The Lets Read Podcast - 278: MY GRANDMA SURVIVED THE BLACKOUT RIPPER | 38 True Scary Stories | EP 266

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about undercover cops, Walmart & the paranormal 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

Everyone's got a pro. Need tires? I've got a pro. Car making a weird sound? I've got a pro. So who's that pro? The pros at Tread Experts. From tires to auto repair, Tread Experts is always there, helping you with Michelin tires you can trust. Until May 30th, receive up to $70 by prepaid MasterCard with purchase of four new Michelin passenger or light truck tires. Find your pro at your local Tread Experts. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca What I'm about to tell you is probably the single craziest thing that's ever happened to me. If there was one event from my life that I think transcends just being a personal experience and would make a good movie or short film or something, it's this. So back in 2012, I used to work at a card shop here in Pittsburgh. We weren't like a greetings card store though. We bought and sold trading card games or TCGs. I'm talking about things like Pokemon cards, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic the Gathering, stuff like that. As part of our jobs, we were very active in online message boards related to various trading card games, especially when it came to buying, selling, and trading threats. We did a lot of business using those message boards and

they were also where we got all our news regarding updates and new releases for the various TCGs that we dealt in. And so one day I roll into the shop to find my boss and a co-worker sat in the office in just complete silence. They were just staring at the office's computer screen, all this wall of text that had been posted on one of the TCG message boards, and when I asked them what the deal was, they gave me the TLDR. One of the largest collections of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in the entire United States had been stolen from its owner, and according to the post on the message board, the robbery itself had been absolutely terrible. Two guys in ski masks broke into the collector's house, tied him up at gunpoint, and then tortured him until he gave up his cards.

The collector had all of his rarest and most valuable cards locked up in a safe and had his less valuable collection on display. But then instead of just grabbing binders full of cards, the robbers seemed to know that the more valuable ones would be locked away somewhere, almost like they had inside knowledge of this collector's habits. The guy ended up in the hospital and had to have an emergency transfusion from all the blood that he'd lost. I think he tried to hold out and talk them into taking the less valuable cards or something, but they knew that they just had to burn him or cut him a little more and he'd eventually give

up the goods. And they were right too. The message board posts went on to say that literally thousands of dollars worth of cards had been stolen from this guy and basically warned every collector and dealer on the east coast to watch their backs and be on the lookout for this dude's stolen collection. As you can imagine, we were all pretty shocked. I mean, it's actually not all that uncommon for thefts to occur in the TCG community, we just never heard of anything on that kind of scale. To have targeted a big collector like that, in a way that suggested some pretty in-depth planning, and that was spooky all on its own. But then to have tortured them, it was very chilling, and not nearly as chilling as the following day when we had a very unusual

looking visitor stop by our store. I wasn't actually working that shift, but my boss told me the story later. It was a weekday afternoon, so the store was basically empty aside from one of our regulars when a very unusual looking customer stopped by. Speaking of regulars, we made most of our money from a very small core group of customers. Occasionally some random kid and a parent would stop by to take a look at some starter decks from Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, and if it was a first-time visit for most other folks, they usually fit one of several nerdy archetypes. But the day after we heard about the collector getting robbed, the person who walked into our shop did not have the look of your average TCG enthusiast.

My boss said the guy looked like he was a mechanic or something. I saw the security camera footage myself and he pretty much nailed it. From what I could tell, the guy had dirty overalls on with a pair of sunglasses covering his eyes and he had short reddish brown hair. The guy walks up to the counter holding nothing but a thin plastic bag, puts it on the counter and tells my boss that he's got some cars to sell. My boss is a savvy guy so instead of asking him anything too direct, he asked the overalls guy how long he's been collecting as a form of non-confrontational information gathering. The guy replied that he wasn't a collector, and that he'd inherited the cards from his brother following his untimely passing.

My boss shares his condolences, and then the guy adds that he was trying to get some cash together to pay for his brother's funeral, so he figured that he'd stop by to see if the cards were worth anything. My boss promises to pay him a fair price for anything we could flip and then opens up the bag to check out what the guy had brought in. My boss said the second he opened the bag, his jaw dropped. Inside were a mix of extremely rare Yu-Gi-Oh cards, protected by a mixture of soft sleeves and hard plastic top loaders. There was a cyberstein card, a dark paladin card, two black luster soldiers, and a chaos emperor dragon, just to name a few. And these constituted some of the rarest cards on the market at the time.

But strewn among them, my boss starts spotting the likes of a High Priestess of Prophecy card, a number 11 Big Eye, and a Spellbook of Judgment. These were cards that had only been released just months before, and not all in the same set, meaning someone had gone to great lengths and potentially spent a lot of money to be able to secure them all so fast. My boss then started thinking how the guy's dead brother must have been a pretty serious collector. So, in the most polite and respectful way possible, he asked the guy what his brother's name was, since he might have been one of our regulars while he was still with us. The guy dropped a name my boss didn't recognize,

and then mentioned something about how he wasn't from the area. And that is when my boss starts to realize something. The Yu-Gi-Oh collector that had been robbed just the previous week lived across state lines in Ohio, somewhere outside of Cleveland I think, but don't quote me on that. Anyways, my boss starts thinking, if he robs some Yu-Gi-Oh collector, the smart thing to do would be to drive across state lines to stay one step ahead of law enforcement. He then starts to realize that a lot of the cards the guy had brought in that day were the exact same kind that had been stolen from the collector, particularly cards like Medolce Queen Tiramisu. Then slowly but surely he figures out that the story about this guy's brother suddenly passing away was just that. A story. My boss, being the guy that he was, lowers his voice and then tells the mechanic looking dude something like, Look, I'm gonna be honest with you buddy.

These cards are worth a heck of a lot of money. A lot more than what we got in store right now, but if you give me until Friday, I can scrape together $5,000 in exchange for every card in that bag. Does that sound like a fair deal? And the guy smiles, nods his head, and then my boss asks for a name and cell number, just in case he needed to contact him. The guy says his name was Ricky and then gave him some excuse about how he was between cell phones or whatever but that he'd 100% stop by Friday afternoon to make the sale if we were still down. My boss then shakes the guy's hand, kind of jokingly makes him a promise to come back on

the Friday and then watches him walk out of the shop. He said the next few minutes were pretty surreal. He went back to his computer and re-read the post about the collector getting robbed, which I think was written by one of this dude's Yu-Gi-Oh buddies since the collector himself was in the hospital. I saw that big wall of text for myself, and I also saw how it included a pretty comprehensive list of what had been stolen. Presumably, it had already been put together for the benefit of the cops, but it also meant my boss could check the list to make sure it all lined up with what was in the bag. Every card that was in that bag was also on the list of stolen from the collector. Every. Single. One. So what does my boss do? He calls the cops. The officer he spoke to knew nothing about the

robbery over in Ohio, so the first thing my boss does is fill him in on the whole backstory. The officer makes sure to get a description of the mechanic looking guy and asks a few other routine questions but then my boss informs him of the whole come back on Friday thing. He said there was a pause on the line before the cop asked him and what sounded like disbelief. You arranged for this guy to return to the store? Which he had with a promise of five grand. The officer then tells my boss that he has to make a few phone calls but that he'd be in touch by the following morning at the very latest. But then, a few hours later, the cop calls back to tell our boss that he was about to receive a phone call from two major crimes detectives who had just been in touch with their counterparts

over in Ohio. Basically our store was about to become the center of an interstate sting operation and so as not to blow the cops cover we had to go over a few things with them so we could play our part correctly. And it was also around about that time that I learned that I'd be working the day of the sting. And so finally, on the Friday morning, I show up to work to find two random kids sitting in the manager's office. And I do mean two random kids, too. They looked to be high school seniors at the most, but the second I asked who they were, they each flashed me a shiny badge that read State Police. And both cops were in their 20s, and thanks to a fresh shave and some loose hoodies,

and a few very real late-stage pimples, they looked like the kind of guys that belonged in a TCG store. Before we opened, we went over a few final details, and essentially we were to simply go about our regular duties, and if the suspect showed up, we were to make the sale as planned. Under no circumstances were we to try to get involved in any shape or form, and when the cops made their move, we were to retreat back into the store until it was safe to come out again. No citizen's arrests, no heroics whatsoever. And that was fine by us, I mean, the dude had already tortured someone half to death and, as the cops explained, probably had someone waiting for him in a getaway car since it was two suspects that committed the torture slash home invasion, not just one. Anyway, the whole morning the cops were basically hanging

out across the street from the store, then right around the early afternoon, they came into the store to start doing their thing, which was basically acting like a pair of very indecisive customers. They stayed for a few hours too. The suspect didn't show up until around 3.30, so they were pacing back and forth, just hanging out, talking to us about our jobs and the card games and stuff like that. We close at 5.30 so by the time 3.30 rolled around, we were starting to wonder if the guy was going to show at all. And then out of the blue,

in walks the suspect, dressed in those same dirty overalls, wearing the same pair of shades. It got real tense for a few minutes as my boss looked through the cards, then when he was done, he essentially gave the two undercovers the go-ahead. I was already stood back near the office trying to look inconspicuous when my boss said, hey thanks for bringing these in buddy, let me head back to the office there and get you your cash. Then, right as we're walking into the office, intent on closing and locking the door behind us, we just heard, State Police, let me see your hands. We watched the security camera monitors in the office as the two baby-faced cops approached the suspect with their guns drawn. He didn't even try to escape or put up a

fight. He did exactly as he was told, got on his knees, and then they put him on the ground and put the cuffs on him. It was a huge relief for us because we'd very briefly discussed the possibility of a shootout happening, in which case we'd just have to hit the deck in the office and pray nothing went through a wall. But the arrest itself was actually kind of quick and boring. The guy just did as they said and I guess because he was so stunned that he'd been bamboozled like that. He just saw these two nerds when he walked in and then the next, they're yelling at him with guns drawn saying that they'll shoot him if he even dares to fart.

I guess if it were made into a movie, that scene might be a little bit more intense, but like I said, we were super relieved that the situation remained relatively calm. Back in 2014, my family and I moved out of Manhattan and up near this little place called Batavia, which is about halfway between Rochester and Buffalo. I'm not going to bore you with all the details of the move, just the one most relevant to the story, and that's how the worst part about moving was losing my bar. So I went to the same place to watch them Yankees for over eight years, so not being able to stop by whenever I wanted felt like losing a limb. I could drive into the city, maybe take the train if I wanted to visit and have a few beers, but what I really needed to do was find a new booze trap for me to watch sports at and one that was within walking distance. I ended up having to settle on cycling distance instead, which ended up me riding home drunk more than a few times, but in the end, I found this little place called Johnny's Bar that I could ride out to, with all the same local spot feels my old

bar had, just with much cheaper beer. And who needs familiar faces when you got three bottles of bud? Now anyways, I start heading over to this place on game nights just to check it out. The first couple of times were kind of awkward. The people in Johnny's weren't rude, just a little insular I guess. So it took a few visits for them to really warm up to me. I think Johnny's saw the same six faces night in and night out for the better part of two decades and one of these faces was at the end of the bar there almost every single time I visited. I didn't really notice just how frequently this guy was there until one Wednesday afternoon when I took a half day at work after a fight with the old ball and chain there.

It wasn't anything too vicious and we kissed and made up by bedtime but after slamming the phone down on her at work I took that half day then rode my bike over to Johnny's to get a beer. And there he was propping up at the end of the bar the only other guy in the place. And he's skinny as a rake balding a little on top with gin blossoms all over his nose and cheeks and all he's doing is sitting there glass of liquor in front of him watching the ash of his butt slowly burn down and I didn't say anything to him at first just said hi to the bartender and ordered a beer and then seeing as it's the great unifier got to talking about how the wife was giving me grief back at home. And then while I'm doing that, I start trying to get our quiet, skinny friend into the conversation.

I guess I'm gregarious like that, not wanting to make anyone feel left out, but almost the second after I turn to the guy to basically be like, women, am I right buddy? The bartender very suddenly raises a hand and shakes his head, as if to say, don't bother. I didn't want to offend the guy or anything, so I offered up a little apology to the bartender, just by way of politeness, and then carried on the conversation with him alone. At one point, the bartender goes over to the skinny guy, pours him another liquor, and then, a second after turning his back, the skinny guy downs the drink and then just says, Another one. In a way that was so flat it kind of came off as rude. I figured skinny and the bartender must have known each other pretty goddamn well if he'd take that kind of talk without comment.

And that, or something really crappy had just happened to this guy which was why I'd been told to leave him alone. The bartender then walks back over to him but instead of pouring him another drink he puts the whole bottle in front of him and says that he'll just add whatever he drinks to his tab. The skinny returns a nod in thanks and then over the half hour or so he finishes the whole bottle that almost falls off of his stool when it came time to leave. He's only just about made it out the door before he sort of steadied himself and took a deep breath and started off down the grass verge towards wherever he lived at. I waited until the guy was 100% out of listening range and then I asked the bartender a question

in about as diplomatic a fashion as possible, and that question being, what the hell is that guy's problem? The bartender sighed and then just stared off at nothing for a second like he was weighing up whether or not to tell me, but I think in reality it was more like he was wondering how much he should tell me, and I guess he settled on this. The skinny drunk at the end of the bar, whose name I don't really want to give away, used to be an undercover cop. As soon as the bartender said that, I thought to myself, well, that explains that.

