in the midst of some kind of manic state. But anyway, this was easily the scariest thing that's happened to me in my life thus far. I still walk in the parade from time to time, but have taken a step back from volunteering as much. I'm hoping that as time moves on, I can erase that horrifying scream from my memory. When I'm alone or in the dark, I can still hear it just as clear as I did.

That one St. Patrick's Day. Although this might not be your conventional scary story, it sure as hell was the most unsettling, otherworldly thing that's ever happened to me, and I think some of your viewers and listeners will get a kick out of it. So, I used to do a lot of trail running near the Au Sable River in northern Michigan. Some of my favorite routes were right in the middle of the Huron National Forest and passed near some pretty good fishing and swimming spots too. I used to load up my pickup truck, drive a few miles upriver, and then run in a big old loop until I got back to my truck feeling like I'd lost a few pounds in sweat alone.

Both sides of the trail are shrouded by tall white and red pines, occasionally birches and the like. It's very scenic, very lovely, but it gets hot as hell in the early July afternoon and some days I'd much rather have been tubing down the river than sweating my butt off on the trails. Some sections of the trail are pretty close to nearby highways, so typically you could either hear a distant radio or music playing from a passing car or truck. But then on one day in early July, like I said, I heard something which sounded like classic rock music coming through the trees. I used to run without headphones if I was trail running, because it's not the kind of place that you want to lose your situational awareness. And as I was running, I could hear the sound getting closer and closer like I was about to see some ATV or bike off-roaders coming along the trail at any moment.

Within the span of 30 seconds, it felt like the sound had gone from being very distant to sounding like it was almost on top of me, but bizarrely, even though the sound was so loud, I couldn't see its source. It must have been easily within 30 feet of me, just off to the left in the forest, and it should have been obvious, but it wasn't. The sound got a little louder one second, and it went from sounding like a cross between tinny heavy metal music or a high-pitched engine to sounding like a great buzzing of tiny wings. And then, I saw it. It was perhaps five feet from me and the second I laid eyes on it, it appeared as a big shapeless shadow floating through the trees. They were little flies, thousands of them, all buzzing in unison in this big cloud that moved like it was one ethereal body.

Their buzzing sounded like it was in differing octaves of the same note, definitely not classic rock music but still eerily mesmerizing. But then, the cloud of tiny buzzing insects suddenly and unexpectedly veered towards me. I tried to back up, but the cloud moved surprisingly fast and before I could turn and really sprint to get away, I felt and heard the cloud of flies envelop me. I was expecting to feel them biting or stinging me and I started to scream and wave my arms in a pointless flailing attempt to keep them off of me. I could hear them and feel them buzzing in my ears and even though their wings were probably no bigger than an eyelash,

their combined buzzing sounded almost deafening as the cloud took me over. I could feel my skin crawling, not from sheer fright or disgust, but because there were literally things buzzing and crawling all over me for a moment, and it made that moment feel like an eternity. But just a second later, the buzzing subsided and the cloud moved on, and when I opened my eyes, I caught one last glimpse of it before it disappeared among the trees again. Then, as it left the area for good, the audible buzzing diminished and its noise warped back into what sounded like ACDC being played from a small, tinny speaker. It was easily the most frightening, unsettling, and downright skin-crawling thing I'd ever experienced. The kind of thing that, if I didn't know any better,

I might think was a demonic manifestation. I mean, go back a few hundred years and a more religious ancestor of mine might have died of fright when this dark shadowy presence veered towards them out of nowhere. I mean, it's the closest thing to a ghost or spirit I think I'll ever see. Just this inexplicable mystifying presence that heralded itself before it became visible. After I got home, I did as much online research as I could to try and figure out just what the hell I'd experienced. This was back in the fall of the year 2000, a time when the internet wasn't nearly as padded out with information as it is now, but I still managed to find a few relevant websites which gave me a clue as to what had happened. Apparently during the summer of just a few months prior, Grand Traverse County discovered it had a major tent caterpillar infestation. They're called that because they make little webs that look almost like tents, and they completely strip the leaves of trees that they make their homes in. Obviously, this wasn't all that good for the

environment, so officials in the Traverse City consulted with some nature expert who told them that flooding the area with black flies, who like to lay their eggs on the tent caterpillars' cocoons, would thin out the infestation and return the balance of nature. Believe it or not, there's actually companies out there who specialize in breeding things like black flies or any other insect species that might prove valuable in managing ecological problems, such as a tent caterpillar infestation. They probably made tens of thousands of dollars selling the city of Traverse a whole bunch of these little black flies, and because they'd been living in swarms and closed spaces for their short lives, some stayed in formation longer than others, I guess, and resulted in the thoroughly spine-tingling sight that I'd witnessed in the woods that day. It was nice to have some kind of explanation for

what happened. I didn't think anything supernatural was at work or anything, but I was still creeped out by the experience. It having something to explain what happened that actually made sense to me on an environmental level, it gave me an awful lot of peace of mind. I guess there's a lot of things in the world that are like that. Things that are really creepy, even when there's a perfectly rational explanation for them but I'm certainly in no hurry to experience them because feeling that huge cloud of swarming buzzing black flies swallow me up and the raw terror it produced in me it's not something I ever want to feel again. St. Patrick's Day in my city is always kind of a big thing.

