The Lets Read Podcast - 337: I WAS RAISED IN A CULT | 10 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 322

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Cults & Encounters in the Deep WoodsHAVE 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:- Mint Mobile

Back in the late 90s, I was a teen with hopes, dreams, and above all, a love of the wilderness. I got this from my grandpa, who I'm convinced would have become a fully-fledged wild mountain man if he hadn't met Grandma, the love of his life, and settled down to become an accountant of all things. I'm told that if you met him in his day job, you would absolutely never have known what kind of guy he was. A short king, average-billed shirt and tie white-collar worker. But as soon as the weekend came, it was like Clark Kent going into the phone booth and coming out as Superman.

Grandpa was like a 5'6 rambo, rippling muscles hidden by his workshirt, a just total transformation. By the time I often went hunting with him, he'd retired from the office job so I mostly knew outdoor grandpa. And he was my hero. Me, him, my older sister Jess and mom, we'd go hunting often. Grandma and Dad couldn't stomach it though. Grandma, because she actually hated the killing, and Dad, because I swear that man was the worst shot that you'd ever seen in your entire life.

In the end, he admitted that he was such a liability that he'd stay home and get ready to prep the meat when we brought any kills in. Many happy family times were spent on hunting trips, but alas, everything comes to an end. Grandma got sick and passed away, mom and dad went their separate ways, and it wasn't hugely friendly, so dad and grandpa never really spoke again.

Jess went off and got married and had a whole family of her own and grandpa got old. I stayed close by. I ran a small general store in town and he actually worked for me in his retirement, just helping where he could, but mostly sitting on a rocker on the porch. The store was doing a good turnover and it was honestly worth paying grandpa a wage to just sit outside the store being a local character who greeted customers, and shared a tale or two. I honestly think Grandpa was the best friend I ever had. He lived in an assisted living home,

and it was one of those where he was free to come and go, but there was staff on hand if he needed anything. I asked him many times to come and live with me and my partner, but he was having none of it, said that we didn't need an old man stinking up the place with his tobacco smoke and whatnot, and I reminded him that I'd always had a crappy sense of smell and could barely even smell his huge stinking cigars

when he smoked those. And he reminded me that my long-suffering partner had perfectly good olfactory senses, and he had a point. Plus, honestly, I think he had a crush on one of the nurses at the assisted living home and didn't want to admit it. One day, when I had a week enough from the store and so did he, I went to visit him. Grandpa was more cheerful than usual, which was odd considering he was a pretty cheery old fella at the best of times. Seemed in the best of health, in fact. We played cards for a bit, and he was hooting with laughter whenever he won or lost, and eventually I asked him what was up. Something clearly had him down good.

When he told me the answer, I was absolutely shell-shocked. I had to stand up and stare out of the window for a moment, and I remember it being a very dreary, rainy day, and that felt almost perfect right then. It was a letter from an oncologist that he'd been seeing, without my knowledge, and I don't remember exactly what it said, but the words brain tumor, inoperable, affairs and order, there are ones that stuck out to me. And I stared out the window for a moment and then turned to him, and I think this was the first time that I ever got angry at the old man.

I asked him why he was so damn happy and how he could let me think something good was happening. And he just smiled at me gently and told me that I'd understand when I was his age, which was 82 at this point, that he was finally going to see grandma again and his daughter, mom had also sadly passed early by this point, and that knowing the end is coming when you're old isn't scary. It's like knowing you're about to get to the end of a good, satisfying book, and that all things considered, a brain tumor was a pretty quick way to go compared to some forms of cancer.

I sat down and thought about it for a while in silence, and then I looked up at him and I said, Hey, Grandpa, is there anything you want to do before the end, you know? And then his face lit up like he'd been waiting for me to ask, like this was what made him so happy. Then he told me, he told me that there was one that got away, and that there was a final hunting trip he wanted me to take him on. It wasn't easy. The old man needed a cane to walk at this point and sometimes even a wheelchair. He refused that for the trip, of course, but... We still had to make our way deep into the woods with one of us using a cane.

It was extremely, extremely slow going, and what would have previously been a day's hike took us four days of stopping to camp, stopping to rest, stopping to talk. And I think that was the point, really. Grandpa just wanted to spend some time with me, away from everything, and it was like chicken soup for the soul for both of us. On day five, we pitched up camp, and Grandpa said that this was it.

This was the spot. He waited till the sun set, and then he sat me down and told me about the one that got away. And it was like a bigfoot, he said, but it wasn't one. He'd first encountered it years back when my mom was a teenager and they had been hunting together one time. He said at first that he thought it was a werewolf, until we remember werewolves don't appear in broad daylight and bigfoot's do. At this point, I paused to remind him that neither of those things are actually real. and he waved my concerns away. Besides, he said, it was neither of those things anyway.

I asked what it was, and he said it didn't have a name. It was like a Wendigo or a Skinwalker, but it wasn't those either. He said he called it the Shatterpaw. I asked him why, and he explained that he'd found footprints that day, which looked like an animal's paw, if it had been shattered. Hence it forever became known in his mind as a shatterpaw. And he then told me that he'd seen the Shatterpaw another six or seven times over the years. It was hunting him, he said, or so he thought.

He'd be out with us in the woods, and he'd look over and see the Shatterpaw just standing there in the far distance, watching him. He said he could tell the Shatterpaw wanted him, and it was sending him a clear message, like one he could hear straight into his brain. It wanted him, and one day it would get him. And so he told me this was the last chance to get the Shatterpaw first before it came to him one night and took him to whatever hell it had come from. Of course, my reaction was to very sanely assume that the brain tumor was starting to do its business, and maybe I'd made a big and dramatic mistake by bringing a dying man with a neurological condition out hunting. Something had stopped me even considering this up until that point, and now I felt like an actual lunatic.

And so I decided to do the only sensible thing that I could think to do. I acted like I believed Grandpa about the Shatterpaw. We spent the next few hours clumsily, loudly stalking through the woods in pursuit of this creature that I knew didn't exist. I knew it didn't matter if we spooked it away because it wasn't real. It was like two kids play acting. Only one of us was a grown-ass man who owned a general store, and the other was an old fellow with a brain tumor who could barely walk. And here was the other thing.

I did have a bit of sense in me. Little did Grandpa know. He was carrying a hunting rifle that I'd actually disabled at the store. The firing mechanism simply wouldn't work even if he tried to shoot something. And even without the Shatterpaw, there was no way that I was letting an 82-year-old man with a brain tumor and a cane carry around a deadly weapon. I might be dumb, but I'm not that stupid. Unfortunately, Grandpa was neither, but we'll get to that in a moment. Eventually the sun set and we cooked burgers over the camp stove and went to bed in our tent for the night.

Now a few hours later, Grandpa woke me up by shaking my shoulder. Can you smell it? He said. I couldn't smell a damn thing and told him so. He waved dismissively at me, reminding me how bad my sense of smell was anyway, and then he added this sudden lure to the shatterpaw that apparently. Apparently, it gives off this really strong stench, but only 10% of the population can smell it, I guess, like how not everyone can smell blood or cyanide. I thought about asking why he hadn't mentioned this earlier, but since it was all fiction,

what did it matter? And so I told him that if Shatterpa was out there, we should stay put. Now, grandpa says, no way, he's out there. Grab your gun, Sonny. We're confronting this beast. And then he was gone, out of the tent before I could say a single thing. And I figured that there was a tiny chance that there was at least some kind of mildly threatening animal out there or even a person, so I snatched up my rifle. Weirdly, I noticed Grandpa had just left his behind.

And when I stepped out of the tent, Grandpa had lit the bonfire. I looked around and asked where the Shatterpaw was, and Grandpa looked me dead in the eyes and said, I think you know. And that's when he pulled the handgun from his waistband. He told me he'd known all along that I'd sabotage his gun, that he was sorry for stealing from my store, but he needed to be armed, that the real me would thank him if I was still alive somewhere. And then he pointed the revolver at me.

His hand shook as he aimed, and tears started coming down his face. You reek of it, boy, he said. You always have. It took you one day. And it's been you ever since. What? I'm not the damn shatterpaw? I told him.

You know I'm not? And he denied it. He said it was him or me. He kept talking and he kept stalling. Said that the only way that I could prove that I wasn't the shatterpaw was if I shot him in the head or he'd do it to me. I threw my gun to the ground. Grandpa looked confused and then maybe even a little bit ashamed. I told him I knew what he was doing,

that he wanted to go out on his own terms and that this was the best damn plan that he could think of. He was a die-hard Christian, so ending at all wasn't an option. And if I shot him believing it was life or death, I could forgive myself. I asked him if that was right, and he nodded as he lowered the gun.

A big part of me wanted to be mad. How could my beloved grandpa try tricking me into killing him? But then I realized, to him, he was putting his fate in the hands of the person he loved and trusted the most, and in his aging, decaying brain, he'd somehow justified it. I told him this isn't the way, and he nodded again. I took a step forward to embrace him and take the gun away from him. Everything happened at once. I heard a sound and saw Grandpa.

raised the pistol. Honest to God, I thought that he changed his mind and was about to shoot me. Instead, he yelled, get down, and I dived to the left like my life depended on it. The gun went off with three cracks, and I heard the sound of a body hitting the floor. I rolled over to look, and out of everything in the story, this is the most unbelievable part I know, but this happened. It wasn't a shatterclaw or a bigfoot or a Wendigo or a skinwalker, but while we'd been talking, a mother-effing cougar had been creeping up on us and eventually was poised to leap on me just as Grandpa noticed it. And heck, the old man had put the creature down with the first shot we actually think,

right between the eyes, brain tumor and palsied hands and everything. Well, there was no way that we were leaving proof of that kill behind, the greatest of Grandpa's career, and it took us five days to hike back with that dead mountain line tied up in a sleeping bag. The extra days left us having to ration, and by the time we got back to town, Grandpa wasn't doing great. It actually started to develop a lung infection. Things declined pretty quickly after that, but he lived long enough to see that goddamn mountain line taxidermied and displayed in my store, along with a plaque explaining some of the story. It's not there anymore as I donated it to a museum about ten years ago now in the honor of the old man,

but I still have photos somewhere from the days before digital. Grandpa passed away in his sleep a couple of months after our camping trip, and I won't say that things went easy because cancer never lets you. But he went gracefully, and to this dying day, he would admit to me that the whole shatterpaw nonsense of the creature secretly being me was something that he'd gotten from a TV show that he watched in the rec room. But there's one thing that he swore until his passing, and I cannot tell if he believed this,

because Grandpa was one hell of a joker. But he swears he didn't make up the Shatterpaw itself, and he didn't make up that very first sighting of the creature. And whenever I try to look it up, I can't find a single piece of evidence of a cryptid called a Shatterpaw, so maybe Grandpa really did see one and named it. I think he'd kind of love that as a legacy, so if anyone out there comes across this mythical shatterpaw, please let me know, so I can let it know that it made an old man very happy in his last days.

Now, I need to be careful with what I say here because I don't want to bring hell itself down on me again. This was one of the most terrifying things I've ever gone through, and I don't want to risk even the slightest chance of the same people getting mad. Because let me tell you, these people are horrifying. They're worse than anything you'll find on the dark web, and I would rather walk down a pitch black street in the middle of Birmingham, naked, painted, and day glow paint, and have the face these horrors again. Now let me explain.