I mean, the guy had probably been in some pretty hairy situations, right? We've all seen the movies. Probably had to do a few bumps of blow with a gun in his face or something, terrified his targets are going to find the wire strapped to his ball sack. But no, this guy wasn't that kind of undercover. He never dressed up or worked on his character, like some kind of crazy method actor. He did all of his undercover work from the comfort of some air-conditioned office over in Albany. He didn't physically infiltrate any of the groups that he'd helped bring down. Instead, he did it online. I kind of went from thinking, well, that explains the hardcore day drinking, to how does this guy have advanced PTSD from sending a few emails? But that right there, ladies and gentlemen, demonstrates the sheer vastness of my own ignorance.

Because our former undercover cop wasn't busting dorm room pot dealers at NYU or Columbia. No. His job was to infiltrate online pedo rings by posing as someone who shared their disgusting inclinations. From what the bartender said, and to be fair, I've heard this a few places too, undercovers are only supposed to be on the front line for a limited amount of time, what with it being such a high-stress position. Every couple of months, you swap your team out for a fresh one and let the spent one rest up and decompress so they're ready to do it all over again. But then, when it came to all the online creepy stuff, things worked slightly different.

In regular undercover work, you can't overuse your assets. You can't have one guy who was some meth-slinging biker five minutes ago pop up as some mafia associate in the same city just a few weeks later. A lot of the time, when an undercover operation finishes up, you can't use the same people again, especially once criminals start figuring out that there was a rat that they should have been smelling. Only with the online stuff, if your undercover had to burn a profile, they can make up another one in a matter of minutes. Definitely not a cop 69 became swear I'm not 50420, then were back on the job cracking into all those evil websites and bringing them down. They still arrested their guys every so often but it wasn't like they needed to

constantly cycle officers around to maintain their covers and on top of that that skinny bar fly there was relentless. I don't know if he had some kind of savior complex or if he just knew how good at his job he was, but time and time again, Skinny refuses to go on leave or take any kind of break. He goes back into the meat grinder over and over, boom boom boom, uncovering these freaks left and right through gaining their trust, maybe even their friendship, and then getting them to share any material that they had stashed away. Getting them to admit that they were pedos wasn't enough either. You can't just arrest and throw someone in jail just because they said something gross, or at least things don't work that way as far as I know. To get an arrest and a conviction, Skinny had to convince these guys to send them whatever child exploitation pictures they had, and he had to actually look at all this stuff too to make sure it was legitimate, and then another bunch of cops went did it for years, taking only the odd piece of vacation time here and there so he didn't completely burn himself out.

And I guess he was obsessed, but then who wouldn't be? You're taking these scumbags out. But there's still just so many more of them and every day you take off is one that they're free to carry on doing all their evilness. And I'm not saying I know exactly what this guy was thinking, but that's just my best guess at why he works so relentlessly. And then one day, I guess things just got the better of old Skinny there, and he turns in his badge and just vanishes off the face of the earth. It wasn't actually Skinny who told the bartender all that stuff about him either. Apparently he just showed up one day, ordered himself a drink, and then

kept on knocking him back until the cows came home. Next day he shows up, does the same thing all over again. And then aside from the odd vacation that he gave his liver, that guy was in there almost every day, day in and day out, doing his respectable impression of Nicolas Cage in that Leaving Las Vegas movie. You know the one, where the guy drinks himself half to death before someone pulls him out of it. Now anyway, several months go by, and then some stranger comes into Johnny's bar with a picture of Skinny, asking if anyone's seen him. Skinny wasn't there at the time, and everyone was all tight-lipped and first wondering who this guy was and what does he want with him. The stranger then pulls out a police badge, but instead of appealing to

authority, the guy appeals to the patron's sense of common decency. He explains that Skinny was an ex-coworker of his at the state police, that he just disappeared after quitting on them, and that he and his old buddies had been trying to track him down for the better part of six months. He explains how he thought that Skinny's drinking was out of control, how they'd been worried he'd driven his car off the Five Arches Bridge or something, and how they just wanted to check in on him to see how he was doing. I think the goal was to get Skinny on the wagon, but by the evidence of my own two eyes after seeing him nearly face plant after climbing off that barstool, I can safely

say that their efforts were in vain. The bartender then told me that that's all Skinny ever seemed to do Stop by, talk to no one, get drunk, and then leave And he did it Because all he wanted in the world was to forget about the things that he'd seen And the things that he'd said Trying to land those child predator scumbags in jail Where they belonged. I was born in Edgewick, which is an area in the English city of Coventry, and I grew up in the 1970s. Like most kids lucky enough to have their grandparents still knocking about, they were two of my favorite people in the whole wide world.

My granddad was a fantastic bloke and taught me to fish and shoot pellet guns, but my nana was an absolute saint. She always had a tray of gingerbread men ready whenever we went round for tea, and she made the best roast potatoes I've ever had, even all these years later. And almost everywhere she went, people would stop her to say hello or would simply say something nice as they walked past her in the street. As a young lad, I didn't really know any better. I just thought Nana was as popular with everyone else as she was with me. But they didn't love her because she made good roasties or baked a cracking apple pie. They loved her for a very different reason. As I learned later on in life, my Nana was a popular and rather famous figure in Coventry

because she served as an air raid warden during the Second World War. I imagine not many of your American listeners will know what one of those is, so if you'll excuse a slight diversion, let me explain. During the war, every fit fighting age man was sent off to the army or what have you, meaning women had to take their places in jobs they wouldn't be traditionally expected to do. You had lady police officers, firewomen, ladies digging through the rubble of bomb sites and helping to rebuild essential infrastructure. And in the case of my nana, you had lady air raid wardens too. When German aeroplanes started dropping bombs on us, the air raid wardens would go around to make sure everyone was in their shelters. They also went around to make sure no lights were showing, as they did

these full citywide blackouts back then to confuse German bombers. So if there were a crack in your curtains and your warden could see light coming from inside, they'd bang on the windows so hard that the glass would almost break and that was your warning for the night. Anyway, that's what Nana did. Walked around all night making sure everyone stayed blacked out and all that. And anyway, one night Nana's doing her rounds when she hears a scream coming from a good few streets away. As you can imagine, the blackouts meant that the nights back then were deathly quiet, so Nana could hear the scream from quite a distance away. As she was running to investigate, she bumped into another air raid warden, a bloke this time, and as they reached the area they suspected the scream to have come from, they started looking around to locate the source of it. Minutes later, they find her, a young woman, stabbed almost to death in an alleyway.

The young woman was rushed to the hospital, and she survived her wounds wounds but everyone agreed that she'd been very very fortunate to do so she claimed her attacker had been a very nondescript working-class gentleman wearing an overcoat and cap they also discovered that the woman was a prostitute or rather she wouldn't admit to being one but there was very little other reason why a woman would be all dressed up and not on her own like that especially when there was a bloody war going on. She was never about to admit it though, not even so much as to avoid arrest either because of the deep shame associated with it. With that being said, she wasn't the only one who attempted to defy the blackout regulations to ply her trade, and they ended up paying a very similar price.

A few nights later, and Nana wasn't there to hear it happening this time, but another young lady was attacked in roughly that same area, just too far for Nana to hear it on her rounds. Again, the woman was suspected to be a prostitute, but sadly, she wasn't as fortunate as the first young lady. Her attacker seemed to have learned a lot from that first attempt, and on his second, he very literally went for the jugular. When all was said and done, the air raid wardens were scared that they had a sort of Coventry version of Jack the Ripper on their hands, and the timing of it was just bloody awful as well.

The Germans were raining bombs from the sky, and as grim as it was, that brought a real sense of togetherness to the people suffering from it. So to think this bloke was, how to put it, battling against his own team in the middle of a war, it put the absolute fear of God into people. People said he was a German agent, some commando sent over to terrorize the people. He wasn't that at all as it turned out, but it gives you an idea of how frightened people were. Anyway, this carries on for a few more weeks until in the end, there were no more prostitutes walking the streets at all after sundown. But then, the psycho still wanted to satisfy his thirst for blood, so after having no luck on one of his hunts, he tries to break into the home of a woman he believed to be alone. Thankfully, the woman wasn't alone as her husband was in the bath upstairs and he chased the

attacker away without a stitch of clothing on him which probably added to the shock factor and scared the attacker off. The fact that no one was hurt was no doubt a good thing, but it was a very thin silver lining to a very dark sort of cloud because if this blackout ripper, as the people have taken to calling him, was willing to break into houses to find a victim, that it wasn't just prostitutes that were in danger. No one was safe. As you can imagine, people weren't happy. They thought the police should have caught the bloke after the first attack, but they'd let him commit two or three more attacks before he finally went

for someone minding their own business and their own home. They were outraged, saying it never should have gotten that far in the first place, and they raised such a fuss that the local superintendent promised to beef up local patrols and hire more air raid wardens to watch the streets. But then, that was no good, was it? The police couldn't very well neglect other areas of the city for a prolonged period of time, and the blackout ripper avoided officers and wardens like the plague. And what's even worse, they couldn't let lady officers or patrol women out on their own, so they had to double up for safety,

meaning even though they'd brought in help from other areas of Coventry, it still wasn't enough to cover all the necessary ground. Then that night, when the patrols were supposed to be boosted and everything was supposed to be fine again, the blackout ripper struck again. Some of the prostitutes who had gotten word of the boosted patrols had decided to take their chances out in the street again and for one of them, that proved a deadly mistake.

That night's murder was the most savage yet and it seemed only a matter of time before the Ripper decided to go kicking down doors again. Something had to be done, or rather, someone had to come up with a plan. And that's when my dear old Nana suggested something incredibly brave. That she would pose as a prostitute, to bait the man into trying to attack her, at which point she could blow very hard on a whistle to summon officers who would

be waiting nearby. And you read that right, by the way. They didn't give her a gun, or a club, or anything else she could use to actually defend herself. The police gave her a tiny tin whistle, and then basically told her, off you pop, go and catch us a murderer. I think it might have been a bit more of a sophisticated operation than that, but I remember feeling an acute sense of outrage when I found out that they wouldn't give her any kind of weapon. Granted, not even the police were armed with guns at the time, and British police still patrol mostly unarmed,

not counting your taser, baton, and CS spray. But back then, they had even less to work with if they wanted to subdue a criminal. But then, the officers standing by to catch the blackout ripper would be armed with batons. Nana had nothing but her wits, that bloody whistle, and a will to catch the monster that had been preying on the good people of Edgewick. And so one night, Nana makes her way down to the local police station to go over the plan one last time before heading off into the night. Then, down at the station, she dolls herself up in all her finest glad rags, slaps on a load of

war paint, makeup that is, and then once all the officers are in their various hiding places, off she goes towards the Cap Martin Road, which was where she'd first pose as bait. She said she was walking up and down for hours, heels clacking on the pavement, but she didn't see so much as a soul and after a while, Nana started to think that they wouldn't have any luck. Finally, she turned down the back street between Cheverel Avenue and Grandmouth Road and took a little wander down that, not realizing it was a dead end. She then turns back, only to see someone blocking her exit. The figure is about 50 feet down from her, but she knows it's not one of the policemen, because he's clearly not wearing that very distinct Bobby's helmet that they were all wearing. Nana said she called out to the man, and she could tell that it was a man by the way he was dressed,

but that he didn't reply to her. Instead, he started walking down the back street towards her at a brisk pace, still without saying a word. She sees him reach into his jacket and take something from a pocket, something which he fiddled with for a second before she saw the glint of a blade in the moonlight. Nana's hand went straight for her pocket, straight for that little whistle she'd been given. She knew that there were policemen just a street or two away, so blowing the whistle would have them there in seconds. But as she pulled it from her pocket, the tiny tin whistle got caught on a brass button and it slipped from her grasp. She thought she'd had it.

There was no finding that whistle before the bloke reached her, but she's also sort of instinctually kneeled down to grab it back up off the floor. She said she was frozen in terror for a moment, convinced that she was about to die when suddenly this wave of defiance rose up in her, and she whipped off one of her shoes and brandished it like a weapon. Nana said this ripper laughed and asked her, what are you planning on doing with that? But in reply she told him, and she didn't just say this either, she barked it so loud that people streets away heard her. My name is Warden Eileen Topsbury, and you're bloody well under arrest. That got another laugh from the bloke.

That one a little bit more nervous than the first, and then Nana started screaming something equally loud. Things like, I'll have your bloody eye out with this heel if you come near me. Maybe that was a bit more fight than he was used to. But just for a moment, the Ripper hesitated, and the next thing Nana knows, she can see two bobbies coming bombing it around the corner, at full pelt, shouting, oh you, stop where you are. In that moment, Nana went from behind, trapped in the back street with the blackout Ripper, to having successfully trapped him in with two approaching officers. The stroke of bad luck turned into a stroke of good luck in a matter of a few moments,

and it's a bloody good job too. My mom hadn't been born yet, so if Nana was murdered, there's no mom, no me, and none of my kids either. Since he knew he was boxed in, the ripper tried to scale a wall to get away, but it was too late for him. The two bobbies grabbed him by the leg, brought him down, and then beat the living shite out of him before they dragged him off to the police station. After that, Nana was a hero. We still got the newspaper clipping from that time too, and she was intensely proud of them, right up until the day she passed away. She was a bit loopy towards the end too, started losing her memory and all of that, but she never, ever forgot the night that she saved Edgewick from the blackout Ripper. If you put a gun to my head and told me that if I didn't tell you the craziest true story you'd ever heard, you'd blow my head off, I'd tell you this one.

