The Lets Read Podcast - 335: THE LEGEND OF PALEFACE | 11 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories | EP 320

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about the vast wilderness & encounters that happened in the middle of nowhere.HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?[e-mail] ME ON -►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/♫ Music & Cover art: INEKThttps://www.youtube.com/@inektToday's episode is sponsored by:- Quince

In the summer of 2015, so more than a decade ago now, me and a few friends were just sinking beers and watching TV in my apartment, when I flipped over to the history channel and saw this show called Alone. Now, for folks who have never seen it, a bunch of contestants get dropped off in some isolated patch of forest up in Canada, but so spaced out that they can't work together, and hence why the title is called Alone. They only get the basic survival equipment and contestants can tap out at any time, and then whoever stays out their longest wins a million dollars. And as we're watching, an argument breaks out between us, over which one of us would win the million dollars, and by the end of the night, we only agreed on one thing. We should head out to the middle of nowhere for some kind of

hardcore camping trip and find out which one of us was king of the wilderness. And then a few months later, the five of us are sitting in a truck headed for a place known as the River of No Return. Now, its full name is the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, but we ended up shortening it to the much more ominous River of No Return to make the trip sound more badass. It's the largest wilderness area of Alaska, and with us living in Boise, it was basically right up there on our doorstep. We drove up to a little town called North Fork and then made her way to the trailhead which should take us to a place called Long Tom Mountain on foot. And this meant our four days hiking there and back and one day's rest on Long Tom Mountain with some fishing and swimming in the

nearby Salmon River while we camp there. That first day's hike was rough and I slept like the dead when we finally made camp for the night. The second day was a little easier after the first and seeing the view from the top of that mountain made every second of that hike feel worth it. We made camp again, grabbed our towels, and then headed down the mountain for that fishing and swimming I told you about, which was probably the most fun I'd had in a long while. It just felt epic, for lack of a better words, you know, like we were making memories, especially when our buddy Dave caught a couple of fish with a collapsible pole that he brought along with him. They weren't huge, but knowing we were about to eat something we'd actually caught made the whole thing feel extra special.

With a few hours of daylight left, we had to back up the mountain feeling refreshed, and then got to work making a fire so we could get those fish cooked. The first thing our buddy Kyle does when he gets back to the camp is crawl into his tent for something, but then he comes back out a second later and says very sarcastically, ha ha, very funny, and then asks which of us took his backpack. Now we respond, I don't know what you're talking about, dude. But Kyle tells us to cut the crap and return his backpack before he starts getting mad. Now again, the four of us tell him that we have zero clue what he's talking about, and that if we're going to prank him, we'd think of something funnier than just hiding his stuff. Kyle kind of stops, but he doesn't calm down.

Then after a little more discussion, we collectively come to a pretty creepy conclusion. Somebody had been walking around our camp while we were down by the river, and they'd chosen to steal Kyle's backpack, along with everything he was holding. We were definitely creeped out because, who was this thief? And had they been following us? Were they dangerous? But I'd also say that the primary thing we were feeling at the time, especially Kyle, was anger. All he had left was his phone, his gun, and his tents, along with a handful of other items that hadn't been inside his bag. What he'd lost amounted to hundreds of dollars worth of clothes.

and hiking equipment, so as I said, he was majorly pissed. After pacing back and forth in anger for a while wondering why me out loud, and rightfully so, something kind of flipped in Kyle and he suddenly says, I'm going to go look for him, meaning the person who stole his stuff. But this split the group almost right down the middle. Kyle and another guy, Jay, wanted to go hunt the thieves down, but me, Dave, and our other friend Sherrod thought that that was a terrible idea. We were mad about the theft, too, but the solution was not to turn our epic hiking vacation into an effing manhunt. Dave suggested we relocate our camp before bedding down for the night, but Kyle outright refused, and we couldn't talk him down on the manhunt thing either.

It got kind of heated at one point, with Kyle calling us a bunch of pansies, and then he and Jay just storm off to go looking for those thieves. Now, I remember Dave saying, it's okay. They won't find anyone, and by the time he comes back, he'll have just calmed down a little. And he was right. Kyle came back maybe a half hour later, much calmer, but majorly bummed out. But I can't blame them. We all were.

We knew our epic survival trip had basically been ruined by some creepy a-haul with sticky fingers. The whole point was to get away from people, so knowing we weren't as alone as we thought we were sucked balls. and the next morning marked the beginning of the third day, the one that we were supposed to spend relaxing by that river, getting ready for the hike back. We tried to make the best of things, but instead of getting to completely chill and enjoy having all that wilderness to ourselves,

we couldn't even leave our damned camp alone. Dave said that he didn't want to do any more fishing, especially if it meant being alone down there by the river. He also said that we should probably gather a bunch more firewood to keep the campfire burning throughout the night. If we weren't going to move camp, it was probably a good idea that we'd take turns keeping watch throughout the night. And I asked if he thought the situation was bad enough

that we needed to post a freaking century like we were at war or something. He said he didn't like how quiet it was when we went out to gather firewood, but the thief might still be out there and it was better to be safe than sorry. That's when it really hit me how much trouble we were in. Dave wasn't a nervous, person, and since he used to go fishing a whole bunch with his dad, he was easily the most experience of the five of us when it came to being out of doors. So to have him say something like that, it just kind of hit different. We each had a pistol with us, so it wasn't like we felt

completely defenseless or anything, but that night, as we all stayed up late in the night shining flashlights out into the darkness, it was definitely the most creeped out that I'd felt in the long, long time. It was only made worse by the fact that Kyle actually wanted a conference We each got a couple of hours of sleep, taking turns, keeping watches agreed to, and then come sunrise, once everyone was on their feet, we agreed to get back on the trails as soon as possible. We still had one more night to spend in that river of no return, and seeing as the situation hadn't taken a term for the worse, we thought it would probably be best to make camp early so we could just rest before having another all-nighter.

In the hike that final camp was very tiring but uneventful. We were still mad, Kyle especially, but after we set up camp in the late afternoon, the mood seemed to just lighten a little. We all agree that whoever stole from us was probably long gone with Kyle's stuff and that the chances of seeing them again were probably non-existent. But on that count, we were proven majorly wrong. Maybe an hour or two before sunset, our friend Sherrod walked off to take a dump. He took his gun along with him because there was still that thought of,

we're not alone out here in the back of our minds. But we never imagined there'd be an issue with him walking off to take a bathroom break, not till a couple of minutes after he walked off, when we suddenly heard him scream. And I say scream, it was more like he yelled a curse at the top of his lungs, which had all of us running in his direction. And he met us halfway, looking scared out of his mind and told us that he'd just seen someone. watching him through the trees.

Sherrod said that for privacy, he walked till he couldn't see us anymore. And then before dropping his pants, he looked around in all directions to make sure the coast was clear. And that's when he spotted him. Sherrod said that the guy was almost a full football field away, just some sort of figure in the distance. But he was easy to spot because his whole face seemed to be painted bright white. He said he didn't stop to see what he was wearing or if he was holding anything. He just sort of bolted the second he saw him. But we all agreed that was probably who'd stolen Kyle's backpack.

I thought Kyle was about to go ripping off through the woods to find that guy, but I guess hearing about the bright white face knocked some of the pep out of him. And it took some of the pep out of me too, especially once we all'd asked Sherrott if he was sure about the whole white painted face thing or if he was messing with us. Sherrod said, in his exact words, On my mama bro, Mother Effer looked like the crow ran out of black.

And as we headed back to camp, Kyle said that he thought the person who stole from us was like some trail rat or something, some scumbag solo hiker who smelled how green we were and took what he wanted when we inevitably left our camp unattended. But to think that he was out there putting white makeup on before stalking us through the woods for probably miles. That majorly changed the game for everyone.

Like I said, we were armed, but we didn't know to what extent our pale-faced friend was armed either. We also didn't know whether or not he was alone or if there was a whole bunch of freaks with painted faces out there, and we just spotted one of them. And that's when we decided to change of schedule. Instead of just sitting there all night with our campfire lighting up like a damn beak, and we decided to walk all the way through the night so we could reach the trailhead and Dave's truck by morning. We packed up our camp again with daylight fading pretty fast and then after maybe a

half an hour or so was full on dark and we were walking by flashlight. To say we were on edge would be the understatement of the century. And Dave later said that he was more scared of us accidentally shooting each other than anything our pale-faced follower might have in store for us. Everyone was doing these little 360s every so often, making sure that there was no one shadowing us, and just the thought of my flashlight catching that pale face through the trees was giving me shivers as we walked. And we walked for hours like that, too, most of the time in total silence, until suddenly it was broken by our friend Jay saying in this quiet but freaked out voice, dude, what the F!

He was standing dead still. And so was the beam of this flashlight as he pointed at something hanging from a nearby tree. It was Kyle's backpack, the straps hanging from two branches that looked like they'd been cut short. But the thing that really caught our attention was how it had been shot, full of arrows. And we gathered around it, our flashlights all converging on that one spot, and no one spoke for a while till I distinctly remember sharing. Sherrod saying, this can't be happening right now. Kyle reached up to take his bag down, and Jay said something about preserving evidence for the

cops or whatever, and then when Sherrod was like, what are the cops going to do? I remember agreeing with him. Whoever was following us, you only saw him when he wanted you to see him, or at least that's how it felt. And the cops weren't going to mount some Bin Laden-style hunt for this pale face when and all he did was ruin a backpack. Kyle ended up taking one of the arrows to the cops, thinking that the numbers and letters on it were some kind of serial number.