I know probably everyone says that, but it's probably because it's true in most places. It's like everywhere just comes alive for the day. And for some reason, everyone just loves being out that entire day. Of course, drama still exists, but as a whole, it just seems like most people get along better that day. And it's why I personally have always loved St. Paddy's Day. Two years ago, I was out that night hopping from one bar to another, just enjoying myself and living it up. I was dancing, drinking, kind of living in the moment, and that's when I met her, this girl who seemed to stand out from everyone else. She was alone, which struck me as odd

because it looked like everyone else was out in groups, laughing and kind of stumbling over each other. But not her. She was just there, sipping her drink, watching the crowd with this sort of amused smile. I should admit that I'm usually horrible at trying to make a move on a person. I have no problem going out there and dancing and looking like an idiot, but talking to a girl? That's a death sentence for me. But for some reason, I approached her and made some horrible pickup line that actually worked. I'm sorry I don't remember the exact line, and knowing me, it was probably some stupid dad joke. And we hit it off almost immediately. She had this way about her, easy to talk to, laughing at my jokes, and somehow making the chaotic bar scene around us sort of just

fade away. And we spent the next few hours bar hopping together, losing track of time until it was well past two in the morning, and that's when she asked me to walk her home. She said that she lived close and didn't want to go alone. Maybe it was the drinks or the way the night had gone, but it didn't seem weird at the time, so I agreed. She led the way, her hand grabbing mine, pulling me along. She was being cute, and this felt very special in the moment. I don't know if that's cliche or whatever, but I was really feeling it. With almost no warning, though, she veered off the main street onto this sort of dark side road. She mentioned with a whisper that it was a shortcut and me, being none the wiser, just followed.

She could have told me that there was a dragon that needed to be slain down the road and I probably would have followed her. The streetlights were few and far between here, casting long shadows that made the whole thing feel like we were stepping into another world. That should have been my first clue that something wasn't right, and that's about when I noticed that there were no more houses in sight. It was just trees on her left and a long stone or brick wall on her right. Suddenly, she stopped and turned, grabbing my shoulders and pushing me against that brick wall that lined the road, my heart racing, thinking this is it, a kiss or something is coming my way. But I couldn't have been more wrong. Before I knew it, two men jumped out from the darkness

behind the fence, One of them pressing something against my side, claiming that he had a gun. I didn't actually see one, but in that moment, I wasn't about to question it. And they didn't waste any time. While the one was pressing something against my side, the other man was rifling through my pockets, taking my phone, watch, and wallet, which was everything I had. While this was happening, the woman I was with started yelling, hurry up, you're taking too long. It was dark and I tried keeping my eyes closed, praying that this would just end soon. However, I did catch a glimpse of the man who was going

through my pockets. He had a hood on and a beanie under the hood. He had what looked like a snake tattoo or some sort of design resembling a snake on the left side of his neck. He was clean shaven and had these weird scars on his face. I didn't see the guy who said that he was holding a gun. All I know is that he had a hood on as well. And then, as if stealing my stuff wasn't enough, they threw me to the ground and started kicking me over and over. Even the girl I had just spent the last few hours with was getting some shots in. I remember them telling me to stay down for five minutes or they'd shoot, and the fear of that moment, the helplessness. It's something I can't shake. His squeaky voice

stained in my memory like some sort of scar. After they vanished back into the night, leaving me there bruised and battered, I did what they said. Stayed down, not daring to move, every second feeling like a small eternity. I waited far longer than five minutes and eventually I managed to get up and find help, calling the police to report what happened. But as these things go, nothing could really come of it. No way to track my phone, no leads on the girl or the two men. I even gave the police information about that snake tattoo and the scars and the voice and even an extremely detailed description of that girl. But it ended up just another unsolved case in a city too full of them. And looking back, I keep asking myself how I could have been so naive, so trusting. The warning signs were there,

but I ignored them, caught up in the moment and the excitement of the night. It's funny, in a twisted way, how one night and one chance encounter can change everything. How it can make you question your judgment, make you see danger in every shadow and every unknown face. St. Patrick's Day will never be the same for me, not after that. And I guess the moral of this story, if there really is one, is to stay alert. Always be aware of your surroundings. And maybe, just maybe, think twice before walking someone home down a dark and unfamiliar road. St. Paddy's is usually a blast. Everyone's out, the streets are popping, and the bars are filled with tons of people, and the night is usually one of the best party nights of the year.

Unfortunately, this year I was stuck working at the bar. Now don't get me wrong, the tips are nothing to complain about, especially on a night like that. Still, I'd have killed to be out with my friends, taking shots and dancing and being a degenerate. Instead, I'd be on the other side of the counter serving the drinks. The bar slash restaurant I worked at got this dishwasher named Josh. Nice enough guy, a bit quiet, keeps to himself mostly. He's got schizophrenia, something he's pretty open about and has talked about. When he got hired, he basically told everyone there and told us a little about his condition.

Usually, you just find him mumbling to himself while he works. Nothing out of the ordinary for him, and he seemed harmless. I don't know much about the condition. I don't know if this mumbling to himself is a part of his condition or if that's just Josh being Josh. But I can say, on that night, he was acting stranger than usual. He kept stepping outside to where we keep the dumpster. He was talking to the trash inside the dumpster like it was a person, and not just piles of garbage.

But he wasn't just mumbling this time. He looked genuinely upset, almost arguing with the garbage inside that dumpster. A couple of us noticed, and when we would walk inside, we'd ask if he was alright and he'd just shrug us off and head back to his work area, not saying a word. This routine of Josh walking out to the dumpster continued for several hours. Every so often, he would stop what he was doing, go outside to said dumpster and start quietly arguing. We'd seen Josh do some weird things over the years, but this was taking the grand prize for me. Things went from weird to bad later

in the evening. I was out back trying to catch a break from the busy bar scene inside when Josh cornered me. His eyes were all teary and he looked scared out of his mind. He said in a shaky and almost nervous voice, The trash man wants to get you. Knowing Josh and his condition, I figured that he was just having a very bad moment. So I tried to calm him down, telling him it was alright. But he wouldn't have it. He blocked my way, refusing to let me pass.

I'm not the smallest person in the world, but Josh is a huge guy and I wasn't getting around him or through him. I started to get really scared, not necessarily of Josh, but of the situation itself. I started to scream for help and thankfully our manager came rushing out. He had to physically remove Josh, who by then was just inconsolable, screaming over and over that I wasn't safe. The whole ordeal had me freaked out, but I tried to just sweep it under the carpet and get back to work. I'd be lying if I told you my feathers weren't a little bit ruffled at that point, but I understood Josh has a condition and I have no idea how the highs and lows of that can affect a person.