I used to post a lot on Twitter, like terminally online a lot. I was one of those annoying bints who have an opinion on everything. Main character of the day, less believe that I was there giving my two pence. Remember that Bean Dad guy who wouldn't give his lass a can opener or whatever? I barely remember it, but I do remember that I wrote a seven-tweetth thread about the guy. What else was there? Oh, the black and gold or white and blue, that dress, Yanny or Laurel?

I used to tweet a bloody Stephen Fry and Neil Gaiman like we were pals. Yeah, that second one aged right well. Now one thing I really loved was the trending topics and hashtags. It was almost like a delicious menu of completely meaningless crap that I just have to have an opinion on, whether I actually had an opinion on it or not. I mean, why the hell did I get into a two-day-long row with people about the YouTuber Ninja. I still told him to go suck a dentist, thanks Auto-Correct, and managed to get into a row with ninja's stance. The best part is, I thought the hashtag was about the guy from... the Anfurt. I don't give a crap about Fortnite, but I sure as hell know a lot about Tyler

Ninja Blevins, after his fans told me numerous ways in which I deserve to get touched. All of this pales in comparison to the really terrifying event I got myself into, though, and it was for equally stupid reasons. I can't even explain who I'm talking about exactly, but I'll just say this. The hashtag I saw was a color combination, a color combination I don't like, and it also happens to be a band, a pop band, of the K-variety. Now, the irony is, after this whole incident, I actually listen to them and do love them. I also really love that song by Rose about meeting her at the Apet-Tap-a-Tay.

Hopefully this is now clear enough without me quite saying any keywords that'll get me flagged up on Reddit, or if I'm especially lucky if you include this in a video. So anyways, what I saw was the hashtag of the band name, and I thought that it meant the color combination, so I posted hashtag band name, effing sucks. Then I logged off, thought nothing of it, and went and had dinner with my boyfriend. When I next checked my phone and saw 99 plus notifications from Twitter, I had a sinking feeling. Could people really be that mad that I didn't like the color combination?

So before even unlocking my phone, I said to my boyfriend, holy crap, I tweeted that I don't like black and pink. together and I think people are really mad at me. He looked at me like I just told him that I'd run over a dog and that's when I knew that I had absolutely effed up and was about to find out. He asked me if I was sure that's what I said, or if I said that I didn't like a very similar sounding band. I said that I didn't really know and that's when he explained to me what K-pop stands are. Considering what a terminally online dumbass I am, how this escaped me baffles me to this day. We looked at my phone together, and it may have shown 99 plus notifications on my display screen, but in reality, it was well over a thousand tweets.

I can't even repeat some of the things that they told me should happen to me. I was told that I should be peeled apart from various orifices. One person wrote a 10-tweet fan fiction about me choking on centipedes, which they dug up from my profile and found out that I actually had a phobia of. Of course, this also involved a bunch of people sending me phoenix. photos of said insects, the British and American kind. And you ever seen the first terrifier movie? One Twitter user sent me a giff of the girl being sawn at half by Art the Clown up the middle.

If you've seen it, you know what I mean, and they sent this to me 14 times. Thankfully, my DMs weren't set to public, but that didn't stop a few people I did follow from sending me abuse as well. No friends, of course, but just some folks that I had pleasant interactions with in the past. And the abuse did not stop. In the end, as much as it pained me to do so, I deleted my Twitter altogether. Over 10,000 banger posts completely gone. But of course, then they'd found my Instagram, my Facebook, my poor old mom's Facebook, my LinkedIn, they've found the coffee shop where I worked, and that's where a big revelation came from, actually. I got called into work, and my boss, who was thankfully a good friend of mine, told me to listen to this. Our answering machine was

full, and the things these people were saying were vile, terrifying, and threatening, or they would have been, if not for the fact that about 80% of the callers were clearly under the age of 14. Yeah, I was being harassed and tormented by literal tweens. Some of them were older, sure, and there was some very camp-sounding Irish guy who went into detail about eating my toes. I asked my boss what she wanted to do. I offered to quit, and she said no freaking way. mostly because it wouldn't help. These people were nuts-o children and they were going to keep calling

whether I actually work there or not. Instead, she and my boyfriend frog marched me to the local cop shop and we told them everything. Turns out there's not a lot that the cops can do when you're being harassed by feral kids. The sheer volume of weirdos harassing me

had to mean that it was being organized from somewhere, but trying to pinpoint where it was absolutely impossible. Where to K-pop kitties even go to hang out? Tumblr? I have no idea. And neither did the cops. And there was nothing they could do or would do. Then it died down. The cult of K-pop kitties decided to leave me alone. What a relief. Scary story over. Let that be a lesson to you. Don't insult a band. At least I came out of it unscathed. Just kidding. If you've ever run afoul of bored tween Stan culture,

You know they don't stop at normal things like death threats and harassment. And just when I thought it was safe to go back to normal, I went downstairs one morning to see something strange sticking through my letterbox. I got closer, wondering what the hell it was. Someone had shoved a dead pigeon halfway through my letterbox. It had gotten stuck, but not before, well, the viscera had squished out of its beak. And judging from the state of decomposition, I'm pretty sure that the pigeon had been dead for a little.

a while, so at least I don't have its death on my conscience. I tried to convince myself that it was just some coincidence. Some other random lunatic had shoved a dead pigeon through my door, but no, of course not. When I extricated the cadaver from its resting place, I found a black and pink ribbon tied around its neck. There was no question, and surely this wasn't some little kid. Of course we told the cops who dusted for fingerprints and all that kind of stuff. I don't know if they actually dusted the letterbox or the dead pigeon or what, but unsurprisingly, they found nothing. And that same day, my boyfriend got a ringed doorbell, and I guess that scared them off because nothing else happened at our home. Unfortunately, this wasn't the end, though. One day I was on the

other side of town picking up some supplies from the coffee shop that I worked at as an assistant manager. I'd parked down a side street and gone in to see our supplier, who hooked us up with a particular brand of imported coffee than no one else in town had. And as such, we had a kind of friendly relationship, so I hung out with the guys for half an hour, telling them about the weird crap that I'd been experiencing. When I emerged from the back of their warehouse in this absolutely nowhere side street that nobody ever went down, my car had been spray painted. Now, I'm sure you can guess the two colors that adorned my little Honda accord. The cult remembers, is what it said on the windscreen.

I called the cops again. And holy heck, not only was there a security camera in the alley, but it was working too. This time the K-pop cult member wasn't some tween girl, but was in fact an adult man. I never saw him myself

and the cops handled it all because there was no need for me to be involved. He made no attempt to hide his face, probably because he had no idea that there was a security camera watching him. I can only imagine how the officers reacted watching a grown man, who I'm told was in his early 40s, leaping around my car and spray painting pink and black graffiti all over it. Was he dressed in band merch? I wish I knew.

It made me think, if lunatic fans like this can behave this terrifyingly towards me, what must it be like for the artist themselves? Imagine being Taylor Swift, for example, knowing that a mussely bearded guy is out there threatening to kill people if they do you wrong. What would it take for his ire to be directed at his idol? Now, I wish the story had stopped there, but there was one more twist in this tale. A few months had passed, and it seemed like everything had died down. Life had gone back to normal.

We were out at a bar together, and I went off to use the ladies' room. When I came back, a strange woman had sat next to my boyfriend at the bar. I watch from a distance, and I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm a little bit of a jealous person and in fairness in the past he's given me a reason to be jealous. So without thinking anything more of it than my boyfriend being hit on by a random woman, I just watched. She was all over him, touching his arm, laughing at his jokes, leaning in to whisper in his ear, and the asshole was eating it up like the chump he was. I watched, looking around the corner of the corridor leading to the looos, as this woman reached down and began fondling my boyfriend.

He didn't resist. He let her take a sip of his drink even, and then she leaned in and licked his freaking ear. I just crept closer, and that's when I heard her say the thing. She said, How you like that? And it didn't hit me at first.

Despite being a victim of stands, I didn't really pay attention to their music. But then the woman, kissing my boyfriend on the side of the mouth, reached into her purse and pulled out a little card, a two-tone card. You guessed it, black and pink. She tossed it down in front of him and walked away,

but not before tipping me a little wink. So the cult of the band's stands had finally gotten their ultimate revenge. One of their nut job fans has seduced my boyfriend right in front of me, and this sweetie little asshole had been enough of a horny freak to fall for it. The message was very clear and succinct. You play with fire. you're going to get burned. But consider this.

This cult ranged from middle-aged men to attract of 20-something women to angry tweens, all of whom wanted to actively ruin my life because they thought I'd been insulting their favorite band. And if you remember, I wasn't even talking about the damn band. I was talking about the color combination. People be cray-cray, let's read, I swear to God. I don't use social media anymore

because you hear about terrifying cults like the Ant Hill game. gang or Jonestown, but the cult of celebrity, the Taylor Swift stands or the K-pop girlies or hell, I don't know, maybe even bowling for soup diehards, they're all lunatics. People can find anything to worship, and people can find anything to use as an excuse to go absolutely frothing crazy. If you like keeping more of your money in your pocket, you're definitely not alone. The problem is, the big wireless companies like it too, and they tend to take a lot of it. If you're tired of huge monthly bills, sneaky fees, and free perks that somehow end up costing you more, it might be time for a change.

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no headaches, just simple, affordable, wireless. You can even get three months of premium service for Mint Mobile for only $15 a month. I use Mint Mobile, and so should you. In my opinion, it's just the best way to save. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at Mint Mobile dot com slash read. That's mintmobile.com slash read. Disclaimer. Up front payment of $45. For three-month five-gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $15 per month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. So I've been a listener for a couple of years and it was my kids who got me into you. They know that I'm a big true crime and weirdness buff and sent me one of your Appalachian videos.

And from that day, I was hooked. My girls keep harassing me to send you a story of my own, and I was always thinking, well, I never got stalked along the Appalachian Trail or kidnapped from a Walmart car parking locked or flying kicked by a homeless bum, so what can I share? And then they said, well, Mom, weren't you in a literal freaking cult in school? And hey, I guess I was. Maybe it's not as glamorous as that makes it sound, but I did go through an absolutely crazy, terrifying, unusual incident when I was at boarding school.

So I wasn't the best kid. My parents didn't really know what to do with me. I got into buttloads of trouble in middle school and then the first year of high school was absolutely hellish. And looking back, I was incredibly grateful to my parents that they didn't just ship me off to some kind of military camp or allow me to end up in juvenile hall. Now, I don't want to go into the bull crap that I got up to, but it wasn't anything you'd hate me for. I was just a little bratty who wanted to rebel against all the things teenage girls are supposed to be, so being rebellious, I was. And the compromise was to send me off to boarding school for one year, and obviously I hated it.

I was expecting my peers to be a bunch of loser and nerds who studied hard, played little, and made me look bad. Well, damn, I could not have been more wrong. On my first day at St. Jimmy's, not the real name, just a little green day reference for you, I soon realized that I was a very small fish in a pond full of piranhas. Now, these kids, they knew how to be troublemakers, and I was honestly humbled. Any sensible kid would have kept their head down or maybe begged their parents to come pick them up, crying that they'll be good, I promise, just don't make me stay here with these lunatics. Me? No. I want to impress these guys.

guys. And when Laura, a absolute terror in my class, threw a chair and broke the window, I didn't want to avoid her. I wanted to be her friend. And when Brianna smuggled a townie boy into our dorm and, well, pretty much effed him, I didn't want to turn a blind eye to that. I wanted to help her cover it up. And when Chantelle wanted to slash the tires of our math teacher's car for giving her a deserved bad grade, I wanted to make sure that she actually got away with it. I was desperate. to please these girls and desperate to be their friends, and they barely even noticed me. Only one of them did, my only real friend at the time, Noel. One day I confessed to her that the others were almost like a cult.