But they turned out to be spec numbers, denoting nothing but the model of the arrow. On top of that, the kind he brought in were some of the most commonly sold sporting good arrows in America, so they literally could have come from anywhere. We didn't see anything else in the way back to the trailhead, but we didn't need to. We were done pretending we were on the same level as that guy, whoever he was, because if it had come to some kind of confrontation like Kyle initially wanted, I have a pretty good feeling it was us that would have come off worse. I thought the ride back might be a quiet one, but it wasn't, and the whole way we just talked about what happened. I guess we all kind of have different takes on it, especially when it came to how dangerous the guy actually was, and what would have happened if he wanted a fight instead of just trying to spook us. But the one thing we agreed on was that for our next trip, we were staying the hell away from the river of no return.

My name's Katie. I'm almost 30, and I'm a huge fan. I went through a really stressful and scary time last year, and your videos helped me so much. So I thought a good way of thanking you would be to write an account of what happened to me, so you can share it with your viewers. So in April of last year, I was lying in bed and scrolling through Instagram, when a lot of the time. message request suddenly appeared in my DMs. I get scammers sending me sketchy links from time to time, and I usually just block them. But this time, the profile looked legit and the message just sort of said, hi. I decided to scope out the profile a little bit, and when I did, I saw a belong to a girl who lived in the same city as me. Then, since we were roughly the same age, I figured that

there might be a connection there. I replied saying, sorry, do we know each of us? other, with a little smiley face too, so she knew that I wasn't being rude. It came through two minutes later, but when I opened it, I saw it wasn't a text message, but a voice note that was like a minute long. I had no reason not to press play. I'd heard scammers calling sweet old ladies pretending to be the IRS, and nothing about them sending voice notes. So, I pressed play, and my God, do I wish I hadn't. The first of the first. The First words were, hello Katie. And as soon as I heard them, I felt this full body sinking feeling, like I wanted to bury myself into the mattress and hide. The voice obviously wasn't human. It was

some kind of really basic-sounding AI thing that sounded almost like a robot. Maybe hearing it in some other contexts wouldn't be all that scary, but hearing it in bed, all alone except for my seven-year-old daughter in the room next door, it just about scared the hell out of me. It started out with, Hello, Katie. I've been watching you for quite some time, and I've decided you have to die. But not just you.

Your daughter needs to die too. It went on and on about how someone was going to make me watch as they killed her, and then a whole bunch of other stuff that made me sick to my stomach. But the thing that really scared me, the thing that had me rushing to the window and scanning the street outside, was when he started describing the house we lived in. It wasn't just the house either. Whoever made that recording knew what my daughter looked like.

He knew her name, and he knew what elementary school she went to. The message ended with a few more threats about how it was going to die and then signed off with. Enjoy your final days, because I'm going to enjoy ending them. When the message ended, I just lay there for a little bit of a little. minute, wondering what the hell I should do. I knew I needed to call the cops, but I also knew all they'd do was take my report and be on their way. I needed someone to come over and stay with me, someone who could make me feel safe. So, I called Joey. Joey and I had been dating on and off for about a year, and while we'd officially broken up a few months back, we somehow fell back

into the same old dating pattern. Joey was close with my daughter, and My dad liked him, and he was pretty handy with repairs and maintenance stuff too. So it was nice to have him around. The only issue was his drinking habits, because when he drank, he became a totally different person, someone I didn't want around my daughter, and he refused to straight up quit it. He cut down a bunch, which was the reason that I still took his calls or hung out with him. And then when I got that voice message that night, he was the first person I thought to call. He drove over as quickly as he could, so maybe 20 minutes after calling him, he was sitting in my TV room being my shoulder to cry on.

I didn't want to hear the voice message again, so he took my phone into another room to listen to it, and when he came back, he looked this sort of mix of really scared and really mad. He told me we needed to call the cops, and while obviously I already knew that, he gave me a ton of hope by telling me about all the new techniques they had to catch cyberstalkers. Ten years before, they'd have told me to just block the person and move on. But now, they had whole departments dedicated to tracing and arresting those responsible. He said he'd watched a documentary on it a while back, and that if I went to the cops, we could stop it before things got out of control.

I told him he could sleep on the couch if he wanted to, but he didn't. They spent the rest of the night watching the street outside and reading about the experiences of others who dealt with cyberstalking to give us ideas on how to fight it. He had to work in the morning too, and while I called in sick, Joey powered through before coming back to check on us once he clocked out. I called the cops that morning, and then a few days later, they sent over a detective who worked exclusively with victims of cyberstalking. She laid out the playbook of what I was to do, and fortunately, it didn't include any of the delete, block, and move on stuff that I was actually worried about. It was actually the total opposite, because the detective talked all about how I needed to keep records of each message.

I had to save every voice note, every piece of text I was sent, and all the usernames from the various accounts my stalker was using to harass me. And boy, did they harass me. The fresh Instagram accounts came thick and fast, each sending what looked like innocent messages so the app didn't filter them out. But I knew as soon as I accepted the message request, a voice note would arrive and that same process repeated itself every time I did. I didn't listen to any of them.

I just kept them in my inbox so the cops would be able to. But my stalker must have also figured out I wasn't listening to them because they quickly switched up their methods. late one night, right as I was finishing up my skincare routine, I realized I had a miscall from an unknown number. It wasn't a no-call or ID number, just one I didn't recognize, and since they called so late, I figured it was important enough for me to listen to the voicemail they left. The detective I'd spoken to had called me out of hours once or twice, so I figured that I might have been someone from the department trying to catch me before bedtime. But it wasn't.

It was another one of those robotic voice notes. I only listened for a few seconds before I hung up, but that was all I needed. I broke down crying, then called Joey to see if he'd come over again, and just like that first time, he drove over as quickly as he could to be my shoulder to cry on. He was so amazing that night. I cried so loud that it woke my daughter up, so she was crying too by the time he arrived. The first thing that he did was calm her down and get her back to bed. telling her how everything was going to be just fine.

The next morning, Joey drove my daughter to school while I called the cyber-stalking detective. I gave her the phone number the voicemail came from, saying maybe she could trace it or whatever. She thanked me before saying that sometimes cyberstalkers just get bored and move on to someone else. But my stalker didn't get bored. Instead, they escalated. I actually thought things were getting better at first because the number of instanties Instagram messages slowed down a little and didn't get any more voicemails either. But then one night, right around the same time of night as both voice messages had arrived,

I heard a super loud banging on my door. It wasn't just someone trying to be heard either. Someone was trying to scare me. I was upstairs when it happened, tally off after taking a shower and my daughter was staying with my mom who volunteered to take care of her while things blew over. I was so glad that she was there that night too because that banging scared the hell out of me. I slammed my bedroom door closed and sat against it after grabbing my phone. That time, I didn't call Joey first.

I called the cops instead. I told the dispatcher I had to stalker and that I thought he'd escalated and come to my house for the first time. The dispatcher asked if I feared for my life. Then when I said I did, she sent two patrol cars over to take a look around. The whole time, whoever was outside, kept hammering on my door while the dispatcher kept me on the line with her. And then suddenly, the banging just stopped. The next thing I heard was the police sirens, just a short burst to let you know that they were there. The dispatcher asked if I heard it.

And then when I said, yes, she told me to stay put while the two officers searched the outside of my property. A few minutes later, the dispatcher told me she was ending the call and that I was to head downstairs and opened the door for those two cops, and I thanked her, and then did as she asked. The next day was a Saturday, but I managed to talk to the cyber-stocking detective a little on the phone, and she told me it was best that I stayed someplace else for a while, which was how I ended up sleeping in my mom's spare bedroom with my daughter. And that little reunion was a silver lining, but it didn't last long because when I next returned home to grab some more clothes, I discovered someone had broken in.

It didn't look like they'd stolen anything, and they hadn't smashed anything either, but when I walked into the kitchen, I saw someone had pinned a note to the fridge. It was a printout, not handwritten, and all it said was, I see you, with a text message smiley face emoji. And that was probably the worst part of that whole period for me, knowing that I couldn't go home, and I leaned a lot on my mom for support, but Joey was a huge help too. He offered to let me and my daughter stay at this place,

but I figured it was more comforting for her to be around her grandmother. It also meant that we had a place that we could be alone, Joey and me, I mean, which was something we both appreciated. And that's how I lived, for almost two and a half weeks until the cyber-stalking detective suddenly called one day and asked if she could pay me a visit. We arranged to meet at my mom's place, and when she arrived, she told me she had good news and bad news.

But the good news was that the police had found my stalker. I could have just about jumped for joy in that moment, and I remember sitting there with this big smile on my face after she told me. But the detective didn't seem to share my happiness. She told me my stalker had been smart and had used a whole bunch of computer wizardry to make sure almost everything they did was totally untraceable. They'd just made one face.

mistake. Because when they downloaded those pictures of the girl I thought that I might have known, the one from the first voice message, he didn't scrub the metadata from them. This meant the cops could trace where the device images were uploaded from, and bingo. That's how they got him. The detective then explained that they were planning on arresting my stalker that same day, but before they did, they wanted me to hear the news from them rather than through the grapevine. I just wanted her to tell me who it was so bad, so bad that I didn't stop to think why learning their identity might be bad news for me. But then, she just came out and said it.

