The Lets Read Podcast - 309: WE ENCOUTERD ZOMBIES DURING THE WAR | 18 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 295

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about ghosts & war encounters HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT? [e-mail] FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ♫ Music & Cover art: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt

It was a lot of We're going to be able to A few months back, a co-worker of mine found out that I used to be in the Marine Corps. I don't talk about it a whole lot, and my life took such a turn after I got out that you really wouldn't think I was former military just from looking at me. So when he found out, he was so surprised that he came to ask me if it was true. The actual story of him finding out is pretty boring, so I'm sure you won't mind if I skip over it. and then since me and him had gotten pretty close over the years, I didn't mind answering all the questions he had. I ended up telling him a few funny stories from my days at Paris Island,

and then eventually we got into the topic of deployments. I told him I'd been in Iraq from 2004 to 2005, and more specifically, how I'd taken part in what became known as the second battle of Volusia. At one point, he asked if it was scary, and while that might seem like a dumb question on the surface, it's one that required a complex, multi-layered answer. Sure, there were times when I felt frightened and afraid, but during most of the firefights I took part in, all I really remember was feeling mad about it. Someone starts shooting at you, and yeah, it gets your adrenaline up faster than you can say incoming, but it's like one split second of abject terror, and then you and your platoon mates are like, oh, you effed up today, mister.

and you're just angry. I'd get scared for other people more than I got scared for myself. If it's me running from building to building, I'm focused on 101 things, but not so much my own safety, if that makes sense, because I'm doing my job and helping protect my buddies. But then, if it was someone else doing something dangerous and I could see it happening, that was way worse.

Because it was sort of like, am I about to watch one of my friends die? And sometimes they did. But that initial fright of contact and the fear your buddies were going to get killed, those weren't the same thing as what I'd call horror. When I say horror, I'm talking about being so afraid that you start to panic, freak out. The kind of feeling you get when something starts to feel almost supernatural, and you just want to, as they say, nope the hell out of there because you are way, way out of your depth.

Imagine how terrified you'd be if you legitimately saw someone turn into a werewolf in real life. It's not just fear and confusion, it's shattering the laws of reality as you know them. Mind-bending, soul-shattering, grown man pissing his pants kind of fear. I only felt that feeling once in my whole career in the military, and it was in a half-finished two-story house in a Fallujah neighborhood named Jolan. Without boring you with too much of the strategic and historical stuff, Fallujah was probably the toughest fight the Marine Corps was involved in since Hugh City of Vietnam. And we also faced a much different enemy in Fallujah than we did anywhere else.

In the south of Iraq, you had your Shiite militias like the Mahdi army, well, in Baghdad. It was a lot of former Iraqi army guys that had gone to ground and were conducting an insurgency from the shadows. But then in Fallujah, it was like the international jihadi all-stars over there, and the opportunity to take on the good old US of A attracted a lot of talent. You had Al-Qaeda, aligned terrorists from all over the world, descending on Fallujah, and a lot of them were only still alive because they were very good at what they did. It was the second battle of Fallujah before the first had been a wake-up call to our commanding officers.

The enemy were dug in like Alabama tics, and they were being taught urban warfare and booby-trap manufacturing by guys that have been fighting in various theaters for almost 20 years by that point. As soon as they realized that, our COs pulled us out of Fallujah, called for reinforcements, then got working on a much more intricate plan to take the city without completely destroying it in the process. And so, a few months later, there I was, fighting from house to house. with tanks and cobra support. In terms of the actual fighting, Fallujah was kind of like chess. Each building in a city block was sort of like a square on a chess board and winning each

engagement was all about where you had your pieces on the board. Only, imagine you're playing a game of chess and you can't see where some of your opponent's pieces are until you put one of your pieces in the same square. This meant that every so often, we had to send an assault team out into dead ground and in order to secure a building on the enemy's flank. This was not an enviable task because, while sometimes you got lucky, sometimes you didn't, and the enemy had a real knack for surprising the crap out of us. And so this one time, me and three other guys are sent out to a building surrounded by a high wall.

Recon had spotted a singular hole in the outer wall, which made the whole place great for defense, but it also meant the building was being used by the enemy, who'd most likely blown the hole in wall themselves. Recond hadn't seen any movement around the building, but obviously that didn't mean there wasn't anybody there. So we had to be extremely cautious during egress. We sneak up to the wall, climb through the waist-high hole in the concrete, then start making our way towards the first door we see. We stack up outside, but as we do, we can hear this dude inside shouting out some Arabic name because he's heard us and he thinks we're his buddies. He's shouting,

Mustafa, Mustafa, then when Mustafa doesn't talk back to him, we heard him start to panic. We knew we had to force entry right then and there. Otherwise, this guy might potentially alert his friends, so one of us pushes open the door. As soon as the door opened, our saw-gunner sees the guy right there in the hallway in front of him, AK in hand,

and this look of pure shock on his foot. face. The guy tries to bring his AK to bear, but it's too late. Our sawgunner put a burst of about 15 bullets into the guy's chest and stomach, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes. We leave his body lying there in the hallway, dead as a goddamn door now, and three guys head downstairs to watch over the surrounding area while I'm left watching a window that overlooks the hole in the wall. It was a very simple task, watch the hole, and shoot anyone who tried to climb through. it that wasn't American. A few minutes go by, then one of my buddies upstairs shouts down at me to go grab the dead guy's

phone. Stuff like that was of huge intel value, and since he had the point of entry covered from an upstairs window, I was safe to move without having to worry about the enemy sneaking into the compound. I step out of the room, walk out into the corridor, and instead of a dead body lying there, with 20 bullet holes in him, there's just a pool of blood and no body. body. The dead body had disappeared. And right away, I'm like, guys, we got a situation down here, because obviously dead bodies don't just get up on their own. We'd already cleared the ground floor so we knew no one else could be inside with us. But the thing that really

freaked me out is there were no drag marks, just a pool of blood, and then a few drops leading off into another room at the back of the building. When it hit me that I was, there was a lot of our dead body had just stood up after being shot 15 to 20 times, I felt this chill run through me. It didn't make sense, not by any natural law. I'd looked at him with my own eyes and I knew that he was dead. So how in the hell had he just stood up and walked off? One of my buddies comes downstairs and we start slowly making our way to the doorway that the drops of blood are leading to. We decided to toss a grenade in first. But then the second the grenade went into that room, we just heard boots against the concrete before the wounded

enemy fighter comes hurtling out of the room with a knife raised above his head, ready to stab us. In all fairness, a lot of the time these guys shouted something before they shot at you or came running at you like this guy did, but on this occasion, this guy was completely silent, and his eyes were so wide they looked freakishly large as he came round that corner with his knife held high. All it could do was back up to keep from getting stabbed. But even though my buddy behind me put at least two or three more shots into him, he kept on coming at me with that knife. It was literally like a zombie movie, dude. I was yelling, shoot him in the head, shoot him in the head, over and over, but my buddy's got to get up real close with his barrel at an angle where

he's not going to kill me, too. It was really touch and go for a while there. But eventually, my buddy's able to get right up close without getting himself stabbed and pulls the trigger three times. Boom, boom, boom, until the attacker's head just disintegrated and he stopped moving. And now I'm sure a lot of you will be thinking, okay, this guy has to be bullcrafting me at this point because no one in the history of medicine survived 20 shots and then just kept on fighting. Well, believe me, this guy did. and it's not because he was a zombie, it's because he was on drugs. Later on that day, after conducting a deeper search of the building we'd taken, we found all kinds of needles and bottles of adrenaline and amphetamines.

These insurgents had been shooting the stuff up and then going into battle wired on stimulants so they'd be less afraid and more aggressive. It didn't really work for him, I guess. it just made them stupid for the most part. But when it came to being able to sustain injuries and keep fighting, I never saw anything like it anywhere else. It really was like being in a zombie movie, and it wasn't just like that with that one guy.

I know dozens of Fallujah vets that have stories like this, of having to shoot a guy in the head just to get him to stop moving. I don't got many stories like that, just the one. But I'm sure you'll agree. It's enough for one lifetime. The summer of 1914 felt electric, like the way the air feels before a lightning storm. My friends and I, all from the same small English town, were caught up in the fervor of patriotism sweeping through the country.

Then when the news came that Britain was at war, it was as if a switch flipped in us. We gathered at the local pub, where the air was thick with talk of duty, honor, and adventure. Someone suggested we all volunteer together in, before we knew. it, we were all nodding in agreement. The idea of a pal's battalion where friends could serve together seemed very appealing at the time. We'd known each other all of our young lives and the thought of going into this great unknown alone was unthinkable. But together, I knew we'd be unstoppable. And so there we were, signing up, our names going down on the recruitment list one after another. There was laughter, a lot of back slapping, and not even the slightest clue

of what we were actually getting ourselves into. We were young, naive perhaps, but driven by a sense of comradeship and the belief that we'd all be back in time for Christmas. And we dived in head first. The training was tough, but seeing as we were all there together was also a good laugh. But then beneath all that bravado, there was this undercurrent of something more serious, something we couldn't quite put words into. We were going off to war.

But not just a local scrap, we were waiting in global conflict, and at the time, I'm not sure that registered with any of us until it was too late. As we marched to the train station, the whole town came out to see us off. Our families, neighbors, even the kids from school. They cheered and threw flowers as the local brass band played, but I could see the worry in my mother's eyes, and the four smiles my father put on so as not to ruin the moment. We didn't know then what we were truly volunteering for.