I said that there was something about them that just commanded loyalty and admiration, and it reminded me of all the cult things that I'd read about. I've been kind of obsessed with it, in fact. Noel looked at me very funny and said, You know why that is, yeah? And I didn't, so I asked her. And that's when she told me. They were a cult, and they even worshipped a certain god, older than time, that she'd derrant name even.

And if I promised not to tell anyone about it, anyone at all, she'd get me into their next meeting. Now, I didn't believe in ancient gods and all that kind of stuff, of course, but I did believe in the power of human persuasion and hysteria, and even as a teen, I was fascinated by it. I was fascinated by the way people manipulate others in the concept of sociopathy and narcissism and peer pressure. I was also the biggest stand of The Craft, a movie that my parents swore was the reason that I'd gone all wayward. Now it wasn't, but I did still love it. So how could I turn down the opportunity to join these girls and try to get an insight into what could be the very beginning of an honest-to-god cult? So I nervously followed Noelle out of our dorm in the middle of the night and,

avoided the night monitor, and then we snuck barefoot across the grass to the old caretaker shed, which somehow Laura had the key for. I stepped inside to this sort of mix of incense, candle wax, and underneath all that, the obvious smell of weed. The other three girls were handing on a joint, giggling, and they were sitting around a book that sat open in the center of the shed with two spaces from me and Noel. Now, long story short, the girls told me that they were, they were acolytes of a demonic presence called anti-god. And they called themselves the Sisters of Sleep. Now, if this sounds familiar to you already, bear with me, because, yeah, the thing you're

thinking of is exactly where they got it from. I hope it's not a spoiler at this point to reveal that it wasn't really an apocalypse cult, and we weren't really serving any type of anti-God. Noel and I sat around the circle, and they rambled on about the Sisters of Sleep, and how we had to do what anti-god commanded us to. The first task was that I had to cut my hand and drip my blood onto the sacred text that lay in front of us. They said the book took different forms of whoever looked at it, and the book that we saw before us would shape our future.

Now, for me, it was a copy of Jane Eyre, and now to this day I've never read Jane Eyre. And so I actually cut my hand and bled onto what I'm sure was the school library book of this Jane Eyre. and then Chantelle made a big display of throwing her head back and rolling her eyes back into her head. The anti-god was speaking through her and telling her the task that he had for us next. Noel leaned in and whispered that this was totally normal. Now, of course, I wasn't a complete moron, so I wasn't buying any of this. I knew it was some display the girls were putting on, some kind of play acting.

But here's the important thing. They were including me. These cool, edgy, outcast, badass bitches were bringing me into their inner circle. And let me tell you, acceptance and trust is more powerful than any demonic ritual or cursed copy of a Charlotte Bronte novel. The diabolical act that the anti-god wanted the sisters of sleep to do next was to key the principal in Dr. Lanahan's car. I wasn't at all surprised when speaking through Chantelle. anti-god decreed that I, the new girl, should be the one to do it. The others wanted to test my loyalty to their group, of course, and how I'd done worse things

than key the principal's car in my time. What was the worst that could happen? I'd get kicked out of a school that I didn't want to attend anyway, but I didn't get kicked out. I keyed her car that night, accompanied by Noel, who kept watch, and she told me to write The Sleeper Awakens on the door. And I got as far as the... sleep before we saw a flashlight beam in the distance and realized that we had to run before the security guard found us. And then the next night, back at the hut, speaking through Laura this time, it decreed that the sleep would be enough, as it showed my devotion to the cause. The next task we had to perform in honor of our ancient god was to graffiti the first floor bathrooms, and this was

our friend Brianna's job. This felt a lot less high stakes than what I I'd been asked to do, but again, I was very aware that this was all play-acting and they were just testing me. Now, Brianna was told to write, send me home, bitches on the bathroom wall, and I thought nothing of this at the time. A bunch of other incidents happened after that, vandalism, theft, pouring soap into the fountain, just a bunch of really essentially silly pranks. The most dangerous or risky ones always seem to fall on me, though, as the new girl. And the last prank before everything went to crap was Chantel drawing a weiner on the English class blackboard. We had another meeting a few days later after that.

Now this time, Noel channeled Antigod. Once again, it was me who was chosen to perform the duty. Now, according to Antigod, I still had to make up for only writing part of the message on Dr. Lanahan's car way back. Now, I should note here that Lanahan had been absolutely fuming. about the vandalism. Called a special assembly and everything, and if the culprit was found, there would be absolute hell to pay.

Now, via Noel, anti-god told me that I had to blow up one of the chemistry labs. Now, hold on a second, I thought. This was escalating pretty quickly. And besides, I had no idea how to blow up a chemistry lab. That's okay, Laura said.

Anti-God had pointed her to a book that would show me how to make an explosive using chemicals that I could find at the lab itself. How convenient. I really didn't want to do this, and this was obviously too far to go for an imaginary cult that I didn't even slightly believe in, but just wanted to fit in. These girls were so, so persuasive. They talked about things anti-God would do to me, but they were obviously talking about themselves. I don't even want to repeat them here, but these delinquents made it clear in no uncertain terms that if I didn't go along with their plan, they would do very, very bad things to me. The next day, Noel took me aside,

and she confessed to me that, of course, anti-god wasn't real, and the whole thing was just some set-up. It was, in fact, some crap that they'd gotten from a movie called Prince of Darkness, that they'd all watched last Halloween. I still never watched that movie either. It's still on the pile along with Jane Eyre and one other thing that you'll find out later. Now I told her I knew, but that I really wanted to be friends with these girls. Noelle told me that's how it all started with her too and how she was essentially trapped she felt. If she didn't do what they said, they had blackmail material on her that would not only ruin her, but shame her parents, and possibly even land her in jail. Now we talked for hours that night and with Noelle's guidance

decided that the only real course of action was to set the explosion in the chem lab. So I did. Obviously, it didn't blow up the whole room or anything. It just caused a fire in the chem lab that did a little bit of damage. Laura had done her homework, and I forget the details, but I was able to set up a chemical reaction that gave me enough time to get quite far away from the classroom before it went off. And with the Noel and the other girls keeping watch for me, there was no chance of me getting found out. So that caused some chaos at the school for a few days. Everyone was focused on who'd blown up the chem lab, why anyone would do this, etc.

So focused, in fact, that security was pretty lax when the other girls, without my knowledge, broke into the principal's office. They showed me their spoils at their next meeting. They'd stolen all of their permanent records, and this was their master plan, caused chaos at the school, then steal our own files so when he passed indiscretions would be wiped from the history. This was the late 90s, so it was before most things were digitized, I guess. Now, nevertheless, I pointed out that this really didn't make any sense. People had memories. Chances are those records were just the principal's own copies, too. Now, I tried to be as nice as possible. I was trying to help. I didn't want to undermine their plan. But wow, these girls did not like

being contradicted. Who was I to disagree with their master plan of the anti-god? Was I some kind of heretic. And this led to just some absolute fight where I told them that I knew that the anti-god was just some BS from a movie, and the whole thing was just some big joke. Now, they didn't deny this. In fact, they just laughed at me. They told me I was the one who didn't understand. Of course, there was no anti-god, no blood rituals, nothing like that. They knew Noel had told me everything because they'd known all along that I never believed it. And that was why it was so funny to them. Because I still did all those. things. They held so much power over me that they'd managed to create a cult through literal

willpower and peer pressure alone. And then Noel stepped forward. She held some book out that she'd gotten out of the library, cults in our midst by Margaret Singer. And this is the third thing on the pile of things that I've never engaged with, but with this one, it's simply because the idea of reading about it would just be too scary even now. Noel then goes into a speech about how she'd read the book, and how she and Laura had to make a bet that people weren't that easily influenced and couldn't be so easily bullied into self-destructive behavior that went against their best interests, just to fit into a cult-like group. Noel had been the one to insist they could.

This whole cruel experiment had been Noel's. The one person that I thought was actually my friend, the one person at that damn school that I trusted. The whole time I was just her play thing to prove that some human beings are weak and mindless enough to be influenced into cult-like behavior for literally nothing other than boredom. And I was chilled to my core. What was their end goal? They'd pointlessly stolen their own permanent records for what reason.

And I found out the next day, the principal and some members of staff were waiting for me. They were holding a bunch of folders, all of which they'd found tucked under my mattress after some anonymous tip. There was also a note in my handwriting addressing my friends saying something about how I'd stole. and their permanent records for them and hope that they'd be grateful. Their idiotic plan wasn't so idiotic after all, I guess. They'd framed me, and now I was getting kicked out of school, all because these weirdos wanted to prove that they could convince the new girl that cults were real.

And I guess when I didn't fall for the anti-god crap, they just modified their approach and decided that bullying and peer pressure was close enough to cult-like behavior. And when you think about it, I guess it kind of is. I got kicked out of that school and began the most depressing, bleak period of my life. My parents didn't believe me, of course. They just saw me as the ungrateful brat who'd thrown away my one chance. Thankfully, I was able to enroll in one of the local high schools I hadn't been expelled from.

And there, I actually worked my ass off, graduated, and then went to college and eventually did my master's. And no, it didn't have anything to do with cults or criminal psychology. I never want to see another damn wannabe edgy cultists for as long as I live. I had a less than conventional upbringing, let me tell you. Firstly, have you ever heard of Ruby Frankie? So she was a YouTuber, although not like you, I hope. I'm sure most people know her. She ran that eight passengers channel and was eventually sent to prison for some fairly serious child neglect,

along with some woman that she was shacked up with. And they claim to be Mormons, but to my knowledge there's nothing in the teachings of Mormonism and the Latter-day Saints that tells people to be that obscenely cruel to their offspring. Obviously, I'm not one of the eight-passengers' kids, but when that story first came out, I followed it with utter horror. At times I was shaking on the floor, actually in tears, and even my hubby couldn't console me. Only a cuddle from my beautiful 10-year-old daughter could snap me back to reality.

I'm a mom myself, and I cannot imagine in any universe, treating my beloved daughter like that. The Ruby Frankie's story didn't disturb me just because it was horrible, though. It disturbed me because it reminded me deeply of my own childhood. When I finally escaped that hell at 18, I always kind of assumed that I had a unique, one-of-a-kind abuse of upbringing. But seeing the eight-passengers story made me wonder how many other families like that are out there,

families who, for whatever reason, become their own kind of cults. People don't realize that dangerous cults are far more than just weird hippies wearing robes and killing actresses, or moving to Guyana and drinking the Kool-Aid. There are cults of personalities, MLMs that are kind of cults, and there are social and political movements, some of which start off with the best of intentions even. But cult behavior is always cult behavior, and the more people get wrapped up in their own cults, the more they start to believe their own bull crap. And this is what I can only imagine happened to my parents.

By the time I was born, the parental group of my family consisted of mother Cora, stepfather Jacko, Auntie Brady, and her partner, Uncle Eric. And then there was Mama Charlene who wasn't related to us by blood, but was the matriarch of our family unit. Now, I was the oldest of the four kids. We were all instructed to call each other siblings. It was brother John, sister Sabrina, brother Roger, and Nick. me, Sister Krista. Now, if it sounds weird the way that I've written these names, that's because it was.