There's no easy way to say this, Katie. I'm so sorry to be the one who has to tell you, but the person's stalking you is your friend Joey. My mind just went totally blank for a second. And then once I could finally form a coherent thought, I decided that she must have been confused. you somehow. I reminded her that Joey was my ex-boyfriend, someone I was super close with, and how we were actually on the verge of getting back together since he'd been so helpful and supportive. I told her that she had to be mistaken, and I clearly remember the look of pity that she gave me after I did. She rehashed a little of what she'd said about how they'd figured out

it was him. They said if it wasn't Joey that had created the first Insta profile on his computer, then they needed to figure out who did. And that gave me this little ray of hope, that it was all just a big mistake, and it wasn't someone I loved that had been terrorizing me. But once the cops visited Joey's place and told him he was looking at jail time, he confessed everything after they hauled him off to the station.

It only felt real after the detective came over another time and showed me the video of Joey confessing in the interview room, but there was one part that she said that would be of particular interest to me, and that was the part where Joey explained why he did it. He sounded like he'd been crying as he told the cop interviewing him that he did it, in his words, so she'd need me.

The cop sounded like he sympathized with him, but the detective swore was just an act to get Joey to talk more. She also said that since Joey had no priors, and he'd cooperated and confessed to everything, he most likely wasn't going to prison. He'd probably be able to make bail somehow too, but the judge at his hearing would issue an emergency restraining order, preventing him from coming anywhere near me. And if he did, he'd go straight to jail to await trial there. And that was the first good news I'd heard in a really long time.

Actual good news, I mean. Obviously, I wanted Joey out of my life. I wanted to forget I even met him, and it made me sick to think that we'd slept together while he was secretly. making my life a living hell. Thankfully, once all our friends heard about what he did, Joey ended up leaving town and moving someplace across the country. It felt good knowing the whole thing had ruined his life, just like it had ruined mine for a while.

And wherever the hell he went, I hope he rots there. A well-built wardrobe is about pieces that work together and hold up over time. That's what Quince does best. Premium materials, thoughtful design, and everyday staples that feel easy to wear and easy to rely on, even as the weather shifts. Quince has the everyday essentials I love with quality that lasts, organic cotton sweaters, polos for every occasion, lighter jackets that keep you warm in the changing seasons.

The list goes on. Quince works directly with top factories and cuts out the middlemen so you're not paying for brand markup. Just quality clothing. Everything is built to hold up to daily wear and still look good season after season. season. Plus, they only partner with factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. I recently got my hands on a pair of black Warren stretch athletic tapered jeans and ultra-stretch 24-7 smart chinos, which allows me to tackle all my exercises while looking super fresh, as well as some micronized creatine monohydrates to boost my gains.

Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash read for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash read. Free shipping and 365-day returns, Quince.com slash read. My name is Dr. Fernando Castillo, and for 17 years I worked for the National Parks Administration here in Argentina. I was posted all over the country, but most of my time was spent in a place known as Gran Chaco. El Grand Chaco, or the Chaco Plains, as you might call them in English, is an area of semi-arid lowlands spanning several countries here in South America. It's a mix of savannas and thorn scrub, but also subtropical forests, palm groves, and wetlands, and is home to thousands of unique and rare species of plants and animals.

It is an incredibly beautiful place, but since the 1970s, the region has been plagued by illegal laws, and forest fires set by cattle ranchers who want more area for their cattle to graze. In my final year of employment, Grand Chaco lost tens of thousands of hectares of forest, and I've seen the heartbreaking effects of men's greed with my own two eyes, but I've also seen far, far worse things in the forest of Grand Chaco, and of all of them, this is the one that haunts me the most. During the late summer of 1991, I was out doing some survey work around 20 miles north of a little town called Fuerta Esperanza. After crossing a long and desolate patch of flat scrubland, I reached a section of forest composed of Algarobo and pink trumpet trees.

The Algarobo are particularly favorites of illegal loggers, so I wanted to make sure that this forest was untouched by their hands. Now I spent around an hour walking around, making notes and marking the area on my map, and then once I was happy that the forest was in good condition, I started making my way back towards where I'd left my ATV. Gran Chaco is a very wild place, meaning many of the forest do not have any well-defined trails or paths to walk on. Even if they did, the nature of my work means I have to walk places that are infrequently traveled, so sometimes I lose my footing among the many roots and fallen branches. and this trip was no different.

Most of the time I merely stumble when catching my foot on something, but on this occasion, I caught my foot immediately after hopping over a thick branch which had fallen among some knee-high grass. I was totally unprepared for the second impediment and completely off my balance, so after my foot caught on, I was sent tumbling into the grass in front of me with a very loud crunch. Notice how I described it as a crunch, not a thud, because I didn't fall directly into the dirt and grass.

Something broke my fall, something hard but kind of brittle. I didn't check to see what it was at first because my priority was to inspect the fresh grazes on my forearms and elbows. But then after picking myself up, I saw that I hadn't landed on a pile of fallen branches. I'd landed almost directly on a pile of bones. Since Jaguars are very active in Grand Chaco, I initially thought that, that the bones must have belonged to a jaguar kill, perhaps a deer or some type of pig. But upon further inspection, I found that they were too large to be a pig of any kind,

and too much like a monkey to be a deer. The forests are home to howl their monkeys, too, so when I saw bones that looked remarkably like those of a human hand, I thought they belonged to some dead monkey. But then I saw the skull, and there was no mistaking things anymore. I had landed on a human skeleton. and one that was filthy and moss-eaten, and when I realized that, a powerful feeling of mortal dread came over me. I picked myself up and crossed myself before brushing myself off.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the first time that I'd found a human body hidden among the wilds of Gran Chaco. But it was the first that I'd found spontaneously, as it not on a search, and the first that I'd found in such a terrible state of decomposition. I carefully flattened some of the grass around it and then walked around it in a circle, studying it as I went. It looked like it had been there a long time, like the ground was already in the process of swallowing it up with dirt and grass. But then as I walked, I stood on something else that felt hard under my boot, and on closer inspection, I found a second skeleton just feet away from the first.

It's hard to describe the feeling of abject terror one feels upon viewing huge. human remains, unless you yourself have experienced the same sensation. But to see two sets of human remains in such quick succession, it made me fear for my life. It made me wonder what had happened there for two people to lose their lives on almost the same spot, and the dread that I felt was only amplified when I found the third skeleton, and then the fourth, and then the fifth. I came to realize that there were human remains for a hundred meters in every direction. In every couple of meters I saw the eyeless sockets of a skull as they stared back at me from the undergrowth.

And this was no ancient indigenous burial site either, as some of the remains came complete with half-wrotted boots or sneakers lying close by. The place was a cemetery without graves, and I feared that whatever fate had befallen these poor souls would soon befall me. I left that place as quickly but carefully as I could, not wanting to befall. to disturb any more sets of human remains, and then drove straight back to the place my group was headquartered in Fuerto Esperanza. When I told our station chief what I'd seen, he demanded we drive back out onto Gran Chaco so he could see for himself. He didn't think that I was lying or mistaken. He just simply wished to see such a thing for himself. And when we arrived, he was just as horrified as I was, and before we departed, we set a prayer for the dead

together. And after that, it was out of our hands as the federal police stepped in to carry out their investigation. They are Argentine as equivalent of the FBI, and in coordination with our group from the National Parks Administration, they were able to paint a picture of what had happened to the many lost souls that we found. From around 10 years in the 70s and 80s, the Argentine government collaborated with several other South American countries for what was called Operation Condor. Condor was the codename given to the tactics of anti-communist repression that these countries employed. And then along with jailing activists and assassinating politicians,

the Argentine security services began what came to be known as Los Vuelos de la Muerta, or in English, the death flights. And this is when they would load a dozen prisoners onto an airplane or helicopter, fly them out into the middle of nowhere, and then throw them out of the aircraft to disappear them. Thousands of people were murdered this way, and to this day, many of their bodies have never been recovered. But as much as I am proud to have helped return many lost souls to their rightful resting

places, there are still many more who remain missing. And although I am happy to have helped reunite these poor people with their long, grieving families, I'm haunted by the sight of what became of them. In some nights, I dream that I, too, am being thrown to my death from the whole. of an airplane. My name's Bradley, and in 2008, I was working for a big insurance firm here in Birmingham. We sold insurance to big construction firms, and I was paid very well for what was basically just a junior role.

I was living the dream. I was young, single, with a lot of disposable income, even for London. But then came the big short, as you know, and everything went down the toilet. I lost my job just days after the market pooed the bed. I had a bit of Dosh saved up, so I wasn't as hard up as some other people. But as the months went by and the job market didn't improve, that little nest egg of mine kept getting smaller and smaller. Once I was eligible, I applied for job seekers allowance, meaning that I got money from the government if I could prove that I was looking for work. But that only went so far and my savings kept on shrinking as I held out for another finance job.

Then finally, once the situation started looking critical, I did something very silly. I got in touch with an old mate of mine named Darren and asked him for a big favor. Darren and I had been mates all through school but had drifted apart once we got to university because Darren got mad into Ganja. He wasn't a waste man with it. He had a proper job and all that, but after work, he'd just zone out and smoke loads of Ganja playing GTA4. and I'd never even touch the stuff. I hated the idea of what smoking would do to my lungs,

so imagine Darren's surprise when I called him up one day and asked if he could get me some weed. So I went over, and then once we'd caught up a little bit, I basically started grilling him on how much weed he smoked a week and how much it cost and where he got it from. And he asked if I wanted to try out smoking for the first time, but I said no, that I wanted to try out selling it instead. I'll never forget his face.