A few hours passed and the night was finally winding down and it was almost closing time. I went out back with a bag of trash, eager to get it over with and head home. And that's when everything went from bad to outright terrifying. I lifted the lid of the dumpster and out jumped a man. My heart practically exploded just on shock alone. It took me a second to recognize him, but once I was face to face with the man it became clear. This person was my ex. The same ex that I had a restraining order against for reasons that should be obvious now. The guy was crazy and let me be tame for the sake of the story and I'll tell you that he was a bit of a stalker too and I'll just leave it at that. Now anyways, I was face to face with this now

horrible man and he obviously smelled like trash but I could still smell the overused lingering smell of Axe body spray as well, and he was inches away from me, beginning to creep closer. I was slowly stepping back, but I was running out of room, and before I knew it, I'd be backed against a wall. I was losing my mind. I didn't know what to say, and I tried to scream, but it was like my brain had forgot how to make a noise. While I was trying to think of anything to get out of this situation, some folks started walking behind the bar. They saw me cowering

against the wall and this intimidating man standing over me with something in his waistband on his backside. As they saw what was happening, they intervened. Three guys ran over, grabbed him and held him down, and somebody else called the police. They continued holding him until the cops arrived. And it turns out, Josh had been seeing my ex hiding in that dumpster way earlier in the night. My ex had somehow convinced Josh to just keep quiet, playing on his schizophrenia making him doubt his own reality. That's why Josh was so fixated on the trash and why he kept going outside to make sure what he was seeing was truly real. I felt a mix of emotions afterward. I felt guilt for not taking Josh seriously and gratitude for the strangers who had stepped in and a whole lot of anger towards my ex.

It was a mess of a night that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. And in case anyone wants to know, my ex was arrested and he did get into some legal trouble as a result. I apologized to Josh who accepted my apology and told me no hard feelings. The manager also apologized to Josh for basically sending him home and not listening to him. I was always skeptical about telling the story. I was worried people would judge me, and rightfully so. Trust me, if you knew Josh, you'd think the guy was just being a more intense version of himself, and I bet you wouldn't take him seriously either. I was really into trail running back when I lived out in the sticks and I used to frequent this

walking trail that followed a river around the edge of this big patch of forest. It was supposed to be a real old trail, one used by local Indians way before the French arrived and settled the area. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when one day I saw a guy with a metal detector out where the trail ran next to some farmer's field. I was curious, so I stopped by, asked the guy if he'd found anything valuable. First impressions were that he seemed pretty friendly, and he told me that he'd found an old brown bottle with dimes from the 20s inside of it. He then asked me if I wanted to see something else that he'd found an old brown bottle with dimes from the 20s inside of it. He then asked me if I wanted to see something else that he'd found. I wasn't sure that I did at first, but it turned out this

thing was on my route. I wanted to catch my breath anyway, so I figured why not. It wasn't like he was a big dude or particularly threatening or anything, just a kooky old geezer who liked using his metal detector. So we walked down to his patch of trees which connected the river to the farmer's field. There, stacked up in a big knee-high pile in the center, were all these animal skulls. I don't know what they were, maybe deer or cows or horses, then smaller things like a raccoon or maybe a skunk. I asked him if he knew why they were there and he told me he did, that it was him who had been stacking those skulls there

and had been doing it ever since he was a kid. I asked him how he came to find so many animal skulls and he said that every so often, he and his pa would find the head of an animal just lying there on their land but they never, ever found the bodies. Obviously, that's pretty goddamn creepy, right? And I asked him if he thought it was a cougar or a bear or something, dismembering the animals, then carrying their lifeless carcasses for snacking at a later date, I guess. And the guy said no, that they only ever found the heads. No carcasses, no desiccated limbs,

only ever the heads of whatever animal had been killed the night before, or two nights before, or whenever it was killed before he and his pa had found it. I remember letting out a kind of chuckle because I was pretty sure that this guy was just trying to give me the creeps for fun, and he was doing a damn good job of it too. But he was serious, deadly serious, and he wasn't done either. He told me, with a completely serious look on his face, that he'd seen headless animals walking around at night, all walking off in the same direction. Again, I'm creeped out, but only in like an entertained creeped out way As in, I'm legitimately appreciating this guy's ability to give me the willies But then, when he saw that I wasn't taking him entirely seriously

I saw that his brow furrowed and he started staring daggers at me asking You don't believe me, huh? You think I'm crazy? Now I had to backtrack a little and say that I wasn't implying that at all but that didn't seem to convince him and not completely anyway and I figured that it was best to just make myself scarce in that situation. I thanked him for his time and I bid him farewell but he didn't say anything in return. He just kept looking at me in that you think I'm dumb, don't you kind of way, and then I just carried on jogging along the trail. Those animal skulls didn't scare me in the slightest, but he did. What he had to tell

me wasn't some campfire story to him. He seemed to genuinely believe that he's seen headless animals walking around the fields late at night, and I don't know what was scarier, the idea of that actually being true, or the fact this guy was so off his rocker that he believed it was true. It just makes me think. We spook ourselves with all kinds of stories about ghosts and ghouls and headless freaking animals, but it's always the humans you gotta be wary of St. Patrick's Day in my hometown isn't just a holiday. It's an event. Imagine the streets and seas of green, hearing nothing but laughter and cheers, and the air thick with the smell of street food and the promise of some pretty good times.

It's the one day a year where everyone, regardless of your heritage, becomes a little bit Irish. A few years ago, after the good times and clinking glasses, I stumbled into a situation that left me pretty rattled. It was supposed to be a night of celebration, but it twisted into something much darker. Something that's had me looking over my shoulder ever since. My town's big on St. Patrick's Day, as I said, and I mean huge. We're talking green beer, parades, the whole nine yards, and they even shut down the main streets around the bars so people can party without worrying about cars. It's like our own little vision of Mardi Gras, just a lot greener

and colder, since we're nowhere near New Orleans. Now on this specific year, like every year, I was out celebrating with my friends. And we started early, hitting up our favorite spots, enjoying the specials, and just getting lost in the sea of people all decked out in green. It's always a good time seeing everyone letting loose and celebrating the luck of the Irish, even though I'm pretty sure I'm French. Around 10pm though, you could tell the all-day drinking was taking its toll. The crowd started to thin out and the vibe shifted from festive to, I don't know, more subdued.