This is how we had to address each other from as young as I could remember. If we slipped up and missed the prefix, we would be punished. For example, one day I was playing with Sister Sabrina and I called her Sabrina. Auntie Brady overheard this, dragged me from the room, and smack my palms with one of those beach sticks that the adults always keep on hand for regular punishments. And there were so So, so many rules like this, and as a little kid who grew up with them, I didn't really question them. According to Mama Charlene, who we were to regard as an almost holy figure, these things were the decrees of our Lord. If we did anything that went against the decrees of the Lord, we would be punished. I did not remember what all the decrees were, but only because years of therapy and distance has allowed me to tune them out.

Every day, we would begin our morning by reading through the four pages of decrees that we had to follow. We were not allowed to leave our rooms until we'd finished reading them, not even to use the bathroom. Of course, when some of us were really little, this led to accidents and that broke one of the decrees. And here are the ones that I can remember. Don't dirty yourself. Address the family appropriately. Thank the Lord upon waking, even if just from a nap. Thank the Lord before and after meals.

Do not take the Lord's name in vain. And then there was some of the more bizarre ones. We weren't allowed to eat any food that was orange because orange was a sign that it came from the devil. One time, Brother Roger asked why this was, and Mama Charlene cained him for questioning the word of the Lord, and then explained that the devil's flesh is orange. Brother Rogers said that he thought the devil was red, and Mama Charlene explained that when you cut a red devil, they're orange on the inside. And so from then on, we unflinchingly understood that carrots, oranges, butternut squash, and similar stuff were just evil.

Never orange candy, though, we weren't allowed candy, as tooth decay came from the devil too. And fire was evil, too, because that was orange, so we weren't allowed to just look at fire. The adults cooked, and us kids had to do things like peel the vegetables, butter the bread, and tend the vegetable garden. and we had the last task because the shed was in the garden. The shed was where we'd get sent if we misbehaved too badly. The longest I ever spent in the shed was three days. Brother John was once sent for over two weeks. If we were locked in the shed, you were able to use the toilet in the bucket,

which one of the other kids would just empty every two days. You were brought one pitcher of water a day and three slices of dry bread. When one of us had to enter the shed to bring up, food to our sibling, or empty that bucket, the punished child had to stand in the corner facing the wall. If they turned and looked at us, we were to report them to stepfather Jacko specifically. We were all far too afraid of stepfather Jacko not to tell on our siblings. The strangest part about this is that I never once remember stepfather Jacko actually punishing us. We were just for some reason incredibly afraid of him. It was just drummed into us

from a very early age that we were not to feel love for our siblings. Even though we weren't all related by blood, we were all siblings in the eyes of the Lord, and thus feeling any love for each other was unnatural and unholy. The same went for the adults. They would remind us every day that they did not love us, and we should not love them in turn. The only person that we could love was the Lord. The one exception was on Mama Charlene's birthday. One day, we had to bow in front of her and tell her that For this one day only, our love was hers. And the reason for this was never really explained to us. Our house had various bookshelves, but we were never allowed to read them.

All the spines had been covered up except for the Bibles. However, despite claims that we served and loved the Lord, we were never taught anything directly from the Bible. We knew nothing of Jesus, and in fact I never even heard the name of the Son of God until I escaped that family. And we were taught to read, but we were taught from books that had been written by Mama Charlene in her very spidery handwriting. They were all books about the family, about Mother Cora, stepfather Jacko, Auntie Brady

and Uncle Eric. Mama Charlene herself was never in the books. They were mostly tales of our family's adventures before the Lord burdened them with us children. The books referred to us as the albatrosses, a reference that I didn't get until many years later. Read the rhyme of the ancient mariner if it's not familiar. In the books, Mother Cora, stepfather Jacko, Auntie Brady, and Uncle Eric had fun and wild adventures.

They went exploring mountains. They visited these fairs and they went fishing on lakes. They even solved mysteries. They had a pet and something that the books called a Wufflelump. I'm not even joking. And I later found out that all but one of the books were just abridged versions of the famous five books rewritten by Mama Charlene to just peddle her insanity. And the book they used to scare me the most was the first book.

Stepfather Jacko wasn't in that book, and instead there was a man called Daddy Cobleton. Now, Daddy Cobleton was a wicked man who tried to lead the others astray. He guided them into hell itself, where he peeled his skin to reveal the orange demon beneath. And there he did unspeakable things to Mother Cora, until Auntie Brady and Uncle Eric cast him into a fiery pit. At the end of the book, Mother Cora gave birth to me,

sister Krista, and the Lord sent stepfather Jacko to the family. But then Daddy Cobleton returned three more times, impregnating Mother Cora again and Auntie Brady twice, and each time they saw him off with weapons. And then Mama Charlene was sent by the Lord to protect us. And that's what the book said. And as I grew older and began to observe the reality of how the world worked, I started to realize that orange demons didn't exist. My siblings weren't hell-spotlanded. The world that we lived in was very, very abnormal. Our house was very remote in the middle of nowhere, but occasionally we'd be visited by traveling salesmen

or families and cars would just drive past, and they just simply did not live like us. They wore fancy, wonderful clothes, not the basic sheets that we wore. The children had hair, not the shaved heads like we had. And none of us were allowed bedrooms. Up until I turned 18, the four siblings slept on mattresses and four corners of a room. Lines were drawn dividing the room into four. If one of us entered into

another sibling's quadrant after 8 p.m., we would be punished. And the punishment usually involved having our hands whipped or spending time in the shed, but there were other things too. Standing outside and having ice water tipped over us, having to stand there while the other siblings yelled the meanest things they could think of at us. If a sibling wasn't mean enough, they would get punished instead. Now one day, Brother John took a Bible from the shelf thinking that if he learned more about the Lord, he might understand why we live such a cold, miserable life. When he tried to open the book, it wouldn't open. It was just some prop, a sort of replica. Mama Charlene caught him, and that's when he spent two solid weeks in the shed. I genuinely cannot think of a single

happy time from my childhood. We were encouraged to avoid human connection with each other. We were homeschooled, we had no toys, no TV, music was forbidden in the house, sister Sabrina was caught singing once and all hell broke loose, the adults grilled her for hours on how she even knew what singing was, how she had learned to do that, etc. And she just said that she didn't know, it just felt like something that she could do with her voice. And as punishment, the adults made her eat a carrot. They told her that by ingesting the flesh of the devil, her voice would be forever cursed. It was miserable. Just this daily drudge of bleak nothingness.

Every day was exactly the same, and yet I rarely thought of escape. Other than the view beyond the high fence and the occasional glimpses of passers-by that we could see through the rare gap in the wood, we had no idea what life was even like on the outside of our little house in the middle of nowhere. And then I turn 18. On my 18th birthday, the adults woke me at just past midnight, and ushered me down the stairs alone. In the kitchen there was a cake, and it was unlike anything I'd seen before.

Apparently, it was just for me. At first I thought it was some kind of trick, but the smiles on their faces convinced me otherwise. I sat down and took a bite, and it was like heaven. Mama Charlene told me that what I was about to hear was going to be hard. Nothing I learned growing up was real. The world was a cold, harsh place, and she was a radical psychologist who had found a willing family to help her with her thesis.

She believed they're raising children without the concept of love and following a set of incomprehensible and inexplicable rules, and then introducing them to the concept of love and reality at 18 when they were old enough to understand it, would lead us to live the most fulfilling lives possible. She promised me that she taught me everything I needed to survive in the real world. She told me that all of them loved me really and they loved all. all of us kids. And in her words, this was her thesis. Robbing us of our childhoods would enrich our adulthood beyond anything any normal person had experienced. I'm sure there was some kind of logic

to this in her head. I'm sure that there was some kind of reason why four other adults had agreed to put their children through the coldest, most unloving hell to help her study her theory. Then came the kicker. Mama Charlene said it was totally my choice. They were not evil people, but I was now 18, and they wanted me to stay with a family and become one of the parents. I would now be known as Mother Krista, and I would mother a child of my own. I asked how that would work if Daddy Cobleton would return, and she said yes, but that Daddy Cobleton took the form of different men. I asked whether the Lord had blessed all of this, and I asked if she thought that she was doing the Lord's work. And they all sort of laughed at that.

I think that's the part that hurt the most. the one being that I had loved, the one savior I believed might one day save me from this hell, and they didn't even care about him. They didn't even believe in him. I kept my calm. I said I needed some fresh air, and I walked out the back door. I sat on the ride-on mower that we used to keep the lawn trimmed, and I crashed that mother effort through the fence and just kept on driving.

It was the first time that I'd honestly seen the outside world. At that point I flagged down a car. and they just took me to the nearest town and to a police station. And I just talked to them about everything. I expected my siblings to be saved and my parents to be arrested. But do you know what happened? They got a warning and six months of regular visits from CPS. It was ruled that nothing that they had done actually constituted child abuse.

Apparently lying to your children about reality itself is not a crime worthy of having your kids taken away. One by one, my siblings turned of age and they too left the cult that was Mama Charlene's family. We reconnected and started building our own lives. The first time we all got together and said, I love you to each other, the tears did not stop flooding. And after I left, the family did start treating my siblings better. The presence of CPS kind of forced them into being a little more honest. By the time my youngest sibling, Roger, had left the family, he said it was almost tolerable. I've never spoken to any of the adults again and I never want to.

Maybe they weren't as bad as Ruby Frankie and her evil friend, but the psychological harm that they did to us with their made-up lunatic cult is something I still feel today. And from what I understand, the five of the adults still live together. Roger couldn't quite bring himself to cut them off, and he visits them and gives me updates from time to time. Apparently, Mama Charlene is suffering from aseptic necrosis, One of the pills that she has to take for it to sort of type of ibuprofen is orange.

And I wonder what the devil makes of that. So the absolute weirdest crap happened to my grandpa a few years ago. I got the call the next day, but this is what he tells me happened, and based on what I found, I don't think the old man's confused. He's a bit of a vulnerable old lad, but he's still in possession of his senses. Now, it was late at night, and there was a knock at his door. Granddad lives alone ever since Nan died after she fell in front of a speeding lorry. Now, he was there and it kind of messed him up.

And ever since, granddad, who was an agnostic for most of his life, has been looking to find faith. And that's why when these two young Mormon chicks arrived at his door, telling him that he'd arranged a meeting with them, he didn't really question it. He just figured his memory had slipped and maybe it was normal for them to show up at 8 p.m. And this was before the movie Heretic had come out, and trust me, this isn't similar to that plot at all, I promise. Granddad didn't try and lock these chicks in his house or anything. Instead, he made them a nice cup of herbal tea, and they sat down and chatted for a while. One thing Granddad told me was that they didn't really seem particularly educated on Mormonism.

The more they talked, and Granddad's always been a theologically curious man, even in his agnostic days, the more he got the impression that these girls either didn't really understand the church that they were part of or simply didn't care. Sure, they had the literature, pamphlets and things, but they weren't really able to describe anything that was in them. They simply suggested that they leave the reading material with Granddad and he could make up his own mind. Now, I've dealt with Mormons before. One of my best friends, Chris, is a Mormon, and I know firsthand that Mormons can be very passionate about their church and their beliefs. especially the ones that go door-to-door trying to convert people. Granddad knew this, too, and despite his age and the fact that he was slowing down,

this started to ring alarm bells for him. The girls were called Emily and Bella, I guess, and Bella started asking Granddad about Nan and what had happened to her. And, of course, being an old fella who's prone to trips down memory lane, this led him to talk at length about his wonderful, beautiful wife, Evelyn, and the tragedy that took her from us. At the beginning of his story, Emily excused herself to use the bathroom. Granddad got into it, sharing tales of him and Nan, talking Bella's ear off, and eventually the grandfather clock chimed at 9.30 p.m.