He literally couldn't believe his ears. But after I told him about my money trouble and how it was only supposed to be a temporary thing while I was out of work, it started to make a bit more sense to him. We talked until late about almost every aspect of the trade. Darren had never sold wheat himself, but he knew a fair bit about it. And then after a call to his dealer to get his approval, Darren gave me his number and we set up a meeting. I started selling a few ounces a week to Darren and friends of his that I knew personally, but only that select group of people to keep things small, safe, and profitable. But after a while, they convinced me to allow people I didn't know to call over.

Now, I was dead against it at first, but when I did the maths and realized that I'd earned hundreds more a week with just a few more customers, I changed my mind fast. By the time my customer base hit double figures, I was able to cover the price of everything job seekers allowance wouldn't, which was a massive weight off my shoulders. I kept up with my job-seeking commitments, though. I genuinely wanted to get back into work, but I didn't think anything would come along for quite a while. And then one day, just as markets started to recover, I landed a job. The pay wasn't as generous as my first job before the crash, and I was looking at a long probation period, but getting back into the office was

preferable to having to visit the job center every two weeks, which was so depressing, it used to sap the life out of me. I took the position and carried on selling weed to Darren and company until my first pay slip arrived. Then when it did, I tried deleting the dealer's number. I just couldn't do it. I was making hundreds of pounds a week for doing next to nothing, and I was doing it in a way that I thought was safe and secure. So when it came to giving it up, all I could think was, why should I? I sometimes wonder if I'd stop right then and there. I'd have avoided what was coming.

But a part of me thinks that it wouldn't have mattered, and it was already too late. Now cut to about three or four months after I got back into work, and I'm still selling Ganja to that small group of customers. It was a Wednesday night, and I'd been asleep for about three hours when a sudden noise from downstairs had me jumping out of bed. My alarm clock said 203, a number I'll never forget, as the same sound repeated itself from downstairs. It was a sharp bang, bang, bang, of a fist slamming into my door, and then when I went up to the top of the stairs, I heard the one thing that I'd prayed that I'd never hear. Police, open up the door.

I'd feared that moment so much over the past few months, but I'd also done a lot to prepare for it. Having put so much thought into my various hiding places, I was very confident the police could search my entire house and not find a single banknote or a single baggy. So I made one of the worst mistakes of my entire life and I walked downstairs to open the door. Before I reached it, the man on the other side of the door gave me another loud bang and announced himself as police again. I told him, all right, I'm coming and then started prepping myself to act all innocent. I undid both locks, nice and slow too, so I had time to calm myself down a bit more. But then when I opened the door, I just about filled my boxers with fear. Because it wasn't the police.

It was a load of men in mass holding tools as weapons. I looked at them for what felt like seconds, but was probably only a fraction of one, and then tried slamming the door in their faces, but it was too slow. The man who'd been banging stuck his boot out, stopping me from being able to close it, and then another one of them rushed forward to either kick the door or slam his shoulder into it because the next thing I know, the frame is flying out of my grip, and they're shoving their way inside. I tried running to my kitchen because the back door was there, but since I kept that one locked too, I was still trying to turn the key when one of the guys rushed in and grabbed me.

I tried shoving him off and fighting him, but he had a hammer, and one blow from that was all it took to get me to give up. I had my back up against the kitchen's back door, hands raised to try and fend off another hammer blow, while shouting about how they can take whatever they want if they didn't hurt me anymore. I thought it was just a very aggressive burglary, and that after taking my TV and laptop, they'd be on their way. But I was wrong, dead wrong. They all had balaclavas on and mostly wore black or other dark colors, so the only way that I could tell them apart was by what they were wearing or carrying. And that's how, when the one with the hammer backed off a bit, I recognized the fella who'd

been banging on my doors as he stepped in. He pointed a wrench at me and then told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn't cooperate, they were going to kill me. I just nodded like, yeah, okay. and then he grabbed me by the hair and dragged me into the front room. And once I was there, I saw one of the men pull out a length of blue plastic cord from the front pocket of his hoodie. I started to panic again, because it was obvious they were planning to tie me up, but all it took was another couple of threats before I decided the rope was preferable to the hammer.

I thought they wanted me tied up so I couldn't cause problems for them. I also wouldn't be able to phone the police until long after they'd left. But again, I was wrong. They had other plans for me. They tied my wrist behind my back, then tied my ankles and knees together before pushing me onto the couch. I told them all a second time to take whatever they wanted, and I thought that they go about carrying off the TV and all that to what I assumed was a van waiting outside. But instead, they started asking me where my stash spots were.

For the second time that night I got that horrible sick feeling, and it came when I realized that my big secret, the one I'd worked so hard to protect, wasn't a secret anymore. I tried playing ignorant at first, saying that I didn't know what they were talking about, but that didn't wash. One of the bloke started bashing my legs with something heavy, and when I screamed, another one clamped his hand over my mouth. They kept on hitting me over and over, while I screamed into that guy. eye's hand. But when they asked me again where my stash was, I somehow found the will to play

ignorant again. I suppose that was the thought of losing all that money I had hidden away, which by that point was a couple of thousand pounds that kept my mouth shut and I was amazed that I had the minerals in me to withstand a round of torture. But when they up the ante and threatened to start cutting off my toes with a pair of pliers, I broke. I screamed at them to stop as soon as I felt cold metal on one of my toes, and then told them exactly where they needed to look to find both my money and the ounce bags of weed that I had hidden away upstairs. Two of the guys kept watching over me while the other ran upstairs to grab everything. I heard them rummaging around for a bit, and then suddenly I heard one of them shout found

it. A few seconds later they came back downstairs holding the bags I kept my cash and Gonja in, and then once the lead bloke was happy with everything there, he ordered his boys out of the house, but not before telling one of them to put me to sleep. I thought that was it, that they were going to kill me to make sure that there was no witnesses. I was almost relieved when I saw the bloke who approached me draw back his fist in preparation to punch me, and then when he did, it landed right on my jaw, and at that moment everything started to go fuzzy. When I next opened my eyes, the masked men were gone and the house was quiet again.

I remember being robbed, but somehow tied up had slipped my mind, so it was only when I tried to move again that I realized I couldn't. I started to panic again, because I realized that even though I'd be missed at work in the next couple of hours, my bosses wouldn't jump straight to calling the police. They'd just assumed that I'd pulled a sick or something. And if I didn't give myself some help now, I could be stuck. in the house for God knows how long, waiting for someone to knock at the door or realized I was missing. The thoughts scared the crap out of me, and even though it heard like a bastard to fight against

the ropes, I did everything I could to loosen them. It was no good, though, and by the time I kept it cutting into my wrists, I knew that I'd have to try something else. I ended up hopping over to my home phone, which sat on the coffee table in the back room. I sat myself down on the floor, kicked it off the table so the handset got a dial tone, and then I called the only person whose phone number I knew off by heart, the dealer I used to buy from. I had to try a few times because he didn't answer the first few times I called, but then finally, after feeling my hope shranked down to almost nothing, he answered the phone with a very groggy, yo, and I told him it was an emergency, that he needed to come over to my place right away. He replied that he had his kid with

him so he couldn't make it. And I reckon that he thought that it was after a few fresh ounces, but when I told him what had happened, he said he'd come over as soon as possible. I told him where I'd hidden a spare back door key in the garden, and then after he hung up, I just laid there, praying that he'd show up. About half an hour later, I heard someone climbing over the back fence, and that's when I got up and hopped towards the sliding doors in the back room, and I felt this deep feeling of relief when I saw who walked to the back fence. I into the garden. It was the dealer, true to his word, and after he unlocked that back door, he helped cut away the ropes and free me. He couldn't stay long. He really did have his kid with

him and she was asleep in the backseat of his car, but after I explained what had happened, he actually told me I was lucky. He knew about one fellow who'd come away with a nasty scar on his chest, where the gang had taken a hot clothing iron to him, and another who never walked properly again after a gang smashed one of his knees to pieces. I remember asking him, What do I do now? I can't phone the police again? And all he said back was,

move into the other side of the city if possible, because once they've found you, they always come back. And I took his advice, and I moved house as soon as possible. It wrecked me financially because obviously I was still under a contract I had the fight to be free of, but wild horses couldn't have stopped me moving because there was no way that I was going to risk going through that again. I finally stopped selling too. I'd always known that I wasn't cut out for that life, and that's why I promised myself it'd be a temporary thing,

but seeing and experiencing the brutal realities up close was another thing entirely. There are some bad, bad men in the world, but it's nice to know I'm not one of them. Just over 20 years ago now, when our daughter was still in diapers, my wife and I moved out of our one-bedroom apartment and into what we called our starter home. It was a two-bedroom townhouse right on the boundary between the city and the suburbs, and we were in love with it from the moment we attended viewing. We lived there for almost 10 years, and it was a great place to live, and I've got a lot of very happy memories of our daughter's childhood in that house. But it's also the place where I experience one of the most frightening and disturbing things of my entire life. The street that we lived on was kind of out of the way, and that meant peace, quiet, and a very low crime rate. It was serene compared to the neighborhood of our old apartment, and that was a place where you basically had to be on your toes all the time.

So after a few months of living there, I slowly started to let my guard down. I still kept all the doors locked at night, and I still kept all the doors locked at night, and I still kept my gun ready to go in its lockbox, but I stopped having to be so suspicious of crazy neighbors and local weirdos, and it was great. But then imagine the terror that I felt when I woke up in the middle of the night in our peaceful new neighborhood and heard noises coming from downstairs. My wife was asleep next to me and our daughter was in her crib just a few feet away from our bed, so I knew whoever was downstairs must have broken in somehow. I woke... I'm sorry, guys, this has been such a tough night.