I used to be an undercover cop here in DC and my cover was being a street junkie. I was good at it too. Did three full stints before they killed off my character, as you could say. And part of the reason I was so good was no different from what makes an Oscar winning actor. It's all about the way you carry yourself, your mannerisms, or what I always called a person's physicality. For example, for my junkie character, I'd draw in my stomach real tight, like I'm having stomach cramps. And after that, I'd drop my shoulders real low, walk real fast, and pretend to be wiping sweat off my brow or cheeks every so often to add that real sense of authenticity.

It was all in the stomach cramps though. People saw you holding yourself like that or if I looked like I was going to ask them for change or something, I became the invisible man. It was like my superpower. I saw everything and everyone but no one saw me. No one except the other street junkies and by the time I won those guys over, everything else just kind of fell into place. In as few words as possible, my role was intelligence gathering. I'd stay on the job for a few months at a time, really living that lifestyle aside from all the dope and disease. And then I'd take a vacation, tell the junkies I was going to visit my parents out in the country, and then be back on the line again in like a week or two, refreshed, renewed. One of the first major things we accomplished as a task force was closing a violent gang assault case which was connected to the narcotics trade.

Now I won't go into details, but the whole thing was essentially a punishment for a missing package, and it sent shockwaves around the whole city seeing as the victim was basically a civilian. It means a lot to everyone to send these jerks to federal prison, but little did we know that it would be what they called a Pyrrhic victory. Not long after we put these people in cuffs, the number of bodies being found around D.C. went up by 500% over the course of about a month, and as you can imagine, the chief of police wanted to know why. Officially speaking, all the deaths were coming up as overdoses, and some suspected a bad batch of heroin was to blame. But then some of the OD

deaths were some veteran street junkies, and although junkies tend to be desperate sons of bitches, their vocation relies on them being street smart, not street stupid. And if they know that there's a bad batch going around, they'll try to isolate and avoid it. And by that, I mean find out who's selling it, and then avoid them till it's off the street. But some of the deaths were cats who should have easily known better. Junkies who had all kinds of ways of getting their hands on a fix without having to risk poisoning themselves. My point is, I knew something was wrong almost right away. Not just that there was some bad dope going around. I just had to figure out what.

I started doing my usual rounds. Not asking too many questions, just putting out feelers like I always did. And that's how I found out it wasn't coming from one particular corner, or one particular dealer even, who might have stepped on his product so hard that he didn't mind a few dead addicts. It was coming from everywhere. People were avoiding one dealer thinking it was coming from them, and then they dropped dead after spiking the bag that they got from their safe guy. Rumors were flying around, people were getting scared, and what's worse, they were getting sick from running out of dealers to turn to. We had four pharmacy robberies in one day. Four. And that's what I mean when I tell people that

in a city like DC, so any city really, everything is connected. And when that rot sets in, it's like mold. You need bleach to get it out, and at times, the BPD looked more like a dry wet wipe than a bottle of Clorox. Anyways, the part when I feel like I fell down was, unlike a lot of the other junkies who were avoiding their regular hookups in an effort to stay safe, I was hunting bags like it was the last batch of dope ever made. I wanted to find whoever was selling that bad dope and get them off the street. Locking junkies up is one thing, but letting them die off in their dozens every week was no part of my job description. Don't get me wrong, street addicts do

each other pretty dirty and you'll meet some real bad ones too, but I'd say around 40% are just good people who made terrible decisions and some of them I might have even called friends in some other lifetime. And so as I was saying, I was running around Deanwood, trying to find the source of this bad dope. But then, instead of being everywhere, it seemed to be nowhere all at once. And by that, I mean, everyone seemed to be able to get their hands on the bad dope when they weren't looking for it. But me, going out of my way to try and get my hands on it, I couldn't seem to find any at all. Every bag of dope I bought went straight into evidence and after the spike in drug deaths, every other bag was being tested for toxins and

whatnot. Not a single one ever came up as hot. Hot meaning fatally poisonous. So as you can imagine, I was starting to get pretty frustrated. Everyone seemed to be able to get their hands on that bad dope except for me. At least until one day when I finally got my wish. So early one morning I get myself onto the street and start doing my thing, putting out feelers and asking the junkies who's holding. Eventually I get hooked up with the one guy I'd been buying from and we meet in our usual spot to make the exchange. But then, instead of being there on foot or on bike, the delivery guy is in his car, and instead of just giving me the dope and taking the cash, he says something like, Get in. We gotta go someplace to get it.

I'm thinking, okay, this is out of the ordinary, but whatever. And I get in his car and off we go to get the product. I'm thinking, okay, this is out of the ordinary, but whatever. And I get in his car and off we go to get the product. We ended up in some trap house, which was to be expected. But what I didn't expect was to be given the bag of dope by someone you might call a lieutenant. I.e. someone who would never regularly involve themselves in direct sales. He didn't just hand me the stuff either. He asked me to sit down in the upstairs bedroom that doubled as their kind of office,

and then I was subjected to what I can only describe as a minor interrogation. I didn't get the impression that they were looking for an undercover. It was all minor questions. What's your name? Where are you from? How long you been in DC? That kind of stuff. They wanted to know who I'd been buying from, who I thought had the best product, if I'd never been picked up by the cops. I answered everything as honestly as I could, even the question about being arrested. Me and the boys had faked one or two arrests while I'd been working, just to give me a little authenticity, so I brought up those times figuring that they could corroborate them if they asked the right people.

They asked a few more questions, just seemingly basic stuff, and then after that, they gave me the bag and then told me to get lost. I asked them straight up if the stuff was safe and they said yeah, that it was like a new package and the old one was off the streets. I didn't take their word for it and like everything else I bought, the bag went straight to evidence and then on to testing. Testing also takes time, a long time given the backlog of crap the lab has to test, so we didn't get the results until days, sometimes weeks after we sent off samples. Usually that kind of timescale worked for us, but on this occasion, it almost got me killed. The next morning was the same start as usual.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by 7am, out in the streets by 7.30. Everything went as normal. I did my usual thing, and then come early afternoon I went to my usual spot outside a liquor store to beg for smokes from people coming out. It was part of a daily effort to establish presence in the area and part of my routine was harassing the store owner for a free bottle or a free pack of smokes or anything. He never gave me anything which was fine because I wouldn't be able to take it without catching hell from the higher-ups, but it did big things for my character in terms of establishing that presence and authenticity. Every time I walked into that guy's store,

it'd be a case of, you again, what the hell do you want now? And that's if he didn't open straight up with, get the hell out of my store, you crackhead. But that day, the day after the visit with the lieutenant, I walked into his store to have him address me by my street name, and the thing that really grabbed me was how he didn't know my street name, and if he knew my street name, that meant someone had been talking to him about me. But if that was the case, why was I being talked about? So the store owner calls me by my street name and right away my guard is up when he tells me that someone is looking for me. I'm posturing like I always did, asking who's looking for me in an aggressive way and adding

things like, you tell whoever's looking for me that I'm right here. I ain't hiding. I'm right here. But then, instead of telling me who was looking for me, the store owner told me that someone had called into the store, as in on a cell phone, and asked for me by my street name. They asked the store owner if he had seen me, and that when or if he did, he was to tell me to call him back, whoever he was. A lot of y'all might think that that's a little too vague to know who was calling, but you gotta understand something. None of my street contacts ever used a phone and neither did I, or if I did, it was always a payphone. No true street junkie could get their hands on a cell phone and not try and sell it for drug money, so me having one would have been a dead giveaway that I was undercover. No one who knew me on the street

would ever ask me to call them back, and if they did, there was no way that they wouldn't have left a number or a street address or something for me to head up. That meant that whoever wanted to talk to me was from the department, in which case it was probably important if it couldn't wait for the next debrief. I found the nearest payphone, I fished through my spare change to find enough for the call and then placed it directly to our office. I kept in character, used my street name, then the person who picked up passed the phone to the person who tried to contact me, and that's the proverbial crap hit the fan moment. As soon as he picks up the phone he's like Jody you need to get your ass off the street and you need to do it fast. I asked him what the hell he's talking about and he says these five little words

I don't think I'll ever forget. You should be dead already he me, and then repeated that I needed to bring my ass in before I got myself killed. It was like a movie or something. I'm asking him to tell me more and he says something like, there's no time, I'll explain later. Anyway, so we coordinate a pickup point, somewhere discreet that didn't involve me hiding in a goddamn dumpster like he'd only half-jokingly suggested. He shows up, I get in his car, and I'm goddamn furious because doing that completely burned my cover. I didn't see anyone see me get in, but that doesn't matter in undercover work. You always assume someone's watching. You either go total immersion or you might as well assume that your cover's been burnt. And for me, there's no in-between, so as I said, the moment I stepped in my co-worker's car,

years of work went to crap in the time it took me to buckle up. I told him that he better have a damn good explanation for pulling me out like that, but boy did he ever. We didn't know it at the time, but narcotics had a mic in the apartment I'd been questioned the day before. And that's how we learned that the baggie had been sold contained what we like to call a hot shot. A hot shot is basically drugs that have been tampered with so that instead of getting you high, they kill you. And following the gang assault arrest, the dealers somehow got wind that one of the street junkies was an undercover cop. In other words, they knew I was there, they just didn't know who I was. And so someone had the

bright idea to load up a bunch of hot shots and sell them to whatever street junkie they suspected of being the undercover. They must have murdered at least 50 junkies by poisoning before they finally found out it was me, and the way they did it was kind of genius. They were so effective in murdering their suspected undercovers because no junkie on the planet doesn't shoot up or snort the dope they just bought. So if I bought the bag and I was still alive, that was because I hadn't taken the dope I bought from them. And the only reason I wouldn't do that is because I was an undercover cop. The surveillance team heard the dealers put a green light on me with their own ears.

They used my cover name and everything. They heard how I must have been an undercover because I clearly hadn't taken the hot shot they'd given me and at the time I was picked up there must have been like a hundred little hoppers running around with pistols in their waistbands just hoping to run into me so they could ice me and enjoy the reputation boost associated with that. And what I'm trying to say is I should not be alive right now. To outsiders, it seems like the system worked. Surveillance heard my cover name, got in touch with the boss, and then that started the frantic effort to get a hold of me before I ended up with several bullet

holes in my face. But the probability of that all happening exactly as it should, it's like winning the lottery of life. Surveillance didn't know my cover name, so if the dealers hadn't talked the whole thing out and explained exactly why they knew that I was undercover, the call wouldn't get made. If I didn't stop by the store for some reason at that exact time, the call doesn't get heard and I'm dead within an hour. I could have got shot on my way to the pickup, shot as I was getting into the car. I've gone over it in my head like a thousand times and in every scenario I don't make it out alive. But then somehow by the grace of God Almighty I made it out of there. And I'm not a religious person and I kind of admire people that do have

faith but after some of the crap I've seen I can't bring myself to share it no matter how hard I try. And that's why I don't talk about guardian angels or any of that stuff and I talk about the lottery. I don't need to believe in angels to appreciate how awesome, literally awesome it is. Everything fell right into place for me. That circumstance and coincidence aligned and saved my life. I know my angels. I met them. They're my co-workers. And I owe them everything. Back in 2011, I did a week of guest lecturing at UMSL and since I was still a young maverick back then, I was content to surf the couch of an old friend who happened to be working there after attending the same university. We were still in our late 20s, so we were holding down jobs and being fairly responsible,

but still staying up until 3am on the weekend, playing stoned Wii sports until we got hungry enough to want to eat. At which point, we'd head over to the local 24 hour Walmart to grab whatever looked good. He worked late shifts and almost all my lectures were scheduled for the afternoon so we stayed up almost every night either just hanging out, watching movies or playing Wii. Then on the fourth night of our little ritual, my buddy gets home from work, we smoke up, play some more Wii sports, and then made our way over to the Walmart to get some food. We're walking up and down the aisles with a basket, throwing in pizzas and wings and whatnot, but then when we got to the snack aisle, we found ourselves in a minor disagreement over which chips to buy.