And granddad realized that Emily had been in the bathroom for almost half an hour. He paused his storytelling and asked Bella if her friend was okay. Bella waved it away and said it was normal. Emily usually spent a while in the bathroom and not to be concerned. Granddad wasn't having that, though, and I'd drummed into him over and over about scammers and weirdos, and he was already suspicious of these two ladies who were claiming that he'd booked an appointment with them. He argued that no. He would feel more comfortable if he went to check on Emily, and Bella clearly started to panic. Even though he was an old man with a cane, Granddad has a presence,

especially a few years ago when he still lived by himself. Bella had no choice but to let him push past her and go find Emily. Emily wasn't in the bathroom. She was in his bedroom, sort of wandering around, looking at things, studying photos. Nothing inappropriate or anything he could accuse her of, but enough that Granddad really didn't want her poking around and asked the pair of them to please leave. Weirdly, they were almost too happy to go and they left a bunch of pamphlets in literature for him to read when they'd gone. He went to sleep and had a pretty fitful night.

He spent the night dreaming about hell, he says, and he kept waking up convinced that someone was in the room with him, and the Lord Will Save You kept bouncing around in his head. The next day he called me over and told me everything. I was baffled. We searched the bedroom, and it didn't seem like they'd stolen anything, but I found a little black speaker stuck under one of the shelves. And then there was another by the headboard of his bed,

and a third stuck inside a bedside drawer. They didn't seem to do anything, though, and they didn't appear to be listening devices. They were just speakers. Now next, I looked at the literature they left behind. The girls had told Granddad that they were Mormons, but this literature certainly didn't belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Instead, it was a strange fringe offshoot of the Latter-day Saints,

purely local, and based on a quick Google search, and they were not held in very high regard at all by our local Mormon population. In fact, a handful of former members said that they were basically a cult that tried to convince other people to make the church sole beneficiaries of their wills. One common throughline I found with the few people who talked about this extremely fringe church is that their frail elderly relatives had all talked about having dreams in which the Lord told them that the path of the church was righteous. Some even said angels were speaking to them. I had a theory.

That night I stayed over at Granddads. He slept in the spare room and I stayed in his room working on my laptop until the early hours. Sure enough, at 1 a.m., the three hidden speakers crackled into life. They were simple, pre-recorded messages telling the recipient that the end of the world was nigh, and they could secure their place in heaven by joining this fringe church and signing over their worldly goods to them. It's a pretty known scam, but I never heard of one that actually uses audio props and targets elderly folk in such a sinister way.

Obviously, we call the authorities, and they took the speakers away and interviewed members of the church. No members of the church matched the description granddad gave of Emily and Bella, so our theory is that they hired actors and crooks to play these roles, just so the church could deny all knowledge. Sadly, the investigation never went anywhere, and while Granddad avoided being a victim, I'm sure that there were other vulnerable old people who joined the cult, I mean church, and spent the last days of their lives in poverty, waiting for a salvation that would simply never come. Me and my buddy Mikey used to go deep into the woods on a hiking exploration trip every few months.

We still go, just not as often anymore, and that's at least partly because of the story that I'm about to share with you all. And it's about a time that we didn't get killed by a guy who wasn't Corey Feldman. Now, yeah, I know pretty much everyone has a story about a time that they didn't get murdered, and as far as I know, Corey Feldman has never killed a guy either. But trust me when I say that this is the absolute best way of explaining what the story's about. Cutting out all the BS preamble that drives me nuts, I'm going to start the story with me and Mikey two days into our hike,

sitting around the campfire frying up some meat. We weren't out in the wilderness to hunt, just explore and have fun, and we knew our crap and new situational awareness and being mindful of our surroundings and all of that stuff, obviously, which is why we were a little surprised when seated at our campfire.

A voice spoke from directly behind us saying, Hey guys, what's up? We both kind of jumped and turned around in our seats. And you could tell that this fellow was hoping for that reaction because he had this little grin on his face. That was surreal enough, but what made it even more surreal was that the man standing before us looked like Corey Feldman, the child star of the Goonies, Lost Boys, Friday to 13th Part 3, and more. I would have sworn on the Bible that this was the case. Cory Feldman, looking exactly like Corey Feldman would look in the late

2000s, but wearing those thick glasses he often wore as a child star. He was dressed in one of those military jackets that you could get in just about every store back in 2000s and some camo khakis. He had a green military-style cap on too. And I remember all this because, let me stress, I was 100% sure that I was looking at Corey Feldman. And when he took another step towards the campfire, I saw that he was not, in fact, Corey Feldman, because I happened to know that Corey Feldman is a pretty short guy, 5-3 or 5-4, and this guy was clearly a fair few inches taller than that dude. And he also had this little scar on his cheek that Cory Feldman does not have. But beyond that, if I'd been asked to pick this guy out in a lineup, I would have put the DVD

of standby me in the player. I'll try not to let the guy know that he'd startled us. Me and Mikey were saying something like, hey, bud, how's it going? you're out hunting, how's the game? You know, those sort of questions. He said his name was Buck, Buckie, to his friends. And before we even had a chance to invite him, Buck sat at a campfire and helped himself to a stake off the damn grill. Want a beer too, Bucky?

Mikey asked. And Buck replied that his name was Buck, not Bucky. And I wasn't sure if he was joking or if he was trying to make a strong point to say, yeah, we're not friends, so you can't call me that. But the dude was chowing down on our goddamn stake, so in my eyes, they gave us the right to call him whatever we damn well pleased. Feeling a little impolite at his rudeness, I asked him how often people called him Corey. And he stared at me through those thick glasses and was kind of saying, huh, Corey? What are you talking about? And I waited for him to laugh, but it never came. I told him not to worry about it,

but he just pushed and I had to ignore my... Mikey stifling giggles as I was forced to say, well, buddy, you kind of look like the actor Corey Feldman. But Buck just stared at me. And then he says, don't you mean Adam Sandler? What? And then he went on to claim that everyone always compared him to Adam Sandler, that he looked like the guy. And I'm sure most of you know this, but Adam Sandler and Corey Feldman do not look a thing alike. And this guy did not look like Adam freaking Sandler.

I shot Mikey a look. Is this guy yank in our chains and Mikey was no help? But he just sort of girlishly was giggling behind his hand. Yeah, Buck said people say that I look like Adam Sandler, but my friends call me Kyle. Wait, what? I thought this guy's friends called him Bucky, and this got more confusing by the minute.

He explained they call him Kyle after Chris Kyle, the American sniper dude. But he doesn't like being called Kyle because he makes that guy look like a baby. Buck apparently was a trained sniper, and he told us about some of his best shots. I can't remember, and I can't be bothered to recount it, but the exact details of these claims,

but let's just say that as someone with even a passing interest in long-range rifles and snipers, who comes from a military family, you would have to be the most talented marksman to ever exist in order to pull off some of the shots that Buck was claiming, to the point that some of the shots. were not humanly possible. Apparently, he'd stayed prone for over three days without eating and drinking and using the

bathroom just to avoid shooting a woman who was in the way of his target, a Taliban leader. Mikey, who was getting a bit drunk at this point, asked why the woman and the Taliban leader were having a three-day conversation in the first place, and Buck looked at him like he wanted to bite his eyes out. Genuine, absolute fury at being questioned. It was enough to sober Mikey up, and let me tell you, that's no mean feat. The problem is, sober, insulted Mikey is a lot more confrontational than drunk mocking Mikey. So when Buck told his next story, some elaborate yarn about ricocheting a bullet off of three different metal surfaces, and saving a pregnant woman from a rogue American general who was clearly meant to be Marlon Brando and Apocalypse Now,

Mikey called BS. Like literally he just said BS, and then started humming ride of the Valkyries. Buck stood up fast and began to reach into the waistband of his pants. Both of us leapt to our feet, and within seconds I had my own pistol trained on him. I don't drink, unlike Mikey, and I do carry. I'm the designated don't F with us guy when we go hiking, because you'd be surprised how many times you'd need one of those. Now Buck says, Hey, hey, steady on guys.

We got a couple of wannabe soldiers on our hands, huh? Uh, excuse me, buddy, you were the one who was seemingly just reaching for a gun. Buck then says that he could tell that he wasn't wanted, but that maybe we'd better watch out, because he owned this land, he didn't, and had every right to shoot us. He didn't. And then Bucky stormed off into the trees, never to be seen. seen again, by us anyway.

Now, the next day we packed up and continued our hike. We were just walking along chatting when suddenly out of nowhere we hear a crack and a bullet hitting a tree about 20 feet away from us. Mikey and I are both like, what the crap? As some hunter

taking pot shots? And the idea that it was bucked for some reason didn't even occur to us. And so we call out saying, hey buddy, careful over here! And we're wearing these very high-vis his jackets, all that good stuff, and then another shot rings out, and we can see it hit almost exactly where the first bullet had.

Mikey and I dropped to the ground, run behind a tree out of line of sight of the shooter, and try to scour our surroundings. There's no sign of anyone, and we both whisper, Bucky, at the same time. But it couldn't be. Those shots were accurate. Well, the second one was anyway. When we have a whispered conversation, shock that maybe Buck was. actually telling the truth, at least to some extent. He was an absolute crack shot,

even if he was a crack pot. But what the hell could we do? There was no sign of him anywhere, and we're just sort of sitting ducks out here. I decided to put something to the test. I grabbed something out of my pack, a water bottle or something, and toss it out into the open. The shooter fired, and it blew out of the air. This was a serious, genuine pro. And based on the directions the shots were coming from, and the size of the tree that we were hiding behind, I knew that we were somewhat safe. So I called out. Hey Buck, buddy, you're not trying to hurt us, are you? There was no reply, silence, and then another gunshot, causing bark to explode from the same tree he'd shot at before. Now, maybe this was my inner optimist, but I took that as a no.

Meanwhile, Mikey says screw this and decided to run from one point of cover to another. My heart basically stopped. A shot rang out, and I expected to see my buddy crumple, but no, he made it to safety. Instead, the shooter had hit the tree Mikey was aiming to hide behind. He was toying with us and it was some kind of sick game. We ditched all of our equipment so we could move light. All we brought was enough water to last us the day or so. that it would take to get back to the truck.

We figured if we really pushed ourselves, we can make it without stopping. Now, the whole journey back, the shooter was taking pot shots at us, but shots designed to prove that he was a cracked marksman. He'd shoot at these thin branch off of a tree, and then he'd land a shot directly in the whirl of some trunk, and it was honestly uncanny,

and I'm almost starting to believe that that buck guy was actually capable of the feats that he'd claimed. The markman's ship that he was displaying, was insane, and not once, not once did we see the damn guy. He'd been dressed in basic civilian military gear, sure, but not full camo. And besides, to stay hidden in the forest, he would have needed to change outfits at certain points, and it was like he was a goddamn chameameameame, which, I guess, did fit with what Buck claimed. Eventually, after 22 hours of solid running and crouching and ducking, because who could tell if the shooter would finally decide to stop toying with

us and finish us off. We saw the parking lot. The truck appeared, thankfully undamaged, and I say, Mikey, you did take the keys out of your backpack before you ditched it right. And it says something about the type of terror we felt that he didn't even try joking that he'd left them behind. I had no idea if Buck was still watching us. Maybe he wanted us to get to the truck, think we were safe, and take us both out there and then. We waited for five and then ten minutes, and then that familiar crack sounded, but it was far away in a different direction. I can't explain how, but somehow it was almost like he was telling us that we were safe to go. We got into the truck, and before I got in, I noticed something resting on the windshield. It was a spent cartridge that I later discovered was some

kind of Winchester cartridge that had been placed there deliberately. I picked it up careful as I could in my gloved hand and slipped it into a Ziploc bag that I had in the truck. And then we drove to the nearest town and obviously went to the damn sheriff's office. The sheriff himself was on duty, thankfully, and I guess it was a quiet day as usual, because he came out to meet us personally. We told him everything and about how we'd met this guy who seemed okay at first, but then became more threatening and how the next day he began taking extremely accurate, intentionally avoidant pot shots at us.