I woke up my wife, told her what was going on, and then told her to call the cops while I made sure the home invader didn't make it upstairs. Then I made for my closet, grab my gun from the lockbox, and then crept out into the upstairs hallway as quietly as possible. Looking back on it, I can remember the exact point I changed my mind on what I was going to do. I knew that I didn't want to kill anybody because, no matter the circumstances, I didn't want that on my call. conscience. But I also wanted this mother effort to pay for breaking into my family's home and putting my girls in danger. So that's when I made up my mind to try and surprise them, and then keep them where they were under pain of death till the cops showed up and arrested them. Once I was maybe two-thirds of the way down the stairs, still creeping quieter than a mouse, I heard noises coming from

our kitchen. I figured they'd be in the living room where all the most valuable stuff was, but But when I heard sounds from the kitchen, I realized that I'd have to creep all the way down the first floor corridor without alerting whoever was there. My heart was thumping like a drum as I walked barefoot along the wooden floor, and I seriously struggled to maintain my cool as I heard the moving around. I froze when I heard the faint sound of a chair leg scraping against the linoleum floor, and listening as I heard the sound of someone opening and closing cabinets. I guess that should have been a clue right there, that someone was digging through our kitchen cabinets and not our living room with its brand new DVD player.

But at the time, I was too hopped up on adrenaline to think about anything other than my plan, and things didn't drop until I peaked around the kitchen doorway. I had my gun ready and was about to tear around that area like I was in a movie shouting freeze. But when I peaked around the corner and into the barely lit kitchen, there was just enough light coming through the windows for me to see that it wasn't some six-foot jailbird armed to the teeth. It was a little kid. He was wearing what looked like shorts, but nothing on top, and he was standing on a chair while digging through our snack cabinet. I watched him stuffing the pocket of his shorts with candy and chocolate bars,

and as I did, all the anger, just went out of me and was replaced by a kind of sadness. I didn't want to frighten him, not just because he was a kid who was, from his height, looked to be no older than six or seven, but because I was scared that he might fall off the chair and hit his head on the corner of the kitchen table. I thought about whispering something softly,

just to gently get his attention, but I decided that that would probably come off as creepy and maybe scare him even worse than just yelling something at him. but then it occurred to me to just switch on the kitchen light. The second I did, the kid's head spun around to look at me and he just froze looking at me. All I said was, it's okay, it's okay, buddy. And then I asked him super softly if he was hungry. The kid didn't answer, but even if he had, I'm not sure that I'd have heard him.

I tried to stay very smiley and friendly looking too so as not to alarm him. But once I got a good look at the kid, that smile was wiped from my face. Like I said, the kid was bare-chested, wearing shorts. But he was bare foot too, and his hair was really short, like someone had given him a buzz cut in the last couple of weeks. But what really caught my attention were all the scars he had all over his chest and arms. They were small enough to be cigarette burns, but they also weren't circular either, so Lord knows what caused them.

There were a lot of them too, maybe two dozen spread all over, but that's not all this kid had on his body. Because on his face, neck, and right arm were these small black symbols, and that poor kid had been tattooed. I asked the kid what his name was, trying to get him talking and calm him down, but he didn't talk, not once. He just got down off the chair very slow with his pocket stuffed with candy and then stood very steep. still and stared at me. I asked him if he'd run away from home. He stayed quiet, but his eyes darted over to our pantry in the back door beyond. I couldn't see inside the pantry from where I was standing in the kitchen doorway, so when his eyes went there, the first thing I thought was, holy crap, he's not alone. I jumped back from the kitchen doorway and raise my gun towards

the pantry, half expecting the monster who scarred up that kid, to come bouncing around the corner with a weapon of his own raised. But the only thing I saw was the kid goat tearing past my field of view and ran into the pantry. I waited a second before moving to peek inside, and then when I did, the last I saw of the kid was his feet just sort of wriggling through the doggie door. The doggy door had been installed before we moved in, and since we planned to get a dog in the near future we actually kept it. It was so bizarre to me that if I'd have woken up right then and the whole thing had been nothing but a dream, I would not have been surprised at all. But it was real. So after taking a few seconds to process everything, I called the cops to tell

them what happened. Now, just to be clear, I didn't call 911 to report a break-in or trespassing or anything like that. I called because I saw a kid who had been subjected to some horrific physical abuse. He needed to be found and he needed to be rescued. Once I told her it was safe and that the cops were stopping by, my wife came downstairs to make some coffee. And these two uniformed cops stopped by about an hour later and I told them everything I could about the kid's appearance and how he'd acted. Now one of them asked if I'd noticed anything strange about any of my neighbors or noticed any behavior that suggested that they might be hiding something. And the answer to that was definitely no. I hadn't met anyone who set off any alarm bells, but the cop then suggested that

if the kid was climbing through these doggie doors to steal candy, he could have been starving after being on the run for days. But on the run from who, you know? What kind of person treats a child like that? I wish the cops a ton of luck before I left, because good God did I want them to find that kid, and more than 20 years later, there's not a day to be a day. that goes by that I'm not reminded of him in some way. So almost 15 years ago now, before my husband and I settled down and started a family, I went on a horse drive up in Montana. I'd always been something of a horse girl growing up, so it had always been a dream of mine to do something like that. So in the spring of 2009, I booked a guest spot on a cattle drive organized by a ranch up in southern

Montana. I flew out to Billings and was picked up at the airport with several other guest riders. Some of them come from as far away as Europe and since the drive out to the ranch was just over two hours, we had plenty of time to get to know each other on the way. The ranch cook fed us dinner when we arrived and as we ate, our guide explained what we'd be doing for the next five days. We'd head out on a few warm-up rides to get us used to working as a team and then we talked to some of the wranglers about what it's like to live out there and do the job they do. And then finally, we'd use the wrangling skills we'd learn to drive a herd of 150 horses south of the border to their summer home in Wyoming.

It was said to be the complete cowboy experience, and to me, it sounded like heaven on earth. But if the beginning was heaven, then the end might as well have been hell. After that first night on the ranch, we woke up super early for breakfast and then went down to the stables to meet our horses for the week. Mine was a caramel-colored Mustang named Chip. She had a black mane and ermine spot, so combined with her coat, she had the color of a chocolate chip cookie, hence the name. I loved riding Chip, and she was an incredible animal, calm and disciplined, but full of energy too. And then since we were all pretty experienced riders, it wasn't long before we were riding into the heart of the Montana wilderness. As we wrote out,

I felt like I was back on the wild frontier, more like a hundred years before, and the feeling of freedom was nothing short of exhilarating. Then once we were done, we rode back towards the ranch at a much faster pace before spending the night there. The next morning we were back in the saddle, headed north towards the plains. We were looking for a herd of horses roaming north of the ranch, but when we started out, we couldn't even see them. We had to ride for an hour across almost featureless planes.

before they finally came into view. And when they did, it was probably one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. More than 150 prior mountain Mustangs were spread out across the horizon, with coats ranging from Bay to Red to Palamino. They were the descendants of Spanish horses that escaped New Mexico in the 1600s, a piece of living history right there in front of me and was our job to wrangle them back towards the ranch. But that's the first of the first of the The first drive was probably the hardest ride of my whole life. The Wranglers didn't mess around. They talked to us like they would each other, which for an adopted city girl like me, was not something I was used to. Every other word was a curse word. They rode like they were mad at the

herd, and if you slipped out of position and you didn't do what you needed to do, boy, they let you know about it. When the ranch finally came into view, we stopped for some lunch and to talk about how we did. We drove the horses some more in the afternoon than as the sun started to set, we rode back to the ranch to get some well-deserved dinner. I remember the Wranglers telling us to get as much rest as possible because not only did we have a wake-up call at 4.30 a.m. the next morning, but the next few nights would be spent on bed rolls out in the plains. I didn't get to sleep till around 10 on account of how excited I was, so I was groggy as hell when I woke up. But after a of cowboy coffee and a few pancakes, I was ready to hit the saddle again. We found the herd,

and then started pushing them through the ranch in a kind of semi-circle. The old cold tried to break from the herd every so often, and I was just giddy at the prospect of getting to canter one back towards the herd. When the time came, it felt every bit as good as I thought it would, and then we kept driving all day long till it came time to camp. We set up a high line for the horses, is basically a kind of clothesline that you can tie them to, and then set up our tents in a rough circle around the spot that we built our campfire. We ate some basic campfire food, talked about the day's ride, and then as night began to fall,

people headed for their tents as the day's exhaustion began to set in. I was exhausted, too, but I couldn't sleep. Looking up at the night sky, hearing the horses snorting behind us, and the fire crackling in front of us, I just didn't want it to end. so I stayed up with one of the Wranglers who also couldn't sleep. I can remember exactly what we were talking about, flavors of beef jerky, when something flew over my head and landed a few feet short from the campfire. I screamed, which woke people up and brought them from their tents.