We basically ended up standing there having some dog brain debate on which ruffles were the superior flavor when I start to notice this dude at the end of the aisle on our right. And I noticed him because he wasn't looking at the chips, he was looking directly at us. You know when you can see someone looking in your direction but you don't want to make any eye contact with them so you kind of just check them out in your peripheral vision but refrain from meeting their gaze. It sounds oddly specific I know but I'm sure some of you will know what I mean when I say that. I didn't look directly at this dude but I also knew for certain that he was looking at us, not just a glance either, he was staring at us. I turned to my buddy and

I was about to say, get a load of this guy, when I saw a second dude standing at the opposite end of the aisle, who was doing the exact same thing. Now I didn't end up making eye contact with this second guy purely by accident, but he only glanced at me for a second before I recognized that he wasn't strictly looking at me, he was looking past me, at the first guy I had spotted who was standing to my right. And that's when I turned back to the original dude to see if he really was checking out this other guy and not me and my buddy, and lo and behold, he was indeed looking at this seemingly random dude. Keeping in mind that I'm just completely toasted at this time, it took me a second to realize what was going on, and that

there weren't just these two random dudes staring at me from each end of the aisle. They were having some kind of weird staring competition and at first I didn't realize just what that meant. But the second the guy on my right reached into his waistband and I saw this flash of jet black against his bright red boxers, everything I'd been slow to pick up on hit me all at once and I just remember dragging my buddy to the floor as the shots started popping off around us. I instinctively tucked my head in and squeezed my eyes shut after hitting the floor so I didn't see anything of what happened next. All I heard was the shots, or more specifically, the crazy echoing they made as the sound waves bounced all over the store. Then, while the shots were like, wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, just this weird sound, I had my buddy in my left ear screaming, what the F, what the F and F.

And we just lay there until everything finally went quiet, ears ringing, and by that point, my buddy had gone quiet too. Probably one of the most terrifying moments of my entire life, right there, thinking one of my best friends in the entire world had been quiet too. Probably one of the most terrifying moments of my entire life, right there, thinking one of my best friends in the entire world had been shot dead. Thankfully, he just finally decided to shut up and stop screaming, but that moment of thinking, oh god, please no, probably one of the worst ones of my entire life. I remember just helping my friend up and then we saw one of the employees running for a fire exit and we followed. And then the next thing we were in the parking lot hearing one siren turn into two and then double again and then before we knew it there were like

half a dozen cop cars all pulling into that Walmart parking lot in twos and threes. The parking lot was just completely filled with blue and red lights as the cops ran into the Walmart through the front entrance, but by that point, I think both shooters were long gone. I don't remember seeing any blood either. I mean, not that we were looking, but the point is, I'm not sure that they even hit each other. And I read later that you don't even start gushing blood after being shot. That it sometimes takes a second for the bleeding to really kick in, depending on where the wound is. So, maybe they did hit each other and I just didn't see any of it.

I actually did a disturbing amount of research into small caliber shootouts after that whole incident too. And all under the recommendation of the therapist that Yushai provided me with. They were great providing me with paid leave, as I'm not going to lie, being in public places was pretty nerve wracking for a while after that shooting. The thing that really got me was how lucky we'd been not to have been hit in the crossfire. And I'll put it this way, we had to talk to the cops afterwards to give them a description of both shooters, so we got a pretty good breakdown of what had actually happened. I guess these two gangbangers managed to pepper that entire aisle

with 14 bullets that went everywhere, but then somehow, by the grace of God, neither of us were hit. It's still something that I think about from time to time. Like whenever I drive past a Walmart someplace, it's guaranteed to pop into my head if I ever have to visit one for any reason. And I always wonder what would have happened if I hadn't spotted the guns in time, or if we hadn't been so lucky in regard to where the bullets ended up. The single worst shift I ever worked during my time at Walmart was on Mother's Day of 2015. I was working customer service and handling the day as best as could be expected on a Sunday holiday where the employees were mostly female mothers.

That meant we had 13 call outs and 5 no call no shows and resulted in us having just 5 overworked women to handle the whole Sunday. Lines were long but we had zero help and management couldn't spare anyone. At one point I'm getting yelled at by a blue haired old woman about the lines when I get the call that made me regret waking up that day and coming to work. Hey, see that kid in the orange shoes to your left? Someone asked me over my radio. Stop him. I did as I was told, but also asked why. Like if the kid's mom was looking for it or something. And then I hear him reply. He crapped himself and is tracking feces all over. I'm trying to find his mother on the cameras right now. And my heart sunk. The kid was absolutely covered in it and I felt horrible for this little guy but

I had to do everything in my power not to puke as I led him over to the customer service desk. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes went by and I saw our head of security approaching customer services. He'd been looking for the kid's mom, so I asked him if he'd found her yet. He just walked right past me without a word, with this weird kind of zapped out look in his eyes. The second security guy, the one who had been watching the cameras, he came out to watch the kid while I went to mop up all the poop. And there was a lot of it, so it took me a while, long enough so that the next time I walked by the front of the store, I saw our head of security talking to a cop outside. The kid's mom had left him in our toy section to try and distract him before she went into

our bathroom to shoot up the heroin overdose that killed her. And I don't think that she meant to end her own life, just in case that came out kinda wrong there, and I think it was accidental. But yeah, she was dead on the scene in our bathrooms. The paramedics took her body away and one of the cops stayed with us as we watched the kid until CPS showed up. We washed him down, cleaned him up, gave him some new clothes and then off he went with a social worker. I wanted to quit after that shift more than any other I ever worked, but I stayed. For a whole nother actually and and it'd take a hell of a lot for me to go

back to a place like Walmart for employment. I saw the most messed up thing I ever saw in my life at the York Commons Walmart in Dayton, Ohio. I was near the pharmacy section, like not at the pharmacy section, but in one of the aisles where I could see it, when some guy walked past me who smelled like a dead skunk's asshole. I didn't realize where it was coming from at first. Like he walked past me, I suddenly smelled this god-awful stench, and I started to look around to see where it was coming from. I figured the guy might have farted as he walked past me, which isn't anything to start a fight with him over, but still, who the hell does that? But then as I'm looking at him thinking Jesus Christ dude, eat a goddamn salad every once in a while, I started to notice how he's not exactly very well put together. In fact, and I hate to

sound like an insensitive jerk here, but he had a distinct air of homelessness about him. And so then, out of pure morbid curiosity, I decided to just stay put and see what this weird guy would need from the pharmacy. I'm not particularly proud of myself for feeling that urge, and now that I'm typing it out, it's really hitting me how weird that behavior is from people, and the same thing that makes them just stare at car accidents I guess but anyway I watch as the homeless looking guy waits in line to talk to the pharmacist and the person in front of him clearly starts to smell him too because she turned around and gave him this look that said take a goddamn bath already she then took her pills or whatever

and stepped away. Then the stinky homeless dude steps up to the counter to ask for pills for his butt leakage or whatever was going on. And that's legit what I thought was happening too. Like I guess I just couldn't conceive what that guy might have been going through. And in my dumb, ignorant brain, stinky meant poo-poo, and with my total lack of medical knowledge, I could never have guessed just how horrifying the situation actually was. In Jesus H. Christ, was it horrifying. So I'm watching this homeless looking dude talking to the pharmacist, whose eyes must have almost been watering because of how close he was. I couldn't hear exactly what they

were saying, but the dude looked like he was asking the pharmacist questions and the pharmacist couldn't quite understand him. The next thing I know, that guy is leaning down, grabbing a hold of the pant leg and rolling it up real carefully all the way up his boot and past his sock. The pharmacist leans over the counter, kind of looking down at him from what I'm guessing was like a slightly raised platform on the other side. Then when the homeless dude pulls his pant leg up a little more and reaches flesh, both me and the doctor pull back in horror. I'm maybe 15 to 20 feet away so I can't see this guy's leg up close. But even from that distance, I could tell from the color of his leg that he had some kind of serious infection going on down there.

And that's when it really hit me. The bad smell wasn't coming from this guy's mouth or armpits or butt. It was coming from this guy's leg wound, which was so badly infected that it must have been rotting from the inside out. I remember the pharmacist covering his mouth right away after seeing it. Like I didn't see him gag or anything, but he sure as hell looked like he was pretty close to. He then talked to the guy in a higher volume, not talking to him in a polite way, but giving him a direct order. You need to go to the hospital right now he kept saying i don't know what the homeless dude said back to him but the pharmacist's eyes went all wide again as he repeated himself sir listen to me you need to go

to the hospital right away this is very serious and I couldn't just stand by at that point. I suddenly became very self-aware that I was just standing there, watching this all unfold, being one of those insensitive jerks who just stares at the four-car pileup and doesn't offer to help or anything. I walked over, and I did the only thing I could think of. I asked the guy if he wanted me to call him an ambulance so he could get some actual medical assistance for his leg, and he kept saying no. But the pharmacist spoke right over his head like, yes sir, you should do that. This man needs an ambulance. I remember reaching into my pants pocket to get my phone, then looking down at its screen, and that's when I caught a glimpse of this dude's leg close up. It was rotten. Like, actually rotten. So rotten that I'm pretty sure that I

could either see this dude's shin bone directly at the bottom of the open wound, or there was some kind of muscle membrane or something that was pale and I mistook it for bone. Then, as I was looking at it, I really started to smell it again and it was so bad that I had to cover up my mouth and nose with my shirt to stop myself from gagging right in front of the dude. The guy kept telling me, please don't call anyone, but I just totally ignored him. I don't know if he had drugs on him or if, like a buddy of mine suggested, he had outstanding warrants or something, but there was no way in hell that I was about to walk out of that Walmart without at least having done something for the guy.

I guess I felt guilty for my first thoughts being, who's this stinky jerk, and then realizing, oh shoot, this dude might be dying right in front of me. So I figured the least I could do was call the guy an ambulance so I could walk out thinking that I actually did something or tried to do something anyway. But in the end, he stopped protesting and just walked out. The pharmacist and I were calling after him like, hey, you can't just leave, but he did. He just up and walked out like he was fine. But he was definitely not fine, not according to the pharmacist anyway. He said it was a miracle the guy was even on his feet, that he had to be on some serious painkillers or have an addiction to numb all that pain

because a regular person would literally be screaming in agony if they were walking around with that kind of wound on their leg. The pharmacist said the guy would probably die soon, at least if he didn't get to a hospital as fast as possible. I want to hope that he did, but a part of me just kind of knows that he didn't and that he was just one of those homeless dudes that dies, disappears, and doesn't even get so much as a funeral to mark their passing. About ten years ago, I was laid off from my job and I needed money to pay the bills, so I swallowed my pride and I took a job at Walmart until I could find something in my preferred field. I ended up working in the lawn and garden section, which is actually fun when you get to play with plants all day long. However, I wasn't aware that lawn and garden also does all of the holiday setup

as well as placing said holiday product on the floor. Fast forward to a week before the public school systems were in session, I had a cart full of notebook paper, pencils, trapper keepers, all that kind of stuff that I was trying to put on the shelves when a sound ripped through my eardrums that was similar to ones that are typically only heard on the Discovery Channel. The best I can describe it is cats being lit on fire by their tail and being chased by rabid wolves. I looked around to figure out just who in the hell was being murdered in the store when I saw him. It was a kid, about 8 years old, who looked as if he was desperately trying to become Jabba the Hutt, and the kid was succeeding. It took me a minute to figure

out what the hell was going on in my aisle until I realized that this kid was throwing a fit because his parents wouldn't buy him three different trapper keepers, one of which was Hello Kitty. Normally I'd just shrug and say, typical Saturday in Walmart, but no. This little brat realized that his dad wasn't paying attention to him and was instead focused on his siblings. This pisses the kid off even more, since he howls with rage and, here's where it gets insane, kicks his what looked like 8 months pregnant mother directly in the stomach. And to her credit, this lady didn't whomp this spoiled little monster's butt right in the aisle. No, she instead collapsed on the floor and had to be taken away by paramedics. And then in

the commotion, that little brat took that as a sign that he could have all the Trapper Keepers he originally wanted. I watched this whole thing go down, and as the dad watched his wife get loaded into an ambulance, not one iota of, you're gonna get it later, came from him. Instead, the little brat that kicked his mom started crying about being hungry and wanting chicken nuggets, which the dad then took him to go get, I think. And I swear, there's places like Walmart where you see the lowest of humanity sometimes. It's not even the place itself, it's just everyone goes there. And I saw and dealt with some amazing customers during my time there, but I also saw the absolute dregs of society too. And sometimes, if it didn't do some terrible things to my soul. This might sound kind of funny to some people, but I can promise you it was not funny in the moment. I used to work at Walmart, and one day I'm walking the aisles when I suddenly spot this

lady opening up a bottle and chugging the contents. Now this made zero sense to me at the time because I knew the story pretty well and the place where the lady was standing was the place that I was pretty certain we kept all the hot sauce. But then, she couldn't have just been chugging the hot sauce, could she? Well, she was. I walked up to her and I said something like, Excuse me, ma'am.

And just the sight of her must have had my jaw dropping. She had bloodshot eyes, tears streaming down her face, and she was wheezing, or like breathing really heavily from how bad it must have been burning her mouth. She was sweating, gasping, and it was just a really crazy thing to see. Like people have joked when I've told them this story saying, oh she's just love hot ones or whatever. But when I say that this woman was trying to hurt herself. With hot sauce, I mean that legitimately. She kept drinking and drinking. I called security and by the time security came, she was almost bent double over in pain from what it was doing to her stomach. Security just sort of dragged her outside and she just laid there until someone called 911 and then the EMTs came

and took her away. I used to think about her a lot, like hoping that she was doing better and I still do. She seemed very sick in the head. I worked at Walmart several years ago when a co-worker's ex-husband came in with a gun. He owned a failing business and had committed insurance fraud three times. The wife said she had no idea he was committing arson and filed for divorce. The ex-husband was angry at her for testifying against him and he asked her why she wouldn't talk to him. She asked him to leave and then he told her he had a gun.