The mud, the gas, the endless trenches. All we knew was we were doing it together, as pals. And as the train pulled away amidst the cheers and all the waving, a part of me, a very small scared part wondered if this was really the adventure we all thought it would be. And by the year in 1915, we were all stationed in a place called IPRA. in Belgium. The day was like any other, filled with mud and rain and the constant sound of artillery, and we thought war would be exciting, but no one warned us of how bored we'd get in between action. We were told to be on high alert for gas attacks, but we didn't really

believe the Germans would do something so terrible, not to the mighty British Army. There'd be hell to pay. We were told to practice putting on our masks at a moment's notice and told the effects on casualties could horrify, but nothing could have prepared us for when it actually happened. It was late in the afternoon when suddenly the air started to smell strange, like a mix of rotten eggs and bleach. Then I remember watching as the sky turned yellow. Someone shouted gas, gas, gas, and we all scrambled for our mass. I managed to get mine on, but not before breathing a little bit first. And it was agony, but I managed to get through it and breathe properly. But then around me it was complete and utter chaos. Men coughing, choking, and some fell before they could even reach

their mass. I saw my friend Robert trying to put his on, but he was too late. He fell to the ground, gasping for air, but all that filled his lungs was deadly gas. It was thick too, very thick, dense fog you could see but not quite touch. It burned my eyes even through the mask, and I heard men screaming. Some were running blindly and others just lay there where they fell. We were told to stay low. The gas was heavier than air, but staying low men staying near the dead and dying. And we waited for what felt like hours. The gas cleared slowly, but the damage had already been done, and it was devastating. When I took off the mask, that rotten smell, still. hung in the air and all I could hear were the groans of the suffering and the dying. We had to move

the wounded, and there just were so many of them we didn't know where to begin. I saw men with burns on their skin, their eyes red, swollen shut, and some were coughing up blood. And to me, it was a vision of hell. That night, not a single person could sleep. Every cough, every wheeze reminded us of that gas attack. I kept my mask close, even inside our dugout, and we were all terrified it would happen again in the night, and then we'd awake too late to do anything but cough and choke and die. That night was bad enough, but it was only the next day that we saw the full extent of the horror. Bodies of friends and enemies all mixed together, some contorted in pain, others looking like they were just asleep, and we had to bury them quickly. There was no

time for proper burials, just a hole in the ground. I helped carry Robert's body. He was heavy, but I felt nothing but numb. There were no more tears left inside me. We covered him with dirt, and I said a silent prayer, not just for Robert's soul, but for all of us that were still alive and had to go on facing the horrors of war. Christ be with us because the days after were filled with much fear. Every sound, every wind shift made us think the gas was coming back. We were told that mustard gas was used, something new and terrible. It didn't just kill you right away.

It could kill you slowly with blisters, with lungs that never worked right again. I survived that attack, but it was never the same. My lungs hurt for months, and I would wake up coughing, thinking the gas was back, and I saw men who survived the gas only to die later from their injuries. I say all this to let you know. I left that war a different man. The memories of that day, the smell, the sounds, they stayed with me. I learned to live with the memories, but I've never forgotten them.

I know that true peace will only come when I'm as dead as old Robert is. May he rest in peace. And may I see you soon. World War commenced on September 1st of 1939. However, there are some who argue the war truly started eight years earlier during September of 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Back in the mid-19th century, Japan remained in the iron grip of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The Shogunate established a kind of medieval feudalism known as Shinokosho, was samurai warriors

occupying the highest social strata and its closed country policy of Shokoku aiming to limit trade, foreign influence in the spread of Christianity. The policy led to a flourish of artistic and cultural advances, yet as you can imagine, prohibition of free trade led to significant economic downturns. By the mid-19th century, the food shortages caused by financial stagnation led to violent demonstrations among the Japanese peasantry, exposing the shogunate's weaknesses and hastening its inevitable downfall. Then finally, in 1868, Emperor Meiji was reinstated as the nation's divine leader,

marking the beginning of an era known as the Restoration. The Meiji Restoration marked a pivotal moment in Japanese history for a number of different reasons. Firstly, the nation began industrializing like never before. Thanks to the introduction of steam-powered machinery, the Japanese silk industry experienced an unprecedented boom, while the introduction of the country's first railroad system saw productivity skyrocket. The Japanese established a telegraph system

in their first national bank, along with their first power plants in large-scale factories. They wish to emulate the success of Britain and the United States and work closely with their new Western allies to drag Japan into the 20th century. The effort was a resounding success, and by the early 1900s, Japan had transformed itself from an insular island nation into a major regional power. Perhaps the best illustration of Japanese advancement is the result of the Russo-Japanese War. For hundreds of years, control of the Korean Peninsula had been one of the Japanese military's supreme goals.

But Imperial Russia, with its considerably larger army and navy, believe they could simply sweep the Japanese out of the way in their claim to both Korea and northern China. The Japanese attempted to peacefully negotiate, but the Russians seemed happy to let war decide the outcome. Yet this proved a grave error of judgment on their part. On February 9th of 1904, the Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian Pacific Fleet,

which was based near the now-Chinese city of Dalyan. It provided a devastating blow and was followed by Japanese victories at Lu Shuanco and Mukden. The Russian Baltic fleet sailed over 20,000 miles to support their beleaguered ground troops, and in May of 1905, they destroyed the combined Japanese fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. But it was too late.

The Japanese had made significant inroads into China's Manchurian province, but it wasn't merely their victories which forced the Russians to sue for peace. And just over 19 months of fighting, the Russians had incurred around 160,000 casualties. The Japanese, on the other hand, had suffered almost half a million.

But unlike the Russians, whose willed a fight was beginning to waver, and the morale of Japanese soldiers remained extremely high, thanks to their unshakable belief in both country and cause. A peace treaty was signed in September of 1905, with Japan being granted huge swaths of Manchuria. With the process, mediated by the U.S. and U.K., the Japanese came to view Britain and America as potential allies,

so much so that at the outbreak of the First World War, Japan actually sided with the United Kingdom and began attacking German colonies in China and the Pacific. After a month-long siege, the Japanese-fleshed German soldiers, from the Chinese city of Sing Tao in November of 1914. They also wrestled the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands from the hands of the Hun, and provided invaluable support to the Australian Navy in its hunt for the German warship, the SMS Emden. The Japanese proved to be an incredibly effective ally,

and naturally, they were incredibly proud of their contributions to the war effort. But when peace finally came in November of 1918, the Japanese felt their efforts went unrewarded. Believing they'd been allowed to keep their territory they'd fought and died for, the Japanese were stunned when the Western powers ordered them to cede control of certain Pacific Islands. They were also dismayed to discover that huge tariffs would be placed on their goods during peacetime as a wave of so-called protectionist trade policies swept the globe. As a result, Japan's silk and agricultural industries began to suffer.

suffer. But then in 1923, Japan was hit by the most devastating natural disaster in its recorded history, the great Kanto earthquake. The earthquake is believed to have been the worst in Japanese history, and the extent of the destruction was nothing short of horrific. More than half of Tokyo was either leveled by the quake itself or engulfed in the flames that followed, while the port city of Yokohama was virtually obliterated, with more than 90 percent of its structure. lying in rubble. The cities of Kawasaki and Yokosuka both received extensive fire damage, while numerous smaller towns and villages across Kanagawa, Saitama, and Ibaraki prefectures

received extensive damage. In just four minutes and 48 seconds, hundreds of years of hard work and progress had been utterly laid to waste. Central Japan lay in ruins, and it was here that the seeds of militarism were first sown, and the fertile soil of national humiliation and economic instability. Without stable peacetime industry to devote themselves, the Japanese population turned to its generals for purpose and direction. The days of making war against the Russians and the Germans had been glorious,

filled with pride in productivity, and as the factory doors closed, the ranks of the imperial army swelled dramatically. Japan's generals promised to guide its citizens, in the same way they guided their soldiers to victory at any cost. They preached the doctrine of Kokutai, which demanded absolute loyalty to the emperor and the state and revived the ancient samurai ethos of Boshido,

where ultimate honor lies in glorious self-sacrifice. Glorification of Japan's military victories crept into the nation's schools, where students were instilled with martial values, taught that the Japanese were a divine people and told the country was destined for expansion. Any public figure or politician who suggested otherwise was targeted for assassination by either violent militants or members of the Japanese military.

By 1931, despite their reverence of the divine emperor Hirohito, the Japanese military was firmly in control of the state apparatus, and for many years prior, they'd been preparing for war. It wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when, and every soldier in the Imperial Army knew all they had to do was wait. At least until one soldier stationed on the Japanese-owned section of the South Manchuria Railway grew tired of waiting and decided to hatch a plan. One evening, in September of 1931, Colonel Seshiro Itigaki was musing over the Japanese concept of Gekokujo. Gekokujo is a Japanese word which describes when someone in a lower position of power overthrow someone in a higher position using either military or political might.