Then as we crowded round to see what it was, I remember how this chill came over the camp. It was the back half of a jack rabbit, torn clean, through the middle. A bloody set of legs and tail lying near the campfire. One of the Wranglers said that it might have been a bird of some kind, having accidentally dropped its nighttime meal while flying over the camp. But me and that night owl Wrangler knew otherwise. It came in at an arc, not like it had fallen. It's almost like it had been thrown. The Wranglers told us to stay put, then immediately fanned out on horseback to make sure the area

was clear. They returned without having seen anything, and they had to do their best to calm us down by saying it was someone just trying to scare us. The town of Fort Smith wasn't all that far away, so it was possible some jerk-off hunter just wanted to spook the tourists for kicks. But no matter the reason, our next camp would be 20 miles south, and since the Wranglers carried personal protection, we had little to nothing to worry about. And that seemed to put us somewhat, at ease. And then we managed to get a couple of hours sleep before getting back in the saddle again come morning. The mood on that morning's ride was much different than the first. It made for a tense atmosphere, but we focused on doing our jobs, and for the first time, we actually managed to impress

a couple of them. We rode all morning, crossed the river in the afternoon, and then finished the day almost 22 miles from where we started. Over dinner, that German guy with us, asked one of the riders if he thought that we'd find the other half of that rabbit that night. He actually laughed at the question and the German guy joined him, because while it was technically possible to have tracked and followed us, as we were driving 150 horses after all, it was unlikely anyone was that dedicated to harassing us. Unlikely, but not impossible, as we soon discovered. And aside from one of the Wranglers who was keeping watch, we were all asleep in our tents when we heard the horses suddenly start to make a lot of noise.

I remember sitting up in time to hear the watchman yell, Who's out there? And then as I was always climbing out of my tent to see what was happening, the horses started getting even louder, like something was out there spooking them. One of the Wranglers came out of his tent, but before he can turn his flashlight on them to see what all the ruckus is about, we heard the sound of galloping hooves.

Then as the light hits them, we watch an absolute horror as our group of 18-horrors, horses come bolting right towards camp. Some of the wranglers ran to try and shoe them off, but it was too late, and one of them got knocked to the ground pretty bad by a stampeding stallion, but that was nowhere near the worst of it. Some of my fellow guest riders got smashed aside as they came out of their tents, then got trampled as they lay there stunned and defenseless. Others were hit by the metal loops and the ropes we used to secure the horses, and at the speed the horses, the horses were running, the impacts were enough to cause deep, bloody gashes on those unlucky enough to

receive them. It was chaos, pure and horrible chaos. One Wrangler jumped out of the way of one horse and then stood up just in time to get hit by another. And then I saw two guests get knocked into one another before getting trampled. The horse that hit them didn't even stumble. Nothing could stop those horses, no tents, no campfire, not us. Nothing. And seeing as those gentle beasts suddenly were so mad that they'd become a danger to us, it was a reminder of how terrifying nature can be, even what we'd considered the cuddlier sides. When it was over and the last horse disappeared into the dark, all you could hear were the groans of the people who were hurt. I'd managed to avoid the worst of it, but my tent and all my stuff had been

completely trampled. Yet none of that mattered in the moment, although, that mattered was seeing to the people that had been hurt. I remember the German guy, Juergen, the one that had asked about the other half of the rabbit. He'd been trampled after getting knocked down, and by the looks of things, he had a bunch of broken ribs and a few of his teeth had been knocked out. There were a couple of broken wrists, a dislocated shoulder, a lot of sprains and a few bumped heads, but Juergen, the German, got the worst of it. The others needed medical attention, but Juergen ended up needing a helicopter. to get them out of there safely.

The rest of us waited for a bunch of four-by-fours to show up and give us a ride back to the ranch, where those with less serious injuries were then driven to the nearest hospital. I couldn't believe that I got to walk away without getting hurt. I wasn't the only one, but I thank God that I wasn't one of the poor folks who got caught in the center of that stampede. The last two days on the ranch were spent either riding or helping with livestock, and they offered everyone either a full refund or an open invitation to return to take part in another horse drive completely free of charge. I took the second offer, hoping that I'd get to go back one day and all those years later,

I'm still waiting for that opportunity to come. But this time, when I go back to Montana, I'm not going with the naive notion that it's some storybook Cowboy Paradise. It's a wild place, a place some people call home, and some of those people, do not like outsiders. When I was a much younger man, I used to work as a security guard at a chemical plant down in my home country of Mexico. And since I didn't kiss my boss's cullo like some of the other guards did, I worked all night shifts all the time.

Now, I thought I'd hated at first, but after a couple of weeks, I realized it wasn't just easy. It was kind of peaceful, too. Some of the other guards used to say it'd creep them out to hang around a closed-down factory at night, but I didn't mind it. But not until I found those kids. Just over a year into the job, one of the bar gates on the plant's front entrance suffered a minor malfunction. It could have been a local teenager who broke it, or maybe they just figured it out or overheard

at some place, but the bar didn't completely lock when it was down. Meaning a person could just stop, get out, and lift up the bar before a second person drove the car right through into the plant. And the first time I saw a car parked around the back of the plant, I shine my flashlight at it, and it took off toward the front gate like a bat out of hell. I chased it around front, knowing they'd have to stop to lift up the bar, but I wasn't fast enough and they got away. I figured it was a bunch of drug addicts coming to steal whatever they could get their

hands on, but then a couple of nights later, when I saw another car, I caught quite a sight after creeping up on one. Now, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, trading kisses like it was their last night on earth. All I wanted to do was tell them to move on, but they were so embarrassed they took off like a couple of frightened havalinas. The closest town was a real conservative, Catholic kind of place, and a lot of those kids' fathers were plant employees.

This meant that they didn't word of their actions spreading around the locker rooms, and usually all it took was a wave of my flashlight, and the cars would disappear like magic. But then came the time when my magic trick didn't work, and when I shined my flashlight on a trespassing car, it didn't move. I figured it was only a matter of time before I got some pushback from some of the kids. Word of a good make-out spot spread fast among high schoolers back then. Hell, it probably still does today,

so I figured the sooner or later I'd get a couple of kids who just wouldn't leave at the sight of my flashlight. Now I walked towards the car, giving them a friendly warning about how they didn't have to go home, but they couldn't stay there. And the engine was off, and I figured the sound of my voice would have it starting up, but it didn't. I was walking up to the back of the car, and since I could see that there were people inside through the rear window, I called out again and asked them to leave. It feels dumb to say it now, but when they didn't respond that time either, I got kind of frustrated. and then as I walked up on that passenger window, I yelled out,

Hey, I'm talking to you. But the kids inside that old car couldn't hear a word I was saying, because both of them were dead. The boy in the driver's seat was only sitting upright because the wire he'd been strangled with was tied to the headrest. His tongue was out, and his face and hands looked bright blue in the beam of my flashlight. The girl next to him looked like she'd been stabbed in the side of the neck, and there was a ton of dried blood all over her left side and all over the center console, too. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my life, not just because of how bloody it was, or how I hadn't expected to find the two bodies, but because their eyes were wide open when I found them.

The girls were half closed. She looked sleepy, but the boys were almost bulging out of their sockets, and that final look of death terror was preserved for me to see. I ran to the plant security office and called the cops, and then a short while later, a single officer drove over from the town precinct to check out what I'd reported. But the time my shift ended, the back of the plant surrounding the car was a crime scene, with a bunch of cops all walking around while a police photographer took pictures of the bodies. The guy replacing me was asking if I was all right because he must have seen how shaken up I was. I told him I was fine. I just needed a day off to drink and forget. But as much as I tried,

I couldn't shake the image of those two kids sitting in that car. After that, every time I did a foot patrol around the plant, I'd find myself lingering near the spot I used to find the cars. And it took me a while to face up to it, but I was truly haunted by what I saw that night. I found a security job someplace else in the months that followed, then about a year later, I moved to Arizona with my heavily pregnant wife. Tucson is crazy in its own way, but it's my home now. And while all kinds of terrible stuff happens on this side of the border too, I actually have faith that the police want to do something about the crimes that happen here,

and I can't say that for my country of birth. It seems odd to think that seeing something so terrible was the start of my journey to the U.S., but it also reminds me of something my abolita used to say when I was growing up. She used to say, there is no evil from which good does not come. I used to be a surveyor for a large oil and gas company that will hereby remain unnamed. I think I'll also remain unnamed because the specifics of what I did for a living tend to make certain people very, very angry. See, I used to scour this great nation of ours looking for areas of outstanding natural beauty and assess their potential to be, and the words. of one critic, pillaged and polluted so fat cat corporate types can make a buck. I guess that's not

entirely wrong. Oil and gas have made a lot of people a lot of money, but modern oil and gas extraction is a lot less messy than it used to be, so it's not like the places I recommend end up scorched, scarred, and devoid of all life. The primary reason I took the job is because I love being outdoors, and being a surveyor afforded me a heck of a lot of time in the field. The last thing I wanted is to see the environment ruined, but as a society, I knew we couldn't just switch to renewables overnight. So I decided to live my dream of making a low six figures for being what was essentially a professional hiker and see if I couldn't do some good from the inside. But just because I was living my dream doesn't mean it was always smooth sailing. There was this one job that I took back when I first qualified as a surveyor, my third ever trip into the boonies that took me to the middle of nowhere.