My buddies were either too drunk to function or had already had enough excitement for one day, so they called it a night. I found myself alone and just not ready to head home yet. I stepped into this narrow alleyway beside the bar that I was at to smoke a cig. I wanted to enjoy the cool night air and the quiet after hours of constant noise. And that's when things got weird. Not necessarily scary, just very weird. Out of nowhere, these two figures turned into the alley. They stood side by side blocking my way to the street. They were wearing these bizarre leprechaun masks and these green hats, the kind

that you'd find in a kid's costume or something and not on grown adults in a dark alleyway at night. After a few seconds, we just stood there, staring at each other. They didn't say anything, didn't move, just stood there, staring. And that's when the weirdness started to turn into some fear. People had been partying all day and night and I had come across some strange characters, but something was very off about these two. Something was different. It was very freaky and unnerving to say the least. And just as I was about to chuck my cig and bolt, a group of people spilled into the alley from the other direction, looking also for a place to smoke. The commotion of the other people must have startled those masked figures because they just ended up leaving, and they just sort of melted back into the night.

I brushed it off, tried to laugh with the newcomers about how creepy those guys with the masks were, but deep down, I was a little freaked out. Eventually, I forgot about that strange interaction and went on with my night. I decided it was time to go home at around 1 in the morning. While I was waiting for my ride outside I remembered those figures with the leprechaun mass and I felt a brief moment of fear and kind of started looking over my shoulder for those weirdos and thankfully I never saw them. I got home a little after 1. My place was very quiet, just the way I left it. I was still a

little wired from the night, so it took me a while to wind down and get ready for bed. And that's when my phone buzzed with a notification from my ring camera. My heart dropped to my stomach when I saw it. There, on my front porch, were the two masked guys from the alley. They weren't knocking or making a scene, and they just looked like they were trying to be quiet. I noticed one of them was trying to open my front door. He was jostling the doorknob and trying to quietly budge his way into my house. While he was doing that, I noticed that the other guy was trying to slide open the window

that is next to my front door. Thankfully, the door and window were locked, and this was like something straight out of a nightmare, watching these two in their freaky masks trying to break into my home. I was on the phone with the police in seconds, but before I could even get my address out, one of them pointed directly at the camera. Somehow, they had just noticed the light from that ring camera and decided to book it, and they took off and ran away before the cops could actually get there. The police did a sweep of the area but found nothing, no sign of them anywhere, and it left me very shaken. I mean, why me? Why my house? Was it random or had they followed me home?

I had a million questions with literally zero answers. And the worst part was those stupid masks. Because of that, I had nothing to give the police. I don't know who these two people were. Either they followed me home from the bar or they knew where I lived to begin with, which truly was even more terrifying. And now, every little noise makes me jump, and I keep replaying the events of that night over and over again in my head. The worst part is just not knowing. Not knowing who they were, why they came to my house, or what would have happened if they got in. It's messed up, feeling unsafe in your own home. And that's my story. No ghosts, no monsters, just a pair of weirdos and some masks that turned my St. Patrick's Day into something I'll never forget, but for all the wrong reasons.

I'm still trying to figure out what to make of it years later. I haven't been out in a St. Patty's's Day since and I still can't really shake off and I wanted to send in to you. I figured maybe if I try and write it down and share my story, maybe some people will read it and offer some opinions on what they think. Here goes. You know how St. Patrick's Day is supposed to be all fun and games, green stuff everywhere, a lot of beer, and people pretending that they're more Irish than they actually are? Well, mine started just like that, but it turned into a nightmare before it was all over. It was just me, a pretty girl that seemed perfect, and a night that spiraled so far out of control I'm still trying to piece it all together. St. Patrick's Day in Boston is like nowhere else. The city turns into a city of green

with people everywhere and, of course, every bar packed to the gills. My buddy Mike and I decided to hit the town, see where the night would take us. We weren't really looking for trouble, just a good time, some laughs, a few pints, and maybe meet some interesting people. We ended up at this place that I won't mention by name, but it was one of those overly Irish bars. Kind of over the top with all the green lights and shamrock decorations, but it was a good time and the place was buzzing. And that's where I met her. I'll just call her Sarah for the story. She was there with her friends, laughing, the life of the party kind of girl, and we hit it off right away.

She had this laugh that sort of filled the room, you know what I mean? And we spent the whole night talking, dancing, and well, drinking more than we probably should have. Mike gave me that look, the don't do anything stupid look, but I was too caught up in the moment to care. The night flew by and before we knew it, the bar was closing. Sarah suggested that we continue the party at her place just a few blocks away. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Her friends were all heading home, and so was Mike, and I felt those butterflies in my stomach when I realized that it was just Sarah and I.

It's crazy that even at this late hour, the streets were still just bustling with people, even though there was kind of a chill in the air, a reminder that winter hadn't quite let go yet. And so, we got back to Sarah's apartment after what was honestly a pretty good night. I don't know if we were still buzzing with the St. Patrick's Day spirit or if we were both caught up in the vibe of the situation, but either way, I was feeling great. Sarah's apartment was in one of those older buildings, the kind with creaky floors and windows that never seemed to close all the way.

But it had character and she loved talking about it. We decided to call it a night, at least for drinks. We were just sitting on her couch, talking and laughing about nothing in particular. And that's when things started to get weird. At first, it was just a feeling, like we weren't alone. I know that sounds crazy, but I know you know the feeling I'm talking about. I tried to brush it off as just the buzz from the night wearing off, but then we heard it, the sound of someone else in the apartment. It was subtle at first, the faint sound of movement coming from the kitchen, and we both froze trying to listen.