And in the opinion of Colonel Itagaki, Manchuria presented the perfect opportunity for Gekokujo. The local Chinese garrison at Sheng Yang seemed poorly trained and poorly motivated, while Itagaki's troops were well disciplined and well equipped and positively itching for a fight. He knew that, given the opportunity, he and his soldiers would inflict a crushing defeat on the numerically superior Chinese. So, in order to get that opportunity, he decided to manufacture consent. On the night of September 18th of 1931, Colonel Itogaki ordered one of his soldiers to place explosives near the train tracks. When those explosives detonated, Itagaki told his superiors that they were being shelled by Chinese artillery, and beg for the opportunity to subdue the local Chinese garrison.

He was granted permission, and the next morning, two Japanese artillery batteries opened fire on the local Chinese garrison. The ensuing infantry assault was so swift and ferocious that a Japanese force of just 500 defeated more than 7,000 Chinese soldiers. The war in the Pacific had begun, and when the Japanese Prime Minister tried to stop it, he too was assassinated in cold blood. China had been embroiled in civil conflicts since the 20s,

and although Japan had invaded territory that is now part of the People's Republic, the Chinese and Japanese governments were not officially at war yet. That all changed in July of 1937. When following a skirmish with Chinese forces, the Japanese officially declared war and began the full-scale invasion of the Chinese Republic. By August, the Japanese, Japanese had captured Shanghai, but not without strong resistance and heavy casualties. And seeing as the Japanese were vastly outnumbered and far from home,

General Iwani Matsui realized a single fatal strike was necessary to collapse the Japanese government and end the war. And so, he volunteered to lead his army in a march on what was then China's capital city, Nan King. Chinese general Dong-sung-di announced he and his garrison of 81,000 soldiers would defend Nan King to the death. But government officials, recognizing that the defenders were made up of untrained conscripts and wounded veterans, evacuated this city less than a week before the arrival of Japanese troops. But it wasn't merely their rapid advance which scared the Chinese so terribly. It was what the Japanese did along the way that struck terror into their hearts. Historian Peter Harmson asserts that the 170-mile strip of land between Shanghai and Nan King

was transformed into a nightmarish zone of death and destruction, with Japanese fighter pilots later confessing to firing on Chinese farmers with their machine guns and 20-millimeter cannons for, and I quote, fun. Columns of marching Japanese soldiers also subjected civilians to extreme violence and cruelty. such as in one instance where the occupants of a village named Nan Chien Tō were locked in their homes by Japanese soldiers under the pretense of imposing a curfew. The soldiers then set fire to the buildings, leaving nothing but ash and embers where the village and its people used to be. When another and child returned to find their village in flames, Japanese soldiers threw the woman's two-year-old into the fire, stabbed her with bayonets, and then tossed her bleeding body into a nearby creek.

In another incident, a pregnant Chinese woman was beaten and violated so brutally that she lost the ability to walk. Japanese soldiers then cut open the belly of the pregnant woman, gouged out the fetus, and then rounded up the remaining villagers, and bayoneted them to death. A soldier of the Japanese 13th division, Khorosu Tadanobu, wrote the following account of his its activities. We'd take all the men behind the houses and kill them with bayonets and knives. Then we'd lock up the women and children in a single house and violate them at night. Then before we left the next morning, we'd kill all the women and children and to top it off, we'd set fire to the houses so that even if anyone came back, they wouldn't have a place to live.

Another account attributed to a now anonymous Japanese journalist attempted to explain the speed of the Japanese advance. The reason that the 10th Army is advancing to Nan King quite rapidly, he said, is due to the tacit consent among the officers and men that they could loot and violate women as much as they wish. Rather than face the horrors of the invading Japanese army, many Chinese civilians chose oblivion, with first Lieutenant Nishizawa Ben Kichi bearing witness to an incident in which two young Chinese ladies chose to drown rather than face capital. capture. Perhaps one of the most infamous atrocities committed on the road to Nan King involved two Japanese officers engaging in a little friendly competition. And that competition involved a race

to be the first man to behead 100 Chinese prisoners. Second lieutenants Toshiaki Mukai and Su Yoshinodashin rushed to behead every Chinese captive they could find with their razor-sharp Shin-Gunto sabers. The competition was widely reported on in the Tokyo newspaper, Nichinichi Shimbun, as well as the English-language publication, the Japanese advertiser, with both papers publishing regular updates. For one edition, Nichi-Nichi-Nichin-Bun's front-page headline read, Incredible record in contest to cut down 100 people. Mukai 106, Noda 105, both second-lieutenants go to extra innings. Lieutenant's Mukai and Noda had such a close tally that it was declared impossible to determine who had been the first to reach 100.

Yet instead of calling it a draw, the two officers decided to continue their murderous contest until a clear winner could be decided. In the year 2000, revisionist scholars from Japan and the United States argued that the contest had been an elaborate hoax, with the purpose of fostering what they called national fighting spirit. The claim led to a 2005 lawsuit filed by the families of lieutenants Toshiaki Mukai and Suyoshinoda by which they attempted to clear the names of their war criminal forefathers. Yet the suit was promptly dismissed by a Tokyo district judge who stated that the lieutenants admitted the fact that they raced to kill 100 people and have done so on multiple occasions. On December 8th of 1937, with the Japanese army just 15 miles away from Nanking City Walls,

Prince Yoshihiko Asaka arrived at the front. He was met by two lieutenant generals who proudly informed him that the Japanese had almost completely surrounded the 300,000 Chinese troops in the vicinity of Nan King. And that preliminary negotiations suggested that the Chinese were ready to surrender. However, instead of issuing orders to accept surrendering soldiers as prisoners of war, Prince Osaka signed a now infamous order, instructing his officers to kill all captives.

It's also important to remember that the Japanese considered all Chinese men to be combatants, regardless of age or infirmity, meaning that for all intent and purpose, Prince Asaka had given the order to slaughter almost every single person in the city of Nanking. On December 9th, and despite a valiant effort on the part of its Chinese defenders, the imperial Japanese army finally reached Nankan. city walls. Then following an intense four-day battle, a combination of fatigue and a complete breakdown in command and control led to the collapse of the Chinese resistance. General Tang

Xin Qi gave the order to retreat, and while many of his soldiers were able to reach safety, the order had failed to reach the ears of the so-called Chinese supervisory unit, who had been issued strict instructions to execute any and all deserters. To their horror, Many Chinese soldiers discovered that not only were they being hunted by the Japanese, but their own countrymen were scouring the now shell-scarred cityscape, gunning them down at random. On December 13th, when it became clear that Chinese resistance had been sufficiently worn down, the Japanese army units advanced toward Nanking's city gates and smashed their way inside.

That same afternoon, two small Japanese Navy fleets arrived on both sides of the Yangtze River, cutting off the escape of anyone hoping to take to its waters. At first, the advancing Japanese soldiers were met with an eerie quiet, but upon advancing deeper into the city, they began encountering pockets of terrified Chinese army holdouts. Having heard the rumors that the Japanese were slaughtering them, many fought to the bitter end rather than face capture. After the Japanese began broadcasting messages to the besieged Chinese,

promising them mercy if they laid down their arms, arms, tens of thousands surrendered themselves. However, the Japanese didn't just detain uniform Chinese soldiers as prisoners, and, as previously stated, considered almost all adult males to be enemy combatants. In one incident, around 20,000 Chinese prisoners were led to a so-called detention facility near the village of Mufu Shan on the banks of the Yanksy River. Each had been told their surrender meant that they would be spared and were led to a large barbed wire cordon surrounded by Japanese machine guns. They were told the machine guns were for security purposes, forming the ultimate line of defense in the event of a riot among the prisoners.

It was a lie. At dawn the next morning, as tens of thousands of Chinese prisoners woke up and began to rise to their feet, the Japanese opened fire with heavy machine guns. Swaths of Chinese prisoners were sithed down like wheat, and in the panic, they rushed the barbed wire cordon. Scores were shot and killed as they attempted to climb over the razor-sharp wire, forming human bridges for other prisoners to scramble over. Soldiers from the Yamada detachment were forced to fire on fleeing prisoners in order to prevent their escape, a storm of lead carving flesh from bone. When it was over, Japanese soldiers had to trudge through a few.

field quite literally soaked with Chinese blood. Then they dragged the bodies, all 20,000 of them, to the edge of the Yangt Sea, before tossing them into the water. In the space of just a few short minutes, tens of thousands of lives had been needlessly snuffed out, with a river that had once brought them life now swimming with their blood. In other such incidents, Chinese prisoners were used for live bayonet practice, with soldiers being taught to kill with just one. strike. Helpless prisoners were tied to wooden stakes before Japanese soldiers were instructed to plunge their razor-sharp bayonets directly into the prisoner's hearts. Some groups of prisoners were tied together, doused in petrol, then set on fire. Others were beheaded, sometimes dozens

at a time by Japanese officers who wish to perfect their sword strikes. One Japanese officer, Shira Ozuma, later said, when I tried to behead the first one, Either he moved or I mis-aimed. I ended up slicing up just part of his skull. Blood spurred it upwards. I swung again. And that time I killed him. We were taught that we were a superior race

since we lived only for the sake of a human god, our emperor, but the Chinese were not, and we held nothing but contempt for them. As the Japanese began to dispense with their so-called mopping up operations, in which those capable of defending Nanking were slaughtered in their tens of thousands. The city was now ripe for the taking. Minnie Vatran, an American missionary who was present during the invasion,