Arizona. I had to drive around nine miles off road, then hike another four or five just to get to my destination. Then once I'd taken my geophone readings, I turned around and then started making my way back to my truck. It was early fall, but those Arizona daytime temperatures were unforgiving. Not quite as unforgiving as the summertime, but it's still made for a sweaty hike, and I had to stop about half a dozen times just to drink some water and let some sweat dry. I hadn't seen another living soul out there all day, but when I was on my third stop, only a couple of miles from where my truck was, I saw a lone hiker wandering down the trail. He looked to be about the same age as me, maybe a little younger, and he had this sort of California hippie look about him. He had shoulder

length, long hair, loose-fitting shorts, and a shirt with some kind of Native American design on it, and then hiking shoes that looked like they'd seen better days. When he saw me, he smiled this big, friendly smile and said something like, All right, didn't expect to see a fellow traveler out in the trails today. Surveying could be a really lonely job, so I didn't mind the company. And then after he sat down opposite me on a rock, we got to talking about the trails in the area in general. It's not often I got company while I was working,

so it was nice to be able to talk shop with someone. But then I guess I must have said something about work because the guy suddenly asked me if I was a ranger. It didn't even occur to me that I should bend the truth a little, so I told him, no, I wasn't a ranger. I was an oil and gas surveyor. He kind of frowned a little, then asked what the job entailed, and when I told him, I included all the necessary caveats

about how it's all responsible, regenerative practices that don't leave places polluted or scarred. And the guy just sat there, listening to me speak. He kept that same chill facial expression, nodded along every so often, and even seemed to agree with some of the stuff I was saying. He asked me a few questions about pay and benefits and all that stuff, and at first I got the impression that he was interested in becoming a surveyor himself. But then after the conversation meandered elsewhere and started to peter out a little, this hippie-looking guy suddenly turned to me and said, I got a question about that whole surveying thing. I told him to fire away.

And then with that same chill smile on his face, he said, I can't help but wonder, how the F do you sleep at night? And the question was so unexpected, and the tone he used to ask it was still so friendly sounding that I honestly figured that I'd misheard him. Then when I repeated the question back to him to confirm it's what he'd said, he just nodded like it was the most normal thing in the world to ask of someone. I told him I slept just fine, that I worked for an energy company, not some evil

megacorp who sells missiles or sketchy pharmaceuticals to third world countries. I knew, I still know, that energy companies can be incredibly greedy, but my job was all about efficiency. If I did it properly, it would lead to less speculation, less drilling, and less destruction to the environment. But as much as I thought that I'd made that abundantly close, I'd made that abundantly clear to my new hiking buddy, he obviously chose not to believe it. I remember he said, let me get this straight. You love the outdoors, but you're helping destroy it. And you don't lose any sleep over it? I'll take bull crap for 200, Alex. I realized I'd lost the guy completely. That's if I ever really had him to begin with. I told him if he had a problem with what I did,

that was his business, not mine. But if he really did, he really had a problem with what I did, but if he really felt that way it was probably best if we just changed the subject or just didn't hike together. I thought he'd want to get away from me since he was so disgusted by what I did. But he didn't. He stayed put and just kept on asking me how I was able to live with myself knowing that I was contributing to the entire planet's destruction. And I was rapidly losing patience, so I decided the best thing to do was to walk in the opposite direction that we were headed for a while. It meant adding time to my own hike, but by that point, I didn't care.

I wanted this guy away from me, but he seemed perfectly content to follow me up the trail while continuing to casually insult me. Eventually, I lost my temper completely and told him I either walked away or things were going to get physical. The guy raised his hands as if to say, no need for fisticuffs, and then said, All right, man. You got it. I can see I got under your skin a little. but I'll be on my way.

Then off he went, walking on down the trail until he was out of sight, while I sat on a rock trying to breathe my anger away. And I gave it around 10 to 15, enough time that we wouldn't run into each other again, and then I hit the trail. But I don't think that I made it more than a mile before I heard, Hey, scumbag! From off the trail to my side, and I looked around to see that hippie guy walking out of the wood,

holding a pistol in his hand. Now, this was my turn to raise my hands as if to show that I didn't want the conflict. But the guy wasn't interested in anything I had to say anymore, and he kept the gun trained on me as he stepped out onto the trail. He then says, Not so tough now, huh? And then told me to get on my knees. When I told him I wouldn't do that,

he put the gun right up against my head and told me I could either do as he said, or he'd kill me right there and then. I honestly figured he was going to kill me no matter what I did, and if I was going to die, I wanted to go out with some dignity. I certainly wasn't some ninja who could karate chop the gun out of his hand before he pulled the trigger, but I also didn't want to give him the satisfaction of dropping to my knees and pleading for my life. I actually tried to say that too, but when I tried to speak, no words would come out.

It felt like no matter what I did, no matter what I said, he was going to pull that trigger and everything would just cut to black. So instead of doing anything, I guess I just sort of shut down. And when I started to shake, he made fun of me for being scared. And then goes into some big speech about how what he was doing, putting a gun to my head, was essentially what I was doing to the entirety of planet Earth. He couldn't understand how I was able to sleep at night, but he figured that he'd sleep like a goddamn baby if he blew my brains out, because it only meant one less parasite to suck the life of Earth. I'm not going to make out like I wasn't terrified. I was more frightened out there than I've ever been in my entire life. But he was saying all this stuff I'd heard a hundred times before, so there was this kind of surreal moment where I found myself thinking, I can't believe this crap is the last.

thing I'll ever hear. The only time I found myself close to tears or showing any kind of emotion that wasn't hate and anger was when I thought about my mom and how she'd wondered what happened to me if search and rescue didn't actually find my body. Thankfully, I didn't have to dwell on that long, because before those thoughts managed to break me down completely, the guy pulled the trigger. It didn't shoot me. He moved the gun to the side at the last second and then fired a shot off. right next to my ear. I didn't actually realize that I had been shot, though. It's almost like the explosion in my left ear and deafness that followed

made me think that I'd actually been shot in the head. So I just sort of collapsed to the ground, clutching the side of my head. And the last thing I kind of heard in my good ear before the guy eventually disappeared was the muffled sound of quit your job, asshole. I honestly thought that I was a dead man, because the shot had caused blood to come out of my ear, my whole head was just completely throbbing. So I thought that I'd been hit,

and I had maybe seconds to live before I collapsed and bled out from a shot to the head. But after lying there, waiting for everything to fade, I slowly realized that I was okay, or at least that I wasn't going to die. I managed to make it back to my truck, drove to a hospital to get my ear checked out, and then filed a police report as soon as I was able to. It took a while for my hearing to partially come back,

as it's still not entirely back, and the cops didn't manage to catch up with the guy who'd almost deafen me. I didn't think that they would. I didn't even catch the guy's name, but it still makes me mad sometimes thinking that he just got away with that, Scott Free. I did end up quitting my surveyor's job, too. The social pressure just got too much,

and I couldn't face lying about, what I do for a living for the rest of my life. Now, I won't bore you with what I had to do now, but let's just say it's nothing a person might threaten to kill you over because it's on the wrong side of their politics. Back when I was still a college student in living in dorms, I woke up in the middle of the night one time to hear an argument unfolding outside my window. It wasn't super loud or anything, but it was literally right there outside my window, and Since it was a warm night and I kept my window open, they woke me up.

And my first thought was to tell whoever it was to shut the hell up, because it was like 3 a.m. and I had classes the next morning. But after I overheard what they were fighting about, the gossip in me suddenly wanted to listen. It was a boy and girl arguing, mostly in very hushed tones, but every so often the tension would rise and so with their voices before one shush the other back to just whispering. and at first I thought they were a couple, and then I realized that they were an ex-couple and that the boy was basically pleading with the girl for them to get back together. He kept apologizing for something he hadn't told her, but she didn't want to hear it.

She called him disgusting, said he should be ashamed of himself, and that he never wanted to talk to him ever again. She said that, but there she was, still talking to him and doing it outside my dorm at 3 a.m. too. That had me thinking that they were both as bad as one another, one of those toxic couples that shouldn't be together but can't seem to separate. But since the tea was being spilled, I guess I was going to drink it. After pulling back the curtains just a little, I peeked out from around them trying to figure out who each party was. I thought I recognized the girl's voice from somewhere, so she had to be living in one of the nearby dorms. But I didn't recognize the boy's voice at all, so I tried getting a look at both of them to see who they were. It was dark outside, and the couple were standing right at the edge of the parking lot.

They weren't all the way lit up by the street lights, and the boy half of the couple had his back to me. So without being able to ID them, I just kind of kept on watching from my window and listening in to what they were talking about. But all they did was go round and round in circles. Now, the boy was trying to explain something in a very low voice, and then in a slightly louder one, The girl would then respond, I hate you, you disgust me. If I've ever known who you really were, I'd have never have dated you. And it seemed like the guy had something that he didn't want people to know, which was why he was always the quieter one.

But the girl knew it and was absolutely letting him have it. Then as she went off on some rant about how gross he was, he wheeled around in frustration like he was about to walk off. But he didn't walk off. Instead, he took him. turned back and punched the girl in the face as hard as he could. And the impact was loud, and the noise that the girl made when he hit her was so upsetting that I just gasped and held a hand over my mouth as she fell to the ground.

The boy leaned over her and looked like he was about to hit her some more, so I kind of got up on my tiptoe so I could yell at the window, and I remember saying, hey, leave her alone, You piece of crap. I guess he didn't realize how he was being watched that whole time, because the second he did, the boy started running off towards his car and then took off driving like some crazy person. Now my yelling woke up some of the fellow students and they were pissed to be woken up when they had classes in the morning. But all it took was me telling them what happened and they came running too.