I tried to play it off, suggesting that maybe it was a neighbor's noise that we were hearing, but the layout of the building made that impossible. The next sound wasn't subtle at all. A very loud sound, a sort of crash like a bunch of pots and pans hitting the floor echoed from the kitchen. Sarah's face went immediately white, and she whispered that we needed to leave now. And that's when it hit me. She was scared because it seemed almost like this happened before. The look she gave me was a look that said I know what's happening. But before I could ask, we heard it again. The undeniable sound of footsteps coming

towards the living room. And there was no mistake in this time, someone was in the apartment with us. We didn't stick around to find out who. Sarah grabbed my hand and we ran for the door. She fumbled with the locks and for some reason, she had so many locks. I remember thinking this was weird for an apartment in a supposedly safe part of town. We got out and didn't stop running until we reached the street, where we were met with a surreal sight of various partygoers well into the early hours of the morning. It's a strange feeling seeing all of those people having a good time, completely oblivious to the horror that we'd just escaped. We called the police, and they found no one when they checked the apartment later.

No sign of forced entry, nothing stolen, just a kitchen in complete disarray. They suggested that maybe we had scared off some burglar, someone who thought the apartment was empty but later got scared when they heard us in the living room. But the look in Sarah's eyes told me that she didn't believe that, and neither did I. There was something that felt very personal about it. Again, I know that's just a feeling, but it was an overwhelming feeling. And the night shattered something for me. The sort of illusion of safety that you feel when you're inside locked away from the world. And I keep replaying it over in my head, wondering what would have happened if we hadn't left when we did.

I haven't been back to Sarah's apartment since, and we haven't really talked to each other for some time. In fact, I just don't think I will call her back. It's like we're both trying to pretend it didn't happen, but it did, and something was never quite right after that incident. I think about her often, and honestly, I just hope she's okay. I have no clue what she could possibly know, it's kind of just a gut feeling. Maybe it was just a horrible robbery that we both escaped from, but I have a hard time accepting that, clearly. And I guess that's why I can't sleep right anymore. Not because I think someone's

going to break into my place, but because I know that sometimes, even the places we consider safe can turn into scenes right out of a nightmare. And the scariest part? We'll never find out why. To be continued... leave much time for watching YouTube videos. But every so often I'll pick out a video of yours to listen to while I'm doing housework or preparing food. And last night it was your missing 411 video from late January of this year. Not all of the stories in your videos give me the creeps. That's not meant to be a slight against you or anything like that. It's just the truth. But the first story in that missing 411 video scared me so bad that I had to shut the video off altogether. It's not that the details of the story were too graphic, and it's not that any children were getting hurt, which I'm extra sensitive to

these days for obvious reasons. It's that the story unlocked a long forgotten memory, and I realized that many, many years ago now, the exact same thing had happened to me. Back in high school, I found myself drawn to cross-country running, or XC as we used to call it. I still enjoy running, it's very therapeutic and it helped keep the baby weight off after my pregnancies, but back in high school, I was wild about it. I was like the least athletic athlete ever and i sucked at almost every other sport but somehow i just had this crazy stamina in me and i could outrun almost any other girl when it came to longer distances this did two things for

me firstly it gave me a huge self-esteem boost which in turn meant that i got super into world athletics shout out to my high school hero, Mary Decker. But the other thing it did was open up the possibility of getting an athletic scholarship to the University of Washington. Mysteriously, my parents were then very supportive of my newfound love of cross-country, and considering I ended up getting a partial scholarship to Oregon State, they like to consider all those expensive running shoes to have been a good investment. Anyway, in my senior year of high school, I'm obviously trying to prioritize my studies over running, but I'm also

absolutely gunning for at least that partial scholarship. That means I was training my butt off four days a week, which in turn meant that I was exhausted and very grouchy almost all the time. Then there was the stress of trying to balance both things, running and studying and feeling like I was going to screw up both because I was just so gosh darn tired all the time. Basically it wasn't a great time to be me and someone who could relate was a girl we'll call Kayla, one of my cross-country teammates. Kayla and I were very similar in a lot of ways, mixed backgrounds, kind of shy and nerdy. But whereas I had this huge passion for running, she was just in it for the scholarship. That didn't

mean that we didn't get along though and she was also a great teammate in just about every way you can imagine. But listening to that missing 411 story reminded me of a time when, right in the middle of a race, she started acting very strange and very out of the ordinary. So, it was the second to last race of the year, so early May when it's really starting to warm up, and we were running a course around the Owyhi Lakes Trail, which is just on the other side of Mount Rainier from Seattle and Tacoma. I don't want to bore you with the specifics of the course, but it was seven miles long, and the idea was to run it in stages, with water breaks every couple of miles. The idea was you pushed yourself to the max on each portion

of the run, take a short but sensible water break at each station, and then pushed yourself to the max on each portion of the run, take a short but sensible water break at each station, and then throw yourself into the next portion to keep up your lead. But the much more competitive among us started to entertain ideas of skipping a water station or two in order to seriously boost our times. Okay, one last thing you gotta understand about the course. We had people out there with us, adults with radios that we called race marshals, who stayed on the course in case we got lost or there was some kind of medical emergency. But then, the whole thing with the water stations is that the marshals tended to stay away from them, especially the male ones during female races and vice versa, and there's a very specific reason for that. If you run cross-country,

in warm temperatures, up and down trails, you need a lot of water. And if you drink a lot of water, and you do a lot of running, it's not going to be long before you're doing a lot of peeing, too. So generally speaking, there's folks out there with us making sure that we're all safe and stuff, but they're not with us all the time. They also didn't have all the girls running together. We'd run in our teams, in pairs I mean, and we'd have our times recorded and compared with the girls from other schools. I'm so so sorry for this info dump, I just feel like it's better to tell you these things now so you're not thinking, what in God's name are two high school girls doing out in the woods alone with no adults around? I won't want you to think that later on. Okay, now to the actual events in question.

So when it came to our turn, me and Kayla lined up at the start and then took off when prompted by one of the race's organizers. We skipped our first water station entirely, which was pretty common practice and took less than a minute to take on water at the second station and then absolutely powered towards the third station to give us as much an edge as possible before the final section of the race. I felt like I was about to puke up my lungs by the time we got to that third station and Kayla didn't seem to be faring any better. We were both completely gassed out to the point that I wasn't sure that I'd be able to keep my water down if we kept on at the same rate. I remember Kayla, again it's not her real name, kind of walking back and forth with her water.