And the sheriff nodded his head, almost sagely and wisely, and we got the impression that maybe Buck was some sort of local character, and we were about to hear some wild tale. The sheriff asked us to describe the guy that we were talking about, and obviously we both said that he looked like Corey Feldman, kind of thick glasses, bragged about being a sniper, full of crap, and absolutely definitely looked like Corey. Now, the sheriff asked us,

if he told us his name was Buck, and we said, yeah, expecting him to nod and explain that Buck was some kind of veteran with PTSD Rambo type or something like that, and we waited for his response. And instead of looking assured, the sheriff's face went white. He asked us to come with him and led us to the holding cells to the back of the station. He asked us if this was the guy that we'd met. Now, sure enough, Corey, Buck, Feldman sat on the cell bed looking dejected and very hungover. So much so that even when he saw us, he perked up a little bit and acted like we were his buddies,

here to get him out of there. I went to say something like, maybe you shouldn't have tried to kill us when the sheriff interrupted me. Now, the night that we met Buck, he came driving into town, blind drunk and got pulled over for a DUI, and then he'd been locked up in the drunk tank ever since.

Whoever had been taking these warning shots at us was not Buck. We handed the bullet casing over to the sheriff, but Buck shamefully admitted that he'd put that on our windshield even, so that clearly wasn't a clue. The sheriff promised to send a team out to investigate, but we had very little in the way of actual evidence, just a blow-by-blow account of a guy who absolutely could have killed us, but didn't. And when we tell that story back now, we call him The End. If you ever played Metal Gear Solid back in the day, that's kind of how we pictured him. just some insane, super old dude sitting in the woods with his pet parrot, protecting his land from interlopers like us.

He was never found, of course. The woods were a hunting ground. Bullet holes and bullet casings and bullet residue was all over the damn place. Buck seemed especially focused on wanting to help, and I think he was actually affronted that there was an actual sniper in town who was, quote unquote, better than him. Weirdly, for some reason I let Buck give us his email, and we've stayed in touch. over the years. He's still a complete oddball, what they call a conspiracy head, and his latest thing is that he's a victim of some kind of covert surveillance. But surprisingly, he's good

for a beer or two if you've ever down in the vicinity, which, despite our run-in with the phantom sniper, sometimes Mikey and I still are. We don't go to that area of the woods. Maybe the sniper is sitting there in his wheelchair, dead of old age, like that Metal Gear Solid guy. Maybe he's just blowing off steam between some CIA black ops mission because god damn so this is my dad's story but he's giving me permission to share it with you after i got him to listen to a few episodes of the let's-re podcast on a cross-country trip that we took recently so we hail from tennessee we've always been a christian family mom and dad raised me with a strong faith in god and i've raised my kids the same way now i won't turn this into a love in but my faith has given me strength in life more times than i

can count. The scariest and weirdest thing that's ever happened to my dad revolved around a church and a preacher, though. Growing up, Dad's local church left a lot to be desired. He lived in a small backwater town with a small backwater church, and while the town folk were plenty of God-fearing people, they didn't hold the local preacher in quite such high regard as they held our Lord and Savior. Dad can't even remember the old Fogie's name, so we'll just call him Pastor Bake. Yeah, I know. Now, Pastor Bake was a pretty old fella in fairness, but old beyond his years, too. That's because he liked a bit of the sauce, you know what I mean? The local kids joke that he dipped into the communion wine, and Dad says that that was pretty much true.

One time, allegedly, he was so drunk during a sermon that he briefly fell asleep at the pulpit before snapping awake. He was a harmless guy. He couldn't say otherwise, but he hardly inspired passion and confidence in people, especially not in 1970 when the Vietnam War was still in full swing. People were losing loved ones, and the state of the world was terrifying and people wanted faith more than ever. It was kind of difficult to go to church on a Sunday morning and listen to Pastor Bigg, slurring his way through his latest sermon about some dry topic that barely had any relevance to the modern America. It was no wonder that attendance dropped until they'd be lucky to have 20 parishioners in attendance on any given Sunday. And then, the circus came to town. And I don't mean an actual circus, of course,

although Dad does have some pretty cool tales to tell about a traveling circus that passed through one time. But no, this circus had a tent and a ringmaster, but there were no clowns or elephants in sight. It was one of those pop-up tent revival churches. It had a portable organ with a young and hip organ player, and it had a choir who would raise the proverbial roof. And most importantly, it had Pastor Trent. And if you've ever seen any movie or TV show that has a charismatic, larger-than-life pastor who throws himself around the stage, evangelizing the word of God with enthusiastic abandon,

and according to Dad, you've only seen half of what Pastor Trent had to offer. He was everything that Pastor Bake wasn't. Young, energetic, stylishly dressed, dripping with faith in the Lord, and most importantly, sober. The way Dad describes him, you'd almost picture Jesus himself. He had long hair that flew wildly as he gesticulated in his passionate sermons. He never claimed to be a faith healer, but he'd lay hands on the sick and elderly, and they would swear that they felt better.

Dad says that Mr. Rockford, whose hands had been crippled by arthritis, was able to reopen his store for another three years after Pastor Trent shook hands with him. Now, you might think Pastor Bake would have a problem with Trent setting up his tent revival in the nearby field, but even though attendance dropped to four, including the organist, he seemed to appreciate the break, according to Grandpa's friend Steve, who still attended. Everyone else, though, was completely won over by Pastor Trent, and from the way Dad tells it, who could blame them? Now, bear in mind, Dad was a 16-year-old boy at this time,

and even the most well-behaved Christian teen, has other things on their own. mind than going to church all the time. But at least the way he remembers it, dad would actively get excited about going to the tent revival each week. And then, one Sunday, something weird happened. Pastor Trent was doing his usual energetic routine, talking about how God loves us, how he's watching over the soldiers overseas and his soldiers in our country. And then Trent gets very quiet. Just full silence falls over the tent. Dad swears blind. on his life that it felt like the heat in that place started creeping up and up and up. I mean, sure, it was summer, and they were in this big canvas tent and it was standing room only,

but it had never been that unbearably hot before. You could see people starting to sweat. Old Mrs. Crabjoy even wobbled against her son-in-law and looked like she might actually faint. Pastor Trent froze at the front. He gripped the sides of the platform and looked up, and to the left, It was almost like he was listening to somebody that nobody else could hear. Dad says that you could have heard a pin drop. Nobody wanted to break the silence.

Nobody even coughed. And then Pastor Trent clapped his hands together, making half the congregation jump. He started to say something and then stopped, like the words caught in his esophagus. He clears his throat and started again. It's time for the church to move on, he said. and these murmurs ran through the crowd. And this pastor Trent waved his hands to settle everyone down and then announced that next week would be the final service

before they moved on from the town. Of course, everyone was devastated and nobody knew why. Trent and his choir ushered everyone from the tent and they were barely speaking. And for the next week, the town was just awash with gossip. What had happened? Why had the pastor frozen mid-sermon like that? had he been listening to the voice of God. Now remember, this was 1970s, so there were no Bluetooth earpieces or anything like that.

Everyone was poised for the final service next Sunday. Maybe there would be answers. In the meantime, Pastor Bake was on a decline. On the Wednesday, he was found stumbling around the town square at night, three sheets to the wind rambling about how the devil was here to take us all away from him. And the sheriff had to lock the poor old guy up and say, some drunk tank and tried to get some sense out of him. And now the sheriff was grandpa's old pals, so dad hearing this from grandpa's second hand,

apparently the sheriff flat out asked Bake if he was talking about Pastor Trent. If Trent was the devil come to take us away. Pastor Bake said no, it wasn't Trent. Trent was a man of God. The townsfolk arrived at the tent that Sunday, at least most of them did. And the tent was still there. Pastor Trent was not, though. The whole place had been cleared out. The pews were all tossed around and knocked over.

The pulpit had been smashed, but the electric organ was gone and so was the generator. So with the trailers that the pastor and his crew had stayed in, they'd left early and clearly in a hurry. And then someone named Jerry Charlton came running up. Had anyone seen his wife, he asked. He thought that she'd left for church before him, but he couldn't see her in the crowd. She was pregnant with his kid, so where else could she be? B. And then a few other parishioners showed up, the school mistress, her husband was missing. He was a meek, timid man who everyone joked had married a battle axe. And as the day went on, it came to pass that 12 people had disappeared along with Pastor Trent in his choir.

Most of them were people who had been in unhappy relationships. One of them was an 18-year-old girl, who, rumor had it, was being abused by her stepdad. One of the two of the missing had no scandalous gossip surrounding them, but like Dad said, you just never know. It soon became the popular explanation that somehow all these people would run away with Pastor Trent in his church, and then talk extended to Pastor Trent himself. The Manson family had recently dominated the news, obviously, with their murder of Sharon Tate. Was Pastor Trent even really a pastor? Or was he some kind of cult leader like Charlie who lured vulnerable people away with false pretences?

A lot of this gossip occurred in the most natural meeting place for the whole town, church. Pastor Bake was back on his feet by this time, and it seemed like his time in the drunk tank had scared him a little straight. And when he overheard the talk about Pastor Trent, it was like the old fiery Pastor Bake of Yor had returned. How dare people say this about a man like Pastor Trent? Trent was one of God's soldiers. The devil had been coming to our town and had his sights set on the Mississippi. 12. And like an angelic pied piper, Pastor Trent had led them to Heaven's Gate. Of course, this explanation did not sit well with pretty much anyone and doesn't sit right with Dad to this day.

I mean, that could mean anything, couldn't it? Were these people victims of abuse who Trent helped save? Is that what Pastor Bake believed in regards to the devil coming for them? And what did he mean by leading them to Heaven's Gate? There is an addendum to this weird and unusual. tale, though. Everyone who disappeared was a grown adult, and there was no evidence of foul play. Given the volume of people who disappeared in the testimonies that they all had troubled family lives, the cops weren't prepared to treat any of it as a missing person's case. But Jerry Charlton wouldn't leave it at that, and he scoured the damn country looking for Pastor Trent in his tent revival church. Every time he returned home, he had absolute murder in his eyes,

vowing that whenever he found Trent, he would demand answers about his wife and then send the man to the Lord himself. It took him almost eight years, but he found them. None of the missing people were present at the tent revival. But not only that, Jerry Charlton refused to talk about what transpired when he finally met Pastor Trent again. All he would tell us is that Pastor Trent was a man of God, and that wherever our missing loved ones were, they were in a better place. Dad's theory is that Pastor Trent and his choir were running some kind of underground railroad for victims of domestic abuse. I've heard of traveling tent revival churches doing similar things, albeit many, many years later. I think I agree with Dad.