For some reason, she ran into the women's restroom at the front of the store to hide. He followed her there and had her on her back while he sat on top of her, straddling her. He was crying and saying his life was over and all this. Another person happened to be in the bathroom, but he let her go unharmed. They evacuated the entire store while the cops set up and the cops finally said that they were coming in just to talk and he shot at the cop and missed and the bullet went through the door. He said he knew that he was going away for the rest of his life for shooting at a cop and he said he was sorry and he loved her and then shot himself in the head while still

sitting on top of her. They had to move his body off of her to help her get up and out. She wasn't harmed but she's still in therapy to this day and we were pretty good friends at the time and it still scares me because I would have never have thought her husband was capable of that. I was helping direct traffic at an event in a Walmart parking lot when I started to hear a man shouting about 25 to 50 feet away from me. I couldn't really tell what was going on, so I kept directing traffic a few more minutes until I realized his family had locked themselves in the car, seemingly in fear of him and he was intoxicated, cussing and screaming, not only scaring them but the hundreds of people and families walking through the parking lot. I calmly approached him and told him I understood that he must be going through a stressful situation and I asked if I could help resolve things. He looked at me with this fire in his eyes and told me that I better not get in between him and his family.

I tried to reassure him that it wasn't my intention, only to try and calm him down and I just wanted to help. Things escalated verbally, but I was able to guide him about 20 feet away from the family car while we were talking. The wife slash girlfriend saw this as her opportunity to drive away but before she could, he jumped on the hood of the moving car. I had no time to think and just jumped in front of the car. Thoughts of her plowing other families over while driving with him on the hood flashed into my head and I just reacted in that moment. She stopped and I talked him off the car while he threatened me more and radioed for help. Should have sooner but things escalated quicker than I thought they would. In the next 10 minutes before help arrived he got one of the doors open and was trying to pull a two-year-old boy out of his car seat while I tried to pin him into the open door and prevent him from getting the boy. Two random dads saw what was happening and helped me keep him corralled until my help arrived.

I let them take over so I could go back to directing traffic, which went a little haywire in the preceding 15 minutes. Before long I heard yelling behind me and saw him hit one of the other security guards and then two guards and the guy all grabbing onto each other in some scuffle. I ran over and we took and held him down firmly but safely for about 15 minutes until police arrived and arrested him. I received a subpoena but he pled before the trial and I never learned what happened before or since. I just hope that family is okay. I was guarding at a Walmart that had been gutted and used to store construction equipment for a construction company. I literally just sat in my car and circled the building and didn't have to answer to anyone or have anyone check up on me. One night I'm sitting in my car and circled the building and didn't have to answer to anyone or have anyone check up on me. One night I'm sitting in my car facing the building and out of the shadows, a woman walks towards the front of the building.

She had no shoes on, short pajama style shorts and a thin white spaghetti strap top. It was like 37 degrees so immediately I'm like what the hell and watch her for a while. I noticed that she was very alert and checking her surroundings constantly like her head was on a swivel and then all of a sudden she darted behind a concrete column at the front of the building. A Honda had just pulled into the lot and she noticed it before I did and she was keeping the column between the car and her, and the car was creeping slow, like they were looking for someone, and as it drove past her, she shifted so they couldn't see her behind the column. At this point, alarm bells are ringing in

my head, and I get out of the car. The Honda leaves the area, and she sees me. She knows I see her and she starts running over. I ask, do you need help? Are you okay? What's going on? She just tells me to call the cops and she's scared, crying. I don't know how to describe it. It's not crying from sadness or anything. It's like pure terror, tears and gasping. I start calling the cops and and that Honda rolls back into the parking lot, and instantly she's like, oh, never mind, it would be better if you don't get involved, and starts walking to the car like she's just been found out. After that, she got in the car, and that was that.

It's been like three years, and I still think about it. Was it human trafficking? An abusive boyfriend? I have no clue. But my blood runs cold when I stop and remember about that night and I hope she's okay. But I doubt it. One time, I was at a tailgating party in a Walmart parking lot, and the place was pretty crowded. Dude comes up beside me and isn't really looking to get a drink, he's just kind of looking at me really intensely. Really big guy, probably 6'3", 220 plus pounds of just muscle.

I'm like 6'0", maybe 160, rail thin and he nonchalantly starts talking about how his favorite thing on a night out is just to punch an absolute random person and see their lights go out laying on the floor. He says he does it when he's coked out which he insinuated he was and just goes on and on about the thrill that he gets from knocking someone out who he doesn't even know. The things he said were probably more graphic and violent than I remember. I was just like, what the heck, dude? I need to get out of here. I'm not sure how the conversation turned out, but he mentioned that he was out on the town because he went through a breakup. And he said, are you my bro? I was like, yeah, sure, man. We're buds. And I got my drink and said

something like, cheers to you, to all the fish in the sea, or something like that. And I got back to my friends and kept that to get a lot of interesting customers. One day a man came in and I, being a cashier, went to serve him. He stood at the counter for about 10 seconds without looking at me and then proceeded to run out of the store. Cut to about two hours later, I'm cleaning the men's bathrooms when he walks in. I apologize and say that I'll just be a moment to finish up my cleaning. When I went to exit the bathroom with my cleaning supplies, he blocked the doorway and wouldn't let me pass for about 10 seconds again. He then spends half an hour in the bathroom before

exiting the store without purchasing anything. An hour later, you guessed it, he's back again, pacing back and forth at the front of the store, and he ends up buying like $30 worth of stuff and then leaves the store without it, and just never returns. Several weeks later, I'm waiting for my bus. I live very close to work. When he sees me, I see him, and he walks up and stands next to me for that 10-minute wait. When the bus finally arrived, he turned around and walked away. Now as a young woman this scared the crap out of me.

Particularly when I drove past him getting arrested a couple of weeks ago. Surrounded by police officers. answers. There was this random man who happened to be outside when I was visiting a Walmart a few years back. He was disheveled, short, I want to say maybe 5'1 to 5'3, bald, mumbling to himself and walking very funny. When it got to be about three feet from him, he turned around and knocked out the lady directly behind him. A perfect stranger on her phone, and he knocked her out with one solid punch to the face. Then he ran up to a guy who was easily a foot taller than him and tackled him to the ground and began headbutting him and yelling,

Can you feel this now, Mary? Can you? It was psycho. And by the time the cops showed up, this guy was foaming at the mouth from yelling, covered in blood, and two other people, two older men, had been assaulted by him. It was so nuts. The guy was obviously on some pretty strong stuff, but I've never seen anyone before or after that just lose it quite like that. I used to work for Walmart Corporate, and we all had to go to this event one time. We all met up in Miami and took two 15-passenger vans to drive up to Central Florida, both full. We took US-27 known as Okeechobee Road. At some point before sundown,

we stopped at a McDonald's for dinner. My buddy from back then was there too. I remember chatting it up with him. Just typical teenage stuff. I remember at one point we were in separate vans and we started loading up when one of the instructor decided that my buddy and I should switch vans. I was confused but sure, didn't matter to us. I sat in his seat and he went to the other van and then last minute the instructors decided that we should switch back to how we were. I never quite figured out why but it saved my life and ended my friends. A couple of hours later, it's dark. US-27 has no lights at the time, and their van was behind us the whole time till it just suddenly wasn't.

We were six miles from our destination when we got a call from the driver of the other van. We were in an accident. We're hurt. We sped back at like 100 miles per hour, only to be met by a literal wall of semi-trailers blocking the two-lane highway. We had to drive on the shoulder to get past them. As we went around these trucks, I noticed that they all had their headlights on. Illuminated on the road was my friend's body. His eyes were open, but all you could see was the

whites of his eyes. His arms were very obviously broken at odd angles, but most alarming of all, he was torn completely in half. To say that we were beside ourselves is an understatement. The van was laying on its side, completely mangled, and the rest of the passengers were bloodied and bruised, but aside from a broken arm, they were generally okay. According to the driver, they hit wet pavement on a curve, lost control of the van, and it flipped. My friend was wearing a seatbelt, but he was pretty skinny. He slipped through the belt and broke through a passenger's side window. He flew approximately 30 yards over the grass median and landed on the opposite side of the highway. According to the driver, she was trying to climb out of the flip van when

she witnessed my friend trying to push himself up with his arms. An SUV was driving on the lane that he was laying in. It hit him and killed him instantly. The SUV did not stop. They never found out who hit him, and it sticks with me 17 years later. I try to be grateful for the life I have. I was going to be in his seat, and happenstance saved me. I struggle with feeling like I deserved it. He was one of the good ones, and I was always struggling with my inner demons. And I miss you, man. I hope you're alright wherever you are. Rest in peace. I had a stalker situation. I used to work at Walmart and while I was working one time a guy came in and just said hi. He knew my name, I sort of recognized him and he said he went to high school with me.

And then it clicked and I remembered seeing him back in school. We talked for a bit and he seemed nice enough. The next day I got a friend request on Facebook. I added him and didn't think anything of it. Now a few days later some of the guys I'm friends with on Facebook sent me a message asking who he is because he's sending them all friend requests. I never kept my phone number on Facebook but he somehow got it. He started texting me and calling me. He got my email as well. Sent me this long letter about how he always loved me, wants to marry me, and how perfect we were for each other. Asking who all the guys are I'm friends with. And that it should just be me and him.

It really took me off guard since we only talked for the first time a few nights ago. I responded nicely and I tell him that I have a boyfriend and that it seems like he's a nice guy, but that I just didn't feel that way about him. That we just don't know each other well enough. And that was a bad choice of words. He starts showing up everywhere I am. Classes, when I'm shopping, eating, everywhere.

If I don't see him, he sends me emails about if I enjoyed this here with this person, and I finally tell him that he needs to just leave me alone. He sends me this long-winded email about how I'll pay, how I just didn't give him a chance and he will make me give him one. And what a selfish bee that I am. Really creepy, just terribly mean stuff. About how he knew my schedule and my routine and there was nowhere that I went that he couldn't find me. I eventually ended up calling the police and actually getting a restraining order and he did get into some trouble but not very much. I was scared for a while after that but thankfully I've not heard from him since. So this short story is regarding a former co-worker of mine at Walmart who seemed as though he took extreme pleasure and violence. You see, one time, he put on a football helmet and ran into

the break room and just head-butted me extremely hard with it, and I actually ended up with a concussion. And when I told my manager, he confronted me at work. He shoved me down, got on top of me, and I kept screaming and kicking at him, telling him to get off of me and that I couldn't breathe. Eventually he did, but Jesus Christ, I actually thought he was going to kill me. Thankfully he ended up getting fired, but I spent the rest of my time working there wondering if he was ever going to come back and finish the job. I used to work at a Walmart where the managers didn't care about their staff. I've since learned that they were fired, so that's something. But the customers were always the worst part.

We had this one regular, pretty huge guy who would consistently cross boundaries with me. He would try to grab me whenever he was with his buddies, and he would grab my butt, even after I straight up yelled at him and even slapped him once. I begged the managers to ban him from the store but that didn't happen. The best that they would do would kick him out if he went too far which usually involved him grabbing me in some way. He was always free to return the next day though because he was a good customer. One Saturday I was on my cigarette break in the alley beside the store when that jerk sneaked up and grabbed me around the waist and started to drag me backwards. I immediately went into fight or flight mode and smashed my head backwards into his face,

ended up breaking his nose pretty badly, and when he dropped me I laid on the ground and kicked up into his groin several times. When I had a moment to think and realized who it was who had attacked me, I took my lit cigarette and I put it out on his arm. I think I did a fair bit of screaming and I spat on him as well. I was just so angry and afraid that I don't have a very clear memory of the rest of that day. I guess the security guys arrived at some point and the cops were called. When the cops came I gave my statement and he did get arrested. I quit that job and never returned to that crappy place. I never got a chance to find out what happened to the guy or even what his motivations for grabbing me were because I moved to Austin a Walmart parking lot.

On the way out, someone tried to cut me off when I was making a turn which almost resulted in our cars crashing. The other driver was very upset and started following me, flashing his lights to blind me. Then they forced me to park my car and blocked it. He got out with another guy, grabbing a screwdriver and tried first to open my car door, which I locked just in time, and then he tried smashing my window. I wasn't so foolish as to get out of my car and risk being stabbed, so I reached for my phone and started calling a few of my buddies who lived nearby. Some strangers started running over too. The guy with the screwdriver and his friends saw that they were going to be outnumbered and quickly escaped in their car.

Overall, it was a very scary experience and I'm pretty sure if I hadn't locked my door in time, I would have had a huge screwdriver plunged directly into my neck. I used to work with this guy at Walmart who I refer to simply as Josh. Josh was insane. I don't mean he was a really bad drunk and did crazy stuff, or that he was big and a lover of kicking people's butts a lot. He was all of those things, but so, so much more. Josh used to take full packs of caricidin nearly daily, at least that's what it seemed like. He took it and would turn his entire mouth red and he would be at school high as balls. And he sewed his lips shut for a Halloween party with a needle and thread and bled all over the place. And he shot himself on more than one occasion. Once in the leg with a rifle just to

see how it felt. And the other time with a handgun in his head in an attempt to take his own life. It didn't work. He's still alive and almost exactly the same. No effects other than now he gets seizures. And he headbutted a cop. At one time I lent him a CD and he accidentally broke it. He came back to me apologizing and whipped out this obnoxiously large wad of money from his pocket that was just thick with hundred dollar bills and handed me a fresh hundy from it. Now I'd like to take a break in these little bullet points about his life to say, Josh was a mentally disturbed individual, this is true.