We were encouraged to stay limber to avoid injuries and muscle cramps, as I was doing the same when she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks. I didn't think too much of this right away, but when I suggested that we get going, I got no response. I said it again like, Kayla, we should get going. But she didn't even turn to face me, let alone offer a response. I was about to say something else when she started to move again. She turned, walked toward a tree, and then set her water bottle down at the base of it. And then after that, she kicked off her running shoes and started to undress. I remember actually being kind of mad at her at first. This is a very important race, one of the most crucial ones of our whole lives, I thought,

so it was most certainly not the time to be messing around like this. But then, when Kayla finished taking off her running clothes and began to take her underwear and socks off too, I stopped feeling mad and started to get very, very worried for her. I started asking her in a pretty clear voice, Kayla, are you okay? Can you hear me? But again, she just totally ignored me and just carried on undressing until she was wearing absolutely nothing at all. And I'm not trying to be weird or anything. This is just what happened. As she stood totally still, arms by her sides, I asked her again, Kayla, what's wrong with you? And she replied in a voice that sounded weirdly calm considering what she was doing. And she told me, I'm fine, Maddie. I'm just going for a walk. As soon as she said something so

completely nonsensical as in taking a casual naked stroll in the middle of a race, it occurred to me that Kayla might have been suffering from some kind of heat stroke related delirium or something. I'd never seen anything like it before, and I haven't since now that I think about it, but at the time, the whole heatstroke thing was the only thing that made sense to me. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to slap her or anything like that, so I unscrewed the lid of the water bottle and just emptied it over her head. I remember seeing that on TV or something, throwing water in someone's face to bring them out of their stupor. It worked on TV, but it didn't work on Kayla.

She barely even flinched when the water hit her and she just started off on the trail, into the trees without even so much as her underwear on. I was starting to really panic by then, so I started yelling out, Kayla, what the hell are you doing? I guess one of the marshals actually heard me yelling because after a minute or two of trying to drag her back to the water station by her wrist, one of them appeared along the trail behind us to see what the heck was going on. Kayla had walked off the trail down a fairly gentle slope and as the marshal came around a bend in the trail and saw us, they let out a, oh lord no, and then they turned around and walked off. And that was an awful feeling right there, seeing your one lifeline just turn around and walk away. I called after him to help but he just yelled back that he was going to go get someone, and just sort of wandered off talking on his radio.

I understand why he kind of noped out of there. They must have looked crazy just seeing one girl trying to drag another naked one back towards the trail, and he was probably right in thinking that he should just summon someone else to get help as quickly as possible. But I felt so alone in that moment. Kayla was having a serious crisis, and the pressure of knowing it was down to me to stop her from running off, it was terrifying. All this time, I still had Kayla by the wrist, and in the end, I had to really pull her off balance before kind of holding her down in the dirt. She didn't yell, and she barely struggled, and she never even

looked at me, not even once. But she also never stopped trying to get away from me. Not until I totally lost it and started shrieking out, Kayla, please, just stop. One second, she was in that almost catatonic state, and the next, she was so confused and scared that she started to cry. She managed to ask, Where are we? Where are my clothes? What's going on? And then she just broke down sobbing and tried to cover herself asking, Where are my clothes? Over and over. I wanted to run up to the water station and grab her running gear,

but I was terrified that she'd walk or even run off into the woods again and that I might not be able to catch her I guess I'd probably have had an edge on her looking back on it what with me still having my running shoes on and all but I was just so scared that having suddenly gotten her back I'd go and lose her again just as fast. I remember just holding her and being like, it's okay, someone's going to get help. But that made her want her clothes even more, so I kept my hand clamped around her wrist, but led her back to the trail so she could find her clothes before people arrived to help.

I was ready for her to take off again, but thankfully she didn't and a few minutes later, a bunch of marshals showed up with the medical team and they made sure Kayla was okay. Once she realized that she had gotten us disqualified she was devastated but all anyone cared about was that she was okay. We later got to rerun the entire race and came in third in the entire state but that's a whole other story on its own. The general diagnosis was heat stroke, and I think folks kept an eye on her for the next few weeks, but Kayla was otherwise okay. We were basically just told that people acted very strangely if they overheated, and although the incident itself

had been alarming, no one had anything to worry about in the long run. Kayla and I went to separate colleges, and we never really kept in touch. I looked her up on Facebook a few times many years back but I made no attempt to reach out. People move on with their lives and memories fade and are forgotten but apparently all it takes is one little trigger and a whole entire story comes flooding back to us. Or at least that's what happened to me a few days ago. I listened to that story that you posted about Maureen Kelly in the Missing 411 video and all I could really think about was what happened with Kayla during that race on the Owyhi Trail.

I did my own reading on Maureen's disappearance and I know all her friends said that they were sober when she stripped and walked off, but they didn't explicitly say that she was lucid either. She could have been just like Kayla, talking in that faraway voice, not really knowing where she was or what she was doing. Somehow, maybe Maureen overheated too, or some hidden stress coupled with sudden exertion caused her to enter what's known as a fugue state. Kayla always said that she had no memory of taking her clothes off. One minute she was at the water station and the next she was wrestling with me in the dirt. It was like she'd passed out but instead of simply collapsing, someone else had taken the wheel for a minute until whatever

it was let go or my yelling brought her back, I guess. I don't know what it was like when Maureen walked off into the woods, but the circumstances seemed alarmingly similar. I mean, for a start, both incidents happened within less than 40 to 50 miles of each other, and I know Maureen's friends said that she wasn't on drugs when she stripped and walked off, but it doesn't exactly seem like she was lucid either. She was kind of a wild child, I guess, talking about spiritual journeys and whatnot, so when she stripped and told them I'll be back before sundown, all of her friends were taken aback, but they didn't freak out. And they didn't freak out because while it was an