wrote the following diary entry on December 15th of 1937. The Japanese have looted widely yesterday and today, having destroyed schools, have killed citizens and violated women. 1,000 disarmed Chinese soldiers whom the enemy, International Committee hoped to save were taken from them and by this time are probably shot or bayoneted. Many was able to survive the fighting by remaining in what is known as the Nan King Safety Zone, located in the western portion of Nan King and demarcated by symbols of the International Red Cross. The Japanese agreed to steer clear of the safety zone so long as it

remained devoid of the Chinese military. The area was established by German businessmen and avowed Nazi John Rape, and became home to the 22 foreign nationals who remained in Nanking following the arrival of the Japanese. This group attempted to provide shelter to as many Chinese civilians as possible, particularly women and girls, and at its peak, the safety zone was said to harbor almost 10,000 vulnerable Chinese. Japanese soldiers were understandably surprised to find a group of foreigners in their midst, especially a group who refused to leave when given the opportunity. But when it was explained that the safety zone was off limits to them, and on the orders of the superior officers, no less, the Japanese generally respected the zone's

sanctity. However, John Ray wrote that, as the days went by, Japanese soldiers began raiding the safety zone to carry off dozens of women at a time. Few ever returned. Throughout the months of December and January, those who remained inside the safety zone began making records of the Japanese war crimes they had personally witnessed. They recorded a total of 450. All were forwarded to the Japanese embassy, and none received a response, and some of them read as follows. Case 5. On the night of December 14th, there were many cases of Japanese soldiers entering homes and violating women or taking them away. This created panic in the area, and hundreds of women moved into the Gingling College campus yesterday.

Case 10. On the night of December 15th, a number of Japanese soldiers entered the University of Nan King buildings at Tao UN and violated 30 women on the spot. Case 13. On December 18th at 4 p.m., Japanese soldiers demanded a Chinese man handover his cigarette case. When he hesitated, one of the soldiers thrust his bayonet into the side of the man's head. The man is now at the university hospital and is not expected to live. Case 14.

On December 16th, seven girls, ages ranging from 16 to 21, were taken away by the military college. Only five returned, and each girl was violated six or seven times daily. Case 15. There are about 540 refugees crowded at number 83 and 85 on Canton Road, More than 30 women and girls had been violated. The women and children are crying all night. Conditions inside the compound are worse than we can describe. Please give us help.

Case 16. A Chinese girl named Lowe was shot through the head and killed by a Japanese soldier. The girl was 14 years old. The incident occurred near the Kuling Sai, a noted temple on the border of the refugee zone. Case 19. A 62-year-old woman was attacked. in her home at Hansemen. The Japanese soldiers decided that she was too old to violate,

so they tortured her instead. To their horror, Western observers noticed that Japanese soldiers were targeting Chinese women and girls at an alarming rate. But it wasn't just a handful of platoons or companies engaging in such horrific war crimes. It was the entire Imperial Army, and they were doing so on an industrial scale. Having expected an easy victory over a people they viewed as inferior, the Japanese were frustrated, exhausted and furious at having faced such dogged resistance. Then, with a city being completely defenseless, following their hard-won victory,

it created the perfect conditions for one of the worst collective crimes in human history. In the first four weeks after the Japanese entered Nan King, there were approximately 20,000 recorded cases of carnal violence. violation, with some experts claiming the real number as around 80,000. If those experts are to be believed, it means that the 50,000 Japanese soldiers that occupied Nanking committed two acts of that type of violation per minute for an entire month. Japanese soldiers targeted women of all ages, and in most cases they were executed, then mutilated following what were often group violations.

Tokokoro Kozo, a former private in the Japanese army, recalled that women suffered most. No matter how young or old, they all could not escape the fate of being violated. We sent our coal trucks to the city streets and villages to seize a lot of women, and then each of them were allocated to 15 to 20 soldiers for abuse, and after said abuse, we also would kill them. On December 19th of 1937, the Reverend James M. McCollum wrote in his diary, I know not where to end. Never have I heard or read such brutality.

We estimate at least 1,000 cases of violation a night and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet. People are hysterical. Women are being carried off every more. morning, afternoon, and evening. And the whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases. American reporter Edgar Snow wrote how frequently mothers had to watch their babies beheaded and then submit to violation, while missionary George Finch reported that a woman had her five-month-old infant deliberately

smothered by a brute to stop it while he violated her. Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the university hospital and the safety zone, wrote in a letter to his family, and the extract reads as follows. The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of violation and brutality almost beyond belief. Last night, the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into, and two of the women his relatives were violated. Two girls, about 16, were violated to death. death in one of the refugee camps. In the university middle school, where there are 8,000 people, the Japanese came in 10 times

last night and violated until they were satisfied. They bayoneted one little boy of eight who had five bayonet wounds, including one that penetrated his stomach, but I think he will live. Irish Chang, author of one of the most comprehensive accounts of the Nanking Massacre, estimated that the number of Chinese women violated by Japanese soldiers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000. Chang also states that not all victims were women and that some Chinese men were forced to perform repulsive sex acts

as a kind of ritual humiliation. As word of the mass violations made their way up the chain of command, the operations top general expressed intense dismay at the unfolding situation. General Iwane Matsui is said to have told one of his civilian aides. I now realize that we have unknowingly wrought a most grievous effect on this city. I feel depressed and can never get in a mood to rejoice about this victory. I personally feel sorry for the tragedies of the people, but the army must continue unless China repents. On New Year's Day, General Matsui confided in a Japanese diplomat that my men have done something very wrong and extremely,

regrettable. He would later blame the atrocities of the moral decline of the Japanese army saying the Nanking incident was a terrible disgrace. After all our efforts to enhance imperial prestige, everything has been lost in one moment through the brutalities of the soldiers. However, instead of punishing the Japanese troops who were responsible for their atrocities, the Japanese merely decided to open up a series of brothels throughout their occupied territories. yet these so-called brothels were little more than debauched detention centers where female prisoners were violated in private instead of in public. Following the Japanese surrender in September of 1945,

the officers responsible for the atrocities at Nanking were put on trial. General Matsui was indicted for deliberately and recklessly, ignoring his legal duty, to take adequate steps to secure the observance and prevent breaches of the agreement. agreed upon laws of war. Matsui asserted that he had never ordered the execution of Chinese POWs, arguing that he had directed his army division commanders to discipline their troops for criminal acts and was not responsible for their failure to carry out his directives. Matsui was convicted by a majority of the judges, who ruled that he bore ultimate responsibility

for what was called an orgy of crime. Others managed to escape justice entirely, such as Prince Asaka, who was granted immunity as a member of the imperial family, or Isamucho, an aid to the prince who committed Sepuku during the Battle of Okinawa. Finally, on November 12th of 1948, General Matsui, along with five other convicted Class A war criminals, were sentenced to death by hanging. Their sentences were carried out on December 23rd of 1948. Hisewotani, a lieutenant general who oversaw the massacre, was found guilty, of war crimes, sentenced to death, and executed by shooting on April 26th of 1947. That same year, the two officers responsible for the contest to behead 100 people,

Toshiaki Mukai and Suyoshi Noda, were both arrested and extradited to China, and both men were found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death. They were executed by firing squad on January 28th of 1948. In recent years, revisionist historians have been found guilty of, attempted to deny or downplay the horrific events which occurred in Nanking during the winter of 1937. The phenomenon is similar to Holocaust denial, and that it is not only attempting to absolve war criminals of their culpability, but it serves as an insult to the memories of those that were killed. We, as humanity, must always face up to the brutal, unpalatable, or inconvenient

truths of the not-so-recent past. For those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. I am in Sarajevo, and the city, and the city is under siege. with my family, we do not go out much because it's too dangerous. There are bullets and bombs all around us. Every day we hear the sounds of war, and it's a constant reminder of the chaos that now grips our city. The windows of our home are broken. We cover them with plastic and blankets to keep the cold out. It's winter, and there's no heat. We wear our coats inside, but the cold gets into our bones, and we huddle together for warmth, sharing stories of better times to distract from the harsh reality. Food is hard to find. Sometimes we eat what we can grow on our small balcony,

and we've managed to cultivate a few vegetables, but it's never enough. Other times we wait for the UN to drop aid from the sky, but the snipers shoot at the aid truck, so we don't always get food. When we do receive aid, it's like a small party, making us feel grateful for the help of others. My brother was outside one day looking for water. There are no taps working, so we just go to Wells far away. And he never returned. And I heard later that a sniper had shot him down. My mother cries a lot now.

She doesn't talk much. Even her silence is filled with sadness. My father is always trying to fix something in the house or find us something to eat. And he keeps himself busy, maybe to distract himself from the pain. I don't know. We listen to the radio for news, but it's never good. And we hear about peace talks, but nothing changes here. They say the war will just go on.

Every day feels exactly the same as the last. Bombs, bullets, silence. Then more bombs, more bullets, and news that someone else we know has been killed. And the violence seems endless. I go to school in the basement of our apartment building. There are no real schools anymore. We learn by candlelight because there's no electricity.

Our teacher tells us stories about peace, about how Sarajevo was before. for the fighting, and it's hard to imagine now. The tales of normal life feel like fairy tales from another world. I miss my friends, and some have moved away and some are gone. The classroom is quieter now with fewer students each day, and one day I found a cat hiding under our building. It was skinny and scared, and we took it in, and we shared what little food we had with it. It sleeps on my bed, and it makes the nights less lonely. It purring is one of the few comforts we have left, a small reminder of the joys of life.