But he was actually a good guy in his own way. He liked me a lot, actually. Anytime someone would mess with me and he'd hear about it, he'd instantly get incredibly mad and want to kill them. To some, he was a violent psychopath. To others, he was a violent, deranged, messed up human being with an unmistakable sweet side. He was completely delusional. He used to tell me about how the doctors took pieces of his body out and replaced them with alien parts to see how he'd operate with them. Honestly, and I'm not joking, I could write a novel based on my experiences with this weirdo. I avoided hanging out with him because I

knew that he ended up getting me in some serious trouble, not to mention that he scared the crap out of me. But he always seemed to go out of his way to try and hang out with me, chat with me, whatever. I have no idea how he managed to hold down that job, but he did, and everyone knew that he was nuts. Years after, he added me on Facebook, and he still sends me the occasional message and always buys my music when I release something new or comes to shows. He's a good dude to have on your side, I think, and our daughter is 1. This story happened last night, so I'm running off like 2 hours of sleep, and my daughter wasn't into the idea of sleeping in this morning. Now, to start, my husband,

our one-year-old, and myself live in a rental and have been here for three years now. When we first moved in there was a random doorbell that would go off. There isn't a doorbell here that we can see and we thought that there was probably a battery-powered doorbell stored in the attic that is probably dying or malfunctioning. That eventually stopped and we forgot about it for the most part. My husband also used to see what he called shadow people and hear footsteps and have horrible sleep paralysis dreams. I always chalked it up to his mind playing tricks on him or him trying to scare me. It's been a few years since any of that has happened though and for the year that our daughters live with us, zero spooky things happened until last night.

My husband works the night shift so it's just me and the baby most nights. Well last night my daughter wakes up around midnight so I get her and bring her to my bed. She's back asleep and I'm wide awake scrolling through Hulu. As I'm searching for a show to watch, I kid you not, the foot of my bed, frame, and all lifts like half a foot off the ground and slams back down. My daughter is still asleep, but I'm immediately frozen in fear. My first thought is, there is someone under my bed. But I quickly realize that I couldn't even fit under my bed so this is far fetched but not any better. I quickly scoop my daughter up, football style, stand on my bed and jump off the bed as far as possible and run out of the room. I grab our gun, call my husband, shaking and sobbing to

please come home, and then call my mom to pick us up, we're a one-vehicle family. At that point, our kitchen lights start to dim until they were completely off, which was the last straw for me. I took my daughter and went to the front yard in only a t-shirt and panties until my husband got home about 10 minutes later. He did a sweep of the house and nothing seemed out of place, which weirdly only made me more scared, like I would rather a stranger be under my bed than some invisible force. But I still went to my mother's. I finally fell asleep about 3.30 and my husband picked us up at 5am when he got off of work. I'm afraid to sleep here so I've been awake ever since. I don't know how I'm going to be here alone at night anymore.

I'm trying to debunk what happened and find an explanation but I just can't. It may not sound scary to you but I had never felt so scared in my life and scary stuff is 10 times worse when you have a baby to protect. What do I do? How do I bless my home correctly without making things worse? Also, I don't drink or do any drugs so, to always believe each other when we say something is up, so they both believe me, but I still feel crazy. I was about six or seven years old and my mother and I were on a routine grocery run to our local Walmart. I remember getting out of the car and walking up to the entrance. We had parked sort of in the back so we had a little walk to the front. As we walk up I see a homeless man asking for change from every person that walks by. He asks the woman in front of us for change and as she turns him down he

scoffs and begins to say something rude towards the woman. My mother and I walk past him with haste to avoid conflict as he seems to be extremely agitated. We get inside and get our groceries and everything seems fine. As we load up and begin to leave I remember my mother pulling out two dollars to specifically give the man as he is presumably still at the entrance begging. My mother trying to avoid conflict wants to hand him the money and be on her way so we don't end up getting harassed as the woman before us did. As we walk out I raise my arms to my mother in little kid fashion to be picked up as I'm scared of the encounter we're about to have with the man.

My mother picks me up and we begin to leave the store. Before the man can ask us for money, my mother hands him the cash and we walk away conflict free. I'm being held by my mother at this point with my head facing behind her. As we're about halfway to our car, I look up from the pavement and look at the man whom is staring directly at me with a most sinister face. At this point, his features seem distorted and what I can only describe as demonic. He's smiling and sticking his tongue out almost to his chest. He lets out a long hiss as his eyes roll into the back of his head, seemingly invisible to the other people passing him. And I still to this day do not understand

how I was so far away but heard his hiss as if though it was right next to my ear. I'm sure it could be dismissed as the homeless guy was on drugs but I think truly this was a demon. They messed me up for a really long time and to this day is to visit family in rural New England and America. They live on a small farm with buildings that date back to the 1700s which have been restored and modernized, and a guest house which was built about 20 years ago. My cousin is a prolific photographer, and my auntie had decorated most of the rooms in the main house and guest house with her photos. We didn't notice much about the photos in the guest house

when we first arrived, probably because we were all jet lagged. The next morning, after a sound night's sleep, we were sitting in the main family room eating breakfast and making plans for the day when I noticed that my son was keeping his head down and not answering my father whenever he spoke to him, which was unusual because even at that young age they were very close. I looked over to my dad and noticed that he was sitting in front of a photo of a room in a run-down house. The room had a large window with sunlight streaming in, casting shadows across the length of the room towards a dark corner. I got an uneasy feeling from the photo but I really didn't think much more of it. We finished breakfast and all got up from the table and I noticed my son was walking

in a wide arc around the end of the table where my father had been sitting. Again, weird behavior but I just dismissed it as a weird three-year-old thing. Over the next day or so, I noticed him becoming more and more uneasy any time we were at the dining table and doing whatever he could to avoid looking at the photo. I decided to ask him what was wrong and he answered me very matter-of-factly. The bad man in the picture is looking at me. He's very cold and he's not nice. I looked back at the picture and got instant chills down my spine. There was no man in the picture but I got the feeling that there was more to it than an empty room. I decided to ask my cousin about the picture and she told me that it was taken at an abandoned farm a bit further upstate. It was one of her favorite pictures but had always given

my aunt the creeps so it was moved to the guest house. Over the next couple of days whenever I would ask my son about it he would say things like, the bad man is looking at me, he doesn't like me, he wants to hurt me. I didn't think much of it until we were going to bed one night and my son tripped and fell, seemingly for no reason in the middle of the hall and started crying hysterically. When I asked him if he was okay, he said, the bad man hurt me on the leg. I checked his leg and sure enough, on the side of his leg there was a large bruise that looked like he had been struck with a blunt object. I didn't want to play into his fears, but asked him how the bad man could hurt him if he was in the photo downstairs near the table.

His answer was enough for me to pack up all our stuff and move to the main house, with my aunt, uncle, cousins, and big burly housekeeper right away. He's not down there. He comes up here when we go to bed. We left soon after so I never found out anything more about the farm where the photo was taken but I'm sure there was some kind of evil presence around it. Has anybody experienced something similar? Please share if you have. When I was 14, I had a strange encounter that still puzzles me to this day.

On the weekends, I'd sometimes go to my mother's place, as my parents are divorced. The house she lived in was converted into several small apartments. It was a creepy old farmhouse. The house was at least 150, maybe 200 years old. My mom told me off and on of strange sounds that she'd been hearing and seeing things in the corner of her eyes, feeling like she was being watched. This one particular evening when I spent the night, I brought my N64 because my mom would go to bed early and I'd still be up for a few more hours. I still remember to this day what game I was playing. WWF No Mercy. I was sitting Indian

style on the floor playing the story mode. I just finished a mission in the game and set down the controller to the left of me, behind me. Directly behind me was a recliner, and I'll never forget what I saw next. I went to grab the controller and saw what appeared to be a hoof, like a horse next to the controller on the floor. Insects and blood was coming out of the sliver that separated the hoof. I thought to myself, how strange, and I slowly glanced up and this demonic figure was staring back at me. It leaned down towards me, its face got down on my face and grinned the most evil smile I'd ever seen. The eyes were black, its face was red, it was a one-winged creature, and blood was dripping from its teeth

It was so surreal that I immediately went into a panic attack and blacked out I learned later that it was the fight or flight response that I was having And several seconds later I came to, laying on the floor, and I could barely move. The demonic figure in the chair was laughing at me. It was as if my fear and energy had been sucked dry from me, and I lost all strength. I did all I could to crawl to my mom's room and woke her up. After I woke her up, we talked, and she believed me. She told me that she too had seen the same thing earlier that week but didn't want to scare me. I don't know what to make of it and still think of it to this day.

I have no doubt demons and angels are real and believe me the last thing you ever want to encounter is a demon smiling right in your face. I don't care if you believe me or not, but when two people see the same thing on separate occasions, either we're both crazy, or something is and was wrong with that old farmhouse. My mom has thankfully moved since, and we haven't encountered that thing again. The story took place when I was a kid. My dad had been a pool man for many years. This story took place when I was a kid. My dad had been a pool man for many years. One of his oldest customers decided to purchase a ranch. I don't exactly remember where and he asked my dad if he could come and fix their pool which was disastrously maintained before he bought it.

He gave my dad permission to bring us along and told us that we were welcome to stay a few days to enjoy the ranch. We drove there and I had been in charge of reading the MapQuest instructions because I never seemed to be able to sleep during car trips. We drove back home a few days later after my dad was finally able to save the pool. The drive home was very long. For long stretches, the view was mostly desert, farms, and the occasional small suburban town. Unlike me, my mom and brothers knocked out almost immediately, so most of the trip is just my dad and I talking or listening to music. I'm also a very avid reader, so I had a book on my lap beside the maps. I remember the ride had been quiet for a while because I had been reading.

I had to stop because it was getting dark and my dad only let me turn on the dome lights to read the maps. No radio service and the Gameboy's batteries had all died. All I had left to do was look outside. All of a sudden, I spotted a very tall shadow on a roof. I realized that there was a man who seemed to be wearing a hat, bowler or top hat, dancing and jumping from roof to roof of this suburban lot. Kind of like the scene in Singing in the Rain, which at that point I hadn't seen. It took a second to realize that it wasn't a normal thing to see. The houses were separated in a way where a normal person couldn't have jumped roof to roof. What scared me the most is how at the last house before a field, he seemed to turn around and sense me. He bowed and tipped

his hat. Even though I couldn't see it, I could sense it smiling. All I felt was dread. I turned to face my dad to see if he saw him, but he had been paying attention to the road. When I turned back, I couldn't see the houses anymore as they were way behind us. I never saw a face or any details. It was just a silhouette on the roofs. I remember feeling afraid that it would follow us, that it could if it wanted to. I never saw something like that on our many road trips ever again, and sometimes I wonder if I imagined it, but it felt so real. The memory is so vivid as well, which always comes back when I'm watching old musicals because the dancing reminds me of the way it moved. I bought a painting at a thrift store of a beautiful young angel a few months ago.

I was immediately drawn to it, which is not typical for me. I'm not into art or angels, and I hung it up in my bedroom the same day I bought it. The next morning when I woke up, the living room lights were on. I thought that was strange that I would have not noticed that I'd left them on when I went to bed since I can see my living room from my bedroom and would notice if the lights were on. The next night, I made sure that they were off when I went to bed, and sure enough, the next morning they were on again. Same thing happened the next night. This time I woke up at around 3 a.m. and could see from my bed the living room lights were on again. After that third night,

I had never had an issue again, so I chalked it up to some type of electrical thing and it being a coincidence with the painting, although the lights never turned on automatically during the day, just while I slept. Then just the other day I was in my bedroom putting laundry away and the painting started swinging, like it was very, very noticeable. I just sort of stared at it, watching it, and then it just stopped. That's never happened before. Nothing could have hit it. There were no breezes or drafts. It was really, really swinging. I'm not sure what to think. I don't get a bad feeling from it, and I should mention that I live by myself, so no one could have turned the lights on after I went to bed identifying whatever the hell is here with me.