I figured the boy had knocked the girl clean out with that punch, but when he ran outside, we found her having some kind of seizure. And that was one of the scariest things I'd seen in my whole life because I was convinced that she'd hit her head on the concrete and was going to die as a result. Thankfully, the girl survived with just a concussion and her ex-boyfriend ended up getting arrested. But the whole thing that made a lasting impression on me

and even all these years later was still thinking about that girl and how sickening the noise was that she made after she got punched. After earning my pilot's license, I managed to land myself a pretty cushy job flying for a major airline. The pay was fantastic, the hours weren't too bad, and my girlfriend thought that I looked great in my fitted uniform and aviator shades. People thought I was having the time of my life, but the truth was, I hated it. I hated the structure, how polished but ultimately phony everything about the airline was,

and I hated paying a ton of money to rent a home I barely visited. So one day, I just shocked everyone by just quitting. I didn't just quit with nothing lined up. I'd found another job before I handed in my three months' notice. It's just that the new job happened to involve moving up to Alaska to be a bush pilot. My girlfriend thought it was crazy and we broke up not long after a big fight. And then about a month later and after selling off or giving away like half of the stuff I owned, I flew up to Alaska and out to the little airfield that I'd be working from.

I stayed in a cabin just a short walk from the airfield. A place so run down when I moved in that first night, it had me wondering if I'd actually made a mistake. But then after a trip over to the Fairbanks to pick up some groceries and home improvements, the cabin started to feel a little more like home, and I remembered why the whole thing seemed like a good idea in the first place. It was peaceful. I got to set my own schedule, and some of my passengers ended up being some incredibly interesting people.

There was something about living wild that felt good for my soul, too. But don't worry, I'm not about to get all poetic on you. Life was good, but that didn't mean that there wasn't a little turbulence here and there. I had trouble in the air on more than one occasion. I had encounters with wildlife that looked at me like I was dinner, and I saw one or two things from the air that I'd never be able to fully explain. and this is the story of just one of them. One day, I was making a pretty routine flight,

taxiing a couple of researchers from A to B. I'd been in the air for a couple of hours already, flying under superb weather conditions for the spring, when something down below suddenly caught my eye. The ground beneath was the carpet of trees, but every so often there'd be a little clearing, some large, some smaller. Save for the occasional rogue tree,

most were completely bare, but the one I spotted that morning had a row of what looked like saplings, all standing in a row. It struck me as an odd sight among all that wilderness, and since there are a few straight lines in nature, I knew that there was a good chance it was man-made. But as I got closer and ended up passing the clearing with it on my left, I looked out the window and saw they weren't saplings, but crosses. I banked left, turning so I could pass the clearing a second time at a lower altitude. You don't see a lot of stuff like that out in the middle of nowhere, so I guess curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to check it out. Coming up on the clearing again, I could see that they were crosses all right, big ones too.

But it was only when I flew directly over that I saw something squirming against the wood, something that was almost camouflaged from a distance, and I could only see up close. There were people attached to those crosses. Some still, some writhing around in what I could only imagine was absolute agony. I didn't take another pass. I got myself back on course and hit my radio to see if anyone was within range. The only person I could raise was a logging camp, but I asked them to get in touch with the W-S-A-R, the Wilderness Search and Rescue on my behalf.

When the guy asked what he should say, I couldn't bring myself to tell him exactly what I'd seen. I knew he'd think I was crazy, so I made something up about spotting some campers who looked like they were in trouble. The guy at the logging camp said he'd get on the horn to search and rescue, and then after I thanked him, I left to make the rest of the flight with nothing but my thoughts and theories to keep me company. I didn't mention anything to the researchers and their company was actually a huge relief, as it kept my mind off what I'd just seen.

But on that last leg of the flight, when I was all over... my own again. I started thinking all that solitude and isolation might be getting the best of me. I radioed my boss on the long-range radio that I had in my cabin and I told him about what I'd seen, or rather what I thought I might have seen out there in the wilderness. He told me to fly back to Fairbanks to take a week off, and when I did, we met up for some dinner at a little steak and tater's place that he liked. And he said the human contact would do me some good, and he was right. it was great to be able to talk to someone about the job and about life too, and it not be via the medium of some ham radio.

But he also told me something I never forgot. He said he found it funny how some people think of Florida as the weird estate in the Union, and maybe out of the lower 48 it is. But of all the places he'd ever lived, it was the state of Alaska that took the cake for sheer weirdness. It wasn't just all the people that had gone missing over the years either. It was the people who hadn't, which made the wilderness such an odd place. People who moved up there to get away from things.

People just like me, I guess, and for the most part, all they wanted was to be left alone so they could live how they wanted to. Like I said, I saw a whole bunch of other weird stuff during flights, but nothing that ever stuck with me as long as those crosses did. I hope it was part of some passion play type of thing, and those people were just, up there on their own free will and live to tell the tale. Because the alternative, thinking they were put up there to die, it's almost too horrible to even think about. To preface this story, I need to explain something about the room I work and sleep in. It's a ground floor room at the front of a terrace townhouse.

There's a small garden just outside my window, which is a huge set of three-bay windows. The left and right windows open from the bottom. This means when it's unpleasantly hot, which is a lot of the time in the UK lately, there's basically an opening in my room at a height that someone could simply step over and into the room. This isn't normally a problem because I work nights, so I'd only be asleep in the room in the middle of the day. Any other time, who would climb into an occupied room? And even if they were going to, I'd hear and see them open the garden gate and then walk up the garden path to my window. Someone breaking in through the window while I'm in the room just didn't seem like a likely or plausible scenario.

That is, until a series of events played out that led to exactly this happening. One other thing I need to explain first is I don't have curtains hung on these windows. The garden blocks the view from the street, and when the windows were replaced, I just never paid to get new curtains put up because I literally never used them. I hate having the air into the room blocked, and I hate blocking out the natural light. When I sleep in the daytime, I use a sleep mask, so I just didn't need curtains. Then one day, the council replaced the street light right outside my window. What used to be a warm orange glow was replaced by a harsh spotlight white that completely

illuminates my entire front garden and shines essentially a floodlight in through my window. They're supposed to fit these streetlights out with rear guards to, prevent light pollution of personal property, but they just haven't. We've complained. All the streetlights in my cul-de-sac are like this, but they never did anything. So what I did was, I bought a canvas-printed fold-out screen, and it seemed like a perfect option. I can open and close it, move it at will, and shield whichever parts of the room I want, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper and less committled than hanging curtains. This worked great for a couple of years until one day, very recently, there was a pop outside my window.

I was sitting on the chair against the other wall of the room facing the screen when the pop happened. It took me a moment to realize that the streetlight outside had blown. Hey, fine by me. That annoying POS had been dazzling me with its overly bright bulbs shining in my room for years now, and I wasn't going to shed a tear for it just because it blew up. When my entire power shut off an hour later, though, then I'd, wasn't happy. I sat there in pitch perfect darkness for a bit. Eventually I could hear the sound of drilling and clanking from a few blocks away and soon realized that they were obviously doing some

kind of electrical work. The last time this happened in my street unprompted, the power had been out for two hours. This was in the early evening. This was in the middle of the night just past midnight and I didn't have a torch nearby or anything. I just had my cell phone with 48% battery. I tried to read a Superman comic by the light of my phone for a bit, but it was a strain on the eyes. You see, I'm disabled and not too steady on my feet, so I don't really want to go walking around the pitch-dark house in the middle of the night either. So eventually I shut my phone off, put the Superman book on the side table, and just sort of relaxed in the chair. I have no idea how long I'd been asleep when I woke back up. The power was still off, and for a second, I forgot why it was so perfectly pitch dark.

When you're used to constant light pollution to some degree, having the power for your entire street go off is really eerie, especially when you can't see two feet in front of you, which means you can't see what's making that scraping and dragging sound. I listened hard. I could vaguely see movement in front of me. Was the screen falling over? No, crap, no. It was being folded back. In the pitch dark, in the middle of the night, someone had to be. had climbed in through my window while I was asleep, and they were now in the small space in between the screen and the window itself. I strained really hard to make out whatever I could.

I thought I could see a hand wrapped around the edge of the screen, but it was almost impossible to tell. Even as the screen folded back and exposed the room to the meager light of the crescent moon, I barely had any more light. But it was enough to see that, yes, someone had in fact climbed through the window and were carefully moving the screen aside. The moon had slightly lit them up, but I was still in total darkness on the chair. My heart was absolutely hammering in my chest, and I had no idea what kind of thief this was. They could have a weapon. It could be a knife. They seemed thin and of average

height, and they took a shaky step or two into the room, and I could tell that they were looking about as if trying to make out a route. My room is pretty cluttered, because of it's a little bit of being charitable, so almost immediately they reached out and brushed a table. Then I heard the scraping of their foot nudging a box. There was no way that I was going to sit there in the dark and wait until they noticed and stabbed me. My room is pretty cluttered being charitable, so almost immediately they reached out and brushed a table, then I heard the scraping of their foot nudging a box. There was no way I was going to sit there in the dark and wait until they noticed and stabbed me. I had one single option and I hoped to God that if I took it,

things would play out. Putting on my most terrifying horror creator voice, sitting completely in the dark on my chair, I growled, get out, before you can't live to regret it. Here it was. Either I'd succeeded, or I was about to get brained or stabbed or worse. The figure jerked and clattered against something and absolutely hooned it out of the open window. Christ, poor guy. I think I scared him even more than he'd scared me, and immediately I ran to the window knocking on my phone flashlight and shining it down on the street. He looked like some kind of older teenager maybe as he legged it down the street and around the corner. I didn't bother calling the cops or anything. Maybe I should have, but I know that they wouldn't have done anything because all he did really

was briefly enter my property and then leave. At that moment as I saw someone peering around my screen in the damn darkness, though, I've never been more afraid in my life. And hot damn, I'm definitely going to be a lot more careful with leaving the window open going forward. 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 you

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.