There are times when we hear a big explosion and we all run to the safest room, the one with no windows, and we sit there waiting for the next sound. Sometimes there is silence after and we think maybe it's over, but then another explosion comes. We've learned to be afraid of the quiet, knowing who could just be a moment before more violence. one day there was no fighting for a whole morning so we went out to get water it was quiet but we knew that it could start again any second we ran to the well filled our buckets and ran back and that night we drank the water slowly like it was fine wine and every drop felt like a precious gift a moment of normality in a world turned into a nightmare I dream of peace, I dream of walking in the park without worrying about snipers, I dream of school,

real school, not the basement. I envision a city where children play without fear, where families can sit down for meals without the constant threat of disruption. But dreams do not change what is happening. We wait, we survive, and we hope. I write this in my diary because, If we survive, I want to remember. I want to document our struggles, our resilience, and our fleeting moments of happiness.

I write about the good things, too, like when we laugh at something small or when the sun comes out after days of hiding. But mostly I write about the fear, and hunger, and death. It's important to me that these experiences aren't forgotten even if they are painful to recall. This is our life now. we don't know when it will end but we keep going day by day because we must each morning when we wake up we're grateful for another chance to live to love and to hold on to hope in spite of all the despair the siege continues on our area but so does our willingness to endure and our willingness to survive My parents own land that's on an ancient Navajo settlement. And last night, we heard strange growling and yipping. We assumed it was dogs going after our neighbor's cats.

We live in the country, so this is pretty normal. My dad grabbed his flashlight in a pistol. He walked down to the noises, and I ran around grabbing all of our cats. One was missing, so I grabbed another big flashlight and decided to walk around. Now, from my front porch to the left is my neighbor's house where my dad was with his gun. To the right was another pasture that we own, and this is heavily wooded at the property line. I shine my flashlight, looking over this pasture for my cat, and I was looking at the wood line. And that's when I saw it.

It wasn't like those fake ones that are all white and weird. Mine, or my skin walker, look like Navajo folklore. This thing had a pelt over its head. Its face pale and white, very deep white eyes with black iris and its body was hidden. I immediately go into panic mode, looking back, turning up the flashlight, and it was gone. Not even five seconds later, super far away I heard something and it wasn't right. It sounded like something trying to mimic a human.

It just didn't sound quite right to my ears. I heard something scream help with an ear-piercing volume, and the hairs of my neck stood up and my heart dropped. My mind was frozen and I just refused to move. I knew the rule. The further they sound, the close. closer they are, and my flashlight never stopped moving. I was horrified. My dad was too far away to tell, and I didn't want to yell and make things worse. And once my dad came back, I begged

him not to go outside, and I wouldn't tell him what I saw because I knew that he was still looking for the other cat that I was. They started yelling, because he didn't understand what was wrong and why I was so scared, and he grabbed his shotgun and ran out to look for the cat. he came back ten minutes later and told me to tell him when i did his face ran pale he didn't hear the same scream that i heard but when i heard it it went dead silent and he felt off he said that he's heard things but he knew that i wasn't lying but what do we do now i'm genuinely asking for help i wish this was a lie I wish that I was making this up, but I'm not. I'm full-blown, terrified of what's out there.

my best friends died of a drug overdose in 2020. He would have been a groomsman at my wedding in September of 2024, but I decided to leave his spot open because I don't believe anyone could ever truly replace him. I even had a set of groomsman presents set aside to give to his dad when the wedding was over. During the planning for my wedding, a strange thing happened where the veterinarian's office I recently switched to turned out to be the one his parents used when he was a kid, and my fiancé, now wife, has a cat with the same name as his childhood dog. After we switched to his vet's office, my friend's dad started getting emails and automated text messages about his family dog that had passed away almost 10 years prior. When he went to the office

to figure out what had happened, the vet's office didn't have an explanation as to why he got the notifications. They said, it's an automated system. There's no reason why you would have started receiving those when they're supposed to go to this person. And this is when he figured out that I recently started using this vet and that my wife has a cat with the same name as his deceased dog. He was immediately convinced that my friend was messing with the vet's computers trying to reach me. His dad called me and asked if I had any major life events happening and I filled him in on my fiancé and that I was getting married soon.

And he broke down crying and said, I think Nolan is pissed that he can't be at your wedding. I struggled mentally throughout the wedding planning process because of how much I missed my friend and wish that he could be with us. A few weeks after the wedding around my birthday in November, I had a vivid dream that I was helping a mutual friend of Nolan and I moved from one house to another. When I exited the house to load up another car with boxes, Nolan was standing at the car holding the package that was his groomsman present. He held it up, smiled at me, and turned to walk away. I tried to run after him in my dream, but I couldn't run, as if my feet were glued to the ground. He walked off into the distance, and when I couldn't see him anymore, I woke up already crying.

I am convinced my friend visited me in my dream to thank me for saving his spot on my groomsman party. I've always had vivid dreams, so to speak. I always know when I'm dreaming and I love it. Since I can remember, I got to know the term lucid dreaming, and I always look forward to sleep so that I can fly and so on. Last night, though, was different. I was standing in my mom's apartment and her back was turned against me. She was far away, but I could see her clearly.

I shouted mom, and she didn't answer me, so I yelled, Hey, Fatty. And it looked like she heard me, but didn't know where the sound came from. She turned around, but still didn't look at me. And so I yelled, hey, fatty again. I don't know why I yelled, Fatty, I've never called anyone that, and my mom is nowhere near overweight, so it was just a weird thing to yell. I remember waking up and felt bad that I was mean to her and was weirded out by

everything. I told my husband, and he was laughing, saying, who cares? It was just a dream. My husband is nowhere near spiritual and doesn't believe in anything supernatural. I still called my mom just to talk to her, and the first thing she said after I said, Hey, Mom, was, hey, honey, I had the weirdest dream. Someone yelled. something at me and I think they called me fat. She was on speakerphone and my husband's jaw dropped and I started shaking. I told her it was me. It wasn't a dream. If I didn't have my husband by my side, I would have gaslighted myself because I would think I was going crazy. But what is this? I've had dreams where my grandmother told me that I was having a baby girl. I didn't know that I was

pregnant and my grandma died at my birthday so I've never met her and she was right it was a girl i was pregnant and it wasn't planned and my daughter was born after her birthday i'm still just shook by all of this and i'm just curious if any of you have ever communicated through your dreams before I didn't believe in ghosts. The other night, my wife heard the sound of a dog toy coming from our living room. That was impossible because the dog was asleep in his crate in the laundry room. I got out of bed and went to check. and on my way back, I swear that I saw a goddamn image of a boy wearing white shorts and

white shoes with black tips. He was sitting with his face buried in his knees, and I just said nope, and ignored it, and went to bed. I don't mess with ghosts. I didn't share this with anyone because when I was growing up, the movie Ghostbusters basically taught me to just not mess with ghosts. And 20-some years later, I still remember that advice. then a day later my four-year-old suddenly had a new imaginary friend named Daniel who only comes out at night she said that he had been playing in the living room and sleeping on the couch for the last couple of nights and i asked what does Daniel look like and she responds white shoes but black on the fronts white shorts he wasn't feeling good the other night his belly hurt and he was crying

And now I'm sitting in my room, questioning reality. Now, just to add to this, I inherited some furniture about four years ago. It had been sitting in this spare bedroom ever since, and within the last two weeks, I started refinishing the pieces. About six to nine weeks ago, I remodeled the room. It was a lot of junk left over from my wife's grandmother, and most of it ended up in the closet where Daniel says he lives. we lived here for about four years and before that my wife's grandmother had lived here since at least

the 1960s we don't know much about the house before that the records are very unclear some facts i figured i'd mentioned since i've been asked quite a bit about this was i sleep deprived when i saw the figure in the living room honestly no i was pretty coherent my wife had me thinking someone had broken in so i was expecting to have to shoot someone and Daniel supposedly just wants to play and sleep a lot. We have cameras in the bedroom, but nothing is ever caught on video. However, motion is detected quite often, even though nothing is ever recorded. And I always assumed it was just the breeze.

Now, a couple of days ago, my daughter randomly said that Daniel went to heaven. It was completely out of the blue. My wife and I had never really talked to her about Daniel. We just figured if we ignored it, it would go away on its own. and I remember my daughter saying he told me goodbye he said he was going to heaven

I was around I was around six when I was around six when it happened my parents had tucked me in for bed I live in the rural countryside, so nighttime is very quiet, no sounds of cars. It's usually very peaceful. I was laying on my back when suddenly I heard the sound of long nails scratching the wood under my bed. The reason this incident sticks out to me is because I can still remember the feeling of my heart dropping out of my stomach and feeling paralyzed with fear. I was about to call out from my parents when my dad crawled out from under my bed. and stood up in the dark looking at me. He says, you forgot to say your prayers, and then walked out of my room.

I was understandably shocked. I did not leave my bed afterwards and must have fallen asleep at some point. My dad would normally tell me to say my prayers before bed, so this seemed like something he would say, but I have no idea what would possess him to hide under my bed. And when I asked my dad later, he denies ever doing this. I brought it up numerous times over the years, but he has never admitted to doing it. And I never really considered until recently that he definitely doesn't have nails long enough to make the deep scratching sound that I heard. What do you guys think?