I just got back from a week long vacation last night and the same activity from the house that I was staying in is going on at my apartment. I apologize in advance for any incoherence in what I say because I haven't gotten much sleep the last week. The house we stayed in was gorgeous and since my entire extended family was staying there, 18 people, it was also absolutely massive. It was split into two parts, the old side of the house, roughly just a basement studio and three bedrooms upstairs, and the newer side. I'm not going to go into too much detail about the newer side as no paranormal activity took place there, but it was a gorgeous house. I shared a room with my girlfriend and since we were the last to arrive, we got the worst room in the house. Not only did we get the smallest room in the house, it was about 10 feet by 10 feet, it was also on the old side of the house, directly in front of

the basement stairs. As I had been driving for 6 hours that day, I was pretty tired so I said hello to everyone and quickly got into bed to go to sleep. It was around 11pm when my girlfriend and I got into bed. She's lucky in the sense that she can fall asleep just about anywhere in 5 minutes so she was out within seconds. I had a weird uneasy feeling in my chest. Not necessarily a scary feeling, just that annoying alert feeling you get when you feel like something is watching you. And to help ease myself, I hop right down into a YouTube rabbit hole. About an hour into my journey, I could tell that my girlfriend was having a nightmare, so I put my hand on her arm to gently wake her up. But as soon as I touched her, she bolted awake,

screaming, mumbled something like the ghost, and immediately went back to sleep. I had just started to get tired, and safe to say I was sufficiently creeped out at this point, so back down the rabbit hole I went. About two hours went by when my girlfriend woke up screaming again, saying the footsteps are close, and then passed out immediately again. I decided I'm not going to sleep that night and went right back to YouTube. Another hour passes and I see my girlfriend sit up in bed, but she was still asleep. She moved, so she was sitting on the edge of the bed and started having a conversation with the corner

of the room. She eventually laid back down, but not before I was absolutely terrified. Activity died down after the first night, usually just creaks in the floor or knocks on the wall and door. The only other standout event besides movement around the room happened on the second to last night when something sat down on the edge of my bed. My first thought was that my cat had jumped up on the bed, but I remember I wasn't at my apartment and sat up just in time to see the indentation lift up off the edge of the bed. It couldn't have been my girlfriend as she was on the opposite side of the bed and nowhere near where the indentation happened. Also, the bed I was staying in was as firm as a rock, so it was challenging to push that far down into it. Fast forward one more sleepless night and I'm on my way home. After a long day of driving, I got back and settled down with some Netflix. My girlfriend had plans to go hang out with her friends, so she was out most of the night.

I thought I'd finally get a break from the spooky stuff when my dog and cat both start tracking something around my apartment. The way their heads were moving, whatever they saw was moving fast. Now I've seen them track bugs before but neither of them really focus on it too much. They usually just huff and ignore it, but this was different. Poppy, my dog, started growling when whatever it was moved into the corner of the room. My cat Anna jumped up right next to me on the couch while Poppy growled at the corner and started to slowly back up towards me. After a full week of crap like this, I wasn't even scared anymore. Just angry and tired because it likes to keep me

from falling asleep. Poppy and Anna both track the thing moving out of the corner towards us so she starts barking like crazy. After I got her to stop barking I heard a growl come from the center of the room. It was pretty high pitched, like a small dog or a girl. Judging by where my pets were tracking, it looked like it was very short, very fast, and could jump up on the table and counters. I stood up, stared in its general direction, and said, Please leave. I got a huge wave of chills and got goosebumps in places I didn't know I could get goosebumps, but I said it again much louder and more stern this time while opening my front door to let it out.

Whatever it was got really upset it seemed. It didn't do anything but I could feel a lot of anger. My pets tracked it moving towards the door so I thought that I was in the clear. About two minutes later my dog starts barking at the corners of the room where the door is while my cat is on full alert staring at the same place. At this point I just give up and hope it just leaves me alone since it hadn't been violent yet, just annoying. Poppy eventually fell asleep at my feet and Anna had run into the other room, occasionally poking her head out the door to look in and immediately spring back into the room. I just gave up dealing with it at this point. I put my earbuds in to block out the knocks on the walls and watch some

YouTube. I decided to stay up until my girlfriend got back to let her know what was happening but whatever it was took this as an opportunity to mess with me. I was laying on my couch and kept feeling something poking me every five minutes. Not hard, just constant pokes in my arms and legs and feet. And after this went on for a while it pulled up on my nostrils. Again I just ignored it because I learned it just gets worse if I engage with it. Whenever something like this would happen, I could feel the apartment get much colder, despite my thermostat saying that it was 72 degrees. After hours of knocking, poking, pulling, and the occasional arm brush, my girlfriend finally got home. The second she got through

the door I could tell whatever it was left as I had no uneasy feeling and there were no more weird noises so I had one of the most restful nights I've had in over a week. I don't know if it's gone for good or if it'll come back tonight but I will post an update tomorrow if anything happens. Other than the growl and the short but overwhelming sense of anger, it hasn't been violent or disturbing, just really annoying. Any help on how to identify or safely communicate with it would be greatly appreciated. I was with my girlfriend preparing dinner. The year was 2015 and everything seemed normal. I put on some music and the speakers were in my room.

While we were cooking I noticed that the music was no longer being listened to. I was surprised that something happened with the internet because it was Spotify. I went to the bedroom and I noticed that the playlist continued but the volume knob had been set to zero. I didn't pay much attention to it at that moment. I set the knob again and went to the kitchen to continue with dinner. And not even two minutes passed when, again, I noticed that no music was being heard. This time it seemed really strange to me. I lived alone and we were just my girlfriend and I. I went into my

room and this time the knob was on one so I could lightly hear some music. I was surprised because it was a physical and not digital fault with what was going on. Again, I turned the knob and returned to the kitchen. I try not to think about that and concentrated on cooking when suddenly I clearly hear things on the floor, this time in the studio that was next to my room. It bothered me, the idea of passing by these things instead of enjoying a pleasant evening with my girlfriend. I asked her if she had heard that sound and she said no. I replied that it was clearly a noise from the studio so she told me let's take a look. In effect there were things on the floor. I wanted to think that it had simply fallen and we picked them up, turned off the lights and left

and we were in the kitchen again when we heard another noise. This time she could also appreciate that and I told her something was happening and she being a very religious person told me not to worry and we went to the studio and this time the light was on and there was again some things being thrown around there were no open windows or wind currents it seemed very strange to us we searched everything and before leaving I pronounced aloud that I would leave the light on. And we left kind of nervous. We'd not reached the kitchen when noises were heard again. This time I was really afraid that it was a thief who had entered the house.

We ran to the study and the lights were off and a TV that was there was on with static. We looked at each other and I told her that that was not normal and that something was happening and we should probably do something. She proposed that we pray and we went to the kitchen and she took my hands and we said two prayers that she knew. When we finished, something was heard again. I wanted to go see but I was shocked to see that just outside the kitchen there was an inflatable toy that I used to have to punch for fun in the studio. It was horrible, I had no idea how it had even got there and at that moment I felt very scared. I didn't know if it was something paranormal or if a person entered the house and was playing the worst joke ever on us.

My girlfriend asked me what was wrong with me, why I stood at the door. I told her not to leave the kitchen, that I didn't want her to see that, but she leaned out and screamed. I tried to calm her down. Nothing had ever happened in that house. We were very scared and at that moment, the bell rang. I answered on the intercom and nothing. Every time I was more nervous but I tried to stay calm. I walked towards her and the bell rang again. I answered and nothing. I told her let's get out of here. Something or someone is bothering us. It occurred to me to go to the house of a cousin who lived nearby and then the lights started to blink. It was terribly terrifying.

Getting to the street was a great relief and by the way it was completely desolate outside. We walked a few blocks until we reached my cousin's house. We told her everything while our hands were still shaken and she believed us and she had some holy water and that we had to go back because what had happened to us was not normal. When we came back with the holy water, loud music could be heard from the street. We opened the door with fear and immediately my cousin began to sprinkle holy water all over the place. The inflatable toy was in another location. It seemed that it had moved a few meters from where we last saw it. The knob of the speakers was at maximum and all the lights in the house were on. It seemed that

they had had a small party without us and was horrible. Notes on the Spotify browser was written reggaeton, and the first playlist was playing. And I hate reggaeton music, I'd never put that kind of music on before. I don't even know how it's spelled, but it was written the same way that I used to know, and that was very shocking to me. I was never super skeptical of the paranormal but I didn't believe everything I heard until that night. And for good luck I can say that after using the holy water, nothing else happened in that house. I no longer live there, I threw the toy away and the girlfriend is now my wife and we know that all that was real. These spirits or entities do exist and we must be careful and have faith in God and not let them disturb us. So this happened a little bit ago. I was 17 at the time.

It was summer, so we were heading to my uncle's house. He owns a little house near a beach, and getting to his house, we have to go past this big stretch of forest that spans on and on for about an hour or so. The sun was just covering everything in some nice light after it rose and then it got weird. I remember that my dad turned off his music to pull up the GPS and I looked at the forest watching all the trees speed by. Then I also took notice that we were the only cars on the road. The only car. None behind, none in front. Hell, I didn't see another car for like an hour and a half while driving here besides pulling out of my driveway

and getting on the road. I thought it was really weird, especially since I'm in a pretty populated area. It's Oregon, after all, in the middle of summer. I kept looking at the forest, and I kid you not, a clearing opened for a few seconds, and I saw two men wearing black suits and black sunglasses, with black gloves and shoes as well, tying some big hairy creature to a tree. I just kept looking at them and they were looking at me, not the car, me directly, like they knew that I saw them. It scared the crap out of me and I asked my dad if he saw them and he seemed confused and then said that he didn't see a thing.

He was too busy driving and looking at his GPS. I don't really believe in strange things like this but I can't explain what I saw and I don't know how to feel. Thinking about it now I just get uneasy and scared. The creature looked like it was chained up and wasn't lashing around or anything or freaking out. And to make it worse, as soon as we left that forest, we started to join back in with other cars. It was like I stepped into some sort of crime scene. Has anyone else ever had an experience like this or can I chalk it up to just my hyper imagination? So I bought a doll today with an attachment and just wanted to share what happened already. So I got her home and placed her on the top of my entertainment center pretty high up.

Now for starters, the moment I got her in the car, I put an EMF to her with a built-in spirit box. The EMF was spiking and after a few seconds of moving it away and moving it closer again, the spirit box said, don't. So I stopped and apologized. I spoke to the spirit of the doll while driving, letting the spirit know that it was in good hands, kind of like talking to a friend. Now once we got home, I placed her down and I decided to leave her for a bit to get accustomed. Upon returning I decided to do another EMF spirit box check to see if I had any better luck at this point. I'm short so I wasn't holding it up very high. The spirit box said higher.

I raised it higher and then the box asked, what do you want me to do? The spirit for some reason was making the meter of the EMF actually bottom out instead of spike, so I requested it to please make the meter go the other way, and it did. Then the box asked, am I dead? I said yes and proceeded to ask for its name, and it said soon, and then all the activity just stopped, almost like it was in shock of finding out that it was dead and needed time to process it. Anyways though, I just wanted to share this with you guys because it was just an incredible experience to have happen. It started a week ago roughly and has happened multiple times.

First of all, I want to mention that I live alone and don't have any pets. Last week I went to sleep at around 2am and I had my MacBook Pro closed completely on the floor. While I was in the bed I started to hear typing on the keyboard. It wasn't cracking or anything like that. It was typing and I'm not imagining it at all. It lasted several minutes and then eventually stopped. I freaked out like crazy that night but eventually managed to fall asleep. The next day I also went to bed late and I fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night by the typing noise on the keyboard.

It wasn't a dream, nor am I crazy. It really happened. I was very scared so I turned on the lights and the typing stopped. My computer was still closed as in shut down so I turned off the lights and 10 minutes later I heard the typing on my keyboard again. This time too it lasted for a long time and I almost had a panic attack and keep in mind I live alone. It happened again other nights. Every time it happens after I go to sleep and it can be right after I got to sleep and put the macbook down or many hours later in the early morning while I'm still sleeping. It never happens while I'm actually using the computer itself. Last night I also couldn't sleep because I heard weird noises coming from the windows, like some weird gush of wind, loud noises around my windows, and of course, again, the typing on the computer. And I'm terrified. What could this be? I was thinking I'm either

spied on by some agency that managed to infiltrate my computer and search for something. But what? I have nothing to hide and I'm a completely average guy. I've never committed any crime whatsoever. And even then, if the computer is closed, how can I hear the typing? I mean, even if they infiltrated, I shouldn't hear typing on the keyboard. Or is it something paranormal? I read I'm not the first guy who has heard typing of a keyboard at night, and other people who have experienced it were equally frightened. Some of them used a mechanical keyboard, which is exposed at night,

and I have a MacBook Pro and my keyboard isn't exposed because at night I closed the PC as I said. In a sense, I shut the screen above my keyboard so it's not exposed to air. But please, help me figure this out, because it's freaking me out. I'm currently staying in a farmhouse in Northern Ireland. It's a pretty old place and apparently was built on top of the original one according to the owner of it. I never really have believed in any paranormal type stuff. Just thought it was too crazy and far-fetched to be real. And I've been telling myself that for the past few hours after what happened. I've already mostly explained what happened in the title, but I'll go into more detail.