Pastor Trent was helping people escape their bad situations and maybe Pastor Bake even knew about it. And that's what he meant about the devil, because maybe all those people who disappeared were at the end of their rope, so to speak. But even if that is true, even if Pastor Bacon's... Mr. Trent did lead these people to a better life, it still chills me to think about it. Because Jerry Charlton had murder in his eyes every single time he set out in pursuit of that church. And then when he finally found Pastor Trent again, he returned a changed man and would never speak about why. There's one thing Dad and I know for sure. Whatever happened between Jerry Charlton and Pastor Trent,

as sure as heck put the fear of God into him. Back in the 90s, myself and a couple of girlfriends used to go wilderness hiking. We were extremely into it, kind of our whole personalities. I loved it and so did the others, Sarah and Ashley, and we decided to go on a two-day exploration. We drove as deep into the woods as we could and decided to just spend the day there and then camped there overnight. We parked on a dirt road and hiked until midday, then settled down for some food. Now, keen to get going, we ate a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit. bit and then began to explore the area. We'd never been here before. It was kind of an odd location.

It was very deep into the woods, but the dirt track had allowed us to drive down here fairly easily. Ashley was a photographer, and she had some kind of fancy camera that she used to take nature photos. Now, this was before the days of digital cameras and camera phones, of course, so she had to be kind of picky about what she snapped. And that's what drew my attention. One, two, Three photos almost in a row. I looked over to where Ashley was, and she was standing near a rock face. I couldn't tell what she'd seen, so I angled around and realized that hiding behind this curtain of vines was a cave. She'd been using her flash to light up the interior of that cave before going in.

Sarah chastised her in case it was some Bears Den, but pointed out that Bears' Den been active in that area since probably way back in the 7th. It was a pretty safe area this far deep into the woods. Ashley said that this may be so, but something had clearly been using the cave as its layer a long time ago. We could tell it was abandoned, though, because there were some rocks covering the entrance, which we had to clamber over to get inside. Now, this curtain of vines had fell over the entrance,

and almost no natural light filled the cave. Sarah and I turned our flashlights on, and we looked around. Now, it definitely had been some type of animal's layer at once. There were very old remains littered in one corner, and then the dry, dusty, musky smell gave it an almost comforting feel. I could imagine a cartoon bear holed up there with its cute little cubs. Now, we explored the cave. It was actually pretty small and had a fire pit in the center.

People had clearly used it as a camping spot at some point, which made sense given the slight hole in the roof, and the fact that the entrance clearly used to be bigger. Is there a joke that it would be a great place for hotboxing? I just rolled my eyes. We did decide to camp in the cave, though. It meant that we didn't have to bother setting up the tent, and even if it rained,

it was sheltered enough that if we stuck towards the back, we'd be completely sheltered. So we explored some more in the daylight, and then at night, and we settled down. We decided to cook on our stove outside the cave rather than risk filling the constricted area with smoke. It had clearly been a more open hidey hole the last time the fire pit had been used.

We had a good dinner, and then went into the cave to bunk down for the night. We were woken up by the mother of all storms, though. Nowhere in the weather reports had it suggested anything like this. It was like Mother Nature had just turned on us. Thunder, followed immediately by lightning, and I could thank the Lord that we were camping inside a cave instead of outside in a tent. That is until I heard a crack, a crash, and a rumbling.

I flick my flashlight on in the direction of the noise and watched an absolute horror as a rain of rocks fell down over the cave entrance. Immediately, the meager moonlight was almost drowned out with the only light coming in from the hole in the ceiling, which was a good 15 feet high, if not more. With nothing else we could really do in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm to end all storms, we tried to sleep. The next day we woke up fractious, sleep deprived, and snippy at each other. This only worsened as we each had to pee in the back of the cave, which left a fairly unpleasant atmosphere.

And then things got even worse as we tried to move the rocks from the entrance, only to realize that they were far too heavy for us to move from the inside. not to mention rain slicked, and we decided to sit down and just have some breakfast, lit by the meager sunlight that came in through the tiny gap in the cave ceiling. I hope that her hunger abated, and things would eventually calm down. I was messing with the rocks when I heard Sarah and Ashley begin whisper arguing behind me. They had been at each other's throats all vacation, which wasn't hugely unusual, so I tried ignoring it. It was one of those situations where we all shared a strong.

passion for exploring the woods, and they were both my friends, so they were kind of friends with each other by proxy. The whisper arguing turned into raised voices arguing, though, and I couldn't ignore it anymore. Ashley was accusing Sarah of having an affair with her partner, and now Ashley had a tendency to be kind of paranoid when it came to her partner, Tyler, and for good reason. He had cheated on her a number of times, and sometimes I wanted to shake her and say just leave him, but she wasn't having any of it. Now, they were soulmates, even if, in my opinion, soulmates didn't typically screw other people. Now, though, it sounded like Ashley at least was convinced Tyler had actually screwed Sarah.

And of course, this couldn't be true, though, as Tyler barely knew her, right? I expected Sarah to defend herself, and instead, she accused Ashley of being unable to please her man, so what did she expect when he ended up in another woman's bed? I stepped in at this point and just asked straight up, Sarah, did you sleep with Tyler? And she looked at me, and in the dim light of the cave, this look of shame on her face was very damning. And then she hardened up. Just straight up confessed to it. Stared Ashley down and told her that she'd done it with Tyler not once, not twice, but three times.

And then, for whatever insane reason, she added that she'd let Tyler do things to her that Ashley was just, just too much of a prude to let him do. So maybe she should learn how to please her man a little more. And it kind of struck me weirdly at that moment that Sarah was a smoker, and I hadn't seen her smoke a cigarette since we'd hold up in that cave. Weirdly thoughtful, considering that she was out here ruining Ashley's confidence and life. I went to suggest that maybe she would light up and calm down, but then something even more insane happened.

Ashley, calm, meek, Ashley, who was kind of a pushover, full body charged Sarah and slammed her into the ground. Then the pair were fighting, pulling hair, yelling and screeching so loud it echoed around the cave. In the end, this crazy cat fight is what actually saved us. Because a loud, deep male voice yelled down from the hole in the ceiling, asking what in the damn how we were doing in there, yelling loud enough to wake the dead. I looked up, squinting against the sunlight, and I could have sworn the guy looking down at us was a member of ZZ Top, one of them with a beard anyway. And I'd never seen a hairier man with a bigger, whiter beard.

It was like Gandalf. And he looked like an absolute definition of a wilderness survival mountain man, which I later found out it's exactly what he was. I shouted out that we'd been trapped in the cave due to a rock slide and that we couldn't shift the rocks from inside the cave. He yelled back that he'd climb on down and see what he could do from the outside. You would think that this would have calmed Sarah and Ashley down, but no. They were still screaming at each other, trading slaps, and at one point Sarah, yeah, the one who'd boned Ashley's man, grabbed a rock and was threatening to smack Ashley in the head with it. I heard noise above us, and then the sound of clattering rocks and masculine straining grunts.

I don't know how to describe this any better than this. Imagine a mountain man doing a very strenuous activity. And if you select to read this story, please try doing this as a sound effect for me. Just me, though. Thank you. Finally, a medium-sized boulder popped into the cave and light came spilling in. The mountain man looked in, and now I could see that his beard was even bigger than I previously thought. And he also had one blind eye and somewhat of a scar.

God damn, if this dude wasn't the most badass man I'd ever seen in my life. It was almost terrifying. And then he got real scary. Sarah and Ashley were still screaming at each other, and Sarah had that rock in her hand. It was like they hadn't even noticed the mountain man trying to rescue us. So he hollered. Foleon screamed and yelled that if you gals don't shut your harpy yapping and quit disturbing the peace, then he'll skin all of us like the 500-pound black bear that he took down just last week.

Quote unquote. I guess he saw the fear on my face as I turned to him. stare at him because he gave me a wink and a little smile and gestured to the other two who had finally shut up and stopped arguing. With the mountain man's help from the other side, we were able to clear enough of a gap into the rock slide to allow us to climb through. Sarah, the largest of the group, was last to come through and I honestly can't blame Ashley for refusing to help her, so it fell to me in the mountain man. Sarah and Ashley were still staring daggers at each other, The mountain man, who said his name was Bob, told us that he was going to take off, and to drive safe now,

and maybe drop by the local hospital to check on the scrapes and bruises we'd gotten, especially Ashley and Sarah in their little fight. I just about begged the mountain man to ride with us. I genuinely, honestly, didn't feel safe with Ashley and Sarah, especially since I was the driver, and if a fight had broken out while I was trying to drive, I was so exhausted that I'm not sure that I could have kept the car on the road. I guess Bob sympathized with me because he eventually agreed, and even though he said he didn't like to go into town much, his one condition, though, was that he was riding shotgun with me. No way was he sitting in the back with either of those crazy chicks.

Fair enough, if you can picture Sarah and Ashley's anger as being enough to scare the toughest-looking elderly mountain man I've ever met and likely ever will meet, you can probably imagine how icy the environment was. We drove the hour or so into town and went to the small walk-in clinic to get checked out. It turned out that Ashley had some kind of infection that she'd gotten from a cut and was actually suffering from dehydration, so she had to stay overnight. I stayed with Ashley, and Sarah decided to take a bus back to the city. I think it was the last time they ever spoke. And as a funny epilogue, Ashley decided not to tell Tyler that she knew he'd cheated on her.

Instead, she caught him up and explained what had happened. A couple of hours later, he showed up at the hospital. It was me, Bob, and Tyler in the room with Ashley in the bed. She tried to climb out of the bed and Tyler thought that she was going to hug him or something. Bob knew different, though. He put a hand on Ashley's shoulder and told him he had this. And then he walked up to Tyler, moved as if to shake his hand, and then gave him a backhand pimp slap that was firm enough to undermine Tyler's masculinity

but not enough to do any damage. That's the kind of man Bob was, though. When Tyler looked stunned, Bob told him that maybe next time he'd think twice about treating a fine girl like Ashley the way he had. In a kid you not, Tyler's response was, which time are you talking about? And I think that's when Ashley finally decided enough was enough. And from the way Bob looked at Tyler, I think Tyler knew it too. He turned around, through the flowers that he'd brought for Ashley in the trash, and we just never saw. saw that fool again. The only way to stay in touch with Bob, who lived off the grid, was to give him

my mailing address. I realized that in modern day it would probably be considered a bad idea to give a wild mountain man your home address, but Bob actually sent me a Christmas card every year for the next eight years. Eventually, I received a letter from Bob's grandson who sadly informed me that he'd passed away, but that Bob kept daily journals and an address book, and I was marked in there as highly important as a person to send a Christmas card to, which touched my heart in ways I can't even begin to express. The only way for this story to become more of a fairy tale is if Bob's grandson who wrote me and was around the same age as me had met up with me in the city and we'd hit it off and eventually become a couple. But I guess I'll just leave it to you guys to decide whether that

part actually happen, as it's probably too far-fetched to be true, so I'm not going to confirm either way. But I will let you know one thing. My firstborn son, who's a teenager now, is called Robert, and he is a strong love for the outdoors. I thought my ex-boyfriend was a great guy. I really did, so much so that I was willing to let him talk me into going deep into the woods hiking with him. I've never been a real outdoorsy girl, much less a go into the middle of nowhere with one other person girl. So yeah, I really trusted and loved this guy. But the They say if you really want to get to know a partner, go on vacation with them. Well, I'll also add, go on vacation with them into the deep woods.