Maybe I fell asleep and had a vivid dream. I also considered it to be something paranormal, though. And to answer a few questions that I saw frequently, no, I can't remember if I asked my parents about the incident the next morning, but since then I have asked repeatedly over the last 20-ish years my dad has never owned up to it. And I believe at this point that my dad couldn't have done it because, one, my dad likes scary stuff and would absolutely take credit for a prank that scared me so bad. And two, my parents have been gone from my room for probably about 10 minutes before I heard that scratching. It's possible that my father could have just stayed behind, but he could not

easily fit under my bed without me noticing. And three, he's not really a drinker, so I doubt that he was passed down on the floor or something. I'd like to believe that it was sleep paralysis like many of you have theorized, however, that would be my one and only time experiencing that. There's definitely a chance that it could have been something more sinister and it's something that I hope I never encounter again. the last week. Our house is haunted, but this is freaking me out. I usually sleep on my left side, facing away from him in bed. On one particular night, I'd fallen asleep facing him while he was awake on his phone. He sat up for a moment and looked at me before realizing my eyes were wide

open and I was trying to mouth something to him. He kept asking what, huh? But I wasn't responding. He shined his phone screen on my face and my eyes were closed. My mouth was slightly open. But when he moved his screenlight, he saw my eyes open and I was mouthing stuff to him again. He got so creeped out, he almost slept on the couch, but decided to just face away from me and fell back asleep. And this has me rattled. The stuff in our house doesn't usually freak me out, but this has me pretty shaken up. His vision is good, even in the dark. I sleep with my eyes open sometimes, and it's creepy, but it's not wide open, and it doesn't stop once the light is on. I don't know what this could have been if it wasn't his eyes playing tricks on him, and I'm not convinced it was. I grew up in a very old house in the Midwest that my parents got for a steel. It was originally built as a hotel, and the cellar was very motivated to get rid of it. Now, growing up, weird things happen all the time. The typical malarkey that is easy to ignore for years and years.

Footsteps, strange shadows, the feeling of being watched or followed. swearing that you see someone in the room right as you wake up. The room in the basement that chills your blood every time for no reason and the occasional hard-to-explain moments. I moved to the West Coast in my 20s for school and self-discovery. During a visit from my family, my sister told me that they had met a ghost in the house, and I was pretty skeptical, but my entire family backed her up. She was in her room and her radio had been acting up,

so just in the off chance she said okay if you are a ghost could you please just stop it and the radio turned off she waited a moment and then said wait if you are a ghost turn it on and the radio turned on after some experimentation they devised a system of communication volume up was yes volume down was no the digital readout on the volume was 0 to 30s, so 1 was A, 2 was B, 3 was C, and so on. If the radio turned off, then it was a sort of hard no or off-limits question. And through this system, the ghost had explained that he wanted to be called Jason. He had died in the house in 1905 at age 5 when he was sick, and he lived in the house alongside us with his kind of mother and evil father. When they asked if he loved his father,

the volume went to zero and turned off. In fact, he refused most questions about his father. Apparently, he was the cause of the more malevolent experiences that people had in that house. I was definitely intrigued and went back home that year to visit for a chance to experience this for myself. However, when I arrived, Jason refused to interact with me. I would leave the table when the radio would pop on. My sisters would call me back and the radio would turn off instantly. He didn't want to have anything to do with me.

As I thought about this, I remembered an experience I had before moving to the West Coast. I have been lying in bed one night when I felt a hand ruffle my hair playfully. I freaked out. I shot out of bed and turned on the light, pulled out my chest, and overconfidently yelled, You do not know who I am or what I'm capable of. If you try that again, you'll regret it. Don't you dare mess with me? and then several picture frames on my desk flew off onto the floor belligerently.

I stayed at a friend's house that night. One night on my trip after Jason refused to talk to me, I spoke out loud, Hey, I'm sorry if it was you who I yelled at that one night. I bet you were trying to play or introduce yourself to me and I got scared. I didn't need to be so mean to you and I understand if you don't want to talk to me. The radio turned on. Hey, um, are you the Jason I heard so much about? And the volume went up.

Did I yell at you that night before I left? And the volume went up again and then went back down to a reasonable level. I'm sorry about that. Can we be friends? And the volume went up again. It was incredible. He had introduced himself to several family friends as well. And to prove he wasn't some sort of hacked radio, he would do additional tasks. He would ring our doorbell.

He would push crayons around on the table. He even did a really incredible trick for us. You see, while asking about the logistics of being a ghost, he had volume up that he could travel anywhere almost instantly. And to test it, we called up a family friend on the West Coast. This friend put out a newspaper on their kitchen. table, and Jason then visited them and came back to set the volume to the date on the paper. The radio turned off for a moment, and seconds later it set the volume to 17. The friend said, so close, the paper was for the 18th.

But Jason was not convinced. Volume up, volume down, 17. Volume up, volume down, 17, 17, 17, 17, 17. The friend checked again and apologized. Oh, he's right. I misremembered. It's the paper from the 17th. He refused to answer questions about God or religion, and he gave us a few answers that contradicted as well.

He told us that he didn't need to sleep, but he had told my sister a few months earlier that he did. One thing he seemed to know was how long he would be there. Through the volume legist system, he told my sister that he would be around until her 28th birthday, then his family would move on to the next phase. At the time, this was a couple of years into the future, and sure enough, we never heard from him after that. During his time with us, he would occasionally visit our dreams. We would have these extremely realistic dreams where a boy in a white-hitted robe would say hi to us,

asked to play hide-and-seek with us, or ask us questions about ourselves. Then he would confirm with my sister that he had visited us. He used to play the radio primarily, but in the final year he got better at manipulating other electronics. He could make printers print messages. He could manipulate televisions. He even sent us texts in the last few months. My mother had texted me, I see you, ha ha, when I was back in the West Coast a couple of years after all of this. And I texted her back, did you come out here to visit? Where are you? But she was confused. She said she was in the Midwest at home, and her phone had no evidence of sending a text with that message to me. I texted back, I think Jason has sent me a message. Hi, Jason. And I got to

reply, hi, again, not from my mom. My sister even once got a call with a picture of Obama in the caller ID saying, Mr. President, but there was nobody there when she answered an apparently no callback number. The radio confirmed with a volume up that Jason was just goofing around. It was a wild few years with that crazy kid haunting our devices. My family still has that radio out just in case, but it hasn't turned on in years. My sister is now well into her 30s. I know this will be met with a lot of skepticism. Even I was very skeptical until I was able to meet him myself. However, I think it's finally time to share this and to answer questions people might have about it. So, what do you got? Ask me anything. Does my family still live in the house? Yes,

they do. My mom and sister are around and there's been no communication or experiences from Jason or the father since my sister turned 28. You realize Jason is a demon slash lying spirit or malevolent entities sent to trick you, right? Maybe. We have enrolled that. out, but it felt pretty chill. And yes, I get that could be part of it. How did the parents die? It's unclear to us, too. I wish we had found more info on them as well. Why didn't you record it? But we tried. Electronic recording was interfered with or might even glitch every single time. Jason didn't want to be recorded. Camcorders glitched. Phone video didn't save or seemed to be immediately deleted. Even audio recordings didn't work around the radio when he was active,

or otherwise he would just turn off. Did you ever investigate the history or death records of the house? Did the boy named Jason actually live and die there? We did, and we found a record of a death of a five-year-old boy from illness. His name was not Jason, though, but everything else was in line with what he told us. How did a five-year-old know how to read write and spell? Honestly, I have no clue, but he could. I personally always figured that he had picked up some tricks in the afterlife, but who knows? And others have theorized that if this family had this property at the time, they might have been socioeconomically at the top of the class back then, and he might have received a better

education than most kids at that time, and who knows, maybe even comparatively to now. You expect us to believe this crap. Where's your proof? I expect some will believe in some won't, and that's fine with me. I'm not here to prove anything. I just thought it was a cool experience and figured some others would enjoy knowing about it too. So this just happened tonight.

My son's birthday is today, and we are all currently quarantined due to being exposed to someone who was sick. And since we had to cancel our plans, we decided to take a drive. We loved just driving around in the country and hiking and trussing about. We went to an old church slash Masonic Lodge. It's now not used at all. That is, hometown famous for a big goat statue mounted on top of the steeple. The statue was a gift from someone in the same. Dundee, Scotland. It's a very old place. No one was around, so my son and I decided to look around,

and we got to ring this huge brass bell by pulling a rope. My boyfriend and other son were far away from us in the empty parking lot, and we left, and they were amazed at how loud the bell was. Now anyways, we kept driving and exploring until it got dark. My oldest son said that he wanted to stop at the graveyard, then go and ring the bell one more time. It's his birthday, so I said, as you wish, my darling. And we walked the graveyard, paid respect to the extremely old graves, and even picked up trash. We always do this when hiking and exploring. Then just down the road, we went back to the goat church slash Masonic Lodge.

We pulled in, again, no one around. This area is very open. The wide yard you walk across to get to the building is clear of trees. The church is right by the busy highway. No sidewalk, steep stairs. My boyfriend and I decided to stay by the van to smoke a cigarette, and I could see the black outlines of my two boys walking towards the front of the church. It's not super far, but it takes a minute to walk to the building due to the yard being quite mushy and kind of bumpy.