extreme thing to do, it seems like it was within the realm of possibilities, if that makes sense for her personality. I'm not trying to say Maureen was the kind of girl to go taking her clothes off at the drop of a hat, but her whole thing was Pacific Northwest hippie vibes and being one with nature and all that. Kayla, on the other hand, there's no way that she'd have just quit during a race like that, especially not after taking off all of her clothes. That's what made me realize something was just terribly wrong, whereas in Maureen's case, the act didn't have the same alarm bells going off that it did for me when Kayla did it. I'm not some true crime internet detective,

so take anything I say with a whole shaker of salt, but sometimes I feel like I'd bet my boobs on Maureen Kelly acting in that exact same faraway fugue state that Kayla seemed to be in when she tried to go for her nude walk through the woods. I actually thought reading up on the whole thing would ease my mind in some way, but hearing that Maureen was never found, either dead or alive, that made the whole thing even worse. I know I'm not the first person to ask, how can a person just vanish like that? In fact, I know for a fact that there's a whole science dedicated to figuring out those exact kinds of mysteries. But it makes me really wonder to myself sometimes if Kayla had been alone alone or if I hadn't managed to stop her

somehow, just what in the world would have happened to her out there in the woods? Would she have been found a few hours later, scared and confused, having woken up just like she did when I yelled at her? Or would she have just disappeared like Maureen Kelly did, in a way that makes no sense whatsoever to even the most experienced search and rescue people. It sounds messed up, but at this point I kind of just hope what happened to both girls was just some tragic but otherwise entirely explainable medical event. Because the idea that there's something unique or intangible about that area of the woods that, I don't know, influences people to act in a certain way,

that's something that doesn't really help thinking about at night. I know it doesn't seem possible, and I've heard some absolutely unhinged theories suggested by a bunch of online weirdos, but I've also heard some not-so-crazy ones too. Like there's obviously all the heatstroke-induced delirium theories, but that kind of fugue state can be caused by all sorts of things. And there are natural substances that exist in nature that can cause that kind of behavior in completely healthy unsuspecting adults. Like have you ever heard of scopolamine? Now news websites have called it the Colombian zombie drug and they're actually not far off with that description. Scammers dosing tourists with it and then walking them to ATMs and emptying their bank accounts armed with nothing but a please and

a thank you. No, I'm not saying that there's copolamine plants in Washington state, but maybe some kind of fungus or bacteria can have the same kind of effect, even if it is just for a minute or two. And maybe that would explain why these two healthy young people just suddenly took off their clothes and then tried to walk off into the woods like it was the most normal thing in the world. Anyways, I guess I'm just rambling at this point, but it gives you an idea of how deep down the rabbit hole I've gone with all of this stuff, and all as a result of hearing that Maureen Kelly missing 411 story that you posted a couple months back. I've been praying that those still searching for Maureen will one

day find her, and that her family, who have no doubt been desperately waiting for answers for many, many years, are finally able to get the closure that they so thoroughly deserve. But I just can't shake that weird feeling, if we ever do find out what happened to Maureen. And we'll find out what fate lay in store for Kayla too, if she was able to get away from me and just disappear among the trees. Back in 2010, one of the craziest things that's ever happened in my life happened. I never really considered it scary, but just kind of insane. I've been telling this story for years, and usually the people I tell are shocked and surprised that I wasn't more scared at that moment. I guess in hindsight it was thrilling, and all things considered, I'm lucky nothing serious happened to me. It was one of those

rare times when my parents decided to hit the town and leaving me with the house to myself. It was St. Paddy's Day and my extremely Irish parents liked to celebrate. Naturally, I called up my buddies, Jake and Connor. We were your typical high school seniors. Well, I guess not really. We were more into video games than actual adventures. The three of us never partied or really did anything wild. Not that we weren't invited, we just didn't care. It wasn't our thing. But that night, something was different in all of us. I don't know if we were fueled by the spirit of St. Patrick or an unusual dose of teenage restlessness, but we wanted to step it up,

do something memorable for once. A couple of houses down from mine there's this place that's always given off major abandoned vibes. Overgrown lawn, curtains that just never moved, and a mailbox overflowing with what I assumed was junk. We'd always joked about checking it out, seeing what secrets it held. The rumor since I was like five was that the place was haunted. Obviously, none of us believed that, but it was fun campfire stories. That night, we decided that we were actually going to do it. We were going to break in. Not to swipe anything, just to, I don't know, explore, I guess. The adrenaline was pumping as we crept over to the house.

The door was surprisingly easy to open, just a nudge, really, and we were in. And the air inside was stale, heavy with dust, and it smelled horrible, like a mixture of trash and body odor. It was dark, but not completely. There was this eerie glow from somewhere that gave enough light to see. But perhaps the most terrifying thing in that moment was that the place looked lived in, which freaked us out because it was supposed to be empty. At least we always assumed it was empty since none of us had ever seen anybody come or go. Things were way too tense and we were just about to bail when we heard it. The unmistakable sound of feet. And panic mode kicked in. We ducked

behind this old moth-eaten sofa and through the dim light we saw him. Some old man. He was a smaller and creepy looking man, and he had this long grey beard and long white hair that looked knotted and disgusting. He was hunched over and walking with a bad limp. He was clutching what looked like a rifle and sort of muttering under his breath, saying stuff like, I know you're here, show yourself. Our hoods were up, thankfully, so I felt like our faces were sort of hidden. We were trespassers, no doubt, but at that moment, we felt like the ones in danger. Clearly, this man had a right to shoot us if he felt threatened, at least in our state, and why wouldn't he feel threatened? Three young men were inside his home. Three young men that were on the larger side.

We waited, trapped in our hiding spot until the footsteps moved away and the old man's voice and heavy breathing started to fade. And that was our chance. We sprinted out of there, not looking back, not stopping until we were safely inside my house with the door locked behind us. Jake said that he saw the old guy trying to follow but he couldn't keep up. And pumped up from the experience and fear we couldn't just call it a night. We watched the house from my bedroom window and curiosity was getting the better of us. And that's when the night took another turn. Several police cars with lights flashing pulled up outside the old man's place.