I woke up to hear the radio next to my bed, which I didn't even know worked, playing random channels, songs, some talking on chat shows or something. I can't really remember as I was just waking up. The radio did finally stop changing channels after a few seconds, however, and was left playing the song Hello by Dragonette. Had to look that up in the morning from the lyrics that I heard. I heard this section of the song before I switched off the radio at the plug. Kind of like this thing but there's something you should know I just came to say hello. Hey I could stick around and get along with you. Now needless to say, I was already

crapping bricks a bit at this point, not because of the lyrics or anything. Like I said, I don't really believe in ghosts. Rather, just the loud noises waking me up was a little rough, and so I felt on edge. The thing that really tied it all together for me and made me so scared was when I checked my phone and it was 3.33am. I moved upstairs to another bedroom and sat up with the lamps on either side of me for hours, watching something on Netflix to take my mind off of stuff. I don't really know what I want out of posting this experience. Maybe some reassurance to tell me that it's all BS. Edit. Things just got a little bit more spicy. I wrote the first part of the post from the upstairs bedroom in the morning and just came down from upstairs to the room this happened in and looked at the radio. It was off on

the wall switch but the radio setting was also turned off on the radio. The only way it can actually play the radio stations is by switching it to on on the radio with a switch so it wasn't me hitting it while I slept or something. And now, I'm kind of spooked out. This was a while back, but it still bothers me to this day. It was 2016, and me, 22, and my husband, 28, were moving into a rental home. I was six months pregnant and we were thrilled to move into a nice community since before we had lived in a pretty sketchy part of town. We didn't know much about this rental except it was in a good school district, a low crime area and within our budget. Time passes without any problems and soon our son was born. His birth was textbook and he slept well in the hospital.

This all changed when we brought him home. The first night home was awful. Every time we set him in his crib he screamed. And I'm not talking a normal I'm hungry or need a new diaper cry. A legitimate scream like he was in pain. My husband and I had to take shifts at night so one could be with him and the other could sleep a little. My shift was always second and started around 2-3 in the morning. I tried my best to sleep but shortly after my son's birth I began having horrible nightmares. I would dream nightly about my son being hurt or needing me and I couldn't get to him. At my six week checkup I told my OBGYN and she believed that I was having postpartum anxiety and prescribed me

some medicine and recommended that I see a counselor. Weeks passed by since starting the medication and counseling and I was still having nightmares and my son was still screaming all night long. His pediatrician told us that it was colic and that we just needed to wait it out. Everything changed when he turned three months old. His screaming continued but started to be all day instead of just at night. My nightmares became much more specific. One night, I dreamed that I walked into my son's room and he was on fire and screaming. Though I was in his room, my feet were stuck inside his doorway.

I couldn't move or speak. I could only watch my son screaming in pain. I woke up screaming and hyperventilating. My husband ran into our room and tried to console me. In the next few days, I could not sleep. I spent most of my days at work and my evenings sitting on my front porch talking to my next-door neighbor. She was the sweetest old lady who had lived in this neighborhood since it was originally built in the 70s. I guess she could tell something was wrong and ask me if I was okay.

Reluctantly, I told her how my baby had been acting and how I was having horrible nightmares. She was sympathetic and asked me to elaborate and I didn't feel comfortable telling her the details so I just told her that I had dreams about fires in the house. Her face quickly changed from caring and concerned to horrified. Seconds of quiet felt like hours before she spoke again. Do you know what happened at this house? She said, and I told her no. She sighed and looked down before grabbing my hands and looking at me. She goes on to tell me that a

few years ago there was a fire at the house due to some faulty wiring done poorly by the landlord. There was a young family with a three-month-old baby living there and unfortunately the baby passed away in the fire. She said the couple moved away and the house was renovated and put up for rent after. And at that moment, I was in complete shock. I ran inside to my husband holding our baby and told him that we needed to leave. He must have seen the fear in my eyes since he didn't ask me to explain myself until we got in the car. I explained what happened in the house and how I felt like my dreams were warnings that we needed to leave before something happened to our baby. Luckily, my brother-in-law lived in the next town over, so we went there.

The first night we stayed in his house, our son slept through the entire night, not a single peep. I checked on him every hour since it was so unusual for him to sleep this well, and from then on, apart from normal baby stuff, my son never screamed again like he did in that house. My husband packed our stuff and we stayed with my brother-in-law until we were able to get out of our lease and rent a new place. I never went back and I will never go back. I just pray for whoever moves in there next. About a year and a half ago in June, my brother and I were driving back from LA, Nevada to Las Vegas. If you know Nevada, you understand how sparsely populated the state is outside of Reno, Carson City and Las Vegas. So, we were about an hour or so into the drive when we realized that we wouldn't

make it back without falling asleep, as it was already pretty late at night. We agreed to stop at a hotel for the night. We came to a town called King. I had never heard of King, Nevada, nor have I found anything about it since, no matter what I looked up or asked. It looked like one of those old western movie towns where it's one road with little buildings on each side and about the same size as one of those towns. All there really was of note was the hotel that we stayed at called King Hotel and a McDonald's. The few other buildings didn't seem worth mentioning. We hadn't seen anyone or any cars while driving in the town. We went into the hotel and saw the only person we ever saw in that place,

the single clerk at the front desk. We got our room key and went straight to bed. We were awoken by talking outside of what we assumed was around 8 because when we woke up, we realized that there was no clock in the room. In fact, there were only beds, a hotel, a shower, and a sink. Not even a dresser or a TV. We went outside to leave. The hotel clerk wasn't there to check out, so we left our key at the desk. No one else was inside the hotel or outside. We still haven't figured out where the talking came from. We went to McDonald's to eat, however, it was drive-thru only. We

ordered our McMuffins at the drive-thru, then rounded the corner to pay and get our food at the next window. We saw the bag already sitting on the shelf outside the window with the window closed and the inside dark. We got our food and left without paying. We didn't want to stick around anymore. We were honestly getting a bit scared at this point. There was no cell service, nor do we remember ever arriving there. We just suddenly found ourselves in that town. I was reminded of this because a few hours ago, I read a green text about a similar experience someone had in Utah. We only saw one person there, the hotel attendant, and we drove for half an hour before we saw any road signs again. He and I both remembered exactly the same, so I don't think we hallucinated or anything like that.

If you have any ideas on what happened in that town, please let me know. As I'm sure some of you are aware, the hunting season for white-tailed deer is about to start this weekend. I'm a 25-year-old female and have been spending a decent chunk of time in the stand with my partner, in life and in most ventures generally, because we've discovered that hogs have been rooting up the oats and generally causing havoc and scaring away the deer from the feeder. We've gone out a handful of times in the last two weeks, attempting to catch the miscreants at it, and so far no luck, and it's been very frustrating. At any rate, because of the hogs, I've been spending more time in a stand after dark than I ever have in my life.

We've been up there from 9pm to 1am, 10pm to 2am, 9pm to 11pm, and every other weird time slot you can think of. I mention this just in case it's relevant or helps paint a better picture. There have been a few things that have happened that I've struggled to explain away or rationalize and my partner is out of ideas too. The first thing happened about a week and a half or two weeks ago. It was around one or two in the morning with a decent chunk of moon illuminating the area. I was only half paying attention to my surroundings because I had already written the night off as a bust when all of a sudden I become aware of a weird whirring or flapping sound. I thought it originated from somewhat behind me, but my partner said that he had heard it coming from away to the front left of us.

At any rate, it was loud, airborne, and passing quickly over us and away. I am very familiar with the sounds drones make, and that wasn't it. It also wasn't a helicopter. The sound was too small, if that makes sense. And it wasn't a bird. It sounded way too mechanical. It was flying very low, probably just above the tree line, and we couldn't see anything. The second thing happened about a week ago. We weren't in the stand, but it was weird and out of the norm, so I'll mention it. We live on the same property that the stand is the stand but it was weird and out of the norm so I'll mention it. We live on the same property that the stand is on and it was around 9 or 10 at night when all of a sudden there was a distant boom, like an explosion, which hit our home with a very hard thud. If you've ever spent any time around heavy artillery or explosives you'll know what I mean.

It was strong enough that my sister-in-law, who lives down the road, called us asking what the hell just happened. It could have been a natural gas explosion, but the weirdest part is that my partner did some internet digging and a local emergency management website had posted asking for any info on an unknown explosion back in 2016 during that time of year, and we still have no clue what it was. And then lastly, tonight. We were out in the stand once again, and it's gotten cold, and we've had a ton of rain all day, so everything was damp and dripping. We went out at 10, and it was about 10.30. I was preoccupied with trying to keep my fingers and toes warm when suddenly I became aware of a weird murmuring. My partner heard it too, but he was hearing damage, so I don't think he heard

the full breadth of the tones. To me, it kind of sounded like muffled voices off in the distance, like several someones having a conversation too far off to make out the individual words. But the direction the sounds were coming from doesn't have any buildings or dwellings, it's just woods. And there were several different tones. My partner said it kind of sounded like a cow moaning, but not quite. There are cattle in the area and we heard them vocalizing all the time. That wasn't that. And there isn't any grazing land in the vicinity of the sounds' origins. They carried on for maybe 30 seconds, slightly rose in crescendo, and then died off and faded away completely. I want to stress how indistinct these sounds were. If I hadn't been

listening intently, I don't know if I would have heard it. All of this, coupled with the general gut feeling I have whenever I'm out in the dark alone, has me wondering. I don't necessarily feel in danger, just generally watched and noticed. I have very good instincts and I try to listen to them. I'd love to know what you all think. There may be a rational explanation for all these phenomenon. All I know is I don't want to be another hunter with another creepy story, but I feel like I'm starting to see a bell curve emerge. My dad moved into a house in the middle of the woods about two years ago. And I moved in with him soon after to help him get around and take care of the house and whatnot. No side note, it's an old house on land that Native Americans heavily inhabited in the south. Honestly, this house is really weird.

The first night I spent here, I was woken up by a woman whispering, is anyone home, right next to me as I was about to fall asleep. My dad didn't believe me when I told him the next day. It's taken a while to get used to living in the deep woods but something about this property is very off. There's been more than a few times where I've actually felt a heavy presence, almost like someone is standing right behind me. I have a cat who I rely on to alert me when there's someone approaching my room and there have been times where he's alerted me but nobody was there. Other times he stares at the same corner of my room with an expression that tells me that he can see something I can't.

And there's been more times I can count where I'll be leaving a room and a cabinet will slam or it sounds like something was moved behind me. It sounds silly, but it's odd enough for me to notice. I mentioned it to my father, but he didn't think much of it until early this AM when he woke up and went downstairs to find the basement flooded. Somehow, the shower in the basement was turned on and the drain had been clogged. Neither of us used that shower in the basement and he's now fully convinced that there's a ghost in this house. I don't know, if you ask me I think it's more than the house. I get that feeling even when I'm out on a hike. I always leave food scraps and

leftovers out in the tree line for the animals and sometimes coincidentally find little treasures in the same spot, almost like I made a trade with mother nature. Once I left strawberry cake leftovers out and the next day found a stone with a pink crystal formation. Another time I found an arrowhead carved out of stone. Just kind of a thought that I figured I'd share. I don't believe in ghosts or anything paranormal. I'm not religious or spiritual and just generally don't think any of that sort of exists. But tonight I encountered something that genuinely terrified me and can't form any sort of logical explanation for it.

So I have a dog and I almost always walk her at night due to my schedule. I'm currently living with my parents who live in a very upscale private community, one which I'm extremely familiar with and have walked hundreds of times before both during the day and night. It's a very safe place and I'd never felt any sort of risk walking at night aside from visibility to passing cars, for which I wear reflective armbands. Tonight I was taking my dog on her daily walk and we crossed a road that led from one section of the subdivision to another. While entering this next section, I noticed up

ahead, about 80 to 100 meters, a figure moving down the road across from the direction I was going. The best way I can describe it is if a person was wearing a slightly luminescent white hat skipping down the street. The problem is, first of all, there wasn't enough light to get a clear view of whatever I saw. I could definitely see the light that appeared to be a hat. There was a person wearing one but not enough to discern anything more and the most disconcerting thing was that even if it was a person wearing a light up hat skipping down the street they would have been moving in slow motion almost suspended in air in between jumps. There was also no sound either. After seeing this, I yelled out several times asking if there was anyone there and didn't get any response. At that point, I noticed that my dog was whimpering and her tail

was between her legs. For me, this was the scariest part because I've never seen her act like that in any situation. If she sees another person while we're out walking, she'll get excited and pull on the leash wanting to go up and say hi. If there's another dog or animal she's unsure of, she'll bark and start running in circles around me. I have never, under any circumstance, seen her act scared and start whimpering. That was enough to make me go nope and turn the hell around. Like I said, I don't have any belief in anything paranormal, but I have no intention of messing around with whatever the hell I had just encountered, and so we turned around and finished our walk. I admittedly glanced behind me, frequently making

sure that there wasn't anyone following, and we're now home safe, which leads to me typing this right now. I've never experienced something like that and I have no idea what to think. Rationally I think it would be more likely I hallucinated her something rather than it being anything paranormal but the thing that bugs me the most is my dog's extremely uncharacteristic reaction. If I had been seeing things, then why would she have behaved in a way that she had never before? I just wanted to share my story here and hopefully I don't sound insane. To be continued... notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. I release new videos every Monday and Thursday at 7 p.m. EST, and there are Superfund live streams every Sunday and Wednesday night. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit r slash let's read official or over

email at letsreadsubmissions at gmail.com, 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 and bonus content over on Patreon. Or click that big join button to hear about the extra perks offered for members of the channel. And check out the Let's Read podcast where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations located anywhere you listen to podcasts. All links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends. And remember, to be a good girl and eat your vegetables.