Well, suddenly out of nowhere, there were what looked like three more young men, teen boys walking towards my kids and approaching them very quickly, as though they knew my kids. Well, my first thought was, okay, I better get over there and make sure these boys ain't up to no good, but I also thought, where the hell did they come from? I immediately walked toward them to make sure all was well. I heard the bell ring. Then suddenly, one of the unknown silhouettes charged my oldest son. As this happened, my boyfriend ran with his knife out yelling,

hey at the people. He ran around the corner to approach the group and I followed behind him, but I wasn't as fast. As I reached the steps, my boyfriend and my kids were already running toward the car. There was no one there but my family, and I asked, where are they? They just shouted, go, run, go, mom, run. And I repeated, where are those people? As I ran. There are no people just go, they replied so we did just that skedaddling back to the car on the way home we of course talked about this very insane experience the entire time we saw three people walk up to my kids right next to them it almost looked like they had planned to meet them there they were walking as a group until one suddenly started running toward my son with intent like i said but my boys never saw them

There was no one there. There was no way they couldn't have noticed them, though. Nowhere for them to hide afterwards. The area is completely open with no hiding spots. The boys also described how when they reached the steps, everything felt very dreamlike. They got nervous and quickly rang the bell before my boyfriend got to them. Both of them rang it. This brass bell is old and loud and it can be heard far and wide.

Even though both boys rang it, I only heard it once, and I saw three people disappear. On the way home, my boyfriend and youngest son felt nervous and negative and scared the entire time. But my oldest son, the birthday boy and I, felt excited with no sense of malignancy whatsoever. My oldest and I have always loved all things paranormal, but tonight removed that last bit of doubt lingering in the back of my mind. I never thought something like this would happen, not just to me, but to my whole family. We prayed for protection on the way home and arrived safe and sound, but you never know, you guys, anything can happen, and I'm open to any and all theories, whether supernatural or pragmatic. I've gone through every possible scenario, but it just doesn't add up.

This happened in sixth and seventh grade of middle school. I'm in high school now and I am also living in a different state. One night I woke up all sleeping. It was probably 2 or 3 a.m., but it's hard to say. I was only awake for a.m. for a few. minutes. My curtains made it so during the night my room is just completely pitch black. I don't have any light source in my room, and when I turned to my left, at the foot of my bed stood a woman in black, this Victorian dress with long, light-colored hair. I couldn't quite see her face.

It was entirely shrouded and light, and she looked almost ethereal. I was super confused sitting straight up in bed and just staring at her. And suddenly I felt super tired and dizzy. A wave of warmth washed over me and kind of like the feeling that you get when someone hugs you. I went back to sleep and when I woke up the next morning I felt completely fine. I was weirded out, but for the most part I thought it was just a weird form of sleep paralysis and really thought nothing of it. When I went to sleep the same day, that woman was there again. When I tried to talk to her, I managed to get out to who before I felt drained and fell back to sleep.

It should be important to mention that throughout these two years that I never saw her convey any emotion. No sadness, anger, or happiness. I only saw her move two times. For months, I would see her and it just became a part of my routine. I would wake up in the middle of the night, see her, feel dizzy, and go back to sleep. I wasn't really bothered by it either since the sleep that I would get was probably the best sleep I had ever got in my life, and it felt like I was sleeping on clouds after I saw her. Each time I would try and talk or do something other than sit up and just stare, but she would

always make me feel exhausted. One night I managed to take a hold of my pillow and raised my hand, aiming to throw it at her, when she reached out her hand and tapped my head. I think I literally blacked out after that. And this is the only time that I physically felt her. Her touch was very light on my head. Around a week later, I mustered up enough strength and threw that pillow at her. And like I said before, she was still emotionless.

It went through her body easily, which scared me in the moment. This is the only time that I felt fear during the night with her. And while I was freaking out, she reached over and swiped at my shoulder. I couldn't feel it, but a few seconds later I felt so dizzy that it was nauseous. And the next morning, I had red marks on my shoulder. Like I said, this went on for a long time. And at this point, I just let her make me go to sleep, and I just kind of live my life with her. What could I even do?

I don't really remember when, but one time during lunchtime, I went into my bedroom, and I saw her in my neighbor's window, because of how my bedroom is. positioned I could see right into my neighbor's house, and that's the only time that I saw her in person. This was terrifying for middle school me. Once I calmed down, I went to the same neighbor's house to pick up my cat. Long story, but my cat loved going over to their house, and while it was over, I showed them the video and explained my experience, and asked if they had the same thing. They mentioned that their 10-year-old daughter had talked about a woman in the middle of the night, but they thought that it was just her imagination and they also said that she went upstairs

sleeping due to her having a small cold after this i never saw her again and this happened in the summer of seventh grade and since then i moved from that house maybe she's found a new girl to haunt or was angry that i was talking about her i recently told my friend who was the daughter of a pastor and she was adamant that it was a demon i never felt any ill intent from her, but I'm open to really any answer. It could also just be my imagination, which I guess looking back wouldn't surprise me either. When I was a kid, we lived in a small, isolated house on the edge of a half-developed neighborhood. There were only about six houses on our block, and ours was the last one before many

overgrown weeds and empty land stretched out into the dark. At night, the area was deserted, and you'd rarely see anyone stepping outside. I lived there from the ages of 7 to 13, and looking back, It felt like I was trapped inside one of those disturbing, uncanny horror films where reality always seems just a little bit off. Before I dive into the incidents, it's worth mentioning that our life in that house was filled with a sense of suffocating dread. Financially, we struggled a lot during those years, drowning in debt. Strangely enough, things turned around for us as soon as we moved out.

Family fights erupted daily, and I remember feeling terrified constantly. I remember not going too far into any room so that if anything jumps out, I could run through the door easily. I don't know why I did that, to be honest. Now, here are some of the events that made me believe that something was haunting us. Incident 1. The Unseen Watcher. I remember staying home from school one day because I was sick. I was curled up on the couch, watching Barney and friends, trying to distract myself from the eerie feeling of that house. At some point, I felt someone standing beside me.

I assumed it was my mom joining to watch the show, so I didn't think much of it. A few minutes passed, and I casually asked her something. There was no response. I asked her one more time, and there was no response again, and I turned to find no one there. And that's when it hit me. My mom wasn't even home. She had left for work hours ago, and I was completely alone in that house. And this freaked me out, and I opened the front door and said,

out on the porch until my parents came home because it just felt so real. It truly felt like someone walked up and was actually standing there. Incident two, the yellow ball and the swarm. This incident happened to my sister, but I'll try to explain it in my point of view. We all used to sleep in the same room since her house only had one bedroom and me and my sister would sleep between my parents to feel safe. One night, my sister was studying for her test in the living room in around 12.30 a.m., I was starting to fall asleep when suddenly my sister burst through the door, running and jumping on the bed, scared and crying. After calming her down, she told us what had happened. She was in the living room studying for a test when, out of nowhere, a yellow ball with a smiley face on it rolled

into the hallway from the other room. As it came to a stop. Dozens of cockroaches scurried out from the same room, like they do when they hear humans walking. Our house had a serious cockroach problem, and the floors practically came alive with them at night. She said a heavy sense of dread washed over her as she stared into that dark hallway, and then she saw it. A shadowy figure emerging from the darkness, moving in a way that made her feel cold all over. She told us that she felt stuck for a second and frozen in fear before running to the bedroom. Incident 3. The disappearing glasses.

One morning my dad couldn't find his glasses. He had recently undergone cataract surgery, so they were essential. The whole family spent what felt like hours scouring every inch of the house. We checked his shelf multiple times, which was where he was. he usually kept them, but they were nowhere to be found. We left for school, defeated and convinced that the glasses were gone for good. But later that evening, as we were sitting around, my dad suddenly called out to my mom, sounding almost angry.

We rushed over to find the glasses sitting right there on the shelf, exactly where we had checked over and over again. My dad thought that we were playing a prank on him, but we weren't. There was no explanation for how they could re-euro. appeared like that, and it wasn't him pranking us either because he was so angry that day. Incident number four, the mysterious fortune teller. Okay, so this one is actually scary, so strap in. How would you feel if a random, creepy-looking guy stood in front of your house and started

chanting? Well, in South Indian culture, there's a figure known as the Kudu-Gudupu-Kuran. I've not heard much about them, but they're like devotees of God who roam the streets and randomly tell fortunes to people. Most people avoid them, fearing that their predictions might bring misfortune. My first encounter with one of them was when I was young. I remember hearing a man singing some kind of religious song near our doorstep, literally a few meters away from our door.

I went to check on it, but my mom quickly grabbed me from behind and told me to be silent and to not make any sound. We pretended like there was nobody home and eventually he went away. I was so confused and asked my mom who he was, but she didn't explain and just sort of brushed it off. Years later, as the strange happenings in our house grew more intense, a similar figure began appearing near our house

while my dad was home alone. For several days, this man stood near our door, chanting and seemingly delivering cryptic messages at night. Finally, my dad confronted him, telling him to stay away. I never saw the man again after that, but I couldn't shake the feeling that his presence was somehow connected to the disturbances. Incident 5. The Chanting Yogi. My sister also had reoccurring nightmares while we lived there.