I had to know what was going on, so I went outside, mingling with the neighbors gathering around, and that's when I saw them. The police were escorting a young couple out in handcuffs. One of the nosy neighbors filled me in. The couple apparently had been squatting in the old man's basement for weeks, stealing food from him and causing this poor old man some pretty serious grief. The old guy knew something was off but couldn't prove it,

and he couldn't even make it down to the basement himself. So he was just forced to hear these sounds and try to convince himself that he wasn't crazy yet. And here's the kicker. The old man was convinced that there was a third member of their little criminal spree because he'd seen us, the three kids in hoods, earlier in the night. He thought the two people being arrested were two of us and that the third was still loose. I selfishly felt relieved that he didn't suspect it was us inside the house. It also turned out that those squatters were armed with a knife, adding a whole new level of danger to our stupid

stunt. I walked back home with my head completely spinning. The old man had every reason to be scared, just not of us. And we, thinking we were just messing around, could have walked into something way worse, either from the old man's self-defense perspective, or if we accidentally stumbled upon those squatters who knows what they would have done. We never told anyone about breaking in that night. It was a little silent agreement among us to just forget it and move on. But the what ifs always got to me. It's why I always told this story at parties, and it's why I'm telling it now. What if we'd been caught by those squatters instead of the old man? What if the situation had turned violent? It's a little St. Paddy's Day adventure that turned into a real-life crime drama in my mind,

and it makes you think twice about the secrets hidden behind closed doors. And as for me and my buddies, we decided to just stick to video games for the rest of high school. Real life adventures are overrated, not to mention way too risky before St. Patrick's Day. It's a small place, the kind where everybody seems to know each other, and I was just the new guy trying to fit in. St. Patty's Day came around, and the whole town was filled with seemingly excitement. Being a bit on the anxious side, I decided to kind of lay low. It didn't feel right going out when I barely knew anyone yet. I don't want to be that weird guy in the corner trying to fit in, so I

decided to just stay home by myself, watching some old movies, and eventually I would just crash on the couch. That sounds like an awesome St. Patrick's Day, right? It must have been around three in the morning when I woke up to this very strange noise outside. At first I thought it was just the wind or something, but then I heard it again, clearer this time, a kind of scratching noise, like someone was messing with the lock on my front door. I tried telling myself that it was an animal, like maybe a raccoon or something, but the sounds were way too deliberate for that. My heart started racing, and I remembered thinking, this can't be happening. I crept up to the window, very quiet-like, and peeked through the blinds. And that's when I saw them. This group of teenagers,

at least eight of them I counted, but honestly it could have been more. They were all huddled around my front porch at first, a couple of them messing with the door while the others were keeping watch. It didn't look like they were just pulling a prank. They were seriously trying to break in to my house. At least that's what it appeared at first. And panic began to set in very quickly. I didn't know these kids and I had no idea what they wanted or why they were targeting me. I'm not some big intimidating guy, I'm just an average person. If you weren't looking in my direction I would blend into the wall and here I was, alone with a group of people trying to break in, not to mention they were clearly teenagers, so I didn't know how to move forward with this

situation. Calling the police seemed like the obvious choice, but my phone was charging in the kitchen, way too close to the front door for comfort, so I did the only thing I could think of. I banged on the window as hard as I could, shouting for them to get lost and that I had already called the cops. And surprisingly, it worked, kind of. They scattered, but not before one of them turned and gave me this look, like he was sort of memorizing my face or something. It was the weirdest, and if I'm being honest, most terrifying thing I'd ever witnessed. I know it sounds weird, but the look in his eyes still haunts me. I watched them disappear into the night before I had the guts to move,

to finally grab my phone and call the police. I made my way into the kitchen to grab my phone and just about fell over when I noticed three more teenagers at the back sliding door trying to open it. It was a blonde girl and two husky fellows. They were wearing black hoodies and grey sweatpants, and I tried the same approach as before, and yelling that I'd called the police, even though I hadn't yet. But this time they didn't seem phased. The girl said something like, just hurry up.

I couldn't really tell, it was muffled, and I couldn't believe what was happening. Instead of standing there like a deer in headlights, I went for my phone, calling the police. At that point, the three teens finally stopped trying to get into the sliding door. One of the boys waved and smiled, and then they ran away, just like the others I saw on the front door. As I got off the phone with the police, I noticed some of the teenagers in the street in front of my house. They were laughing, doing a sort of poor version of like an Irish step dance. And this was my St. Patrick's Day gift, I guess. I realize the thought of a bunch of kids dancing outside my house may seem comical to some who hear this, but just imagine 10 plus teenagers outside your home in the middle of the night, trying to break in and just being utterly freaks.

You try laughing in a situation and see what happens. I didn't want to take that chance. The cops showed up pretty quick. They took my statement and said that they'd look into it, but I could tell that they didn't think it was a big deal. Just some kids causing trouble and no harm done. They promised to patrol the area more frequently for a while and then left me there in my too quiet house with the adrenaline still pumping through my veins. I didn't sleep for the rest of the night and every little sound I thought was the kids coming back.

And those little monsters had me peering through the blinds like some paranoid freak. The next day I asked around, trying to figure out if this was a common thing in the area, some sort of prank, but everyone seemed as surprised as I was. Things like that don't happen here, they'd say, but it had happened, and right on my front porch. The scariest part isn't even that it happened though. It's just wondering why. Law enforcement kind of just chalked it up to a bunch of kids amusing themselves by scaring the new guy in town, but I feel like it was something more and what would have happened if they'd gotten in. Those questions just kept spinning in my head, keeping me up at night. And since then, I've been second guessingguessing my decision to move here, to the small town where I thought that I'd find some peace and quiet.

And instead, I found myself facing this sort of nightmare scenario right outside my door. I've started taking the necessary precautions, like double-checking my locks and installing a couple of extra security lights and cameras and stuff like that. And maybe it's an overkill, but I don't care. I never want to feel that vulnerable again. To be continued... I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm EST. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash 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.