That really shows what kind of person they are, like a complete and utter maniac, for example. We spent a lot of time preparing for the trip. Days of discussing it, planning our route. Maybe I should have seen it as a red flag when my ex will call him Aaron, but all this brand new navigational equipment, including an expensive compass, satellite GPS locator, etc., despite telling me that he'd hiked these woods dozens of times and was a quote-unquote expert on the area. On the drive-down, he talked incessantly about how beautiful the area was,

how dangerous it could be too. And that's why we were doing a short-day hike on the first day, and then spending a day in a nearby motel, having fun, in his words, and then on day three, we'd come back for a two-night camping trip in the same woods. Aaron was right about one thing. These woods were absolutely stunning. Summer was turning into fall and the colors were breathtaking. I dabbled with acrylic painting in my spare time,

so really all I wished was that I'd brought some paint in an easel and could set up in the parking lot to paint some of the more beautiful foliage. I said this to Aaron, and he sort of glared at me and implied that I was afraid to hike through the woods. I thought he was joking, maybe teasing. And even so, my female pride kicked in and I responded, yeah, I'm going to show you, buddy. And I snatched up my pack and told him to catch me if he could. Now, this was fun for a bit. Leading him through the woods was almost romantic. And then he caught me. And it led to a bit of a makeout session and I let him take over leading the way. And the scenario was kind of beautiful, you know. The day was so perfect.

that I didn't remotely let it concern me that there are the no trail markers or anything. Aaron knew this place like the back of his hand after all, so there was nothing to worry about, right? So we took a break for lunch, these pretty much just gas station snacks and all that kind of stuff. And then I took a roll of toilet paper out of my backpack and started to go off into the woods to pee. Aaron looked at me like I was a maniac and asked what I was doing. I explained that I had to go pee and he acted like it was the grossest thing in the world. world, peeing outdoors, but also remarked that it was really smart of me to bring toilet paper with us. Uh, isn't that common knowledge? And how did he expect to use the bathroom himself, especially on

our later three-day camping trip? I asked him this, and he brushed it off like it was a joke, but I got the impression that he hadn't even thought about it. This was a red flag, because surely a guy who'd engaged in all this wilderness hiking would know that it would know that was necessary to at least take a piss in the woods. And he was a guy. All he had to do was whip it out and spray. I tried to convince myself that that was it, that maybe he didn't have that much experience with women. We were in our early 20s, and I don't know, maybe he somehow thought that someone with girl parts could just hold it in for that long. God knows why. I let it go, though, but I did. And when I returned, Aaron had packed up our things and was pretty raring to go.

Based on the time and how long we'd been out, I figured that we would have probably started heading back to the car now. And when I suggested this to Aaron, he then responds, Yeah, I guess we should do that soon. I mean, I was thinking we could start heading back when it got dark, but... Now, I was baffled. We couldn't be hiking through the deep woods and the pitch darkness, even with those X-Files-level flashlights that we brought with us just in case. In that case, we might as well plan to camp out of our own.

overnight. I told him this, and he got very huffy and puffy and moody and said, fine, we just head back, and then started storming off completely in the wrong direction. Now, I'm not some expert navigator, but even I could tell that we were heading deeper into the forest. Now, I quietly suggested this a couple of times, and each time he got more and more angry to the point that I started to genuinely feel a little unsafe around him. It was a side of him that I'd never seen before. I tried to chalk it up to maybe heat stroke or allergies or I don't know what. I kept asking him if he needed some water because I could tell that he was getting overheated. Eventually he just snatched the bottle from me and took this huge gulp allowing a bunch of water

just spill all over the ground. And again, hardly something that a seasoned survivalist would probably do. And eventually I had had enough. It was almost 3 p.m. and we were clearly heading even further from the car. I stopped and kind of did that hands of my hips angry girl pose saying, Bro, admit it, we're lost. I said, not sure that I called him bro, but I had an affectionate pet name for him, but it's really icky to think about now. And he insisted that we were not lost, and hadn't I been listening to a word he said? And he was a seasoned hiker, and of course he knew that the sun would be setting soon. We were nearly back to the parking lot. I asked him to look at the GPS tracker that we'd spent so much on, so he just grumbles and says fine,

and then takes the box out of his backpack. The sealed box. He hadn't even set it up or charged it or anything. He just brought the damn GPS tracker and somehow expected it to just work. And when I pointed this out, he almost threw the damn thing in a rage. I had to grab his arm and stop him from hurling it into the woods. Jesus. And I realized that.

maybe Aaron had a temper on him that I'd never seen before. I was out here in the absolute middle of nowhere with this guy, and he was quickly revealing himself not to be the guy that I thought he was. Very calmly and quietly, I suggested that maybe we'd check the map out, and try to work out our location and piece things together using landmarks and the compass. I really wasn't being accusatory or belittling at all. But of course, little did I know just how much this was all insulting his pride, so I did not expect him to react the way in which he did.

Aaron began screaming at me, calling me terrible things, all types of derogatory insults about how stupid and demanding and ridiculous I was being. And then finally he ended the rant by calling me an ungrateful sea word, which, well, I've never been called that by someone who wasn't some catcaller or a stranger in my life. And even then I was prepared to forgive him if he immediately apologized. But no, he said if I knew best that it would be better for me to find my own way back, and he'd wait for me in the car, because obviously in his mind there was no chance that I'd get back before him. And then he storms off into the forest in clearly the wrong direction while screaming one final F.U.

Over his shoulder to me. Up until that point, I'd still been considering reminding him that I had the keys of the car. But at that point, I said, nah, screw him. I took a few minutes to gather myself, had a little bit of a cry and ate a granola bar, and then I put myself together and headed in the direction that I was certain that we'd come from. I walked for about half an hour, recognizing landmarks and even a twig that I'd snapped from earlier. I felt like I was doing pretty well, feeling confident and almost smug about the situation. And then I heard the sound of branches cracking somewhere behind me and a voice.

A high, mocking redneck voice, like the kind of cliche backwoods killer that you hear in some crappy horror movie. You don't effed up, girlie. You don't come into our part of the woods. Something like that, anyway. And I didn't even wait. I just began to run. Now, stupidly, my first thought was that I'd hoped Aaron was safe and that whoever this was hadn't got to him first. I had to be careful, though, not to head off the beaten track and,

still make sure that I was going in the right direction. Now, I could hear this unseen hillbilly pursuing me. He was running somewhere behind me and up the hill among the trees. Occasionally he'd hoot out some kind of threat like, I'm going to skin your pretty little butt, or that chest is looking real good mounted on a cabin wall, psychotic things like that. And what followed was a chase worthy of a movie,

or so it felt to me at the time. I was darting this way and that. way through the trees, occasionally hearing this pursuer. And in my head, I was picturing him as some kind of mix between Jason Forhees and The Undertaker from WWE, even though he had a kind of high-pitched nasally voice, more like that one guy from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie that I'd actually watched with Aaron just a week or so before this stupidly. Now I found a hollowed-out tree stump and ducked into it, deciding to listen for this murderous hillbilly. I could hear him, but he seemed pretty far away now, and he was yelling something about inserting

something that I don't want to repeat into my mouth. I started to feel throw-up rise in my throat, imagining this filthy inbred monster doing all this awful stuff to me. I decided to use stealth from here on in. He was yelling about how he could see me, but from the positioning of his voice, I was pretty sure that wasn't true. I snuck through the trees, as silently as I could. and he was being pretty silent too.

And then, creeping through the undergrowth, I saw a figure with its back to me, peeking from behind a tree. I almost called out and ran over there, but then the figure called out. Where are you little piggy? Piggy, big, pig. I'm going to put you on my spit roast. The voice had definitely come from the man peering around the tree, only the man was no redneck hillbilly monster. It was freaking Aaron.

And then suddenly it dawned on me. Aaron acted all macho, but he'd later been a theater kid in college. One of his buddies had told me, and this absolute lunatic had been following me through the woods trying to put the fear of God into me by play acting as some murderous hillbilly. The problem I still had, though, was that I had no idea how fake the murderous part was. I had three choices. sneak past him, confront him angrily, or treat him like a potential murderer, and, I don't know, knock him out with a rock or something.

I decided to go for a fourth option. I found a small rock on the ground and threw it as far as I could in the direction that Aaron was looking, and this dumbass fell forth like some crappy video game MPC. He started off in the direction of the sound, and I ran an almost crouch-walking way away from the location. Now, ten minutes later, I spotted a huge, gnarled tree that I recognized from the beginning of a hike, because I'd so desperately wanted to paint. Another five minutes, and thank the Lord, I was back to the parking lot. I got into my car and genuinely, honestly considered just driving off and leaving him there.

But I figured the chances of the dumbass getting himself killed were pretty high, and I didn't want his death on my conscience. Plus, I wanted to find out whether he'd own up to it. I kept a small licensed revolver in my glove compartment that Aaron didn't know about. I stashed it on my lap under my purse and then hammered on the horn repeatedly trying to guide him to the car. Ten minutes later, Aaron comes out of the trees looking embarrassed but still a little smug. And when he got into the car, I quickly started the engine and began to drive off. He didn't really say much, but when we were on the road, I eventually told him that the most terrifying thing had just happened

to me, and that some cannibal redneck killer had stalked me through the woods, and I told him that I genuinely thought that I was going to die. Do you sound a bit like this? He asked, putting that voice on. Now, I pretended to be shocked, like, you heard him too? And then Aaron began hooting and hollering with laughter, saying, no, no, it was him the whole time. Remember, he's an actor. Wasn't it hilarious? I stared ahead at the road as I asked him if you really didn't intend to kill me. In his defense, he acted horrified, like he was simply too much of an ignorant, arrogant, idiot to even consider the fact that it could have traumatized me.

And we drove for a while in silence. He kept asking me if I was mad, and I think he knew that he screwed up. Eventually, we reached a gas station in a somewhat suburban area. They had a diner and a truck stop, and I checked. and I had cell phone reception. I told Aaron that I'd consider forgiving him if he went into the gas station and bought me a gas station hot dog. And then I watched, waited until he was halfway through the gas station door,

and then peeled out of that parking lot and did not stop driving for another hour. When I pulled into the next rest stop, I had dozens of texts from him. First they were apologies. Then they got madder and matter, telling me that I was some stuck up sea word, than that I'd better come back and get him right now. I texted them back telling him to call an Uber, or, better yet, hitch a ride with one of the truckers at the truck stop, and just hoped that they weren't a cannibal redneck serial killer.

Then I blocked him, and I never heard from that idiot again. I did check on Facebook to be sure that he'd gotten home safely, and he had. Hilariously, the post that I saw was actually kind of contrite about how he'd done a terrible thing to a person that he loved and blah, blah, blah. Somehow, most of the comments seemed to assume that he'd done something a lot worse, and a whole argument had broken out about him being a POS. I almost cracked then and posted to answer their burning questions of what he'd done,

but I decided to let sleeping dogs lie. Absolutely the weirdest vacation I've ever had, the weirdest guy I ever dated, and thankfully the weirdest scary story I have to share at parties. Now, I hope you enjoyed the tale of the time that I wasn't stalked. by a cannibal killer. Hey, friends, thanks for listening. Don't forget to hit that follow button

to be alerted of our weekly episodes every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and Thursday at 9 p.m. EST. Thanks so much, friends.

And I'll see you in the next episode.