She remembers one in particular that terrified her. She would wake up to a vivid vision of a figure, like a yogi or a mystic, sitting on her chest, chanting in an unknown language. She could feel his weight pressing down on her, making it almost impossible to breathe. And this vision plagued her until we left that house for good. We finally moved out of that place, and to our relief, the strange experiences almost entirely stopped. Our financial situation improved, the family conflicts became less frequent, and that constant creeping fear seemed to lift. I can't explain what was happening in that house, but living there always felt like I was stuck in a disturbing horror movie,

one that I desperately wanted to escape. Do you think that there could have been something paranormal going on, or was it just the atmosphere of that place that was getting to our minds? And if you'd like to hear more stories from that house, let me know. I have plenty more. I'm from Ireland and live in England at the moment, and I'd never heard of any ancient giants before, or even skeletons that have been found in the past. However, I have a true story of actually seeing one. It was maybe five to seven years ago on a trip to Ireland, not sure of the exact year per se,

and a friend of mine and myself saw what look like a giant walking across the motorway in Ireland after a visit to Terra. We were heading south after coming down from a visit to the hill of Torir in County Meath, Ireland. I was driving down the motorway, and I distinctly remember we passed a group of traveler caravans parked on the grass verge on my left side. After passing them, I could see somebody crossing the motorway ahead of the car. I first thought it might be somebody from the caravan side crossing over for some reason, but I could see this man, and he was huge. We both saw the man, the giant, I'll just call it, clearly a man who was really tall, about 200 meters ahead of us as we were driving back to Dublin.

And it was huge. Beyond normal human height, maybe at least ten. feet, it was hard to say exactly, and it moved very slowly with his head bowed, very slim, and took no notice of us, and as he was moving so slowly, that was the strangest thing. I thought it was somebody crossing the motorway, so I'd ready to break as I was doing about 70 miles per hour, but as I approached him in the car and this giant just got to the central reservation of the motorway, which was a large hedge, and just disappeared. My friend in the passenger seat was seeing it and said to be careful as we approached it.

We both saw the same thing at the same time and described the features of the person exactly. The strangeness about the man or being was the way he moved. Very slow and lumbering, heavy, not fast at all. And he had long black hair with the top which went to knee length, but he had something under that, as I couldn't see flesh. it was not a cape but some sort of top i can still see the image to this day but the color was not apparent the weather was clear and it was daylight taurier is a very spiritual place and we visited the stone of destiny just beforehand the stone is called lise na fehl and so all i can say is

that's what we saw both of us All right, I've reached the point where I can't keep this to myself anymore. I need a semi-anonymous place to get it off my chest so I can just move on. I was part of a trio of best friends. We hung out socially pretty regularly, and one of our favorite things to do was have a girl's night out at the local clubs. We always started at one of our least favorite clubs, but it had one of those inexpensive fishbowl drinks, so we typically began our evening there. And that's where it happened. We had arrived, and we were about 30 to 45 minutes into conversation and drinks when we decided to hit the dance floor.

A group of three guys was seated near the dance floor and joined us. once we started. I ended up paired with the youngest-looking one. He seemed about five years younger than me, but we were having a great time dancing together. We danced and eventually merged back with the group, forming a circle. Directly across from my dance partner and me was my friend. She was laughing and smiling, dancing and enjoying herself, and then boom. It was like a hologram or a shifting picture, like tuning an image. Suddenly she stood well over. our heads and my dance partner looked about 5-11 and she was a clear head and shoulders taller than him and this is the part that i have the hardest time saying without ridiculing myself for not having an

answer and please i struggle to even say it to myself but she was a reptile a standing scale-covered muscular human-like creature with a dinosaur slash human-shaped head my dance partner and I both froze. I felt stuck, just staring, willing myself to stop. When I turned to look at him, the color had drained from his face, and I felt so bad for the fear that I saw on him. And without a word to each other, we both took a step back, turned, and fled outside. He kept walking, completely left the club and didn't say a word, just walked off. He left his friends there was gone. I went back inside because I thought that it had to be the lighting, the shadows, something practical. After all, I knew this person. We were friends, best friends at the time.

Clearly, I was the crazy one and needed to understand what had just happened. I sat at a table near the dance floor and watched the whole room, the lighting, the effects, the shadows, my friends dancing, and I told myself that it had to be an optical illusion. A terrifying one, but it could have been real. I knew this person. I wasn't prone to hallucinations or fantasies, so I must have been the one who misinterpreted something, my brain filling in the wrong information.

It unsettled me so much that I decided not to continue the night out. I said goodbye to our other friend and went home, and as soon as I got there, I searched the Internet for anyone who had experienced anything remotely similar, but I found nothing. At this point I tried and have continued to try to convince myself it was the room, the lights, the strobe effect, something, something that made my best friend look like a seven-foot-tall reptilian person. I avoided them for a month after that. The next time I saw her, I thought she'd find it funny that I ghosted everyone because she shapeshifted. But she didn't find it funny.

She seemed worried and started asking me what she looked like. And fair enough, I thought, if my lunatic friends said the same thing to me, I'd have some questions, too. And I turned it into a joke and tried to steer the conversation away. But sometimes I get reminded. I see it again in my mind just as clearly as that night, and I'm still just as frightened as confused as I was then. We all grew apart after that, but there, I said it. Maybe just getting it out of my head will finally make that memory go away. I'm in my 30s and I've had a few of what I believe to be paranormal experiences.

Both of my parents served. in the military, which led to me growing up in many different homes all over Europe in the United States. When I was about 15 years old, my family and I lived in a really old house in Portugal. I believe that I was being haunted by an entity that lived in the closet in my room. This was my first paranormal experience. But once we moved back to the United States, I decided that what I thought I was experiencing in the old house in Portugal was just my imagination, and I didn't think about it again until years later. Fast forward eight years, I landed a job as a state park ranger at a park that included a historic site.

At the time, I was already a park ranger at another park, and I remember my co-workers telling me, Oh, you're transferring to the creepy cult park? I laughed it off. I genuinely was not considering the fact that the historic buildings could be haunted. I really enjoyed learning about history and was only thinking about how lucky I was to be working there. On my first day at the creepy cult park, a volunteer gave me a full tour of the historic site. When the cult was at its peak, there were over 100 buildings. Now only 13 buildings remain.

We had already entered three of the buildings, and the words haunted or ghost still hadn't crossed my mind. That was until we went into the old bakery. We were on the first floor. Park visitors could look through the glass window at the doorway to see all the artifacts that were there when the bakery was in full operation. But we had a key to get inside the building. At this point, everything felt normal while taking a look around the first floor. The volunteer then started to lead me to the stairwell where only park employees could go.

I was in the front and made it halfway up the stairs and all of a sudden, there it was. The same kind of feeling I had when I was a teenager in Portugal. I asked the volunteer, do I have to go up there and she seemed annoyed and said oh you're one of those one of what i asked one of those people that believe in ghosts i didn't know how to answer her i was new and didn't want to start off on the wrong foot i had been a park ranger for years but never had a historic site i responded i don't know if it's a ghost but i got a bad feeling and i really really don't want to go up there. She rolled her eyes and said, let's move on to the founder's home.

We toured about five more buildings after that. I had that uneasy feeling in all of them, but I assumed it was just me still thinking about the experience I had at the bakery. Two weeks later, I had a week of morning field shifts. One of my tasks during this shift was unlocking and disarming the buildings before the park opened. I had done this on my own a few times and really only got that eerie feeling when opening the bakery. Luckily, going upstairs was not a requirement. But on this particular day, I had opened six buildings before arriving at the founder's home, as in the home of the founder of the cult.

When you walked inside the founder's home, you could see two old wooden staircases on either side of the room leading upstairs. Underneath those staircases were storage closets, and one of them was where the security system was installed. When you open the main door to the building, an alarm would go off, and you had to use the skeleton key to open the main door, then quickly grab a different key to unlock the door under the staircase to disarm the alarm. You only had one minute to disarm the alarm before the cops were notified, so I was focused on looking for my second key while walking inside the building. As I was walking toward the closet, hearing the loud alarm going off in the background, I found my next set of keys, looked up, and there were a little bit. it was. A silhouette of someone standing there, staring at me. But he had no features. It was a shadow.

I froze. I felt like I couldn't breathe. For those of you who have not experienced something like this before, it is literally a sixth sense. Your body does not know how to respond because it doesn't know what the hell it's looking at. The figure stood there for only one or two seconds, then ran up the set of stairs to the right at an unnatural speed. I dropped my keys and yelled and expletive and ran outside. I paced the porch a few times trying to catch my breath and thought, damn it, I have to alert the ranger at the ranger station that no one broke into the founder's home. I radioed the ranger station to let them know that I was just late in disarming the alarm,

and my coworker said, it's okay, it happens sometimes, just disarm it and finish open in parks come up to the ranger station when you're done when i got to the ranger station my co-worker didn't lecture me like i thought he might instead he just said you saw something didn't you and i was shocked and relieved at the same time he had been working there for almost 20 years and he told me he wanted me to come to my own conclusions about the buildings being haunted before sharing all of his experiences with me knowing that some of the other rangers and volunteers felt the same way I did about the building being just downright creepy made me feel a lot better even if that meant that the other half of the staff thought that I was paranoid but I don't care I know what I saw I worked at that park

for five more years after that and I have many many stories to tell and maybe I'll submit another one if you're interested Hey, friends, thanks for listening. Don't forget to hit that follow button to be alerted of our weekly episodes every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube. where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and Thursday at 9 p.m. EST. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you in the next episode.